 Welcome everyone to Pathways to Publication 2021 with CJ Verberg, otherwise known as Carol. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mechanics, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, the oldest in fact designed to serve the general public in California. We're also a cultural event center and a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the United States. Right now, due to the pandemic, almost all of our activities are still virtual, but I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It is only $120 a year and with that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Now Carol is a longtime Mechanics Institute member and some 10 years ago she founded the Independent Publishers Working Group, which was a motley crew of writers who endeavored under her direction to study the craft and process and trends of independent publishing. Though that group dissolved a few years ago, Carol keeps close tabs on the industry as well as she also finds the time to write contemporary mysteries and her short fiction has appeared in many diverse anthologies and e-zines. She is also a frequent speaker and a panelist at conferences, libraries, and other forums, including the Mechanics Institute. So more information can be found about her on her website at carolverberg.com and I will put that in the chat space once she takes over, but just wanted to explain how things are going to work tonight. We're using the webinar format of Zoom, which means that your audio and your video is off and that's because we have such a large group with us tonight. And so Carol is going to present to us her knowledge about the publishing industry and then we'll take questions. So I want you to post those in the chat space and and I will pose them to Carol. I hope in an engaging conversational style, but we'll make every effort to answer your questions and I want to thank you all for coming and thank you Carol for coming to share your knowledge as always. Thank you, Taryn, and thanks everybody for coming out. As Taryn said that in a way this is an anniversary celebration, 10 years since we launched the weekly indie publisher's working group. If you were here in 2011, you recall that self-publishing was just cranking up thanks to the twin revolution of print on demand and e-book technology. For the first time, anybody anywhere could turn a manuscript into a book. We start to discover how that could work for us. The publishing process hasn't changed much in the past 500 years. An author writes a manuscript and a publisher formats it for mass distribution. The technology has evolved from carvings on stone or hand lettering on parchment to print on paper or computer code. Form follows function and also vice versa. Your content and your audience depend on what's technically feasible. The printing press revolutionized who could read books, where and when, and so did the e-book 500 years later. I'll never forget the first time I saw a family traveling on Muni with a small child and instead of the usual Santa Claus bag of toys, the mom just carried one tablet that kept the kid entertained for the whole trip. During the coronavirus pandemic, there's been a surge in e-books and audio books because they're so convenient. Nobody has a clean hand, you buy a book or take one out of the library and read it or listen to it without even getting out of bed. For our indie publisher's working group, print on demand technology flung open the gates. In the past, almost every author had to go through the long and fairly expensive process, which is aptly called submission. Photocopier manuscript mail it to one agent or editor after another until somebody gives it a thumbs up and then spend a year or more rewriting and correcting. Publishing companies ran the show partly because of the huge upfront cost to print and store thousands upon thousands of books. POD changed that. Now you only have to print enough books to keep up with incoming orders. The other value of publishers though is their expertise. They have entire departments to make sure a book is readable, accurate, the right length and appearance audience in general matches its intended market. I had the good luck to be hired into publishing by Canfield Press, a San Francisco spin-off of the New York company Harper & Row and then Little Brown and Company in Boston, where I became one of the first developmental editors. My job was to ride shotgun on big budget books, study the competition, talk to sales reps and bookstores and coordinate all the company's areas of expertise. With that background, I welcomed publishing, set up my own company, Boom Books, so I could use my whole repertoire of skills to publish any kind of book I liked. What I liked most were Golden Age mysteries in the Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rick Stout tradition. I'd written two of them set in modern New England and I'd had some interest from publishers, but my books were too quirky, too dark to be cosies but not dark enough to be noir. Another number for the road was an international literary rock and roll mystery, a category no publisher wanted to touch, especially because I was committed to making it a multimedia novel. Until now, the technology for that didn't exist. With Boom Books, I devised a way to embed four live songs in the book written and performed by a real rock and roll band. That was so much fun. I followed up with a multimedia memoir about my bitter work with the artist Edward Gory. I was like a kid in a toy shop, creating MP3s, websites, Facebook pages, QR codes, blog posts, Twitter feeds. I also was persuaded to publish three Regency romance novellas in ebook and audiobook form by a friend in marketing. She spotted the potential in genre fiction with unlimited demand, like sci-fi and spicy romance. These were genres that most traditional publishers had ignored because of their low profit margin. Snack food books, cheap paperbacks that fans gobbled up as fast as authors could churn them out. But with ebooks, no printing or distribution cost. The problem was, fans of new authors saw the same opportunity. Unlimited demand wasn't enough. The trip became discoverability. How will readers find your book in the vast sea of competition? Over the past decade, that's become the key question in publishing. We'll come back to it in a moment. What it meant for me as an indie publisher was you can't do everything. Even if demand is infinite, your time and energy aren't. Focus on what you love and what you do best. So discoverability, how do you get a book into the hands of readers? Senior editor Stephen Pierce Sontia Barrett Kohler, a non-fiction poet in Oakland, described the problem this way. Many book categories have become entirely saturated with a surplus of books on every topic. It is increasingly difficult to make any book stand out. I've boiled down this list from his June 2020 article, The 10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing. For an author, a particularly sobering statistic is number five. Average sales of a U.S. print book, fewer than 200 copies per year, and 1,000 copies in its lifetime. A year ago, two months into coronavirus lockdown, print book sales tanked. Bookstores were closed, libraries were closed, and everybody