Tag Archives: marketing

Which Self-Published Genres Sell the Most?

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If you’re thinking about self-publishing a book, you probably want to know which genre gives you the best chance of selling and making a profit. The answer is simple. Romance.

Romance novels make up close to 40% of Amazon’s market share of self-published books with science fiction and fantasy following close behind.

Following these three genres, the next most popular genres are mystery, crime, and thrillers. Surprisingly, coming in last are nonfiction books, although serious literature only makes up a paltry 2% of Amazon’s ebook sales.

The fact that genre fiction is the most popular shouldn’t surprise anyone. Genres attract certain types of readers who are willing to explore different authors as long as they fit in their chosen genres. If you want a romance novel, you m ay gravitate towards your favorite authors, but you’re also likely to enjoy romance fiction from unknown authors.

On the other hand, serious literature is much harder too sell because there are no clear boundaries like romance or science fiction. Still, don’t try to write books to satisfy a particular genre because unless you enjoy writing in that genre (and reading it too), you’ll likely churn out a mediocre book. It’s far better to be excellent in your chosen field (even if it’s not as marketable as romance) than to force yourself to write solely for money.

Ideally, you ant to write for both love and money, but given a choice, write for love first and the money will follow. If you write just for the money, chances are good the money won’t even appear at all.

So decide what type of book you want to write and self-publish. Genre fiction may be the easiest to market, but don’t let that sway you if you don’t feel you’d enjoy writing in that genre. Write what you love. You may be surprised at how lucrative that could really be.

To read more about the most profitable genres, click here.

 

Pricing an E-Book

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There are several schools of thought when pricing an e-book. One school says price it as low as possible and make up for small profits in volume. Thus a 99 cent e-book should sell more copies than a $9.99 e-book. The other school of thought says price your e-book as high as possible because you’ll make fewer sales, but more profit per sale. As always, there’s more than simplistic guidelines to worry about.

Amazon once fixed maximum e-book prices at $9.99 until publishers rebelled. Then publishers won the right to set e-book prices anywhere they want and what did they discover? That higher prices meant lower sales.

If you keep raising prices, you’ll keep reducing sales. The trick is that if you price an e-book too low, you’ll actually lose sales because a low price implies lesser value. Thus you can deprive yourself of profit by pricing your e-book too low.

For example, suppose you sold an e-book at 99 cents and sold 10 of them. That would mean roughly $10 with the author taking a traditional 70% cut, which means selling 10 e-books at 99 cents earns you roughly $7. Now if you priced that same e-book at $9.99 and sold one copy, you’d make that same amount of profit. The real trick isn’t just arbitrarily choosing a low or high price, but in finding the specific price that maximizes your e-book sales.

Unfortunately, every e-book is different. Fiction e-books tend to be throwaway purchases, so a low price is better since you want impulse buys. Nobody’s going to buy a $9.99 novel from an unknown author so a lower price reduces the barrier to a sale.

On the other hand, non-fiction e-books tend to be more important. If someone wants that information, they’re willing to pay for it up to a certain amount. If you price a non-fiction e-book too low, people think it can’t be that good. If you wanted to learn how to reduce your chance of a heart attack, would you trust a 99 e-book or a more expensive one? It doesn’t matter if the information is identical. A higher price (up to a certain point) creates an aura of value.

So the general rule is to price fiction low and price non-fiction higher. You may need to experiment to find the right price for your particular e-book but don’t think there’s a magic price that works for all e-books because there isn’t.

Price e-books too low and you may miss out on profits. Price e-books too high and you’ll also miss out on profits through reduced sales. The real answer is to experiment with different prices until you find the price that maximizes sales and profits. It’s not a fast processor but it’s the eventual answer.

The HarperCollins Experiment

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One of the latest trends in writing and publishing has been blogs. The idea is that you write a blog and turn your best blog posts into a book. General this works best for non-fiction where each blog post represents a single idea that you can paste together with other similar blog posts to create a chapter and eventually a book. Blogging a book gives you a chance to get feedback from others and capture your ideas.

For fiction writers, blogging can still work, but you’ll need to blog much like writers did when magazines serialized their novels. That means you should write in order. This gives you much less freedom than blogging a non-fiction book, but forces you to write and focus on telling a compelling story within each chapter so readers will want to read the next installment of your story.

