I've been writing a lot for other blogs the last few weeks, so I thought it might be an idea in these cases to act as a sort of aggregation site so people can have a read, but can do so on the actual site, and with any luck discover some amazing new sites as a result.
First off, I wrote a piece called "The Large Middle" for Words With Jam, a fantastic writers' magazine for which I write a column on social media and live reading. The piece argues that the real winners in the epublishing revolution are midlst authors.
Here's a sample:
"There are two reasons why literary midlisters were Kindle pioneers – they have a natural inclination to the new, and they of all groups they had the strongest disaffection with the old industry. So they were the first to head for the new frontier...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE
Read Words With Jam Magazine here
Showing posts with label long tail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label long tail. Show all posts
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Saturday, 26 September 2009
You get ZERO for FREE
All three of the first Year Zero Writers novels - Benny Platonov, Glimpses of a Floating World, and Songs from the Other Side of the Wall - are now available as ebooks for free.
I want to take a moment to explain why. Inevitably this will mean rehashing some arguments I've made on this blog, and on others. So if you've heard it all before, please bear with me. Because I want to give a list of reasons and starting points for conversation, I won't be going into too much detail. Not because there isn't any, but because that would make the post way too long.
So, why decide to make our work free? (In electronic format - you can, of course, still buy the paperbacks) Of cousre, these reasons don't just apply to us - go forth and make your books free.
Here's my Free Manifesto:
1. People want content to be free. They expect content to be free. As hardware tech advances and people fall in love with it, the hunger for free content grows. I'm going to call this phenomenon FREED. And FREED IS GOOD. It's a wave the new writer can ride.
2. For a new writer, the choice isn't between giving your book away and having people pay for it. It's between giving your book away (and maybe getting some readers), and having no one read your book. Why should someone pay money for a book by someone they don't know? The answer is they won't. Let them get to know you.
3. File-sharing is a fact of life. Embrace it as a way to get your book read. Make it easy for people to do. It's NOT true they'll file share YOUR book anyway if you protect it. More's the pity. They won't. They'll ignore it and file-share Dan Brown/Stephanie Meyer instead.
4. Free does not devalue something. The value of culture isn't in what you pay for it. More importantly, it's not even PERCEIVED to be in what you pay for it. What we value most is what we have a personla and emotional connection to. If you're an author, it's THAT you should be trying to reproduce and not a sense fo "having paid for something". That's what I mean when I encourage writers 1. to engage their readers and 2. to try and recreate the festival spirit. Soem people call it "adding value". Yes, increased money is a result, but that's not the aim - the aim is to "add attachment".
5. Freemium goes with 1,000 true fans like hand in a tight, sheer, silky glove. Jargon apologies. Freemium is the term coined, I believe, by Chris "Long Tail" Anderson to describe the business model by which you give something away for free in one format, with the intention of selling it n another (paperbacks etc).1,000 true fans is Kevin Kelly's idea that to make a living from your creativity you only actually need 1,000 true fans who will pay for your work. Clearly these two ideas marry up nicely. If you give your work away for free, not everyone who takes it will aslo pay. But you don't need them to. If you've got a great product, and back it up with direct engagement with your readers through your blog, book tours, other events, you will build a following of true fans who WILL pay - for the paperback - and more.
6. Free helps us sever the link once and for all between culture and money. At a time when increasing internet access starts to outstrip access to banking, this is, on a global social level, essential. As creatives from all over the world acn put their work out there, and consumers seek to remunerate them, if we rely on the old equation of value and money, the only model available will be to go through third party conversion agents. We will see the developing world's creativity raped for profit in the exact same way as happened to its natural resources centuries ago. We need a new way fo turning the desire to reward into benefit for the producer; and whilst money plays part of that role, it can't be the only part.
