Author Archives: chucklitka

This is my followup to a post from July 2 2022 called “Through Query Hell on a Lark” that can found here:

https://wordpress.com/post/writerssupportingwriters.com/953

In it I described how and why I decided to see if I could get my most recent novel traditionally published by going through the time honored query process. The short answer is that on a whim I had submitted the novel to Gollancz, a British SF publisher, during one of their rare open windows when they accept manuscripts from authors directly.Since I would not hear back from them for six to nine months,I had the time to see if I could find an agent to represent it. I have not yet heard back from Gollancz yet, but I am drawing a line under the query process.

Over the course of the summer and fall I submitted my query letter to 15 agents, four on the first of each month starting in July, from my list of 31 agents who handled science fiction and accepted queries from unpublished writers. The remaining 16 were either closed for submission or did not seem worth the trouble. To date I’ve received 7 form letter rejection emails, and with the last submission 6 weeks ago, I think I can safely conclude that the other 8 queries are rejections by default.

Given that I did not expect to sell my book, and I was going through the process on, as I said, on a lark, the process was actually sort of fun – a challenge that resulted in several very good things.

The first positive thing was I joined a discord channel run by a “Traditionally published Fantasy Author” which he set up to raise a little money and provide a forum for writers to help each other on their quest to get published. It was not as active as I had expected, but it did provide a forum to talk about the writing experience, see the work of other writers. I was able to get into the mindset of people who are serious about being traditionally published.

Secondly, it was interesting to think about my story and how I could sell the story to an agent and publisher. I tried several different query letters and actually changed the title of the novel from The Road to EuraEast to the rather tongue-in-cheek title of The Girl on the Kerb to make the story sound more mainstream. Nothing worked, but qua sera, sera.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I used the extra time I had in waiting on the publisher and the querying process to rewrite and improve the final third of the story, adding nearly 6,000 words to it in the process. I had some little nagging doubts about some parts and the time to address them. Now, I don’t know if those nagging doubts would’ve kept me from releasing the book myself since by the time I was finished writing it I knew I needed to submit it to the publisher within two weeks. However, the extra time I had gave me the time and eto improve the story – a lesson learned for any future story. Usually I’m too impatient to let a story sit around for several months. At my age I could be dead tomorrow and no eyebrows would be raised.

Fourthly, I now have a much better appreciation of what thousands of writers have to go through in their pursuit of their dream of being a traditionally published author A “real” author in their mind.And how crushing every rejection email, or perhaps even worse, silence, must be for them. I have to admire the strength of their commitment to their dream. Still, better them than me.

Fifthly, because of the process I looked deeper into the realities of traditional publishing, and it’s not a good place. Between discussions on the discord channel and what the Penguin/Random House-Simon and Schuster trial revealed about the publishing business, it is clear that the so-called midlist author is a dying breed. Traditional publishing is dominated by multinational corporations who only care for the bottom line, and as I reported in the post below, best selling books are the ones that pay the bills.

https://wordpress.com/post/writerssupportingwriters.com/1024

I’ve heard both, booksellers and authors lament that authors these days are only given a book two to become a bestselling author before they are out the door of the big publishers. In fact, the author running the discord channel had his first two trilogies published by one of the big five publishers, but when the second trilogy did not sell as well as expected, he was out the door. His last two books have been published by a small press. And while it’s not one of those very small presses,it is a definite step down, career wise. Now it ain’t easy in indie-publishing, but it ain’t any easier in traditional publishing – even after they let you in the door.

And lastly I have come to really appreciate my decision to release my own books directly to readers. I was 65 in 2015 when I decided to self-publish my books so it was a no-brainer decision, but still… Now I really appreciate the fact that my creative endeavors had not been held hostage by a few dozen agents – people who judge a book by reading the query letter, and maybe glancing over the first five pages of the manuscript. And how lucky I am that real people read and enjoy them. That’s what it’s all about.

So, all in all, my travels in Query Hell was a worthwhile experience. Once.

When and why might the dream of being a writer dies and you decide to call it quits?

For some authors their dream dies when they can no longer write. Like when they are dead. Or when health issues prevent them from writing, despite their desire to continue on. Sometimes real world events in their lives do not allow them the time and/or energy to write. But for some writers, it is a conscious decision to lay down the pen.

For traditionally published authors the end may come when they can no longer sell their books to publishers. When new contracts are not offered. You’re only as good as your last book, so if sales disappoint, new contracts may not be offered and self-publishing may be too daunting or simply unappealing to continue writing. Since writing is a side-hustle for most authors, moving on frees time for other endeavors, even if it means leaving the dream behind.

Much the same dynamics may end the career of self-publishing authors as well. Though in this case, it would be the readers who are either not finding or not buying their book or books in any appreciable numbers. Disappointing sales may lead an author to decide that writing and self-publishing is simply not worth their time, effort, and in many cases, their money.

In both these cases, authors may still have stories to write, but they, or their publisher, don’t see a market for more stories. Books cost money to be produced. Most lose money, so they can’t be published by companies or writers willy-nilly.

