I had this post ready to go yesterday, my scheduled day for this blog, but forgot about it. Here it is a day late.

Author Central is an Amazon website that provides information to authors. Actually, it may also provide info to readers about authors. Despite being registered there for three years I haven’t explored it much. The main reasons I go there is to check book sales and author rank. In fact, normally I just check author rank. If my rank hasn’t budged from the previous day, or if it just continues to drop, I know I have no sales.

The figure above was my author rank at about 7:30 a.m. on November 11, 2014. That means I was the 502,648th most popular author on Amazon, considering both print books and e-books. So 502,647 authors who have their books listed on Amazon were, as of that moment, more successful at selling books than I was. I’ve spent my life as a second-stringer, but this is ridiculous.

The reason I bring this up is because I have sunk to new depths. Here’s a graph of my ranking since Amazon instituted this service.

As you can see from that, my rank has occasionally topped 100,000, but not often. And, my rank as of Nov 11th had hit a new low. It was the first time I was below 500,000. The rank listed for each day, except for the current day, is where you were at the end of the day, probably Pacific Time. You can see the effect a single book sale will have on an author ranking as low as mine.

I’m not doing any promotion right now, since life gives me no time to write I’m not going to carve out time to promote. Not to mention that I hate promotion of myself. Also, the print books I buy from them to sell personally don’t count. I have another 40 or so of those that would have helped my ranking.

So, we’ll see what the future brings. For right now I drag along the bottom. I know there are others lower ranked than I am, but I can only account for me.

For most unpublished authors, obtaining a contract with a trade (a.k.a. traditional, royalty paying) publisher is the dream, the goal, the end of a lengthy and frustrating pursuit. Many chase that dream for years. I did. For eight years to be exact. Some days I still think that I’d like that, have a book trade published.

Then I wake up, and realize chasing that dream didn’t make much sense. I still follow a couple of agent blogs, which keeps me up on the news and mindset of that industry.  On one of those blogs, I had the following exchange earlier this week.

[The Agent] …Quotes from a significant endorser or a phrase from a fabulous review will appear on the cover of the print version, but they wouldn’t be visible digitally.  Quotes or a “burst” that announces the book has won has award, must be handled differently online. Ask the marketing staff at your publishing house to have that cover quote start out the book’s online description. Having that quote in bold or a larger font and separated from the rest of the description will help to convey its importance….

[Me] “Ask the marketing staff at your publishing house to have that cover quote start out the book’s online description.” You mean a publisher’s professional and experienced marketing staff won’t know enough to do this on their own?

[Another commenter; call her “Jane”] Not a lot of publishers like that. I know a couple I work with that won’t even put quotes or tagline on the front cover. Every PH has their own style and preferences. Besides, they have a lot more going on to get a single book out that to worry about marketing details. Most marketing is up to the author, these days to cut expenses.

[The Agent] “Jane” is correct, David, in that the publisher’s marketing department is working on providing marketing for so many titles at one time that taking an endorsement or mention of an award from the cover and highlighting it in the book’s online description isn’t a thought that is likely to occur to them. Authors will probably have to offer the marketer a prompt.

A trade publisher pays royalties in the range of 8 to 15 percent of the book price.  Maybe that’s of the net the publisher receives, which would make it about half that amount, but let’s just leave those as the range. A bestselling author might get the 15, a debut author will probably get the 8, with close to no advance. So essentially the author is paying the publisher 85 to 92 percent of the revenue of each book for services the publisher is providing, and for providing these services the publisher retains a portion of that 85 to 92 percent as profit.

But what does the author receive for paying this? One thing they don’t seem to get is marketing or promotion. “Jane” said what I suggested should be done by the marketing staff would be unusual, not the norm. So it seems the author is not getting any work done by an experienced, professional marketing staff, other than an entry in a catalog, and a very deficient entry at that.

More and more I’m glad I made the decision to self-publish. Sure, I don’t get many sales. But if I had continued to pursue trade publishing I’d probably still be out in the cold, chasing a dream, never waking up.

My post will be brief today, as much is going on in my world. The last couple of days have been very emotional, in a good way. Things have happened, things that I might someday discuss on my other blog.

But for now I’ll just report August 2014 book sales. I sold 12 books, near as I can tell. I don’t understand how Amazon counted the pre-sales for my novels Headshots. The sales report says two were pre-ordered, and that they would post to the novel sales on the day of release. However, only one posted on that day, August 28. I contacted Amazon about it, and they said I only had one preorder and that was the sale that posted on the 28th. I’m about to respond to them, “Then why did my pre-order report show two pre-orders?” For now, I’m just counting it as one sale. Given that’s the only sale I had of it, you could say my novel release, including going for pre-orders, was a huge flop. “It’s a long tail game” I keep telling myself.