7. The big one (and the one most likely to change in coming years) is timing. I won't claim ebooks are THE future. I don't think they are. Not in their current form (the future is intelligent paper). BUT they are about to undergo a mini explosion. As are sites where readers find and promote content they love. The effect of that is simple - if your material's out there now, as the medium grows, the effect of your presence early in the game will be multiplied. I've paid serious attention to the Indie ebook market for about 3 weeks. And I can already tell you who the "players" are, and there aren't many. The chances of great content being discovered and creating a buzz is still high. BUT ONLY IF IT'S THERE and ONLY IF IT'S FREE. And out of that soup, a whole new landscape will emerge. As with satellite TV and internet provision, it's at the start of the tipping point that it's most important to focus solely on market share. And that's where we are now. Now is the time to stake your claim.
I want to take a moment to explain why. Inevitably this will mean rehashing some arguments I've made on this blog, and on others. So if you've heard it all before, please bear with me. Because I want to give a list of reasons and starting points for conversation, I won't be going into too much detail. Not because there isn't any, but because that would make the post way too long.
So, why decide to make our work free? (In electronic format - you can, of course, still buy the paperbacks) Of cousre, these reasons don't just apply to us - go forth and make your books free.
Here's my Free Manifesto:
1. People want content to be free. They expect content to be free. As hardware tech advances and people fall in love with it, the hunger for free content grows. I'm going to call this phenomenon FREED. And FREED IS GOOD. It's a wave the new writer can ride.
2. For a new writer, the choice isn't between giving your book away and having people pay for it. It's between giving your book away (and maybe getting some readers), and having no one read your book. Why should someone pay money for a book by someone they don't know? The answer is they won't. Let them get to know you.
3. File-sharing is a fact of life. Embrace it as a way to get your book read. Make it easy for people to do. It's NOT true they'll file share YOUR book anyway if you protect it. More's the pity. They won't. They'll ignore it and file-share Dan Brown/Stephanie Meyer instead.
4. Free does not devalue something. The value of culture isn't in what you pay for it. More importantly, it's not even PERCEIVED to be in what you pay for it. What we value most is what we have a personla and emotional connection to. If you're an author, it's THAT you should be trying to reproduce and not a sense fo "having paid for something". That's what I mean when I encourage writers 1. to engage their readers and 2. to try and recreate the festival spirit. Soem people call it "adding value". Yes, increased money is a result, but that's not the aim - the aim is to "add attachment".
5. Freemium goes with 1,000 true fans like hand in a tight, sheer, silky glove. Jargon apologies. Freemium is the term coined, I believe, by Chris "Long Tail" Anderson to describe the business model by which you give something away for free in one format, with the intention of selling it n another (paperbacks etc).1,000 true fans is Kevin Kelly's idea that to make a living from your creativity you only actually need 1,000 true fans who will pay for your work. Clearly these two ideas marry up nicely. If you give your work away for free, not everyone who takes it will aslo pay. But you don't need them to. If you've got a great product, and back it up with direct engagement with your readers through your blog, book tours, other events, you will build a following of true fans who WILL pay - for the paperback - and more.
6. Free helps us sever the link once and for all between culture and money. At a time when increasing internet access starts to outstrip access to banking, this is, on a global social level, essential. As creatives from all over the world acn put their work out there, and consumers seek to remunerate them, if we rely on the old equation of value and money, the only model available will be to go through third party conversion agents. We will see the developing world's creativity raped for profit in the exact same way as happened to its natural resources centuries ago. We need a new way fo turning the desire to reward into benefit for the producer; and whilst money plays part of that role, it can't be the only part.
7. The big one (and the one most likely to change in coming years) is timing. I won't claim ebooks are THE future. I don't think they are. Not in their current form (the future is intelligent paper). BUT they are about to undergo a mini explosion. As are sites where readers find and promote content they love. The effect of that is simple - if your material's out there now, as the medium grows, the effect of your presence early in the game will be multiplied. I've paid serious attention to the Indie ebook market for about 3 weeks. And I can already tell you who the "players" are, and there aren't many. The chances of great content being discovered and creating a buzz is still high. BUT ONLY IF IT'S THERE and ONLY IF IT'S FREE. And out of that soup, a whole new landscape will emerge. As with satellite TV and internet provision, it's at the start of the tipping point that it's most important to focus solely on market share. And that's where we are now. Now is the time to stake your claim.