who liked to read books was stuck at home, except for essential workers who were rushed off their feet 24-7. The conferences where writers meet up, find agents, get awards, and so forth were canceled or postponed or went virtual. Books published in March 2020 mostly sank without a trace, but the book world fought back. I gleaned these statistics from an author-skilled panel last month and a publisher's weekly panel two weeks ago. The main sources are BookScan, which is on units sold, and the Association of American Publishers, which reports revenue, plus a couple of industry people reporting their own findings. One, book sales in 2020 rose 8.2 percent in units sold and 10.2 percent in revenue. Two, publishers shipped the same quantity of books as previously, but with fewer returns. Three, audiobook sales continued to grow as previously, while e-books resumed growth. Four, the biggest revenue gains were in adult books. The biggest unit sales gains were in children's books, including some related to education, as you might imagine. Five, backlist titles continued to do better than ever, but new books struggled. New adult fiction sales dropped by 5 million and children's fiction by 4 million. About 98 percent of new 2020 titles sold fewer than 5,000 copies. Six, bookshop.org, where readers can order online from bookstores instead of from Amazon, added hundreds of stores six weeks after their January launch, and saw a 4,000 percent jump in sales. Seven, most bookstore sales were down 30 to 40 percent, however, and online growth continued to be dominated by Amazon. Eight, Tom Chalmers says in 2020, our sales were 65 percent backlist, 35 percent frontlist, a flip from previous years. Our Dominique Rocca says our backlist is up 74 percent in 2021 so far over 2020. And finally, reports of new deals for adult fiction titles were up almost 15 percent at the end of 2020. Now, obviously things are going to change again as lockdown ends. Right at the moment, one of the biggest problems for publishers is the supply chain, the supply chain. If they're buying paper from China printing books in Singapore, they're stuck. I took my first plane flight in mid-March after I got vaccinated and looking down at SFO, I counted 18 container ships anchored in the bay off Oakland. Some publishers are hoping the habit of reading books became so ingrained in 2020 that it will carry over. We know a lot of readers broke through their bias against reading on a screen and for all demographic groups, growth going forward will likely be strongest in digital media. Here's bookshop.org. Their website offers an easy, convenient way to order books online and support bookstores at the same time. You can pick a store that's signed up with them, such as City Lights, Books Inc, or Green Apple, or they'll contribute to an earnings pool for all independent bookstores. Okay, any book published in 2021 faces enormous competition. So what are an author's best options? Here's an excellent overview by Jane Friedman. You can't read it here, but you can read it in detail on her website or print it out as a PDF, janefriedman.com. She compares eight or nine publishing paths from signing with a big five publisher, soon possibly to be big four, to posting your book free online. Jane Friedman offers good advice on all aspects of business in blog posts, books, and classes, and I strongly recommend her free newsletter, Electric Speed. The three most popular pathways to publication are traditional publishing, self-publishing, and assisted publishing. They remind me of the three caskets in Shakespeare's Play The Merchant of Venice. Any suitor who wanted to win the beautiful heiress Porsche had to pass a test set by her late father by choosing between three cryptically labeled caskets. On the gold casket was written, Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire. On the silver casket, Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves. And on the lead casket, Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath. So, choosing traditional publishing is to gain what many men desire. These are the publishing houses who produce the hardbacks you see in the shop windows, and on bookstore shelves labeled staff picks. This used to be the standard route for any of the accepted vantage printable. It still carries ability, prestige, and sometimes sum me up front as an advance against future royalties. But don't expect the legendary three martini lunches at the Algonquin, or a five or six-figure advance, unless you're James Patterson or Beyonce. What you can expect is access. In my field of mysteries, many of the opportunities that boost an author's visibility and book sales, such as prizes and appearing on panels at conferences, are still only open to traditionally published authors. Mystery Writers of America posts an approved publishers list for its annual Edgar Awards, so you can't get around that as a self-publisher. You shot it movie, TV, and international sales, or better, if you're traditionally published. Another big advantage is you don't have to do everything yourself. You have editorial, production, and marketing experts collaborating to give your book the best possible odds of success. Traditional publishers only accept a small fraction of the manuscripts they receive. Most of the big houses, and many of the mid-range and smaller ones too, won't even look at a book unless it's represented by a literary agent. Either way, whether you're looking for an agent or going straight to publishers, your first step is to create a detailed book proposal. Along with a synopsis and a bio, this will include comps, other recent successful, comparable titles for the same audience as yours. Those authors often thank their agent in the acknowledgment, so that's one way to find a good agent for your book. Another is Query Tracker, which lets you do a filtered search of agents by genre, location, and so forth. It also gives you links to online sources about them, such as websites, Twitter feeds, and interviews. As its name implies, Query Tracker will also keep a list of agents you've picked and the status of your query. Now, having an agent will open doors for you, but keep in mind your royalties with the traditional publisher will be low, probably 15% of net profit or less, and your agent will take 15% of that. So how does this pencil out? A $15 paperback minus 40% bookstore discount leaves $9 for the publisher. Say manufacturing is 250, that's 650 x 15% is 97 cents per book, minus 15% to the agent is just under 83 cents per book to the author. If your advance is $3,000, that means just over 3,600 books sold before you start making money. Number two is this publishing, who chooses me will get much as he deserves. This is the 21st century version of vanity publishing in the sense that the author pays the publisher instead of the other way around. It's a good choice for people who want to produce a book but don't really want to get into publishing. For instance, who've written a memoir as a legacy for their family and friends or want to book credit on their resume or who create visual art they want to share. It's also called hybrid publishing but that's confusing because among authors hybrid means we self-publish some of our books and others traditionally. Hybrid