Content is King
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
This week came the news that Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program will offer its content providers a 70% royalty on all sales made in India—provided the content providers go with Kindle Select only. For those of you who don’t know, Kindle Select requires exclusivity from anyone who joins it. You can’t market your work on the iBookstore, for example, or on Kobo if you’re part of Kindle Select. Only on Amazon alone.
Writers who put novels up on KDP in India will get 35% of the price of all sales made in that country, regardless of whether they’re in Kindle Select or not. And, because of the restrictions, I for one will be getting only 35% on any work of mine that sells there. It’s my choice, and I choose to make my work available on as many platforms as possible.
. . . .
Plus, my own beliefs about maintaining different platforms for my work got reinforced this week after WMG hired someone to input the sales figures for the last six months. We looked at those numbers yesterday. I sell a lot of books on Kindle, but my biggest selling title, a short story called “The Moorhead House,” sold a grand total of one copy on Kindle from January to June.
Every single one of “The Moorhead House”’s rather surprising (to me) sales came on the Nook. For some reason, Nook readers either like or have found or continue to find that one short story. And they buy it more than they buy anything else of mine offered through Barnes & Noble.
If I had joined Kindle Select with that story, I doubt I would have made comparable sales. If my years in this business have taught me anything, it’s that readers determine what sells and what doesn’t, and trying to figure out why one reader buys a story when another reader won’t is largely futile. All I can do is write the best story possible, and move on to the next. Worrying about why someone buys this and won’t buy that will simply drive me crazy—and has in the past.
. . . .
The key really isn’t the device any more.
The key is the content.
. . . .
We writers are content providers. Theoretically, we’re in the catbird seat. Weshould be the ones getting rich or at least more financially comfortable from this tech boom.
Instead, we’re lining up to get screwed.
I saw a horrible example of the queue recently. There’s a major epublishing company, started about three years ago by one of the biggest names in the publishing industry, that has signed some of the biggest writers in the world. Most of these writers have been at the business so long that their contracts do not include e-rights, which they’re now selling to this particular company.
Its contract is one of the worst examples of a rights-grab I’ve seen. As I’m writing this, I have my iPad open to the company’s website, and I cringe at the names I see there—folks I respect greatly, whose writing I admire, who most likely signed a version of this contract that will guarantee they make very little money on their content for the rest of their careers.
. . . .
The fact that rights grabs have become commonplace in the publishing industry in the last three years is precisely because content has become king. Publishers used to be manufacturing and distribution companies. The publisher would manufacture a book from a manuscript and then distribute that book to bookstores.
Back then, writers did not have easy access to the manufacturing process, and even if they did, they couldn’t get their books into the distribution system without some kind of help. The monopoly that publishers had existed for a very good reason. They provided an actual service that writers couldn’t do themselves.
. . . .
We’ve had this part of the discussion before. You all know how I feel. Keep control of your rights, and don’t sign anything for a percentage unless you completely understand your contract and know what you’re gaining and what you’re losing.
. . . .
The best solution is the one that media companies have had from the beginning. Buy as much content as possible, own as much of it as possible, and make sure that the content providers work on flat fees or salaries.
I’m trying to get you to reverse that thinking. You’re a content provider. Make the company, like that epublishing company I mentioned, take a flat fee or a yearly salary. Distribute through all venues you possible can, even if you have to take a smaller percentage of the distribution money.
. . . .
If you sign an egregious contract with some of these agents or these publishing companies (e- or otherwise), you might be giving these companies the rights to your characters and your worlds. If you do that, then you’ve given them permission to have someone else write stories with your creations. Some of these contracts give these agents, publishing companies, and media companies control of your very name. They can make the readers believe that you actually wrote something when you didn’t and, chances are, in that circumstance, the readers will think you got worse as a writer.
You’ll want to read it all at Kristine Kathryn Rusch
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
Dolly Parton, shrewd lady, knows this. From Wikipedia:
‘In 1974 “I Will Always Love You” went to number one on the country music charts. Elvis Presley wanted to cover it. Parton was interested until Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told her that it was standard procedure for the songwriter to sign over half of the publishing rights to any song Elvis recorded. Parton refused, and that decision is credited with helping to make her many millions of dollars in royalties from the song over the years.’