On the other hand, a lack of new story ideas may cause both traditional and self-published authors to put down their pen. The spring of their inspiration runs dry leaving them with nothing new or interesting to write. Now this could simply be a case of “writer’s block” that will pass, but only time will tell. In any event, a writer is left waiting for an inspiration that may never ever come.

Another reason for quitting is that an author finds that the pleasure of writing is gone. Writing no longer gives them the satisfaction and joy it once did. It has become a chore, even, [yikes!] a job. And given that for most authors writing is a very low paying job, an author may decide that writing needs to be more than a job to be worthwhile, especially if they don’t have a book contract to fulfill. Or thousands of fans clamoring for the next book.

Or perhaps the writer finds that the need to write – that strange passion – that drove them to spend oh, so many hours pursuing something so iffy as writing stories has been sated. Looking at what they’ve written, they may decide that it’s sufficient. Enough is enough, there is no need to write more. They have nothing left to prove. They have a the hill they’re willing to die on. A legacy that they are willing to be remembered for.

Most likely, when an author draws a line under their dream of being a writer and lays down their pen, it is for more than one reason, it’s a mixture of many different reasons and emotions as well – sadness and relief, regret and pride, and hopefully, a sense of moving on.

I have some experience in endings.

I have been an artist all my life, and indeed for half a dozen years, a very successful starving artist, starving being the operative word. But even when I decided to take down my shingle and stop selling my paintings I continued to paint. However, as the years went by, less and less so. I had taken to painting from imagination rather than photos or life, having no interest – or perhaps not enough talent – to paint from life, so when my wellspring of imagination no longer produced new ideas, I could either just revisit old ideas, or stop painting. I didn’t want to paint the same thing over and over again, so I pretty much stopped, save for painting my book covers, which is more of a chore than a joy. Aiding and abetting this decision was the fact that I had painted something like 2,000 paintings of various sizes, styles, and in mediums over the last 30 years and still have maybe 1,500 of them in a closet under the stairs. I have my hill to die on.

That said, I would like to paint again. I hope to return to painting. But for that to happen I will have to come up with something new to paint, or a new way to paint. But if I don’t, so be it.

I sense the same thing may be happening in my writing as well. Ideas are increasingly hard to come by. I was delighted to be able to assemble a new novel out of several discarded ones this past winter. But while parts of it were fun to write, other parts were more of a chore than I would like – and while I would like to think the story is my best, being my latest, I don’t think it is my favorite, which is discouraging. In short, I fear that my well of inspiration is slowly drying up, just as it did with painting. Still, I have written and self-published 10 novels, 3 novellas, with another novel written and ready to be published. So, if or when it comes time to put down the pen, I have that hill to die on for my books as well. But hopefully not just yet.

So how about you? Do you envision a day when you will no longer be able or want to write? How do you think the end will come to you? Will you die in harness, or call it quits for any of the reasons above, or others I haven’ thought of?

Over the last six months I’ve been experimenting as a writer/publisher. And I thought I would share my experiences.

Let’s start with paperback books. Starting out I took Amazon’s word and made my paperbacks 6”x 9” and I thought glossy covers would be nicer. Well, 6”x 9” might be the most popular size, but I don’t think that’s the case for fiction. Because I am toying with the idea of trying to get my books into a small selection of SFF orientated bookshops, I decided to redo my books in the 8”x 5.25” format with matte covers, just like all the cool kids have. Having put out a dozen paperback books, redoing the books was not a great project, though for my longest ones, I had to reduce the type size to that of mass market paperbacks. Now, you can’t just change the size of published books since it is baked into the ISBN code. You need to unpublish your old versions and publish the new versions as new books. And here’s a pro tip; I discovered that Amazon will no longer let you link ebooks and paperbacks if the metadata does not exactly match. Since these were new editions, I listed them as 2^nd editions, and since the ebooks are either 1^st edition or have no edition number, I now cannot link the two versions. Given the fact that I’ll sell half a dozen paperback books in a year, I’m not losing sleep over it. Just be aware of it, should you do the same.

Next up, audio books. I have, in previous posts, suggested that if you are self-publishing wide, and don’t offer your books on the Google Play store you should. At last count over 60% of my sales came from Google. And that was before audio books. As I wrote earlier, Google is offering, for a limited time, to convert ebooks in the Google store into auto-generated audio books – for free. In May I took them up on that offer. For most of the last six month I have had a dozen audiobook titles on offer. In those six months I’ve sold, that is to say, given away, more than 4,500 audio books, without lifting a finger to promote them. They’ve accumulated over 50 ratings, and the audiobooks rate as well as the ebooks, with no complaints as to the quality of the audio narration. Of course selling books for money is a lot harder, BUT, since you can convert your ebooks on Google for free, (I did so just a couple of weeks ago) there is no reason why you could not sell your audiobooks for the same price of your ebooks, which would likely be significantly less expensive than most audiobooks. With audiobooks being the fastest growing segment of the book market, I think it’s an opportunity you might want to seriously consider if you don’t want to spend what human narrators charge – two to five hundred dollars per finished hour. Most novels run around 12 hours in audio form or more. Do the math.

