Dreams of an Indie Author

With the advent of digital book publishing, many beginning writers think that all they have to do is write a book and readers will rush to Amazon to buy it. Today’s indie (independent) authors have realized the sad fact that books don’t sell themselves.

Even when writers relied on print book publishers to get their books to market, the percentage of those who earned enough from royalties to make a living at book writing was relatively low. True, though royalty percentages have increased from lows of 8-10 percent of a book’s price—sometimes the net price (the amount paid by wholesalers)— to 50 percent for ebooks, the chances that they would have earned their advances were slim. While bestselling authors can make a killing—for example the author of the Harry Potter books—most only scrape by.

When writers had books published by big-name publishers, they assumed that their publisher would help promote their books. In recent years, publishers promoted most books less and less, leaving that up to the authors. Indie authors, on the other hand, must not only write their books, but promote them as well. Some spend twice as much time on promoting their books as they did writing them.

Before getting depressed and deciding not to write that book you’ve been planning, let’s take a moment to look at what you need to do to make it a success.

Write for  your readers, not yourself. While you may be writing a book on a subject that’s near and dear to you, chances are that it won’t be near and dear to your readers. Beginning writers often ignore that the reader’s interest is the most important part of the writing process. Whatever you write about, you must relate it to your readers in order for them to react to and enjoy it.

If you’re writing a memoir, don’t assume your story is of any interest to anyone but yourself, your family and your friends. Unless you are an A-list celebrity or have done something truly extraordinary that makes a stranger’s jaw drop, readers won’t buy your book.

Be sure to have someone else edit your book. Editing a book is an important part of the process, but it’s not something you can or should do. An editor sees your book with fresh eyes, not only to pinpoint grammatical problems but also problems with content and order. Find a someone who edits books rather then giving it to a friend to look over.

Start promoting on social media at least six months before you plan to launch your book. You’ll need to spend several hours each day on social media interacting with fans, building rapport by providing interesting content. Tease them with short excerpts and little-known facts about your subject. Above all, learn all you can about marketing and promotion.

Avoid writing about trending subjects. While it’s great to write about a subject that’s trending on social media, by the time you actually get your book finished, it probably won’t be trending anymore.

Don’t plan on earning a living from indie writing anytime soon. Print publishers are paying out shrinking advances, and many are only purchasing one book a year from each writer. Agents take 15 percent of that and the IRS takes 20-30 percent. What you’re left with isn’t much. In fact, indie writers without some additional sources of income will find making a living a challenge.

Who Cares?

Lots of people think they have a story that everyone will want to read. But unless you’re a  celebrity or have done something extraordinary, no one cares. You could be the best writer in the world, but if your story doesn’t grab readers, it won’t matter. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your story will be interesting to anyone beyond your family and close friends. And even they may not be interested.

Many writers truly believe that their story has the makings of the next New York Times bestseller, whether it be a messy divorce, their battle with cancer, or the adventure of a lifetime. But most of the time, their story lacks what it takes to make it big.

Those that have endured a traumatic experience often feel that the experience, itself, is enough to a make a story engaging. It isn’t. What’s needed is a hook, something to draw the reader in and keep them there. How much you’re involved in the story is irrelevant. What matters is how it affects the reader.

Once there was a woman whose husband had died after a failed operation. She blamed the surgeon and wanted to lash out at him by writing a book about the incident. What she didn’t realize was that she wanted revenge, not to educate her readers on how to avoid a similar situation or what to do if the same thing happened to someone they loved. This beginning writer wrote her story and then paid $8,000 to a vanity publisher to have it printed. What she ended up with was a room full of books and no way to sell them.

But in today’s digital world, you could write a book and put it on Amazon for next to nothing. So it’s important that you write your story with your readers in mind—what’s in it for them, not what’s in it for you.

Another problem with the scenario above is the word “beginning.” As a beginning writer, and most likely one who hadn’t written anything before, the woman would have lacked the writing skills and research expertise to enable her to do a professional job on her book.

A lot of seniors fall into this category. They feel that because they’ve lived a long life,  everything they have to say is interesting. They read memoirs of famous people and say to themselves that they could write a book just as good. But most of the time they can’t. The situation leads to a lot of frustration and disappointment.

So what does it take to hook your reader? First, your story doesn’t have to be earth shattering, but it does have to relate to readers on their level. It has to offer them something—information, advice, hard facts—that will allow them to apply whatever happens in the story to their own lives. This applies to both non-fiction and fiction.

Many beginning writers chose to fictionalize their stories to avoid having to be associated with them, thus avoiding the possibility of getting sued. Even if you turn your true-life story into a novel, you still have to relate it to the reader. And if your characters are anything like the real people in your experience, you could still get sued. But frankly, a non-fiction version will offer a lot more credibility since it actually happened to you.

