It has been said that authors live and die by reviews.  Nowadays, in the heat of the self-publishing revolution, this is truer than ever.  ePublishing has ushered in the beginnings of a paradigm shift, where readers are becoming the new gatekeepers of the publishing industry.  Well, maybe not the gatekeepers—more like the caretakers—as they are definitely more visibly involved in a book’s ranking.  Reader reviews such as those on Amazon (and other sites) are becoming true indicators of not only popularity but also quality.

That said; there is no denying that the marketing machines behind the major publishing houses still reign in mighty ways.  A press release for a new book coming out from Random House, for example, still has significantly more impact than an indie author tweeting about their blog tour.  There are sure to be advertisements and reviews found in the major newspapers both funded and managed by the large publishers.  Ignoring shelf space in bookstores, which is still a huge chunk of the market, we’re much more likely to see well-funded marketing efforts online with lots of “above the fold” placement for new “big six” releases too.  When we see this, it really exemplifies the black hole of publicity that most writers find themselves struggling to escape.  It is very hard to get even a little attention paid to the self-published book, regardless of the effort and expense the author may put into marketing it.  The industry is simply not yet geared to allow an easy sharing of limelight with traditionally published authors, and this will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future it would seem.

This is why reader reviews are so important for the indie writer.  While it’s obvious that there is a lot of “five star fluffing” happening, it’s my contention that with enough “thoughtful” reviews, a book will stand out as being worth a try for most readers.  On a side note, thanks to the advent of the eReader, free samples make trying a new author completely risk free, and that’s a good thing.  At the end of the day, the hope is that with enough reviews, visibility increases.  If the reviews are stellar, a book might even get selected as an Amazon Editor’s Pick, which is like a shot of recognition in the arm for the aspiring indie writer.

The problem is, as I see it, that it’s a real challenge for indie writers to get enough reviews to actually stand out among the established crowd.  If we take a look at some Amazon top sellers, we can see that Fifty Shades of Grey has ~7500 reviews right now.  Hunger Games has ~8000.  Interestingly, their star weightings are very different with FSoG having ~40% of its ratings composed from 1-3 star reviews (these are considered “critical,” or not-positive, according to Amazon), and HG’s 1-3 star ratings composing only 10% of its total reviews.

I think this is interesting because it somewhat underscores the concept that “any news is good news.”  Or it may just be that there are quite a few people impassioned enough about how bad they think FSoG is that they feel compelled to express it.  Anyhow, what I’m saying is that indie authors will be hard pressed to ever see these kinds of numbers.  Even the legendary J.A. Konrath’s Amazon reviews are measured in tens (mostly) and hundreds (a few), not thousands.

So what can the indie writer do?  Well, the first—and all-important thing—to do, IMHO, is to keep writing.  Not just because that’s what we love to do, but also because the more books one has out on the market, the more one’s chances for visibility increases.  It’s a well-known fact that Konrath has written a *lot* of books, and I believe that his large catalogue contributes significantly to his sales figures.

The second thing, I think, is to get a little bold and actually start asking for reviews.  I mean, I don’t think it can hurt as long as you’re not coming across as a pushy twit.  While it might feel smarmy to some, I’m pretty sure many readers don’t understand the impact that their review will have, especially for indies.  I also believe that if they did, they’d probably care enough—provided they liked or disliked a book/author enough—to take the 5-10 minutes (or 5-10 seconds on Goodreads, which is a great site for readers, btw) out of their life to help be a part of the indie publishing movement.  The fact is that there are quite a few great indie writers out there, and without the help of reader reviews they are likely to remain undiscovered amongst the ever-increasing torrent of self-published works.

I know that as a reader, before I ever published a book, I never even thought of leaving a review on Amazon for a book I’d read.  Even after publishing FALSE POSITIVES, I still have to feel fairly passionate (good or bad) about a traditionally published book for me to take the time to review it; however, when I read a novel from an self-published author, I am more likely to leave a review, because I know it counts more for those without a power-house marketing machine promoting their work.