My third experiment was withholding my standalone novel, The Girl on the Kerb, that I wrote at the start of this year, from self-publishing. Instead I submitted it to an English SF publisher during a month-long open window for writers without agents. Since I can’t publish it until I hear that they rejected it – in six to nine months – I decided to use the time to see if I could find an agent for it. I have sent out four query letters on the first of the month since July 1. So far, that’s 16 query letters. I have received 4 form letter email rejections and no requests to look at the manuscript. Let’s just say that I’m not holding my breath – but it was always a lark; a nothing ventured, nothing gained sort of thing. Recently, I hear that Orbit Publishing, a division of one of the big publishers, is going to start offering a line of ebooks and audiobooks, without paper editions, and I understand that this line will be open to authors without agents as well. I plan to submit The Girl on the Kerb to them, if possible. That said, I have already painted the cover for my self-published version of the book, so I’m all set to release it sometime in the first quarter or half of next year if things work out like I expect they will. In short, I’ve got my 2023 novel in the can. That said, I plan to spend six months querying any other standalone novels I manage to write before self-publishing them, because well, why not? The gold rush of self-publishing is long over. There is no hurry to get something out there, no boat to miss or train to catch.

I’m not a lad for seeking publicity, but this year I once again entered one of my books in the Self Published Science Fiction Blog-off. I’m hoping to get a review and a little publicity out of it. I didn’t last year, but maybe I’ll have more luck this year. I really wanted to enter my one fantasy book in the far more popular fantasy version of this contest, but I never found the date to enter until the deadline had passed. Next year.

Upcoming experiments include going over all the metadata on all my platforms and adding as many tags as possible to describe my books. For example a book may have only “Space Opera” for a tag, but I’m going to add tags like “Free Space Opera” and maybe “Free SF Book”, etc. This is probably self-publishing 101, but I’ve been rather dismissive of tags. No more. I gather that is how people discover books now, since they’ll never find them simply by scrolling the lists provided.

Next up, if I ever write a new standalone novel, it is going to be a fantasy. Fantasy outsells science fiction, and there are far more agents, editors, and publishing houses looking for fantasy than there are for science fiction. Since I write old fashioned romances using planets as the required exotic lands, I’m going to bury any science fiction elements and just market them as fantasy. Why not reach for the largest potential audience you can when starting out with a blank page?

I have not spent any out of pocket money on my self-publishing efforts. My modest royalties from Amazon cover my modest expenses, which are essentially the author copies of the paper books and postage that I send to my beta readers. I am, as I mentioned above, I’m toying with the idea of spending a chunk of change to get my books into bookshops by offering them as free samples. The idea is a mix of advertising and creating a (tiny) lasting legacy by having my books on some book shelves somewhere years after I’m dead. I hate spending money, so we’ll see about this ide.

There are many ways to promote your books, and networking with other authors is a good one. Newsletter swaps are pretty popular – if you have a newsletter to swap. Sending books to reviewers and YouTube book channels is another — but that’s not really my thing. What have you been experimenting with to promote your books? And how has it worked for you?

Is fame. Become a celebrity and you are almost guaranteed to sell books – indeed you don’t even have to write them. That’s what ghost writers are for. Ah, I can hear you muttering, if I were rich and famous, I wouldn’t have to try to sell books. Which is true. And you might also be muttering, getting famous is harder than selling books. Now there you might be wrong. For we live in the age of social media. Anyone can become famous if you own a smartphone.

Of course it takes work. But fame in social media is obtainable, you just need to build a large enough audience. I know that some of you are already on YouTube, so let’s start with a YouTuber, Daniel Greene.

Greene talks about and reviews fantasy books. His channel currently has 463,000 subscribers. It has taken him six years and over 460 videos to reach that total, so I think it is safe to say that Daniel Green has put the time and effort to earn his fame. So how does that translate into book sales?

In March of 2021 he self published his first book – a fantasy novella, Breach of Peace. I don’t know his sales numbers, but it currently has 7,402 ratings and 1,458 reviews on GoodReads with a 3.58* rating, plus 2,209 on Amazon with a 4.2* rating. It is currently #333,589 in the Kindle Store, i.e. while it no doubt was a bestseller, it is selling only a few copies today. Compare that to the average debut author offering only a novella, and I think that you can attribute its success to his fame. This is especially evident when you look at his next book.

On October 29^th he published the second book in the series, Rebel’s Creed. I gather that he decided to combine the next two novellas together into a novel based on his feedback for the first one. It has 1,215 ratings and 178 reviews with a 3.58* rating, and 458 ratings and a 4.3* rating on Amazon. Its current sales rank is 431,994. All of which suggests that fame can sell only so many books. While Greene’s first book was considered an okay first effort, it was clearly not strong enough to bring anywhere near all the readers of the first book along for the second. Still, 1,204 ratings on Goodreads is nothing to sneer at.

