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It's an exciting time for authors who want to take control of their creative business and explore the many opportunities we have to get our books into the hands of readers – and make a living from our writing.
In this powerful talk given at Digital Book World in October 2018, Orna Ross explains the rise of self-publishing 3.0.
Orna Ross is a poet, novelist, non-fiction writer, creative coach, professional speaker, and founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors. She's also my friend and creative mentor.
Orna and I do a monthly Advanced Self-Publishing Salon on the ALLi podcast feed.
Show notes:
- What is an independent author?
- Why you're in business from the day you self-publish your first book
- What is Self-Publishing 3.0 and the history of the movement from the 1990s onwards
- What does it take to be a success in this new world as an indie author?
- Step by step, book by book, asset by asset
- Why you need multiple streams of income
- The maker, the manager, the entrepreneur – you need to be all three
- 7 stages of the creative process – and how it can be used for business
- 7 parts of the publishing process
- 7 business models for authors – more detail here. [Note from Joanna: I use several of these models in my own business!]
- The sequence of success
You can find Orna at www.OrnaRoss.com and the Alliance of Independent Author's blog at www.SelfPublishingAdvice.org.
Transcript of Orna's talk
My name is Orna Ross and I’m here today to talk about Self Publishing 3.0 and about running a successful author business.
So just a little bit about me. I run the Alliance of Independent Authors but I am an author myself. I write poetry. I write fiction and I write nonfiction guides for today’s self-publishing author and also for creative entrepreneurs, people who run passion-based businesses. Online, digital micro business.
In 2012, the Alliance of Independent Authors was founded at London Book Fair to represent self-publishers in the publishing ecosystem. Things were a little bit different than they are now and I am really pleased at what has happened in the meantime and this wonderful conference is very much part of that. It’s great to see so many authors here and to have conversations with other publishing professionals who are really interested in what authors are doing and seeing just how pioneering and innovative we are these days.
Our mission at ALLi is ethics and excellence in self-publishing and we promote that in a variety of ways and if anybody wants to talk to me about that, I can talk to you about that a little bit later, but some people always, when I talk about the Alliance of Independent Authors ask me,
“What is an independent author?”
We like to call ourselves indie authors. Yes, it borrows a little cool from the film guys and the music guys that maybe us bookish types like to have. But we have a very clear definition of “independent” at the Alliance and it means that you have self-published a book. Or for our associate members, that you are seriously engaged in self-publishing a book.
But more than that: you see yourself as the creative director not just of your books, but also of your author business.
You’re proud of being an indie, you’re really proud of being an independent author, an empowered equal player in the publishing ecosystem. And you are success oriented. You want to publish for profit and you want to publish for pleasure, so creative and commercial are brought together.
I think it’s a little difficult for authors sometimes because we become business people by default a lot of the time. There are those who set out and know they’re becoming business people when they start to self-publish but actually for a lot of authors, it’s kind of a shock to realize that the day you first sell your first book on one of the platforms–Amazon, Kobo, Ingram Spark, wherever–you’ve just gone into business.
You may be the kind of person that just doesn’t define as a business person whatsoever. In your mind, you are an author, an artist. You have a very different kind of self-image. There’s a huge learning curve when you set out on the self-publishing pathway, but the biggest journey you take is that. That change in mindset. What that does to you as a person and as a writer. So, creative director of the books and the business is really important.
We’re running this campaign, Self Publishing 3.0 because we want to address that whole issue of authors being in business, and what that means, and how to do it better, and how to run a successful author business. We find there isn’t a lot of good information out there for us because our business is very, very different to conventional, traditional business and a lot of the conventional and traditional business information that’s out there is not all that useful to us.
What is Self-Publishing 3.0?
Self-publishing 1.0 was the 1990s. Before that, the last big change in our industry had been the 15th century when printing presses came along. They were big, they were expensive, most writers couldn’t afford them, so we got publishers. Publishers curated what got published and that model developed over the years.
Copyright came in, in the 1700s, in London for publishers, initially. Then author-activists over the years switched copyright to becoming more of a writer’s right, a creator’s right and we have that now, and our living rests on that law, and on the work of those author-activists in the past.
After that, it was the late 1990s before we got the next tech wave that really made a difference to us: desktop publishing. Anyone remember that? Alongside that, print-on-demand. A lot of authors took to that instantly, seeing the potential.