In some ways, reader reviews are the only “real” advertising an indie author has that’s worth a salt.  Reader reviews are, in fact, a form of “word of mouth” marketing, and that’s the real power of the reader.  The more readers that come to learn this, the better off the self-publishing eco-system will be.  As a direct result of a more participative readership, more new authors will get discovered, more great authors will receive well-deserved praise, and a lot of not-so-good work will get justifiably punished.

It’s kind of like Darwinism if you think about it, where only the “fittest” writers shall survive, and I think that is a very healthy environment for both readers and writers.  Yet I fear the indie movement will continue to thrive only if participative readership continues to increase and more and more readers come to understand their importance.  After all, for whom do we write other than ourselves?  We write for the reader, and that’s why their reviews are more important than ever.

If you have enjoyed reading FALSE POSITIVES and have a little time, please leave a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the iBookstore, or wherever you got it.  Your support is most appreciated.  Every little bit helps!

I’ve written about KDP Select as a Marketing tool and the Net effect of KDP free promotions in prior blog posts, so this is a wrap up of what I’ve learned after entering my book, FALSE POSITIVES, into KDP select.

After using up my final few days of freebies, I’d given away over 800 copies of my book.  I’ve read some fantastic success stories where free promotions “sold” in the tens of thousands.  I’d attribute these successes to the marketing savvy of the author/promoter and how well the book is presented.

Yes, I do think that many people do still buy a book based on the cover even if it’s free.  But there are other factors in presentation, including the cover, such as your blurb, price point, and reviews.  Jeff Bennington has laid this out all very succinctly at the Writing Bomb, although I’m still on the fence regarding extremely low price points.

But, as they say, “mileage will vary.” Rose Andrade has written a very concise overview of KDP results on EPUB World.  She’s broken results down into three camps, which I believe are pretty accurate.  I’m posting personal thoughts and results for those who might find it helpful and/or interesting.

So 800 free copies… I must have actually sold some paid copies (hard to tell from the Amazon sales reports) during the free promo, as my paid sales ranking showed significant improvement once that metric reappeared after the free promotion ran its course.  Whatever I needed to sustain this, however, was missing, and as I’d seen during prior promos, paid sales rank steadily drifted downward post promotion.

Paid sales rank can seem to be somewhat of a fickle beast.  I’ve seen a single paid sale cut 100K or more off my sales rank.  My assumption is that these 100K books didn’t sell during the time mine did.   I’ve also seen similar shifts without having any sales, which I can only attribute to some time/sales calculation that I don’t really understand.  Regardless, during the free promos, I did see an exponential rise in my “free sales” ranking.  At one point, I apparently reached #1 for a bit (in Technothrillers), according to a friend on Twitter, but I slept through it.  In any case, anything toward the top of the “free best seller” list will give you “above the fold” visibility for anyone who actually views these lists.  Who actually looks at them, I’m not sure.

What is more seductive, however, is getting to the left side of this list, which is Top Paid—currently dominated for some time now by Suzanne Collins, who is obviously doing something very right.  I’m also pretty sure that she’s never been on the right (free) side of Best Seller’s list because I don’t think she’s never done a free promotion on KDP, which may be something to consider all by itself (although she does have her books in the Kindle Lending Library).  This may also be a sign that traditionally published writers simply get better exposure due to the backing of the big publishing houses.

So do KDP Select free promotions increase sales?  I believe the answer is:  it depends.  For some, yes!  A good example of a free promotion success story is detailed here by John L. Betcher.  For others, it’s no.  In my case, not really, but I do have a few final  inklings on KDP after having done this.

Inkling 1:  The Kindle Lending Library is not really a boon for the writer who is pricing their books at $3.99 or lower.  As one is only allowed to borrow one book per month, I think that people will want to get as much value as possible for their freebies.  Loaning a $5-$10 book from the library is a better value for most.  While I’ve not seen any real stats on this, I’d venture to guess that those sharing large chunks of the KDP lending pot are doing so by loaning higher cost books.  While this may seem to be a Catch-22 for the indie author, it might just be that the Lending Library is not going to be the gold mine some imagine it to be.

