Finding customers, making sales

Mel Keegan

Let’s take it as understood that the book is finished – proofread many times, edited by someone with the appropriate skills and bounced off several tough “beta readers” to provide a good idea of how the broad spectrum of readers will respond to the characters, pacing, denouement. At this point, the indie author has either learned how to package a book personally, or has paid a bureau to package it. A cover artist has been found, whose work suits the project, and there’s a smart jacket on the book. The author has decided on a price which looks competitive, when the size and shape of the work is measured against books already on the market.

Now you, the indie publisher, are ready to sell copies, to ship ebooks to paying customers. You’ve possibly already uploaded the title to Kindle and Smashwords, possibly All Romance ebooks, OmniLit, Lulu, perhaps Rainbow Ebooks – the works. You’ve told your friends about it, blogged about it several times. You’re ready to be knocked over in the rush of readers buying your book –

However, the rush isn’t happening. People are not exactly racing to buy the book, and you’re wondering what’s gone wrong. Is something wrong with the work?

In all probability, the book is just fine. The rather alarming fact is, excellent books are languishing on the virtual shelves, because the volume of ebook publishing has recently become so enormous, any book (every book!) runs an overwhelmingly high risk of being lost in the deluge of new titles. If the book isn’t visible … if readers can’t find it online or in the e-bookstore catalogs … readers won’t be buying.

So the actual question here is not, “How do I sell copies of my book?” The real question is, “How can I make my book visible to potential readers?

And this is the real trick.

It would be wonderful if one could outline a cookbook or “cookie cutter” process via which an indie might automatically appear in the first few pages of the online catalogs – those pages which are actually viewed by browsing shoppers. Few potential customers look past the first five pages; almost no one browses past page ten. Allowing for 20 listings per catalog page, only the first 200 titles in any genre will be seen, while there might be 20 times this many titles in the complete list. This is especially true in e-stores where, for example, “gay,” or “romance,” or “children’s” will be used to head off an entire genre inside which everything from SF and fantasy to historical and crime will all be lumped together to create an incredibly enormous list, 95% of which will never be viewed. If one’s book falls well outside page 10 of a 100 page catalog … now what?

Alas, the facts of the ebook marketing world virtually preclude any such cookbook marketing method. The forces driving this world are complex indeed. Software engines are constantly tracking who’s looking at which book, who actually bought after looking; which books were reviewed, and how well, and how many times, by whom, and in what region of the country and the world; which books were sold, at what price, via which sales channel; how many were sold in what period of time … and so on, and on.

There are more factors to be considered than one can shake the proverbial stick at, and no one can control more than a small handful of them. However, a self-marketing writer can actually influence that handful, potentially to start a “cascade effect” via which these few manageable factors can have far-reaching effects on the massive engines at Amazon and other major players in the online retail universe.

First things first, then: which of these factors are the indie publisher’s to control?

You can certainly decide what’s on the cover. If you’re working in conjunction with a cover artist, s/he will be waiting for you to tell him/her what to assemble. Having a stunning, professional cover will make any book stand out, but it’s not quite as simple as deciding what looks great at 900 pixels high, full sized on a monitor. You and your artist must be sure the cover still looks good around 100-150 pixels high – the size at which it’ll appear in an online catalog. With this done, a book has the best possible chance of being noticeable and attractive enough for the potential reader to click on the cover and glance over the blurb. If the cover is so complex, it turns into a little colored rectangle at 100-150 pixels high, no reader’s eye will be drawn to it. It makes sense to conceive of a cover that will be recognizable under extreme x,y compression.

