Some Marketing Thoughts - Stars and Algorithms

Several months ago, I was e-mailed a link to a chapter from a technical book that explains how recommendation algorithms work. Because of the holidays and the Soulwoven: Exile launch, I only got around to reading it this afternoon, and I want to share some musings. As I was promised, it was interesting to think about how these algorithms are actually designed and how one, as an author, ought to try to take advantage of them.

The book in question can be found here, and the relevant chapter downloaded here.

In 9.1.1, it shows an example of what it calls a "utility" matrix. It posits some hypothetical user ratings for movies, then explains how an algorithm attempts to use them.

Notice that most user-movie pairs have blanks, meaning the user has not rated the movie. In practice, the matrix would be even sparser, with the typical user rating only a tiny fraction of all available movies. The goal of a recommendation system is to predict the blanks in the utility matrix.

I can't quote the matrix itself effectively here, but it's worth downloading the chapter to have a look at it. Basically, it shows that in a recommendation system (like Amazon's, BN's, etc.), you have a massive database of user-book rating pairs, almost all of which are blank. The recommendation system looks at what the user has rated favorably, then looks around for similar users and tries to see what they've also rated favorably (it probably also takes other factors, like genre, length, etc. into account as well).

Put pretty simply, that's where recommendations come from.

And that has driven home for me the importance of those star ratings in a new way. They're necessary for two things:

1.) They allow the algorithm to identify readers who haven't read your books but whose tastes are similar to those who have.

2.) They nudge the algorithm toward recommending other books by you to people who have given a high rating to one of your books in the past.

And that's on top of all the people-related reasons that star ratings matter.

Another salient quote:

In most applications, the recommendation system does not offer users a ranking of all items, but rather suggests a few that the user should value highly.

The way I read this, it helps explain in a new way why it's so important to connect with highly active readers. Let's say you have a reader who's read every bestselling fantasy novel that came out in the last year and rated it on Amazon. They also read yours. They like it enough to give it 5 stars. The algorithm can match a very high number of other readers to that reader ("Oh, this person liked Republic of Thieves and Soulwoven? Maybe all these other people who liked Republic of Thieves will like Soulwoven too). That doesn't work nearly as well if the readers who rate your book only read, say, three books a year.

 Final quote and thoughts:

An extreme example of how the long tail, together with a well designed recommendation system can influence events is the story told by Chris Anderson about a book called Touching the Void. This mountain-climbing book was not a big seller in its day, but many years after it was published, another book on the same topic, called Into Thin Air was published. Amazon’s recommendation system noticed a few people who bought both books, and started recommending Touching the Void to people who bought, or were considering, Into Thin Air. Had there been no on-line bookseller, Touching the Void might never have been seen by potential buyers, but in the on-line world, Touching the Void eventually became very popular in its own right, in fact, more so than Into Thin Air. 

I have spent a lot of time wondering what, exactly, happens when a book suddenly takes off on Amazon. It's a common enough story: "I spent three months or so seeing a few sales a week. Suddenly, in March, my sales took off. I have no idea why."

Maybe this is why.

More Thoughts on Amazon, and Fear, and Desirable States of the Publishing Industry

I've been continuing to noodle everything that's going on between Amazon and Hachette these days, and last night as I was falling asleep, I had a very interesting thought:

I've spent plenty of time wondering what would happen if Amazon "beat" all the major publishers and attained Crushing Market Power (THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!). But I have spent very little time considering what would happen if the reverse were true. So I thought about that, and, in short, it would be bad.

I talk a lot about how publishers are shooting themselves in the foot by not selling directly to consumers more actively, meaning readers have to turn elsewhere (usually Amazon) for e-books. Well, some of them are changing gears. And if they do it well enough (which I suspect is unlikely), they could conceivably drive readers away from Amazon. This would be a terrible thing for authors, and, I suspect, for readers as well.

Amazon, for all its evils, has vastly expanded the options an author has for building their career. Ditto for selling backlist titles. Amazon has also created markets for very cheap books that did not exist before, which is good for readers. Frankly, if I have $.99 to spend on a book, I'd much rather grab a new, cheap e-book than a paperback copy that's falling apart out of a bargain bin somewhere.

In world without Amazon, or where Amazon sold as few e-books as B&N and Apple do, it would be much harder to start a career as an independent author (which, for the record, is how I think most authors should start their careers). That would be at least as bad as a world without traditional publishing, in which Amazon had no reason not to dictate draconian terms to independent authors.

Which leads me to my newest thought on where the publishing industry is: right where it should be.

If Hachette and Amazon are battling each other tooth and nail over publishing terms, that's a good thing, unless you happen to be a Hachette author. But most authors aren't Hachette authors, and eventually Hachette will make peace with the beast, and those authors' lives will go back to normal. It will then be someone else's turn.

