OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn
In the last few weeks, Amazon has bought Goodreads, the largest social network for readers. You can read a digest of author reactions and articles in the fantastic Ether for Authors here.
When I first decided that I wanted to be a writer, I assumed in perfect naivety that the hardest part of the process would be writing the book.
It’s easy to make this mistake, because writing a book is hard. By the time I had a manuscript in hand that I was actually willing to show the world, it’d been a good ten years since I printed out my first rickety short story and thought, hey, maybe I can do this writing thing. It wasn’t a bad ten years. In fact, I was pretty proud of all the words I’d typed in that time.
Now that I had a book, I thought the rest would be easy, or at least less hard. How wondrously wrong I was.
If you happen to be looking for a new book to read at this very moment, then you are in luck, because you’ve never had more reading choices then you do right now.
Amazon and other online publishers have made it so simple for authors to self-publish that the number of books hitting the electronic shelves each year has skyrocketed. For example, in 1950, only 11,000 new books were published. Seems like quite a good amount of books, doesn’t it? The year 2011 welcomed an estimated 340,000 new books into the world, according to data company Bowkers.
In the days of bookstores, titles were quickly retired to make way for the latest and greatest. With online book retailors like Amazon now the go-to place for literary material, books can stay on electronic shelves indefinitely while each new year brings an ever-increasing tidal wave of newly published selections.
Readers have more reading choices than ever, but writers have never faced a more competitive environment or struggled so hard to get their book noticed.
This is a lesson that many writers learn the hard way. I am no exception.
When I self-published my first novel, I dreamed of my sales as a little snowball.
I’d tell my friends. They’d read the book, gasp and cry in delight at how wonderful it was, and then tell their friends about it. Roll, roll, roll, until my sales reports would creak under the weight of such big numbers.
What ended up happening is that my snowball didn’t so much go downhill as it got lost in the desert and melted.
A study performed in 2007 by the Ipsos Public Affairs for The Associated Press found that only 27% of Americans read 15 or more books a year. That’s still a good number of books, but nowhere near enough to go around for all writers. Assuming that the majority of readers mostly stick to their favorite authors and rarely wander outside the bestseller list, then the rest of us authors are clamoring for the attention of a tiny percent of the reading public.
How in the world are we supposed to get a reader to pluck our book from the masses?
This is the great challenge of discoverability, and there are no easy answers (though reading about how other self-published authors, like Joanna, achieved success is a good start).
Authors regularly build websites, lavish hours each week cultivating their Facebook fan groups, spend their hard-earned dollars on ads, giveaways and book tours, and hit up overwhelmed book bloggers to review their books. These are all great marketing tactics, and I’ve tried them all with mixed results, but the problem is that most other serious authors are doing the same thing, so you’re more likely to be keeping up with the crowd rather than pulling ahead.
After struggling to figure out that elusive perfect marketing strategy that would boost my sales numbers, I finally confessed my difficulties to my trusted book critique partner, Leslie Ramey, who had also recently self-published her first novella. It turned out she was dealing with the same challenge.
It’s not just authors who are having problems getting their books seen. Readers are also struggling to make sense of all the new reading choices they have. In a recent article published on Forbes.com, author David Vinjamuri points out that readers are really facing two big challenges. The first is too much choice and the second is lack of resources to effectively assess the options. In other words, readers may be able to choose from hundreds of thousands of books, but they have no way of telling if a book is going to be any good unless they stick with authors they know and trust. Peer reviews seem like an obvious solution, but a string of sock puppet scandals last year has shown that reviews are not always trustworthy.
In his Forbes.com article, Vinjamuri highlights some companies that are trying to help readers parse the slew of books on the market, including Netgalley, Goodreads, Bookish and Rabble Reads, a service that is still in the works but intends to be the “Rotten Tomatoes” of the literary world. These companies may also provide writers with a tantalizing opportunity to scale the treacherous slopes of Mt. Discoverability.
As for myself and Leslie, we’ve thrown our hat in the ring as well and created Compulsion Reads, a company that evaluates and endorses self-published and indie books that meet a specific set of quality standards. Our endorsement is meant to spotlight talented authors and to give readers an easy way to distinguish well-written books from the masses.
All in all, it’s a tough road ahead for writers and for readers. The literary world has been turned upside down in the last five years, and I don’t think the majority of us have yet found our bearings. As more and more books pour onto virtual bookshelves on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online retailers, writers are going to have to work harder and harder to stand out from the crowd.
What do you think about discoverability? What are you doing to stand out from the crowd? Please add your thoughts in the comments below.
Top image: Maze by Tim Green, Flickr Creative Commons
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1 2 Next »Hi Jo
Just popped over to the Compulsion Reads website and had a look at their submission criteria. The slightly worrying thing for me was the submission page itself. It doesn't seem to be a secure page (there's no indication of an https URL or a reassuring little padlock at the top of my browser window) yet it includes fields for credit card details.
Do you know anything about what they're doing to keep details secure? Or what payment service they're using? Can you find out?