The next thing the indie can control is the blurb. You can either write it yourself or, if you don’t have a knack for writing effective copy, pay someone for this service. The blurb is like the backmatter on a paperback. Readers browsing through a brick-and-mortar store are attracted by a cover (same as in an online store – see above); they pick up a book, turn it over and read the back. You have an absolute maximum of around 100 words and half a minute to grab their attention, or the book goes back on the shelf and they drift on to the next one. It stands to reason that a long, rambling, over-detailed blurb will get a book put back … as will a short, pithy blurb that’s rendered trashy by hyperbole, exclamation points and pulp wording … and a blurb betraying the literacy of the author through spelling, punctuation and style errors. Blurbs are delicate little things. If a great cover gets the book picked up, a rotten blurb can get it dropped again – so don’t skimp here. If you can’t do it yourself, have a professional write it.

Sample reading is the next crucial part of the process. People will usually read a few pages of a book as they stand in a physical bookstore – why? Because every author has his/her own style, and all readers simply don’t like all styles. Even a great story can be told in a way that annoys a specific reader even while it entertains a dozen others. This is what online sample chapters are for, and if you don’t upload a generous enough sample for readers to get a taste for your work, many will pass on to the next book. The bottom line is, you’ll lose a lot more potential readers by withholding sample readings than you’ll lose by showing people how you work and letting them decide for themselves.

By the time a customer has noticed the cover, liked the blurb, decided they like the writing style, and is interested in buying, you’re down to just a couple more hurdles to get over, to make the sale. Right in front of you now is the issue of price. How much to charge is a touchy subject for many indies, writers and publishers alike, and an increasingly large body of readers will tell you, the only right price is free. Thousands of writers – good ones! – have made tens of thousands of books – good ones! – free. With this body of free reading out there, the truth is, no reader is actually compelled to pay for a book ever again. One could read for nothing, for the rest of one’s life, and the inescapable fact is that freebies are downloaded about 100 times more often than anything with a pricetag on in, no matter how low-cost.

But how can an author spend hundreds of hours working on a full-length novel which might be 200,000 words long, and make it free? Some writers write purely for fun. To them, knowing many thousands of people are reading the work, and liking it, is all the recompense they need. They thrive on the feedback, the sense of community. In fact, these hobbyist writers are much happier in their trade than authors who’re trying to “go pro” and earn royalties. However, many more people get into the business of writing to find some money, even if only a little extra cash to make their paycheck stretch further. This is where the air gets thick and hazy.

A tiny fraction of priced books will sell 1,000 copies. Most will sell closer to 50. That’s not a typo. Fifty is about the max some books (good ones!) will sell. If the author/indie publisher sold 1,000, s/he could afford to charge $2.99 for a big novel and profit nicely. If s/he sold 50 copies of the same work … hmm. Not so good. One idea is to research what other indies are charging. This will get you into the ballpark – but it’s a very big ballpark. You can see prices of .99c to $4.99 on works of the same length (though the quality may vary dramatically). The amount of money the publisher invested in the prepress phase must, and will, factor into the price. Did s/he pay for edition, packaging, cover, promotion? At the end of the day, the decision is the publisher’s, whether to charge .99c or $9.99 for a full-length book – and the price will to some degree be decided by the royalties needed to recover prepress investments from (conservatively) guesstimated sales.

The other side to the equation is that low prices are said to increase the likelihood of getting high sales. Does this pan out in reality? It depends who you talk to. Some writers (myself among them) have played with 50% discounts to see if this would triple sales. Double is no good: you’re right back where you started twice as many sold at half the price. For me, the result was a very minor bump in the line on the chart marking normal sales – nowhere near double, much less triple. However, the interesting thing was that while a half dozen titles were discounted – not selling very many more than they do at normal price – my whole list, top to bottom, enjoyed a nice little bump in sales. Everything sold better, across the board, irrespective of the prices. As Julius Sumner Miller used to say, “Why is this so?” The overall sales increase can only be due to the fact that many (most?) readers almost obsessively scan the “on sale” pages at big, influential sites like All Romance eBooks. They’re looking for cheap books, but they discover good books that aren’t on sale, and they’re impressed enough to by one right now, today, rather than putting this book on their wishlist and waiting a year or longer for it to be discounted. (And I’ll be candid: some of my titles – the best, the biggest, the award winner and nominated, those with the cult followings – don’t go on sale. Ever. I imagine many hopeful shoppers at OmniLit and ARe have the NARC and Hellgate books on their wishlists. Several years from now, they’ll figure it out.)

