c2011Shalako
Hot damn! I'm so excited I'm fit to bust; I'm so happy I could shit!
That's right, ladies and gentlemen, we got our first fan mail for the first time ever, just this week!
Okay, okay, okay...(sorry!) Here's a little snippet from the first one:
Dear Louis;
I see that you are such a nice person and I don't know where else to turn. Boy! Oh, boy. Am I in a lot of trouble. You see, my father, the King Of Ethiopia, has been captured and taken hostage and held for ransom by rebels. While he is being held in the hills not far from the capital, I myself cannot help him as I escaped with my colleagues and the bodyguard and the Crown Jewels.
We are in a camp for displaced persons just outside of Val d'Or, which I admit is actually in Italy. As you should know, kind sir.
Unfortunately, the rebels are demanding cash, i.e. untraceable assets. They are quite adamant you see, and so of course I thought of you. You have many friends around the world and we (the government in exile,) were kind of wondering if you had any friends at the Bank of England.
(Personal details omitted.)
Okay, here's the next one:
Lou!
Old buddy, old pal!
Say, Lou, all kinds of lazy, no-good bastards, untalented fools and other assorted shitheads are making a ton of money off of the internet. Why not you?
What's so fucking special about you?
If these idiiots can do it, so can you! I'm here to help you, and if you will just click on this link to receive my free pdf, we can get started right now!
(Withheld.)
Don't worry, I got lots of links. But before we do that anyway, look here:
Here are the twelve points of successful internet marketing:
1.) Listen to me.
2.) Sign up for my course.
3.) Check out my other products, all free!
4.) That's right, Lou, they're all free!
5.) It is only when you go to upgrade, that the reasonable monthly charges really start to kick in.
6.) But I could go on!
7.) Lou, I can see that you are a busy man, just like me, so I will now enroll you into my only-free newsletter, for a special thirty day free trial!
8.) I am really looking forward to our new relationship.
(Name withheld.)
...and I got a couple others here, as well. Yes, ladies and gentlemen:
'Nothing beats the glow of a job well-done.'
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Flux or Revolution?
c2011Shalako
I’ve been trying to make sense of what I’ve learned over the last few months. Is the industry in a state of flux, or is it in a state of revolution? It is my assertion that debt and recession has shrunk the market for brand-new authors, i.e., ‘real’ publishers, by an estimated ten to twenty percent.
Self-publishing is not revolutionary. It’s been around for a long time. What is revolutionary is that it doesn’t cost any money. What’s revolutionary is that you don’t even have to leave home. You can do it from a blanket on a beach. You can write your book while commuting to your day job on the train and you can publish it from a table at a fine restaurant.
E-books are not going to ‘kill the book.’ The forty or fifty dollar cost of a typical hardcover, or the ten, to fifteen, to twenty-dollar cost of a paperback, are not going to ‘kill the book.’ The sheer weight, bulk, and cost of producing a book, the investment in plant and machinery, plus the high cost of labour and shipping, (i.e. fuel,) will inevitably shrink market share in the face of professional digital publishing and distribution without the use of trucks, warehouses, and human employees unpacking cardboard boxes and sticking books on shelves.
The POD of ‘Case of the Curious Killers,’ is listed at $13.99. By the time it is shipped to your house, it will cost about $20.00 or more, depending upon where you live. My profit would be sixty cents. I can set the price of an e-book at less than two dollars and still make my sixty cents.
Is there some reason why big box publishers can’t see this? I have no costs—no costs except my own time and labour. It’s a good investment, from my point of view.
The old fashioned full-service gas station went away, for many reasons. It was hard to get good help for a buck-ten an hour, which is what the wage was back then. But it was the sheer weight of traffic that actually killed the old fashioned gas station. No one was willing to wait for thirteen cars ahead of them to be filled.
Global online traffic is growing at an exponential pace, especially in developing and newly developed nations.
In five years, ninety or ninety-five percent of all publishing in major markets will be digital, and that’s just because people will still be sticking flyers in old people’s mailboxes. It will never be one hundred percent.
