Digital Delta: Charting a course through the changing world of publishing.
The New Publisher: Innovation and Incompetence
Feb 17th
Yesterday, the Author’s Guild placed an ill-advised blog entry on their site. It’s such an obvious piece of fluff propaganda that it’s being picked apart around the internet. One of the better commentaries was penned by Passive Guy over on his blog.
I’ll agree with PG’s summary: the writer of said post was clueless.
PG hit the main points pretty well (and I recommend his article), but I want to expand on a couple of them.
Amazon’s first Kindle, released in November 2007, was certainly innovative, but its key breakthrough wasn’t any particular piece of technology. Sony had already commercialized e-ink display screens for handheld e-books in September 2006. (E Ink, a Cambridge company co-founded by MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson developed the displays used by both companies.) Amazon’s leap was to marry e-ink displays to another existing technology, wireless connectivity, to bring e-book shopping and downloading right to the handheld device.
Amazon’s innovation, in other words, was to untether the Sony device and put a virtual store inside it.
Not even close.
Amazon produced a decent device, yes. But Amazon’s primary innovation was to create a better user experience on their web store than anyone else. It’s why they’ve succeeded as well in online retail as they have. Yes, lower prices is part of that user experience. But Amazon customers routinely shop there even for items which are the same price elsewhere.
Why?
Because Amazon has the best designed retail website in the world.
It’s not about the device. It’s about the user experience.
Pricing – Predatory vs Smart
The article goes on to say:
But it was even worse than that. Amazon had deployed its buy-button removal weapon before, but never so publicly, never on such a massive scale, and never (to our knowledge) as a means of shielding its ability to use a separate anticompetitive tactic: its practice of routinely selling e-books at a loss. Such practices, commonly known as predatory pricing, are a means of using superior capital resources not to innovate nor to provide better service, but to weaken or eliminate competition.
Pricing your products lower to sell more is not an Amazon innovation. Local gas stations routinely battle each other to have the lowest price per gallon on gasoline. I worked at a convenience store, many years ago, which charged less for gallons of milk than any other store in the area. They lost money on the milk. They earned money on everything else customers bought when they came in for the milk.
Walmart is one of the best known examples of price reduction as a tool to build retail. Walmart routinely offers prices on most of their goods lower than other retailers in an area. They’ve built an enormous economy of scale to accomplish this, leveraging their ability to sell massive quantities of product to get that product at lower prices and sell it at lower margins.
Online sales use a different method to achieve lower prices. Economy of scale is less important than economy of expenses. Freed of physical stores, online retailers have dramatically reduced costs to do business. They convert those reduced expenses into an ability to price their goods at lower retail costs to the customer.
This is an advantage which brick and mortar retail cannot compete with. The prognosis for brick and mortar retail? Anything which CAN be sold effectively online, WILL be sold online. Some small retail establishments will be able to survive in niche markets, but brick and mortar chains cannot compete with online retail.
It’s not predatory pricing. It’s smart pricing. Amazon turned a profit last year. B&N did not. Amazon is not the company with issues about how it prices its products…
Who is REALLY locking customers in?
Predatory pricing could, in turn, help Amazon buttress its other critical barrier to entry into the e-book marketplace: its use of a proprietary e-book format, rather than the industry-standard epub format. Kindle owners would naturally be reluctant to switch to incompatible devices after they had sunk money into a personal e-library of Kindle editions. Viewed this way, Amazon’s costs incurred in selling e-books at a loss amounted to an investment in erecting walls around its young, booming e-book marketplace. The more Amazon succeeded in locking customers in to Kindle’s device and format, the less rewarding the market for any potential competitor. Amazon’s investment could pay off handsomely as the e-book market took off.
Again, no. A failure to think this through seems typical here, but let’s consider the issue of formats for a moment.
First, let’s look at this from a publishers’ perspective. Publishers want to sell books. They ought to want those books to be as easy for readers to use, and transport from device to device, as possible. Instead, major publishers are universally adding DRM to their ebooks.
