Next up for review is my publishing business. It is a business, and as such, it perhaps more than anything else is affected by the underlying reason for these introspective accounts. And that is, I ain’t young anymore. I’m 73, and while I don’t have my foot in the grave just yet, the time for long term planning has passed me by. If I was 20 or 30 years younger, I could perhaps look on my publishing business and decide to try things different things. But I have neither the energy nor the time to change much, and to be honest, no desire to.
I have only recently come to fully consider publishing as a distinct activity, rather than an extension of my writing, but even so, from the very beginning, I had to consider my products. My books are passion projects, not commercial ventures with any sort of mass market appeal. This being the case, I felt that spending money on promoting them would likely lose money. And the money I'd make without spending money to promote them and/or the money I'd leave on the table by selling my books at cost – wouldn't be enough to change my life in any meaningful way. Given these facts, I opted to use the most efficient and laziest method to sell them, i.e. to sell my ebooks at my cost in every available outlet as free ebooks, using their FREE! price alone to promote and sell them. Some might consider this cheating, but I consider myself the Aldi of publishing, a discount publisher. In the last eight years I've sold over 74,000 books which I think is well above the mean number of books sold for both traditionally and indie authors. While the $600+ I've grossed from Amazon's foreign stores doesn't hold a candle to even the most unsuccessful traditionally published authors, I suspect that when it comes to indie authors who follow the "experts'" advice and “do it right”, i.e. spending a lot of money on all sorts of services to produce an ebook, even a $50 clear profit from my gross sales would still put me above the mean for indie authors when it comes profit and loss. While it is getting harder and harder to sell ebooks without spending thousands of dollars promoting them, I don't see any better alternative to my ebook sales model.
What has made a great difference in my sales was my willingness to jump into audiobooks when Google offered me the chance to do so - for free - last year. These days half of all my sales now come from audiobooks on Google’s Play Store. Had I not made that move, my sales would be declining rather than growing as they have been over the last two years.
I can offer the Google auto-generated audiobooks on other audiobook platforms, as long as I keep them on Google. However, I would probably have to charge money for them, circling back to the fact that they would probably not sell in any economically significant numbers, so why bother?
The paper books market is a sector that I have entertained some ambitions in during the last year or two – mostly with the goal of creating a more lasting and tangible legacy than ebooks will likely provide. I was even considering spending money for that legacy. On the local scale, I toyed with the idea of offering some free sample copies of some of my books to the local bookshop. I also considered offering them into the local library. And on a larger scale, I considered offering bookshops that specialize in science fiction a free sample set of my books for them to sell. I have now abandoned those plans. Being a shy person who has successfully avoided the limelight his entire life, why risk my anonymity, however slight the risk, by calling attention to myself locally for sales that would amount to next to nothing. Plus, the library does not guarantee that they will shelve books contributed to them. My books could just end up on their sales rack for discarded books. I can give my books to charity shops myself. On the national scale, if the bookshop actually sold my books and wanted more copies, I would have to become the distributor of the books, likely having to keep a stock of books on hand to send out, since my books are not set up for extended distribution on Amazon, and Amazon takes it's time sending out author copies. Not worth the hassle.
I toyed with making print books via Barnes & Noble's print on demand service in addition to my Amazon editions, since with the paper book files on hand, it would take little effort. I could then also sell my ebooks directly through B & N rather than via Smashword. But to what end? B & N aren't going to carry the paper books in their stores, and my books will still be lost on their website without paying to promote them... so it hardly seems worth even the little effort.
I've found that no matter how big a publisher you are, books don't sell themselves. Selling books is a hard business, even for big publishers with plenty of money. I could, however take a page from their promotional efforts by sending paper copies of my books to "media influencers." Unlike traditionally published books, I probably could not expect to receive a review, but I do know a number of booktubers who post “book haul videos” every month or so where they show off the books viewers have sent to them. It amounts to maybe a minute of time holding the book, reading the blurb, and thanking the sender for the book in front of several thousand viewers. It is unlikely that they would read and review a self-published book as their TBR list numbers in the hundreds. Given how inefficiently social media works for selling books (it works, but you need clout and scale) I doubt that any resulting sales spike would be worth the cost of the book and shipping.
I've also toyed with the idea going back to listing my ebooks with Kobo directly, just out of curiosity to see how many of my ebooks they are selling, since they do not report free sales to Smashwords. I've done so in the past, but sales were so minor that I decided it wasn’t worth the bother of entering their sales on my sales charts, so I went back to Smashwords distribution. Still, I am slightly curious, and the effort would be small, but… being lazy… we’ll see.
Looking back at all these ideas, it seems like I'm just being lazy by not pursuing them. Maybe if I felt that I had more time to grow my publishing business, I might be more willing to try new things. But since I don't, I’m just going to stay the course. I have a business that runs itself and produces, if not money, readership, which is what I value most. No point fixing what isn’t broken.
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