I've got a serious question for people, and it concerns unpubbing stories. Namely, what people think about the idea of me doing so for certain titles.
Please! Read the whole blog before commenting!
First of all, let me just say this: I don't expect my Kindle published books to ever be my main income. I have Plans for the future, involving returning to college, gaining my degree, and pursuing real gainful employment. However, with that being said, it WOULD be nice if I could sell enough on Kindle to give me a decent supplementary income, like, say, a couple hundred dollars a month.
To date, between my two books I've put up there, I've earned less than 50.
There are a handful of reasons for this, I know. First is the fact that I'm not part of Kindle Select (something that I could fix should I choose to unpub my work here.) The second is the fact that my currently available books are merely edited versions of stories I've already got available here. Yes, there is a bonus story in my Josie's Con Stories book that isn't available on the site, but that's obviously not enough to inspire people to buy it for the most part. I can completely understand, and I don't fault anyone who can't afford to buy my books simply reading the free versions: I do the same thing, after all!
BUT. I would like to make a bit more than I have. For my future publishing efforts, Oh Cheers (rewritten completely as Phoenix Soars,) and Princess For Hire, my plans are to unpub the stories as available here and simply have a teaser snippet and link to the Amazon page on the book pages for each (though they WILL be available one other way to read them: I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but if not, then I'll let it be a surprise.) My question is, though, what do people think of the idea of me unpubbing the stories I have for sale NOW? I'm going to follow the general consensus/opinion on these, since at this point I doubt it will make a terrific difference on sales figures for either one, but I still want to know what people think.
The stories that would be impacted by this are:
Dear John
Josie's Con Stories et al
The Tree
The Voice on the Line
The Valentine
One Last Game
What do you think? The advantage for me would be a doubling of royalties on all future sales, and of course the potential for more sales in general since the stories have no free version available. The disadvantage would be, obviously, that the stories would no longer be free for readers to enjoy HERE.
Lemme know what y'all think, please. I will also say that the stories I've already listed are the ONLY stories from the site that will ever be impacted by this: all future writing I do will either be for BC or for publishing, but not or the former then the latter, because I honestly feel a little duplicitous doing this kind of thing. It makes me feel like I'm offering everyone free cake then taking it away.
Melanie E.
Comments
Melanie, I can't tell you
Melanie, I can't tell you what to do, it is your decision and I will abide by it. You have to do what you think is best for you and your future goals. You remind me of myself and I have held myself back many times worrying about pleasing everyone else. If I have the chance to publish, I would remove the free ones and push the published versions. Maybe leave a teaser of it here to get people to buy it.
Post for a limited time
I like what Katie Leone has been doing. Posting the story here for a limited time. And giving a decent warning (1 week to 10 days) before unpublishing here. That way members here have the oportunity to read the story for free. And the comments suggest that some will become impatient and buy the book instead of waiting for all the parts to be posted here. Seems like good marketing to me.
Personally, I appreciate a decent warning before a story is removed for publishing for sale at other sites.
Jessica
Without a financial stake...
I am not impacted either way, at least for this. That said, here's my take on the matter.
I consider works that are written and put forth on the site to be the property of the author, free for them to modify, remove, add, or whatever floats their boat. They wrote it, they own it.
The dichotomy comes about when you look at _why_ the writing was published. Writing fiction requires an audience to be more than a form of mental masturabation. It feels good, but not as good as having participation. Once you've provided your work to someone else, they now have a stake in the work - at least as far as ego goes. Just look at the explosions that came about when Lucas decided to rework the special effects (and cuts) from the original Star Wars! Yes, it was his work, but millions of people had invested part of themselves into the existing story; for many, it was almost a mental rape of their childhood.
I see things as two sets of stories. You have the stories you give away, and the stories you sell. There _should_ be a difference between the two. (Value added). Some authors give part of the stories away, then the rest is only available online. Others give the first away for free, but the rest cost. Another group leaves the ones they originally wrote online, but publish heavily edited versions for pay. Yet one more group is pay first, then publishes for free later.