It would be best if Amazon and large publishers made war on each other without putting their business disputes between authors and readers. But in the end, I think, I'm glad that they're warring with each other at all.

The Amazon Problem

(Note: This is replacing Friday's blog post, because I'm going to be on the road)

For those who don't know: Amazon, who has made self-publishing what it is (i.e. a path to a living for some and to readers for all) today, is brawling brutally with Hachette, one of the largest traditional publishers, over the terms of their distribution relationship. You can read up on it here and here, but the gist is that Amazon is basically doing everything short of not selling Hachette books at all in order to get them to capitulate to whatever new terms it wants for selling their books.

Charlie Stross has hit the nail on the head in describing what this means for authors. In short, it is bad, bad news. Most salient passage (emphasis mine):

By driving down the unit revenue, Amazon makes it really hard for publishers—who are a proxy for authors—to turn a profit. Eventually they go out of business, leaving just Amazon as a monopoly distribution channel retailing the output of an atomized cloud of highly vulnerable self-employed piece-workers like myself. At which point the screws can be tightened indefinitely. And after a while, there will be no more Charlie Stross novels because I will be unable to earn a living and will have to go find a paying job.

This is the nightmare scenario. It's one I have been worried about since Amazon started doing this to publishers years ago. There is nothing---absolutely nothing---underlying the amazing royalty rates that Amazon pays authors like me other than either a.) Amazon's goodwill or b.) this business strategy or one much like it. And Amazon is not a company that has gotten where it is today because of its goodwill toward suppliers.

For traditional authors, the hope is that their publishers will band together (probably through mergers, because they were sued successfully by the Department of Justice, largely at Amazon's behest, for banding together without merging---admittedly illegally, from my point of view) and survive strong enough to remain a counterweight to Amazon.

For indie authors, the hope is that Nook Press and Kobo (and to a lesser extent Apple, but they're much less friendly to indies than the other two) will remain just enough of a threat to Amazon in the realm of e-books to keep Amazon from turning the screws on self-published authors.

I went into self-publishing knowing this.

But this month I removed my titles from Nook Press and Kobo anyway.

Why?

Because I'd sold a handful of copies of Soulwoven in each venue, lifetime, and zero of Three Dances. Because Amazon gives me valuable promotional tools in return for exclusivity, and Kobo and Nook Press don't give me any promotional tools at all. Because the increasingly powerful handlers of the best marketing tools available to indies care more than anything about how many star reviews a book has on Amazon.

After writing a good book in the first place, reaching readers is the great issue in self-publishing, and by taking and holding the lead on ways to promote books, Amazon is making itself indispensable to indie authors. By requiring exclusivity to use its best promotional tools, it's also making publishing e-books anywhere else a losing proposition.

At this point. It could get better. Kobo and Nook Press do a lot of things right. Maybe someday Apple will decide it wants to be a player in the e-book market rather than try to leverage its small market share to sell hardware to self-publishers. Google may get their act together too.

It could also get worse. Amazon could start dropping royalties anytime, and I'm willing to bet Kobo and Nook Press would follow suit. Nook Press's royalties are already worse than Amazon's, and both of those companies need all the revenue they can get.

Everybody in traditional publishing fears Amazon, for two reasons. The first is that they're brutal. The second is that they're so damn good. They're light-years ahead of everyone else, and they're experimenting and rolling out new ways to connect authors and readers so fast that the best the industry can do is laugh at Amazon's failures to hide its tears over Amazon's successes, and rage when it gets the opportunity to.

Indie authors should fear Amazon too. Yes, it's the hand that feeds us, but the open palm has turned into a fist at some point for everyone who's ever been in our shoes before, and we are fools if we refuse to recognize that.

I titled this post The Amazon Problem, but Amazon is not THE problem. It is A problem. THE problem is that nobody is competing with them effectively.

P.S. Filed under "Decisions I may come to regret" because of hands that feed, and biting, and concern thereof.

Soulwoven's First Sale! $.99 - $2.99 on Amazon for the Next Week!

Okay, friends and readers---big and exciting news about Soulwoven's first sale!

In honor of the book's three-month anniversary (can't believe it's been so long already), it's going on sale on Amazon.com for a week. The sale will start Wednesday 5/21 and run through Wednesday 5/28, and it'll look like this:

Wednesday 5/21: $.99 for the e-book.

Thursday 5/22 - Wednesday 5/28: $2.99 for the e-book

Thursday 5/29 forward: Back to the regular $5.99 price

So if you're interested in reading the book but have been put off by the price, or if you've been needling your friends about it but they haven't done anything, now (or rather Wednesday)'s the time to strike!

Enjoy!

Marketing Soulwoven Part 3: Running the Kickstarter

This is part the third of a series of posts on how I've marketed Soulwoven. Part the first and part the second provide useful background.