Cheers
Eva
I've emailed Jessica to come and answer that - thanks :)
This article hit the nail on the head in so many ways. I wrote a book thinking that would certainly be the hardest part. Fast forward two years and the wide eyed delusions of easy success are gone. The publishing world is a tough and competitive territory. Tenacity, commitment, hard work, and thick skin are a must. But examples of those who've gone before us and paved a way of sorts provide a bright light to follow!
~Eden
Exactly right Eden - and I think many people think that way when writing the first book - it's only later when you realize there's so much more you don't know :) But life wouldn't be so much fun without learning every day!
Hi Eva,
Compulsion Reads has a secure server, I am not sure why it is not showing up on out site at this time. I have spoken to our IT team and hope that will be remedied soon. In the mean time all of our payments are processed through PayPal which is a trusted partner. I hope this information helps to make you feel more at ease with our submission process. Thanks for pointing out the issue and we will get on it right away.
Leslie
Thanks for the info, Leslie
What a great post. I checked out both Compulsion Reads and Rabble Reads since I hadn't heard of either of them. We do need a system to help truly great books written by Indie authors rise through the pages of 340,000 books annually. Whew! That's a lot of books. I'll be interested in learning more about Compulsion Reads in the near future.
Exciting, very exciting, I might be seeing the future now or at least an option. My worry is getting the cash in the electronic world. I have recommended bank to bank transfers of buying stuff sold on the internet. It might be a new Internet Bank idea and one can create an account on-line. There might be other ways. I am still learning. I still do not understand how you get the cash from Barnes and Noble or Amazon with self-publishing an E-book on the Internet. I can self-publish to be read for free now, but how does one get the cash?
Hi Daniel - if you sell from your own site, you can use a shopping cart like http://www.e-junkie.com which works through Paypal. You can then transfer your paypal cash direct to your bank account.
In terms of Amazon., Createspace, Kobo and the other sites, they have varying terms - but either pay by check or direct deposit monthly, ~60 days after the end of the month. Smashwords pay quarterly via Paypal and BookBaby pay ad hoc based on you reaching a threshold.
So essentially, you publish, put a price on it and then the money arrives once you sell to a certain point. When I first started this a few years ago, I was making under $100 a month and now I am making multi-4 figures a month - so I know it works :) You just have to keep writing great books and getting them to readers - and give it time ...
TY for the new information, are there any initial costs involved? Do you have to deposit to have a Pay Pal account?
I became an author with the knowledge that it always takes at least three books before you get anywhere with getting noticed, so I'm not too discouraged yet that I'm on book 2 and am not completely famous yet. :) However, with all the books flooding the market, as you say, I'm wondering if that number is larger than it used to be. Do people have to have five or six books now? Ten? It's something to ponder. And the problem for us authors (and, as a reader, the problem of not knowing what in the world out there that is worth reading and not full of quality issues) is only going to get worse. I hope sites like Goodreads and your site can keep up and help.
I agree on the number of books - I interviewed uber-agent Donald Maass a while back http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2011/04/18/breakout-novelist-donald-maass/
and he mentioned that it takes at least 5 books for an author to reach a critical mass of readers that enable them to get traction on sales.
The authors making serious money have 8-10+ and people like Joe Konrath, Bob Mayer etc have 20 - 40 and more. Obviously we all need more time in the market to get to numbers like that - but that's just about continuing to write quality books over the long term - which we all know is the key :)
Really enjoyed your article Joanna and can also relate. I write nonfiction/personal transformation and my "why" for doing this is to be able to help people - so when I receive an email from a reader (like I did just yesterday) telling me how much my book has helped them and they only wish they could have found it much earlier - it is on the one hand gratifying - and at the same time it's frustrating trying to come up with more and more ways to get in front of readers. I know it takes time, and I'm all in when it comes to experimenting, but it does get discouraging at time. In fact I feel kind of sad when I see so many new authors posting in online forums "hey I just published my first book, any tips on how to market it?" Groan.
I get that question at least twice a day via email and twitter :) hence I created this post to point people at http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2012/10/12/help-my-book-isnt-selling/
so I can stop repeating myself :)
Hi Leslie, I found Compulsion Reads, after having read an article about Rabble Reads. I submitted to CR and my work received plenty of ticks, and a few areas to work on. I found the critique really helped focus my mind on specific areas. I had one of those EUREKA!! moments, where the final pieces of the writing jigsaw started to make sense. As a result, I'm working on my resubmission to CR.
I can't think of a better way of kick starting any author's discoverability with a Compulsion Reads endorsement!
Hi Eliza, I am so glad to hear that you found your critique helpful and that we will get to read more from you. Jessica and I both know how hard it is to get found in this over populated little world of our and are very happy that we get to do our part to help authors. Thank you for you kind words.
Just wanted to take a moment to say Thank You for such a helpful, inspirational blog, Joanna. Love coming here to read, get tips and other helpful info. Much appreciated & much continued success to you!
Sites like Compulsion Reads are very helpful to both authors and readers. Another great one is Awesome Indies, which has a stringent review process. Thanks for another informative article!