Here’s the sales table.  I’ll insert s smaller one later for display at Absolute Write.

Here are the tables. I’ll come back later and edit in some commentary.

I’m trying to figure out what’s going on at Smashwords. This is the site where I publish my books to for distribution on to Barne & Noble, Kobo, Apple, etc. I have 15 of my 16 books there. Smashwords doesn’t allow publishing of public domain books, so I can’t put my Thomas Carlyle book there. If I want it for Nook, etc. I’ll have to go to the individual site.

One of the things Smashwords does that Amazon doesn’t do is track the number of times your book is sampled at the Smashwords sale site. Samples aren’t sales, of course, but samples are evidence of interest. I would hope that more sample downloads would eventually result in more sales.

I began tracking my sample downloads in April. Monday morning, around 7:30 a.m. my time, I record, in a spreadsheet, how many times each book has been sampled. I have the spreadsheet calculate the change from the week before, and track this change as well as the total downloads. On April 2 (a Wednesday; then I standardized on Mondays), my books had been sampled 722 times. Since then, here are the samples week by week.

• April 2 – 722
• April 7 – 726, so 4 downloads
• April 14 – 738, so 12 downloads
• April 21 – 741, so 3 downloads
• April 28 – 745, so 4 downloads
• May 5 – 761, so 16 downloads
• May 12 – 783, so 22 downloads
• May 19 – 786, so 3 downloads
• May 26 – 787, so 1 download
• June 2 – 792, so 5 downloads
• June 9 – 804, so 12 downloads (new short story added)
• June 16 – 819, so 15 downloads
• June 23 – 842, so 23 downloads
• June 30 – 878, so 36 downloads (new short story added)
• July 6 – 896, so 18 downloads
• July 13 – 906, so 10 downloads
• July 20 – 927, so 21 downloads

As you can see, the trend is generally upwards, helped out quite a lot when I published those two new short stories in June. Now, if I add this week, as of today, which is almost three days short of a full week, I have:

• July 25 – 977, so 50 downloads

Wow! That’s a big increase from my previous high week, long before the week is over, and with no new book to stimulate downloads. If downloads continue proportionately for the rest of the seven days, I should have 60 or more by Monday morning.

What can I attribute this increase to? Could it possibly be a summer thing? People are looking for a summer read, and so are downloading more samples, trying to figure out what to buy? Is it a volume thing? I’m up to 15 items available on Smashwords. People who see my page think “Oh, this is a serious author; let me sample some of his stuff.” Is it just the law of averages? Some weeks you’re over average, some below, some right on average, and occasionally way over average?

Obviously I don’t know. I may never know. So far this hasn’t translated to higher sales on Smashwords or any of the places it distributes to. I think, however, that more downloads has to be good news. That means more interest, more exposure. Someday the sales will come.

I think I’ve written this before. I hate G.I.M.P. (which I’ll type as GIMP to speed things up). This is a graphical design program, a poor man’s Photoshop.  I’m using it to make book covers. I do that because the copy of Photoshop Elements (i.e. Photoshop lite) on our laptop looks very hard to use.

But GIMP is probably just as hard. The first cover I made with it was for Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. See that yellow background? I have no idea how I did that. I couldn’t figure out how to add color to the canvas. At least I did figure out what the canvas was and how to create it at the size I needed. That was kind of easy. But when it came time to select the simple color that the canvas should be, I couldn’t figure out how to make it happen.

I tried a bunch of things, and eventually that color appeared on the canvas. I have no clue what set of keystrokes I used to achieve that. When I wanted to do the same thing with the cover for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, the same thing happened, more or less. Though maybe this time it wasn’t quite so random. I thought I figured out the right place to do the color add thing. I must have been in the right place, because the color added, but, again, don’t ask me what keystrokes I used.

Of course, since I couldn’t figure out how to resize the cover photo and change the aspect ratio, without cropping, I couldn’t do what I wanted to do anyhow.

I suppose I need to take a couple of weeks and just learn the program. Trial and error, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Problem is, I don’t have a couple of weeks of spare time to devote to that.