Now let’s look at a new Austrian fantasy author Stacy McEwan, who released her first book, Ledge: The Glacian Trilogy, Book 1 on 13 September 2022. It currently has 1,199 ratings on GoodReads with a 495 reviews and a 4.19* rating and 310 ratings on Amazon with a 4.5* rating. As of this writing the Kindle book is ranked 8,633 which my handy dandy sales estimator says that book is selling on Amazon.com at a rate of 30 books a day, 449 copies a month. The hardcover book is ranked 15,680 which translates to about 17 books a day, 256 a month. These numbers bounce around daily, and reflect the sales on Amazon in the US only. Amazon sales outside of the US and all bookshop sales are not included, and no doubt add significantly to the grand total.

So why have I chosen her? Well, I happened to watch an interview with her, which is the only reason why I am aware of her. But in this interview she told her story. She happens to be a TikTok star, a “Booktok” person, which I gather are people on TikTok who do whatever they do there around a book theme. She happens to be very good at it, and has some 321,500 followers. I’m not on TikTok, but what I gather is that she does short comedy skits about books. So, when she wrote her first fantasy novel, Ledge, and talked about it on TikTok, not only did several publishing companies request to see her story, but something like five agents offered to represent her.

Interestingly enough, she had planned to release her book as a self-published book. She had it all set to go, with a cover done and a release date set when these publishers and agents contacted her, and bid for her book. She had to cancel her publication and at the same time, let all the people that pre-ordered it know that it was going to be published by Angry Robot instead, at a different date.

Now, as it happens, I happen to know of another debut fantasy author, Shauna Lawless, from Ireland who published her first fantasy book just two weeks before McEwan did, on the 1^st of September 2022. This book, The Children of Gods and Fighting Men, was also traditionally published, this time by the Head of Zeus. It is a historical fantasy set in Ireland. It currently has 189 ratings and 114 reviews on GoodReads with a 4.51* rating and on Amazon it has 26 global ratings with a 4.7* rating. As of this writing the ebook sits at #118,647 on Amazon.com which translates to 2 copies a day and 29 a month with the hardcover book selling at 4 copies a day, 54 books a month. Again, these numbers reflect only Amazon sales in the US. Amazon sales outside of the US and bookshop sales everywhere will add significantly to the total sales.

Both of these books were traditionally published, so sales are not directly comparable to self-published books. And as always, we are comparing apples to oranges when comparing the two books. Still, I think that it is clear that being famous on social media contributes significantly to sales. The numbers tell the tale: McEwan’s 1.199 GoodReads ratings to Lawless’s 189 (with a 2 week lead).

I also know of a booktuber, Bookborn, who’s husband, Zack Argyle’s self published debut fantasy series the first book which was published in March 2020 has sold petty well, with his first book having 624 ratings and 263 reviews with a 3.94*. Now, I really don’t know if it was even promoted on his wife’s YouTube channel, but all these people have Twitter accounts as well that can be used to get the word out to followers.

All in all, while it is quite obvious that fame will often lead to fortune, and books sales, it is perhaps less obvious that in this day of age, fame is not out of the reach of ordinary writers. It may well pay, especially if you are only starting your writing career, to develop social media channels to your potential readers.

Oh, and blogs are too 2012. They don’t make you famous. Just say’n.

In my last piece I profiled the sales experience of two indie authors, a part-time writer like most of us, and a full time writer. The Department of Justice vs Penguin Random House/S&S trial has generated a great deal of buzz in the book world and a great deal of numbers, statistics, and headlines, mostly out of context. In a blog post, Lincoln Michel put some context to the numbers being bandied about. If you have any interest in the business of bookselling, you should read his post, which can be found here:

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen

And in the comments on this blog post, Kristen McLean, the lead industry analyst from NPD BookScan, gives us some concrete numbers. BookScan is the company that tracks about 76% of the sales of paper books in the US. She provides some specific numbers for the sales of paper books by the 10 largest publishers in the US for a period of 52 weeks ending on August 24^th 2022. BookScan uses ISBNs to track sales, and this data set tracks 45,571 frontlist titles from Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmilan, Abrams, Soucebooks and John Wiley.

It should be noted that the numbers below are the sales of paper books reported by about 76% of the US retail outlets, (including Amazon) so they do not include all paper book sales. Nor do they include the sales of ebooks and audiobooks, nor sales to libraries, or sales via an author’s website or at conventions or trade shows. Thus actual numbers will be somewhat higher.

Here are the numbers from this group of publishers:

>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more

>>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies

>>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies

>>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies

>>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies

>>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies

>>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies

>>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies

The first takeaway is that almost 15% of the books published by these 10 publishing houses sell less than 12 copies. And mind you, this data set only include frontlist books, not books from their backlist catalogs. Nor do these numbers include indie published paper books. These are books that were purchased by the 10 largest publishers in the US. The upside is that the authors of these books were paid an advance independent of sales. They made money on those 12 books, which is more than an indie publisher that sells 12 books is likely able to claim.

The second major takeaway is that 66% of these frontlist books published by these big publishers sell less than 1,000 copies over the 52 week period. They will continue to sell for the next couple of years, so these may not be their total sales. Still, in a nation of about 330 million people, a thousand copies would seem to be a low bar to surpass.

