Digital Book World Recap Day 2 and Defeating the Forces of Darkness

Digital Book World ended this afternoon and here are my double-tap, killing house, quick thoughts.

I feel old and tired and a slacker after being on the Doing It On Their Own: Self-Publishing Authors Find Success panel with Bella Andre this afternoon.  She had so much energy and drive, she reminded me a lot of Susan Wiggs, another bestselling author, except Bella is a self-published author who earned over a million dollars in 2011.  The amount is impressive, but more so her drive for the future.  I plan on bugging the hell out of her for more information that, I being the slug I am, have failed to uncover.  Also, I think Bella and I should co-write a romantic, Special Forces, thriller and translate it into a dozen languages.  Hey, I’ve co-written some romance before.  I bring the bullets, she brings the romance.  I do real body count, she does fun body count.

Tony van Veen from Bookbaby was a great panel member and I liked the way Bookbaby does business.  Straight up, you get what you pay for, and the rest is on you, author.  No percentages, just flat fee (and an incredibly small one in my opinion) for digitizing your content.

And our other panel member, Elle Lothlorien gets bonus points just for her name.  Yes, it’s real, not a pen name.  As you’ll see at the end of this blog, I’m going to mangle a quote from the LOTR movie.  Also, she started out self-pubbing with no backlist, and has been successful which is astronomically hard to do.  She achieved that dream of many writers:  earning enough to quit her day job to write full time.  So check her books out.

I have to thank Mike Shatzkin for putting together a great conference.  And Michael Cader for his usual deluge of information during his presentation and for Publishers Lunch.  If you write, sign up for it.  For $20 a month, it’s more than worth it.

I also had lunch with my wonderful sister, Ellen, in Grand Central Station.  She said let’s meet at the Apple Store there, so I walk down and am standing looking at a map of the station, trying to find the Apple Store, then look to my right, past the famous clock, and duh.  Can’t miss it.

I’ve got a stack of business cards I have to wade through, but you want to know the good stuff, the useful stuff.  So.  Hmm.

In the interest of being controversial, let me restate my feeling about digital publishing:  Authors produce the product.  Readers consume the product.  Everyone else:  Lead, Follow or Get The Hell Out of the Way.

That is from my days in the Infantry.  Listening to many of the people on panels here, they act like the author is almost a secondary consideration.  Others act like authors are partners.  Guess which of the two is going to be successful?

Open Road focuses on authors.  That’s leading. Some others.  Not so much.

Yesterday morning was a series of large group talks from the big guns.  I thought Ellen Archer of Hyperion made a lot of solid points.  It’s clear when people are seeing the big picture and when someone is focused on their niche.  But overall, I felt a lot of traditional publishers are still about a year behind on the digital learning curve.

The reality is with digital it’s going to be the same as print:  the big names will get the attention, while the midlist and the rest will wither on the vine unless the author gets lucky or does an incredible amount of work and gets lucky.  The latter just means you have a higher chance of getting lucky.  As Elle said on the panel:  I’d rather trust my fate to me.

A lot of panelists kept talking about their big successes, which are exceptions to the rule.  The rule is that this is a brutal business for authors.  It’s also called reality.  However, I’m taking a cue for that and going to discuss how things have gone for me in eBooks over the course of the next several blogs.  Not the rule, but my experience.  The first fact I’ll throw out is that in January 2011 I sold 347 eBooks.  By the end of 2011, the tally for the year was around 400,000.  So things picked up a bit as the year went on.  You could say.  I didn’t earn quite as much as Bella but not far behind.  I’ll give more exact numbers in a few weeks once all is tallied along with percentages, but frankly they’ll mean little to you unless you’re in my situation.

I re-iterate my point that publishers and agents need a formal training program for their authors.  I submit, once more, my Write It Forward program.  Still no takers.

Here are some interesting numbers you can make of what you will:

25 million Americans own ereaders.

34 million American own tablets, which includes 5 million kindle fires.

