The Secret to Independent and Self Publishing... Series!

Last week I alluded to having learned quite a few things about independent publishing lately, so this week I’m going to explain a bit about what that is.

When I started doing independent publishing, I wrote nonfiction books and single, one-off novels.  While I’m proud of these works, and the non-fictions in particular have been met with rave reviews, I’ve learned that these are precisely the sorts of books that are the hardest sells for independent authors and publishers.  What works, in short, are series for niche markets.

You see, major publishers can sell one-off books more effectively because they have a larger marketing budget, and they’re well established in the industry.  They have connections and inroads into distribution channels that give them a virtual monopoly in certain venues.  This is especially prevalent in pre-sales where they are able to get reviewed by major publications that have large subscriber bases and loyal viewers, readers, and followers.  These connections would take individual publishers and authors years to build, if they can build them at all.  Additionally, traditional publishers have large teams of people dedicated only to publishing without the distraction of writing.

Independent authors are trying to get the attention of news reporters, bloggers, show hosts, etc. while continuing to write another book and often while doing a day job as well.  And when they finally break through those barriers and get some coverage, all that effort is rewarded once, and then it’s back to the drawing board for the next story.  Sometimes people who bought one of your books will remember you for the next one.  And Amazon has been great about telling people who buy one book that there’s another book by the same author.  But this all has limited success, especially when your books are not of the same subject.

However, social media gives the author complete control over their promotions.  No longer are you dependent upon news sources to see some value in your product.  You can post about your newest creations online.  The problem with this is two-fold.  First, people don’t like to be sold to while you are on social media.  So you can’t just go on and start saying you have a book to sell.  You have to become a part of the community; like and comment on things other people are posting.  After a while, you can bring up your own book, and if you did it right, you’ll get some sales.  But then that’s it.  You’ve done what you can for that book.  And now you belong to a group you only joined because you wanted to do that one thing.

In my case, I did have three non-fiction books that were all true crime related, so I was able to be a part of the true crime community and talk about each book as it came out.  But this was limited because I couldn’t post too much about each book without giving their content away.  And, to be honest, I’ve never had that big of an interest in the whole world of true crime.  I just happened to have three stories I’m fascinated by that happen to be defined as true crime.  My posts probably reflected the fact that I just wasn’t that interested in the general subject matter.

Also, the only conventions I could take these books to were general book conventions.  There are no true crime conventions, (at least I hope there aren’t,) so I was limited to what I could do online to try to generate interest in these books.

Fiction series for a niche market, however, that’s a different story; one I will get to in my upcoming post next week…

Bringing Pick Your Path Books to E-Readers

When e-readers came out, it seemed that choose your own adventure style books would be an obvious choice.  Rather than having to go to a certain page that corresponds with your choice, you simply press a button.  It would be the book version of a video game.

It turns out, it wasn’t that easy.  Since there are no page numbers in e-readers, one cannot program the book to go to a certain page.  It has to be programmed in.

I met some people online who were making a program for this, and I joined them in creating content to go into their application.  Since I’m building on the Relic Worlds universe, I made three books that followed Lancaster and Little Jack.  The program turned out to be a failure for several reasons, but I had put so much time and effort into these, I didn’t want it all to go to waste.  So I set about finding a way to make them work with e-readers.

At first it was beyond me.  Their program had been quite complicated; an entire app dedicated to choose your own adventure style books.  I needed a programmer, or at least a pre-made template.  I looked high and low and couldn’t find anything.  The answer seemed so close, yet so far away.

Then I was talking with a friend of mine, Brent McKibbin, who’s a bit of a tech genius, and he said it was pretty simple.  All it took was making the various pages you needed to go to into chapter numbers.

You see, all e-readers have a table of contents page.  Each entry has a link to its corresponding chapter.  So you already have linking pages from there.  In a choose your own adventure style book, all you need to do is put those links in the choices readers make.

The first step, of course, was to create the choose your own adventure.  (I call mine Pick Your Path to avoid copyright infringement.)  I will be posting a blog with a link here at a later time going into detail about how I lay out and create a choose your own adventure style book.

Second, I lay it all out on the pages.  After every list of choices I have a page break.  At the start of every segment, I have a new page number.  I do not put page numbers on every page.  This makes finding them easier.  After writing the segment, I place the choices, providing the page numbers they correspond with.  This will, of course, become the paperback version, as the page numbers and choices with the page numbers will correspond correctly to a physical version of the book.  (Note, only place page breaks after choices.  Never place page breaks anywhere else.

Third, I select the first sentence of every segment and make it a chapter heading.  (I’ll put the technical aspects of this in another blog and connect it here.)  I title each chapter heading after its corresponding page number.  (Leave the page numbers there for now.)

Fourth, at every choice, I select the choice and link it to the page number it’s supposed to go to.  I then delete the page number listed after the choice.  (But I still leave the page numbers at the tops of every page.)

Fifth, When I have gone through and linked every choice with a page, I then delete every page number from the tops of every page.  Now, when a reader reads my book, they’ll go through the beginning, then reach the point where there are choices and it’ll stop.  The choices will be highlighted, and when the reader touches one of them, it’ll take them to that choice.

At this point, readers will be able to swipe to the next page past the choices.  This can be left there with an explanation at the beginning that readers aren’t supposed to do this.  However, it can be blocked through technical means.  This is a bit more complicated, which I’ll go into in the technical entry.

Putting Together an Audio Book

Audible now distributes independently published audiobooks, which is great news for us independent authors.  Now all we need to do is read our books into a microphone to distribute them, right?

Turns out, it’s a bit harder than that; at least for those of us who have a bad stammer and aren’t used to acting.

The first thing we did was made my computer cabinet into a mini studio.  My neighbor at the time I did this happened to be a semi-professional recording artist.  Though I didn’t have a recording studio, I have doors on my cabinet that can be closed in around me, and when he put blankets on each door and above me, the recording into a mic in front of my screen looked great.  I read the book off the monitor as I spoke just above the microphone.  (Staying above it reduces pops; as does having a sock over the microphone.

Reading wasn’t so difficult; although I struggled with my mild form of dyslexia, stumbling over my words constantly.  I would have to fix it in post.  This involved going through after I was completely done and cutting every point where I stammered.  Recording took weeks, but post took months; so much so that the entire process took me more than a year and a half.  Now I know why audiobooks are so expensive.

I had done this one myself instead of getting an actor because I wanted to see the whole process.  (Also, for some reason, when I started it I thought it would go faster that way.  And I’m in the book, so I figured it would sound better when I said “I” to actually be the one speaking.)  I learned partway through that you can go to Audible and hook up with a reader through them.  Audible even splits the profits between you.  That’s what I will be doing from now on.