Running a successful Kickstarter has a lot of facets. On the one hand, you're working to create the book, and it needs to be your first priority. On the other hand, you've also promised your backers a fly's-eye seat on the wall while you do it, and there's no question in my mind that fulfilling the second part of that equation is smart marketing.

So I consider a lot of the way I interacted with my backers during the Kickstarter a part of Soulwoven's marketing plan, even though I did most of those things to be good to my backers, and not because I wanted to do a good job of marketing (it's always about what you can do for them, remember?).

I started off with a long update a few days after the Kickstarter funded, explaining my thoughts on the whole process, what it meant to me, and why I was so grateful to my backers and how incredible what they did in funding the book was. You can read an adaptation of it here, but the full thing will only ever be available to the backers, as will the other Kickstarter updates I wrote. That was part of the deal I made with them; they got access to me as a creator that nobody else did.

And I did my best to be as accessible as possible.

I started before the Kickstarter even ended. I'd noticed as I backed other projects that I got much more excited about projects while they were still going on when the creators were excited and getting in touch with me about what was happening (excitement is one of the things you give backers in return for their money, or at least it should be). So I wrote about the editing that I was going to get, and I posted an example of the revision notes I was making as I worked through Soulwoven that month (I was getting in one last cover-to-cover revision before sending it off to my developmental editor). I wrote seven updates during the month the Kickstarter ran. Some of my backers were excitedly messaging me as I did it. Others upped their pledges. So that was good marketing, in addition to being A Thing That I Did Because It Was Right.

Once the Kickstarter finished, I kept up the updates---again, I knew from being a backer that having regular (not too often, but when milestones occurred) updates really helped make a person feel like they were a part of the process. I shared my budget, once I had all the final numbers hammered out. I let backers vote on the cover, then shared the final version when it came in. I shared the map when it came in. I tried to post at least once a month about where the book was in the publishing process, and I tried to anticipate questions and answer them (like "What's a galley copy?"). I made some videos and shared some photos as well.

Not everybody responded. Only about half of the backers voted on the cover choice. But that was totally fine; again, it wasn't about what they could do for me, it was about what I could do for them. If all they wanted was the finished product, or even just the momentary satisfaction of clicking the "Pledge" button, I was still absolutely thrilled to have them on board.

But overall, people really seemed to enjoy the process. When I talk to backers (the ones who interact with me, anyway), I get the feeling they really felt like they got their money's worth before the book even came out. Making that happen to me was very important as a creator, but it was also good marketing. Because happy readers are happy customers, and happy customers come back to you again.

And if there's an overall takeaway from this marketing post, it should be that. Make your readers happy. That's always been an imperative for most kinds of authors, but it's more important than ever in today's publishing environment. I've seen it over and over again in the indie world; the most successful authors aren't just the ones who can turn a phrase and crack a plot and build amazing worlds and characters. Their fans also love interacting with them.

I dealt with plenty of moments of panic as I was producing Soulwoven. I still have them now that I'm learning how to sell it. But during one of them, I happened upon a truth that has helped me keep perspective, and I'm going to share it with you because it's important.

You can't control whether\people will like your book. But you can control how you treat the people who do.

Industry Norms: Buying Other Authors' Books

This weekend I did a book signing at Robots & Rogues in Lafayette, IN, during a larger event called the Mosey Down Main Street. It was awesome. On top of selling a bunch of books, I met a bunch of great people, including several local authors. I got to hang out and talk fantasy and science fiction for hours on a Saturday night as well, which is one of my favorite things to do in the world.

When the bookstore and I settled up afterward, I had made some money. I gave about half of it back by buying the books of authors I'd met that night, or who were going to be coming by the store later in the summer and whose books I wanted to read beforehand.

This is an industry norm, and it's one I didn't learn about until last year, and it's one that caught me by surprise.

So I thought I'd write about it here, because I now know that there are other writers early in their careers who read this blog, and I feel guilty about not knowing about this norm at the first signing I did and failing to reciprocate when some really friendly authors bought my book there.

It makes sense on many levels, when you think about it. One, it's professional courtesy. But beyond that, it's the best way to make connections with your peers, and believe me, connections with your peers are exceptionally, superlatively important. During one of the signing's quieter moments, I overheard people talking about how "It's really all in who you know." I'm not sure whether they were talking about publishing or not (because a lot of industries work that way), but they could have been.

And the way you get to know people in this industry is by reading their books and reaching out to them. I've made many mistakes in my career (already!), and one of the biggest was in waiting to read the books of other indie authors until I was almost ready to publish Soulwoven. I should have been doing it for a year ahead of time, both so that I knew the market better and so that I could find the ones I liked and tell them how much I liked them. Because that's really important to do as an author. We all live in a world of deep, dark fears and years of trauma during which we learned to write primarily by being told everything that's wrong with how we write. Peer recognition is important---it's a human thing.