authorship is an increasingly popular success at the most successful according to some sources. A hybrid publisher is a horse of another color. The author pays a couple of thousand dollars, gets a lot of help and hand-holding and comes out with a professional-looking book. The companies range from highly regarded to predatory. On Gatekeeper Press pictured here, a standard 80,000 word novel or memoir around 300 pages would cost over $5,000 for four copies delivered to your door. If you want to know more about this option, check Janefreedman.com. Self-publishing, who chooses me must give and hazard all he have. Its biggest advantage over traditional publishing is also its biggest disadvantage. The author has complete control of all artistic and business decisions and full responsibility for either hiring people and services to edit, design, publish and distribute each book or do it herself. From the outside it can look overwhelming. Inside the industry a lot of us thought it was fabulous. Get rid of the gatekeepers, the bureaucracy. At last the workers will own the means of production and that was sort of true but it turned out like the gold rush. A few early birds who jumped in at the right spots struck it rich but over time the big winners weren't the miners but the shopkeepers who supplied them. You may hear advice to plan on spending $1,000 or two to self-publish a book. You can but you don't have to. I don't. Sometimes I'll hire a cover designer or for a promotion but my only fixed expense is a $30 ISBN, International Standard Book Number, the book's lifetime ID which ensures that I hold the rights to it. In a sense self-publishing was a pilot for the gig economy. A large number of professional editors, designers and other corporate employees became freelancers. Some by choice, some as their company shrank and their jobs disappeared and over the ensuing years many potential corporate employees became authors. Naturally new companies started up to fill the needs of these new author publishers. To publish an e-book you could send your manuscript and cover design to Smashwords. They'd put it through their meat grinder as they call it and then sell the book on their website. Smashwords is also an aggregator meaning they supply the online stores like Kindle, Nook and iBooks as well as library sources like AXIS 360 and Overdrive. You don't have to use an aggregator to reach all these marketplaces although you do for some but it's much easier to create one master book file that your distributor sends to all of them than for you to contract separately with each one. It's also easier to make revisions especially because Apple, Google Books, Kobo and the rest don't have exactly the same requirements. Smashwords started out quick and dirty and kind of geeky. The meat grinder often rejected files for no obvious reason or produced cheesy looking ebooks. As self-publishing expanded, new aggregators sprang up including two of the top ones now draft to digital and publish drive. The best was pronoun. They were the first to offer professional looking ebook layout choices. Their real breakthrough was a highly coveted algorithm to help you choose your book's categories and keywords on the basis of suitability plus competitive advantage. Pronoun was immediately gobbled up by a bigger company that kept their algorithm and dumped their books. All this tension around having dominant ebook sales, they applied their user-friendly skills to ebook creation. You can see here on KDP's landing page Amazon doesn't just pitch its features, they pitch solutions to the specific frustrations that authors have with other modes of publishing. You want to publish a print and an ebook? Great, just send us your manuscript file and we'll do both for free. You want your book to sell all over the world? Sure, why not? You want to make changes? No problem, we'll keep the old version on sale while you revise. Push save and you're done. Save like the hero myth, I've come to save you and it's worked. Amazon or KDP also created its own version of the pronoun's algorithm to help authors pick their marketing keywords and categories and its own design templates. So if we ask, where does Amazon fit into the publishing landscape? Is this traditional publishing or assisted publishing or self-publishing? The answer is yes. Self-publishing you can see here. Several years ago, Amazon merged its old print arm CreateSpace into KDP so you can publish a do-it-yourself paperback and ebook at the same time. Assisted publishing, if you want to spend less time or money, you can hire professional help. Traditional publishing along with dominating book sales and then book creation, Amazon set up its own imprints, 15 of them at the moment including Amazon Encore, Amazon Crossing, Montlake Romance, Thomas and Mercer for Mysteries, and 47 North for Syfy and Fantasy. Amazon also does audiobook publishing. They own audio, Audible, the most profitable producer of audiobooks, and ACX where authors can connect with narrators to record audiobooks which Audible then sells on Amazon. Originally the royalty split was 6040. Audible took 40% and the author and narrator split 60%. Once the machinery got rolling smoothly, they switched it with the majority profit going to Audible. This is not an unusual evolution for Amazon. Jeff Bezos didn't start the company because he loves books, although he does enjoy reading. In January 1994, working for a tech company in New York, he noticed that internet activity had risen 230,000% in one year. Things just don't grow that fast, he later told an interviewer. That started me thinking what kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth. His answer was an everything store. He started with books because he wanted a commodity that could be sold way more effectively on the internet than in brick and mortar stores. I won't go into the particulars, although they're really interesting. The point here is that Jeff Bezos was extremely pragmatic. He focused on what people want and how to give them more of it more conveniently than anybody else. It's made Amazon easy and therefore the most popular place to publish a book, create a book, or buy a book. If you publish print books, you'll also want to work with Lightning Source, Ingram's self-publishing platform, because almost no bookstore will order from Amazon. But as of January 2021, the Kindle Store listed over 7 million titles and was adding 100,000 new ones every month. That brings us back to competition, discoverability, and some more scary facts from Barrett Kohler's senior editor, Steven Piersanti. Whether you publish on Amazon or with a traditional house, you'll need to spend time and probably money on marketing. Most book marketing today is done by authors, not by publishers. Publishers have managed to stay afloat by shifting more and more marketing responsibility to authors. In recognition of this reality, most book proposals from experienced authors now have an extensive section on the author's marketing platform and what he will do to publicize and market the book. Publishers still fulfill important roles in shaping books to succeed and making them available in sales channels. But whether a book moves in those channels depends primarily on the author. Most