Somewhere in the upper range of the 21.6% of books in the 1,000 – 5,000 range the publisher starts making a profit on the book, and the authors can begin to rest a little easier about getting another book deal. And to put it in perspective, if you have sold 5,000 copies of your book in the last 52 weeks, you are in the top 13% of all authors. You are a successful author with 5,000 books sold.

All in all, the bottom line is that if you are writing books to make money, you need to be very, very lucky to have any financial success at all, and very, very, very lucky to have that success to last for any length of time. For most authors, writing books pays about as much as writing a blog.

Numbers are hard to come by in publishing. However, I have come across two indie authors who have put their numbers out for everyone to see, in the hope that their their experiences will help other indie authors succeed. Neither of the authors are at the extreme limits of either pole, success or failure, but they represent good examples of the common experience towards either of those poles.

Let’s start with Ron Vital. I’ve updated this post with a link to his 2022 blog post. He has a full time job and writes on the side. Ron has been an indie author since 2011. He writes fairy tale and adventure fantasy with female leads. To date I believe he has 14 works of fiction and 5 non-fiction books. Each year since 2013 (save for 2019) he has posted on his blog, his experiences in self-publishing during that year. You can find his 2022 blog post here: https://www.ronvitale.com/blog/2022/12/22/what-i-learned-about-indie-publishing-in-2022-full-sales-figures It includes links to his other year end reports, all of which are well worth reading since he is an author who has tried all the different strategies that have been proposed to sell books over the years – mailing lists, advertising, free promotions, perma-free first books, you name it. He goes over how each of them worked, or didn’t work for him. He also reports his sales numbers, which I have collected below.

However, here are the numbers he has reported;

2011 – sales $295 expenses $200 3 fiction book

2012 – sales $295 expenses $500 lost $205 4 fiction

2013 – sales $295 expenses $500 lost $205 4 fiction

2014 – sales $607 expenses $1,055 lost $448 6 fiction

2015 – sales $1,002 expenses $1,729 lost $727 8 fiction

2016 – sales $1,188 expenses $2,842 lost $1,654 9 fiction 1 non-fiction

2017 – sales $854 expenses $4,856 lost $4,002 10 fiction 2 non-fiction

2018 – sales $611 expenses $3,121 lost $2,510 12 fiction 2 non-fiction

2019 – sales $1,047 expenses $2,542 lost $1,495 13 fiction 2 non-fiction

2020 – sales $1,596 expenses $2,173 lost $577 13 fiction 4 non-fiction

2021 – sales $2,258 expenses $4,256 lost $1,998 14 fiction 5 non-fiction

To sum them up, he has lost $13,494 in 10 years of self publishing.

As a business, losing $13,494 in ten years is not the type of result you’d want to see. But that’s looking at the glass half empty. Looking at it half full, as he does, he would argue that he’s in it for the long term. He’s building his intellectual property and learning skills that are laying the groundwork for a long career. To put that loss in perspective, someone might be able to pick up a second hand pop-up camper for that amount – and spend several weekends a year using it – it’s matter of priorities.

If we look a little closer at his numbers for 2021, he gave away 24,819 books as perma-free first books in his various series, advertising them in Book Barbarian, Fussy Librarian, and Freebooksy. But even giving away these first books for free only resulted in 523 books sold at full price. Plus, in his early indie publishing years, he’s given away at least 30,000 copies of his books as well via various promotions.

Given all the effort he has put into his publishing venture, I have to say that it seems that the stories he wants to write are not the stories an economically viable group of Amazon readers want to read. There are readers for every type of book. But if you are writing to make money, you need to focus your efforts on bestselling genres, and write books that deliver what those readers expect. And then spend a ton of money promoting them.

Speaking of a ton of money, we now turn to the indie author of science fiction, space fantasy, and writing advice non-fiction, Chris Fox. Chris Fox has been a full time indie publisher since at last 2016. Since 2016 he has posted an annual video on YouTube showing his results and analyzing them. You can find all these year end videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisFoxWrites/videos For most years, he reports his sales numbers plus his expense. From his gross sales he pays himself a salary, and charges his healthcare costs and various book related expenses, like editing, advertising, covers, taxes etc. against his gross income, with any balance going into savings or into future projects. Below are his gross sales numbers on Amazon – on which he sells exclusively.

2016 – $170,000 9 fiction 5 non-fiction books on writing and marketing books.

2017 – $180,050 14 fiction 6 non-fiction

2018 – $194,900 17 fiction 7 non-fiction

2019 – $354,620 20 fiction 8 non-fiction

2020 – $272,288 29 fiction 8 non-fiction

2021 – $189,978 35 fiction 8 non-fiction

To achieve and maintain this level of sales, Chris spends upwards of $20,000 a year on advertising. He has written books on how to advertise, as well as how to write 5,000 words a day, and on various other aspects of indie publishing. They are in fact, some of his best selling books. In addition to spending a great deal of money promoting his books, he spends a great deal of time writing and managing his sales – the 12 to 15 hours per day type of time. However, in the last two years he’s had a young child in the house and not only has had to cut back a little, but hasn’t had 8 hours of sleep since his son was born.

