I’m excited to say that my dystopian novel We, The Watched will join SELF-e, a select list of self-published eBooks curated by Library Journal and Biblioboard!
This means my novel will soon be available to libraries all over the US through BiblioBoard Library. The first Library Journal SELF-e curated collection is expected to be available to libraries in mid-2015.
We, The Watched will also soon be available to readers throughout my home state of Pennsylvania in the Indie PENNSYLVANIA module as a highlighted selection.
The idea behind SELF-e is to expose notable self-published eBooks to readers around the country who are looking to discover new authors. Libraries can make ebooks available for free with no requirement to return the book and no multi-user restrictions.
Hugh Howey, author of the sci-fi series Wool and a major advocate for self-published work, has had some great things to say about SELF-e.
“The number one challenge any author has is building an audience,” he says on the BiblioBoard website.
“Once they have an audience, they have an opportunity to grow their work professionally. Librarians can be a powerful marketing force for emerging authors, especially if they can promote the books without fear of success. The SELF-e approach to curation combined with simultaneous user-access will encourage books to be discovered and even go viral.”
In We, The Watched, an amnesiac struggles to conform in a surveillance society he doesn’t remember. Resistance is heresy and punishable by death. But some seek to ignite a revolution.
You can buy the novel in print and eBook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and other major online bookstores.
Exciting news! My first novel We, The Watched is now available to download for free on NoiseTrade! All you have to do is provide an email address and you can instantly download the eBook (MOBI and EPUB versions available).
If you like what you read, NoiseTrade provides the ability to donate. However, as a self-published author, I’d be even happier if you left an honest review of the book on Amazon, Goodreads or another bookstore website.
So what’s it about?
An amnesiac struggles to conform in a surveillance society he doesn’t remember. Resistance is heresy and punishable by death. But some seek to ignite a revolution. Will the fresh perspective from Seven’s rebirth be a blessing or a curse?
As an independent author, I’m always looking for new ways to promote my books. I recently came across a cool website called Story Cartel. The site is all about finding new readers–and importantly–encouraging them to write reviews on Amazon and other bookseller websites.
I’ve put both of my novels up on Story Cartel in the past few months. Essentially, the book goes up on the site and for three weeks visitors can download it for free in exchange for their email address. At the end of that period, the reader writes a customer review and submits a link to Story Cartel. When they submit the link, they are entered into a contest to win great prizes like an Amazon gift card.
The review itself does not have to be positive–Story Cartel stresses to readers that they should write honest reviews.
I asked Story Cartel founder Joe Bunting about the origins of the site and his thoughts on how authors can best succeed in a time of immense change in the publishing world. Check out his answers below and please leave your own comments.
What was the problem you were trying to solve when you created Story Cartel?
Joe: Out of the millions of books on sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, and all the rest, how do readers figure out which ones they actually want to read? First, they’ll ask their friends, but if their friends aren’t readers or have different taste in books, they turn to reviews.
Not professional reviews in the New York Times or Vanity Fair. Regular readers are much more interested in finding books other people like them are interested in reading.
That’s why getting reviews on their books are the first and most important thing authors can do today to market their books.
We had figured out how to get a lot of reviews on our own books, and so we built Story Cartel to help other authors get reviews on theirs. It’s working out pretty well. Since 2012, we’ve helped authors get over 15,000 reviews on their books. We’re pretty excited about that.
Why do authors need a site like Story Cartel?
Joe: Reviews, especially Amazon reviews, do three things:
Reviews provide social proof. You’re much more likely to buy a book with 100 reviews than one with 3 reviews, even if the 100 reviews are lower than the book with just 3. We all like to read books other people are reading.
Reviews build word of mouth buzz. And word of mouth buzz is what sells books the best.
Reviews work on Amazon’s algorithm. While Amazon is always changing its algorithm, we’ve found that books with more reviews rank higher on Amazon than books with fewer reviews.
How long have you been running, where are you based, and how big is the team?
Joe: We’ve been helping authors since 2012, when we started by launching just one book a week (now we launch over 20 a week, on average). We’re based in Atlanta, Georgia (but we often travel to Santa Barbara, California to escape the heat!), and have a small, busy team of four people.
The publishing industry is in a state of flux right now. Where do you think it’s going, and how well will self-published authors fare against industry published authors?
Joe: From our perspective, publishing has always been about relationship and conversations. Now the conversation is just faster and less centralized.
Publishers in the last model were heavily reliant on book reviewers in magazines and newspapers to generate buzz for their books.
So what do you do when the magazines and newspapers are closing their book review departments and yet the average reader has more of a voice than ever?
We’re doing the same thing publicists have been doing for decades–getting books into the hands of people with influence. The difference is that now everyone has influence!
How can self-published authors match the marketing budgets of the big publishers?
Joe: Honestly, they don’t need to. They just need to make relationships with one reader at a time, one life-long fan at a time. If you have 1,000 fans who are willing to tell all their friends each time you publish a new book, that’s a career. What else do you need?
Here’s how We, The Watched looked on Story Cartel. During the giveaway period, the “Buy on Amazon” button said “Download.”
Besides Story Cartel, are there any other innovative companies in this space you like that are helping self-published authors?
Joe: Story Cartel fits really well with Bookbub, the eBook promotion service that’s helping so many authors sell books online. They require at least 25 reviews before they’ll host your book, so Story Cartel is a good first step before using them.
I like what NoiseTrade books is doing to help authors build relationships with readers by giving away free copies of their books.