Of course, the revolution was ten years ago when Amazon Kindle combined an ebookstore and ereader and a really innovative publishing model for authors and in that moment, everything changed. Other services like Kobo and Apple books quickly followed in and it really has changed everything. Authors just went on the creative ride of their lives.
It’s been a real privilege and a complete honor for me to be part of the Alliance and to watch every day what authors do for each other: how we support each other, how we learn from each other, how we warn each other, it’s just a really great place to be. It’s gone from being the most lonely job in the world–you know, talking to your imaginary friends, if you’re a fiction writer, or banging out some facts that you don’t know if they’ll ever mean anything to anybody else if you’re a nonfiction writer–It’s gone from that to being probably the most social job in the world, as we pour out our angst to each other on Facebook, or where ever.
What does it take to be a success in this new world as an indie author?
So there is creative success, but today I’m going to be talking about commercial success and the pleasure, yes, of being an indie is amazing, but today it’s about how we turn a profit, how we can earn a living doing this thing that we love.
I think it’s really important to say: there’s a lot of talk about this golden age where authors used to earn their living from their books and now they no longer do… and trade publishing is in crisis… and, you know, doom and gloom stories. I’ve been publishing and media for thirty years, it’s always a doom and gloom story, no matter what’s going on, it’s never, ever a happy story.
In truth, trade publishing is flourishing and some authors are doing very well in that system. And self-publishing is flourishing and more authors are doing well in that system. There are reasons for that that are business-based reasons. Because if you don’t own your metadata, if you’ve licensed your rights, if you don’t have control over your marketing, and so on, you’re not in business. They’re in business, you’re more akin to an employee. And in some cases to a pieceworker.
You know, a lot of authors are making very little money from their writing and what really excites me about self-publishing, why I formed the Alliance of Independent Authors, was because I could see that for the first time with digital tools, we could build a business like anybody else.
Step by step, book by book, asset by asset.
But it’s probably not, for most of us, going to be done by books alone.
There was a “Kindle gold rush” a few years ago when it all started. Particularly authors who had very big backlists, they put their books up on Amazon and bingo! They made a lot of money and got a lot of attention but that’s not a business. So that’s not what I’m talking about here, that’s another kind of literary lottery. The trade publishing sector is a literary lottery for authors and that’s another kind.
I’m talking about something that’s much more sustainable, something that’s much more long-term, and something that arises out of your passion and your mission, your reasons for writing in the first place, the reason you write your book, tapping into that, extending that into your business, into your communications, into your marketing.
The maker, the manager, and the entrepreneur. You need to be all three.
So often, when authors start self-publishing, they say “I like the writing. I like putting together the book, but I don’t like marketing and I don’t like business. If that’s how you feel, and you stay there, then you won’t actually make a long-term sustainable living as a writer.
If you do want to make a living, you’re going to have to wear three hats. You are the maker, you are the manager, and you are the entrepreneur in your business.
The maker is the craftsperson who puts together the book, the writer yes, but also the person who looks after editorial, design and so on. And we had a workshop on Monday where some of you went into this in depth.
The manager is the person who manages the processes of the publishing, getting the books out, getting the money in, reeling in the entrepreneur, looking after the crafter so that they can do their side of the work.
And the entrepreneur is the person who grows the business, who expands it. As an indie author, you need to wear all three of those hats if you want to make a successful living.
7 stages of the creative process
So, let’s just very quickly whiz through what it takes to go through the creative process. There are seven stages.
First: intention, incubation and investigation. So the writer will be going through all of this, then formation, elaboration, and then clarification–which is editing–and completion. I mention this because we will come back to it.
We understand these seven stages as the maker, as the writer. The suggestion that I want to make here today is that we take that very same creative process and we apply it to our author business.
That we don’t see the business side of things as something that is separate from our creative process, from our mission, from our passion. That we actually integrate all of that so that we’re using this very same creative process on the business side. I would argue that if we want to succeed, this is essential.
Approaching our business with a conventional mindset, with the traditional hat on, is not going to work in the main for us.
7 parts of the publishing process
To put a book together you need to manage editorial, design, production, distribution, marketing, promotion and—the one that often gets forgotten–rights licensing.
Being published is not somebody else saying “You are good enough. Your book is good enough.” That’s not what publishing is.
