Creating Best-Sellers

[sr71plt]

One author's take on what it takes to make your book a best-seller (I've found in e-booking it can be done at a distributor's Web site with very few book sales in a short period of time):

http://www.leapfrogging.com/2013/02...book-sales-spike/?et_mid=604693&rid=232915910

 

[Handley_Page]

One author's take on what it takes to make your book a best-seller (I've found in e-booking it can be done at a distributor's Web site with very few book sales in a short period of time):

http://www.leapfrogging.com/2013/02...book-sales-spike/?et_mid=604693&rid=232915910

Very interesting.
Is that how 50 shades happened?

 

[NaokoSmith]

I have a best seller! Well, it's free so perhaps it doesn't count.

My safe sex werewolf story has had, I think, 5000 downloads on Amazon. I think it's because it has a string of one star reviews frothing at the mouth about how much they hate it!

Oh, OK, it has some four stars and even a five star from Aussie Scribbler, who is a writer I love so I am really pleased. The first review was just an honest one star who hated it, and yet people still actually BOUGHT the book - this was before Amazon mysteriously made it free (without asking me, but I already made an unexpected $100 out of it so I don't mind).

Anyway, now the reviewers are all fighting about whether the story is dirt and disgusting or pretty hot and just needs a bit of an edit. I suppose the readers are rushing to download it and find out what all the fuss is about.

Like they say, there's no such thing as a bad review.

ROFLOL in my pink wellies!



(Never mind what I intend to buy with that $100. Luckily I have a small salary for the next six months and don't have to spend it on the kid's school shoes.)

 

[sr71plt]

Did you ask why Amazon had zeroed out the cost? Was it because they found it here offered for nothing?

 

[NaokoSmith]

Did you ask why Amazon had zeroed out the cost? Was it because they found it here offered for nothing?

No. I was busy playing on here and didn't realise anything was going on. It was only when Aussie messaged me the other day to say he'd left a review that I went to have a look and found out what had happened.

I'm not bothered, I would have put it up free in the first place if I could've. It's nice to have $100 though! I'm so excited to have money I can spend on something really and frivolous, that I couldn't normally excuse buying.

I always meant the story to be a floater, see what happened with it and whether I could build on it. My editor is back on track again, after being MIA for weeks, so I can probably get back to writing the rather different story I started producing off the back of this one now.

I just wanted to post that a really BAD review can actually make your story a big success! ROFL. Mind you, we are talking werewolf erotica. The fans of this genre are infamously greedy for more stories. I feel pretty pleased to have got so badly up their noses. One poor woman even said she put her whole collection of werewolf stuff to the back of her bookshelf after reading my story! Since I was deliberately writing against the grain of some stories I think have things in them even worse than bestiality (yes there are!), I was thrilled to little mince balls! (That's mince balls bought at the local butcher without any horse meat in them, for you fellow Brits! )

 

[sr71plt]

I just wanted to post that a really BAD review can actually make your story a big success! ROFL.

Absolutely. I had a review on a wall-to-wall GM porn book that was slammed as such and ended with a "it was written well enough if you want to read one sex scene piled on another." A great number of buyers immediately wanted to do that. It wasn't selling all that well before the review.

 

[NaokoSmith]

Absolutely. I had a review on a wall-to-wall GM porn book that was slammed as such and ended with a "it was written well enough if you want to read one sex scene piled on another." A great number of buyers immediately wanted to do that. It wasn't selling all that well before the review.

LOL my worst story starting pouring off the Smashwords shelves after I got a low star review and wrote: Sorry you didn't like the story, other readers if you agree with her you can go straight to p. xxx for the sex scene. My super 5 star rated top sexy story was completely bypassed.

you, erotica stroke-readers! You know what you want.

 

[D_Lynn]

Imho

One author's take on what it takes to make your book a best-seller (I've found in e-booking it can be done at a distributor's Web site with very few book sales in a short period of time):

http://www.leapfrogging.com/2013/02...book-sales-spike/?et_mid=604693&rid=232915910

This article was fantastic. I followed one of the links in it: The 10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing to find an article that pretty much sums up all the research I did a few years back before I considered publishing. They aren't truths writers like to hear. We want to sit behind our desks at home and create. Most writers are not natural marketers and some of us (I fall into this category) are not very good at social networking because we're somewhat introverted.

The book publishing industry is much like the film industry in that they have well established 'good ole' boy' clubs. There will always be factions of independents that challenge that institution and try to bring them down. So far, these very well organized and established institutions/clubs have hardly stumbled. Partly because they ride on old money and can buy their way out of any real trouble. Partly because they are fully aware that the publishing industry is ever changing and they know how to adapt. They've been doing it for years.