There are lots of other great services, but I think it matters less which tools you use and more that you’re developing relationships with your readers online using whatever tools are at your disposal (e.g. email, Twitter, Facebook, your blog, etc).
What are the next steps for Story Cartel? Do you have any plans to expand or improve your services, for example?
Joe: We’re writers ourselves, so I think we’ll always be creating new things to help them. Our sister site, The Write Practice, is all about helping people practice the craft of writing, and we’re in the process of building a publicity agency to help handcraft custom online publicity campaigns, especially for publishers. We just want to help writers, in whatever way we can, and it’s a huge honor to get to do that every day.
Missed the giveaway of my dystopian novel We, The Watched? For a limited time get the book for just $1 at Smashwords with the coupon code JQ73E. Or get it free on NoiseTrade! And please, leave a review!
Guy Kawasaki talks to media in Sydney. Credit: Canva
I’ve always been envious of traditionally published authors.
I am the self-published author of two dystopian novels and I know there are advantages to my way, including greater control over the final product and more revenue per sale… but marketing is not easy and it’s certainly not cheap.
So, while self-publishing is going OK for me, there’s always been a voice in the back of my head saying, “This would be so much easier with a New York publisher!”
I have to admit I was a bit surprised when Guy Kawasaki said that’s all a myth.
Guy, the former chief evangelist of Apple, is the author of 12 books and recently self-published one all about this topic called APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. At a recent media breakfast in Sydney, he said self-publishers can find just as much success as authors with New York publishers–if not more.
“The publishing industry is a very interesting place because it used to be an oligopoly where a few dozen firms in New York controlled the whole world. That is no longer true because of self-publishing and Amazon.”
It can take a year to release a book under the traditional publishing model, he said. “As a self-publisher, from the time manuscript is done–which I can determine–8 hours later it’s for sale on Kindle.”
That all sounded good, but I couldn’t help but feel that Guy might be forgetting that getting initial sales depends on marketing. Maybe Guy is famous enough to sell his own book to thousands of people, but what about the rest of us? I had to ask, wouldn’t a relatively unknown author still get better marketing from a big New York firm?
Guy said no.
“The fact is that they only do those kind of things if you are Hillary Clinton or you’re David Beckham. They don’t do it for the other 10,000 authors every year because frankly they can’t call the New York Times 10,000 times every year.”
In many cases, even traditionally published authors end up doing their own marketing, he said.
“The irony is, if you are lucky enough to garner interest from a New York publisher, one of the first questions they are going to ask you is, ‘What’s your marketing platform?’ Which is kind of ass-backwards because the reason why you’re going to them is for their marketing platform.”
If the publisher actually took care of marketing, Guy said the 90-10 revenue split between publisher and author might make sense. But if that’s not going to happen, it makes little sense for the author to give up 90% of the sales, he said.
With self-publishing through Amazon, the author keeps 70% of each sale. “That’s five times better than what you would get from a publisher,” he said.
The good news, he said, is that self-published authors today have a free marketing platform to get the word out to their audience: social media.
“I’m not saying everyone is guaranteed a bestseller, but at least everybody has a shot and you’re not at the whim of someone in New York.”
Adam Bender is the self-published author of two dystopian novels about surveillance: We, The Watched and Divided We Fall.
The popularity of the Kindle and tablets like the iPad have driven eBook sales in recent years. Their beautiful screens, light weight and anywhere, anytime store interfaces have convinced readers from around the world that digital books can be just as nice to read as the traditional paper version.
As an author, it’s been great. When I first released We, The Watched online, most people didn’t have eReaders and the best I could expect was for people to read my novel in their web browsers or–maybe, if they had the ink to spare–download the PDF and print it out. Now, with eReaders widespread and my self-published book available on all of the major eBook stores, I have a much wider potential audience than when I began.
Of course, the essential problem with self-publishing remains: how to convince people to give my book a try when I have only a limited marketing budget. Why take a chance spending money on my book when you haven’t heard of it and there’s plenty of other books out there that your friends have been talking about?
It’s a good point. Sure, I could spend all day telling you how great my book is, but why would you take my word for it? I’m no LeVar Burton.
This is why I am so excited about a new wave in eBook publishing: subscriptions!
Following the model of Netflix and Spotify, new sites are popping up promising readers unlimited reading for a small monthly subscription price. These include Oyster and a revamped reading service from Scribd.
Oyster charges $9.95 per month for unlimited reading through an app for the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Scribd charges $8.99 for unlimited reading through its own app for those Apple devices plus Android phones and tablets. Both have promotions offering the first month for free.
The Oyster app running on an iPad Mini. Credit: Oyster
While I’m not sure I read enough books to make this worth it for me personally, I know a lot of people who do. And the ability to discover new books without any risk is pretty cool.
This means that readers can try my novel–and read it to the end–and not pay a penny more than the subscription price they would have paid anyway. And I even get about the same royalty as I would have from a traditional sale.
It’s an exciting concept, and I am hoping it is the beginning of a trend. Perhaps in the future, we will see the bigger eBook stores try similar price models. It is certainly a great development for authors and one that will make an even better business case for going self-published.
I’m excited to say that my dystopian novel We, The Watched will join SELF-e, a select list of self-published eBooks curated by Library Journal and Biblioboard!
professionally. Librarians can be a powerful marketing force for emerging authors, especially if they can promote the books without fear of success. The SELF-e approach to curation combined with simultaneous user-access will encourage books to be discovered and even go viral.”