There is a huge downside to the wishlists that are so common at virtually all online stores. Many stores continually have rolling sales, which habituates readers to the “wishlist it and wait a while” model of shopping. Some folks never buy anything at full price, which is good for the pocketbook. However, the other side to that statement is that some writers seldom sell anything that isn’t on sale, which is very bad for a writer who is trying to earn some extra money (or perhaps even earn a living) from his or her ebooks. At worst, the customer wishlist scenario can be catastrophic: sales might virtually come to a dead stop, while hundreds of wishlistings are made. Everyone is interested, but no one is buying, all are waiting, pending big discounts that might, or might not ever happen. There is also the random danger that if and when the publisher makes the decision to discount, the customer who wishlisted the item weeks and months ago has lost interest in the interim – or was just served a large bill and can’t afford the luxury of ebooks this month. Wishlisting has taken much of the spontaneity out of online shopping, and while this might be good for the store, it’s deadly for publishers, who traditionally profit from the impulse purchase.

If you think the problem of wishlisting is likely to take a bite of out you, then price your ebooks high and regularly, routinely, discount them. The masses of readers scanning the sales pages will see you there – it’s like getting free advertising. However, all indies are in something of a “publisher/seller beware” situation….

Some firm information is starting to come out of the data, the years’ worth of accumulated sales figures, and it seems a price in the regions of $6 is the so-called “Goldilocks spot,” no matter how large the book is. It can be a very major piece of work, several times longer than what’s considered a “full novel” in the ebook environs, but the recommended price is still around $6. Meaning, most people can’t, or won’t, pay more than this, no matter how good the book is, or how large it is.

The problem is that if you’ve set a retail price of only $6 for a full-length book, and then you discount it by 50% to $3, then the retailer takes their cut of up-to-40% … and if this is where the bulk of your sales are derived, due to the “wishlist it and wait a while” shopping model … your book will be earning you $1.20 per sale. The sweet spot might well be around $6, allowing you to potentially earn around $3.60 per sale, but if you’re hoping for free advertising on the discount pages, and if you run afoul of large-scale customer wishlisting, you’ll be earning one dollar in three. You’ll need to sell 3x more to get back to where you were at a full price that was quite low to begin with. Will the discount page listings result in enough sales to make this model profitable? To this point, no one is sure. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. As the old saying goes, “You pays your money, you takes your shot.”

For the same of clarity, Amazon pays 70% for books priced between $2.99 and $9.99. All Romance eBooks and OmniLit pay 60%, no matter what the retail price. Smashwords is an aggregator, or accumulator – in real terms, a distributor – acting as your supply route to get into stores such as B&N, Kobo, Sony and Apple. The retailer will take the big cut and Smashwords will take an additional, smaller cut; how much you receive depends on which third party actually made the sale, and what region of the world it was made in.

Many writers – myself, for one – believe $8.99 - $9.99 is a fair price for a large book which was published via a legitimate though small publisher, where the business has overheads and royalties are divided between several parties. Self-marketing writers can set lower prices, and some do, but many of these authors had to pay for editing, proofing, covers and promotion, so one is back to square one. Bottom line: too-low prices will prohibit recovery of prepress investments, much less seeing a profit.

Check Kindle and the other marketplaces, and you’ll see $2.99 as the price set for books up to 200,000 words. How do writers manage this? My only conclusion is that they are, in fact, hobbyists who might have sent this book to Kindle after it was downloaded as a freebie many thousands of times. The writer doesn’t need to earn royalties; the pricetag is purely a formality. Unfortunately, there’s a faction at Kindle who can’t reason this through, and they firmly believe that if hobbyists can charge low prices, all indie writers and pro small publishers must do the same. In fact, this is a recipe for the doom of anyone with business overheads, not to mention the author paying for prepress services; but you’ll read some dismally foolish comments posted on Amazon apropos of pricing. Again – publisher/seller beware, and as a word of advice, don’t bash heads with critical commenters. They’re wrong. Many people seeing the erroneous comments know just how wrong they are. Let this be enough.

