When I made this blog URL anygenre, let me tell you it’s somewhat satisfying to post this and prove that yes, I mean it. Any. Genre. The rest of this post is technical stuff meant for other writers or curious “how the sausage is made” types of people.
I was thinking recently about a conversation I had with another writer. We sat down and discussed what I’d been through with self publishing. I told her that I’d found it was a big waste of time for a self publishing author to make an e-book (with one, perhaps obvious, exception). If you’re writing almost anything and intending to self publish it, I can tell you that publishing an ebook is sure to be a waste of your time, and you should stick with paperback for the best value.
When you make a final cut of your manuscript and decide to self publish, there’s a bunch of confusing and expensive decisions to make, and hurdles that are in your way. Once you get through all kinds of technical BS and you’re happy with your paperback, KDP (amazon’s kindle direct publishing) enthusiastically offers to help you begin an ebook version. Don’t do it.
I hated this. All of my best friends were too enthusiastic to wait, and they got the ebook version. If you’ve got 200 people ready to read what you’ve got, the ebook will cut into that. Instead of making, say 5$ per copy, you’ll make 35 cents. In terms of psychically encouraging yourself, it sucks to see 20 bucks go into your KDP payments instead of like 500 bucks. So from that perspective, you’re competing with yourself.
People value ebook copies and experiences less. I submit they are even less likely to leave a review, and already the conversion rate of people I directly asked for a review was 10%. Some people who bought and read my books flatly refused to leave me a review, which is frustrating when competing with a bunch of fake review out there. I asked 200 people directly, and got 20 reviews. And those were people I KNOW, and like. I asked over 500 if you include much more broad attempts at marketing, and got 2 or 3.
After spending a hundred bucks on ads, and getting ten or so sales, I realized those sales were far less likely to convert to a review, even if the reader LOVES it. I’m not there: pestering them with social pressure. I’m an anonymous person, with no existing celebrity. I’d guess it’s well below 1% that would leave such an unsolicited review, and probably less than .1% that leave an unsolicited review on an ebook. If you have a marketing budget of a thousand dollars, having a paperback will give you the best conversion on dollars and reviews – and you need absolutely every single review at that level.
The last problem I had was that I was now doing double the work. I promise you that if you write more than 50K words, as a self published author you will want to make changes afterwards.
“Scoff and Tsk, Erik, get an editor. Duh.” Yeah this is frustrating to hear, because that’s what I did. I have had more than one “editor” and more than one copy editor look at something. Things are missed, sometimes glaring things. Big publishing houses have professional copy editors, and review their properties with many more passes than a self-published author could afford. A big publisher will tell you the expected count of errors after any number of copy-edit passes, and it’s WAY higher than you’d think. I have copies of some of the most famous literature of all time with copy editing errors ON THE FIRST PAGE (ask to see my copy of “Last of the Mohicans”). If you’re like me you’re thinking about stories and art, but I have to snap back to reality, this is about commercial and intellectual property and its production level; we are inundated with highly polished writing, and no human lifetime is long enough to get through it all.
It will cost you a total of 10 thousand dollars to have a manuscript of 100K words edited down by a professional editor, and then four passes from different copy editors before you hit the level of commercial polish that people expect. Included in that you’ll need a format editor, cover art, distribution and marketing. Once you start this process you’ll see 10K as a bargain. Random House probably spends more like 30K$ on all this. No wonder as the boomers retire and write their passion projects “vanity publishers” abound. Don’t skimp on any of it, especially formatting. Once you’ve held a self-published artifact in your hands, you’ll know what I mean, you might just lack the technical vocabulary to say why the formatting is so amateur.
You’ll have to sell several thousand copies before you get anywhere near break-even and you’ll be discouraged, because that’s already in the top 1% of writers and is a form of run away success these days. It used to be that authors would get pinched by a pallet of self-purchased copies to drive down printing costs, that they then sat on for the rest of their lives, like an amway distributor. At least with on-demand printing with KDP you don’t have to do that.
So in this case, it’s all flipped around. I am NOT going to offer “Green Christmas” as a paperback. It’s an ebook, because
- it’s a novella
- It’s in the ‘hallmarky’ romance genre
- a conscious trade of value for expectations
- Fast (much less) formatting
- market timing (christmas)
This genre, and really this subgenre of holiday romance is highly commoditized. In this case, if I want to reach the hungry ladies that plow through 10 of these in a given week, I am not going to do that by selling them a 12 dollar paperback. Because that audience is sitting there, I have to go and meet them.
In that way this is like a scratchy lottery ticket. I think that if the most connected readers of this subgenre are exposed to my book, they would like it. I don’t know if that sounds arrogant, but it’s meant to be confident and it is my honest opinion. I like it, and it’s not my go-to genre by any means. More clearly stated: I really am proud of this one.
The novella aspect also makes an ebook kind of perfect. Not only do I need this to hit ASAP at Christmas time, but also I don’t want to take all the time to carefully format a paperback; perfecting gutter and bleed, choosing the paper feel, glossy vs matte cover, the font, the spacing, the bottom margin, page numbers, front matter, etc etc etc. It’s a lot of extra work, and that work doesn’t make sense for fast, trope-heavy reads.
(live blogging) I have 300 impressions on my ad so far. No clicks. Yet!
Writing in Any Genre 