The Big 6 say 15% of sales are digital.  Hmm.  I always liked the line from The Wire:  Juking the stats.  I met my wonderful agent after the conference and she sees real numbers and even she said it’s much higher for her clients.  But I do take back one of my predictions for 2012 made just a few weeks ago.  I think it’s highly unlikely a big name authors will jump this year and go indie.  They’re being compensated well enough by their publishers and the work of being indie is just so incredibly hard.  Ask Bella or Elle.

Amazon plans to publish 400 plus titles in 2012.  The ‘big’ announcement that HMH will sell-in Amazon’s NY print titles wasn’t as impressive as many made it to be, since that’s not their genre imprints in Seattle.  Plus, the future for fiction is what Amazon does best:  eBooks.  I found a lot of antagonism toward Amazon from people, but hey, they sell books.  Sort of the way people went after B&N and said let’s support the indie.  Then the same people cried when Borders went under.  We’re all people who love books.  More on this at the end. But let’s stop fighting each other.  Except you.  Yeah, you over there.

By the end of 2012 it’s estimated there will be 40 million ereaders and 61 million tablets in the US.

Publisher optimism is waning.  Duh.  Isn’t this the year the world is supposed to end anyway?  They had a futurist, David Houle, give a presentation on Publishing  in the Shift Age and my first thought was:  this guy thinks there’s a future?  Remember in Black Ops:  You aint paranoid if they are out to get you.  Watch RED last night and LOVE that movie.  And hate to tell, despite being very funny, it was scaringly realistic.  Down to Malkovich picking up a Swedish K and loving it.  If you know what he’s talking about, then you know what I’m talking about, and now I gotta come kill you and put your head in a safe.

28% of publishers think their company will be stronger—which is down from 51% last year.  That’s telling.

We got asked by our panel moderator, Jeremy Greenfield, from F&W, what would entice us to go with a traditional publisher and we all kind of sat there and eventually said:  “Uh, nothing really.”

I don’t rule it out, but things would have to change dramatically.  I’m open to pretty much anything, being the publishing whore that I am, but I’m also very aware of the realities of the publishing landscape, particularly digital.

I’ve got more, and will have to do another blog post on it, but I wanted to get this out.  So I’ll end with a mangling of a stirring speech from the LOTR movie (wasn’t in the book BTW) as the good guys and gals of Middle Earth stand there on a pile of rubble surrounded by the forces of Mordor and Aragon does what good leaders are supposed to do:

Sons of Barnes & Noble, of Random House, of Amazon, of Indie Authors, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends, and break all bonds of fellowship; but it is not this day! An hour of woe, and shattered shields, when the Age of Men comes crashing down; but it is not this day! This day we READ! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men and Women of Publishing! TODAY WE READ”

Digital Book World Day 1 Recap and 2 FREE eBooks

I flew into New York City this morning, took a cab to the Sheraton on 53^rd, then went out and grabbed a slice of pizza at a local joint.  I always love how places outside NY advertise “New York” pizza.  I grew up in da’ Bronx and know NY pizza.  I loved the rant Jon Stewart did on Trump eating pizza with a knife and fork. I even went into a pizza place one time in Seattle while at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference and asked for a slice.  And they told me “We don’t do slices.”  I mean WTF kind of pizza joint doesn’t do slices?

Rant over.

Anyway, then I went inside, still eating my slice and sat in on a workshop on SEO.  There were a lot of industry people from publishing there since, after all, we’re in New York City, the home of publishing.

I have mixed feelings about conferences.  Sometimes they can be mind-numbing.  Other times they can be very exciting.  But I find in the long run both extremes pull together towards useful.  Even when they’re sort of mind-numbing, they stir the brain.  As a fiction writer one of my favorite sayings is “take it one step further”.  And another is:  “What if what appears to be; isn’t.”  The latter comes more from my time in the Special Forces.  We were a tad paranoid.  But you aint paranoid when they are out to get you.

Which brings me to the topic of analytics.  The panel was “You can’t grow what you can’t measure.”  Hmm.  I’m not sure about that.  Sometimes we become so enamored with numbers, we forget a key question:  what do they really represent?  I think of Snakes on a Plane.  Tremendous internet buzz.  Then when it came out, tanked.  In Special Forces (YouTube video from appearance on Discovery ref the Green Berets) we knew there was a big difference between information and intelligence.  The latter is usable information.