Long story short, this type of sales involves spending both a lot of money and a lot of time to build and maintain the business. And even so, you will note the decline in sales over the last two years. despite the fact that he released 15 new books in that period, as well as a number of boxed sets that I didn’t include in my book total numbers.

He has responded to this downturn like all businesses, by cutting expenses. He now does things that he used to farm out to others. He claims he’s doing better than ever, but, like Ron Vital, he’s a glass is half full sort of person, so I take that with a grain of salt.

In 2021 he started releasing to books in his 10 volume fantasy series, in which he writes longer books, but fewer of them. He spent something like $15,000 on the first book to launch this new series, and it hadn’t earned back that investment in March 2022. However he launched two sequels with almost no advertising, so that the series as a whole was in the black to the tune of some $8,000 plus, in March, with more sequels on the way.

However, what I think what we’re seeing here is what happens when you burnout your readers with too many books released in too short of time – which paradoxically you have to do in the fast lane of indie-publishing just to stay on the radar of the avid, book or two a week (or more) readers. Such a pace may well burn out authors as well. Indeed, Chris, in his 2021 report talks about cutting back to two, and perhaps even one book a year going forward, as well as the need to develop other income streams.

Pick your poison. Be careful what you wish for. Be happy with what you are doing.

Great minds think alike. I was planning on posting this later this week, but since Mark has posted about his experiences with Draft2Digital in the post below, I’ll post mine now as a companion piece to his.

Ebook publisher Draft2Digital purchased Smashwords earlier this year. While the merger won’t be completed for something like another year, I was curious to see what D2D was all about, especially their beta program for print on demand books. I’d like to not only change the size of my paperback books, but offer them to selected bookshops. And since I know that bookshops don’t look favorably on Amazon, I’m looking for a (cheap) alternative POD service.

However, before I get to print books, I’ll give you an overview of D2D’s ebook process. They offer a series of videos on how to do things on their platform. I watched most of one, but being an old hand at ebook production, I figured I knew what I was doing. And mostly, I did. If you have set up your book with either Amazon or Smashwords the process will be familiar – up to a point. You start by supplying all the usual information about your book. All that is different here is the graphics, and the fact that they accept a wider variety of formats, including LibreOffice, which is the free program I use to write my books, so that I don’t have to convert them to Word like I do on Smashwords and Amazon.

But when it comes to downloading your manuscript, things change. You should only download the body of your book – chapter one to the end – because D2D will give you the option to add a title page, a copyright page, a dedication page, an “also by” page, an email signup page, a teaser page, and a bio pager and a publisher pages. You choose what extra pages you want, and add the necessary data, like the text of the dedication, your bio, etc. The “also by” page automatically includes the books published by D2D – but not others.

One issue I had was that the copyright page defaults for new books, so that if you bring an older book into the system it will show that it was copyrighted in 2022, with no option to change it. It is my understanding that you cannot copyright a work again unless there are very significant changes to it. While I doubt that the copyright police will pounce on you for this, it is an issue. The work around is fairly simple, do not include a dedicated copyright page, but add the copyright info to the dedication page.

As for the look of ebooks, they offer various artwork for chapter headings, that are related to the type of story the book is, if that’s your jam. The preview showed the text ragged right, but I believe that is handled by the ebook reader software, so it would probably appear justified on the reader.

As for distribution – they offer the usual suspects, plus a German and a French ebook store. They also offer expanded service to libraries. They did not let me price my books for free, at least on pre-order. I only signed up for those two stores that Smashwords doesn’t serve, and have zero expectations. I assume Smashwords titles will just seamlessly merge into D2D’s system when the time comes.

Now, on to paper books. Their system works much the same way as the ebook version. There are two ways to make a paper book; you can download your formatted book as a document or a PDF or you can use your ebook text and cover for the print on demand paper book.

I tried the first way, using both the LibreOffice and PDF versions of a paperback book that I worked up for Amazon in the new size. In both cases, the program messed up the title pages, which in turn, threw off the interior, so that the book started on the left hand page. I could find no way to fix the problem.

Next, I tried their ebook to paperback method. It worked as advertised. The default look is that the spine and back cover are a solid color, with your blurb on the top of the back cover. You can then add more stuff to fill it up. Stuff like your photo, bio, or some other images. You can also arrange the spine as you like; with either your name on the top of the spine or the title of the book, Plus you can add a publisher’s icon to the spine as well. They also allow you to use your own wrap-around cover. I tried this method using the cover I had made according to Amazon’s requirements, and it worked, even though the page count was different.

There are several drawbacks to this method, however. The first is simply a matter of personal preference. Using the ebook version of your story, the title page is page one. I don’t know how this strikes you, but for me it screams self-published/vanity press. A title page should be page 3 or page 5, if you have a frontispiece. The first page should be some type of blurb, the second; a “other books by this author” page, the third page, the title page, the fourth; the copyright page, the fifth; the dedication page, and the sixth, a map or a blank page facing the start of the story. That said, if you don’t mind opening the book to the title page, you’re good to go.