Now, understand, the Amazon format is almost identical to the epub. Converting one to another is easy, and fast. There are free software packages which can convert your entire library at the touch of a button. Users know this – it’s one reason why DRM-free books are more popular with readers, and why indie publishers add the line “DRM free” in their product description.
By adding DRM, publishers are helping Amazon lock customers into the Amazon system. The DRM generates the customer lock. Without DRM, users could easily move the book over to their new Nook, or Kobo reader, or whatever. With DRM as a barrier to exit, however, customers are loathe to leave the Kindle system for a new device.
In other words, publishers are directly contributing to the strength of Amazon’s position by using a technology (DRM) already proven to have no effect in reducing piracy.
Imitating roadkill is not an effective business strategy.
A truly competitive, open market has no indispensable player that can call the shots. The book publishing industry has such a player, and Amazon is poised and by all appearances eager to use its muscle to rip up the remaining physical infrastructure of book retailing and the vital book-browsing ecosystem it supports.
Here’s the thing. Amazon isn’t so much ripping up competitors as it is stepping over them, while they lie carpet-like on the floor.
Imitating roadkill is not an effective business strategy.
For bookstores? We know the brick and mortar bookstore is dying fast. We know online bookstores are the new thing, for ebooks and print books. Already, most books are bought online in the US, and that percentage will only grow.
So why, then, are there so few decent online bookstores?
Comparing Kobo, iBookstore, B&N.com, and most other online bookstores with Amazon is like comparing my three year old’s tricycle with a Jaguar or Ferrari. The other sites all look decent, mind you. But they lack the power, tools, features, content, and overall *feel* of a good store. Amazon has probably the best online retail store in the world. All a competitor has to do is copy them, and they’d at least be in the ball game with a fighting chance. Instead, they’ve produced webstores which simply don’t do the job well. They’re frustrating to use. They don’t allow users to browse well. They are not good shopping experiences.
Let’s bring it back around to publishers a sec. It’s ironic that the Author’s Guild is complaining about an Amazon monopoly, when the folks actually being investigated in the US and EU are the Big Publishers and Apple, for allegedly colluding to fix prices through the agency system they introduced and then forced on Amazon.
But the agency system is a triple disaster for publishers. On the one hand, it set them up for a class action lawsuit – led by Amazon! – and Justice Dept. investigations. On the other hand, it allowed publishers to set fixed prices that Amazon could not discount, which has resulted in self published books (generally about 1/3 to 1/2 the price of those from major publishers) taking a majority of ebook sales in many types of ebooks (of the top 200 bestselling science fiction ebooks on Amazon, 152 were self published as of Feb 14th 2012; across all fiction genres, the top 25 list in each genre was 72-92% self published in January).
More insidiously, the agency system actually shored up Amazon’s market control.
How?
Because the agency system ensures that all ebooks are priced the same everywhere. Retailers cannot discount them, unless they find the book someplace elsewhere at a lower price. When all prices are the same everywhere on a product, what sells goods?
Service. Convenience. Ease of use. Powerful user tools, for an internet site.
All things Amazon has in spades, and all things none of their competitors have been able to manage. The result is predictable: Amazon has easily managed a majority share of ebook sales. They’ve had time to get popular now, so they’ll be harder to knock out of that seat than ever. But there’s no reason a new online bookstore couldn’t get some serious market share away from Amazon or (more likely) Amazon’s sleeping competitors. All the new store would have to do is provide as stellar a shopping experience as Amazon does. Ideally, an even more stellar one. When prices are the same everywhere, it all boils down to the user experience, and right now, no other store comes close to Amazon.
Honestly, I’d love to be in that field right now. I think the ebook world is ripe for a hot new company to come up and smack some heads around. More, I think Amazon would welcome some serious competition, even if it came from a small spitfire company. Remember, Amazon started as a small spitfire company, too. They know too well that companies which linger for long without serious competition begin to slow down and stop innovating, which is death when that next spitfire rolls up his sleeves and goes to work. And Amazon certainly isn’t getting any competition from other bookstores right now.