When somebody asks you, “Are you published?” if you’ve done the work and your editorial, design, production, distribution, marketing, promotion, rights licensing are really rocking, if you’ve done these processes well, you are published well. I think it’s really important for everyone in the publishing ecosystem to recognize and acknowledge that.
Business models for authors
So there are seven different kinds of business models that an author can use in order to make a good living and again, at the workshop on Monday we went through these in depth but we only have time here to quickly throw them out for some idea purposes, really.
The first model is books only, producing fast, selling lots.
So we hear a lot about that model in indie publishing. There are a lot of high earning authors who do this, they’re on one platform, we know what that platform is, and they write a lot of books, some of them write books, you know, every three or four months. I hate them! They’re really prolific, no, I don’t. I’m kidding, I really admire them. They’re really prolific, really hard-working, very committed authors. But that’s just one model. And unfortunately, because they are successful we see a lot of authors trying to emulate that model when it’s not right for their books and it’s not right for them as authors. It’s really important to understand what is right for you as an author.
The second model is multiple formats–not just ebooks but print and audio too–and on multiple platforms. Being wherever the reader is, and getting out there as much as you possibly can, often called “going wide” in the community.
Third is books-plus-speaking. So writing books but also doing information products and that can include video, audio. Often they’re called courses but in my understanding, they’re not really courses because they’re information, nobody’s teaching as such.
The fourth model is books-plus-teaching: when you do put supported learning in there.
The fifth is books with a membership model, a subscription model attached, where you bring your readers in close to you and they pay a little bit more to have access to something you offer that they value.
Number six is books alongside sponsorship or patronage. We talked a lot the other day about Patreon and there are other ways that you can bring in people who really value what you do.
It’s all about values and we’ll be looking at that in a moment but the readers who really value what you do will actually pay for some other kind of access or information or inspiration or, you know, whatever it is that you are bringing, whatever it is that you offer, whether you’re an entertainer, an inspirer or an informer, somebody who is passing on knowledge.
And the final one is very popular on the Internet and writers are using it to great effect, books along with affiliate income.
Of course, you can combine these into multiple streams of income.
The sequence of success for authors
Looking now at the entrepreneurial side of it and returning to that idea of going creative in order to grow. There is a sequence of success. We have watched people follow it. We can see when it happens in the Alliance, an author begins to really get it, you know, to understand who they are, who their reader is, what they’re offering is and so on.
And they take off.
They begin to sell more and to really build their businesses. Others look on and they’re working just as hard, they’re just as committed, they’re just as good a writer, their books are just as well produced, but it’s not working for them and they don’t know why. Well, these are the steps in the right sequence that will take you there.
So the first one is to really connect with who you are and again, we looked at this a lot in the workshop the other day. This is about your own passion, your own sense of mission as a writer. It’s what you want to make of yourself through your writing and who you’re writing for, who you want to offer it to and why. Why are you writing?
I think of this in terms of passion and mission, I talk a lot about that and a kind of a mashup of passion and mission which I call “mashion.” It’s really worth spending a lot of time thinking about this and understanding this as an author. I was talking to Kathy Meis at lunchtime who runs a great service, I’m sure lots of you know called Bublish about this, about what an integral part of, what an important part of, the author journey this is. When this clicks, then a lot is right. It doesn’t solve everything, you’ve still got work to do, there are another six stages here. But until you have this, is not a lot of point in putting money into marketing.
Because when you get that “mashion,” that mash-up of passion and mission, you understand your writing and why you’re there, you get your micro-niche. And when you get your micro-niche, you get your categories and your keywords.
You understand what it’s all about for you and until you get that it’s very difficult for you to set yourself up properly in the stores, to know how to get your metadata right and everything else that follows on after that.
Authors can skip this and not go there, sometimes it happens spontaneously and you don’t need to do the analysis. But if you’re kind of stuck and you don’t know why your books are not moving and you feel a little bit lost, begin by going back to this level.
The second step in the sequence of success is preparation. Preparing for success is very much about time – when are you going to do the work, really basic, practical stuff. Space – where you going to do the work. The when and the where doesn’t just mean the physical kind of space, the obvious time and space and place but it also means returning to that idea of the three hats. How are you going to fit those three things in? Which bits are you going to outsource and which you going to do yourself?