You don’t have to agree to a bad deal. It’s optional.
Good for Dolly.
I thought this post was an interesting counter-point to Joe Konrath’s post about his sales figures this week. For Joe, Amazon blows all other vendors out of the water.
My own numbers have done the opposite. I distribute to most of the other vendors via Smashwords, so the numbers took a while to trickle in… but I find that, this summer, the other vendors are giving me record numbers, and Amazon… hasn’t. (I’ll be blogging about this tomorrow.)
I’m making more at B&N alone than I ever made at Amazon, and Amazon is maybe matching average Apple numbers now.
I think that there is a self-fulfilling prophesy going on with Amazon. If you buy into what Amazon wants, you are rewarded, but at the expense of other vendors. The result is (surprise!) that you get more money from Amazon than from those other vendors.
The problem is that Amazon gives you so many distracting and wonderful tools — especially real time stats! — which are almost addicting. That means that even when people aren’t trying to favor Amazon, they do anyway, because it’s so easy.
I would love to see how you get more sales from other places! (Well, then there’s Kobo, which mysteriously lost two of my books, including one which is the sequel in the duology… *beats head against wall* Hopefully Smashwords can sort that out SOON.)
Ahem, where was I…? Ah, yes. I don’t like being dependent on Amazon for as many of my sales as I currently am. This “70% in India if you go exclusive; 35% otherwise” scheme does not make me feel the Amazon Luv. So: looking forward to your blogging about it.
The thing is: it’s like a drug, and weaning yourself from Amazon-Mania will make you lose money in the short run.
I started making more money from vendors because I stopped giving a hoot about sales. And yeah, my sales dropped like a rock at Amazon. They ramped up slowly at other vendors.
The big secret is having more time to handle your books in a more naturalistic way – and find what works for them, which may not be in accordance with what works for Amazon.
The thing that has worked for me personally (and this WON’T work for everyone) is that I can make a book free whenever I want and leave it that way for a long long time. And then I can put it back to priced, and leave it. Don’t watch numbers, don’t play games. Just treat it like long term investing.
The most successful form of long term investing is to not watch the day-to-day numbers. Pick healthy companies, and decide on a percentage you want them to have in your portfolio. Then when you have money, invest in whichever ones have dropped below the percentage (i.e. the ones that weren’t doing so hot). And only sell when you need money (like, say, when you want to buy a house) – and sell the ones that have risen to OVER the percentage (i.e. those that are doing well).
But whatever you do, don’t think in terms of days or weeks or months, or even quarters. Think in terms of years. Think in terms of lifetimes.
If you’re going to be a “day trader” and want to watch your numbers rise immediately, then Amazon enables that. You won’t get that from other vendors. But with day trading, you will also lose out on your overall investment growth by forcing yourself to churn and churn to keep the income going.
Which isn’t to say that I dislike Amazon. I love Amazon. I love my Kindle. But I’m not a day trader.
Heh! I actually do hardly anything to push Amazon sales. I do need to switch my Project Wonderful ads to point at the pages for the works, with all the purchase-points listed…
(Now Kobo has lost both my novels, and three other stories for good measure! This does not make me happy with them…)
If those books are missing from Kobo’s catalog, you might want to add them using Kobo Writing Life. It’s not a bad program, and while I had some issues with them at first (inability to properly upload an ePub file), they’ve all been sorted out.
I don’t like Kobo’s contract, which says one can’t talk about Kobo’s contract, which I’ve just done. Oops!
And I thus breach KDP’s contract by mentioning it is no different.
Or did I breach both? o_O
Both!
Look! This is me Not Mentioning that just because one might be stuck with one distasteful clause, one doesn’t necessarily accept it elsewhere! Because, gracious, talking around one thing is hard enough…
(This is where I go off and kick other ebook sellers and exhort them to compete BETTER. >_> )
But that would require they get off their butts and do something instead of just complaining about Big Bad Amazon.