They’re not getting any real competition from major publishers in that business, either. You’d think, if a new publisher sprang up offering better royalty rates, better contract terms, and better marketing efforts, that big publishers would at least think about stepping up their game. Instead? No change. So big publishers are faced with three issues:
- Midlist writers leaving them to self publish.
- Bestsellers leaving to go publish with Amazon imprints.
- The sure and certain knowledge that most books they turn down will be sitting there for sale as competition soon afterward. Probably at 1/3 to 1/2 the price they sell books, too.
But like the other bookstores, publishers seem more inclined to play carpet than they are to step up and actually compete.
Folks, I don’t have time for people who refuse to compete, and then whine because someone else is doing better than them.
Publishers and bookstores alike can survive – and thrive – in this, if they look at the Amazon moves as challenges to be matched and surpassed, rather than unfair business practices. You want to win, get in the game. Otherwise, go home and stop whining.
The New Publisher: Selling to Readers
Feb 2nd
This is the beginning of a new series I’ll be following up on regularly. Here, I’ll be writing about publishers: big, small, and self. How they fit into the new publishing paradigm. What they can do to maximize their success given all the changes we’re seeing today. About what big publishers can learn from smaller presses, smaller presses can learn from self publishers, and self publishers can learn from everone else. We’re living in a fascinating time of epic change. And as with any industry with great disruption, publishing will see some groups able to leverage the change for greater success, while others remain mired in past practices and fail.
Book Marketing – The Old Way
For the last twenty years, most publishers in the United States have been heavily engaged in a vibrant marketing business. This book industry has spawned numerous book fairs, where publishers push their newest releases. Certain publications with only a few thousand readers each month are considered both successful and highly important, because they are a medium through which publishers can reach key book buyers. The entire model has been one of publishers producing books and then selling their wares to a very slim number of major book buyers at chain markets – Borders, Books a Million, Barnes and Nobles, B Dalton, Waldenbooks – and non-bookstore chains like Walmart and Target.
Over the last decade we’ve seen that market compress. Daltons and Waldenbooks went away, which was fine because they were simply absorbed by bigger competitors. Online bookstores were OK as well, because they were just more shelf space to sell books. Even Borders going under would not have been a disaster under the old model – loss of shelf space for a while, yes, but the market would recover.
But over the last ten years, things have been changing. Book buying has moved increasingly online. By some estimates, Amazon alone may sell half of all books in the US today, ignoring all other online booksellers. Online bookstores have several key advantages over brick and mortar stores:
- They have lower overhead, so they can charge less for product and still make money.
- They have centralized storage of books rather than distributed storage, therefore the shelf space is effectively unlimited. With ebooks, this has grown even more true.
- They represent an easy way for customers to browse books and get nearly any book they could want.
Which is all great for readers. But online bookstores represent a particular problem for publishers, because of that virtually unlimited shelf space. You don’t need to sell books to an online retailer. They take all of them. They take every major publisher release, all the small press releases, and are now actively taking books even from self published authors and giving them the same shelf space as any NYC-published book.
Bookstores Are Changing
Right now, the last bastion of chain bookstores is in trouble: B&N is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The fact that they’re considering spinning off their Nook as its own business spells out clearly that they’re in trouble. The Nook IS the future for B&N. The only reason to spin it out is if they believe they cannot save the rest of the company, and are trying to salvage what they can before the rest goes under.
Indie bookstores are going under at a faster rate than ever before, and although we’re seeing a surge of new stores open in the wake of Borders closing, and will probably see more open after B&N dumps the brick and mortar stores (or folds entirely), most of those will simply not be able to succeed in an environment where books are cheaper online, and online stores offer more breadth of availability.
The only brick and mortar bookstore which can survive these changes will be one which can offer books as cheap as Amazon, offer immediate access to as many books as Amazon, and still remain profitable. A difficult proposition (albeit not an impossible one).
Suddenly, we’re looking at a near future where 80-90% or more of books might be purchased online (ebooks and print).
Now, on the one hand, that’s OK. Publishers will still have a great outlet for books. It’ll be online instead of in brick retail, but the venues are still there. But on the other hand, it’s a problem because most publishers have spent a very long time becoming expert marketers…
…to chain bookstores.
