First, Make It Good
Written by David on January 26th, 2009Note: As mentioned previously, Moriah Jovan and I are doing a cross-blog series on how writers might be justly paid for what they’ve created. Mojo explores the issues currently confronting writers in her introductory post. Below is my introduction. Although the two of us may differ in our approach, we both do agree that the ease of reproduction in the electronic age does not mean that writers need to regard their work as a pro bono offering to the world. Hard work deserves reward.
I believe that the writer’s path to making money with her work can be summarized in three not-very-simple steps:
- Make it good.
- Be discovered.
- Determine the most effective means of generating income from your writing and do it. You’ve earned it.
The purpose of this series is to explore that third step, but let me touch on the first two briefly.
Make It Good
This, by far, is the hardest and most important part. If you’ve not written a damn fine book, nothing else you do will matter (unless you’re a celebrity already). If you’ve not written a damn fine book, don’t worry about self-publishing options, ebook formats or business models, because hardly anyone will read the thing anyway. Your book won’t appeal to everyone but it had better have the potential to appeal to your target demographic. Enough said.
Be Discovered
In the traditional publishing world, this meant being discovered first by an agent, and then by a publisher, and then, if everything went according to plan, by an enthusiastic and grateful reading public. Now there are many more routes to being discovered by those readers.
As I described in my post on “How to Get Your eBook Read,” I believe we’ll soon live in a world flooded with self-published ebooks, and authors, whether self-published or not, will need to adapt and get creative if their work is to have a chance of standing out. Gaining a group of devoted readers may lead a writer back to the first step of the traditional path (getting an agent), or it may not.
So is it more important for a writer to gain as many readers as possible, to be discovered, and not worry about getting paid in the early stages of his self promotion? Or should a writer treat his work as a valuable commodity and demand payment of some sort from every reader? I can see both sides of the argument. As Mojo laments, all the information that’s available for free on the internet creates in readers a sense of entitlement to cost-free text and also has the effect of devaluing that same text. If I could magically change all of this, I would.
But this is the world we now live in. No solitary writer, or even a gang of angry writers, is going to change it. If requiring payment from every reader will limit the potential for a written work to be discovered by a larger audience, then I believe the writer should forgo that revenue. For now. If, somehow, charging money has no adverse effects on expanding a book’s readership, then by all means charge whatever you can get away with. But if I could choose between 100 readers who had paid $10 each, or 1,000 readers who had paid nothing, I would choose the 1,000 readers. Only with a base of readers can a writer expand her readership to the point where she could earn enough to make a difference in her life. Just as a start-up’s business plan might envision years without a profit as the company attempts to build a customer base, a writer needs to accept that long-term goals may require short-term financial sacrifices. Of course, giving a book away for free certainly doesn’t mean an author will find readers, but the challenge of finding those readers is a topic for another day.
Those 1,000 readers certainly won’t be enough to allow a writer to quit her day job, but it’s a good start. The more readers an author has, the easier it will be to get more new readers (even if it’s never easy). I can’t say at what point a writer will have enough readers to begin generating significant revenue. That will depend upon the type of writing and the method of monetization. But even those 1,000 readers, if you can get them to come back for more, will be enough to generate some meaningful income, even if it’s not via the traditional per book unit model.
Get Paid
It has never been easy for most writers to earn money with their work. Although there is much to be concerned about in the publishing industry as a whole, I don’t believe individual writers are in much worse of a position today than they ever were, despite all of the free content that is available. As Lev Grossman’s piece in Time points out, literary reading by adults has increased 3.5% since 2002, and writers now have a potential global audience of billions. It’s confusing for writers, though, because their strength is writing, not revenue generation. Although the traditional route (write well, get published by a major publisher) of course is still available, and is still the most reliable means of generating at least some income from writing, there are now many other options available to both the self-published and those published by the big boys. Those numerous options are what I plan to explore in this series.
None of these options will in itself give a writer a life-altering, day-job-replacing revenue stream. A writer will need to be discovered by a hell of a lot of readers for that to happen, and getting to that level is probably just as much a matter of luck as it is anything a writer can control (see “Make It Good” above).