The second issue in using the ebook text for your paper version is that I believe it uses the font size of your ebook text. I use 12 pt text on the screen, and for a 5.25×8” book 12 pt seems a bit large. Because of this, my 2D2 version of my test book came in at 416 pages compared to 362 pages for the one I formatted myself with a slightly smaller font size.

The third concern I had was that D2D’s default price for this book was $19.99 which would pay you a royalty of about $2.35, compared to the book’s current Amazon price of $12.00. You can adjust the price, but cheapest I could price this book at was $14.99, yielding a $.20 royalty. Now, I don’t know how much I would make if my Amazon book was sold elsewhere, probably not much more than that. But I can certainly make a lot more money selling it on Amazon, where it is far more likely to sell. My other concern is how much an author’s copy would cost using this service, and how that system works. I didn’t dare to go that far into the system to find out.

Bottom line; if you are comfortable with a title page on page one, I think you could add enough info on the back cover to make it look halfway decent. Better yet would be creating your own wrap around cover if you’re comfortable doing that. I wonder if using a slightly smaller text for your ebook version would reduce the page count of the paper version. Ebook readers control the type size on their devices, so it shouldn’t matter.

I also explored their audiobook options. Basically, they have partnered with another company that will waive their usual set-up fees. It looks to be a company that will match your book with a narrator, but you can use your own existing audiobook as well. I can’t say too much more about this, as I didn’t go very deeply into it, as I didn’t feel like signing up for yet another service. But it is something I may look into at a later date.

So that’s my experience with D2D. They offer a lot of benefits and tie-ins with other companies that you might find helpful. But all in all, I don’ t think anyone with books on Smashwords is missing anything too important. Everything will come to those who wait.

I am quite content to be an amateur author and self-publisher of speculative fiction stories. I enjoy everything I do as a writer and publisher, and avoid everything I don’t. And if I don’t make much money doing so, I don’t lose any either. So, I’m happy. But maybe a little bored.

Back when I published my first three novels, in 2015, there seemed to be the potential for something to happen. For lightning to strike. What did I know? In 2022 I do know. And what I know is that I’ll not be missing any buses to fame and fortune if I hold off self-publishing my new novel for a year while I try selling it to a traditional publisher.

A year and a half or so, ago Mark Paxson wrote about his efforts to get his novel The Dime traditionally published, You can read about his journey in these posts:

I’m embarking on that same journey through what is often called “Query Hell” more or less as a lark. Not having been hatched yesterday, I know that my odds of selling my novel are pretty close to zero. However, I think there is something to be said for simply having tried.

One motivating factor for me was that the British SFF publisher Gollancz had, in June, opened a one month long submission window for manuscripts by unagented authors. Since I wrapped up my novel in June, I researched how a manuscript should be formatted, and sent mine out to them, along with a cover letter and synopsis, as requested. I gather that they expected to receive 1,000 plus manuscripts during the month and hope to get back to everyone within 6 to 9 months. Which is fine, since it gives me a nice 6 to 9 month window to find an agent for my novel while I await word of its fate, with no temptation to fold early and self-publish the story.

For agents, I found a list of 141 agents accepting science fiction on the web site reedsy here: https://blog.reedsy.com/literary-agents/science-fiction/

I went down the list, copying only the info on agents who are accepting queries and open to the works of non-published writers. I then viewed the websites of their agencies to see their profiles to get a feel for what they were like and what type of stories they were looking to take on. I found 31 agents that I thought worth querying and rated each as to how promising they struck me. I also noted how they wanted the queries – letter only, letter & 5 pages of the manuscript, or letter and 10 pages, or if they used the query tracker web app instead. All this was the work of a few hours over two days.

Then I researched on how to write a query letter. There are plenty of guides online and on YouTube that tell you not only how to do it, but what not to do as well. Alexa Donna has a number of good YouTube videos that you can find here on the entire process: https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexaDonne/search?query=query%20letter

I wrote a hundred variations of it (just a guess) before settling on my current one.

I also wrote a 1,000 word synopsis of the novel for Gollancz and any agents wanting to see one.

In short, I think I did my homework. Or as much of it as necessary. I was never a lad for homework.

While there is no reason not to send queries out to everyone on the list all at once, I’m only sending out four a month. Sent out the first four yesterday. Better to savor the joy of the journey. And, with having to wait on Gollancz before I could self-publish the book anyway, I figure that I might as well spread out the query process, renewing my hope every month with a new batch of query letters. We’ll see how that goes…

Though I read Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness in high school, half a century ago, one image remains…

“The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line… we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush… In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen.”

I am quite sure Conrad was thinking about querying when he created this image.. Ah, the romance!

All that remains is for me to mutter, “The horror. The horror” six months from now.

I know that readers of this blog have gone through the same process, and no doubt some have succeeded in finding publishers. And there are probably others who are considering giving it a try. So how did you find the experience? Do you have any suggestions for others who would follow you down this path?