Running in tandem with the question of price is the issue of file formats. Most indie publishers will find that something in the region of 75% - 90% of everything they sell will be sold via Kindle, which dominates the marketplace at this time. (The situation might change in future – but not if Amazon has any say in the matter!) If you’re uploading to Kindle already, you’ll find yourself wondering why you should even bother with other file formats. There are good reasons. Kindle users can side-load a PDF to their device, so they can buy a book direct from your own website. You can use sites like www.payloadz.com and www.gumroad.com to host the files. They charge a small fee for the download service, you keep the rest. You earn more when you sell a book right off your own pages than when you sell through Amazon, since any store keeps a good wedge of the retail price.

Also, the legions of people reading on other devices is growing. Millions of us are reading on smartphones which are side-loaded from a laptop. The epub format works best for smartphones. End of statement. Reading devices with 4” screens don’t do the PDF thing very well, but epubs were made in small-screen heaven. The challenge of making a professional quality epub might be causing you some strife, but there’s an easy answer. Drop a few bucks, get a dedicated program. And I’ll even recommend one. It’s called Epub Maker. It costs less than fifty bucks even at full price (it’s sometimes on sale), and you get it here: http://epingsoft.com/epub/ … and that’s problem solved.

By including both PDF and epub in your repertoire, as well as having a presence on Kindle, you’re covering about 99.5% of the marketplace. Many other ebook formats exist, but PDF, epub and Kindle serve the vast majority of the market – and any special requirements can usually be covered by the services offered by Smashwords. Indies reading this must know about Smashwords! www.smashwords.com has become something of a Mecca in the last few years.

So with the book professionally presented, at an attractive price, in enough formats to accommodate readers, you’ll be positioned well to sell copies. If … and it’s a big if! … people actually SEE you. Just being listed somewhere in the catalog at Kindle, Smashwords, All Romance eBooks and so forth, won’t automatically make you visible. The catalogs are usually organized around what’s new, or what’s bestselling, so the brand-new books, and the biggest sellers, are displayed first. Books are going online so fast these days, new ones often only show for a matter of minutes before they’re bumped by even newer ones; and if you don’t sell a lot of copies in a little time (a value which is called “velocity” in the trade), you’ll be waaaaay down the lists. You could be on page 98 of a 100 page catalog displaying 20 books per page. So the challenge is in how to get your book up to the top, or front, of the catalog.

And this is the real obstacle. Only a very few books will achieve this. To get to the top of the catalog lists, you need to sell a lot of copies in a very short time … velocity. But, how? One way is to “start a buzz,” get people talking about the book. If you’re plugged into an enormous facebook network, you can talk up the book for days and weeks ahead of launch. In fact, some indies (not all!) swear by facebook. For some people, it works like magic, but it ought to be stated right here that for other people it doesn’t work at all. Like everything else in life, facebook is a crapshoot, but – what have you got to lose? One faces learning curve, to make facebook work as a book marketing tool, but there’s a very good place to learn it: http://gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook-marketing-bible/ … bon voyage, and good luck!

Other people swear by Twitter, and it’s the same story. For some, it’s magic, for others, no joy. Something to remember about Twitter is that it’s very much a realtime engine. If you’re in Australia or New Zealand, your tweets will be posted in the wee small hours of the morning, US, UK and Europe time. Who’s seeing them? To tweet effectively, you might have to be online and twittering away at 3:00am. Is this something you can do – and can you keep it up for months and years at a stretch? Holding down a day job and tweeting frantically at 3:00am could easily be another recipe for doom, this time of a personal nature.