‘Readers,’ are a small demographic group. I’m not saying this to be facetious. But someone remarked that ten million people in France read ten books a year or less, and someone else pointed out that only ‘x-percent’ of people in this other country read ‘y-number’ of books a year. There are plenty of other things to do which don’t require the investment of time that a good book demands of a reader. Why read when you can flip through two hundred channels of TV?
But what really got me was how much time I spend reading online. It’s about ninety-eight, or ninety-nine percent of my reading now. Without a computer, I would read a good deal less. Also, I read much less fiction than I did before, and a lot more technical and how-to material. Digital publishing brings the most up-to-date research to my device. With the devices available today, an old fashioned book is only one kind of programming, and providing it, like music, in the most portable, convenient, and ecologically sound manner makes perfect sense to this writer.
Stripping away everything that is inessential about a book and distributing it globally, to a potential market of one-point-six billion English speakers, at a world-shattering price of one dollar—that is revolutionary, ladies and gentlemen.
That would be a stroke of genius, if it ever comes up in conversation or debate.
A week or so ago, I gave away a box of CD’s. I may never buy a CD again, and the likelihood of buying an ‘LP’ ever again seems rather slim. Did the iPod and MP-3s kill music?
Did sound recorded on wax cylinders kill the orchestra?
I’ve been trying to make sense of what I’ve learned over the last few months. Is the industry in a state of flux, or is it in a state of revolution? It is my assertion that debt and recession has shrunk the market for brand-new authors, i.e., ‘real’ publishers, by an estimated ten to twenty percent.
Self-publishing is not revolutionary. It’s been around for a long time. What is revolutionary is that it doesn’t cost any money. What’s revolutionary is that you don’t even have to leave home. You can do it from a blanket on a beach. You can write your book while commuting to your day job on the train and you can publish it from a table at a fine restaurant.
E-books are not going to ‘kill the book.’ The forty or fifty dollar cost of a typical hardcover, or the ten, to fifteen, to twenty-dollar cost of a paperback, are not going to ‘kill the book.’ The sheer weight, bulk, and cost of producing a book, the investment in plant and machinery, plus the high cost of labour and shipping, (i.e. fuel,) will inevitably shrink market share in the face of professional digital publishing and distribution without the use of trucks, warehouses, and human employees unpacking cardboard boxes and sticking books on shelves.
The POD of ‘Case of the Curious Killers,’ is listed at $13.99. By the time it is shipped to your house, it will cost about $20.00 or more, depending upon where you live. My profit would be sixty cents. I can set the price of an e-book at less than two dollars and still make my sixty cents.
Is there some reason why big box publishers can’t see this? I have no costs—no costs except my own time and labour. It’s a good investment, from my point of view.
The old fashioned full-service gas station went away, for many reasons. It was hard to get good help for a buck-ten an hour, which is what the wage was back then. But it was the sheer weight of traffic that actually killed the old fashioned gas station. No one was willing to wait for thirteen cars ahead of them to be filled.
Global online traffic is growing at an exponential pace, especially in developing and newly developed nations.
In five years, ninety or ninety-five percent of all publishing in major markets will be digital, and that’s just because people will still be sticking flyers in old people’s mailboxes. It will never be one hundred percent.
‘Readers,’ are a small demographic group. I’m not saying this to be facetious. But someone remarked that ten million people in France read ten books a year or less, and someone else pointed out that only ‘x-percent’ of people in this other country read ‘y-number’ of books a year. There are plenty of other things to do which don’t require the investment of time that a good book demands of a reader. Why read when you can flip through two hundred channels of TV?
But what really got me was how much time I spend reading online. It’s about ninety-eight, or ninety-nine percent of my reading now. Without a computer, I would read a good deal less. Also, I read much less fiction than I did before, and a lot more technical and how-to material. Digital publishing brings the most up-to-date research to my device. With the devices available today, an old fashioned book is only one kind of programming, and providing it, like music, in the most portable, convenient, and ecologically sound manner makes perfect sense to this writer.
