Luck

Yup, I'm back at Blogger. I thought the change to Wordpress would be worth it, but it turns out most of my subscribers are present on this portal, and it's like starting all over again using a new platform. So there you have it.

I read an interesting blog recently by JA Konrath, arguably one of the pioneers of the indie movement. After selling millions of books he started taking on deals (or a deal anyway) with one of the Big Five pubs, and he sort of disappeared from not only the blogosphere but also from the indie publishing community altogether (I could be entirely wrong about this, and forgive me if I am, Joe, but that's the way it appeared to me). But recently he made a return with some very interesting blogs about the state of the industry including the state of his personal publishing career.

One of his pieces spoke about how he spent a full year working on a huge project which he sent out to some of the Big Five, plus a couple Amazon Publishing imprints (like me he's been pub'd by Thomas & Mercer a bunch of times). He was surprised to find all the pubs rejected his new project. He offered up logical reasons for why this happened, but it came as a shock to me. Here's a guy who was making upwards of $800K per year, until Kindle Unlimited tore into his profits in a big way. Still, he's allegedly moved more than 3mil books (no reason not to believe him), won some awards, done major book tours, has a huge following for both his blog and his fiction, and yet he gets rejected across the board. Huh?

It gave me pause, let me tell you. That's when I proceeded to another blog that talked about what it takes to actually make it as an indie author (as a hybrid author the rules also apply to me). According to Konrath, it's not paid advertising, or relying on "How to Become a Kindle Bestseller" books (the authors are "full of shit" he says, and I tend to believe him), or social media posts that get your books noticed and eventually purchased. These things help get the word out and therefor have their place, taken in moderation. But the key, aside from hard work, consistent output, talent, and focus on one series and one genre, is pure luck.

Take it from me folks when I tell you, Mr. Konrath is spot on. I've been lucky in my career, and I've been unlucky. Generally, the bad luck comes in long streaks, with occasional breakouts of good luck. That said, the bad luck is usually a direct response to a stupid decision or decisions on my part. For instance, the past couple of years I experimented with shorter books and novellas of which I'm proud. But readers don't want short reads. They want 60K words minimum. I also delved into taboo areas like erotic noir, and those projects stunk up the joint (although the reviews were rave). I was putting out books with a medium sized crime imprint also, but it became frustrating since those titles were competing with my own. I also parted with my long time agent, thinking a new slick outfit would be just the boost I needed to get back on track.

But it was all pretty much a disaster. Over the past two years I've seen my income cut in half if not worse. What's it all mean? Going back to what works (just like coming back to Blogger). By the grace of God, my agent took me back and already, we've been making deals, and making some money too. It never really dawned on me until recently, that my agent isn't just an agent, he's a manager. There's a big difference. I also made the commitment to write thrillers and only thrillers, both stand-alone and in my numerous PI series. If I'm experimenting with anything, it's my cyberpunk book, Primary Termination, which will be out soon. A new genre yes, but trust me when I tell you the book is pure Zandri thriller, nonetheless.

I've also decided to pick up some freelance work again...something I'd always enjoyed but got away from over the past couple years. Lastly, I'm not going to put out one book per month (even though I can pretty much write a book per month). Instead, I'm going to stagger my publications (the indie ones anyway), every two to three months. Taken altogether, this is turning out to be a far better year than than the three previous years. My goal (and as Joe points out, it's important to have goals, not reliance on hopes since you have no control over the latter), is to head back into six figure territory this year. Not an unrealistic goal by any means. Chip has already secured me a "nice" offer for a two book deal (more on this coming later), but we're waiting to see what the other interested pubs say. We've done some non-fiction stuff together, and we have solid movie interest in at least two of my projects. That's a huge step up from the big nothing of last year.

All this involves a lot of hard work, but it also involves luck. I was smart to make the adjustment back to what works. I was lucky I realized it before it was too late.

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM





  

     

Writing short stories isn't worth the effort...

...I hate to disagree with the premise of the title, but in truth, they are still very much worth it. Many authors have discounted shorter works, or what's known in indie/hybrid world as "short reads," altogether since they make squat when it comes to Kindle Select/Unlimited. But I still write and publish short stories for a variety of reasons, not all of them having to do with making actual cash.

 Presently I have maybe a half-dozen short stories for sale under my own label, Bear Pulp. These include Dog Day Moonlight, Pathological, and Bingo Night. All of them not only sell a few copies every month, the majority of them also appeared in various magazines and journals, or were a part of an anthology published by the likes of Down & Out Books. These little devils are a great little marketing tool and also provide a nice creative outlet between novels and novellas.

