I started writing my first novel in 2013.
After some work by a wonderful editor, I sent it off to a publisher I liked and set to work on the sequel. Nine months later I received the rejection note. I didn’t want to lose years waiting for other publishers to make up their minds, so I found an artist to do a cover for it, learned how to do proper formatting, and put it up on Amazon in December 2015.
It sold about two thousand copies over the next four months. It’s still selling a trickle of copies, and the omnibus of the whole trilogy sells in a somewhat larger trickle. I’d shown up at what I call ‘the end of the gold rush.’
When Kindle publishing started, a bunch of people bought e-readers and there weren’t many e-books out there for them to enjoy, so any good book would have desperate readers grabbing copies. I made a sale before I’d told anyone about posting it; even my mother (I was trying to fix a formatting problem).
With so much demand, more writers piled in, and trad publishers began to budge on letting their books have electronic editions. Writers reclaimed the rights to their backlists and released e-book versions. Publishers followed along.
At some point, I’m guessing 2016 or 2017, this new e-book supply exceeded the demand. Writers were now competing for readers’ attention. Bowker estimates over three million books were published in 2023, five/sixths of them indie, and that doesn’t include the e-book-only publications. (1)
How am I doing in this flood of new books? I’m treading water. I’m up to twelve novels in three different series and two story collections. My Amazon sales are declining. Part of that is I haven’t kept up with the advertising algorithm changes, so my ads aren’t bringing in as many sales. Someday I need to spend a bunch of time revising my ads, but I’d rather be writing.
There are other ways I’ve been bringing in money:
- I have a Substack where I post short stories and samples from my novels in progress. The paid subscribers are providing me more support than Amazon.
- Local craft fairs, comic shows, and science fiction conventions are chances to sell in person. I wouldn’t recommend this to someone with only a few books, but with fourteen titles I have a better chance to pitch a book that matches someone’s interests. Not every event is worth selling at—make sure you match the theme.
- Running a Kickstarter let me fund covers for my two story collections, and was a chance to sell higher-end books (hardcovers of my first trilogy) to long-time readers. One supporter went for the $300 pledge to pick a topic for me to write a story about.
Can I quit my day job? No. But I’m making a modest profit, or put another way, subsidizing my habit of going to science fiction conventions. My most recent book was #7 in a nine-book space opera series. My hope is that when the series is finished, readers burned by GRRM and other unfinished series will pick it up, so once #9 is out there will be a big sales spike.
Do I recommend doing this? Nah. It’s an experiment, one that’s taking years at my writing speed, and I don’t know if it will work. Indie publishing is like that.
So what do I recommend?
First, I advise against chasing trad pub contracts. The big publishing companies are in the mating dinosaurs phase of their lifecycle—merging and dying. You don’t want to commit your career to a publisher who may be bankrupt or auctioned off in a few years. As their cash flow constricts, the big houses are making their contracts nastier, demanding extra rights and sometimes not allowing termination clauses. Kris Rusch is a long-time writer who’s tracked these trends at her site (2).
For the multinational corporations that own the big publishing houses, the real value of a book may not be its sales, but valuing it as an intellectual property asset and then depreciating it to balance income in other parts of the corporation (3). If that’s what they want a book for, they’re not going to put much effort into marketing it.
The people who do get trad publishing contracts tend to fall into the buckets of:
- Those with large followings who can be counted on to buy the book. They’d probably be better off going with Kickstarter.
- People with good connections to agents, editors, or publishers. Nobody coming to a blog post for advice is in this category.
- Anyone who’s the proper demographic or ideological flavor-of-the-month in Manhattan. A fickle game, alas.
- Someone with a one-in-a-million superb book. Good luck.
If not trad, what do I recommend?
First, get good at writing. Write a lot of words. Fanfic (under a pen name!) is a great writing exercise. Blog. Write essays. Do stories for practice. Before I started a novel, I’d written probably over a hundred-thousand words of RPG adventures, white papers, operations orders, and wargame scenarios. It’s a skill. You improve it by practicing.