Stripping away everything that is inessential about a book and distributing it globally, to a potential market of one-point-six billion English speakers, at a world-shattering price of one dollar—that is revolutionary, ladies and gentlemen.
That would be a stroke of genius, if it ever comes up in conversation or debate.
A week or so ago, I gave away a box of CD’s. I may never buy a CD again, and the likelihood of buying an ‘LP’ ever again seems rather slim. Did the iPod and MP-3s kill music?
Did sound recorded on wax cylinders kill the orchestra?
Saturday, April 2, 2011
New Post: Kiss Theory of Social Media
c2011Shalako
This is my 'keep it simple, stupid,' theory of social media.
(For what it's worth.)
Considering the time investment in learning any new social platform, any sort of social media strategy is better than none.
Keep it helpful, positive or relevant, if nothing else funny or entertaining. People like to be liked, and they need to be listened to. There is no such thing as cynically 'reassuring' people. If you're fake, they'll spot it. When in doubt, keep silent.
Consistency over time is probably better than a big noisy splash that goes nowhere.
Right now I'm signed up for more social platforms than I can safely handle. Spewing out links that are boring, irrelevant, or shameless self-promotion wears thin pretty quickly. If you are not prepared to put in the time on any social platform, you're not going to get much out of it; and you're just doing unnecessary damage to yourself.
To engage using social media and at the same time distancing yourself from its emotional impact is not in my experience impossible. It is merely hard! It teaches me...maybe a little sensitivity...some objectivity. The fake IDs on some platforms make this clear: you are who you present yourself to be, because no one has anything else to go on.
'I'm not judging you,' sums it up nicely. I'm sure there are good reasons to put on a papier-mache goat's head and call yourself, 'Spawn of Goat-man,' or whatever.
In some ways social media are unregulated. A site is private property and you play by their rules or out you go. Like many things that are unregulated, they are self-policing. This has its dangers, especially if enough people mistake it for high school.
The unwritten rules of any community are enforced by group pressure. At that point it becomes a question of which group you choose to join,(or leave.)
Never click on pictures of some guy with a head like a goat promising 'special' picures of Jon-Benet Ramsey.
Trust your instincts and know when to back away quickly.
To be a writer, and to be friends on Facebook with 800 other writers is a bit like a convention of shoe salesmen. We are all exchanging business cards, trying to sell the other guy a new pair of shoes, and we all know they've got a big truck full of brand-new shoes out in the parking lot, and they're trying to sell us a new pair of shoes...and we've all got one eye on the other guy's friends list or fan list...and we're all just sort of doing our jobs and trying to keep it nice.
If you don't love people for their own sake, and not so much for what they can do for you, get out now while the going is good.
When I get a minute, I'll post a photo of my new shoes up on Facebook or something. Nice guy, gave me a great deal...hopefully he'll buy one of my books, sooner or later.
Does that sound cynical?
***
(This is the dumbest post you've made in some time. -ed.)
(Thank you. -louis.)
Friday, April 1, 2011
New Post: Spring Cleaning
c2011Shalako
I've been doing a bit of spring cleaning and I finally got around to doing something I have been meaning to do for a very long time.
Opening up the old dresser, which was about forty inches wide and thirty-two inches tall, I pulled out the bottom two drawers, which were awfully heavy and hard to handle. They hit the floor with a crashing sound.
I put in a fresh garbage bag and put the industrial-grade can right there and started throwing stuff out. It was bad. Taxes going back fifteen years, an old survey map, a deed of title and sale, and even worse stuff.
I mean old photos, stories and clippings from my youth. Old maps, including all the channel-depths of Lake St. Clair, old fishing and trapping manuals...it was bad. Did you know at one time I was going to go up north and claim some land and start prospecting for gold? It sounds nuts, doesn't it? But I was younger, stronger, healthier and maybe just a tad more optimistic back then. It'll never happen now, of course.
What the hell.