Still think you can't make money with them?

Let's do the maths (as the Brits like to say).

Setting aside the 50 bucks or so you might receive as payment from a journal for the privilege of publishing your story, say you have 10 stories for sale on KDP. If you price them at $2.99, you make $2.09 per copy sold (I always add a substantial free sample from a novel just to offer up a little more value for the reader and to further market my longer stuff). Say you sell five copies of each throughout the month. That's $10.45 per story, or a total of $104.50 for the month. Doesn't sound like a whole lot, but multiply that times 12, and you get $1,254. That, my author friend, pays the rent for the month (depending upon where you live). 

This is a numbers game. Write 20 stories and you can easily double that $1,254. Write 30 stories, and, well, do the maths again. Some authors like Dean Wesley Smith, who is a strong proponent of the no-luck/no-big-ass-promos-required method of indie/hybrid publishing success, has maybe 400 short stories published. An old timer like Harlan Ellison has 1,200 and counting. Both writers are millionaires.

Admittedly, I spend most of my time writing novels and novellas. But short stories most definitely have their place in my canon. By creating short story collections, like my Pathological: Collected Short Reads of Sex, Lies, and Murder, I'm also able to create a book-length product that can also generate lots of reads on Kindle Unlimited. Make the collection available in paper, eBook, and audible and you begin to realize the enormous possibilities short stories still offer up in this new century.

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
 

     

Promoting your book could become illegal...

"Hi, I'm William Devane." Just joking...

More specifically I mean, promoting your eBook over various "home run" sites that boost your rank from never-never land to the top 100 of the Overall Kindle Bestseller List in sixty seconds flat. I exaggerate, but you get the point. The top 100 was and is the most coveted place to be and the place you could consistently count on to make you a whole bunch of cash say every two or three months. But more recently, KDP has been coming down on those authors who appear to be manipulating sales rank. Doesn't matter if you're legit or pushing books written by someone in the Philippines and then paying for KU clicks in Hong Kong. Either way you're gonna get busted.

The old days

In the old days, say pre-2014, there were all sorts of ways to shoot up the ranks. Of course, the big Kahuna was Book Bub. Used to be, I could count on three of those bad boys per year. Add in a fourth if my publisher Thomas & Mercer nailed me one. But Book Bub seems more intent on handing over promotions not to indies so much as the big four publishing houses now. I'm not sure why this is happening, but perhaps it has something to do with the quality of the books they are pushing, or perhaps the big 4 are paying more for the privilege of BB's super promo power.

But even if you are lucky enough to nail a Book Bub, or something just as powerful, chances are Amazon might strip you of your rank since it reflects a book that shot up the charts way too fast. That is a no-no these days, so I'm told. It remains to be seen if I ever have a ranking stripped, but from what my sources are telling me, the situation has become a source of concern.

Amazon can kill your account

What an author has to remember is that Amazon can kill your account at any time, and they don't need a reason to do it. If they suspect foul play, legitimate or not, they can come down very hard with sanctions such as taking away your KU account (this happened to me once, but they realized it was a mistake), or something else, such as the ability to leave reviews (I currently cannot leave reviews since I'm guessing I was suspected of review swapping, which I have never done).

Amazon Giveaways

Recently, I was also told I could no longer run Amazon Giveaways. After many calls and emails attempting to find out why I could not run giveaways, I hit a brick wall. But I suspect the privilege is somehow tied to the review thing. Also, this isn't a KDP issue, but a seller issue. Other sellers have run giveaways on my behalf, but I'm probably not going to run many of them anymore since they are no longer the effective marketing tool they once were.

The solution? 

The solution...and it always seems to come back to this...is to simply keep on writing good books while building your email lists. If you wish to utilize giveaways as a form of publicity, go to Good Reads or Book Funnel or Istafreebie. I do all three. Slow steady growth aided by AMS and FB ads is the ticket these days. There's no getting around it.
  
Slower writers are screwed

The problem slower writers are going to have is that their sales will trail off. They will eventually get tired of earning less and less, and many will drop out of the fold altogether, and the indie playing field will be leveled. Perhaps this is something Amazon and KDP inevitably want. The future remains to be seen. One thing is for sure, the indie side of things is not only always changing, but it can be volatile. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Publish many different ways. Become a hybrid like me. But as always, proceed at your own risk.