Last month I posted about Google’s offer to convert the ebooks published in their Play Store into audiobooks for free. Unlike most audio books that use human narrators, these books would be generated using Google’s AI technology to convert the text into the spoken word. Google suggested that it would best for non-fiction books, but I decided to convert my fiction books anyway, since I don’t think my style of writing demands a lot of dramatic reading. And it was likely the only way I could enter the popular audiobook market. It has now been a month; so how has this experiment fared?

I offer my ebook catalog of 11 titles for free, and since Google was offering to create my audiobooks for free, I was happy to offer my audiobooks for free as well. In May 2022, the first month of their availability, with 11 titles available, I sold 434 audiobooks, in addition to 293 ebooks.

Ebooks first. My peak sales of ebooks to date on Google was 836 copies in October 2021 and they have been declining since then – 643, 633, 459, 409, 303, 390, so that May’s 293 sales total is more or less in line with that gradual decline. The audiobooks didn’t seem to have affected ebook sales one way or another.

As for audiobooks, well, with 434 books sold in one month with no advertising – I only posted their availability on my seldom visited blog two weeks ago – I have to believe that I’ve tapped into a whole new market. Only one audiobook has a rating, and though it is a 5 star rating, the jury is still out on how the AI generated narration fares with audiobook listeners. However, from my own listening, I am optimistic that they are good enough now, and will only get better as time goes on, since Google said that they will update the files automatically as their technology improves.

My standard is “Good Enough,” which is to say that all things considered, something is indeed good enough, even if it may be a couple percentage points short of perfection. If you hold yourself to a higher standard, then perhaps Google’s AI generated audiobooks may not be up to your standard. That said, I have listened to samples of audiobooks with a voice actor who uses different voices for different characters, and found it annoying. It seems that my golden standard for audiobooks is my dad reading bedtime stories to us as kids. I do know that the AI does a better job of reading books than I did with my own kids. So I think my audiobooks are good enough.

To take advantage of this technology, you have to offer your ebooks on the Google Play Store, though of course, you can charge money for them, and for the audiobooks as well, if that is your policy. Selling books for free is a magnitude or two easier than selling them for money, so your results will vary.

The audio book market continues to expand. I’ve read recently that while print and ebook sales rose 5% in 2021, audio books rose 18%. No doubt most self published authors have at least considered offering an audio version of their work. I must confess that I’ve never researched how to go about doing so, or how much it costs to create an audiobook, even though Smashwords offers links to audiobook narrators. Until now. Why now? Now, because the price has fallen to the point where I feel that I can afford it. Which is to say, I can convert my books to audiobooks for free.

Create audiobook versions of your ebooks for free? There must be a catch, you say. And you would be right. Several of them.

The first catch is that you have to publish your books on the Google Play Store. And the second is that this is a limited time beta program. I’ve had my books in the Google ebook store for a number of years now, and I was sent an email announcing this program. I don’t know how widely available it is, or whether or not if you put your books into the Google store now, if you would be eligible to take advantage of this beta version offer. The email implies that the program might not be a free service once it is out of beta. Still, it might be worth looking into, if you are comfortable with the big catch.

The biggest catch is, as you might suspect for the price, that the narration is being done by our AI overlords, not humans. So the question is, is it good enough? And that is one question that I am not equipped to answer, since I’ve listened only to a few parts of audio books – they are not my thing – so I’m not the person to judge whether or not the quality is acceptable or not.

Google suggests that it would be fine for non-fiction books without a lot of illustrations. But is it good enough for fiction? I think it might be, but not for the $20-$30 cost of a professionally produced audiobook. But as a low cost alternative… They might be acceptable.

You have your choice of 22 English speaking voices – 7 different American female voices, 5 American male voices, 1 female and 2 male Australian voices, 2 female and 2 male British voices, and 2 female and 3 male Indian voices of different age groups. Which gives you a good variety of narrators, though, of course, none of them are likely to match the narrator or character in your head. But that might be said for human narrators as well.

Here is a link to sample the various voices for English, as well as Spanish: https://support.google.com/books/partner/table/10957334?p=narrator_library

From the sample that I have listened to, the AI voice is aware of the context of what it is reading. And while it will not match the narration of a good voice actor, it is far from the robotic voices of some years ago. I have been expecting this – AI generated audio books – to happen for some time, and I am sure the process will only get better over time. So while the voice sounds quite human, the biggest downside I see – or rather hear – is that the AI narrates the story in a single voice. I believe that good narrators will narrate characters in different voices, so that you have a better sense of who is saying what. Without that change in voice, it can be sometimes hard to follow who is speaking. Though that will depend, in part, on how you use dialog tags and your writing style.

But when you consider the current price – and the fact that you can download the files and sell them on platforms other than Google – as long as you continue to sell them on Google – it seems like a pretty good deal. A deal that I found that I could not pass up, if only to see what type of sales and feedback I get with them. They can always be unpublished, should I find a strong negative reaction to them. Still, the way I see it is that these would, at the very least, be a way of getting my foot into the audio book door. And, since I can publish them at the cost of my ebooks – which is to say, free – I believe that my customers will get their money’s worth, no matter what.

If you are curious to hear how they sound, you can download one of my free books to sample by going to the Google App Store Book, Audio Books and search for C. Litka.