I was a bit surprised during the sessions I attended on how basic a lot of the information being put out was and how basic many of the questions were.

But here is some of the information (along with a few comments); make what intelligence of it you wish:

There was a lot of focus on click throughs.  I get that you’d want people to actually go to your site and look at what you have, but I think (anecdata without even an anec or a data) that just having the cover on the side of a Facebook or Google page a couple hundred thousand times with only 20 clicks, still has reach.  That image is in the corner of the eye.  It penetrates the subconscious.  And most of the time nothing happens.  But say that person sees that cover or that author name again, somewhere else?  There will be a connection.  Presence marketing.

An interesting slide from the SEO session was how important it is to rank in the top three results on a google search of your keywords.  Because people click on choice one 36.4% of the time, choice two 12.5% and choice three 9.5%.  That’s hmm, 58.4% of people gone before they get to #4.

Pre-Order your copy NOW!

But Jen Talty covered all this in our upcoming The Shelfless Book:  The Complete Digital Author (pre-order you copy NOW!).  After I came back from Storyworld, the West Coast cousin to #DBW12 we focused on metadata.

Google also own 80% of the SEO market share.  However, Bing has now passed Yahoo as a search engine.

Some other points made:  use your keywords over and over in the body of your text also.  Bob Mayer.  And use links.  A lotta links.  Bob Mayer.  An interesting thing we need to check into is that you can use keywords for images inserted into a WordPress blog (Jen just told me when she loads blogs here she puts in a description for the image).  Also, the more time people spent on your page, the higher Google ranks it.  So go get a beer, this will still be here when you get back.  Even better, just leave this page on your screen when you go to bed?  Hmm.

Any of you heard of pinterest?  It’s supposed to be the hot new thing.  I sent Jen the link. She signed right up, though is still waiting for her “invite”.  What do you think if you’re using it?

One thing I realized, again, is that because I wear so many hats:  author, publisher, promoter, crossbow firer, consigliore to Riley (my three week old grandson) the future leader of the resistance, servant to hardworking guard dogs Cool Gus and Sassy Becca, I have a big perspective on this whole digital book experience.  I still get the feeling that experts are, well experts.  Very good at what they do, but not exactly sure at times how their expertise helps the big picture.

I’ve got to go over my notes and then process them with a full day tomorrow and I’ll blog again.  I did get some interesting ideas “taking it one step further”. Jen is waiting on the edge of her seat for my ideas. I think I’ll make her wait a little longer.

It’s weird, I keep hearing military terms in the civilian world and it kind of, well, I don’t know what it makes me feel.  Don Cheadle in House of Lies used HALO, which stands for High Altitude Low Opening Parachuting.  Special Forces runs the military’s HALO school at Ft. Bragg, which is now only 60 miles down the road from my new abode.  I also use it in Who Dares Wins by that guy Bob Mayer, and Write It Forward, by that guy, Bob Mayer who works with that girl…what’s her name? Oh yeah, Jen Talty.  But to hear people use it who have never done it, is strange.  BTW, that’s a wickedly good show.  Right up there with The Good Wife and Southland.  We all need a touch of reality.  And yes, I’m watching Downton Abbey too and it’s damn good.  And then there’s Raising Hope, which is on the lighter side and we all need that too.

Oh, yeah, as promised, FREE eBooks.  Two of the Black Ops series:  The Line and The Gate, will be free on Kindle for the next three days (that’s Toosday, Wendssday and Thoisday in the Bronx).  So go snark ‘em up.  (You do know you don’t need to own a Kindle to read a Kindle book, right?  It’s an app.)

Free Kindle eBook 24-26 Jan

The Line received some really cool reviews and also got me banned from the Association of Graduate’s Magazine book reviews at West Point:

“Mayer has crafted a military thriller in the tradition of John Grisham’s The Firm.” Kirkus

“So convincing, that by the last page, readers may doubt the official version of the last 50 years.” Publishers Weekly

I used to pitch it as an updated Seven Days in May.  Until I gave the keynote at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and asked how many people had read or seen Seven Days and not one in 500 people raised their hands.  Oops.