books are selling only to the authors and publishers' communities. Since every reader has a backlog of titles to read and little time, people are reading only books their communities make important or even mandatory to read. What is your community and how do you rally their support for your book? Your friends and family can't buy that many copies or post that many reviews. The next circle might be neighbors who read about your book in the local paper or come to a reading at a bookstore. Then there are people who know you from an online readers group or who don't know you but like your kind of book. You've probably heard it takes a reader to spend exposure to a book before they commit to buying it. You've probably also heard successful authors say they spend about 40% of their time writing and 60% on marketing. That's the bad news. The good news is all kinds of services have sprung up to help. The bad news is too many for one author to keep up with. The good news is other services have sprung up to navigate us through the maze. Here you see some helpful starting points not for marketing per se but for learning how the business works. Answering legal and technical questions and helpful sites and answers and figuring out how to match your publishing strategy to your goals and resources. As a mystery writer I've included mystery writers of America and sisters in crime but whatever your genre it will have affinity groups. Sci-Fi author Chris Fox's strategy for connecting with his readers community starts with creating a user profile. Your target audience wrapped into one fictional every moment. He writes, my books have intricate plots a fair amount of violence. I use a lot of geeky pop culture references. I decided that Bob my user is 35 years old and works in IT. He grew up in the 80s devouring fantasy novels and playing Dungeons and Dragons. In the 90s he graduated to PlayStation and Xbox and beyond. He likes to read fiction but he only reads maybe 10 books a year. For a book to grab his attention it has to explore some awesome new concept. It isn't really about the money. Bob will pay $4.99 without batting an eye if the book catches his eye. He can go, Bob where would I spend my time? A hiking I'd be more likely to binge watch a Stargate universe marathon than log into World of Warcraft. A 15 minute search yields over a dozen large internet forums devoted to these topics. But if I go to Bob's favorite forum and you'll buy my book then Bob and his friends will crucify me. So how do we get him interested? By being genuine go find a wheel of time board and actively participate put an innocuous little link in your signature to one of your books. Over time people will find it especially if you're an active member of that community. Notice that this costs you exactly zero dollars only your time. Ideally you share Bob's passion for the forum you're frequenting so posting there should actually be fun. He will welcome you into the herd and because you are part of the herd he will not only happily buy your book he will tell all his friends about it too. You also want to make sure that when potential readers discover your book they'll recognize it as one they'd like to read. Indie author Dee Haggerty's publisher was herself. Patricia Duesenberry's was a small press. Both writers had to ditch a cover that didn't appeal to writers in their genre. Haggerty also had trouble with the genre character of her series genre category of her series. She writes when I first published my gray hair admitting detective series I thought they were fun chick-lit. Just thought differently and shoved them into the cozy mystery genre. I thought okay why not? Wrong Dina wrong these books contain swearing and some sexual scenes. You know what cozy mystery readers really really hate swearing and sex scenes genre is one of those wonderful paradoxes in publishing. If a friend says to you oh my god I just finished reading a tale of two cities you won't say what genre is that but if you were pitching a tale of two cities to a literary agent that would be their first question followed by is it a series or a standalone? What's your subtitle? What's your log line? A log line is what I think of as a cocktail pitch your five-second answer when the famous editor next to you at a bar asks so what's your book about? A Shark Terrorizes the New England Village on 4th of July weekend. Gotcha. Subtitles we can see on this Kindle search page are designed to tag the books genre. Some cozy mysteries with a touch of romance a suspense thriller mystery a paranormal cozy mystery. This is where search engine optimization and metadata come in a fascinating and important topic which is too big to go into today. The point is you want a reader who's searching for any of those genre keywords to find your book and ideally buy the whole series. This chart by klytics.com breaks down Kindle rankings within the major book genres. Klytics was created by Swiss analyst Alex Newton to uncover some of Amazon's closely guarded e-book data and turn them into a resource for authors and publishers. Here we see why Dina Haggerty says if you want to earn money with your writing a series is the way to go. Publishers of genre fiction like series because you get a bigger bang for the buck. When you mark book one you're all selling books two three and beyond. And publishers like series because readers like them. We know a book offers readers an escape and adventure but it also offers comfort a second home familiar faces in familiar places from the New York brownstone of detectives Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin to the Canadian village of three pines of Inspector Gamache. Fans go back and over and over to spend time in that world. So do the authors creating a world is a lot of work. Whether you recycle your setting and your characters like Rick Stout and Louise Penny or you keep one and change the other a series means you don't have to start from scratch every time. The advantages of series also help trigger 20 books to 50k described here by founder Michael Anderle. 20 books to 50k is a simple concept of what money is to read effectively in calculus. If 20 books earning $7.50 each per day you can make $50,000 per year. You don't have to write 20 books in a year. You might make 50k on two books. There are plenty of people who do. What we don't know how to do is make money with books that readers don't like or make lots of money with one book. Tina Haggerty also said that bookselling is now a paid to play market. What does that mean? Earlier this year I got a personalized invitation in the mail to buy Amazon advertising for my ebooks that are enrolled in KDP Select or Kindle Unlimited. Maybe you got one too. The deal with these KDP programs is that you as a publisher give Kindle exclusive rights to sell your book, your ebook, on a three month self renewing contract. Kindle then makes that ebook free for Amazon Prime members and certain other customers. They also let you run a discount or free promotion once a quarter. We do this to boost our reviews and our royalties, except we don't actually earn royalties. KDP pays enrollees out of the fund they set aside arbitrarily, a different amount each month, and divide up among the participants. Like their