So read other authors, especially those you meet in person and who buy your books. Then if you like their book, reach out and tell them so.

I think my initial resistance to doing that was that it felt too much like a pyramid scheme. "What do you mean I have to read a dozen other authors before I publish my book? That sounds fishy..." And when you put it that way, it is fishy.

But you wouldn't launch a restaurant without trying out some of the other ones in the neighborhood, right? And you wouldn't launch a website without seeing who else was doing the same thing and how, right? It's the same here. Reading other authors, in addition to being professional courtesy, is market research. It's important. You should do it. You'll be glad you did.

Marketing Soulwoven Part Two: The Kickstarter Launch

Okay, time for part two of the ongoing series of posts on how I'm marketing Soulwoven (you can read part one here).

The second stage of marketing Soulwoven came with the Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter, like Wattpad, was a thing I found out about via the news. I started backing projects on it in 2012, with Amanda Palmer's album Theatre is Evil. Over the next year or so, I backed several projects and got a chance to see firsthand how they worked---what was exciting about the process, what wasn't, what other people did well and poorly, etc.

Kickstarter, for those who don't know it, lets people pledge money to support a creative endeavor. For authors, it's a way of funding all of the many expenses related to publishing a book, like editing, marketing, and cover design. In the traditional publishing world, your publisher foots those expenses in return for a large slice of the profits of the book. When you Kickstart, your audience foots those expenses in return for various backer rewards and the fun of being a part of your creative process.

Launching the Kickstarter was the first time I began actively marketing Soulwoven to anyone. I knew from backing other projects and from reading up on it that having a good video was extremely important, so I turned to a friend of mine from high school who runs a small video production company in Denver. He did a bang-up job on the video, which more than paid for itself.

I also reached out to my Wattpad followers, of which there were several thousand at the time, and asked them what they'd be interested in getting as rewards from a Kickstarter. I built a survey using Survey Monkey and asked them to rank my ideas in order from most exciting to least exciting, and then to write in any ideas of their own. I didn't get a ton of responses, but I got enough to correct some misconceptions I'd had about what would be the most exciting. I also realized that I wasn't likely to have people from Wattpad pouring thousands of dollars into the Kickstarter.

So I set my goals low. I knew I couldn't adequately copy edit a book of Soulwoven's length (because I'd already copy edited Three Dances myself, and it was a bear of a job even for a book so short). So I told myself I needed $550 to hire a copy editor I'd worked with through my freelancing for Carina Press, and I set up my reward tiers pretty aggressively to hit that goal. I was reasonably certain I could convince 25 people to pledge $25 each to back to the book, and I filled the $25 reward tier with all the goodies my survey respondents said they wanted most. I also set a number of stretch goals for the campaign, which would add interior artwork and additional editing to the publishing process if they were reached.

It worked well beyond my wildest dreams. My core fans were extremely excited to back the book, and I hit my funding goal about 12 hours after the Kickstarter went live. I eventually received 660% of my goal, allowing me to bring on an interior artist and developmental editor, as well as to launch with a pretty significant marketing budget.

There were a few other marketing tricks I pulled out for the Kickstarter that are worth mentioning. I noticed that being part of a successful Kickstarter was a lot more fun than being part of one that wasn't going very well. I also knew that if the book funded quickly, I'd have another flashy hook I could dangle in my marketing copy. So I set my funding floor low with that in mind. I also set up my reward tiers in a way that encouraged interaction between me and my backers. I wanted to get to know these people, who were making my dream a reality. I also knew that the more contact we had, the more likely they were to remember me.

This is getting long, so I'm going to break it off here and talk more about the process of fulfilling the Kickstarter in another post. But first I want to mention another marketing caveat. It's true of anything you do marketing-wise on the Internet, but it's especially true of Kickstarter:

It's never about what they can do for you. It's always about what you can do for them.

Marketing actively to people can make you come off as a sleazeball at relativistic speeds. The world is full of people and companies trying to separate readers from their money. Don't do that. Don't be desperate. Don't be needy. Don't be pushy. Your needs are unimportant to people who have never met you, and if you put your needs above the needs of the people who have met you, you'll start to push them away pretty quickly.

So find out what your readers want and what you can give them. Then offer it to them. When you ask for something back, do it humbly and with a smile on your face that says, "I'll still like you whether you help me out or not." Let the money question ride quietly and unobtrusively in the backseat of your relationships with readers and fans, because that's where it belongs.

And watch Amanda Palmer's TED talk. It will help you put things in perspective.

Marketing Soulwoven Part One: Wattpad

I realized after I promised another marketing post on Friday that talking about the commercialization strategy for Soulwoven was going to take up several posts' worth of space. Figuring out how to share this book with the world has taken, literally, years. Not as long as it took to write it, but a long time.

The story starts in 2012.