That is one of the best business articles I think I have ever read. I’m bookmarking it.
Dolly Parton is one heck of a business woman. She’s not a sily blond, even if she works hard to make it look that way.
I have one e-book in Select. It’s the one novel that sells there, but nowhere else.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a short story that sells well on B&N, via Smashwords, but does not sell via Pubit.
I feel that every author has to find what works for each book. Some will hit in some markets and miss in others.
I wonder if there’s any way to get a sense of this pre-indie-publishing? Is there any data that says, for example, sweet romance sells well on Kobo, so-so through Smash, and terrific through Anazon, but for mystery, Smash is your carrier of choice? Thoughts, anyone? The numbers may be out there.
Well, I can tell you that m/m erotic contemporary romance short stories are selling roughly 50/50 on Amazon and AllRomanceEbooks (with only 3 sales through Smashwords itself. Never sold anywhere Smash distributes to). Until the summer slow-down, they were selling well too.
As much as I respect Kris, Joe, and Camille, they are all speaking from ignorance. They do not know why their books perform better on one platform or another. This is mostly because they do not know who is buying their books. Of course, very few writers do. Here are the questions you should be asking yourself:
1. How many names did I add to my email list this month?
2. How am I doing vs. my marketing plan?
3. Do I have the same readership base for all my books?
4. How do I capitalize on the good things that happened that I didn’t plan for?
You really cannot make informed decisions about platforms without information. From what I can tell, everyone is stumbling in the dark and congratulating themselves when they don’t stub their toe.
Wiliam, we all respect you too.
But just a couple questions: What makes you think that any of us haven’t asked those questions? Haven’t done marketing professionally?
I’m also not quite sure where you are disagreeing.
To me, what you just said about inability to trust data is the foundation of why Kris is absolutely right. She’s recommending a broad-based strategy that takes into consideration that we can’t trust short term data.
I take it further: over the years, I’ve come to realize that an awful lot of marketing (especially data-driven marketing) is purely magical thinking.
It’s easy to feel like something is right or working because you added more names to your mailing list, or you did better than your marketing plan — but you don’t really know the causes of those things. It just feels like success.
You hang around long enough — in writing, investing, and entrepreneurship — and you come across more and more times when you neglect what you “should” do. You get sick, you have a family crisis, you neglect things … and by golly your business picks up! Your stats boom!
Does that prove that you shouldn’t do those things you “should” do?
No, it just proves you don’t know squat.
That’s the point of what I was saying. When you’re angling for advantage (i.e. what I called “day trading”) you focus on things you can’t really know. You try to work magic, based on a partial picture. If you’re smart, it seldom works out bad, and sometimes it works brilliantly. But you still don’t actually get what’s going on. You’re just making educated assumptions.
As Seth Godin recently said, if the clock is wrong, and you have no idea exactly how wrong it is, then you are better off with no clock at all. Use a different strategy.
IMHO, that’s exactly what Kris is advocating, a strategy which takes into consideration what we don’t know, while making reasonable use of what you do know.
I am saying that you are wrong. Data-driven marketing isn’t magical thinking if you have the right data. What I am saying is that you can, over time, build the data necessary to make informed decisions. I am talking about avoiding the day trader mentality in favor of building up data about your fans so that you can build your fan base. If all you have to work with is number of sales, you have almost nothing. If you know who your fans are, why they buy your books, and when they buy your books, you can make informed decisions.
Where do your fans hang out on the net? What do they like about your books? Who are the influencers, the people who sell your books for you? Where should you invest your most limited resource, your time?
I have met very few writers who could answer any of those questions or even knew that they should ask them. I find this attitude a little baffling. This is all basic stuff and it works. Writers need stop worrying about discovery of their books and start focussing on discovering their fans. People rarely just buy stuff. People are sold stuff. Someone is selling your books.
There is no reason that Joe’s experience should inform your decisions unless you are selling to the same market. I suspect there is a very good reason why Joe does better on Amazon and why it might be the right decision for him to ignore other markets. But even he doesn’t have the data he needs to be sure. And that data could be gathered. He just isn’t doing it.