I don't challenge the publishing game because I believe it to be a silly use of my time. I do believe that the system is somewhat corrupt, but what industry is above corruption? Then again, my goal has never been to be a best selling author. I've exceeded the goals I set for my writing last year, and I'm working toward new goals this year. That's what is important. And nowhere in those goals is 'Join other Indy Publishers to rise against the machine'. I prefer to go my own way.

Just my 2 bits. Pardon the rambling.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

It bears repeating.

Twenty years ago I wrote a hilarious humor skit that we made into an audio tape with relevant sound effects (my co-producer was a newbie sound engineer). The sample tapes got loose, and today the creation is alive and well, sold online, making money for everyone but me and Glenn.

My point is, if your wares are top-shelf theyll launch themselves like missles.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

I am working on raising a considerable amount of money right now in order to do a limited run of high quality hardbacks of selected works of authors here. The process via which I think I'll be able to pull this off is going to be very complicated and take god, maybe a year, maybe even longer.

I've done this kind of thing before but a long time ago - in the Nineteen Eighties.

There is no way that I'll be able to solicit financial support from anyone directly based on this particular project by itself - even though in my own view the works potentially available are way good enough.

My own opinion is that authors here and elsewhere are too disorganised as a producer group and have little or no personal funds easily disposable to move together as a power bloc - even though there will be some who simply claim they personally choose or want to be 'independent.' But independent from what? From a bunch of thieves masquerading as publishers in the hardcopy print medium? And further, sometimes the plans that people express or let's say 'run up the flagpole' are just not very skilled or professionally savvy in the marketing arena... That is certainly true enough I think; and others here have hinted so too. This is not a criticism; authors are not necessaily meant to be marketeers - but in the modern world they more or less have to be or have to have good access to very clever marketing.

I think the quality of writing is definitely here.

And if I don't succeed perhaps someone else may one day and start to showcase all the good stuff that is here. The trick is to make it financially viable as a commercial endeavour.

I'm certainly going to give it a go.

My process will be to pick up one or other of the big-ish industrial/commercial business capital raisers with a decent cashflow - with no particular connection to writing as such - and turn the financial networks and the fundstreams surreptitiously towards this direction 'under the radar.'

Let me give you an example of how it might work: A university with some commercialisable research lets me put something onto Kickstarter, they see that there is (in reality, 'appears to be') a level of external market interest and support, they establish a meaningful budget for me to use to continue marketing, I cut out a piece of that... ...and use it for what I really wanted to do in the first place.

And everybody gets their objective because basically in reality, if I can get the main budget forces to stick and stay with a program long enough, given that the product is solid, I will definitely be able to get adequate overall funding for all parties - people in authority often just don't understand the need to stick and stay in for a sufficient amount of time. They are just too impatient in my experience.

I have raised a lot of money in my life and always, when the endeavours were successful, you had a basic level of positive attitude and perserverance.

If I had but twenty people here to help 'conspire' with me there's no doubt I could pull it off for serious money.

And so you should all take this as an open invitation to private message me to explore further.

Why it's important to do it this way these days is because this IS the way of the moment. Nobody is raising any money for real in the stockmarkets and the bigger operators are not necessarily as clued-up in the web and its mechanisms as they will have everyone believe. I know. I work in this industry at the big end of town.

The other thing is the sheer thievery of ideas and strategies. I would not dare open up to the people I work with in the flesh daily EXACTLY all the financial mechanisms and sources that I am aware of - right now for instance I have a sixty thousand USD mini budget being ummed and aghed over in a corporate legal department because I myself will not just blurt out to them all the benefits in detail. Because I guarantee that someone within the board itself will shoot straight off and try to implement it on their own - once they discover enough key details. And they will stuff it up too. That's another guarantee. It's outrageous the way they think and behave and I think it's all a hangover from past days when public companies were somewhat entitled to believe they were superior to everyone down where the 'ants' lived. Not so any longer I don't think, but I just don't think people get it fully yet.

Sooner or later I'm going to put this budget together the EXACT way I want...

Let me just run over a few fundamental moralities of what I am thinking - no way ought big companies keep getting away with not paying writers and creative thinkers for the lifeblood of what makes all of their stuff sell in the first place! So I don't think I'm morally wrong thinking along the lines that I am. This cat has to be skinned without the idiots in the accounting departments and the legal and compliance departments getting ANY SAY WHATSOEVER. I think they have destroyed corporate America, the entire corporate Western World frankly, and unless people find effective ways of sidestepping their parasitism, none of these guys are ever going to give up their power and they are certainly not ever going to voluntarily admit to their own blameworthiness.

DMMwk.

 

[sr71plt]

You're a bit behind the curve, Desire. There already have been publishing houses beyond the individual self-publishers that have sprung from Literotica (six that I can think of), including a large one (over 550 books in five years) that is a cooperative--doing exactly what you say authors here can't collectively do (eXcssica).

