Why "How To Self-publish" guides systematically give you the wrong advice: Revisiting 1000 true fans

A couple of years ago, in the earliest nanoseconds of the big Kindle bang as Brian Cox might say, you could barely come across a post about self-publishing that didn’t refer to Kevin Kelly’s seminal article “1000 truefans.” These days, mentions are as scarce as a self-published book in Waterstones.

The idea behind 1000 true fans, and earlier versions of the theory (which Kelly outlines at http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/04/the_case_agains.php), is that it is possible for an artist to make a living wage by building and then looking after a small, dedicated following (in this case 1000, but he is not dogmatic) of people all of whom are willing to pay a relatively small amount for your work on a regular basis.

It’s easy to understand why so little is said about 1000 true fans (as well, I’ll admit, as a lack of case studies of those using the model to earn a living). Post-Kindle (I wonder when we will start saying BK and PK, for all it makes me want to sit down with a whopper and do some freerunning to burn it off), advice to self-publishing writers focuses fairly exclusively on maximising revenue from ebooks (in practice, this usually means talking about Kindle).

In this piece, I want to suggest three key points that most advice in the PK era focuses on, all of which is antithetical to the 1000 true fans model, and then next time I want to reclaim the model, looking at what working by it might look like for writers, and arguing that not only might there be some mileage in the economic aspect of the theory, but that this is a very good way for us as artists to do our art.

1. How-to advice focuses on volume – on how to sell more books. Where this is moderated in some way it is in terms of the relationship between volume and price and how that feds into maximised royalties. There is little place for discussion of how to achieve a fixed or maximum number of sales
2. Advice focuses on how to use charts and algorithms to create exposure for books, effectively looking to hit a sweet spot where sales become self-generating, whereas the 1000 true fans model looks at selling only at a very specific, and fully defined, customer base
3. When how-to advice looks at craft, at standards and doing things better, the focus is on objective criteria – professional editing, formatting, proofreading and cover design, for example – all of which are aimed to please a notional idea of a customer. With 1000 true fans, on the other hand, the artist aims to meet subjective criteria or, rather, a single subjective criterion – pleasing their fans. And not some abstract concept of a fan, but their actual fans.

The thing about each of those dichotomies is that we are so used to a particular mindset we don’t even think of them as dichotomies, as choices – in each case we struggle to see the former as anything but the only option. In brief:

1. Surely we all want to maximise sales, after all we want to make a living (how many times did you read that before you saw it was a glaring non sequitur?)
2. Surely the point of marketing is to maximise the return on your effort, and this means learning to use the most efficient sales generators (well this may be a non sequitur also, and it may be wrong about the purpose of marketing, but what it most definitely is, is mistaken about the most efficient sales generators because its still hung up on measuring volume and not percentage of target audience reached
3. But this is incontrovertible, surely? To rise above the slush we have to present our work professionally. Readers notice. Readers matter. Yes they do matter – your actual readers, the ones who will love your work so much they will buy anything else you write. So give them what they love – maybe that *is* well-punctuated and neatly justified text with no typos. I’d wager it’s not though – stop forming some imaginary ideal of a reader (didn’t that go out when Aristotle slam-dunked Plato?) and look at what your readers want (and also not someone else’s readers, people who would think the only great thing about your book was the punctuation).

Next time I’ll take a look at what a writer’s life might look like if they took the 1000 true fans route, and explore a world of crowdfunding, gigs and merchandise, newsletters and a life without Amazon.

Self-publishers fail to earn a fortune shock!

The Taleist today published the results of its survey into self-published authors' earnings and their habits. They asked 1007 authors 61 questions, which mkes it undoubtedly an important event. The headline figure is that self-published authors earn $10,000 a year from their books on average (£6375) whilst half earn under $500. The media is already buzzing with the seeming negativity of this - though in reality it's hardly quantum leaps off the mark of the Society of Authors figures for published authors (£16k mean £4k median).

There are some fairly bland observations - people who write romance earn most by genre, people who write literary fiction don't earn much, you do better if you hire an editor, but the report will no doubt go viral, and for me that is worrying because - whilst it can hardly but wear its unscientific colours on its sleeve, it seems to me much more a "how to" guide than a state of play survey, and that means authors are going to jump on it and maybe overlook many of its gaping holes - by not being exhaustive and rigorous, it's impossible to use the information in this report as a definitive how-to, because it fails to analyze what may be other central contributing factors to the bestsellers' success (in addition, that is, to, DUH, how good the book is as a representative of its type, which I've not seen mentioned in anny of teh coverage so far!!!!)

In addition to the survey size, I can't find the original post asking for respondents on the Taliest website, but the fact the actual report being charged-for at £3.30 a pop raises questions - I'd like to know whether it was made clear to participants if they were undertaling the survey as part of a commercial enterprise, for example. The purpose seems to have been mainly to produce a "secrets of bestselling authors" document rather than a state of play one, as I've mentioned. No problem in that, but this angle and the commercial aspect combined (one can't help but compare it to John Locke's "How I sold a million" only "how people sell millions") need to be taken into account before people simply red the results off the page as if they were instructions.

That said, the conclusions seem sound, if somewhat obvious - romance sells best, you sell more when you use an editor and cover designer. As how-to goes, though, authors would probably be better served by the 99 cents for Locke's book. What we really need for a definitive "secrets of success" guide is a survey that goes right into the detail of metadata, for example. At one of the events at London Book Fair, an Amazon representative said the single best piece of advice he'd give an author trying to make sales on Amazon was get their metadata right. It would be great to take some cross sections within genres and see some segmented data based on review stats, metadata, price, inclusion in charts, promotional sites used (one thing authors desperately need research on is just how effective in the long run paid-for promotions on sites like Kindle Nation Daily are, with control groups and longitudinal data over several years cross-compared with the dates of other major promotions such as Amazon newsletters and sales containing books in the same genre so authors can see the effect of timing their promotion).

One thing that sounds very familiar from listening to self-publishing debates but seems to me to be utterly contentless:

It shouldn't have surprised me that 75% of the royalty pie is going to 10% of authors: that's life in many industries. If I'm being honest, though, I'd hoped self-publishing might be a bit more democratic

What is that supposed to mean? That they hoped in a self-publishing world everyone would sell exactly the same amount of books? (never going to happen) That they hoped everyone would appear in the same marketplace? (they do) That they hoped sales would be less affected by variables reflective of a profesisonal attitude like getting in a cover designer and editor? (maybe they hoped it but I'm sure readers didn't) That they hoped sales would be more bunched with less outlier-skewing? (they are but the survey is too small and self-selecting to reflect that)

This report is interesting and I would advise athors to read the coverage with interest. Worth £3.30? Maybe, but only if you go in with eyes wide open about what you can and can't expect to get out of it.

And a note of scepticism - many of the questions I want to ask, even ones I've raised here, would no doubt be answered by thereport's authors with the line if you buy the report, you'll find out" - and that most definitely is not the mark of research done for the sake of information.