The biggest problem with blogging a book is getting people to find your blog in the first place. To get around this problem and find potential authors, HarperCollins has created a site called Authonomy. The goal of this site is to create an online community of writers who can share information with each other and post snippets of their work for others to comment on. This immediately gives you a community that can give you feedback and also allows HarperCollins to find potential manuscripts and authors before any other publisher can snap them up. Thus it’s a win-win for both authors and HarperCollins.

It’s free to join Authonomy so you might as well join, even if you have nothing to share with others just yet. Until you do, just participate by helping others and learning how the whole Authonomy site works. Then when you’re ready, post your own manuscript on the site and be ready to get good (and bad) feedback from others. Whatever you post on the Authonomy site remains under your copyright so don’t worry about losing any rights by sharing your work with others.

Every month, HarperCollins reviews five manuscripts for potential publication, so this could be the fastest and simplest way to get spotted by a major publisher like HarperCollins. While HarperCollins might not be the best or most open publisher for horror, they do publish science fiction and fantasy. In any case, if your writing looks promising, you may attract the attention of other publishers who also belong to this site.

Given the difficulties in getting your manuscript published, using a site like Authonomy is worth a try. At the very least, you’ll likely meet new writers and perhaps make new friends. To read some of the criticism about Authonomy, click here.

What Killed Traditional Publishers

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A long time ago in the good old days, publishers served two purposes. One, publishers offered editing services to turn rough manuscripts into polished books. Two, publishers offered a distribution network that could get a book into bookstores all over the world.

Unfortunately, both purposes are no longer the monopoly of traditional publishers any more. To cut costs, many publishers have laid off editors, who now work on a freelance basis. That means you can hire some of the best editors to polish your manuscript without going through a traditional publisher.

Second, books are no longer distributed exclusively through bookstores. Now you can by printed books over the Internet (mostly through Amazon) or buy e-books over the Internet (again mostly through Amazon).

Without editing services or distribution networks, traditional publishers have pretty much lost their entire reason for existing.

As an author, you can take control of your work and get it published and distributed without a traditional publisher. Just get a freelance editor, sell your book as an e-book or print-on-demand book through Amazon/CreateSpace (owned by Amazon) and you have all the benefits of traditional publishers while keeping the lion’s share of the profits as well (which is not possible with traditional publishers).

This is the reason why traditional publishers are obsolete with nowhere to go but down. Traditional publishers are simply not needed any more. That’s bad news for traditional publishers, but good news for authors since there’s no longer a gatekeeper to pass through to get your work to the public.

For authors, this is liberating and scary. Without a traditional publisher to help you out (and take most of the profits), you have to learn how to market your own books. For some authors, this isn’t a problem, but for many who just want to write, this new world of self-publishing represents more of a hassle. Yet it’s unavoidable.

Even today’s traditional publishers have cut back on their marketing budget so authors still need to promote their own books. If you don’t promote your own books, nobody else (not even a traditional publisher) will do it for you unless you’re a famous author like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. For the majority of authors, self-marketing is the new way of publishing whether you like it or not.

So embrace the freedom of today’s world of self-publishing. It’s scary, it’s more work, but in exchange it gives you more freedom and flexibility. If you’re interested in writing a book, there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. Now you have no more excuses, and that could be the scariest thought of all.

The Future of Digital Magazines

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A few years back, Apple introduced something called Newsstand. The idea behind Newsstand was to create a single location where publishers could send digital issues of a magazine for people to read on their iPhone or iPad. The problem with Newsstand is that it basically duplicated printed magazines in digital form. By burying so many digital magazines within the Newsstand app, it was easy for people to completely ignore Newsstand.

To read a digital magazine, people had to go through three steps. First they had to find the Newsstand app. Second, they had to find the digital magazine they wanted to read. Third, they had to open that particular digital magazine. Many publishers simply created their own apps to give users one-click access to their content and ignored Newsstand altogether.

That’s why Apple recently dumped Newsstand and created a different app called News. If you watch Apple’s WWDC keynote at the 51:30 minute mark, you can see a brief six minute demo of how this News app works. Basically the News app collects content from multiple sources and displays them within a single app. Now you get one-click access to just the content you want to read on a regular basis.

For self-published authors who want to publish their own books, think of creating your own channel of content to publish information about your latest books. If you write fiction, release a novel in chapters like magazines used to do in the old days. Charles Dickens wrote many of his novels as serialized magazine issues. That kept people buying the magazine so they could find out how a particular story ended.

