I’ve dabbled a bit in self-publishing, and I’m dabbling more right now as we finish up our first Red story and start considering how we want to handle it.  People familiar with JA Konrath’s blog know that there is money to be had.  What makes me sad, though, are the people who seem to miss the most important thing he did in the years leading up to his phenomenal ebook success: work. Really. damn. hard.

My theory (and it is only a theory) is that the people who find the most success in self-publishing will be the ones who don’t have to do it. The ones who have options but chose to go the self-publishing route for their own reasons.  Self-publishing isn’t a band-aid that fixes a book no one wants to buy.  It’s a viable option for a business savvy author who has a strong product and wants the control to package and market it in ways regular publishers can’t or won’t.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that New York is struggling to catch up and adapt to the digital market.  Considering the chaos running rampant across digital retailers right now, that seems like a given. This post is not about the benefits and pitfalls of self-publishing vs New York print publishing, though.  This is about digital publishing, and whether you should do it yourself or team up with an epublisher, and I think the choice is a whole lot stickier when you take out the question of whether or not your publisher can effectively navigate the digital market. (Which presumably your epublisher can.  This goes back to research, though!)

Some Numbers

Epublishing is not all roses and rainbows.  There are good publishers and bad publishers, and even at the good ones you might sell a book that just doesn’t hit.  Or one that sells fast for a few months and then drops into obscurity for no reason you can tell.

A few days ago I posted this chart talking about how wildly our kindle sales had taken off.  As a reminder, these are month-by-month sales on one kindle title–I have quite a few other ones that showed the same Dec/Jan jump.

Of course, that’s the rainbows and roses chart.  To be fair, epublishing is not a sure thing.  Even someone who has pretty decent numbers on one book can have another book that looks more like this:

So what about self-publishing?  Well, we have 3 $.99 titles available at Amazon, and I made a graph showing just how well all three of them have done since the beginning.  (Also, an interesting side note: all of these stories are available for free in our website, but we’ve repackaged and bundled some of them for the kindle.)

(I have no idea why they’re converging on 200. Weird.)

Those certainly seem to be doing better than the worst of our epublished books, but not as well as the best.  Of course, these are also selling at a fraction of the price and, to be perfectly honest, since publishers get a better deal with Amazon than I do, I’m only making 5-10% more per sale on my self-published titles than I am on my epublished titles. It all comes down to a numbers game.

What numbers?  Well, I can tell you that every self-published book we’ve sold added together made us just a little more than we made on that one epublished title in January.  If you’re working with an epublisher who knows how to competitively price books, who knows how to attractively package them, and who has consumer trust (and this is a big one if you aren’t a name brand yourself) you’re probably going to end up ahead of the game getting a boost from a good epublisher.

How do you find a good epublisher?  First go read every word written here. Then follow all the links and read every word written there.  Don’t tell me it’s too many words, this is your career we’re talking about!

(I’m not kidding. Every. Word.  Research, y’all!  It is so important.  If you don’t know the difference between 3rd party and direct sales, or which pubs are known for which genres, you need to go find out!  I’ll wait here.)

Blah blah, so this is all rah rah epublishing yay?

No.  There may be times when self-publishing is the best option.  We’re doing it because we want to experiment with formats and giving them away for free, and most publishers aren’t 100% happy with you when you post your entire book online for free.  But the brutal truth is that unless you have a massive backlist and a lot of fans, chances are you won’t be paying the bills on self-publishing any time soon.

Which isn’t to say don’t do it.  And now we’ve circled back around to priorities.  Do what makes you happy, but know what you’re in for.  And with self-publishing, it’s a lot of work for maybe not a lot of reward.  But if it’s worth it to you?  That’s all that matters.

(As for us? We use the money we get from our kindle self-pubbed titles to pay for more contests. )

Note before we start: as this is about cover art, there will be an awful lot of images, and some of them a bit on the sexy side, so be careful where you browse.

Today I’m going to talk about covers. We happen to be lucky, in this regard, because I have a copy of Photoshop that I’ve spent 12 years becoming adequate with. This is not some kind of faux-modesty thing here–in twelve years I’ve probably learned how to use 50% of this program. I learned so much at last year’s Creative Direction workshop…if you have any interest at all, it is worth the money a hundred times over. The instructors are some of the names you’ve seen on some of epublishing’s most stunning covers: April Martinez, Anne Cain, Chris Griffin and Croco Designs. Seriously, check it out.

In this particular instance, I’m going to admit it. The covers came first. Sometimes I peruse stock photo sites and save pretty pictures, but on this day there were three that just really were calling out to me. I futzed around while I was on the phone with Donna doing some plotting and eventually I tentatively showed her my masterpiece entitled “fakes.jpg”

They’re not much. They’re small, blurry, watermarked and sloppy. Oh, and there’s that thing with the titles. But I liked the idea of them, and when I showed them to Donna she said the fateful words, “That makes me want to write…”

(Side note: so much of what we do starts with one or the other of us seeing something and saying, “That makes me want to write [monkey pirates]/[shapeshifters dealing magical drugs]/[pioneer werewolves]/[okay not the monkey pirates].” It’s like an illness!)

It turned out that a few of the ideas we had kicking around on the back-burner chose that moment to fly together into an irresistible concept. Best of all, it happened to be one that we’d considered doing as a free-read serial before, to the point that I’d even designed a blog template for it. So now we had an idea, a publishing plan, and covers! (I’m going to pretend it was that easy, and that we didn’t dither for several days over abandoning the idea of self-publishing because generally speaking we do enjoy getting royalty checks and letting someone else do the work.)