Self-publishing is a misnomer. Nobody publishes a book by themselves.
You need support, editorial and design and so on for true and ongoing sustainable success. And you will find yourself pulling in more assistance as you go along.
This also returns us to the questions that we were looking at a moment ago. There is the pacing, the understanding that you’re there for the long haul, this is not about a killing on Kindle, it’s not about overnight success, it’s about building a sustainable business and rest and play are not breaks from your creative process or your business process, they are the business process, they are your creation process. You have to build them in.
The creative process completely relies on rest and play; it is not about endless work.
When you’ve got that in place, you’re ready to give your pitch. Some of you will have it and a lot of you don’t have it yet.
It should be written down and learned off, so when somebody says to you, “What do you do?” you’re able to tell them. And it needs to be a powerful answer, not just “I’m a writer.” That just doesn’t do it. You need to really communicate your value offering, what it is, why they should be interested.
It needs to be clear and you need to hold your head up when you’re saying it and look them in the eye and not mumble and feel uncomfortable about it. Keep the discomfort hidden and communicate it with clarity but also in a way that hopefully inspires some action. And by action I mean money. That they will actually be interested in buying something that you have to offer.
And then really, producing becomes much easier. Once you fully understand what you’re doing and then you can start to create assets and your books, of course, are a creative asset, one of your biggest creative assets but also the other kinds of things that I was talking about earlier on.
So I think for those of you who are already up and running it will be a good idea to do a check and see which of your assets are working for you, which are fun for you, which are having impact, which are giving you the influence that you want and decide what to drop, what to refine, what to do next.
Understanding your business process is the next step and in a sense, some people think this step should come before the other, you know, understanding the process first, then you produce but really it’s a learning by doing, and again, this is because we are pioneering to some degree, but it’s also, I think, part of the process that you have to throw yourself in, you have to make the business, you have to get it up and running, you have to get your books up and running, and then you begin to establish and refine your process and go with it.
And so, again, those of you who are already up and running, and I suspect that almost everybody in this room who’s an author is already some way along the journey, just to establish with each project what stage you are at with the core project, the one that you’re working on right now, whether it’s a book or whether it’s one of the ancillary products we talked about earlier, just see exactly where you are with that and then map the next wave of action on each of those, but also, look at your business and where it is at and look at your profit and where it is at and make a plan for that too.
Don't forget to always to work on your author business, as well as working in it.
And then publishing, and it might sound strange that I’m talking about publishing at this stage but what I mean by this is publishing in the widest sense. So every business is now actually in the publishing business and every business is trying to do what authors can do almost naturally if we allow ourselves, if we let go of that division that we often set up in our minds of “I love the writing but I don’t like the marketing.”
Publishing is each time you tweet, each status update and your copy, you know, your book description. All of that is writing, all of that is a chance for you to further the reasons you wrote your book in the first place, just in a different sort of way.
It’s not about shouting “Buy my book, buy my book.” It’s very much about making that heart to heart, soul to soul, imagination to imagination connection that you try to make in your books, bringing that into your social media, bringing that into your website.
And we would encourage every author to have an e-commerce website, not a brochure. A brochure website is fine for people who are solely traditionally published but if you are self-publishing you should have the facility to take money for your products on your website, and not guide people over to Amazon but guide people to your own site. Not to spend more time on Facebook and Twitter than you spend on your own website.
Publish always with the idea of growing your profile, your discoverability, and your authority.
So this comes back to understanding, again, the reason you’re doing it, understanding your keywords and your categories, making sure that if you do a blog post or a podcast appearance or any kind of publishing–and again I use the word in the widest sense–to make public. To go out there with words or video or audio. To understand how Google works, how your categories show up, how SEO works and how all of this brings people to your books, yes, but also brings them to other products.
Books are hard, you know. They don’t cost very much, they have a very small margin on them. You can shape what you put in your book in more ways, the shape of the book is changing as confidence grows in the author community. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that in the next ten years.
So, this is about publishing your own media so when somebody Googles you as an author, they should get your website up first, and in your website, they should get a very clear idea of what kind of books you write, even if you write in more than one genre, that it’s really clearly laid out and they understand it. And they should get a clear idea of what you want them to do when they land on your website.
And then you should also be showing up in other places because the more places you show up on Google, the better. And the better chance of you rising up under the various categories and keywords that you are interested in.