Likewise for Kris. She generalizes from her and Dean’s experiences to fundamental principles. I think there a danger in the way she dismisses the “Kindle Board” people. Not because they are right, but because you can learn a lot from people who are wrong. She has rejected exclusivity but she has no data to justify that bias. She and Dean have a big enough back list that they control to do some real experiments that would yield important data for them. They just aren’t doing it. They and Joe are just now figuring out what their sales are. That boggles my mind. What sort of business is this writing thing, anyway? And they are better than most.
That’s nice, William. Now show me an ebook retailer that actually allows authors (or publishers, for that matter) access to data on individual customers. Absent that, you don’t have any representative information about your readers. All you can do is put out various kinds of appeals to encourage them to share their contact information with you; and then your entire dataset is contaminated by self-selection bias.
To treat such a dataset as if its properties can be validly generalized to the whole population is — just as Camille says — magical thinking.
I mean, say what you will about the tenets of magical thinking, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
DriveThruFiction.com allows authors access to customer email addresses.
I agree that the folks who respond are different from the ones who don’t. I am arguing that you can take advantage of that fact. The people you need to know the most about are exactly the people who will respond. Not all readers are fans. You have to understand your fans before you can hope to understand how to turn more readers into fans.
Yet, Kris lists in THIS article which kinds of books sell well where. WMG has been doing all kinds of experiments. I wouldn’t say they are operating off a lack of data, but rather by data most of us haven’t had the time and backlist to build up.
Data-driven marketing efforts are constrained by time, financial resources, and expertise.
You’re indicating collecting this data is fairly simple. And like others, I’m not certain it really is. As Tom Simon said, a lot of really useful data is unavailable because it’s restricted by the retailer, and utilizing survey-type approaches is self-selecting.
If you’re talking about accumulating stuff like a mailing list, or providing newsletters, even online forums – a lot of writers utilize any or all of those approaches. But they often remain as baffled by the unpredictability and uncorrelated nature of sales.
Partly that’s also affected by two different things:
1) Shifting audience tastes
2) Shifting writer tastes
Sometimes in the latter case, an author accumulates a new audience that supplants the old. Sometimes even a loyal audience begins to think that the author’s “best work is behind them.”
In the former case, audience tastes shift with cultural changes, aging of audiences, and other factors. Ideally, any entertainer (writer, musician, etc.) would develop a replenishing audience base crossing multiple age groups and other demographic categories. But that requires expanding appeal across age groups – which is never easy – and accruing more than alienating if the author shifts their style or genre to try to take conscious advantage of a favorable shift. That’s also unpredictable.
As far as going out to find the audience, one approach was the one Amanda Hocking took – and the one she scaled down from because its success required too great a time commitment from her. As well, the social networking approach quickly lost its efficacy by all the me-toos who flooded GoodReads and various reader boards – such that a lot of the admins restricted author activity to assigned forums. I’ve likened this somewhat amusing effect to having a bunch of male fireflies flashing like crazy inside of a jar to one another – and all the female fireflies are living free and unaware outside beyond the glass.
John Locke – as a recent article indicated – led his audience to his books like a Pied Piper, by hiring a firm to have people buy his books en masse and post paid reviews, giving him a twofold effect of being an existing “bestseller” (and thus gaining visibility for the majority audience who buys whatever the crowd has curated) and having reassuring reviews.
I would say that frankly one of the best things that can happen for any author or book is for an influential voice to promote it. A lot of times, that kind of event happens more from randomness than from intervention or planning. It involves the right person(s) at the right place at the right time kind of happenstance. While there are things any person can do to “put themselves into the potential path of Fate” and certainly a lot one can to do lasso a tornado and hang on if one fortuitously blows one’s way – I don’t tend to see a high correlation between effort in that regard and results.
I think what I would tend to do when given suggestions of various approaches – particularly when they’re data driven and there’s the implication that this significantly reduces factors of uncertainty and hones and narrows the efficacy of selling – is to ask “What’s the percentage success that these approaches have provably attained among those who’ve used them?”