If you write non-fiction, simply write related content about your book topic, or just serialize the entire book as a series of chapters as well. With digital magazines available, there’s no reason to let just the big publishers target audiences. You can carve out your own niche in the new world of digital magazine publishing available through Apple’s News app, coming this fall. If you put ads in your content, you’ll even get to keep 100% of the profits. If you let Apple insert ads into your content, you’ll get 70% of the profits.

Look beyond e-books and start investigating digital magazine publishing. A digital magazine won’t look like a print magazine converted into digital form (as Apple’s Newsstand app’s failure shows), but will look like something dynamic that lets people selectively choose what they want to read mixed in with their other content. Digital publishing in books is already popular and digital magazines are next. Don’t overlook this new opportunity.

To learn more about publishing your content though Apple’s News app, click here.

America Online’s Going Mobile

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Anyone remember America Online or AOL? They’re still around and despite their fading influence, they still manage to attract a huge number of visitors to their main site every year. Because a growing number of visitors were visiting AOL.com through mobile devices, AOL recently redesigned their entire web site to make it mobile-friendly.

What does this mean for authors? It means as more people shift to using mobile computers like smartphones and tablets, they’ll also shift to reading e-books on smartphones and tablets. Since people use a smartphone or tablet for minutes at a time, compared to hours at a time when using a traditional PC, you can see how mobile computer users will have much shorter attention spans. That means if you’re writing an e-book, it’s best to keep your chapters short and your text simple and easy to read.

Look at older classic novels like “Moby Dick” or “The Last of the Mohicans” to see dense, descriptive text that creates a rich atmosphere but at the cost of slogging through paragraph after paragraph of text. Now look at modern novels by John Grisham or Dan Brown, and you’ll see that novels have gotten much shorter, simpler, and faster paced. As people start reading e-books more on smartphones and tablets while riding a bus, waiting for a plane, or sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, you can already see that people will want to read even shorter, faster, and easier to read books optimized for smartphones and tablets.

When writing your e-book, keep your audience in mind. Nobody wants to wade through dense text on a smartphone when so many other distractions are just a tap away. When you focus on an audience that’s easily distracted, that means you’ll need to make your text more inviting to read and faster with simpler text. The easier your writing is to read, the more likely someone will continue reading it.

Your e-book is going to face the real world of audiences who want bite sized chapters, so adjust your writing accordingly. Just compare “The Last of the Mohicans” with today’s novels to see how far today’s novels have come. Now extrapolate into the future how even today’s novels may still be too much for mobile computer users to digest easily in short bursts.

Keep it simple and your e-books will continue attracting an audience as the world shifts more and more to mobile devices. It’s inevitable, so go with the flow and be part of the future instead of clinging to the past. When even a dinosaur like America Online acknowledges that the world is going mobile, that’s a clear sign that you better keep up with mobile computing as well if you want to stay relevant in tomorrow’s world too.

Strategic Self-Publishing

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There are many ways to make money self-publishing, but here’s the one way most people pursue and how most people fail. The plan is to write and self-publish a single e-book and wait for millions of dollars in profits to magically appear overnight. It could happen, but the odds are just as likely that you’ll find the winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk. Don’t ignore this possibility, but don’t plan for it either.

Since you can’t write just one e-book and hope to make millions, the other strategy is to work at self-publishing over a period of time to maximize your odds of profitability. Write one e-book and then write another one that will appeal to anyone who liked your first e-book. Then write a third one that will appeal to anyone who liked your first two e-books and so on. The goal is to create a series of related e-books.

Now each e-book acts like part of a wider net to capture potential customers, and if they like one of your e-books, they’ll likely want and buy the other ones. In this way, you build a slowly growing series of related e-books that you keep selling to customers who already like you. Ask any business. It’s always easier to sell to existing customers than it is to find and sell to new customers.

In fiction, write a series of books with the same characters. Notice the popularity of books like “The Maze Runner” or “The Hunger Games” that use the same characters. Once you read the first book and like it, you’ll likely read the second and third ones too. You’re never going to please everyone so don’t bother trying. Just focus on pleasing the people who like your books.