So the other thing to do is to publish with other people, to partner up. I mentioned podcasts there, reaching out to influencers who are working on the same passion and mission as you, other authors who are writing in your genre where you can cross promote and help each other and everybody, really, who shares what this “mashion” of yours is somebody who is a potential partner.
Writing is not about competition, it’s sometimes it’s called “co-opetition.” Just as there is no one book that is the winner, every book is a complete individual, the same thing is true for every writing business.
So that’s Self Publishing 3.0. We have a lot information about it than I was able to explain to you today. It is a campaign that the Alliance is running, we have badges that you can give to your readers which, you know, tells them that you sell direct, that they can support you and I think Self Publishing 3.0 is very much about helping our readers to understand the publishing landscape.
They don’t and when they understand what a difference it makes to you if they are your patron, what a difference it makes to you if they buy direct from you rather than from somebody else, they really want to to help with that, in my experience and in my observation of lots of different authors.
The blockchain is new technology that is coming, that I think, again, will further this movement. So, the wind is behind us as authors. It’s favorable. There are lots and lots of opportunities, it’s up to us, really, to narrow them down, get them down into a micro niche.
It’s not about trying to grab all the opportunities, it’s very much about going really small. The smaller you can go, the narrower you can go, the better. The more you-shaped your books are, and your business is, the better.
So these are some links to follow up on what I’ve been talking about today because it really is a very big topic. There is, the top link there is the Self Publishing Advice Center. There we have all sorts of information about author business but also about writing, editorial, everything to do with self-publishing a book.
We also have the Self Publishing Advice Conference and we will be bringing this talk and some of the other highlights from Digital Book World to the conference which is on this Saturday, the 6th of October if you haven’t registered, it’s all free and there’s lots of other really good author education lined up for you and soon to launch, I’m running the pre launch here at Digital Book World my series about going creative in business and it’s not just authors, it’s for artists and anybody who runs a passion powered business and that is on preorder at the moment, so you go to my website to preorder:
OrnaRoss.com/Go-Creative-Preorder.
I also do a monthly workshop because there are lots of issues to tease out around this kind of stuff. That’s on the third Thursday of every month on Facebook Live, which you can sign up for there to get an alert and we have a closed Facebook group for those of you who would like encouragement, motivation, accountability around business, you know, because it is getting your head wrapped around this and the three different dimensions of your job.
It’s challenging at first. It comes together very nicely when it does, but until it does, it can be quite challenging, so there’s a group of us there to help and support each other and I’m here, I’ll be here downstairs for the hall crawl and for the rest of the conference, so if you have any questions I’d be delighted to take them and thank you for being here, it’s an amazing conference, don’t you think?
View Comments (6)
Some serious points an otherwise seemingly a brilliant Interview/Article indeed:
1. POD is risky as we know any Book-in-Print has no DRM. The Torrents websites could scan them up into a PDF file and then share it for FREE over the world wide web.
2 . If Audio-book is aimed, why not a Video-book too? It's the age of YouTube & Vimeo etc. Even in google image search, these days the Video images dominate effectively making the "Image" option in the search engine a Video option too via hyperlinks.
3. There is no hard & fast rule that the Author business model has to have 7 steps! 7 may be a popular number only in the English-language countries. And that might be what's exactly creating this Illusory idea of having to have 7 steps. It could perhaps be 8 steps in the Non-English world of E-books.
Hi Nirupam,
(1) Most indies don't agree with DRM anyway and we also just ignore pirates and get on with selling to readers who want to support creatives.
(2) A video book is more like a film, right?! Most authors aren't so keen on video, but of course, if you are, then go for it.
(3) Agreed, it's just a framework
Thanks for your comment, Nirupam. It drove me to find out what DRM is and to find this persuasive and comprehensive article on Joanna's website https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2017/02/23/piracy/
Hi Wonderful Joanna and Wonderful Orna,
Thank you so much for sharing the wonderful podcast. All authors who read and write for pleasure and profit will enjoy it.
God bless you, Wonderful Superstars, God bless your wonderful work, every day!!!
Jean Baptiste Rufatabahizi, Novelist
Will this book be published as a paperback?? Would love to purchase but not in ebook form.
Yes, Orna will be getting all her books out in paperback and hardback :)