Professional writers target their readers. They usually don’t write to a general audience, but to a specific group of readers—men, women, young, old—who would most likely benefit from what they have to say. True, bestselling books often get read by a large audience, but they weren’t written that way. They were first written for a specific one and then got picked up by other groups when the book became a viral hit.

So before you pour your heart out in a book that may not go anywhere, think about what you have to offer your readers.

Royalties Don’t Always Amount to a Kingly Sum

It seems every writer wants to write a book. While writing one may give you a great ego boost, it probably won’t make you rich. In fact, it will probably pay less in the long run than shorter writing projects. Income from books traditionally comes from royalties. But understanding royalties in today’s market can be difficult.

Besides negotiating for an advance, you'll be negotiating for royalties on your book or a percentage of the retail price of the number of copies of your book sold by the publisher. The publisher adds the amount of the percentage to your book contract after the two of you agree to it.

Traditionally, the escalating royalty schedule for adult hardcover books has been 10 percent for the first 5,000 copies sold, escalating to 12 percent for the next 5,000, and then to15 percent for all copies sold after that.

The traditional practice was to compute these royalty rates and the author's earnings from the list price of all copies sold. So if sales totaled 3,000 copies at a $20 list price and a 10 percent rate, your royalty earnings would be $6,000. However, times have changed.

Today, publishers have a number of different distribution outlets open to them, some of which are through  chains of bookstores and other outlets to which the publisher sells your book for less than the list price. As a result, some standard contracts now provide that your royalties will be computed on net proceeds from the sale of the book rather than the number of copies sold—the money that the publisher collects after deducting costs for shipping, distribution, and miscellaneous services, generally about half the cover price. Though such contracts aren’t necessarily bad for you, nevertheless you should be wary of them.

Your contract may also contain a second set of royalty rates for "Special Discount Sales” to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and such.  These percentages are usually half what the full royalty pays—if your full royalty pays 10, 12, and 15 percent, your special discount royalty might be 5, 6, and 7 percent. This scale will apply to "sales made at a discount greater than 58 percent, but not more than 75 percent of suggested retail price. And let’s face it, many more readers purchase books online, so that will lower your royalties substantially.


But the larger volume of sales made possible by wholesale deals may more than compensate for a smaller earning per copy. The important thing is to read carefully and fully understand what your contract actually provides and negotiate from that basis without illusions or misunderstandings about what you have agreed to. Today, there are wide range of royalty arrangements for books, and knowing that, you need to balance your idea of the book's potential against the mathematical results.

The best way to do this is to compute what you’d earn in various hypothetical cases if your royalty was based on list price, weigh that against earnings on net in the same cases, then decide from your result what you want to try for as far as royalties are concerned. You may want to ask your editor to give you  figures based on the publishing house’s sales department's projections.

Royalty rates for paperbacks may differ slightly from hard backs. Normally, they range from 5 to 20 percent, with 10 percent more common. But escalation rates are less standardized than for hardcover books and therefore require more negotiation. Don’t assume that because marketing techniques are different with paperbacks, escalation clauses are negligible. While a paperback publisher may count on selling what he can of his first print run—say from 100,000 to 250,000 copies—and then drop the book from his list, it just as often happens that after a number of years, he may reissue the book with another  large printing. You deserve a greater share of the profits from the reissued book and should have it provided for in the original contract.

Unlike trade-book publishers, those who publish textbooks can more accurately forecast sales. They base negotiation and contracts on previous experience with relatively stable school markets, so there's usually less flexibility in dealing with them. It's also easier to predict what you'll make for your work, so the whole process of contracting is less stressful.

Textbooks have a relatively fixed market, depending on the subject and the number and kind of schools in which they may be used. The competition from comparable texts is easier to identify than with trade books. A textbook publisher usually plans to market his books over a number of years.

By using simple calculations, you can work out the potential advantages of various royalty arrangements which might be acceptable to your publisher. Obviously, a text with a chance for a nice share of the national high school market for 10 years will call for different royalty arrangements than one which will be used only by special students or scholars for say 20 years, Thus, a typical college literature book, published in paperback, pays a royalty of 8 percent of 80 percent of list price on copies sold.

So if your book doesn’t have the potential to sell a lot of copies, you better negotiate for a reasonable advance and take the money and run because you’ll never see any additional funds from royalties, no matter how much you negotiate for them.

Revamping or Retrenchment

As your freelance career progresses, you may find that some of your ideas and avenues for publication just aren’t working out. Do you throw in the towel? No. Instead, you should revamp what you’ve been working on and try again. However, the damage may be severe—markets for your ideas begin to disappear, you’re running out of ideas, or you’re just not as interested in the subject as you were when you started. In this case, you may need to fall back and retrench. And much like soldiers in World War I who did just that to come up with a new strategy, so should you.