And I tend to think the results are going to follow at best a normal statistical distribution pattern rather than demonstrating much in the way of skewness, or even a leptokurtic weighting toward average experiences as opposed to outsized success. I’ve no doubt many people tried to emulate Ron Popeil. But what was easy for him, because he was wired in a certain way, isn’t so easy for others. That’s why the majority of salespeople wash out or manage only average success, versus those who just have a knack for it.
When I look at things by simplistic observation, I see that even industries that expend enormous amounts of money and time on marketing efforts are still somewhat surprised and befuddled by what becomes popular and what doesn’t, as well as why this happens. This crosses every industry – network television with its (what? 90% failure rate of new shows?), movies, product launches by every kind of company under the sun. A lot of this even utilizes expensive widescale test-marketing and still results in failure.
I think any writer benefits from utilizing various approaches and finding what works for them. Remaining flexible and utilizing new approaches is also great, and is certainly part of a fast-changing industry. I’m not certain that data-driven efforts are easily doable (from a time and expertise perspective) or that their efficacy will always or even highly likely justify the expense. Data-driven efforts depend upon people having a knack for organizing data in certain ways and understanding what they’re seeing. It comes naturally for some people, but for others it doesn’t.
Again, I’ve no doubt certain people may use it to great effect. I just tend to think that for most people, there wouldn’t be the right intersect of time, expertise, and expenditure (let alone organization and other skills) that would make it work in the way it might for a few.
Matthew,
I agree with most of what you say. I especially agree that you have the right question to ask about these approaches. I am not suggesting that collecting this kind of data is simple, just that it is straightforward. What I mean is that we know what kind of data is useful, and I’m convinced that there are ways to collect this data that aren’t being exploited effectively today.
Where I suspect we disagree most profoundly is in our perception of the “audience”. Because the set of people who would enjoy reading your books (Urban Fantasy/Paranormal, right?) is vastly larger than the set of people who have bought your books, the marketing situation for your books different from marketing a movie or TV show. The easiest way to think about that is to ask yourself what percentage (in sales dollars) of this year’s biggest hit in your genre do you need to get to be a success? A big budget movie has to get very close to that number to be a success. TV shows are fighting over tiny fractional differences in audience share.
In addition, the overall market for books could be substantially larger if there were more effective ways of matching readers to books. The success of Amazon’s algorithms are proof of that. The ability to market all books directly to consumers has existed for less than 5 years. It isn’t really surprising to me that almost no one is doing it effectively. The production side of storytelling (writers, editors, etc.) isn’t organized into efficient economic units yet. This leads to a substantial underinvestment in marketing innovation. What innovation exists is primarily targeting the old guard of publishing.
I agree with Matthew.
There are too many variables to predict why people buy what they buy. When even multi-nationals with $100′s millions to spend solving this “problem” can’t do it, what hope do I?
As a writer my best bet is to write the type of stories I love and put them out there to find their own audience. It might take me six weeks/years to write a story/novel. But once it’s done it’s there for ever. Even if it only makes me $2 a week, that’s $2 a week income, from an ever increasing number of stories, for the rest of my life.
I view my writing career as a pension plan, not as a get rich quick scheme.
On the other hand there is also an element of “Winning the lottery”. Who knows if one of stories will hit big and make me an overnight success.
William, have you self-published any work? And if so, for how long? You have interesting ideas, but it doesn’t, to me, seem correlated to real-world actuality.
(Anthea, who has 7 self-published short stories, novellas, and novels, and has been doing this for a year and a half…)
No, I am not a writer. I am building a company to enable writers to outsource this activity.
If a writer wants to outsource writing instead of all the other aspects of the biz, they should probably call themselves something other than writer.
lol, I think William means the data side of things~
William, I completely disagree. I think you are obviously a writer. Quite an eloquent one.
You write non-fiction, essays, I would guess you can write other non-fiction forms as well.
The funny thing about mailing lists is that I’m not on any author’s mailing list. I wouldn’t even know if they have one, since I don’t visit author websites. I discover new books through friends and brief mentions on blogs I read.