If you don’t do a series of books, do what Stephen King or John Grisham does and write books within a certain genre. If you like horror, chances are good you’ll like most of Stephen King’s books even if they don’t have the same characters. If you like legal thrillers, chances are good you’ll like all of John Grisham’s books. By publishing related books, you increase the odds of building a fan base and selling to that fan base.

For non-fiction, write books on similar topics whether it’s gardening, military history, or fishing. Once people like and trust one of your books, they’ll be far more likely to buy your other ones.

So the secret to self-publishing is to create a small empire of related e-books that establish you as an expert in that field whether it’s horror fiction or as a sailing expert. People are far more likely to buy your books if they clearly see your brand and expertise. If you’re constantly on the news talking about caring for pets, you’ll have a much easier time selling pet books than an unknown author, so you must first establish credibility. If you don’t have massive credibility outside of publishing, create it by self-publishing several books on the same topic. If you were looking for a book on caring for reptiles, would you trust an unknown author who has only published one book or an unknown author who has published five books on the same topic?

Self-publishing is mostly a matter of self-promoting. One e-book isn’t enough. You need as many as you can get. The more the better. So strive for establishing a publishing empire and forget about making a killing by self-publishing a single e-book.

Once you realize the surest way to success is by steady progress in growing a series of related e-books, you’ll see the folly of book services that charge hundreds of dollars for editing or book cover design services. Get trapped into thinking one e-book will make you millions and you’ll fall easy prey to these services designed to separate you from your money in a hurry while giving you little chance of ever recouping your costs. Instead, keep it simple and cheap because you need to write and self-publish several e-books, the more the better, and it will be impossible to pay expensive book editing services and book cover designing services for each one.

Start small and keep growing. It’s not the fastest way to riches, but it’s one that’s more under your control than simply hoping one e-book will make you a millionaire overnight.

Israeli Law to Boost Book Sales Kills Them Instead

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To give authors a living wage, Israel recently passed a law preventing book stores from discounting new books. The idea was to keep new book prices artificially high so authors could earn higher royalties. As usual, what the government tries to do, they tend to screw things up and that’s exactly what happened to book sales in Israel. Instead of giving authors more money, the higher price of books simply drove people away from buying books at all. That means lower book sales and less income for authors.

This backwards law that boomeranged on authors is just one more clue that authors can’t rely on making money the old fashion way of selling books through traditional publishers any more. The real money comes from self-publishing because now you can experiment with different prices until you find the right price range for your particular types of books.

Some people think that 99 cents is the magic price range, but that’s not always true. Offer too low of a price and you may see sales fall because people think 99 cents means the book is cheap. Yet if you raise your price too high, you’ll eventually drive away price-conscious buyers.

For fiction, cheap prices are good because it encourages people to experiment with new authors and essentially dispose of books after they’re done reading them. For reference and non-fiction books, a higher price is usually justified to convince customers that the information is valuable so it’s worth paying for.

So there is no magic price range for everyone. You have to experiment with different prices until you find what works best for you. Remember, selling 10 books at 99 cents is pointless ($7 profit) if you could sell just one book at $9.99 (also a $7 profit). Lowering prices doesn’t always mean people will flock to buy your book. Likewise, raising prices doesn’t mean people will buy it either.

What definitely won’t work is to put your fate (and income) int he hands of traditional publishers who are reacting to the whims of the market place that they no longer have any control over. At one time the huge advantage of traditional publishers was their massive distribution network. Nowadays, that distribution network is basically Amazon, and anyone can sell books though Amazon as a self-published author, so where’s the advantage of traditional publishers any more?

Beyond the name recognition and the ego boost of seeing a printed book in a store, authors aren’t seeing much cash from traditional publishing book deals and they likely won’t see more in the future. As traditional publishers cut costs to stay afloat, self-publishing is becoming more viable from both a practical and financial point of view. The old world of traditional publishers is gone for good. You probably won’t make much money selling books through traditional publishers so you might as well try self-publishing. You may find you can reach more people than ever before faster and more profitably than going through a traditional publisher.

The Lesson of Romance and Monster Porn

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The most lucrative e-book category seems to be fiction, specifically focusing on romance novels and its offshoot known as monster porn where women have sex with Bigfoot, space aliens, dragons, or hobbits. One reason why such romance books are so popular as e-books is because of the anonymity of reading an e-book. Try reading a lurid Harlequin romance novel in public and everyone can see exactly what you’re reading by glancing at the flowery book cover that depicts men with rippling muscles passionately embracing a thin, beautiful woman.