Despite my tendency to go off on flights of fancy imagining how the publishing world might work in the near future, I’m going to try keeping myself grounded on planet Earth and focus upon methods authors might use to generate income with their work right now, in the world we currently live in. A few of the topics I may cover (and Mojo may take on some of these herself), are:
- Options for the traditional charge-by-the-book-unit model, for both print books and ebooks.
- Making money through secondary services like paid writing assignments, teaching, lectures, tours, promotions, etc.
- Monetizing a writer’s blog, whether a personal blog or one used for blog fiction.
- Can a writer do it alone? Or does she need, if not a publisher, then at least to be part of a group of writers who work together in some way to help sell each others books?
- Advertising in books. Although this is not currently an option for most and would probably require a Google-like entity to make it technologically and logistically feasible, I’d still like to explore the possibility since it may well be writers’ best hope for making money in the near future.
- Cory Doctorow, what others might learn from his experience and why most writers could not successfully do what he did/does.
- I’d also like to have some interviews with, or guest posts by, writers who have successfully monetized their writing, especially those who have done so through non-traditional means. Are you one, or do you know one? Please get in touch with me!
If anyone has other topics you think would be appropriate, please leave a comment or let me know here.
Related Posts:
- Are Authors Like Journals? In my first post in the Moriah Jovan/The Urban Elitist...
- Good Idea, Bad Idea: Self-Published Fiction Writers’ Peer Review If I were to publish my novel with a publisher,...
- Mojo Writing Moriah Jovan has published her final entry in our cross-blog...
- Word DJ In his post reacting to Jason Weaver’s piece on post-punk...
- The Future of Book Publishing (Maybe) There are many people and blogs doing an obsessively thorough...
26
PM
Actually, I don’t think this will apply so much. Yes, to a certain segment of the reading population, it will, but my thinking is that part of the monetary devaluation of information is that people A) have accepted subpar work so long that B) they no longer know what’s good and C) they no longer care. That’s not to mention the fact that D) “good” is subjective. A lot of exquisitely written literature bores me to tears and leaves me either unfulfilled or frustrated or unable to finish the work.
A LOT of people (esp. young ones who’ll be reading e-books) are already used to not-so-good writing. Ex. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. It’s not good writing, but it’s a helluva story (yeah, I liked it) and moves right along. As long as the reader can get swept away, they’ll forgive anything.
So when you say, “good,” I’m wondering if you mean a simple storytelling skill or technically good or both. In my opinion, only the storytelling skill will matter (technically good worth brownie points!), rendering technical skill unimportant and thus, not worth paying for.
And no, I don’t think technical skill is as important to good storytelling as all that. I think they could be in different area codes and that deeply flawed, but engaging storytelling will win every time.
26
PM
Yes, “good” is subjective, which is why I added “Your book won’t appeal to everyone but it had better have the potential to appeal to your target demographic.” So I’m not talking about good-ness in the traditional literary sense that says The Great Gatsby is better than Twilight. Rather, I mean simply that it needs to be good by the standards of the expected audience. Just as a good action movie can’t be judged by the same standards as a good period romance, and vice versa, a good paranormal romance novel can’t be judged by the same standards a good science fiction novel.
For example, poet-novelist Tao Lin is very effective in using self-promotion to get media attention and sell work. His method of self-promotion is often accused of being gimmicky, and often it is. But the real reason it works is because his work is very original, very intelligent and very insightful. That is, his work is good by the standards of those who like experimental (but not too difficult) poetry and fiction. Many don’t like it, but enough do. If he had the same methods of self-promotion and his work just wasn’t there, I’d probably never have heard of him, never would have spent MONEY on his books, never would have read him and wouldn’t be writing about him right now.
26
PM
Mojo, I was expecting an objection to the “give it away for free” part. I’ve got my answer all ready…come on, don’t let me down! ;)
26
PM
Gotcha.
Getting there! Hold your horses.
26
PM
Well, I can’t disagree completely because you said the magic words: FOR NOW.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot because it takes, on average 3 years for most businesses to see a profit or fold. Since I see myself as a business as well as an author/publisher, I should be accepting of this, but it seems so counterintuitive to the social conditioning that you simply don’t get that time as an author to build a reader base.