I don't spend much money on e-books, mainly because I see them as vastly overpriced. Before you gasp and scream about it, it's a reasonable complaint. There are four main costs to publishing a novel through a major publishing company (DAW, Baen, etc). That's Editing, Printing, Distribution, and Author. The Author is probably the smallest of that group. Ebooks remove the Printing and Distribution cost, so all you have left it Editing and Author. (It's not a complete removal, of course, but for the purposes of this discussion, I would say that a reduction of 95%+ is 'removed')
So, why should I _still_ pay $6.99 for a book that now has half the overhead that it used to? In fact, it has even -less- overhead, because in the SF/F publishing industry, the common sell through rate was 50%. (For those who aren't familiar with the term, because of the Great Depression, publishers allowed book stores to return unsold books. It's the only industry that works like that. So, if Michael's Books orders 4 books from the publisher, and sells two, then returns two to the publisher, that's a 50% sell through rate. Baen, through their Free Library, had doubled their sales, and halved their returns.)
Okay - so, with a sell through of 50%, that means that out of four books they printed, two would be sold, and they'd eat the other two. So those two $6.99 books had to absorb the cost of printing and distributing four. With electronic distribution and publishing (e-books), -That doesn't exist-. There's nothing other than greed that has been keeping them from selling the E-Books at 25% or 40% less than the cost of the dead tree edition.
Skipping over to the self-published, we (mostly) even remove the Editing cost out of that. So now the entire _cost_ for publishing is Author. Yes, you get charged a fee for every sale, but I haven't seen that Amazon, Smashwords, or Lulu _charge_ you for putting the book up on their site to sell. It's not an up front cost, but rather a recurring expense. (or even simply a difference between Gross and Net income.) I can't tell you how many times I've glanced at a self-published e-book, and simply turned it down because I'm not going to hand $5 to someone who isn't paying an editor or distributor, especially if I can't tell how well it's written. (I _hate_ those .99 prices. I loathe, despise, and detest them. Sell it at a dollar. It's a nice round number. If it's $19.99, it's $20. Period. I also wish the taxes were inside the price, so that what I see on the tag is what I pay)
Wow, quite a digression, but oh well.
Back to the issue at hand. If you decide that you MUST remove your works from the site, I would rather you/the author give a reasonable warning (a week, perhaps) to allow people to pull a copy for their own personal use. Not one of those "I'm removing it tomorrow, so grab it tonight" posts.(usually posted on a thursday afternoon, when people might not see it until Saturday or Monday)
What that does is say "Hey, if you really liked the work, but can't afford to go to Amazon and buy a copy to read four the fifth time, I'm not going to yank the rug out from under you."
Another option, and I'm not going to take the time to read the Amazon wording to see if it would pass, would be to hide those stories behind a paywall for donators only. If you're not actually paying for _that story_, it shouldn't hit the 'you provide it elsewhere for less', or the 'available elsewhere for free'.
Absolutely, however, do _not_ remove the story from your list! Just make an empty post that has the story name that explains that it's available elsewhere! Otherwise, people will be sitting in the corner gibbering, thinking that their mind is going. (Or, in my case, knowing that it's gone)
So, despite the incoherency, I hope this helps at least a little bit with your thinking. It's not to discourage removing from the site, it's to say pros and cons, and what people might think.
BW
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
The books I'm moving over to sell
are receiving heavy editing -- Angela Rasch AKA Jill for most of them, in fact -- and the only reason I'm not paying for it is because she declined my offer to do so. My two offerings up at this time are .99 and 1.99: yes, the 99 cent pricing thing, simply because it's expected in the modern market. My next two books I'll be releasing I do intend to charge more for, but I don't think it's unreasonable that I want to ask 4.99 apiece at all. I can see your reasoning, but at the same time I see it as A) they're still cheaper than buying books in dead tree format or from a "real" publisher, and B) the extra money goes to the offer. For non-Kindle exclusive books Amazon only lets authors keep 30% of the money charged for any book, which means of those two books I'm selling right now one is only netting me about 30 cents a copy and the other about 60, which really isn't a lot.
I believe that if I'm going to charge for something I've offered for free before then I need to put in the effort to make it worthwhile, including extra content, extensive editing/rewrites, and a lot of care put into presentation and value. At this point I've spent nearly a YEAR working on the rewrite of Oh, Cheers: I'm two-thirds of the way done with the rewrite, and it's already double the length of the original, PLUS I intend to provide the Gaming Sessions stories I never got around to writing originally. In this case, the ONLY reason I'm considering unpubbing the originals is so that people will bother to see all of the extra work I've put into the rewrites: the two are so drastically different I'm actually considering including the original version as "bonus" content, only edited for syntax/spelling, just so readers can see the difference.