Should I get a mailing list? Nah. I’ll wait until I have more books available. I don’t even mention to any of my friends on Facebook that I have books available. No active marketing and I still have a slow trickle of sales.
The best thing we writers can do is write our next book better than we wrote our last one.
I totally agree about mailing lists. I have never subscribed to the mailing list of any author. If a favourite author has a new book out, I find out via other means.
And since I do not subscribe to any mailing lists, I initially did not see the point in having a mailing list either. I eventually started one, because so many people said that you ought to have one and I might just be the odd one out with my reluctance to subscribe to anybody’s mailing list. So I put the sign-up link in my sidebar and at the end of my books. I have maybe 11 subscribers now and two of those are my Dad, another is my own test subscription. Do I get any sales from that mailing list? Maybe one or two.
This doesn’t mean that mailing lists can’t be successful as a sales tool, especially since they have worked for many writers. And I certainly won’t cancel mine, since it doesn’t require much work aside from sending out a new newsletter whenever I have a new release out.
Nonetheless, in my experience mailing lists have been underwhelming as a sales tool.
I think the main issue here is that data driven marketing takes a lot of time and energy. That’s why companies hire people just for that role. I doubt very much if you can actively pursue a data driven marketing strategy and still regularly produce and publish good content. I think the important message here is that content is still far more important than marketing or trying to figure things out. If you’re an author, your job is to produce content, not pursue readers. It doesn’t hurt to make it as easy as you reasonably can to find you, but still your job is to produce content. Don’t get caught up in everything else that will divert you from that.
I noticed the KDP Select requirement for India’s 70% last night when I went to update one of my books, one item was the price. I shook my head. No I’m not going to limit my book to Amazon just to get a higher discount from India.
Interestingly enough, today now that it has updated the book, the price shows list at what I set it for, and the sale price at where it was before changing it (lower). I checked, and my other outlets had changed their prices to the higher price, so it couldn’t be price matching. Is Amazon treating it as wholesale again (I don’t recall any emails on that.)
Anyway, I’ve noticed on my sales what Kris noticed. I have some shorts that sold well on Amazon, but not other places. And another short that did well on Apple and B&N, but not much of anywhere else. And another that sells well at Kobo. And Apple sales are often higher than B&N sales, and sometimes have matched Amazon’s overall.
FWIW.
No single author’s experience speaks for the experience of all authors. It’s nice to know what they do, but the fact they think we should follow their path is no reason to do so.
I don’t believe Kris was attempting to speak for all authors. I know I’ve seen Dean at least state that every author is different, and what works for one won’t for another.
And Kris even mentioning her one short that sold well other than at Amazon wasn’t to prove anything other than it happens, you can’t so easily predict it, so it doesn’t make logical sense to restrict your work to one outlet because you’ll never know if it might not have sold better at a different one.
And they are not also just drawing from their experience. They’ve been in the business since the 80s and have talked with and watched countless authors come and go, and how the ones who stuck it out did it. And as Kris says, there is one constant. They write good content, and their marketing plan it to continue to write good content. The more of that you do, the more you sell, the more your “platform” builds. (I’m sure readers are thrilled to know they are not much more than a platform to launch our careers.)
While it may not be everyone’s approach, it is an approach which has worked for many, many authors who have made it in this business, and has the logic behind it to have the ring of truth to it. I wouldn’t dismiss it so easily.
This is absolutely terrific. I love Kris’ posts.
I wish there was a way to convey to other authors that they really don’t need to sign away their rights for peanuts. Why do they do this?????
It breaks my heart.
It’s usually fear or ego controlling them, Mira.
Yes, I think you’re right. Mostly fear I think.
With the burgeoning market, publishing exclusivity benefits only the publisher in this day and age, regardless of who it is. The writer that agrees to it limits his or her potential to expand.
How true! For so long we took it for granted that the medium (paper book) which disseminates the content is more important than the content. Now the cost for the medium (eBook) is zero. The content, which matters, finally gets paid fairly.