On the other hand, it’s easy to give away a novel or two if you have a bunch of other novels in on your list that people would pay for if they just got, say, the first novel of a series free. It’s a lot harder to do that if you’ve got exactly 1 book out there and people are waiting for your next and, in the meantime, forget you. You have to find the sweet spot of the impulse buy.
This is where I think our collective writerly brains go TILT.
Let’s assume we’re either past the agent/contract part and/or have a self-published novel on the market. We’re past the submissions process.
The goal IS to be able to quit the day job and write, yet, most novelists can’t do this until they have a significant backlist, if even then. For instance, you go to college for 4 years. You might intern. You might TA. You might go pick up your professor’s dry cleaning. You’re either working part- or full-time while you do that or living on student loans or some combination, but you know, at the end of 4 years, you should be able to get a job somewhere that will pay your bills. Whether you get a job in your field or not is irrelevant; the expectation is that you get a job and be a productive member of society.
I think if we writer types approached it this way (and I’m talking about me, too), there wouldn’t be as much angst about the gathering of the 1,000 true fans. On the other hand, this is where self-published folks have the advantage on traditionally published folks. We might have a hard row to hoe to get into the bookstores, but we have a long time and the flexibility to choose its online distribution, pricing, etc.
Traditionally published folks have about 90 days to build their fan base and limited recourse if they want to give their work away as an incentive. One might say that by being traditionally published takes care of that issue to a large extent and makes that author’s work out in the public easier, but it can backfire (such as the author with a three-book series contract whose contract got canceled after the first book because Wal-Mart wouldn’t carry it). It can also backfire with regard to those midlist authors whose books go out of print.
Ultimately, I think it’s up to each author to decide how best to offer free work. Right now it’s a struggle to remember that gaining a fan base isn’t an overnight process whether the work is free or not.
26
PM
Glad you brought that up! Heh…
I’m planning a post describing how newly launched scholarly journals often use a “free for a few years” model to get a running head start and what independent writers can learn from it. I know, different worlds, different formats, but there are some lessons to be learned, I think. Just need to research some stats.
“Ultimately, I think it’s up to each author to decide how best to offer free work.”
I agree. There are definitely no rules here. What I do believe though is that the money making part cannot possibly happen until the discovery part has occurred, and therefore facilitating that process of discovery must take precedence over financial concerns.
I also agree that while traditionally published folks may have the financial advantage out of the gate, the make-or-break-in-90-days problem means their hands are tied if they want to try anything that might help build an audience rather than simply sell book units. As time goes on, I’m sure many of them will be craving the flexibility (if not the empty wallets) of their self-published brethren.
27
PM
I love that you and MoJo are tackling this topic. I’m a current ‘freebie’ author. I don’t envision being able to quit my day job any time soon, but I’ve got a pretty decent fanbase started. I’ll keep you posted on whether it leads to ’successfully monetizing my writing.’
27
PM
Yes, please do keep us posted, RJ. Just curious (and sorry if you’ve mentioned this in the past and I missed it): where possible, are you doing any kind of tracking of those who download the book in terms of collecting contact info or anything like that?
27
PM
I have stat trackers on the online version of my novel, which tells me where the reader is (geographically), where they came from (link-wise), and can track their progess through the book. (It sounds creepy when I put it that way, doesn’t it?) I don’t collect contact info, although I should probably start doing it, but I’m fortunate in that my readers seem to like contacting me.
27
PM
Not any more creepy than what Mr. Google (and others) do to us every minute of our online lives. I have been thinking that, whenever possible, it would be a good idea for authors to collect their readers’ contact info so they can keep in touch and alert them of the next project (whether it’s a book or something else). Leaving that contact info would be the (very small) price they’d have to pay for access to the ebook.
28
AM
read this article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28selfpub.html?pagewanted=2, this confirms all we think about self-publishing
28
AM
Thanks, Leonor…I’d missed that article. For once the NYT is catching on to a trend early in the cycle rather than (sometimes years) late. This line “The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them.” …gave me a good laugh. Hyperbole, yes, but it makes the point. Personally, I can’t wait until ebooks become more dominant as I think it will really facilitate this process.
31
PM
We should form a gang of angry writers, just for the hell of it. But I’m sitting here thinking… “hmmm, how could we monetize that?”