Which aren’t going to exist much longer.
Without the bookstore chains, all that marketing experience is out the window. There’s no need for it, anymore, not when anyone can upload a book to online bookstores as easily as they can. There’s no selling anymore. Suddenly the book fairs and expos are pointless. Kirkus loses its primary purpose (helping publishers sell books to retail chains). The massive industry built around that type of marketing is undermined and loses value. It’s already lost value, and loses more with every brick bookstore closure and every new customer who moves to ebooks or online print book buying.
New Marketing for the New Publisher
Writers have been able to be their own publishers for a very long time now. Editing, cover art, and book formatting have always been available for people who wanted to create their own books. But in the past, almost all of these efforts failed, earning the (justly) derided title of “vanity publishing”. Writers, and even to some degree small publishers, lacked one key ingredient: distribution. Major publishers had a virtual lock on book distribution. This has for decades been the primary value publishers offer to writers; everything else they do can be outsourced.
When the distribution lock went away with the dominance of online bookstores, it’s left publishers in something of a pickle. Everything they offer, writers can now do for themselves, and generally do cheaper. A major topic last month at Digital Book World was what, if anything, publishers could offer writers to retain a good sense of value on their side of the deal?
I believe that the answer is marketing. But not the marketing of last year, done to bookstore chains that are dead or dying. Rather, I believe publishers must learn to market themselves effectively to readers.
Understand, most publishers haven’t done much of this sort of work for a very long time. There’s a serious learning curve attached. But writers out there are definitely seeing the value which an excellent marketing department can give their books. Ridan Publishing has seen virtually every book they have launched reach its respective genre bestseller list, and is now being approached by “name” fantasy and science fiction writers like Joe Haldeman interested in working with them. That’s an enormous coup for a small press like Ridan. But writers as a whole seem to feel that their superb marketing department is well worth the 30% of net that Ridan keeps.
Yes, they keep less than half what a major publisher does for ebook sales, even though they do substantially more. And that’s the sort of math I believe publishers are going to need to get used to in the near future; but pricing and royalty shares should be their own post.
Marketing isn’t about selling to bookstores anymore. It’s about reaching readers.
1) It’s about building brand recognition as a publisher. Right now, most readers don’t recognize the names of most publishers, or even care who published a given book. With a few exceptions (certain romance presses, and some science fiction publishers like Baen), readers buy a book for the author, not the publisher. This element is critical to change. Publishers need to build brand loyalty among readers to their specific imprints. What this means, for a large publisher, is that a central access point of shared resources should be used collectively by a very large number of small imprints. Each imprint would work with a small number of highly focused books, all of them excellent, all of them related enough in subject or tone that readers of one will tend to enjoy the others. Brand loyalty – to publisher, not to writer – is going to be critical in building publisher value.
2) Reviews are as important as ever. Which reviews are important has changed. At the moment, the most important book reviews in the world are probably the ones written by readers, on Amazon. Major industry reviews are no longer key to book success and will grow less so as brick and mortar retail continues to contract. The NYT reviews are no longer what they were a decade ago. Today, getting reviews where readers buy books is most important, and a set of disseminated reviews at various book blogs around the internet is second. You want reviews to be placed where readers can easily see them and have their fancy tweaked.
3) Direct customer relationships are crucial. Most of the successful indies and small presses I see today utilize direct relationships with their readers. One of the most common elements of this system is a mailing list. Twitter, Facebook, and blogs can be useful tools to acquire readers for your deeper connection methods (like newsletters), but by themselves tend to have only mediocre results in actually pushing sales. Social media is about connections, not about selling. Using it to build deeper connections with readers/fans is useful. Publishers must then drive those connections into brand loyalties, converting those brief connections into lasting customer relationships.
It’s a very different form of selling from what most large publishers are used to.
I’m not sure how many of them are going to be able to make the shift. Those who do will probably excel in the new industry. Those who can’t will probably see their market share and influence continue to diminish, and may eventually fold from the trade book industry altogether. No matter – for each that folds, I predict we’ll see several outstanding new companies spring up to replace them, agile and adapting to each new change as it comes along.