Inkling 2:  Authors with more books on the Kindle shelf will tend to see better post promotion sales.  The reason behind this is that once a person has received a book for free they are more apt to actually buy another (not free) book from the same author.  The downside to this is that if an author has given their only book away for free, there’s nothing left for the newfound fan to buy.

Inkling 3:  Those who’ve paid for a book are more likely to give it a review.  Anyone who pays for a book generally has more invested than someone who’s received it for free.  It’s my thought that the majority of organic (i.e. non-solicited) reviews come from those who’ve actually bought the book.  Often these are the best reviews, because the reader doesn’t feel obligated, or at least their obligation to tell others of the book comes from within.

My final thoughts for now…

How one makes this right (free) to left (paid) best seller transition is still somewhat of a mystery (to me at least), but I believe it all boils down (for the indie writer) to continued promotion and positive feedback from that all important person, the reader.  If you’ve got your cover and blurb polished to perfection, your book should sell at least a few copies even at price point higher than $5, and if those readers leave positive reviews, then you’re on the right track.  It means your book is not only worth reading, but it’s good enough for people to tell others about it, and that’s the best thing any author can hope for.

KDP Select has its pros and cons and its varying tales of success for the self-published author.  Will it equate to higher sales?  It depends.  Again, your mileage will vary.

This is the first article in a series on ePublishing, covering the aspects of the publishing process for the indie writer, who becomes an ePublisher by default when deciding to self publish their own book.

Having gone through this process myself, I’ve found there are many phases involved.  It seems like a lot of indie writer’s don’t realize how involved the publishing aspect can be.  There are ways to make the process streamlined, and hopefully what I share here can be of help to other writers who are trying to publish a book on their own.

A first critical step, of course, is to write a book; and even here, there are ways to work that can help make things better in the long run.  My first bit of advice is to know your word processor.  The fact is that writing a five or ten page essay is pretty easy—formatting wise; however, when your book grows close to 100,000 words with several chapters, it can become unwieldy.  For example, changing something in one place can have a ripple effect that may mess things up throughout the manuscript.  This is why I believe mastering the use of “styles” in one’s word processor might be one of the smartest things an indie writer can do.

I use Microsoft Word on a Mac, but many other word processors handle styles.  If your word processor doesn’t, you might want to think about getting one that does.  I won’t go into actually how to use styles in a particular word processor, but I’ll cover the “why” of it, providing some links for the former at the end of this article.

A style, in short, is a grouping of formatting options such as a font’s selection, size, and other attributes like bold, italic, etc.  There’s line spacing, indentation, and slew of other things that can be defined in a single style.  Once a style is defined, it can be applied to specific text areas within your manuscript with a single click.  The key here is to try and define and apply your styles up front before your work gets too big and potentially more complex; otherwise, going back and fixing things later can be a chore.  Styles, while simple, are very powerful and can save you a lot of time and anguish when used effectively.

Any manuscript is going to have “Normal” or “Body” text, which will have a certain style.  This style, call it Normal, is pretty much a no-brainer.  It’s probably going to be a nice 12-point serif font like Times Roman (I’m a sucker for Garamond myself).  This will probably have the first line of each paragraph indented, and depending on if this is going to an agent or to the printer, the text might be double spaced and justified with a “ragged” right edge or single spaced and full justified like we see in most finished publications.  This is a great example in and of itself, as one change to the Normal style can change the formatting of the entire manuscript.  Caution must be exercised here, because if you haven’t defined and applied styles other than Normal, you may inadvertently change things you didn’t want to.

It’s a common mistake to just use the Normal style everywhere, and then edit the parts you want different.  This is called direct formatting, and it’s not an ideal way to work on any long document.  For example, you might make the chapter name bold and increase the font size to 18-point.  You might want to right justify a chapter subtitle where you’ve written information like the time and location of the scene.  You might want to simply center the ubiquitous “* * *” section breaks within your manuscript.  And you may want to create an indented text section or even an italicized block of paragraphs, representing a dream sequence or an internal dialogue, for example.   There are a lot of places where text will deviate from the Normal style.  The problem is that later on, you’ll forget where all of these spot changes are, and one change to the Normal style can revert all of these direct formatting changes, putting you back at square one.  Trust me; I’ve done this before, and it’s not fun to fix.