Blogging is often recommended as a way to attract readers, but this imposes a whole new challenge which can turn into a full time job: driving traffic to your blog. A writer’s blog is a very different animal from the political blog, celebrity blog, or the blogs covering product reviews, movies, fashion, sex, mega-trends. A writer’s blog is dedicated to a little known “brand” – meaning yourself and/or your work. Who will find you, and how, and why would they bother to search for you, if they don’t already know your work? One good way to get traffic to a personal blog is to write about anything BUT your writing. Watch the headlines as they break on Google News, and blog about current events. Visitors will definitely touch down on your page … meanwhile, on the side, you talk about your books, display them prominently in the margins. If you only blog about your writing, very few people will visit; basically, your readers will be folks who already know you. However –

A word of caution about blogging as a way to sell books: it takes a lot of time. You’ll be writing hundreds of posts – and they’ll need to be serious posts, not flotsam. Add this to tweeting and facebooking activities, and you’re approaching the “full time job” scenario. Selling large numbers of your book(s) will become critical; writing for fun will dwindle away. It often happens that authors who once used to love writing for its own sake will become so jaded with it, they quit. This is so sad – and in almost every instance the quest for income brings it about. “Art” and “joy” turn into “work,” and the fun goes away. When it stops being fun, we stop doing it.

If the challenge is the sell a lot of copies in a short time, in order to get the velocity to propel yourself to the top of the online catalogs and be seen (which sounds like Catch 22), and if you can’t spend 4-6 hours per day, and long into the night, facebooking, tweeting and blogging in order to try to stir up a buzz, word-of-mouth advertising, you have three more options which are probably more doable, and realistically within your reach.

The first is to find a huge body of followers. If thousands of people know you, then some hundreds might be inclined to pay a rather cynically low price for your new book. But how can you develop any such network? There’s one fairly sure way: make your work FREE. Anything free is downloaded thousands of times, so long as people can find it (see below). Anything free that is also top quality will be remembered, and the writer will be respected – blogs and websites will be bookmarked. Future freebies will be pounced upon. A very-low-priced “commercial” book from the same author will at least be viewed and considered.

Making good quality books free is not so easy. Going this road means developing perhaps ten fully professional pieces and giving them all away … and the indie’s blood could be running cold right now, if s/he is paying for professional editing and packaging. However, the giveaway process will pave the way for a launch at, say, Kindle and All Romance eBooks. Let’s say you’ve given away ten works; you’ve invited people to join a mailing list, so they’ll be informed of the next freebie, and your giveaways are dependable. During this phase, supply real value – proper stories, professionally written and edited, medium- and full-length works rather than fragments and flash fiction. Woo the ever-growing mailing list of supporters. Get to be a pleasant habit with them. Then, when you bounce your enormous mailing list with a link for a book priced cynically low, you’re assured of getting a whole lot more “velocity” than any book that was ever launched without this deliberate buildup. If the velocity is sufficient, you can make it to the top/front few pages of those online catalogs … and once you’re there, and visible, you’re in with a much better chance of making significant sales.

Making the decision to give away a string of top-quality stories is step one in the process. Just posting them to a blog or Live Journal page probably won’t generate the traffic needed to build an immense mailing list. However, there are many, many places across the www where you can list your free stuff, and one really good place which will point you to the directories: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/free-ebook-promotion_b52130 ... surf this list, cruise around, check out the sites, work out which directories are appropriate to your type of material.

If you can’t live with making a string of high-quality stories available free – and even if you can – you can go one step further by seeking reviews. Book reviews are a double-edged sword. It’s often said that good ones sell books. The reverse is quoted less often – poor reviews hurt books. A bad review will definitely cost you sales, and if you’ve spent much time on Goodreads, you’ll have come to a full realization that an alarming number of reviews are little more than an airing of very personal opinions. A book can score a bad review just for being long, when the reviewer prefers shorter stories. The dumbest one-star review on record has to be the critique of a Wilbur Smith book which was given a lousy rating for not being set in Africa. A reader purchased it on the (mistaken) understanding that Smith writes only books set in Africa. Upon reading the work (which I believe was “Hungry as the Sea”) this customer was miffed to discover a story having nada to do with Africa, and lavished a one-star review on it. The bottom line is, reviews are another crapshoot.

An author can send his/her brainchild to review sites all over the web, but no one can guarantee a good review – in fact, any review at all is far from guaranteed. Reviewers are increasingly overwhelmed by submissions as the indie publishing industry expands. Time is not boundless, and not all books can be read. Those that, on close inspection, don’t appear as promising as they did when they were offered, will be discarded. The worst sin the writer can commit is to write to the site, asking when the book will be reviewed, and why it hasn’t been reviewed. This is absolutely contrary to the etiquette of the trade, and will immediately brand the writer as an amateur and a newbie. It could also get the book discarded, even if it had been in the must-read stack. Also, if the writer were to write repeatedly, and harass the site boss, s/he might be told in plain terms why the book was discarded … and the truth can smart. Start as you mean to go on: be professional. Submit the book, and leave it there. If it’s reviewed at all – great. If it scores a good review – outstanding.

If you’re giving books away, and submitting books for review, make sure to contact potential reviewers in the month before your new commercial book launches … and now that this enterprise is kicking into high gear, you can perhaps think about spending a few dollars on some advertising space. Research is critical. Find out “how much for how much.” Advertising can be expensive, so look into the possibility of trading ad space. If you’ve been blogging, unless you’re “blogging in a vacuum,” which is the worst way to blog, it’s likely you’ll have made the e-acquaintance of scores of other bloggers in a field similar to your own. Having made friends, it’s entirely appropriate to ask if they’ll trade ads. “You run mine, I’ll run yours.” Keep the ads small – remember, to score 12 ads on 12 other blogs, you must run an equal number on your own page. Your blog could become overwhelmed with huge ads for other folks, if you sent out enormous ads. The vital thing is to set a realistic budget. Don’t invest more in promotions than the book has a good chance to earn back; and whatever else you do, never finance promotions on a credit card. Such debts have a nasty way of sticking around, at up to 26% p.a.

Make sure you utilize sites like Author’s Den, Goodreads, Shelfari, and if you’re in the GLBT genre, GLBT Bookshelf itself. Social networking, as an art form, is growing, evolving, all the time, and if there’s one guy who has his finger on the pulse, it’s Mark Coker, the boss at Smashwords. Keep an eye on the Smashwords blog: http://blog.smashwords.com/ for developments in the industry, and be ready to take advantage of opportunities, if you have the time and resources available.

In fact, Mark has rolled years’ worth of research into an ebook project that is well worth your time: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145431 -- “The Secrets of Ebook Publishing Success.” Not everything in the book will be useful to you, but some ideas will get you thinking, and inspiration is the root of all things, in the world of indie publishing. Many such works have been produced lately; another is “Ditch the Publisher,” edited by Hayley Sherman: http://s405131255.initial-website.co.uk/free-ebook-ditch-the-publisher/ … to which I had the pleasure of being a major contributor, with “Mel Keegan’s Nine Golden Rules.” At some length, I examined what goes into producing – rather than marketing – a top-notch book. Both Hayley Sherman’s title and Mark Coker’s are free … the price is right.

Somewhere along the line, and probably so late in the process that you’ll be ready to publish before you come to grips with this, you’ll be wondering if you want or need an ISBN. This is an area of some dispute right now; more traditional parts of the industry still swear by them, some people insist they’re obsolete – and at least for small publishers, not to mention entry-level indies, they’re damned inconvenient. For a start, they can be expensive for a newbie with few books, or only one.