If you've read any of the promo material for Soulwoven, you've seen me trumpeting the success it's had on Wattpad. For those of you who don't know, Wattpad is a story-sharing site. You sign up for an account, and you can post stories on there and read the stories that other people post. The whole thing is free. I'm not sure how they make money, or if they are making money (it's a tech startup; they often go a long time without making any money).

I heard about Wattpad through Publisher's Weekly, a trade publication I used to read every day and wish I still had time to read every day. They ran an article about an author with a huge Wattpad following in late 2011. Shortly thereafter, she got a huge deal. I took notice, signed up for a Wattpad account, and started lurking and thinking and thinking and lurking.

At the time, I wasn't sure how to use it. I still wanted to publish Soulwoven traditionally, and I was afraid that putting it on Wattpad might trounce its chances. So I started asking around. Six months later, after I asked several literary agents about Wattpad and they asked me back, "What's that?" I decided that this was going to be The Next Big Thing and I ought to get involved before it hit that point (I was partially right; it's bigger now, and I think it's much harder to catch their attention).

So I started revising Soulwoven and posting chapters of it on Wattpad. I had enormously high hopes, as I always tend to. The results didn't live up to them. People read it. People liked it. But it didn't go gangbusters and generate huge word of mouth and suddenly shoot to the top of Wattpad's rankings (it did crack the top 25 at one point, but it dropped off from there pretty quickly).

I blogged about the experience though, and my blog posts caught the eye of a Wattpad community manager, and she contacted me and asked if I was interested in having Soulwoven featured on the site.

One of the principles of book marketing (and writing, for that matter, because it enters into how you construct your first page) I cottoned on to pretty early on in the process was the importance of setting reader expectations. I noticed that I gave authors extra slack if I had seen their work before or it came with laudatory quotes from authors or reviewers I trusted (or best yet, from friends). Neil Gaiman's American Gods took most of the book to hook me, but I stuck with it because it was Neil Gaiman, and I had faith it would get there. I put A Game of Thrones down after the first chapter because I didn't like it, only to pick it up later, read farther, and fall in love with it after it was recommended to me repeatedly by friends.

Marketing a first novel, especially if you're self-publishing, is difficult because you don't have any of that credit with readers. They bring no positive preconceptions to your book, which means you get very little slack from them. I wanted to do as much as I could to set readers up to enjoy the book before they even opened it, and having Soulwoven featured on Wattpad let me do that.

It worked in two ways: first, I could plug the fact that it was featured. A lot of readers haven't heard of Wattpad, but they know the word "featured" and that it's a good thing. Second, before I launched Soulwoven, it generated over 500,000 reads on Wattpad (Wattpad's "reads" are essentially page views; Wattpad is cagey about how it calculates things, but as far as I can tell, it counts a read anytime a user opens a new chapter of the book). Again, you don't have to know Wattpad to see "half a million" and think "good thing." When it came time for the Kickstarter campaign, I could point to my success on Wattpad and say, "You should fund this book because people already love it," and that was immensely helpful.

But on top of giving me some means with which to make myself sound good, having the book up on Wattpad gave me a wealth of useful information about it. I got to see who was reading it and liking it (at least as much as they shared with me), and I got to see what people were saying about it and what they liked about it. I learned that about half of people who were starting the book weren't reading past the first chapter, and I could compare that to the numbers of other successful books on Wattpad and see that it stacked up pretty well. I could also see that Soulwoven wasn't the kind of book that people JUST HAD TO SHARE OMG. I eventually concluded that it was a middling success on Wattpad and was likely to be a middling success commercially. So far, that's exactly what it's been.

I still have the book up on Wattpad. The sanity of that decision has been questioned, but I'll talk more about that when I get to the pricing part of this series (much in the future). But put shortly, all the evidence I've seen shows that Wattpad users aren't big book buyers, and that big book buyers aren't Wattpad users. The ecosystems exist more or less independently, and I benefit immensely from having Soulwoven up. It crossed 750,000 reads this weekend. When it hits a million, I'll update my promo info with the new, flashier number.

Plus, people are reading it who otherwise wouldn't be, and in the end, that's more important than anything else. I don't write fiction solely to make money. I make a hell of a lot more money writing things that aren't fiction. I write fiction to move people and make a positive influence on the world, and the only reason I'm after money for it at all is because if I can make a living at it, I can do more of it and do it better.

And that's worth keeping in mind whenever we talk marketing. There are dueling goals of art and commerce for every author, and I do my best to privilege the artistic over the commercial whenever I can.

Sales Rankings

Hello, dearest readers.

Sorry this is a day late! Yesterday went far, far off the rails and blogging slipped my mind. Anyhoo, today it's time for a BUSINESS post. How exciting. Because my head is back on straight and I'm back to working on Soulwoven: Exile again and it's all very hush-hush, big secret, oh my God the things I wish I could tell you, etc., etc.

