Build A Career As An Author

Finding Readers Online And Selling Them Books

Amongst the tens of thousands of authors a year who collect advances and see their books published by the trades, only a handful are truly in control of their own careers as authors. The rest live from advance to advance, recasting their work to meet the demands of the market, or their publisher's perceptions of those demands. Some are typecast as tightly as Hollywood villains, forced to write the same book over and over again, with just enough of a twist that a publisher can ethically package it in a new cover. Many are addicted to watching their Amazon sales rank, because it's the only feedback they get on how the book is selling until the next quarterly or semi-annual royalty statement shows up. Mid-list fiction authors can slowly build up a steady income from their backlist titles, without ever becoming stars, and the same is true for some literary nonfiction writers. But for most of us, publishing is a "what have you done for me lately" career, where both future income and opportunities are impacted by how our books sell in the next twelve months. Accountants and editors have short memories.

Most trade published books don't last a year on bookstore shelves, many never achieve significant exposure to start with. Authors who throw themselves into the job of promoting their books with a vengeance greatly increase their chances of success, because relatively small differences in unit sales, as little as a few hundred copies a year, can make the difference between a book holding onto shelf space or being remaindered and taken out of print. The chain stores have computer software monitoring the sales of books, and with hundreds of stores in their chains, they can determine within just a couple months whether a title merits space in their business model. One day, they may make that decision within a few weeks. And the only control the author has over the outcome is to sell, sell, sell. If the market turns out to be smaller than the publisher expected, if too many competing titles appear, if trends change or the weather is bad during holiday season, the author's career may come grinding to a halt. When an author depends on a publisher to provide for the future, most of the time, the author will be disappointed.

With the exception of works by superstar literary authors, nonfiction books in edition (those getting updated and released in a new edition on a regular basis), and certain education areas, publishing is a bit of a crapshoot for all involved. Publishers can try to increase the odds of a new title becoming a success by investing above average money in promotion and a large print-run to convince buyers that they are serious, but it makes failure doubly expensive when it backfires. The obsession publishers have with signing authors who have a platform of their own is to spread the marketing risk. The publisher knows how many sales they can expect their catalog and their sales reps to generate, but the author platform is an attractive unknown. An author who can get serious media exposure, TV, radio and print, can generate a lot more sales for a book that a salesman armed with cover art and a blurb. But that media exposure isn't something most authors can count on, it's not even something most authors can really plan for. It requires a confluence of timing, luck, interpersonal skills and a killer instinct for self promotion.

I don't like luck. I don't like when I ask somebody how they got from point A to point B, get a long winded explanation of pains endured and plans upset, and come away with the understanding that they got lucky. You can't plan on getting lucky. Lets take the example of an author recording progress in a daily diary:

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Day 1 - nothing.

Day 2 - nothing.

....

Day 237 - nothing.

Day 238 - nothing.

Day 239 - breakthrough! All of my suffering and hard work paid off, I'm going to be on the XYZ show

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What happened is the author got lucky. While the XYZ show may or may not put the author over the top and get sales rolling, the author didn't get there through following a course of action. That diary would have looked like

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Day 1 - Called the hometown newspaper to talk about my book. Got laughed at. Called the free newspaper they hand out in the supermarket and convinced them that I was a local person of interest. Phone interview went well.

Day 2 - Talked to managers at all the local bookstores to do reading. Only one was willing to host me, and only if I provided free coffee and donuts. I agreed. Owner told me the local cable access might cover the event if I begged nicely. Will follow up.

....

Day 237 - The plastic surgery made all the difference in the world. I feel like a new person. Good timing, now that the divorce is going through. Never knew "emotional abandonment brought on by book promotion activity" could be a cause!

Day 238 - Danced all night with smelly people in the "in" bar, again. Old hometown newspaper called begging for an interview, again. Went home with some assistant to an assistant, again

Day 239 - breakthrough! All of my suffering and hard work paid off, I'm going to be on the XYZ show.

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Now, I don't recommend the second course or action and I've got my doubts it would work with any great consistency, but the result would have been achieved through action, not luck.

As an individual author, you can't do everything and do it well. You might not be able to do anything well, so you have to prioritize where to put your efforts. I only have so much time a day I can spend staring at a computer screen, and I don't spend any of it haunting online forums or participating in discussion groups for the sole purpose of getting my name and my website in front of people. If I issue one press release a year, that's a lot, and I wouldn't know my knee from my elbow on MySpace, YouTube or FaceBook. There are lots of ways to get the word out, they all take work, but none of them have the permanence of building your own little piece of real estate on the Internet.

(I think I'll take out this next part and make it a blog post someday)

To put some dollars and sense into the argument, let me offer you a hypothetical choice and look at some factors that influence the outcomes. If you could choose between having a book published in two years that would bring you $50K in income that year, or a website bringing you 5,000 visitors a day from honest organic search, which would you choose? To put it in context, $50K net from a single title in a year would put you in the top 1% earning authors for the year. Sure, there will be some superstars earning millions, but while those authors account for a real percentage of the publishing industry's sales, they don't account for a significant percentage of authors. On the other hand, 5,000 organic search visitors a day pales in comparison to the millions of visitors a day that visit to portals, retailers, and popular social networking sites, but it's 5,000 largely new pairs of eyeballs who may be interested in what you're writing about.

If I was given the choice, and the book bringing in $50K of net was a trade published fiction title, I would go with the book. To get to $50K of net in a year as a trade author, you need a solid five figures sales number, probably over 25,000 copies unless you had a heck of a good contract. That's a solid success for a first novel, and even if sales tail of radically, it pretty likely that you'll get an offer to write a couple more books, you may even be locked into the same publisher by the contract. If your goal is succeeding as a novelist, commercial success is measure by the number of books you sell. You've already "made it" as much as a new novelist can hope, and you can always build a platform around your newfound popularity after the fact.

But let's say the book bringing in $50K was of net was a trade published nonfiction title. I would take the solid website without another thought. Trade nonfiction tends to be much trendier than authors realize. With the exception of some literary nonfiction writers, and books by pundits who have extensive media platforms in place based on television or radio, there's little chance to build a career around a nonfiction title. Books that go into multiple editions can provide steady employment for authors, but that career path isn't in the author's control, and is usually short lived. The nonfiction authors you see who ave books appearing in the 12th or 18th edition normally have a career of public speaking and giving seminars that's tightly integrated with the title.

The most aggressive salesman in the world can't sell refrigerators to Eskimos if he can't find any Eskimos. The Internet is littered with websites that are nothing more than advertisements pitching some product or service. When an author puts up a website that consists of nothing but teasers, or "long copy" as it's called in the advertising industry, it's going to fail. While the sell-through, the success rate of closing a sale to visitors, may be relatively high, the number of visitors from the search engines will be abysmally low. It doesn't matter how much you tweak your sales copy, how slick your storefront looks, whether or not you take all major and minor credit cards. You can't sell books to people if they aren't visiting your website, and nobody is going to send their friends to visit your advertisement. Most importantly of all, an advertisement is never going to serve as a platform.

So the way to publishing nirvana is through self-abegnation and charitable works online. Is that what I'm saying? Only in the same sense that being a good person and helping your neighbors can bring you respect in your community. Respect is just as important in the online world as it is on Main Street, even more to authors who don't have any business downtown. The respect and links of your peers is critical to establish your website in a good neighborhood and bring you organic search visitors, but what happens when they show up at your resource. What's in it for you?

My publishing website averages around 5,000 visitors a day steered my way by search engines, year-in, year-out. Given the number of subjects I've written about over the years, it's not unlike having a small town newspaper, but one that I don't have to publish every day. With the exception of blogging, I'll go months at a time without updating a single page on my website, yet I can demonstrate the sort of traffic that brings tears to an acquisitions editor's eyes. So maybe you're thinking, I'm selling 500 books a day and raking it in. You'd be high by two orders of magnitude, I get a documented book sale to less than one in a thousand visitors, and I'm proud of the fact. My website is not some giant book advertisement, in fact, I haven't published a book on anything related to most of the topics I write about. And that's why I get the number of visitors I do, and that's why any new subject I write about gets off to a running start for search engine visitors. My publishing website is a resource, not a book advertisement.

But I do sell over a thousand books a year as a documented result people finding my website through search engines. The thousand books only includes books that I sell directly to individuals by mail order and Amazon sales to customers who go directly from my website to Amazon by clicking the link I provide and purchase the book. If I hadn't intentionally cut back on direct sales by raising my prices a couple years ago, that number might be over two thousand, but order fulfillment and customer service was proving to be a headache. Without the walk-in traffic generated by my website, Barnes&Noble would never have started stocking one of my titles, as I've never approached them to do so, generated a book catalog, or jumped through any of the hoops that publishers associate with bookstore stocking. Likewise, the half-dozen or a dozen colleges using one of my titles as a course text would never have started if the instructors hadn't come across my online content and requested review copies.

The balance between the free resource and commercial aspects of your website may be difficult to strike, but it's not some delicate negotiation that will result in ruin and loss of all your hard work should you push a little too hard on one side of the see-saw. But the philosophy that's worked best with every website launch I'm aware of, including some of the big billion dollar IPOs, is "get the traffic first, monetize second." This turns out to be a great formula for authors who don't know much about the Internet because it maintains the focus on the important part, getting the visitors. There's no penalty for not maximizing the income potential of your website, and it can actually help you win visitors if your site tends more to the hobby/enthusiast side than to the profit motive.

You can buy visitors with advertising, but the profit margins in books rarely justify the expense, even if you're a self publisher. You may also find yourself in the position of the refrigerator salesman who makes that mythical sale in the frozen tundra, but is left with a hollow feeling when the euphoria fades. If you spend time researching Internet business opportunities, you're going to find that most of them are based on trying to out-clever the next black hat guy in the short term, in a world full of clever guys. It has nothing to do with building a platform as an author, unless you're hoping to write a book with a title like, "Waiting for the FBI to knock on my door."

I've made small purchases of Internet search advertising in the past through Google and Yahoo! primarily for the sake of doing market research on search terms. If you're willing to pay more than other bidders for a search term, and your advertisement gets little or no actions, it's a pretty good bet that nobody is searching on that term. This is very useful information for a author with limited time trying to build a platform and planning on putting all the eggs in one basket. You don't want to go with a basket that people would just kick out of the way if they saw it lying in the street. But I've also known authors who have spent thousands of dollars trying to raise the sales of published books with search advertising and have failed to sell a handful of books. Paying for people to come to your website is a completely different business model than getting them for free, and it's one you have to approach a few dollars at a time, measuring the results. Deciding that your're willing to spend $X dollars promoting a book and setting up a campaign with that budget is a guaranteed way to throw your money away. If it was that easy to sell books, everybody would be a successful author.

Although I almost hate to mention it, there's another compelling reason for authors to practically write their books online, with draft chapters or rough research notes. Like most authors working on most books, the work might stretch into years, and you may never even finish. But during that time, the website can start working for you, raising your profile and through feedback, helping you write a better book. The book you may have given up on from the fear that nobody would ever read it, could turn into the first book you finish thanks to Internet fans cheering you on. And when a publisher decides they need to publish books to have a presence in a new market segment, and they don't have any authors in the stable raring to go, you better believe the Internet is one of the places a savvy editor will look to check for candidates. An unfinished book on your hard drive isn't worth the electrons that recorded it. An unfinished book on the Internet can be a vital piece of a platform, if not the whole thing.