As writer/publishers, owners of small publishing companies, or management at larger publishers, we face a significant challenge in the years ahead – to find ways to build our specific brands into something readers can have loyalty toward, and then leveraging that loyalty by continuing to consistently produce books that slice of the overall readership will love to read.
Special thanks to Kris Rusch, whose article here sparked the idea for this general response to one of the greatest challenges our industry faces today!
User Changes
Jan 30th
Due to the issues I had recently with insertion of a script into one of the PHP files on the website, I’m taking a number of steps to try to ensure the site is at least a little bit more secure and less likely to have this sort of trouble again. Nothing can guarantee that, of course, but at least maybe I can stop random bots from causing me trouble. 
As part of those changes, I have removed all registered users, and disabled registration. This is something I should have done ages ago, thought I had done, and hadn’t – so I’ve gradually gained a bunch of new users, mostly from random email addresses. I know there were some genuine users among those, but I couldn’t tell them apart with any degree of certainty, so all have been removed. I apologize for any inconvenience, and will do whatever I can to help make sure folks can continue reading here the way they’d prefer, provided I am also able to keep the site secure!
Apologies about the virus warning
Jan 26th
A long time ago, I had another domain, kevinwriting.com, which I had intended to use for this site. I swapped over to this one fairly early on, and I like having my full name in the URL. Just makes more sense.
When I switched over, I set the other one to auto-forward to this site. Either I messed up the forwarding script and Google just noticed it – or someone somehow got into the page and tweaked it. I suspect that Google just got more sensitive about a certain type of script.
But anyway, the old domain is nested with this one under the same hosting account, so both were tarred and feathered with the same brush when Google decided it disliked the script. The offending script has been removed, Google has been asked to review the site, so all should be good soon.
Just wanted to let anyone still coming through the big red screen that YES, the site is safe, and NO, you’re not going to mess your computer up by coming here. Totally what I wanted to spend my day doing today, let me tell you. ;)
Update to Indie Bestsellers and KDP Select
Jan 14th
The holidays are over. All those millions of new Kindles are unwrapped and in use. So I thought it might be a good time to take another peek at those bestseller lists, and see how the indies are faring in a market which some analysts believe has doubled since this time last year.
The answer is, very well.
If you’ve been reading here a while, you’ll remember that on December 20th I was window shopping for ebooks on Amazon and noticed something odd. Last October, there were a few indie books in the top seats of most genres, but the majority of each top 25 list was traditionally published books. In December, something seemed to have changed, and self published books were everywhere. I did a survey of four genres and posted the results here.
Today I revisited those genres, and added two more. So I’m covering Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Thrillers, Mystery, and Horror today. What follows is an analysis of the top 25 breakdown in each genre on Amazon. Why Amazon? With around 70% of the US ebook market, Amazon represents a higher percentage of ebook sales than Bookscan does of print, making the Amazon lists the most reliable bestseller list for ebooks available today.
I’ve also mentioned how many of the top 25 were in the Kindle Select program, as this seems to be having an increasingly robust impact on bestseller listing.
- Romance: 24 self published, 1 trade published, 20 Kindle Select
- Fantasy: 18 self published, 7 trade published, 17 Kindle Select
- Science Fiction: 18 self published, 7 trade published, 14 Kindle Select
- Thrillers: 18 self published, 7 trade published, 19 Kindle Select
- Mystery: 21 self published, 4 trade published, 21 Kindle Select
- Horror: 23 self published, 2 trade published, 23 Kindle Select
So at this moment, self published books represent from 72-92% of these Top 25 bestseller lists.
Also noteworthy that 56-92% of the books on these lists were in the Kindle Select programs, and overall over 90% of the self published books were enrolled in Select. While Select may not be working perfectly for every writer, it does seem to now be key in reaching the very top of the Amazon bestseller lists.
Now, bestseller lists aren’t everything. They’re the top books right now. Tomorrow, some of those books will have swapped out. And thousands of other books, indie and trad pub, are selling just fine without ever reaching a bestseller list.