When you’re good enough (alas, only readers can tell you, and you have to publish stuff for them to give feedback on), write something to be published. Find an editor, maybe more than one. You need someone who can spot problems with the story structure and one who can spot typos, continuity errors, etc. If you find them in the same person, bless them.
You need a good artist to do a book cover. Might be you, if you have the skill. The cover shouldn’t just be a pretty picture. It has to say “This is a book of sub-genre X.” If it looks like a mystery but it’s actually space opera, you will get unhappy readers.
Amazon is the big gorilla of publishing. You can go directly there. Doing that gives you a link you can start promoting on social media and with advertising. How to do that? Sorry, I’m not good at that part of the game.
There are other outfits you can put your book on (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, etc.) but they won’t sell as much as Amazon. If you go Amazon exclusive, your book is available to Kindle Unlimited readers. Some months I get more from KU than from sales; usually it’s about a third of my Amazon revenue. If Amazon ever cancels my account, I will be screwed, so it’s a gamble.
A mailing list (Substack, MailChimp, many others) will let you keep in touch with your core readers, the people who can be counted onto buy all your books. Make yourself visible—social media, conventions, in-person sales. Recruiting readers one at a time is slow, but gets you people who will read everything you write. Substack has the advantage that instead of charging you for sending emails, they offer subscribers a chance to pay you (while Substack takes a cut, of course).
The Amazon algorithm rewards publishing fast. I’ve seen writers succeed by putting out a new book every month. Some authors have teamed up to write in shared universes so they can jointly feed the algorithm. I don’t write fast enough to do that, but if you can do it without burning out, Amazon will reward you.
Kickstarter is a good way to bypass Amazon and the other e-book platforms, to contact readers directly. An “event” lets you attract attention. You can have a range of pledge levels from cheap e-books to autographed hardcover sets, to bring in readers with different incomes. You can also offer huge pledge levels to hook “whales” among your fans.
If you’re going “wide” (not exclusive to Amazon), you can build a website of your own to sell books directly. That’s more labor, but you keep the highest percentage that way. I know an indie writer who’s become so successful that her husband quit his day job to handle shipping for her books.
For an introvert like me, selling in person is hard. I got better with some advice from fellow author Chris Schmitz (4). This is another thing practice helps with. Meeting readers in person is another way to add to your following.
It’s not easy being writer. It’s not a great way to make money unless you’re both good and lucky. But if you work hard, you can do your part in changing that three million new books a year to four million new books a year.
If you want to see what I’ve done, you can check out my books on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Karl-K-Gallagher/author/B0195ZEOO8
And my short stories on Substack:
https://gallagherstories.substack.com/t/shortstory
Footnotes:
- New books stat: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/96468-self-publishing-s-output-and-infuence-continue-to-grow.html
- Kris Rusch: https://kriswrites.com/new-contracts-and-dealbreakers/
- Depreciation: https://deanwesleysmith.com/advanced-magic-bakery-chapter-five/
- Live selling: https://authorchristopherdschmitz.myshopify.com/products/sell-more-books-at-live-events-how-to-sell-more-books-at-conventions-shows-signings-events-and-beyond?variant=45077611413760
Karl K. Gallagher is a systems engineer, currently performing data analysis for a major aerospace company. In the past he calculated trajectories for a commercial launch rocket start-up, operated satellites as a US Air Force officer, and selected orbits for government and commercial satellites. Karl lives in Minnesota with his family.
ATTENTION, AUTHORS!
Are you a successful self-published or non-trad published author? Have you had a self-published, small-press published, or other non-traditional-published book released within the last three years? Are you willing to share what you learned from the experience with other writers? If so, we’d like to hear from you, and to share your story with our readers.
Query first, please, to stupefyingstories@gmail.com, subject “Success Story.”
We’re most interested in hearing what worked for you, and what didn’t. Is there one thing you did that really worked well, and that you’d recommend that others do? Conversely, is there something you did that you really wish you hadn’t, and would caution others to avoid?
Yes, of course you can use this opportunity to shamelessly promote yourself and your own books.
1 comments:
PHEW! That was a read. I feel like I need to dive it again a little later. It's one of those things you don't digest all at once. Loved it! Taking notes for sure. Thanks!
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