audible payments, they could change this deal at any moment. Any letter of money you have access to Amazon advertising self-service ad products to help drive discovery of your books. Readers are shopping for a unique book like yours. Help them discover it with Amazon advertising. Aside from the irony of a unique book like yours, this felt like a warning. The classic advice, write the best book you can and it will rise to the top, is out of date. Back to the Kindle search page we looked at a moment ago. Here's another genre paradox. My search query was mystery traditional amateur sleuth. I wanted to find books like Dorothy Sayers, Lord Peter whimsy novels or Agatha Christie's Miss Marples. What I got instead was modern cosies with romance and witches. The clue to why that happened is circled in red. All the first titles that popped up in my search had paid Amazon advertising. This chart by Alex Newton and Klytix gives us another angle on Amazon success. By producing what they sell, Amazon can offer carrots and sticks that nobody else can. Indies still rule in snack food books and traditional publishing leads in nonfiction but Amazon's own publishing imprints win a large share of Kindle top 100 rankings. And that is why last August the heads of three major publishing associations wrote to the chair of the house antitrust subcommittee. They complained, quote, Amazon no longer competes on a level playing field when it comes to book distribution, but rather owns and manipulates the playing field, leveraging practices from across this platform that appear to be well outside of fair and transparent competition. This point was amplified in December by analyst Benedict Evans. In print books, Amazon has a generally recognized 50% or more of the American market and at least three quarters of publishers e-book sales. It also has its own e-book publishing business for which it has never disclosed any data. And as you probably know, Amazon also has bought Goodreads and A-Books. Where does all this leave us when we choose a publishing path? Picking the right option for any project involves balancing goals and resources. What are you best at? What do you have most of to put into this? What do you want most to get out of it? Other things being equal, which they never are, here's a nutshell summary of what a publishing matchmaker might advise. If you have an ample budget and you want to produce a professional looking book with minimal time and effort, you could try assisted publishing. If your logline is Shark Terrorizes New England Village on 4th of July weekend, or you have friends in high places, or your personal story is both unique and timely, you could try traditional publishing. Keep in mind too that traditional publishing isn't just the big five companies. There's a whole range of small to mid-sized houses that are very good with one or another genre. Here are some of the choices for mysteries. And then in nonfiction, Milkweed Editions just had a big hit with the botany memoir Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. And there's some excellent historical, international, and other nonfiction coming University of Alaska Press, University of Oklahoma Press, and Heyday to name just a few. And then if you're more interested in making enough money to quit your day job than in literature, and you have the energy to turn out two or three heartwarming or heart pounding novels a year, you probably can get a traditional publisher, but self publishing may be a better choice. Joanna Penn I mentioned earlier is a terrific resource for indie publishers. These comments come from her end of business 2020 review blog and podcast. The boldface statements explain why she prospered during the pandemic. By organizing around the ads she controls, and making it digital first and location independent, she protected her income stream from outside disruptions such as bookstores closing, or supply chains breaking down or Amazon changing the way it displays book search results or pays authors. Notice also that Penn increasingly sells ebooks and audiobooks direct to customers on her website. That's one of several areas where 21st century publishers are dodging Amazon and collaborating with partners like bookstores, libraries, and writers conferences, rather than treating them as rivals or obstacles. Penn uses book funnel, which securely sends ebooks for reader and hip, which directly transmits payment to her bank account. There are also marketing options you can use with or without Amazon. One is free or discount promotions. You lower your ebook price for a day or more on Kindle, Book, Kobo, or wherever, and you pay a service like Free Booksy or the Fussy Librarian or Bookbub to promote it to their members. Subscribers get a daily email list of half a dozen free or discounted books in their chosen category, such as co-stories or historical non-fiction. Of course, readers can always find free books on Amazon or Facebook, but for authors, these promo services have the advantage of large opted-in email lists. They also are in a great position to observe sales trends and they send out newsletters full of use for information for authors. Number one in the field is Bookbub. They screen their offerings carefully. They claim they only accept 20% of applicants. That's partly because they have stiff requirements like number of four to five star Amazon reviews and partly because they've been so successful at boosting sales that there's a waiting list for authors to pay upwards of $500 to give away a book or close to $1,000 to sell one for 99 cents per day. Marketing guru David Goffern reported in February that his last Bookbub giveaway generated 37,000 downloads. Bookbub has an audiobook firm called Chirp, their answer to Audible. Chirp offers listeners access to a full catalog of audiobooks that they can purchase a la carte with no subscription fees, but focuses especially on surfacing amazing limited time audiobook deals in members' favorite genres. On the creation end, Chirp is an affiliate of Findaway Voices, a service like Amazon's ACX, which helps authors find narrators and record audiobooks. I squeezed their landing page a little here so you can see one big selling point versus ACX. You keep 80% of your royalties. I use the Fussy Librarian for discount promotions because A, it's easier to get into than Bookbub. B, it costs under $75. And C, the idea of giving away 37,000 books makes me a little queasy. My last giveaway got about 3500 downloads, brought in maybe 30 new ratings and reviews on Amazon, sold a handful of my other books, and it's still earning a little money from Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program for pages red. It's worth noting that Amazon tapers off the payback for pages after the giveaway date. That is, on a day when your book is free, you still get your usual KDP payment for each page that someone reads, but that amount drops by about half per day afterwards. KDP similarly discounts the factors behind bestseller rank so that likewise fades over time. Still, every little bit helps. There's at least one author who runs a KDP promo and a Fussy Librarian giveaway on one book or another just about every day, which may well be her main source of publishing income. So, looking back