Getting your styles correct before you’ve got hundreds of pages to work with will pay off in the long run.  The important thing to remember here is that changing a style in one place, changes text everywhere that the style is applied.  It’s best to be sure that every piece of text that differs from Normal has its own style applied so as to prevent changes happening where you didn’t want them to occur.

How does all of this help with self-publishing?  Well, imagine that you’ve written your book, and you’re going to use one of the many methods to get that book into a popular eBook format (e.g. ePub, mobi, etc.) or a format ready to use for POD companies like CreateSpace or Lightning Source.  Or maybe you use SmashWords–whatever.  You’re all excited because you’re about to see your book for sale!  When the magic moment comes that you preview your book, it looks like crap because the chapter title is too big, section breaks are weird, or something you didn’t (or couldn’t) catch in your word processor.  Rather than the fix being an arduous detour of manual rework, it can now be as simple as changing a style or two and trying again.  And that, my friends, is the beauty of using styles.

Here’s some links on using styles in Word and iWork’s Pages.  Know of some other good ones?  Please feel free to post them here as a comment.

• Creating ePub files with Pages
• Formatting Guides in Word for Mac 2011
• Style Basics in Word 2010
• Video for Applying Styles using Microsoft Word 2010

Enjoy.

Have you ever found a typo in a traditionally published novel?  I have, but it’s a rare occasion.  The key reason for this is because publishers have editors on their payroll that work with authors to polish their work, getting it ready for the masses.  If you are a self-published author, perhaps it’s time to consider putting an editor on your payroll.

Yes, there are self-published authors out there who poo-poo the idea of having someone professionally edit their work.   They poo-poo this almost as profoundly as they poo-poo working with “the dinosaurs,” which is the label given to traditional publishers by the more vocal crusaders of the ePublishing revolution.  The arguments of the self-edited are many:  “The author should master their craft,” they say.  Or “Editors change your voice,” is another.  Others simply find it too expensive.  Regardless, the lack of editing can be a scarlet letter that labels your book as the work of an amateur.  If you’ve ever started reading a self-published novel and couldn’t finish it, you probably know what I’m getting at here.

The editorial process is not a one shot deal.  It occurs at varying stages along the development of a book.  If a book is not finished yet, there’s developmental editing, which is a collaborative process between the writer and the editor to build out the concept and scope.  Characters are developed while plotlines and timing are hashed out so that non-sequiturs and other bugaboos are quashed.  This type of editing may not be for you, especially if you consider your book “done,” but there are many published authors who have engaged in this process.  For indie writers, I think money is better spent elsewhere, and that’s on copyediting.

Once the manuscript is complete and you have edited the bejesus out of it to the best of your abilities, there is the copy edit process.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, many eschew this process.  The absence of copyediting is a major cause for self-published books to be easily singled out as amateurish at best and slipshod (i.e. unreadable) at worst.  Donna Marie Williams suggests that indie authors should “honor their readers” by having their work professionally edited rather than showing readers their “dirty underwear,” and I tend to agree with her.

Professional copyeditors catch all kinds of stuff.  They find and correct pesky things above and beyond the basics of capitalization, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.  A copy edit fixes problems with accuracy, ambiguity, consistency, formatting and style standards, subject-verb agreement, and usage.  And this is money well spent—for when a reader comes across any of these while reading, they pause.  As a writer, you should try to make sure that never happens.  Your job is to make your book a delight to read—not to burden the reader with clumsy mistakes; otherwise, you’ll risk coming off like a hack.  Now, some readers might say, “Aw, heck!  It’s just an indie book,” and carry on merrily.  Others, however, might be more inclined to think, “So that’s why this book is self-published,” and these readers might just fuel the negative reputation of self-published works via word of mouth.  If you’re OK with either of these responses, that’s fine; you can stop reading now.  But if you want a plain and simple example of why not to forgo copyediting, here it is.