Free Kindle eBook 24-26 Jan

The Gate, I based on a book I picked up in the nonfiction section of the library at Ft. Campbell called Japan’s Secret War.  The author claims there’s a chance the Japanese detonated an atomic bomb at the end of World War II in Manchuria.  His evidence is spotty, but it is true the Germans sent two U-Boats with their uranium to Japan near the end of WWII.  So it got me thinking and I took it one step further and asked:  What if they did do that, but there were two bombs?  And where is the second one?  And . . .

Well, you can read the free book to find out the rest.

That’s my name (Bob Mayer) repeated how many times in this post?  And how many links?  And how many left this page live overnight?  Come on, Google.  Of course, the machine probably didn’t like me referring to the future leader of the resistance against the Rise of the Machines.

I think I just linked myself into a visit from a guy with sunglasses.

Write It Forward!

Reflections on the Value of Bestseller Lists vs. The Long Tail

I’m watching the tweets from the Writers Digest Conference in New York (#wdc12).  A good way to ‘attend’ a conference without attending is to follow the hashtag twitter stream.  I’ll be in New York on Monday for the follow on Digital Book World (#DBW12).  I’m on a panel of successful indie authors.  I find the tweets interesting because pretty much everything that’s being put out is in The Shelfless Book:  The Complete Digital Author, which is being published mid-February and you can pre-order in either print or eBook.  But the business is so fluid, Apple’s announcement this past week already means part of the book needs to be updated.  But that’s the great thing about digital books:  you can change them instantly.  The upload takes a little bit longer.  Even the print version can be updated instantly, although processing takes about a week or so.

I’ll be doing a blog post with the publication of the book to discuss how my eBooks did in 2011.  I’m going to quote real numbers in terms of sales.  I mean dollars. That seems cold.  Americans hate talking about money.  Even though we are a capitalistic society.  Do you know how much the person in the next cubicle/office/home office etc is making?  Hell no.  You can ask them if they beat a gopher with a stick but not how much they make.

I remember sitting at lunch years ago with several authors at the Maui Writers Conference.  We were discussing the business and I started talking about dollars and every author just about spit their iced tea out.  They said NO writer talks about actual dollars.  But they were also very happy to finally let the beast out of the closet and talk about contracts and real dollars.  Because it was their livelihood and for their entire career they had been working in the dark trying to figure out what they were worth, what their books were worth, what their time was worth and what their writing was worth.  But it was all hidden under a bushel.

All I read lately are blogs about indie and trad numbers and how many of each hit whatever bestseller lists and how USA Today is better than NY Times because it sort of tracks real sales, yada, yada I told you about the bisque didn’t I?

There are quite a few indie and trad authors making a very nice living and they never hit the bestseller lists.  To them, I say, take satisfaction in that you get to do what you love and don’t worry about the ‘validation’ of lists that are vague at best.

Because not a single bestseller list focuses on earnings (except in a way, Amazon sales rankings, although pricing can vary widely).  And that is a fatal business flaw as any MBA, or person with a business sense, will tell you.  Especially with the tidal wave of eBooks.  Let’s walk through a practical application of this.

A certain author sells 1 million eBooks.  (Stephen King just passed 1 million btw) Woohoo!  At .99.  Well, okay.  But it’s a million.  I grant it’s a brilliant marketing move.  For the first person who did it.  For the rest, sorry, it’s not that unique any more.  A million eBooks on Amazon at .99, where each earns a little over .29.  Ultimately around $297,000.  Not chump change.  Except the guy in the next cubicle who sells 100,000 eBooks at $4.99, one tenth of that all important number, earns $349,300.  Huh?  Yet which one does the publishing world focus on?  The units sold.  However, which, ultimately, is the more important number?  You can’t pay employees with units sold.  You pay them with earnings.

Bad business.  Because at the end of the day we have to pay the rent/mortgage, the utilities and our business expenses.  And our employees.  Or else, you know, we have to like, fire them.