Also because people are asking me how Soulwoven is doing, and because at times I have absolute, panicky, mind-crushing anxiety about that very thing. This post about Amazon and its sales rankings has helped me put that into perspective. Come Monday, I'll crack the door open a little more about what my marketing and sales strategy has been with Soulwoven, what's worked, what hasn't, and what the next step is. It'll be a long one, or possibly a series, so consider this the primer.

And then enjoy your weekend. It's springtime in Indiana, and whatever else I may say about this state when it's -50F after wind chill and I haven't seen the sun in days, this place has beautiful, beautiful springs.

Some Thoughts On Marketing

As I swing from the production part of publishing Soulwoven over to the marketing part, people have been asking me questions about it. One of those questions turned into a pretty interesting conversation via text message this week, and I thought I'd present it here for the edification of anyone who's interested.

Voila!

I find I use the words "Haha" much more often in text messages than I do at any other time in life, which is to say at all. But at least I still speak in sentences. ;-)

Michael Martinez on Self, Hybrid, and Traditional Publishing

Mike Martinez, for those who don't know, writes an incredible hybrid blend of science fiction and historical fantasy, in which tall ships battle for control of the solar system rather than the New World (full disclosure: I edited his novella The Gravity of the Affair, so I'm not exactly unbiased). So it's only fitting that he's a hybrid author, and he took the time recently to weigh in on a brouhaha in the publishing world forming around a survey of author earnings done by a prominent self-published author and his partner. The survey in question grabbed a bunch of data from Amazon and crunched it to try to compare average earnings of various types of authors.

There's been a lot, and I mean a lot of vitriol floating around concerning this survey.

Mike took a more peaceful approach, one shared by a lot of authors, including myself, and I wanted to share it with you.

There are an awful lot of reasons to publish a book, and the various approaches to doing so will suit you better or worse depending on what your reasons are. One book may have different reasons than another. Your reasons may change as your career progresses, and it's a good thing that authors can and are moving fluidly from one publishing model to the other and back as it suits them. Personally, I love working with authors who were self-published as an editor; they tend to be better educated about the industry than those who never went through that crucible.

I'm also immensely enjoying being my own publisher. It's teaching me a lot.

And for what it's worth, I haven't read much that's self-published that's as good as Mike's books are.

What Fulfilling the Soulwoven Kickstarter Looked Like

Continuing with these week's theme of spreading the Kickstarter love out to the broader world today. When the print books arrived for Kickstarter backers, I was about a week behind schedule on them. So in order to get them out to people as quickly as possible, I had a signing and packaging marathon. I thought it might make for an interesting time-lapse video, so I shot one.

Enjoy! And then go buy the book. S'il vous plait.

Thoughts on Kickstarter

So let me be perfectly honest here: I'm cheating a little bit with this blog post. Shortly after my Kickstarter finished, I wrote a short essay on some lessons the process taught me about publishing, writing, and life, and how everything came together to make Soulwoven a reality. I shared it with my backers. What follows is adapted from that.

--

Several Big Thoughts occurred to me while the Kickstarter was up. I’ll try to get through them all here.

The first, and probably the most powerful, is what it means to say “yes.”

I have made a habit, in life, of going where the doors are open. I did not expect to enter publishing through the doors of a midlist romance publisher. But they said “yes” to me, and there I went. I did not expect to become a freelance writer and editor, but freelance clients said “yes” to me, and there I went.

I did not expect to become an indie author, but readers said “yes” to me, and there I went.

Publishing is organized around saying no. It has to be. As an editor, I get more submissions than I could possibly publish, even if I loved every one of them. As it happens, I don’t love every one of them. So I say no to the ones I don’t love, or I pass them on to others (who will also probably say no to them) if I think they’re very good but I still don’t love them.

This is a terrible thing to do to authors. We ask people to pour their hearts and souls into learning a craft and creating art with it, and then we ask them to come and seek our approval. Then we tell them “no” again and again until they reach the minuscule cross-section of people who would love their book and people in the publishing industry with the power to publish their book.

And then we wonder why some authors are unbearably arrogant or unbearably neurotic.

At any rate, I spent the first decade or so of my writing life being told “no,” over and over and over again. In the face of that, there comes a point where you honestly stop expecting to hear yes.

The first day of my Kickstarter was incredibly emotional for me. I was reasonably certain that, over the course of a month, I could get 25 people to pledge $25 each and get the book funded.

But the number of people who came right out of the gate not just to pledge, but to pledge big, absolutely astonished me. After ten years of being told I wasn’t good enough (or sometimes that I just wasn’t a good fit), I discovered in half a day that people believed in me who I didn’t even know were paying attention to me.

That was an incredible feeling, and it has kept me going for a long, long time.

Second, the Kickstarter taught me that there really is a revolution occurring in the world of arts and music and letters, and that it’s an honor to be a part of it.