In some ways it was good to just chuck all that old stuff from the past and let it go. Let it frickin' rot!
It was like some big weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I filled up a couple of large garbage bags, and the pair of them probably weighed about ninety pounds.
You wouldn't want to carry that crap too far on a hot summer's day.
I've been doing a bit of spring cleaning and I finally got around to doing something I have been meaning to do for a very long time.
Opening up the old dresser, which was about forty inches wide and thirty-two inches tall, I pulled out the bottom two drawers, which were awfully heavy and hard to handle. They hit the floor with a crashing sound.
I put in a fresh garbage bag and put the industrial-grade can right there and started throwing stuff out. It was bad. Taxes going back fifteen years, an old survey map, a deed of title and sale, and even worse stuff.
I mean old photos, stories and clippings from my youth. Old maps, including all the channel-depths of Lake St. Clair, old fishing and trapping manuals...it was bad. Did you know at one time I was going to go up north and claim some land and start prospecting for gold? It sounds nuts, doesn't it? But I was younger, stronger, healthier and maybe just a tad more optimistic back then. It'll never happen now, of course.
What the hell.
In some ways it was good to just chuck all that old stuff from the past and let it go. Let it frickin' rot!
It was like some big weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I filled up a couple of large garbage bags, and the pair of them probably weighed about ninety pounds.
You wouldn't want to carry that crap too far on a hot summer's day.
New Post: Promotion 101
c2011 Shalako
During E-Book week, we observed that page hits on our Smashwords e-books went up to eighty, a hundred, or even a hundred twenty-five per day. During a couple of short bursts of Twitter-feed promotion, again page hits went up, maybe in the twenty-five to fifty per day range.
The lesson is a simple one. When you promote the book, people look at it. When you don't, they stop! On our Smashwords statistics page, we can see that paid customers are in fact downloading books that they 'paid' for by signing in and typing in the promo code.
Now that the free book promotion is over, virtually no one is buying books even when the page hits are up due to links going out on Twitter and Facebook, etc. I still have one product for free on Smashwords. That is the short story, 'The Handbag's Tale.' People are taking this product, and I can see downloads on the stats page from time to time.
With the price marked at, 'zero,' rather than using a promo code, this does nothing to boost that all-important statistic, books that were 'sold' one way or another.
Right now my Smashwords total is only 135, so anything that sells or even just moves books is important. At some point, I have to put a price back on 'Handbag' just to make the counter move!
As far as pricing, any edge helps to move books. The funny thing is, people are buying my books from Amazon, and that number has bumped up since the promotion. In some crazy way, price doesn't even really matter.
Somehow promotion rubbed off...or something.
No one who isn't into self-publishing or writing really knows what Smashwords is. They don't want to sign up if they don't know anything about it, or its advantages, or how the system works. At that point price is meaningless.
Why I am selling more books in the U.K. as opposed to the U.S. is still a bit of a mystery. The ratio is 2.3/1 in favour of the Brits.
So for March, 'Heaven Is Too Far Away' is back in front, followed by 'Handbag's Tale,' with a surprising third-place resurgence of 'The Paranoid Cat,' and in fourth place is a steady 'Case of the Curious Killers.' Once again, 'Core Values' lingers in a distant trailing position, and maybe we should count ourselves lucky to have sold or given away seven copies of that book.
Promotion gives feedback, which means you have data you can attempt to interpret.
If I do something right, the numbers will climb...if I do something dumb, or just stop promoting...the numbers will fall.
Notes:
First, I posted this at about noon on a Friday. There were virtually no page hits within an hour or so, yet when I made a post at about eight or eight-thirty last Thursday night, there were about forty page-hits. So time of day, i.e. 'prime-time' makes a big difference to a blog entry which cross-posts on Facebook or Twitter. In terms of technique, it's just dumb. However, I can 'share' it later or copy and paste the URL into posts on other platforms such as LinkedIn or Stumbleupon. It's all written up and everything. It's not a total waste, is what I'm saying.