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
   

Is it possible to make a living writing fiction?

Signing The Corruptions earlier this year at Mysterious Bookshop in NYC

Probably not if you set out to write literary fiction (I recall one of my assigned reads back in MFA writing school was The Lime Twig by John Hawkes. I nearly barfed it was so boring). Literary authors, in my mind at least, view a commercially successful book as a failure, which is why so many literary writers must teach to make a living. It's different for a genre author. We write books for the masses and gladly take their casheshe for our efforts and in the end, much of our work stands up to the test of fine literature anyway. But I'm getting ahead of my skis here.



The Experiment

This past year (2017), was more or less an experiment precipitated by my having been suddenly fired from the one steady trade journalism gig I had going. It brought in a nice baseline income so that I didn't have to worry so much about royalties and/or advances. Plus I loved the gig. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely needed the book royalties if I was going to survive financially. It's just that because I enjoyed a writing/editing income separate from the fiction, I didn't wake up suddenly in the middle of the night wondering what I could be doing to sell more books.

So, last year, when that ten year gig suddenly vanished due to a cooperate buyout, I found myself with a choice. I could either look for more journalism-freelance writing gigs, or I could concentrate entirely on my fiction efforts and hope that I brought in enough money to at least keep the cable TV on.

Work, work, work

It turned out to be the most productive year in my twenty year professional writing career. I wrote six 60K+ word novels, a couple novellas, and several short stories. In fact, I wrote and published so much stuff that if I write not a single word this year, I am all set for publishing (both indie and traditional) well  into 2019 and perhaps 2020. How did I do it? Simple. I dragged my ass out of bed every Monday morning and set it in the writing chair just like any other working stiff. I wrote whether I wanted to or not (In all candor, I pretended to be an employee of say FOX, and they were expecting me to put out at least one novella per month, or no pay check. The ruse worked!).

Exploring Central American ruins and fictional inspiration this past June

Dollars and cents

Ok, so in terms of dollars and cents, what does all this mean? I'm not going to be entirely transparent here but according to the tax documents I've received thus far, I made a solid mid-five-figures. In terms of more recent years, it wasn't all that great, but this is the nature of the business. Some years you're hitting home runs and scoring major deals and you're pulling in a comfortable six figures whether you like it or not. Other years are down years. Production years I call them. Years when you're working your tail off and not a whole lot is coming in, but the important thing is you're making a living.


 A smart move

For once in my life I made a smart move: Every advance I received (and I took in quite a few of them) over the past five years from agented deals, I invested in mutual funds, which means those monies are working for me on a monthly basis. Another smart thing I did was to invest a big portion of my royalties into my indie books. When you invest in creating a new book, it's almost as if you're buying real estate. Eventually the return on investment will be enough to pay back what you spent and earn you a nice 10-20% per year of passive income from that point on. The key, is to write more quality books that will stand the test of time.


Steady growth 

2017 proved to be an interesting experiment. There were no big advances (I did receive a small four-figure advance from an independent press), no big Book Bubs (I had two Europe only BBs), and no one single title entered into the Amazon Top 100 (that I can recall anyway). Like I've intuited in previous posts, it was a year of steady growth, steady writing, steady sales. And in the end, I earned enough to make a living. I'm actually quite shocked, to be honest. If this were the old days and hybrid authorship were an impossible dream, I would have found myself begging for a job ("Welcome to McDonald's, can I take your order?").

Instead, I'm able to do something most writers only dream about. I can get up every morning, sit myself down at my laptop in my PJs, and write my particular brand of noir and hard-boiled fiction. Hopefully my books are more interesting than the Lime Twig (No offense, Mr. Hawkes). And hopefully they keep on selling so I can continue to work at the only job there is for me.

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

Zandri is Wide (Not in the Ass) and a First Quarter Assessment: Notes from a Hybrid...No. Whatever

That's me arm-in-arm this past Sunday with the Noir at the Bar crew NYC

You all would have heard by now that Amazon KDP kicked me out of Select apparently for violating the exclusivity agreement once in 2012, once in 2013, and again in 2014. They couldn't prove that I had violated anything by producing the "warning" emails at my request, but they said it is so and if they say it is so I guess it has to be true.

Ever get the feeling the crucifix will one day be replaced with the Amazon logo? 

It's all for the good though, because like those pesky young adults who won't leave their parent's basement, I had been depending upon Select too much as of late for my indie books, and it was time to leave the nest and go wide. Which I have. I'm everywhere except Google at present, but I'll get there too. I'm only one person, people! Maybe I should hire an assistant. Preferably a hot little brunette. Don't get me started...