But another one would be fine if you want to do it. Someone could start up another one on the eXcessica model--eXcessica has been so popular it's been closed to new authors for a year or more now--and I know there are authors here at Literotica who would like to get in on such a deal.

It's doomed from the start if you are talking about hardcovers, though, I think. Very few buy hardcovers of anything anymore (except from remainder tables) other than to dress up their living room bookshelves, and certainly not of erotica. The godsend for erotica was the e-book. There aren't too many people who proudly put hardcovers (or even paperbacks) of erotica on their living room bookshelves.

What university did you think would put money behind a hardbacking of erotica venture? And what training and experience in publishing do you have to show to an investor? Just mentioning a few hurdles to your idea.

 

[sr71plt]

The book publishing industry is much like the film industry in that they have well established 'good ole' boy' clubs. There will always be factions of independents that challenge that institution and try to bring them down. So far, these very well organized and established institutions/clubs have hardly stumbled. Partly because they ride on old money and can buy their way out of any real trouble. Partly because they are fully aware that the publishing industry is ever changing and they know how to adapt. They've been doing it for years.

An eyeopener for me in working in publishing houses is that most of the best-sellers and even most of the planning on how many copies a book is going to sell are preplanned in the mainstream publishing houses from the get-go and the publishers orchestrate how they publish it (hardcover/paperback/e-book, mass market/general release/targeted market) and how/if/where they promote it. The question of whether this is a literary best-seller or a Walmart shotgunned release is brought up and often decided at the book adoption meeting.

Surprises do creep around the edges, certainly. And wishful authors point to these as the norm, which they aren't.

 

[D_Lynn]

An eyeopener for me in working in publishing houses is that most of the best-sellers and even most of the planning on how many copies a book is going to sell are preplanned in the mainstream publishing houses from the get-go and the publishers orchestrate how they publish it (hardcover/paperback/e-book, mass market/general release/targeted market) and how/if/where they promote it. The question of whether this is a literary best-seller or a Walmart shotgunned release is brought up and often decided at the book adoption meeting.

Surprises do creep around the edges, certainly. And wishful authors point to these as the norm, which they aren't.

I agree.

I knew nothing about this industry before I started researching a few years ago. Like you, I was utterly shocked at the process and decisions that were being made up front and how this affects a) What is available to the consumer b) How widely it is distributed c) How/When the author will be paid. These decisions are made by people who have never read your work. In addition, there are layers of people getting paid at the major publishing houses and dozens of strategies for delaying payment to the author.

The harsh truth is that none of those decisions are based on the quality of the work or whether or not people will like it, really. It is based on how easy or cheap it will be to market it, and whether or not they will make a profit on it.

Some of this should actually be comforting for new authors. Rejection does not equal bad writing.

 

[sr71plt]

I'll have to disagree with part of that and especially because it drifts toward the "it's all about the author" misconception. From inside publishing houses, I see folks who very much know what is in the books they have decided to handle and know even better than the unobjective author does how good they are comparatively and where they fit and how to maximize the various functions of publishing to the level the book comparatively deserves. It's their investment on the line as much if not more than the author's. They aren't doing this to be failures. Once your book is taken up by a publisher, it's no longer "your" book, it's "our" book and you aren't the only one with a vested interested in getting it sold right--and to its maximum potential. Unfortunately, I hear too much of "it's all about me and my singularly brilliant book" in your post to be able to agree with you very far in that respect.

 

[sr71plt]

There are two phases of "it's all about me" that authors typically go through. There's the "clueless" phase before finding a publisher that extends into the publishing phase until it either gets beaten out of them or they are dropped by publishers. Then, if they are lucky, there's a realism-based teamwork phase of getting published and building a reputation together. And then for a handful of authors, the "it's all about me" phase returns, largely justified this time by the bottom line, during which their fan base would read an unedited laundry list published under their name and the publishers will let them do this because their share of the profits cover getting what are now better writers published. (Think Tom Clancy and, some would say, Stepen King.)

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Oh no I wouldn't be doing it to make sales. I just love good quality hardbacks as items of manufacturing!

Where did you get the idea that I would be TELLING ANYONE where I had channelled my own money??

Sr71plt... You would be so surprised to know who I am...

DMMWk.

 

[sr71plt]

Where did you get the idea that I would be TELLING ANYONE where I had channelled my own money??

Where did you get the idea that this had anything to do with anything I posted?

 

[Bramblethorn]

And then for a handful of authors, the "it's all about me" phase returns, largely justified this time by the bottom line, during which their fan base would read an unedited laundry list published under their name and the publishers will let them do this because their share of the profits cover getting what are now better writers published. (Think Tom Clancy and, some would say, Stepen King.)

And Anne Rice.

 

[sr71plt]

And Anne Rice.

I haven't read any of hers yet. Nor Stephen King's (other then his one on writing). I have, unfortunately, read some of Tom Clancey's.