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
A Long Tail needn't make a Big Splash
Last week an agent sent me the most lovely rejection letter. What’s strangest about that sentence? That I should consider a rejection letter lovely (hardly – it was, I won’t quote at length out of courtesy to the agent concerned, but it was), or that I should have written to an agent (I am a firm advocate of the benefits of self-publishing, and I am committed to the self-publishing collective, Year Zero Writers, of which I am part, but whilst the agenting system is part of a machine I don’t really like, there are individual agents I’d give my eye teeth to work with – this is one)?
Digression over. The gist of the rejection letter was that my novel had a super, original voice (which is the nicest thing a writer can hear – maybe my voice is something other than simply loud after all!), and a wonderful atmosphere, and that the agent would love to see my future work, but Songs from the Other Side of the Wall was, alas, just not the kind of book capable of making a “big splash”, and as a result not right for the current climate.
Now it’s not news to me that Songs isn’t an “event” book. If I could pick a perfect review phrase for it, I would pick “achingly beautiful.” It’s the dreamlike story of a teenage girl growing up gay in post-communist Hungary, the imminent death of whose father forces her to choose between past and present; East and West; the family-owned vineyard, or art college with her lover. It is, in other words, the kind of book to sit alongside Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, Alessandro Baricci’s Silk, Marie Darieussecq’s Mal de Mer, Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen – it’s a beautiful “translation table” book that students and the odd middle-aged melancholic would love. Because it’s about the fall of the Berlin Wall and that’s topical (I’m speaking about the book at a conference commemorating the anniversary this week) I figure it would happily sell 5,000 copies rather than the 3,000 it would sell in other years.
No publisher in their right mind would sign an author whose books will (consistently, probably – I like writing dreamy, quirky, pop-culture-heavy, character-based books about Eastern Europe [as anyone who’s got further than chapter one of Agnieszka’s shoes will attest] and have no intention [more to the point no capability] of changing) achieve these figures. There’s a chance – an outside one – that one day I might scoop a minor award for one of these books, and increase its sales tenfold (to a very mediocre 30,000).
In other words, no publisher working on the system of advances and big marketing budgets would be able to sign me without being sectioned by their shareholders. And, as a result, any agent of moderate sanity is equally unlikely to want to chance their arm.
It is this kind of book for which self-publishing could have been made. I need to pay for my ISBN – but that’s it on the essential outlay front. I have the most exquisite cover to hook in readers – designed by the super-talented Sarah E Melville. And I know exactly who my 5,000 readers are – they’re students, people interested in Eastern Europe, and fans of Murakami. So marketing consists of finding those people. And because it’s a genre I will stick to, I’m happy to give stuff away to get fans – if people like this book, they’ll like anything else I write. So marketing consists largely of finding these people and giving away pdfs of my novel. It’s slightly more complicated than that, of course (and my marketing series of posts will look at exact details), but not much.
Once I’ve uploaded the pdf to Lulu’s Print on Demand service, it can sit there indefinitely. And I can do the same for Kindle format. It doesn’t matter that I have a very small market. No one’s lost out by having to pay a big advance, and there’s no big marketing budget (the advantage of a small-market book is that we writers tend to know our market fairly exactly, and once we know them, it’s easy to reach them at little or no cost because there are no fishing expeditions).
So my advice would be – have a little self-knowledge. If your book’s not the next Twilight, Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code then admit it to yourself. Having one of those hard to sell hard to place books needn’t be the end of the road for you, just because an agent won’t (rightly) take you on.
Yes, it’s hard going it alone. But over the next few weeks, I’m going to run a column on my experiences of setting up and getting running a writers’ collective – one great way to help you on your way – not just because you’ll have greater marketing support, but because you should never underestimate the importance of company and not being alone. I hope that’ll help you. That will take my regular Tuesday column slot – 10 Commandments will become Year Zero in a rather Pol-Potian manoeuvre – I’ll also be running posts on marketing for self-publishers that I hope will help anyone thinking of that route. Together, let’s see where we can get in 2009.