But it’s noteworthy that not only did indies grab the majority of the bestseller lists last month – they seem to have held that majority and even gained more ground on traditional publishers in some genres.
The prevalence of Select in those titles is also relevant, because it demonstrates the effectiveness of that program. While I still believe it’s something of a lottery – and most writers will probably do better to at least have *most* of their books available everywhere – it’s undeniable that Select is making magic for some writers. Having a book rotate through Select might be a powerful tool for indies to build name recognition on Amazon.
1/4 ROW80 Check In
Jan 4th
And check in number one.
A Round of Words in 80 days has twice weekly check ins, where everyone posts what they’ve done in the few days since the last check in. I’m thinking I need a new blog for this stuff, and might go grab one so it’s not mixing up my regular blog. We’ll see.
To date for this year?
1/1 1243 words and WIP converted over to Scrivener.
1/2 (official start of the ROW80 round) 1074 words.
1/3 No new words.
1/4 2068 words. Plus a MAJOR renovation to the blog that I’m quite happy with.
So far, I’m actually sitting ahead of goal a little bit, which is a minor miracle seeing as how I’m still at the in-laws, still in Boston, and still taking the kids out for excursions to places like the Boston Museum of Science (that was today – awesome traveling exhibit on Pompeii). Also still sick, and the bug has me tired out and is trying to move into my lungs, but I’m battling it best I can. The continuing saga of one Ryan Blackwell are proceeding apace, and the words are flowing well.
Going to bed now. Stuck it out long enough to get the words in and get the blog post up, but I’m tired!
New year, new look, new name, new focus!
Jan 4th
A new year, and time for a change.
I’ve updated the blog. New look – a crisp, clean website which should load a little faster and look a little more professional. I have to admit, I liked the old stonework art I used to have. It’s art I made, back when I was doing game art, so it had a little personal appeal. But I have to admit the clean white looks sharp.
When I founded this blog back in Autumn 2010, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing with myself. I knew that publishing was changing. I knew I loved writing, and that the way the writing profession seemed to be shifting had a lot of appeal. I’ve run a few businesses, and enjoy the work. Authors as entrepreneurs? Sign me up!
I’ve ended up doing quite a lot more than that now, though. Yes, I’ve been writing, and yes, I’ve been publishing that work. But to date, I’ve earned more income from formatting work for other writers, and done more work advising others on how best to go about doing things in this new world. I’ve listened to some of the best in the business, and I’ve participated in, even run, some intensive studies of the changing publishing marketplace.
In the process, I’ve created a blog which is fairly scattered. And as a very bright person pointed out to me earlier today, that’s not really the best way to go about things. So this is a moment of refocus. The old blog name was centered around me, my learning, my SF and fantasy writing: “Swords and Starflight: Exploring the worlds of writing and publishing”.
The new blog name is “Digital Delta: Charting a course through the changing world of publishing.”
Appropriate, because that’s what I’ll be writing about here. Yes, I’ll talk some about my own writing still. But the majority of what I put up here will be detailed information and analysis about the publishing industry as it exists today, and as it is likely to exist in the near future.
Because we’ve seen enormous change over the last two years, monumental change just over the last twelve months. But I think we’re still at the tip of the iceberg, and there’s much more to come. We’re still collectively working to find ways of coping with just these first steps of the digital publishing revolution, but the deeper changes won’t happen for a while yet. I predict that the next three years are going to be a rollercoaster of events as retailers, publishers, agents, writers, and everyone else involved in the industry work overtime to keep up.
Change can be scary. Folks, change can also be a lot of fun. Change can mean endings, but change can also mean new beginnings, new opportunities.
Let’s find them together.
Accountability Aids – and #ROW80
Jan 2nd
Accountability Aids:
Accountability is important in habit building. We use accountability aids as a tool for fostering the sorts of behavior we are trying to generate in our lives – whether that is kicking a bad habit, or building a new one. NaNoWriMo is essentially a big month long accountability aid, as we’re guilted into writing 50k words in a month because we’ve told all these people we’re going to get it done.