Onwards. It's the end f the quarter and I'd like to do an entirely non-scientific assessment of this year thus far in sales and productivity. In other words, I'm not going to bore you with specific numbers, but instead just a general accounting of how it's been going with my traditionally published books, my Amazon Imprint Published Books (namely Thomas & Mercer), and my indie books published under my imprint Bear Media (Bear Thrills, Bear Pulp, etc.)

Okay, so the traditional side of things. The hard-cover of The Corruptions arrived in late January while I await the paperback version of Orchard Grove which came out in hard-cover in January of 2017. Both books seem to be doing well, in paper, audio, and especially e-book. Although I don't have the exact sales figure for the first part of this year, I believe we're looking at around 4-5K in sales, mostly in eBook on the back of a Book Bub, which I was fortunate to acquire (and finance). What I must stress here however, is the importance of authors doing their own marketing since leaving it up to the publisher will usually result in crickets. They just don't have the time. One of the books I have going traditionally at present is stinking up the joint which sucks, because when I was publishing it under Bear Thrills it was doing relatively well. Live and learn.

Amazon Imprint Books (Thomas & Mercer): There's been a lot of changes at the firm as of late, and every single one of the editorial and/or marketing people I started out with in 2012 are gone baby gone. Some good people have taken their place, but while last year at this time I was hitting the overall number 1 spot on the Amazon bestsellers list with The Remains (and all the residual sales that went with it), this year thus far has been kind of a yawn. Sure books like The Remains and the Jack Marconi PI novels continue to carry the bulk of the load (I have a whopping 9 books with the firm), there hasn't been a promo yet that's propelled a single title to the top 10 much less the top 100. But that doesn't mean it won't happen next week. So if I had to guess without looking the numbers up, I'm around the 3-4K sales range there.

Indie Books: In terms of full-length novels, I believe I'm somewhere around 15 now. I'm not sure how I've done it, but I've sold around 7-8K books during the first quarter, not including KDP borrows. So that's something to be proud of. The Ashes, the sequel to The Remains, is doing very well, and considering AP passed on it, saying it's too late for a sequel and therefore a "non-starter," I'm more than pleasantly surprised. Now at the same time, I've also given away more than 10K books so far this quarter and if I had to guess, that's one of the reasons for my success (remember, there are hybrid authors out there who sell way more than me, and more who sell way less, so it's all relative).

So where does this leave me? I'm making a nice living, and slowly, incrementally doing better with each new book published one way or another. Some might say I should pick a method of publishing and stick with it, but truth is, if I were to go back to being traditional exclusively, I'd have to pick up more freelance work, or maybe grab a teaching gig. So that's out of the question because I love my freedom. And I'm not ready to go entirely indie either, because I enjoy my books being in stores and libraries, and I love the trade reviews, and you're just not going to get that with indie (sorry for the run-on).

I'd like to think I'll do more books with AP, but I might be tipping the scales with 9 novels right now, plus When Shadows Come is still in the red in terms of its earning out its advance (Come on guys, let's market the hell out of this one. It was selected as a Suspense Magazine Best Book of 2016 for God's sakes...What's not to like?)

So now I'm wide and thus far I'm selling almost the equivalent of what I would have been making in page reads per day at Select. So that's a good thing. But more marketing will be needed in order to get the word out. That includes Facebook and Amazon Ads.

As for the production end of things, you'll recall in a past post that I have committed myself to writing only fiction this year (that can change), and thus far I'm putting out on average 10K new words per week, plus rewrites. So this is a full-time job to be sure. But what this means is, I not only have a new thriller for a traditional publisher to pick up, I am, at the same time, able to publish a series novel, novella, or short story at least once per month. And what's the best marketing tool for a writer? Proliferation. Or, simply writing more books. Write, publish, rinse, repeat. Word of mouth is a big help too, but you have no control over that. So if you're a writer, turn off the Twitter, and get busy. Get writing.

For links to all my "wide ass" books and all the stores that sell them go to:
WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

 

A Writing Life

Recently I was able to catch bestselling author Wayne Stinnett's videos on the writing life and goal setting. They are quite good. That said, I thought I would imprint my own brand on the topic. It's totally unscripted, and I try holding back the laughter at some points. Imagine the absurdity of it all. Me standing in the middle of a trout stream making a video. But here you go.

 WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM