02 Writer's False Hopes - Dashed Dreams
Second in a series. An investigation into what's preventing writers from making a viable living as published authors. We examine the conventional marketing model - and find its flaws...
Continued from the Introduction:
Where Conventional Wisdom Fails
This story is the common theme of the bulk of all authors out there. They've read and been told about the massive success that's possible – and how they only have to follow this model to start raking in the dough as it falls from the sky.
The problem is: that conventional wisdom models for ebook writing-publishing-marketing quit working for all but a scarce few.
In 2018, a final study from a company called Author Earnings, published some remarkable findings. They'd tracked over the income and production of over 200,000 authors through all known publishers in every version. The ballyhoo was that indie authors were now making as much as traditionally published authors – that it was possible for anyone to make themselves a financial success. What was hidden in the numbers was that only four-tenths of one percent were making over $50,000 annually. The punchline underneath: Even most traditionally published authors were no longer making a living at this. Almost no one was.
This parallels the world which existed before ebooks became a “thing”. In traditional publishing, only 1 percent of all books pitched to those publishers were ever accepted. And of those, only 3 percent of those published books actually earned their advances back. And sales after that then result in on-going small royalties flowing in for those tiny few truly successful authors. Yes, the number is similar – three-tenths of one percent.
The unfortunate part is that while indie authors get as much as 70% of the ebook's price as their royalty, traditional authors only get 10%.
This is our jumping-off point.
We are dealing with writers who have done the work to get a book started and taken it over the finish line. Their hopes are still to earn a living with their published writing, to become that wildly successful author they've heard and read about.
While this process is technically easier than ever before, this short text and video series became an investigative study into what made these tiny few writers successful – what are the proven steps to take that will push any author's career up into a self-supporting, livable income level? Also, what are the missteps to avoid?
Examining Marketing Model Malaise
Obviously, the models being used that get this poor result are flawed. But we have to examine what these models are and how they are promoted as working in order to see what parts are broken. It's not enough to accept the smiling car salesman's advice without taking it for a test drive. You have to take it somewhere that you can see how it handles under worse conditions than smoothly paved roads outside the sales floor.
We want to know what is being promised, what doesn't work, and why.
Long before self-publishing entered into the book-selling markets, there have always been three major phases in book production:
Writing – Publishing – Marketing.
The modern writer gets an idea for an interesting and potentially salable book, writes and edits the book, decides where to market it and then releases it with an expensive promotional campaign.
For traditional publishing, the writer submits their book treatment to an agent. That agent then pitches it to various publishers. One publisher decides to take a change, and forks over an advance with a contract. Then the author writes the book. Then the publishing house works the book over with editors and cover designers and its in-house marketing team. After that, it's published and pushed through their publicity department while the author is sent on book tours and shows up for media interviews.
Self-publishing has basically the same basic model, but the author does all the publishing and marketing steps for their own book.
Now, in that Author Earnings report, it essentially said there was no difference in effectiveness between self- and traditional publishing. Total books sold were pretty evenly split between the two.
Print has always outsold ebooks for most genres.(The outlier is in Adult Fiction, which is dominated by Romance – where over 90% were indie-published ebooks. And we'll see this later as a factor.)
One very telling summary sentence from that Author Earnings report: “The only gatekeepers that matter now are readers.”
Analysis of the Writing-Publishing-Marketing Model
The difference between self-published and trad-published is that the indie author pays for everything they have to do to produce their books – cover, editing, proofing, promotion, etc.
In traditional publishing, the book publisher not only gives the author an advance to finish writing the book, they also pay for working up the book to its finished state and stocking the brick-and-mortar bookstores with books to sell.
Either way, you write the book and get it ready for publishing, then publish, then market. Simple. Indie authors pay for everything, book publishers – if you can get accepted – pay for everything, mostly.
The kicker is in the marketing. Lots of books hit the market every year. On Amazon, the rate is something like 4-8 new books per minute, depending on what survey you follow.
All that boils down to not just finding your audience, but having your audience find you. Traditional or Indie, it's the same priority. If your book doesn't quickly find its audience, it gets quickly buried under an avalanche of incoming ebooks.
A SIDEBAR: WHAT IS MARKETING?
It's key to define something here. Writing and Publishing are well defined. But the devil is in the details of that last one. What really is Marketing?
In its simplest terms, it's where the supply meets demand. It's where the buyer and seller exchange something valuable – the offer and a commodity called money. A fair exchange, where they help each other.
The trick is in getting these two together. Not every seller is a good match for just any buyer. On top of that, if there are too many buyers, the price resembles an auction – highest bidder wins. But if there are too many sellers, it becomes a discount clearance sale.
Where this becomes a problem is when third-party marketplaces show up and put arbitraries on what can and can't be sold, or limit prices high or low. It's no longer a balanced playing field. Meanwhile, the marketplace owners can themselves charge the moon for access to buyers – while getting an entrance fee from those same buyers. Artificial marketplaces interrupt the natural balancing act of supply and demand. All to pay for their operation as a marketplace.
Meaning – less and less value for the buyer, even less income for the seller.
Enter the Whale Buyers
“Whales” are buyers who purchase many books per week, some reading two or more 300-page ebooks daily. These whales are not loyal beyond a few authors that they like and can keep them supplied with their “fix”. These are commonly romance readers, but exist in most of the major fiction genres, such as mystery and science fiction, thrillers and fantasy.
Because of the whale buyers' volume of sales in these genres, the bulk of attention tends to follow the large sales areas, which is followed by a consistent supply of ebooks for the most popular categories. And we'll see later how Amazon has evolved their policies and algorithms to cater to this section of book buyers.
...To Find the Whaler Authors
A prolific writer is generally able to produce 300 or more pages of fiction every month – if they keep at writing every day. That volume of production means having a support network to do proofing and editing and covers, etc. And those cost a percentage of their book income.
Every book needs to produce income right out of the gate, and maintain sales of the other books in its series.
When you add in the “required” advertising costs to keep your book findable, that extra “service” can cost from 25% to 50% of your book production budget. So you can see another reason indie authors need to have an outside income source to prime the pump. And why modern authors need to pay for a support group to keep them going until they can break through the marketplace barriers.
Obviously, if you could match up the whales with their particular reading needs, and the writers with their particular writing talents, then this conflict of not enough books and not enough buyers could be resolved simply. Any whale-buyer can support several authors through their buying habits. But that isn't encouraged. Because the system is rigged to keep the whales starved as well as the whalers.
Who are these “someone's” inserting their “protection racket” that keeps both supply and demand artificially scarce?
Next week: 03 Villanous Monopolies Exposed