to bookseller pay-to-play market, Jeff Bezos's fanatically geeky, data-driven approach to publishing turns out to be catnip for the geeky end of the author spectrum. It's like they're battling Amazon spots and algorithms in a giant video game. I recommend reading this entire interview between Thomas Umstad and Brian Cohen on AuthorMedia.com. You remember that my top Kindle results were paid Amazon advertisers. So are Amazon's recommendations. This book you may like section down at the bottom. Thomas and Brian highlight some key points on this slide. In 2021, you don't just buy an Amazon ad, you bid for viewers who are searching for keywords that match both the target books metadata and your and competing books metadata. That's what they mean by relevance, and that's why your SEO keywords and categories are so important. Here's Thomas explaining the bidding system. Let's say we have three authors, Andrew, Betty and Charlie. Andrew is bidding 50 cents per click, but he's only budgeting a maximum of a $5 ad spend per day. Betty is paying 30 cents per click and Charlie is paying 20 cents per click. Assuming they all have the same relevancy, Andrew's bid will win the auction for that spot. But after Andrew receives 10 clicks on his ad, he spent his entire $5 budget for the day, and Betty will be in line for the leftover spots. Once Betty receives enough clicks and spends all her budget, any leftover clicks will finally go to Charlie. Some days, Andrew is the only one of the three who will get clicks. If only three Amazon customers search for the keyword those three authors are bidding on, Andrew's high bid will be the only ad to show. But when we return to the principle of relevancy, things change. If an Amazon customer searches for author Betty, who is only bidding 30 cents per click, Betty will probably be listed first in the search results. She's not the highest bidder, but she is the most relevant because that customer is searching for an author named Betty. So that's all the time we have, and thank you for coming along on this Seven Cities in Six Days Tour of Book Publishing. I have two short novels and a long story coming out later this year, and maybe more. Stay tuned to my website and Boombook's website. And please come back to the Mechanics Institute Library in person as it reopens to keep this writers community the treasure it has been for 150 years. I will try to post a list of the resources I've mentioned on my website, but it may be more helpful to just review the recording of this session, where they're all in context. Taryn can give you the information about access. So let me close this slide show and take any questions. And where am I? Let's see. Here I am. Okay. Let's see. Let's stop the screen share here. There we go. All right. What did I want to say? Yes. Come and be a part of our writers community. Historically, about a third of our members at Mechanics Institute have been writers, and we have all kinds of activities geared to help one write better. Because as a library, the last thing we want to read is bad writing. So the thing I really wanted to point out was the writer's lunch, which is the third Friday at noon of each month. We have a fun discussion, and I'll put our website in the chat space. And meanwhile, I have a question for Carol, while we let other people put questions in the chat space. Did I hear you correctly in saying that Amazon does not provide any sales figures for its ebook publication? That is my understanding. I don't know how Alex Newton got hold of those data, but he has been able to make a successful company on the basis of having that information. And you can use it for yourself at klytics.com. He will give you a sample run through of how that applies to a specific book. What was the URL for that again? So I can put that in the chat space. klytics.com. How do I spell that? I think it's k-lytics.com. Okay, let me test that. Meanwhile, okay, so there's a question from Niveen. Which option makes the most sense for a first time novelist? I guess hybrid? Well, it depends. It really depends. And I think if you look at Jane Friedman's chart, or if you go back through this presentation, you can see the factor is pretty much laid out. It depends what your goals are, what your resources are, how much time you're willing to spend, how much money you are willing to spend, whether you want to make it a career, whether you are doing a standalone or a series book, all the things that we've mentioned really play into that decision for any individual. And you pretty much just have to figure out how it works for you specifically. The fact that there are so many ways to publish is because everybody has their own ideas about what is most important to them. And Julie has a question. She says she's based in San Diego and she's been writing poetry for 40 years. She's published in two different spots and she would like help with her poetry books. I wonder if she doesn't need to speak to some sort of like book shepherd or someone to help. There is actually a website. I think it's called Author Rights. I'm never not going to be able to remember for sure. No, Authors Publish. Authors Publish. And whoever is in charge of that, they have all kinds of book information. They have a daily newsletter, but they seem to be particularly good at pointing out places for poets to go, either magazines or book publishers, ways to develop the craft. There seem to be poets involved with that company. And I have recommended them to other poets to answer questions like that. That's a great answer. And I put that URL for that in the chat space, but basically AuthorsPublish.com. Let's see now. Millie asks, so you're avoiding Amazon entirely with your publications. What are you using instead? I am not avoiding Amazon entirely. I include Amazon in my publishing options. I, in fact, have some books enrolled right now in KDP, although I'm going to probably take them out when the next three-month thing rolls around. The three romances I publish are only on Amazon, because that's not an area that I'm pursuing with my own writing. So it's just, you know, if they sell, they sell. They're, as I said, kind of snack food books. Whereas the stuff that I'm writing, I work through publish drives to distribute to other publishers. They, I pick publish drive because although they're based in Eastern Europe and they were extremely inscrutable at first, they seem to have gotten better with their customer service. And they distribute to the big five, which was really important to me. Kindle, Nook, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Apple iBooks, and of course I'm suddenly spacing on the fifth one. Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Google Play, and anyway, there's five of them. And I'm not sure about Draft2Digital. They may have added the fifth missing one, Kobo, did I say Kobo? But publish drive does all of those. And I also discovered just today that although it's always been, it's been difficult for quite some time to get hold of Amazon's KDP, which is now their total publishing print and ebooks by phone. They now have no telephone customer service whatsoever. They have just ended it. You have to fill out a sort of a form online and send in the form and someone will send you an answer which has not very much to do with your query. So that's another thing to keep in mind. If you can find somebody who has customer service, go with it. And that's true for whatever sort of business you're involved in. Tom has a question. Do you still do 40% writing versus 60% marketing? Or does that change as you establish a following, a presence, a book list? Will you never get rid of the need to market? Unfortunately, it works almost the other way around. That the way you've become successful enough to need to do all that marketing is by doing all that marketing. And a lot of us, including me, I would have to say, have just decided that's not how we want to spend our time. I've taken to doing things, spending more time writing short stories and getting those published, which is more exposure quicker than writing novels. I'm also writing more novellas and even though there's not really much of a novella market at the moment, I really like that length. And I hope that that market will evolve. Because it's about the same length as a TV episode to watch is a novella to read. And I really think TV people are going to figure that out that and so are book people that this is a really good length for readers. But we'll see. Anyway, it's it takes half a year instead of a year. Well, while we are talking about the ratio of writing versus marketing, how given the amount of time that it takes to market, how do you develop your voice as an author when you're doing all these other things? That's Courtney's question. Well, that's that's the question. You start out with a voice and then it can easily get kind of drowned out. As you start hearing demands for, well, as as author Dee Haggerty wrote, she wrote what she thought was chick lit, and then people were wanting it to be a cozy mystery, but then they didn't like the way she defined cozy mystery. And people are always kind of trying to respond to, to their fans, and it can get really very draconian. So at some point, you really just do have to write what you like, and make an effort to find the communities. This is why I liked Chris Fox's comments about his ideal reader, Bob, Bob the reader, the 35 year old guy who goes to who who plays a lot of games online, that if you can figure out what kind of person is going to be most receptive to your books, then you can then you can keep your own voice and focus more on that and let your marketing be kind of more personal. And in that regard, one innovation that I'm really happy about in the zoom era is Hank Philippi Ryan and Karen Dion have created something called the back room, where they invite four authors who you may or may not have heard of, but who are all writing in roughly similar genres. They each speak about their latest book, and then they everybody goes into breakout rooms, and they have moderated conversations where each writer speaks to each breakout room for about 10 minutes. So you really get a chance to talk to the writers as you might at a book presentation event in a bookstore. It's so it has the intimacy, but it also has the long reach where they can get people from all different parts of the country, both as participants and as audience. And in fact, there's one coming up, I think it is Thursday, so Google the back room. Hank Philippi Ryan, she's a presenter. I forget if she's, I think she's TV. And she's just really good at this medium, as well as history writing. I see it here. Okay, I'm going to put that in the chat space as well. Great, thank you. And while we're talking about cozy mystery readers, you made a comment about how they don't like to read books with sex scenes in it. And I thought, I could see not, you know, a soft porn book or something, but you know, a sex scene or two shouldn't make you have caused a complaint. Well, we're in a new we're in a new era now. And I had a kind of a shocking experience in this regard about a month ago. There was a short story contest for cosies, which I was thinking about entering. And I asked the guy who was running it about language and sex scenes. And when I didn't get an answer right away, I just googled it and went online to a couple of forums that are about of cozy mystery readers. And I was surprised to see a lot of people sit, not a lot of people just see several people saying, if I am reading your book, and I come across you taking the Lord's name in vain, or saying hell or damn or having any sexual contact, I will throw your book away, I will never read another thing of yours, and I will tell all my friends never to read anything you've written. So they're serious, these people. Well, you got to listen to what your readers really want to read. Or you just have to find other readers. I don't, you know, we each have to muddle through in some way or another. And that's a marketing dilemma that you might have for yourself, that you have to figure out how to get past these readers that are a little too literal and how they want your genre to be defined. So, or your particular work to be defined. So, yeah, yeah, how do you find those other readers? Good question. Position yourself. Well, online communities, online forums seem to be very helpful. And certainly when we get back to more in-person ones, that will be helpful too. Okay, there's a couple of questions about cost and profit regarding your particular publications. Stephanie wonders what the average profit might be for one of your ebooks. Can you comment at all on that? I kind of hate to check because it's not very high. I have made money on all of my books, but I don't know how much on any of them. It's real up and down. And the thing is, Amazon, which is really where the bulk of ebook sales come from, unfortunately, from my point of view, but there it is. They report every country separately. So, each month, you will get, if you do direct deposit, which is what they prefer, you'll get 27 cents from Japan, 43 cents from Germany, 28 cents from Lithuania. So, it's you really would have to be severely committed in order to keep track of what exactly your sales are. That's interesting that it's parsed out that way. Yeah, you do get your W, what's it called, your form for the IRS at the end of the year, but in my case, it tends to be for, it tends to be more in the three figures than the four figures at this point for ebooks. And Susan has another question. Where do you publish your short stories? There's a wonderful group called Short Mystery Fiction Society, which has a list of markets, and that's the best source for that, that I am aware of. There are a couple of big magazines like Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but because they are big, they are not, they only take a small fraction of what's submitted to them. Interesting. Did you have any, Julie wonders if you had any other recommendations as far as poetry, self-publishing websites regarding poetry? You know, I think maybe... That's not an area I'm involved with at all, I'm afraid. Yeah, Julie, why don't you, you know, there's Poets and Writers Magazine, which is a really great resource for writing, for publishing. It's a very reasonably priced magazine. I would check that out from your library or read it online. Their website is great. I'm going to put that in the chat space, but it's a great