Yet when translated into an e-book, that cover becomes invisible to everyone around you. Nobody can tell what you’re reading when you read an e-book. All they can see is that you’re reading something on a smartphone or tablet. That gives you the freedom to read whatever you want whenever you want without any sense of shame or embarrassment whatsoever.

That’s one of the biggest advantages of e-books. If you have a book that might cause embarrassment to readers, it will likely be more popular as an e-book than as a printed book. For example, someone struggling with alcoholism wouldn’t want to take a book on alcohol recovery to work in case someone might spot them reading it, but they can easily read that exact same book as an e-book without any fear of having their secrets revealed or discovered.

Someone reading a book on relationships or how to find a perfect mate might likewise be squeamish about someone finding out what they’re reading, but an e-book provides complete anonymity. No one needs to know what you’re reading nor will they ever know so you can read an e-book about curing joke itch in a crowded conference room and your boss and co-workers will never know.

So if you have a book topic that could cause embarrassment if others know what you’re reading, you’ll likely find that topic will sell more copies as an e-book solely because of this anonymity factor. Use this fact to your advantage and you may be surprised at the results.

Three Cases for Self-Publishing

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There’s a comprehensive essay about self-publishing called The 7k Report. This report tries to track the e-book and self-publishing markets and contains lots of information, but some of the most useful tidbits are that mysteries/thrillers, science fiction/fantasy, and romance are three of the hot fiction genres for e-book/self-publishing. In general, genre fiction will be easier to market because there’s already a built-in market for those types of stories. Anyone interested in spy novels will automatically be interested in your spy novel. However, if you just write a story about a boy or girl growing up and coming of age, that may be a little tougher to market initially. You could have the best coming of age novel, but it’s still harder to attract an audience.

Perhaps the most important bit of information from the 7k Report is its conclusions about self-publishing. Generally if you’re a writer, your manuscript probably falls into one of three categories:

  • Awful
  • Average
  • Excellent

If you have an awful book, no traditional publisher will want to publish it so you’re better off self-publishing. Whether you make any money or not is irrelevant because you most likely won’t get a traditional book contract anyway, so you might as well self-publish and get the joy of seeing your work on the market, whether anyone buys it or not.

If your book is average, then there’s a chance no traditional publisher will print it. Even if they do, there’s a large chance that it won’t make money and will go out of print. Once a book goes out of print, it’s essentially gone forever. However, if you self-publish it, then you can continue selling your book forever. You may only make a little money, but at least your book will still be available and you can publish (or self-publish) additional books on the same topic and built up a library of similar books you can sell to the public. Now each additional book on the same topic or genre helps sell the other books and you’ll gradually increase your income. Once again, self-publishing is preferable for average books because you’ll make more money in the long run and have control of your manuscript.

If your book is excellent, you may still be better off self-publishing because you can get the lion’s share of the profits and most publishers won’t do much promoting of your book anyway until it proves profitable for them. So even if your book is excellent, you’ll still need to promote it yourself so you might as well get most of the profits. Traditional publishers pay 10% of the profits while self-publishing earns you 70% of the profits.

Theoretically, traditional publishers should earn you more because of their greater distribution, but with bookstores dying and Amazon basically being the biggest book distributor in the world that’s available to publishers and self-publishers alike, the distribution advantage of traditional publishers is gone.

If your book is excellent, you’ll attract a large following through self-publishing and then traditional publishers will come calling because they want to market a proven winner. Now that your self-published book has proven to be a winner, you’ll be in a much stronger bargaining position with traditional publishers. “Fifty Shades of Grey” and “Still Alice” were both self-published books that were later snapped up by traditional publishers. You can be certain that the authors got a much better deal with the traditional publisher after they self-published first.

So no matter what the quality of your book, self-publishing offers more advantages than going with a traditional publishers. Eventually you may wonder why bother with traditional publishers, and that’s exactly why so many of them are in trouble.

Unless your book contract says otherwise, a traditional publisher gets all the rights to your book and if it goes out of print, you won’t have control of it any more. Self-publishing gives you many advantages over traditional publishers. While it might be flattering to your ego to get a traditional publishing contract, it might not be financially best for you, so consider self-publishing. It’s pretty much the future of publishing so you might as well go with the future instead of sticking to the past.

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