The Internet war between bookseller Amazon and book publisher Hachette is heating up—although it is being fought through or by surrogates. How much either of the two negotiating behemoths are orchestrating the surrogates is just speculation. I suspect some of it is, but not all. So far the war isn’t dying down; if anything it’s escalating.

I won’t trouble you with a bunch of links. If you follow them then follow the links they give and one more time you’ll be blaming me for all the time you’re spending. No, I won’t be giving you links. It’s all pretty easy to see. The Passive Voice blog has a number of summarized, aggregated posts about it. Joe Konrath has a couple, as does Barry Eisler, David Gaughran, and Hugh Howey on the self-publishing side. Several on the trade publishing side have blog posts as well. I have read a few, but don’t remember the names. All of the self-publishers I mentioned have links to blogs on the other side.

I’ve said before that the gist of the war is the Amazon-Hachette negotiations. Because of non-disclosure agreements no one knows for sure what the negotiations are about, or why they are taking so long. Lots of people speak authoritatively, as if they do know, but then say they don’t. One such person is Stephen Zacharias of Kensington Publishing, who, in comments on another blog, wrote: “The negotiations stem from one side wanting more money than before and the other side not wanting to give it up…but no one knows for sure what all the negotiations entail.” So he states it as a sure thing, then says he doesn’t know. This is typical of the commentary on the negotiations.

The latest salvos are open letters. An open letter to Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon, has been written and signed by several bestselling authors, including James Patterson and John Grisham. The gist of that letter: Amazon, stop hurting authors and readers. It has around 70 signatories. A competing letter written by Howey and signed by most of the outspoken in the self-publishing world says: Hachette and other big publishers, stop hurting authors and readers. It has, at last count, a few less than 5,000 signatories.

I haven’t signed either. But I think I’ve made it clear on this blog where I stand. Amazon actually wears a few hats in the publishing world. They are a bookseller. They are a book publisher through a couple of trade publishing imprints. And they are a publisher for the huge self-publishing community through Kindle Direct Publishing. My involvement in publishing is through the latter.

Since it’s remotely possible that someone may read my blog who is considering what side “to take” in the Amazon-Hachette standoff, I offer my take on which is better for writers and readers.

• Amazon, as a bookseller, discounts aggressively and extensively. Big Publishing colluded to fix prices and prevent Amazon from discounting. Higher prices hurt consumers, i.e. readers. So Amazon wins this round.
• Amazon, as a publisher, pays higher royalties to authors. For an e-book that costs the consumer $5.00, at Amazon the author receives $3.50. At Big Publishing the author would receive $0.63. Larger earnings per book sold are better for the author, so Amazon wins this round too.
• Except, of course, Big Publishing won’t price their books as low as Amazon does. They will price it around $14, and the author would earn $1.75 per copy sold. Also of course, they will sell fewer copies at $14 than they would at $5, so they will receive less per copy and sell fewer copies. So at the higher price the author is not truly helped and the reader is hurt. I still award this round to Amazon.
• When e-readers proved successful to early adaptors and commercially viable, Amazon innovated and developed Kindle Direct Publishing. Taking no rights from the author, and charging nothing for use of the publishing platform, they made that 70% royalty possible for any author, independent or with a publisher, to use it and put their work before the public. Big Publishing waited a few years, and when they decided they needed to compete, they bought Author Solutions (well, one of them did, but the others all use it), that company that takes money from writers to profit, rather than doing so by selling books. So this round clearly goes to Amazon.
• Bookstores boycott products published by Amazon while they embrace products published by Big Publishing. This one we can’t mark off against Big Publishing, unless they are the ones convincing booksellers not to sell Amazon-published products. I suspect booksellers have enough motivation on their own. This one is a draw.
• That leaves only the book creation process itself. Big Publishing does things for each book it publishes: three different types of editing, professionally made covers, professionally designed book interiors. Some self-published books have that, either because the author hired some or all of them done or happened to have those skills. But I will admit that, on average, the average trade published book is of better quality than the average self-published book: in the writing and the production. This round goes to Big Publishing as being better for the reader, and for those writers fortunate enough to be let in the gate.
• Oops, I forgot about rights. Who’s better in terms of what rights they insist on having for the money that the author receives? This is a long subject, much too long to discuss here. I’ll summarize by saying that Amazon takes no rights while Big Publishing typically takes all rights for the life of the copyright (which is the author’s life plus 70 years). Some authors are able to negotiate more favorable terms, but most can’t. At least that’s what the best heads in the industry tell me. So obviously Amazon is better for authors on this than is big publishing.

Food for thought as you go about your book buying.