Go back and take a look at the picture at the top of this article.  Keep in mind that the picture is not your manuscript (you didn’t write it).  If you immediately found the mistake, you might make a great editor!  If you didn’t see it right off the bat, then you might now better understand why hiring an editor is probably not a bad idea.  This type of subconscious omission is similar to what happens when you edit your own book—part of your brain shuts off.  Because you are too close to your work:  you know the scenes in your head, you know what your characters are going to say before you read it, and your brain—all by itself—glosses over things that just about any second set of eyes would catch.  A professional editor will not only catch minor things like in this example but a whole lot more.

In summary, professional copyediting can separate the wheat from the chaff on the bookshelf.  While no copyeditor can make a bad book a best seller, not hiring one could definitely impair your book’s potential.  When it comes down to money, plunking down four-figures is not to any writer’s delight; however, there is a more positive take on this.  As indie writers come to realize that they really are ePublishers, they might also come to realize that all of the things that publishers would have done for them are now their onus.  Since one of the chief gripes regarding getting traditionally published is a “less advantageous” royalty structure (not 70/30 like on the Kindle Bookstore), some might even go so far as to consider any investment that goes toward the production of their self-published book to be an investment toward future, more advantageous royalties.  Said differently, rather than using the publisher’s money to edit your book, use your own money.  The money you “save” by not accepting the traditional publisher’s royalty structure can be invested toward a better quality book that will sell under better royalty schemes when you self-publsih.  That is, of course, assuming your book sells, which brings me to my final point:  are you willing to invest in your book at least as much as a traditional publisher would?  If not, perhaps you should consider it.

There are probably as many reasons to self-publish as there are not to.  Today, however, the stigma surrounding self-publishing is far less than it was a few years ago—that’s when Amazon made it very easy for authors to publish their own work in the Kindle store.

There is a joke in publishing circles that says that Kindle is Amazon’s slush-pile, and it’s not that far from the truth.  To understand what this means, you need to know what a slush-pile is.  Imagine all of the submitted manuscripts that have been sent to agents by authors seeking representation.  Any submission, partial or full, that has yet to be read (and not rejected) by an agent is in the slush-pile.  Simply put:  if a manuscript has escaped the slush-pile without rejection, it means that an agent has vetted your work.

Agents have traditionally served the role as the gateway to publishing.  One of their jobs is to assess an author’s work to see if it’s worthy of their effort to try and market it.  Very few authors pass through this gateway.  And though some “greats” may go unpublished while a lot of crap does get published, the system has generally worked for many years.  This has changed because the ease of self-publishing has made it possible to eliminate the agent from the process.  And one side effect of this is that agents no longer perform the vetting process.

Take this one step further, and we’ll also realize that the publisher is no longer a part of the equation.  One of the significant contributions a publisher provides is editing, and although some writers will argue the point, all books could use a good editor.

The upshot of all of this is that today with the advent of the ePublishing “revolution” there is a lot of unvetted material for purchase that would have never made it out of the slush-pile prior.  Bypassing the agent has effectively shifted the slush-pile from the agent’s desk to the Kindle store and other places like it.  But, really, it’s not such a bad thing after all.

The elimination of the agent and traditional publisher has two very potent effects on the industry.  First, it allows more books to be published; and second, it puts the power into the hands of the most important person out there—the reader.  Readers are in fact the new agents, and free samples are the manuscript submissions.  The Internet and eBooks have made this all incredibly easy.

If a book’s free sample has a “hook” or whatever it takes to make the reader want more, they’ll buy it.  If not, it stays in the slush-pile.  When a reader leaves a review—good or bad—this feeds the most potent form of marketing any book can have—word of mouth.  And that, in my opinion, is a pretty good thing.

There are quite a few out there who’ve written on this subject.  And yes, ironically, they’re all indie writers. Some have been traditionally published and have gone indie, while others have gone from being ePublished to to “tPublished.”  Regardless, here are a few items that I’d recommend for anyone interested in learning more about self-publishing:

• Be the Monkey by Barry Eisler and J.A. Konrath
• Ditch the Agent by Jack King
• Let’s Get Digital by David Gaughran
• Reader’s Rule by Bob Mayer

I’ve written a semi-related article on the importance of book reviews, please find it here.