By having a number of products and platforms, which is a lot of work to set up, it gives me the chance to experiment. By treating one book differently, or promoting one platform against another, I can compare results and try to figure out why one performs differently; or why it might be perceived differently.
***
While not exactly an expert, my mother is asking me to set up a free website for her.
That is so easy for me now, that it's really more a matter of her finding the time! If she had some short texts written up, and a few images, all I would really need is a little fuel and a couple of hours.
I started blogging in February 2010 and created my first website in August/2010.
I published my first two e-books last fall and I have seven or eight products in all, (some of which are experimental or promotional,) with a few more on the back burner.
***
If I treat it like a game, and enjoy it as a learning experience, I think we'll do all right, ladies and gentlemen.
During E-Book week, we observed that page hits on our Smashwords e-books went up to eighty, a hundred, or even a hundred twenty-five per day. During a couple of short bursts of Twitter-feed promotion, again page hits went up, maybe in the twenty-five to fifty per day range.
The lesson is a simple one. When you promote the book, people look at it. When you don't, they stop! On our Smashwords statistics page, we can see that paid customers are in fact downloading books that they 'paid' for by signing in and typing in the promo code.
Now that the free book promotion is over, virtually no one is buying books even when the page hits are up due to links going out on Twitter and Facebook, etc. I still have one product for free on Smashwords. That is the short story, 'The Handbag's Tale.' People are taking this product, and I can see downloads on the stats page from time to time.
With the price marked at, 'zero,' rather than using a promo code, this does nothing to boost that all-important statistic, books that were 'sold' one way or another.
Right now my Smashwords total is only 135, so anything that sells or even just moves books is important. At some point, I have to put a price back on 'Handbag' just to make the counter move!
As far as pricing, any edge helps to move books. The funny thing is, people are buying my books from Amazon, and that number has bumped up since the promotion. In some crazy way, price doesn't even really matter.
Somehow promotion rubbed off...or something.
No one who isn't into self-publishing or writing really knows what Smashwords is. They don't want to sign up if they don't know anything about it, or its advantages, or how the system works. At that point price is meaningless.
Why I am selling more books in the U.K. as opposed to the U.S. is still a bit of a mystery. The ratio is 2.3/1 in favour of the Brits.
So for March, 'Heaven Is Too Far Away' is back in front, followed by 'Handbag's Tale,' with a surprising third-place resurgence of 'The Paranoid Cat,' and in fourth place is a steady 'Case of the Curious Killers.' Once again, 'Core Values' lingers in a distant trailing position, and maybe we should count ourselves lucky to have sold or given away seven copies of that book.
Promotion gives feedback, which means you have data you can attempt to interpret.
If I do something right, the numbers will climb...if I do something dumb, or just stop promoting...the numbers will fall.
Notes:
First, I posted this at about noon on a Friday. There were virtually no page hits within an hour or so, yet when I made a post at about eight or eight-thirty last Thursday night, there were about forty page-hits. So time of day, i.e. 'prime-time' makes a big difference to a blog entry which cross-posts on Facebook or Twitter. In terms of technique, it's just dumb. However, I can 'share' it later or copy and paste the URL into posts on other platforms such as LinkedIn or Stumbleupon. It's all written up and everything. It's not a total waste, is what I'm saying.
By having a number of products and platforms, which is a lot of work to set up, it gives me the chance to experiment. By treating one book differently, or promoting one platform against another, I can compare results and try to figure out why one performs differently; or why it might be perceived differently.
***
While not exactly an expert, my mother is asking me to set up a free website for her.
That is so easy for me now, that it's really more a matter of her finding the time! If she had some short texts written up, and a few images, all I would really need is a little fuel and a couple of hours.
I started blogging in February 2010 and created my first website in August/2010.
I published my first two e-books last fall and I have seven or eight products in all, (some of which are experimental or promotional,) with a few more on the back burner.
***
If I treat it like a game, and enjoy it as a learning experience, I think we'll do all right, ladies and gentlemen.
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