You mentioned making stories available in another way, and I do intend to do so: my plan is to announce the release of the rewrite of Oh, Cheers, as well as the fully edited/compiled version of PFH, at least two weeks ahead of time, and to pull the BC text a week before release on Amazon, with the ebook versions of the two going into the Hatbox for donators to have access to. Otherwise, 3.99 or even 4.99 for the base books I don't think is asking too much: they've been a lot of work, and have a lot of value, and I feel like I'm being more than fair with my idea for pricing.
I'd STILL like to get more answers on whether I should unpub the other stuff, though.
Melanie E.
With heavy editing, and
With heavy editing, and increasing in length, then you definitely have a different work.
It sounds to me like you're looking at everything, and that's all that I could really ask an author.
If you think it will materially affect your sales, unpub. If you don't, leave the originals intact here, sell the edits, and mark every story here with a link to the "New, Improved, with Extra Verbage!" through Amazon or Smashwords. (only 30%, really? I thought it was more than that. It's still a bigger percentage than dead tree authors, at least).
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
It is at that,
but at the cost of no marketing department, no physical copies, no legion of publicists/editors/market experts, or any of the other advantages a real publisher brings.
Amazon's Kindle Select program does allow authors to pull 70 percent royalties instead of the 30 (maybe 35, now I think of it...) for non-select books, but it does require exclusivity, for the most part, and is only available on books priced 2.99 or higher (hence so many flash fic pieces on the Amazon store that are under 5k works and 3-4 dollars apiece.) If it comes down to it, I'd rather have the 30 percent profits and the flexibility to do more of what I want with the work, rather than having to deal with Amazon making an issue of it if I ever were to release something that, heaven forbid, grew popular.
Melanie E.
Be sure you understand the 'fine print'
Actually, you're hurting yourself more than you realize. You do NOT have to be enrolled in Kindle Select to receive the 70% royalty portion... EXCEPT for the India/Brazil/Japan/Mexico markets. You can still receive 70% royalties of all other market sales via Amazon without signing up for Kindle Select and making yourself exclusive to Amazon. And there are many people who will not buy Kindle simply because they don't do Amazon (I know this because I've had several people ask me when I'm going to put up a Smashwords version because they won't buy Amazon). So going exclusive with Amazon hurts your potential marketing via other ebook routes like Smashwords (through which you can also get listed on Barnes and Noble).
The ONLY thing that Kindle Select does for you is open up some (very slight) additional marketing options for you and giving you a share of the 'library' funds. Which is relative to how many people download and read the story. So, if you've got a lot of people out that who said they 'would' get your book except they can't afford to buy books... that might help you. But if you're already offering books for a dollar and still not selling, the problem is more likely that people aren't aware of it not that they aren't buying it.
Options? You need reviews. More reviews, even somewhat bad ones, result in more connections to your book. Getting your book on reading lists may be a big deal too. I spent some money on advertising, personally... and ran a Google and a Project Wonderful ad campaign for the first month after release. I'm watching numbers right now to see if sales sustain or if they drop now that the campaign is on hold.
Get some people who are members on Goodreads to mark your book as 'reading' or 'read' with ratings/reviews.
Lots of things other than making yourself exclusive to Amazon to try before going that route. Not that I'm not curious about what the benefits of being Kindle Select might turn out to be... but I don't see them going out of their way to support marketing a book averaging 50 sales a month compared to all the other books averaging 50 sales a month just because one is exclusive to them and the other is not. Maybe once you're selling ten or twenty times that, I could believe it.
Reviews help but
Reviews help but are not the end all be all of getting a book sold. My most reviewed book "Unreachable" (a book everyone should have in their library) has 64 reviews and most of them are good, but it is consistently in the bottom third of sales. Conversely, The Dress Punishment, which is still available on BC for free, is my best seller month in and month out with only 11 reviews and most of those are middle of the road. You can say price has something to do with it. (Unreachable is 4.99 and Dress Punishment is .99) but I refuse to sell something like Unreachable for less then the smut that floods the transgender fiction market.
The main thing is marketing. I think that's why I sell around 500 copies a month across all my titles. And having a good product helps. Though I get complaints about editing, I know that the mistakes are really few. I have an editor who catches a lot of things and I'm constantly updating.
Select is good if you know how to use it. If you price at .99 then half the benefits of select go out the window. You get 70 percent royalties if you price between 2.99 and 9.99, but I always price on length. I would feel cheated if I paid 2.99 for a 5000 word story and that can lead to a backlash.