I’ve read lots of articles proclaiming that digital publishing is ushering in a new era of something or another. I’ve always taken them with a grain of salt. Every prophet of the new seems to have something to gain from ensuring that it comes to pass. So I never drank the Kool-Aid.

And then, as I started to answer questions about the Soulwoven Kickstarter, I realized something.

The best music I bought in 2013 was all independently produced.

To be sure, I bought some good albums from music labels too. But the best? The most striking? The most inspiring? The most unusual and artistic? Indie. Or at worst, started indie and got picked up by a label after.

I’m not a part of indie music fandom. I know very little about bands, or scenes, or music in general. I have next to no sense of what I should like and what I shouldn’t. I just hear songs (usually on the radio), and then go buy the album if I like them enough.

So if the best songs I was hearing on the radio, which were succeeding against all odds in the land of Clear Channel and label dominance, were indie, that meant something.

I’ve long contended that music is about five years ahead of publishing. Up to now, indie publishing has largely been the breeding ground of the most commercial of commercial fiction. Fifty Shades of Grey, etc. Not authors who claim to be making great art.

But that’s going to change, and I’m excited to watch that wave hit the shore from the inside rather than the outside.

My third and perhaps most contentious Big Thought came about because of who my backers were. I know, personally, 51 of them. And those 51 contributed the lion’s share of the book’s funding.

In my head, I have a voice that tells me my success is therefore invalid. That my book was a pity case. That it was only what personal popularity I possess that motivated anyone to back me. The voice began speaking to me before my Kickstarter even launched.

And you know what? It’s full of it.

On the day the Kickstarter went up, another voice spoke up in my head, and it said, quite clearly: Who did you think your first fans were going to be? The staff of the New York Times Book Review?

That voice knows what it’s talking about. To be an author requires a certain amount of arrogance. You have to believe that you can write something worth reading. If you want to make a living at it, you have to believe that you can do it better than almost everyone else who’s trying the same thing.

That’s enough arrogance. You don’t have to believe you’ll be so good at it that you won’t need the help of your friends and family to succeed.

A lot of success stories start with “Using money borrowed from family and friends.” I didn’t even have to borrow. I’m giving things back, and they’re experiences and objects, for the most part, that no one else will ever get to have.

My fourth, and by far my most important and far-reaching Big Thought, involves the proving of an idea I had two years ago.

In early 2012, I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, and I realized as I watched people fail and fail and fail trying to put up new climbing routes or face death on 8,000-meter peaks that I was jealous of them. Because they weren’t worrying about marketing or careers or star makers or success. They were doing what they thought was awesome. And success, if it came, came later.

That, to me, is what being indie is all about. More importantly, it’s what leads to good art and a sustainable career no matter how you publish.

So I decided not to worry about how I was going to succeed. I decided to just do things I thought were awesome and to trust that, if other people agreed with me, success would follow.

Now it has, and I am immensely honored to have had the support of so many wonderful people in making it happen.

Soulwoven is OUT!

Gentlepersons:

The book is OUT!

Soulwoven is live today in several places. On Kobo. On Amazon. On Barnes & Noble. If you're looking for a good read this weekend, I think we all know where you should turn...

Anyway, that aside, this moment is a big one for me. I'll write more in a bit about what the Kickstarter meant and what Wattpad meant and how this all fits into a life that I decided long ago would be dedicated to telling stories, but for now, I want to share some of my favorite reader quotes with you.

"This is the finest piece of literary work I've read in months."

"Very, very like a piece of steak."

"Once it picks up, it's impossible to put down."

and possibly the best one yet: "THIS BOOK IS SOOO DAMN AWESOME A.K.A COOOOOL!"

As time goes on, Soulwoven's going to get more reviews, from professionals and semiprofessionals and other readers. But these ones came from people who took a chance on it on Wattpad and found something well worth their time.

I hope you'll take a chance on it as well.

Cover Reveal: Soulwoven

Hello, friends and readers!

There is much news to relate on the Soulwoven front. More on that in a few days, however, because today I want to focus on the book's cover!

Boom! The artist Kendall Roderick and I spent a few weeks hammering out concepts and working through revisions before proposing two variants to my Kickstarter backers. They chose this one overwhelmingly (it was my favorite too).

There are a lot of things I love about it. I think it does a good job of evoking some of the things that Soulwoven is other than an epic fantasy: it's modern in its construction and aesthetics and themes, and it's meant to be read seriously. And, of course, it has a dragon.

I'm a big fan of the ink-splatter effect as well (I pushed for it, and Kendall outdid herself making it happen). I wanted to work the idea into the book that the dragon isn't really of the world. It's not a new concept---I first saw it in Stephen King's IT---but it's one that resonated with me. The thing the characters are seeing as a dragon is just the closest shape their minds can give to something much more primal and unyielding than that.