Many accountability aids are personal and private. These are tools to provide inspiration by showing the progress you’ve made toward your goal. Other accountability aids are more public. Dean Wesley Smith mentioned he used to play a game with other writers where each writer got points for every piece out on submission to publishers or magazines. He also said that many of those writers who excelled at the game are folks he still sees making a successful career of writing today.
I kicked off one accountability aid yesterday, in the form of that little black book. I’ll be logging each day the word count I accomplished, and by tracking the goal daily, I am left with a daily reminder of how far I’ve come, how much I’ve done. Hopefully that will inspire and encourage me. ;)
Today I’m kicking off another accountability aid, this one a public one: ROW80, or “A Round of Words in 80 Days”.
It’s a cool little writing crew dedicated to setting realistic goals that one can peck away at on a regular basis, building a routine of writing effort which will eventually become habit, and move from habit into generating success. The premise is that small goals accomplished regularly are more sustainable than big sweeping goals which force one to put out a huge burst effort. And after my last three NaNoWriMos – each of which left me completing 20-25k words on the last day – I am inclined to agree. ;) I mean, I MADE those word counts, but that’s hardly a sustainable effort for me. In fact, it’s burned me out each year.
So I’m joining ROW80 in an effort to help create a sense of public accountability to steady, sustainable goals, with a crew of like minded writers also doing the same thing.
As part of the joining process, we’re supposed to write a blog post detailing our goals for the next 80 days. I’ve read several other goal posts, and some are very elaborate, with very specific targets. Since this is my first time through, I’m going to use the KISS method and keep the goals as simple as possible. Not easy, but easy to understand and easy to assess.
Goals:
1) I will try to write every day, at least a little. But I will not beat myself up if an attack of life prevents this sometimes.
2) I will write 7k or more words per week.
3) I will finish 80,000 words over the course of this 80-day ROW80 period.
Those are good goals, I think. They’re in keeping with my already stated goal of achieving 366,000 new words this year – that’s about 1k per day, so 80 days = 80k words. But they’re flexible enough that I should be able to miss some days without feeling it’s a crisis, and at the same time be accountable for those 7k words each week, minimum, so I won’t get too far behind.
It feels like a good place to start!
And Day One of 2012.
Jan 1st
Completed 1243 words of new fiction today. Also pulled all the files over from Ashes Ascendant into Scrivener, so I can finish the project there. Since I already had a bunch of the novel done, I had a lot of copy/paste and outline setup to accomplish, but I think it was worth it. Already feeling pretty good about using the software – I’ve used straight LibreOffice for writing for some time now, but picked up a Scrivener license now that the Windows version has been released (and hey, I had a half off coupon from completing NaNoWriMo, so why not?).
I’ve gone through and entered chapters for each chapter, and broken those chapters into scenes, so I have a rough outline of every scene. Then I pasted in the scenes from the LibreOffice document. Took a couple hours of work, interspersed with watching TV with relatives, so I wasn’t working at peak performance. Not a huge time sink, and it’s nice to have the outline sitting there on screen so I know what’s coming next. Still a few holes to fill in, but the book is proceeding apace.
Most important, I think – I started off the year right. It was a busy day, with a birthday party, my wife and I sick and two of the kids just recovering from being sick yesterday (thankfully, seems to be a quick but nasty fever/congestion bug). All sorts of excuses to miss a day. But I had an urge to kick things off properly regardless, so I made sure to make time to do so. ;)
I won’t report on this sort of progress daily. I don’t want to bore you all! But as a ‘getting launched right’ post, I thought it was worth telling you about.
Hope your New Year’s Day went well, too!
2012 Writing Goals
Jan 1st
I don’t really feel like running out new predictions right now. Maybe tomorrow.
Instead, I thought I’d take a look at 2011, and then ahead at 2012, and set some goals.
Dean’s written some amazing articles on goal setting. He’s done similar articles before, but these just rock. Excellent reading, and very timely – hey, we’re all looking ahead at the new year, right? Check them out:
http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=6062
http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=6111
http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=6140
2011 was a good year. I published three short stories and a novel. I met a ton of really amazing people, and learned a great deal. But it’s time to push things to the next level. Now, I’ve got a lot of changes coming down the pipe. This is going to be a huge year, with a lot going on. So goals – real, achievable ones – are going to be critical.