Look at Publishers Lunch, which announces deals.  We know agents and publishers never give exact figures to PW.  So it labels them with terms:  good, nice, yada yada.  Except how many books?  What rights?  What royalty rates?  Which exact end from the low end to high end does the deal actually hit?  Ask anyone.  Big difference if they get the top number or the bottom number.

Let’s not even get into how antiquated the NY Times list is.  It’s always been skewed. Sunday’s list reflects sales through 7 January.  Hey, NYT, it’s 21 January!  Do you own a computer? Connected to the Internet?  You’ve been reporting the list the same way now for decades.  And it’s based on reports from stores, not actual sales.  One time I had the #4 bestselling fiction mass market title on USA Today and didn’t even hit the Times extended list.  Then I had a book on the Times list that never touched USA Today.  So which reality are they operating in?

I know that we’re not going to shift to reporting actual dollar figures.  But I think as indie authors we need to be aware that believing in numbers with such a high degree of variance once you get into the details as our measuring stick has inherent problems.  I took some courses in psychology on statistics and how they can be skewed.

I know, it’s all we have. The key to success in digital publishing is not the immediate success and the bestseller list.  It’s the long tail, a broad base of titles, and consistent sales over the years.  Where bestseller lists really count is on Amazon if you get on that first page for your genre.  That’s called discoverability.

All I’m saying is let’s be aware that ‘success’ is different for each of us and there are many roads to Oz and even Oz is a different place for each of us.

BTW:  I had my first title free this week on Amazon:  Atlantis.  It was downloaded 26,000 times in five days and hit #1 on the science fiction free list.  Once it was back to $2.99, it dropped precipitously in ranking, then climbed quickly until it hit the top the top ten in paid science fiction.  It is currently #14 in scifi and also selling well in audio via Audible.

We just did a schedule where at least one of my books will be free every week (in some weeks up to five will be free).  I’ll do a blog post each time a book becomes free.

Write It Forward.

Book Dissection: The Smart Writer’s Way (and free book)

Someone has already done it; let them help you.

You’ve got your original idea and you’ve done your research. Now, before you begin to write your book, you should find a novel similar to what you plan to write that is already published. I guarantee you there is something out there that is similar. Then you should sit down with your razor sharp brain and cut it apart to see all the pieces. Then put them together again to see how they all fit.

You have to ask yourself a number of questions:

1. What was the original idea the author started with? How close is it to mine?
2. How did the author translate that idea into a story? What twist did the author put on the original idea? What’s my twist? How am I different from this author’s work?
3. What is the theme/intent to this story?
4. Why did the author begin where he or she did?
5. Why did the author chose the perspective he or she did?
6. What scope did he or she place on the story?
7. What is the pacing of the story?
8. How did the author bring the story to a conclusion?
9. What did the author do that you liked?
10. What did the author do that you didn’t like?
11. What didn’t the author put in the book that you might have? Why didn’t the author put that in?
12. What was in the book that you feel could have been left out? How would the story change if it were left out?
13. What were the subplots? How did they connect with the main plot? Did all the subplots get resolved?
14. Why did the author pick the settings he or she did?

These are questions you are going to face in your own manuscript. If you can understand how someone who successfully wrote the same type of book answered them, you greatly improve your ability to answer them.

Here’s another interesting exercise to do. Take a book that was made into a film and compare the two. For example, The Great Santini by Pat Conroy. If you read the book, then watch the movie, you will notice several subplots are missing from the movie version that are in the book. How did the screenwriter do this yet maintain the original idea and story of the book? Did these subplots add or take away from the book?

I was talking to producer Dan Curtis (Winds of War) and he told me how he works on taking a novel and turning it into a screenplay. First he breaks the novel down into a list of one or two sentences summaries of every major scene or action. Then he writes the screenplay off that list. Then he breaks the screenplay down into a list of one or two sentence summaries and sees how that compares to the one he did for the novel.

Use narrative structure to lay out the structure of the novels you read. What is the hook? What are the progressive complications? What is the choice the protagonist has to make? How is it made? How is the main plot resolved? How do the subplots support the main plot?