starting point for you to get a sense of the publishing industry for poetry. And then Susan asks, where do you publish your short stories? Well, I just asked you that, didn't I? Yes. Mary asks, any idea, just ballpark, how much it would cost to self-publish a novel, either standalone or part of a series? It totally depends on what you do with it, what, if you hire it, how many different kinds of editors you hire, if you hire any editors at all, how many different kinds of designers you hire, interior, cover design, whatever. If you hire marketing people, it can range anywhere from 30 bucks, as I said, an ISBN, up to several thousand dollars, depending on what your book needs and what you're willing and able to put into it. But again, to go back to the short stories, another thing worth mentioning is anthologies. This has been a really popular way for story writers to get stories out and also for book writers to get the visibility of having stories out. People will put together a themed anthology, some of the writers conferences issue anthologies, some of the local groups like sisters in crime will put one out, usually on a given theme. The story that I have coming out later this year is in the annual Malus Domestic Conference anthology, which is always called murder most something or other. And in this year, it's murder most diabolical. And that means that everybody who comes to the conference will find out about the stories, and we all will get some visibility from that. So look for anthologies as well as magazines. And, you know, I also wanted to point out that Publishers Weekly, which is a print magazine, but they also have a large website presence with newsletters that you can subscribe to by genre. You can get current trends, everything about the publishing industry, they have a newsletter for. So Publishers Weekly, a lot, most of it's free. It's a great resource. We subscribe to that at the Mechanics Institute. And I always recommend it that new writers start looking at it while they're writing, so that they can get a sense of what Publishers are publishing, how books are positioned, how reviews are written about books. And that might help you with your back cover copy and your own elevator pitch. It's just amazing what you can glean from that magazine as you look at it each week. Let's see, what else do we have here? Oh, and I wanted to say Smashwords, which I put in the chat space there URL smashwords.com. They have a lot of guides that I think are, even if you don't end up contracting with Smashwords, they're, they have a lot of resource material to kind of help you understand their process and the process of e-publishing. So take a look at that. Right. And then Michael has a compliment for you, he wonders where you get your book covers. Well, I designed most of them myself. This one was professionally designed and won an award. But the rest of them, I worked in all this in publishing. So it was really fun for me to finally get a chance to unleash it and just get to do it and try it out myself after working with people who were doing it for so many years. But the next one, the next two that I'm doing, I do have the same designer who did croaked. I hope she's going to do both of those. And our last question, I think Heidi wonders if you could define high concept. Yeah, we used to talk more about that than I've heard it lately. It's basically the log line idea is something that's an obvious bestseller in 25 words or less. Something that clearly hits on the zeitgeist. Mm hmm. Something that anybody, any agent or Hollywood connected or publishing connected person would hear and say, yeah, I got to have that. I see. And then there was one more question hiding in the Q&A questions. So this will be our last one, maybe circles back to that company that you forgot about. Rasa asks, what about Ingram Spark? Do you have any comments about their services? Yeah, as I said, Ingram's lightning source in Ingram Spark, they've been a little bit, they started off as being just the go to place for professional publishers. They were for decades and decades. And then they suddenly had to get user friendly. When self publishing, indie publishing came in, they haven't quite got it. And they switched, I forget if they they started with lightning source and then moved to Ingram Spark, they do slightly different things. One does, I think just print books and one does the whole shebang. I haven't checked back with them for a while, but they are really important if you're doing print books. Since as I said before, bookstores will only order their print books from Ingram, they will not order them from Amazon. So Amazon will tell you they will do a print book for you and you can take it anywhere. And you can take it anywhere, but nobody will buy it if it's a bookstore. So you just send basically the same file to Ingram, they do charge you for it. But it's a fairly small setup, they're something like 40 bucks. And they do, I found with in particular with any book that has color interior and with color photos or anything like that, Ingram does a much better job than Amazon and cheaper. Great. All right. Well, I want to thank you so much for this informative presentation. As always, you are on the cusp of it. So I appreciate that. And gosh, I wish we had time to have a dialogue, you know, and to hear from, I would love to hear from people who were in the indie publishers working group about what they've been doing in the years since we stopped meeting. Because so many books came out of that group. I'd love to know how everybody's continued. But so maybe we can have a 10th anniversary celebration at some point. We can. And, you know, I wanted to have our annual December party this year, but I just didn't get it together with all these other things that I had to do virtually. But I hope, and I also didn't have the wherewithal to, I just really want to do it in person. Yeah, absolutely. It's about seeing each other and, you know, valuing each other's books and honoring the process and the journey. So if we can't do it in person this December, we will do it for sure virtually. But I hope that by then the pandemic is better and we're all vaccinated and we're all, we got the herd going on. Yeah, if we don't come out of our burrows, our voices are all going to get really strange. Indeed. All right, well, thank you so much, Carol. And thank you so much, everyone, for turning out today. The video of tonight's not performance presentation will be up tomorrow and you will receive an email the same way you received the Zoom link for today's events. You'll receive an email with the YouTube link. And if for some reason you don't get it, just go to milibrary.org and click on our YouTube icon and you'll be directed right to our YouTube page, where also you can find all the videos for events that we have hosted during the pandemic. And that's, I don't know, like 40 events or something. We've really been cooking. So really interesting. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. And thank you for doing this. You're very welcome. And I hope to see you face to face very soon. And I hope everyone stays well and come to Mechanics sometime and I'll show you around. All right. Thanks, Carol. Good night, everybody. Good night.