It’ll cost you a one-off fee of $55 to register as a new publisher, and if you just want to buy one ISBN, the pricetag is $40. You can buy 10 for $80, which gets the price down to $8 each – but if you abide by the letter of book industry law, you’ll need most these to cover one book, so you’re back to square one. The reason you need as many as six ISBNs for one title is that, strictly and legally speaking, you need a different ISBN for each edition. One for the PDF; another for the epub; another for the Mobi version you’re almost certain to be asked for; another for the HTML version made available for people who can’t read the other formats; another for the plain text version, for folks whose devices are so old, they can’t handle newer file formats. If you issue a POD paperback version, you’ll need a sixth ISBN. Even if you decide to run with just PDF, epub and plain text, it’s still $24 for the ISBNs for a single title. And if you’re going to give away ten titles, as suggested above, to build a healthy mailing list before you launch a commercial book, in the interests of generating enough velocity to be visible in the catalogs … well, you do the math.

Recently, however, the once-ubiquitous ISBN has begun to fall out of favor. Kindle never used them; instead, Amazon issues an ASIN identification number to every item sold through its store. Since up to 90% sales will come through Kindle, one can be forgiven for wondering if it’s financially worth the gamble of investing in ISBNs, especially since many indie publishers don’t bother with them any longer. Without an ISBN, the indie is essentially “flying under the radar” of the legitimate, traditional publishing world, but this is by no means illegal. Since an ISBN won’t actually do anything to enhance online ebook store sales (not to mention those generated through personal web pages, using something like Payloadz as the file server), it’s the individual’s decision.

Some online stores do require an ISBN before you can upload a title to their catalog, but there’s a morsel of good news. Smashwords can provide an ISBN as part of their packaging process; it’s free; it’ll get you there. It’s not as prestigious or as unique as having your own ISBN which identifies you as the publisher, but it’s a means to an end … and the fact is, not one reader in a thousand actually looks at the ISBN on any book. The numbers are used by the traditional publishing and bookselling industry to control stock across distribution chains ending in brick-and-mortar stores, libraries and reviews’ desks at major newspapers. However there’s little traditional about the world of ebooks! This question – to ISBN or not to ISBN – is the indie’s decision.

If you’d like to know more about the dispute over the value, and future, of the ISBN, see this: http://personanondata.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/isbn-is-dead.html -- a 2009 blog post by Michael Cairns which was indeed prophetic.

A last piece of wisdom and insight which few “gurus” will offer you is this: go into the realm of independent publishing with a sense of perspective. Know the realities; know what’s likely to be the destiny of even the best books. You’re up against a phenomenal ocean of published works, with new books coming along at the rate of hundreds per day – and this will almost certainly become thousands per day, by the time we roll into 2014. Many of those works are free; the near future will bring vast repositories of free books. Indie publishing is a piece of cake in one way: anyone, everyone, can publish their book, hence the deluge. On the other hand, Indie publishing is also like the quest for the holy grail … tough, and getting tougher, not because it’s hard to publish a book (quite the contrary), but because one writer, one book, among hundreds of thousands, must fight hard to be seen – and when the book has a pricetag attached, any sale will be achieved in the teeth of Amazonian rivers of free literature, some of which is very good indeed. It’s important to go into this endeavor with a keen sense of perspective. Know the odds and accept them. In fact, there’s a couple of blog posts you owe it to yourself to read before you commit to the quest. Going back to Mark Coker for one moment, see this: http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/12/mark-cokers-2013-book-publishing.html.

And to this I’d like to add my own ten cents’ worth, with a post I wrote back in 2007: Literary History Repeats Itself -- for $2 a pop.

The fact is, there’s no one single “key to success” in this complex, evolving business. There’s an enormous bunch of keys, and one of them is knowing your readership – your marketplace. Get to know your readers; be accessible to them through your blog, your social networking, and if you’re writing in the GLBT genre, there’s no better place to meet your readers than on GLBT Bookshelf.

So long as you recognize the challenges ahead, the road can be fun; and if you’re in it for the fun – for the sheer pleasure of writing – you can have a great time, meet some fantastic people … and maybe even sell some books along the way.

Good hunting, and good luck!