Hence the grunginess and simultaneous definition and lack of borders to the dragon's shape.

Maybe I'm just digging too deeply, but this is part of the fun of indie publishing. I get to art direct my own cover, and that means I get to make it art. Or at least try to.

The print cover will have a slightly different layout. The dragon's body will wrap around the spine and onto the back cover, where it will circle around the marketing text there.

Enjoy! Share! Swoon! Tell your friends! Soulwoven comes out February 21, 2014. You can add it on Goodreads today!

News for the Week of 10.21.13: Soulwoven Comes Together, and All Hallows Write is Soon

Hello, friends and readers!

I was up until 1:00 a.m. last night reading the second book of Soulwoven to my fiancee, so I’m exhausted as I write this today. But it was worth it. The book’s coming together very well. It’s darker and deeper and harder than the first one was, but I think readers liked those things about the first one, and if you did, you’ll like the second even more. I hope to start posting chapters of it on Wattpad around the same time the first book launches commercially (February 2014).

Speaking! Of! Which! The commercial edition of Soulwoven is starting to look really exciting. The new cover is approaching a finished state, and it’s going to blow the doors off the one I’ve got now (especially in print). I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to handle page design and layout, and I’m really excited about the way the whole package is coming together. I’ve always thought of books as pieces of art, of which the text is just the heart. And I think that Soulwoven is turning into a piece of art, and it’s incredibly satisfying to watch.

More news! On Oct. 31, I’ll be staying up all night with a couple other authors for a scary story writing marathon we’re calling All Hallows Write (more info at allhallowswrite.com). That means I should have a new short story up here for you guys on Nov. 1. It’ll be a bit of a departure from my usual style, but I think it’ll still be recognizable as mine, and it’ll still be good. Hopefully. I’ve never tried anything like this before, and that’s half the fun.

Finally: Nadya. Nadya’s mired in the muck of the traditional publishing process, searching for the needle in the haystack that will be the agent who loves her. I’ll know in a month or two whether that’s going to happen. I’ve gotten lots of nibbles so far, but no bites. Everyone has been in concurrence that it’s a good book. It’s just a matter of finding the right home for it.

So there’s more coming from me to you shortly, in one form or another.

Stay tuned, thanks for reading, and if you want to give me a wonderful birthday present, head on over to Amazon and pick up a copy of Three Dances. :-)

Yours dearly,

Jeff

Kickstarter Success!

So as you all can see from the widget over that way ------>

The Soulwoven Kickstarter successfully funded at midnight last night. It's going to take me a few days, I think, to fully process my thoughts on this, because there are a lot of them.

For now, I just want to share a couple of pictures.

This is what Kickstarter success looks like when you're facing a computer screen.

And this is what Kickstarter success looks like if you're a computer screen looking out.

I'll be back soon to tell you what it feels like to be an author who just successfully completed a Kickstarter, but we can start with the following:

It feels great.

-J

Phone blog with pictures!

The Soulwoven Kickstarter is LIVE!

This will be the first of many Soulwoven Kickstarter posts. Because the Kickstarter is now LIVE! You can go here to donate!

A few protips about Kickstarter for the curious and uninitiated:

- You can pledge any amount you like and choose any reward tier that requires that amount or less. So if you want the Founder's Tier reward but were thinking of pledging more than $25, you can do so.

- You can change or cancel your pledge and reward choice any time up until the end of the project funding period.

- You can pay through an Amazon account.

If you're on the fence about pledging, just go and check out the site. I spent a lot of time (and got great help from my fans---thanks guys!) setting up the Kickstarter, and I'm proud of it. It's worth your time to check out, even if all you do is look. :-)

We've got 30 days to make this book a reality. Let's go do it!

And as always, thank you all for making this possible.
-Jeff

The Soulwoven Kickstarter is GO FOR LAUNCH 12:01 a.m. EST August 1!

Dearest readers, 

This is it! The Soulwoven Kickstarter has been green-lit by Kickstarter HQ, and it's going to go live tonight at midnight EST! Backer rewards to include: 

- DRM-free copies of the e-book 

- Signed copies of the paperback 

- Hand-annotated, one-of-a-kind signed copies of the paperback 

- Skype chats with me 

- Recognition by name (or Internet handle, or whatever) on a special thank-you page in the book 

- Access to early drafts of the later books in the Soulwoven story, while there's still time to plead with me to save and/or end lives, romances, & c. 

- And much, much more! 

The best rewards have limited quantities (I can really only make so many of those hand-annotated paperbacks), so make sure you get in early! Kickstarters have a history of leaving latecomers brokenhearted :-(. 

Check back here at midnight for a link to the Kickstarter page, where you'll be able to pledge. 

Thanks for coming on this ride with me, dear readers. You guys gave me the courage to do this, and that's a gift I'll spend the rest of my life paying you back for in story. 

Cheers, A Very Excited Jeff