Revamping your operation or project isn’t as drastic. You may have to go back and do more research in both your subject and the market for it. Perhaps you’ll need to find some new contacts and get in touch with ones you haven’t heard from in a while. If you've corresponded with an editor previously and received encouraging words but no assignments, send him or her a short E-mail, saying something like “I contacted you a few months ago, and you said you’d be glad to look at other ideas I had. Do you have any stories you're contemplating? If so, can I help?" Reminding editors that you're still available to take on assignments isn’t such a bad one.

Revamping may also mean asking for more pay. No writer gets additional compensation without first showing that he or she deserves it. Keep a special file containing notes on all the best pieces you’ve written for a particular editor. While some editors will increase your pay automatically if you’re doing an outstanding job, others will need a little more prodding. If you an exceptional job on an article, be prepared to ask for more pay the next time around. But always leave yourself a graceful way out if the editor turns down your request. Don't burn bridges unless you absolutely have to.

If you’ve been specializing in a particular subject area and not getting too far with it, perhaps it’s time to take a second look at it. While revamping may also mean developing another specialty, remember that you’ve already put in a lot of time into the one you’re pursuing, and you’ll have to go back to square one if you begin again. Study your target market. Note changes in it and your specialty.

How has what’s happening in the world affected your specialty? After 9/11, the market for travel articles went into chaos. People weren’t traveling and advertisers stopped buying ads, so publications that specialized in travel had to pull back. Some went out of business. Likewise, have the effects of global events filtered down to your locality yet? You may be able to cash in on your specialty in local or regional markets—at least until the national markets recover. The recent economic recession had the same affect on a number of subject areas.

If you're pushing your skills into a new area, it's bound to make others a little suspicious now and then, even if you know you're competent to handle the new situation. Remind yourself this new arena is one in which you're going to have to sell harder than before. Be prepared. Do your research and come up strong.

If you manage to get an assignment in your specialty area every now and then, that should tell you that you should be able to get more. If you’re at a point where some editors trust you to deliver, you're halfway there. Assuming it may take several queries to land one assignment, prepare yourself for the strikeouts and keep after the home runs. Your self-confidence will grow with practice. Success, no matter how slight, whets the appetite as nothing else can.

Occasionally think outside the box. Even specialized publications run general pieces once in a while. Their readers are always looking to save money, travel, manage their lives, etc.

If you're changing specialties, you may have to go back a step or two until you've proven yourself. Move ahead quickly once you've established your new specialty. Be alert for chances to point out to editors that you're now as qualified as anyone else. Perhaps review books in your new field. You’ll not only increase your visibility, but you’ll also add free books to your personal specialty library, saving money in the process.

New technology in electronic books now enables you to further increase your visibility by self-publishing short books or articles in your specialty to sell on Amazon for Kindle. It’s a fact that Kindle has the lion’s share of the ebook market, so ignore Nook and other venues and concentrate on it. This helps provide you with a track record in your new area of expertise.

Sometimes it doesn't make much sense to continue in the direction you’re headed. If you've tried to make a go at a specialty but discovered you've hardly made headway, you might want to  reconsider. Retrenchment may be what's in order, before you get in over your head financially or otherwise. But retrenchment means giving up what you were doing in favor of starting something else. You’ll definitely lose money on this because income won’t be coming in for a while. Unless you have another source of income, only use retrenchment as a last resort. Don’t give up too soon.

Look Before You Leap

When writing a book, most writers begin by doing just that. They bury themselves in researching their topic or story and spend months, if not years, writing about it. Sounds logical, doesn’t it? But how many of them actually get their book published?

In general, most people feel they have something so important to say that every publisher will want to publish their book and every reader will run out to buy it. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

This attitude of self-importance originates way back in school—as far back as first grade. Most teachers don’t mean to instill this in their students, it sort of happens through a process of educational osmosis. The teachers had it instilled in them by their teachers in a never-ending educational process. So what is a book writer to do? Market research.

Whether you plan to write a non-fiction or fiction book, it pays to take a look at the market for your idea—not your book. Take a trip to a good bookstore and browse through the books on your topic. This will tell you what’s being sold. Remember, most of the books on the shop’s shelves originated at least two years prior to you seeing them. Now stroll over to the sale tables. The books on these tables are remainders—leftovers that didn’t sell during the book’s most recent run. Many may be terrific, but for some reason didn’t hit the mark. Take notes, being sure to nor publishers names.

Next surf on over to Amazon.com, the world’s greatest book depository. Search for books on your topic. Amazon has practically everything in print. Do the same at their competitor, Barnes and Noble’s Web site. Take more notes, again being careful to note the names of publishers.

After all this research, review your notes and draw some conclusions about how viable your topic really is. Generally, too many books on your topic means the market is overloaded. Too few often means not enough readers are interested or the topic hasn’t been explored to any great degree by writers.

Armed with your conclusions, you’re ready to proceed with your book, modifying the topic to reflect market trends. It’s important to note that you shouldn’t cater to your topic’s market but be driven by it. Doing so will greatly enhance your chance of publication.