It is essential that you be well read in the area in which you wish to write. The more you read, the more you will get imprinted in your conscious and subconscious brain the style and manner in which those types of stories are written, which will aid you greatly in writing your own.

You should also read more first novels, rather than the latest by a best-selling author. Since you are trying to get published, see what kind of novel it takes to get published at various publishing houses. Some best-selling authors can crank out anything– which would not get published if a no-name author did it– and have it become a best seller.

Another thing that book dissection can help you with is determining how “realistic” your book needs to be and in researching your topic. For example, in most mystery novels, police procedure lies somewhere between detective shows on TV and the way it is really done. You’ll find if you interview a homicide detective about how they cover a murder scene, that you will be overwhelmed with detail and the scene you write in your book would have to be many hours long and slow your action down. So see how such scenes are generally written in most novels that are published in your genre and proceed accordingly.

I have sat down with best-sellers and breakout novels and broken them down on a spreadsheet scene by scene to study the structure. Many authors I’ve talked to have done something similar in order to learn.

A question you should ask yourself after dissecting a book like what you want to write is this: How is my book going to be different? What is my unique twist? Every idea has been done– it is in the development of your story off that idea that you have to bring your originality.

102 Solutions to Common Writing is FREE for the next couple of days on Kindle.

Atlantis was free last week and now is in the top 10 overall in science fiction.

Monday I go to New York for Digital Book World and will be blogging about what I learn there.  From there, it’s on to the San Diego State University Writers Conference.  Nothing but good times ahead.

Keeping up with The Technology…

Yesterday Bob forwarded me an email from Amazon about new Kindle Publisher Tools with the Kindle Format 8 (KF8) support, which is Amazon’s next generation file format. This new format offers new features and enhancements.

I’m drooling. And as Bob is reading this, his eyes are rolling to the back of his head. Not because he’s not excited about it, but when I get talking about techie stuff, Bob starts to twitch.

Amazon also has a beta tester for a Kindle Adobe InDesign Plugin, but it doesn’t yet have the ability to support the KF8, so its kind of useless to me, but when they do figure that out (and they will) I won’t be drooling, I’ll be foaming at the mouth.

So what does all this mean?

That is what Bob said in his email. When I translated what it meant…I haven’t heard from him since. I think he’s avoiding me…

Seriously, this is very exciting stuff. But it’s only the beginning of what is going to happen as eBooks take over the world. As we discussed before, using a Word document or using a web page .htm Word generated document isn’t a very good idea when creating an eBook. See this blog post. I prefer to use InDesign or Pages, which allows me to create a quality ePub file. The KindleGen is a free download from Amazon that accepts HTML, XHTML or an ePub file as a source file. What is most exciting to me is that I can use a single ePub file that I created that works fabulously with iBooks, B&N and Kobo (video and all) to create the new files for Kindle that can be used on both KindleFire and Kindle eReaders.

Even better, there is a Kindle Previewer Software. I don’t have to be in KDP to “preview” my eBook. (A little piece of advice: if you can, preview your book on all devices and apps).

But here is the problem. This isn’t perfect yet. Certain things that are supported by Kindle Fire Table (such as nested tables and merged cells and scalable vector graphics) are not supported by Kindle eInk based devices or Apps for PC, Mac and Smartphones.

The Vook is another new great tool for authors. I’ve tested it, and while it’s not for me, it’s a really excellent option for authors for formatting both ePub and Kindle eBooks. I do recommend it over some other options out there for authors because it does create high quality and the author does control the end result more so than other services out there, whether it be free or paid. If I didn’t have InDesign, I’d probably use Vook regularly. They’ve done a really good job of working out some of the kinks and for those authors who don’t have a nerd who lives to “figure things out” as their business partner like Bob has with me, then it’s an excellent option.

Also, Apple is going to make some big announcement soon and it will most likely have something to do with eBooks either directly or indirectly.

As eBooks gain popularity, this technology is going to get better and better. We are going to undergo some major changes and with it will come some frustration since we will have to learn new things. But at the same time these changes are very exciting and will help authors connect with their readers and that is a beautiful thing.

Write It Forward!