Oh wait, did I say we had covers? No, we had tiny, crappy quality cover mockups! So away I went to dreamstime.com where I secured high resolution copies of all of the pictures in question. Then I had to make a few choices.

Clearly they were a series, but were they the kind of series that had to go all in order? Would they be stand alone? Did they need a series name? When you’re self-publishing something, no one is going to make important branding decisions for you. It’s up to you to make sure you’re putting forth a product that is going to make some sort of cohesive sense. (Ack! Pressure! It burns!)

Here’s what I started with, and where it ended up…

Cover #1: Yes, she’s wearing plastic wrap. It was not the funnest thing ever.

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Cover #2: You’d think this was the easiest one, but that shirt wanted to be ugly pink.

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Cover #3: The first one I did. That dress started it all, I swear.

All in all, the covers weren’t that complex. There’s very little photo manipulation (some changing/extending of backgrounds) and the font is also very simple. I would say their biggest weakness, overall, is that they don’t scream paranormal! futuristic! shapeshifters! More clear is the fact that these are going to be sexy, intimate stories, and in this case I’m hoping that is sufficient. (Though hey, shout out if you’re reading this: would you be surprised/dismayed to discover that these were not contemporaries? Well, except for the last one…)

My favorite part about the covers? The hands. I think the theme of these three covers is the many ways hands can show intimacy. Possessive, protective, comforting… I really dig the hands in these.

So, so far in our self-publishing adventure, I’ve shelled out ~$15 to secure the three stock photos. So far I’d say we’re ahead of the game budget-wise, and it’s clearly a better deal than if we’d had to pay someone to create them!

Speaking of budgets, there’s something you can love your publisher for–and believe me, during this whole process I’ll be drawing your attention to a lot of these things. Covers are expensive. And absorbing the cost of them isn’t the only thing your publisher does. A good publisher is going to have more insight and insider knowledge about sales trends than your average author. There could be a well documented (if quirky) trend that books with oddly spaced, plain blue font won’t sell. I rather doubt there is, but there could be, and I don’t know about it. So there we go, two for the con column: branding & cost.

The pro column? Well, we got to make them exactly how we wanted them. Even if they don’t sell, they are so fun to look at. At the end of the day, I’m going to call this one a draw.

]]> http://moirarogers.com/blog/archives/1726/feed 6 http://moirarogers.com/blog/archives/1697 http://moirarogers.com/blog/archives/1697#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:00:36 +0000 Bree http://moirarogers.com/blog/?p=1697 So, it’s 2010 now, and Donna and I have been thinking about what we’re going to do with ourselves when it comes to free content.  Both of us love writing freebies.  Sometimes they’re supplemental to existing series and sometimes they’re original.  Some were stories we’d gotten the rights back to and didn’t want to resubmit elsewhere.  In 2009 we had almost 10,000 downloads on our free reads, so I’m assuming someone is enjoying them.  And that makes us both happy!

One thing Donna and I both find fascinating is the promise and the potential of the digital marketplace.  It has its bumps, to be sure.  Most people caught the big vanity vs self vs traditional publishing flap that followed in the wake of Harlequin’s move to open their own pay-to-publish venture.  Many of you probably caught the cliff notes, too, as it was hashed, rehashed, remixed and remastered all across the internet for the weeks to follow.

I mostly kept my mouth shut as much as possible.  Why?  I believe in the promise of traditional publishing.  I believe in the potential of epublishing.  I even believe in the magical possibility of self-publishing. I recognize the possible benefits and pitfalls of all three, and I think that which is the best path for any given person and any given project will depend on a thousand different things.

Thus far Donna and I have had no projects where self-publishing seemed like our best bet.  We enjoy the editorial oversight we get with our epublishers, and their distribution and visibility is far superior as well.  Since we’re lucky enough to publish with several epubs who can assure us a certain level of income, self-publishing has always been too much risk for not enough reward.

Not anymore!  In 2010 we have one project that we really wanted to work on.  We considered this series of shorts for a few of our publishers, but in the end one thing kept holding us back.  Though we know we would probably make more money if we have someone else publish it, in this case there was something we wanted to do that we absolutely couldn’t without retaining all of our rights: give it away for free.

During all of 2009 I talked a lot of smack, in private and public, about how I think there is something to be said for the argument that you can make money on something that is also available for free.  So this year, Donna and I are putting our money where my mouth is and testing the waters.  People have done it before, with varying degrees  of success, but hey.  We’ll never know until we try, huh?

Of course, that doesn’t mean we’re jumping ship.  I can find some of the experimental possibilities of self-publishing intriguing without forsaking all else.  We’ve got a full release schedule in 2010 and plenty more projects on the horizon.  But now we also have something else–an experiment.  We’re finalizing the details this month and will be posting about our experiences and expectations as we go.  Consider this an open experiment…and hey!  Maybe interactive too! If you see something you think we could do to make it better, tell us!

For now I can say this: we have three stories planned.  They’ll be published for a very affordable price in several places yet to be determined, then offered as a weekly serial on our blog.  If you enjoy the story and want to read it faster, or have it in a nice shiny convenient download (or even just support our wacky experiment), you’ll be able to buy it.  If you don’t, you can wait and see it all for free.  We plan to play it all by ear, learn and evolve as we grow, and hopefully end 2010 with a little more insight into how it all works.

Coming in 2010: Three Hot Futuristic Paranormal Stories