Katie Leone (Katie-Leone.com)
Writing is what you do when you put pen to paper, being an author is what you do when you bring words to life
New shoes for old
Try thinking of your stories as pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes. - yes there are out-of-fashion models available going cheap; even second hand or knock off pairs… . They if anything make this year's shoes a 'must buy'.
I hope if someone finds they like your stories through BC they will be more not less likely to buy the latest model from Amazon or whoever as long as the know the name and title under which to search - noting that Tanya Allan, Karen Bishop and Jenny Walker use the same name in both places I wonder why others don't as Googling a phrase will throw up the different names (or plagiarism).
Rhona McCloud
Do what is best for you.
I have been mulling over what to do with my own work, and had planned to publish this month. That schedule slipped and hopefully it will be October 2014.
You are actually a better writer than I am by orders of magnitude and have been quite successful here. Hopefully that success will readily transfer to the real world. Of course, you should write what you wish to write, in the genre in which you wish to write. I would however suggest that for now TG stories represent a publishing challenge, but perhaps not as bad as it was 10 years ago. So, unless someone convinces me otherwise, if you are publishing for the money, a shift in genre may improve your profits.
One story I am working on lends it self so readily to TG work, and straight work, that I will likely publish one version here and a non-TG version for public consumption.
I am in a writers group with a published author named Jeff Blackmer, who just published "Gears of Uriel". At our last meeting, he shared some of the process of how he got from the key board to the market. His latest book went through 6 edits and two more by the publisher.
He was successful as upper management before retiring and now spends his days doing research and writing. This man is a well read, deep thinker and it is with some sadness that I realize that he is in a league far above mine.
Finally, I suggest that you make the decisions that are best for you financially. The rest will sort its self eventually.
Good Luck
Gwen
Personally sis.....
I would go with your plan to remove them, with perhaps a teaser left with a reference to the completed work on Amazon.
Of course, I have already bought them, so it makes no difference to me - but for future works I agree with your thoughts.
Dallas
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
I oppose
I actually oppose removing them. The only reason I pulled my stories is because someone went to amazon and alerted them that my stuff was free in a review and it pissed me off. I see great benefit keeping stories up on BC and it does not hurt sales. People who read on BC, for the most part (so don't flame me) are looking for free stories and will rarely buy something on Amazon. There are those who like reading on the kindle and will buy after reading a story they like to get it on a device they prefer. I personally pub on BC because of the debt I owe Erin and BC, without either my writing wouldn't have improved to be a successful published author.
Katie Leone (Katie-Leone.com)
Writing is what you do when you put pen to paper, being an author is what you do when you bring words to life
Some data and a call for more data
You could take a look here, at my analysis of my first year of selling ebooks, for some data. The book I have available for free here has sold about as many copies as its sequel which is available only on Amazon and Smashwords, for instance. There would be nothing *wrong* with taking down books from BC to sell them on Amazon, but I'm not convinced it will really boost sales.
Also, whether you get double the royalties from being in Kindle Select depends on the territory where the book is sold and the price you're offering it at. In the territories where I've sold the most books, for books sold at $2.99, Amazon pays 70% whether you're in KS or not. (And Smashwords pays 74% or sometimes more, and doesn't require any exclusivity agreement.)
It would help if some authors who have tried selling their books both with Kindle Select and without it would share some comparative sales figures, so we'd know how much KS really boosts a book's sales. I'd be surprised if it's really enough to compensate for not being able to sell the book through other retailers.
I'd suggest that you take down one or more of your titles here, after giving readers fair warning (a week or more), and put those titles in KS, while offering others with the non-exclusive agreement. Then wait six months or a year and compare their sales, and decide what to do then. Maybe in the meanwhile you could offer those others in value-added form for sale on Smashwords as well as in basic form here and the same value-added form on the non-Select Kindle Store, and see how many you sell there. (Be sure to let your readers know that Smashwords pays higher royalties.)
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http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/trismegistusshandy
http://shifti.org/wiki/User:Trismegistus_Shandy
Frankly I probably just need to look into adding them to Smash..
Smashwords, since I've received more than one person who said they would buy them if it wasn't through Amazon.
The general consensus seems to be that it wouldn't make much difference, so for the stories I've already published I'll leave 'em as-is. PFH and Oh, Cheers will get pulled since they'll be getting new, superior versions in the Hatbox, but that will hardly count :)
Melanie E.