1. Write more.
I have a brand new book; a little moleskin pocket sized planner. Aside from tracking dates and schedules in it (the obvious), it’s going to be used to track my writing. When I write, how much I produce, what frame of mind I was in. I’m going to use that to figure out when and where my best times for writing are, and build a better schedule for getting more done. I’m going to track every new word of salable fiction and nonfiction, and I’m going to make sure there are a lot of them.
How many? I’m going to shoot for 366,000 words. (It’s a leap year, 1000 per day.)
I’ve never even come close to that before. It’ll be a huge challenge, from the perspective of history. But then again – since I write about 600-800 words in a 25 minute sprint, it’s not really that much per day. In the back of my mind, of course, is the idea I might be able to exceed that, but life has a funny way of breaking in, so let’s just keep it there for now.
Specifically, on the writing front, I plan to publish Ashes Ascendant, finish Dead In Winter, and publish that. Those will finish off the first three Blackwell Magic books. I also still plan to produce the serial fiction work. I got a great start on that in November, but need to re-examine how I can approach the genre. It was my first try, and there were a lot of flaws (primarily, because I wrote a novel instead of a serial!). I will also finish the rewrite of Accord of Honor – which my wife assures me needs a new title, so it might get one. Science fiction in the not so distant future, this is a “lost book” of mine, or almost was anyway. The file was lost in a hard drive crash, but I had a paper copy, so I’ve been retyping it into the computer, rewriting as I went. The resulting story is not the same as the first one was – there are big chunks simply scrapped and rewritten – but it’s much improved from the first attempt to tell the tale, and I’m very pleased with how it’s coming.
I’ve also had a lot of requests for basically a “step by step guide” to the mechanical parts of self publishing. Where to upload. How, exactly, to convert. How to do a basic POD book. All the basics, all in one book. I know there’s a few out there, but when I queried one LinkedIn group in a half joking post, I had a bunch of replies back saying yes, please do! So the outline is done on said book, and I’ll be cranking it out this year.
2. Follow Heinlein’s Rules.
A while back, Dean wrote a blog post where he mentioned the book those rules came from. It’s a great little volume, “Of Worlds Beyond: the science of science fiction writing”. I got a copy of the original 1947 edition for Christmas this year. It felt vaguely like getting a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. ;) I mean, this is THE BOOK. The source of the rules which spawned the careers of so many writers. And I was holding an original edition in my hands. How cool is that? I may love ebooks, but hey, some print books have value as a symbol beyond the actual words contained within the spine.
For those who don’t recall, Heinlein’s Rules are simple:
Heinlein’s Rules for Writing
- You must write.
- You must finish what you write.
- You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
- You must put the work on the market.
- You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
In this new age of publishing, those rules are still valid. Only the market has changed. The rules themselves are still as simple – and simply powerful – as ever. So I intend to follow those rules. I will write. I will finish each piece. I will rewrite based on editorial suggestion. I will get that work up for sale as soon as is possible, and keep it there so that it sells.
3. Business building.
I’ve begun formatting and editing for other writers. Doing ebook and print book formatting, and copy editing manuscripts. So far, I’ve had a bunch of really happy people, and I plan to continue working in this venue into the new year. I watch all the time as writers are caught by this or that questionable – even scammy – operation that sucks them for every cent it can. I feel firmly that hiring folks for basic one-time fees is the best way to go, and I put my money where my mouth is. I’m making those services available to writers at fees that are reasonable – complete with a free set of revisions, and phone-walkthrough assistance in the upload process if necessary. I’m enjoying the work, it’s extra income I can certainly use, and it’s helping writers become successful publishing their work. I don’t intend to set a goal for how many of these I will do, but I will continue to make the services available so I can help writers achieve their own goals.
There’s a lot to do. It’s going to be an amazing year, in so many ways, for so many people! I look forward to the challenges ahead, and the work ahead, and the new experiences and things to learn. 2011 was remarkable.
2012 stands ready to be incredible!