And if anyone would like the pdf of Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, just send me an e-mail (songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com). You won’t find yourself on an e-mail list that bombards you with spam – I’ll send you a note when I launch the paper book, with an invite to the party, but that’s it.
Digression over. The gist of the rejection letter was that my novel had a super, original voice (which is the nicest thing a writer can hear – maybe my voice is something other than simply loud after all!), and a wonderful atmosphere, and that the agent would love to see my future work, but Songs from the Other Side of the Wall was, alas, just not the kind of book capable of making a “big splash”, and as a result not right for the current climate.
Now it’s not news to me that Songs isn’t an “event” book. If I could pick a perfect review phrase for it, I would pick “achingly beautiful.” It’s the dreamlike story of a teenage girl growing up gay in post-communist Hungary, the imminent death of whose father forces her to choose between past and present; East and West; the family-owned vineyard, or art college with her lover. It is, in other words, the kind of book to sit alongside Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, Alessandro Baricci’s Silk, Marie Darieussecq’s Mal de Mer, Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen – it’s a beautiful “translation table” book that students and the odd middle-aged melancholic would love. Because it’s about the fall of the Berlin Wall and that’s topical (I’m speaking about the book at a conference commemorating the anniversary this week) I figure it would happily sell 5,000 copies rather than the 3,000 it would sell in other years.
No publisher in their right mind would sign an author whose books will (consistently, probably – I like writing dreamy, quirky, pop-culture-heavy, character-based books about Eastern Europe [as anyone who’s got further than chapter one of Agnieszka’s shoes will attest] and have no intention [more to the point no capability] of changing) achieve these figures. There’s a chance – an outside one – that one day I might scoop a minor award for one of these books, and increase its sales tenfold (to a very mediocre 30,000).
In other words, no publisher working on the system of advances and big marketing budgets would be able to sign me without being sectioned by their shareholders. And, as a result, any agent of moderate sanity is equally unlikely to want to chance their arm.
It is this kind of book for which self-publishing could have been made. I need to pay for my ISBN – but that’s it on the essential outlay front. I have the most exquisite cover to hook in readers – designed by the super-talented Sarah E Melville. And I know exactly who my 5,000 readers are – they’re students, people interested in Eastern Europe, and fans of Murakami. So marketing consists of finding those people. And because it’s a genre I will stick to, I’m happy to give stuff away to get fans – if people like this book, they’ll like anything else I write. So marketing consists largely of finding these people and giving away pdfs of my novel. It’s slightly more complicated than that, of course (and my marketing series of posts will look at exact details), but not much.
Once I’ve uploaded the pdf to Lulu’s Print on Demand service, it can sit there indefinitely. And I can do the same for Kindle format. It doesn’t matter that I have a very small market. No one’s lost out by having to pay a big advance, and there’s no big marketing budget (the advantage of a small-market book is that we writers tend to know our market fairly exactly, and once we know them, it’s easy to reach them at little or no cost because there are no fishing expeditions).
So my advice would be – have a little self-knowledge. If your book’s not the next Twilight, Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code then admit it to yourself. Having one of those hard to sell hard to place books needn’t be the end of the road for you, just because an agent won’t (rightly) take you on.
Yes, it’s hard going it alone. But over the next few weeks, I’m going to run a column on my experiences of setting up and getting running a writers’ collective – one great way to help you on your way – not just because you’ll have greater marketing support, but because you should never underestimate the importance of company and not being alone. I hope that’ll help you. That will take my regular Tuesday column slot – 10 Commandments will become Year Zero in a rather Pol-Potian manoeuvre – I’ll also be running posts on marketing for self-publishers that I hope will help anyone thinking of that route. Together, let’s see where we can get in 2009.
And if anyone would like the pdf of Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, just send me an e-mail (songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com). You won’t find yourself on an e-mail list that bombards you with spam – I’ll send you a note when I launch the paper book, with an invite to the party, but that’s it.
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