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Tag: Author economics

For Me, Tablo Is A Dead End

Published by MichelV69 on May 24, 2018

Post Views: 2,343 I’ve been working on two stories on Tablo, the free-to-read and help-to-publish website that is rather good to use. As I say over on my Author Info page, they are a pair of novellas;  the first one, titled “EMC-Squared” is going through the artwork & editing stage.  The second one, titled “the Juliet Gambit“, at the time of this blog post is in the first-draft / work-in-progress stage. Over all, for a “live beta”, the service is pretty good.  There are a few annoying quirks, such as status pages that don’t reflect current stats, or “BookWorm” values that seem fixed in place for days at a time, regardless of other information on the site telling you differently.  I’m a Safari web browser user, since I…

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Shiny New Author Page

Published by MichelV69 on March 13, 2018

Post Views: 600 Howdy, folks. I’ve given up on Facebook for trying to stay in touch with folks interested in my writing. Unless I’m willing to pony up about $100 per month, the best I can hope is that 10% of the folks following my “Sauder” facebook page will see it. Twitter, in general is very hit or miss about who of the ~550+ followers get to see my posts.  My guess is that it’s about 10%, tops. So, the first step is that I’ve rearranged my blogsite here, to have an “Author / Book Information Page” that will have info in one place about the various novels and novellas I have written or am writing.  You can find that at the “Author / Book Information Page” menu item up…

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On Just Being Amazon

Published by MichelV69 on December 30, 2012

Post Views: 303 “At least it’s a good reason and not just Amazon being Amazon.” – Seen on Twitter I saw that come across my Twitter feed this morning, and it gave me pause. Mostly because I wasn’t sure what it meant. I know that Amazon is reknowned within Internet pop-culture for being both secretive and autocratic in it’s operations. They Just Do Stuff, often in a fashion that seems counter-intuitive to both common sense and “popular opinion”. I know that Amazon’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has pretty much run the traditional publishing model off a cliff in the past decade. From everything that I’ve read, it pretty much seems a case of “since they wouldn’t let him join them, he decided to beat them”. I know that the Interwebs…

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Coffee Vs Book or Trust vs Risk

Published by MichelV69 on October 5, 2012

Post Views: 366 “A barista spends 3 minutes making you a $6 cup of coffee, you tip her. A writer spends a year writing a book, you complain $4.99 is too high” — Seen On Twitter I saw that tweet go by a couple of days ago, and it tied in neatly with a conversation I was having with a new author that was talking to me about my experiences thus far in this strange adventure. I’ve talked in a previous post about the cost to bring an indie book to market and why the “five buck book” is actually running a loss, not a profit. Here is the rub, though. Your reader doesn’t care. Or at least, doesn’t care -yet-. Your reader, to use a bit of sales…

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Paid Advertising For Your Book – Don’t bother, I tried that already

Published by MichelV69 on September 27, 2012

Post Views: 430 Back in February, I posted an article titled “More Thoughts on the Economics of Authorspace – It’s a business … who knew?” . In it, I ran through a few numbers based on my own very limited and new understanding of being an Independent author. Part of those numbers was an estimate of $450 in promotion/ advertising. It is that number and how I’ve spent it that I want to talk about. I’ll drop a table on you here in a moment, but the short version is that nothing worked. After about $400 in advertising for “By Any Other Name“, I can definably say that I got nine sales and two reviews as a result of my advertising. That is a cost per outcome of $44. Even…

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Lost Le Carrés

Published by MichelV69 on August 8, 2012

Post Views: 185 Again today I was treated to another “go get ’em tiger” writer-motivation tweet about how many times some famous author was rejected before finally being accepted by a publishing house and going on to fame and fortune. I’m sorry, that doesn’t make me feel motivated. It makes me feel mad. Allow me to explain. When I first considered being a writer, 20-ish years ago, I would have been leaving a word out of my job description. That word would be “starving”. This was well before Web 1.0, let alone the interactive people-published world of Web 2.0. So, if you wanted to be published, you depended on agents and publishing houses; gatekeepers. The Gatekeepers, much as today, are the ones which curate the literary world. They…

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The 80-20 Rule

Published by MichelV69 on August 2, 2012

Post Views: 144 Guest Post By Curiosity Quills Press I read an article this morning in The Guardian about “Why social media isn’t the magic bullet for self-epublished authors.”  It makes a lot of great points and ultimately compares social media as a sales tactic to the tech bubble of the 90s and 2000s—and it hypothesizes that it will burst in the next 18 months.  It’s a fabulous post.  Go read it. As someone who has been around since the early days before the self publishing market was flooded and before all the CONSTANT tweets and blogs and Facebook messages that you have to be on social media to sell books and that social media is more important than writing, this article made me want to stand up…

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More Thoughts on the Economics of Authorspace – It’s a business … who knew?

Published by MichelV69 on February 14, 2012

Post Views: 2,138 Alright, I am obliged to confess to being a bit embarrassed. I run a small business, and I’ve been in charge of $100k IT budgets. So I was rather gobsmacked to read an article at “Rob On Writing”  that told me I was clueless about my approach to figuring out a reasonable price for my books. Why? Well, because I’m a production shop, and I have a cost per unit and I need to know what that is. Huh? Wait, what? I’m an artist, right? A story teller? A creative spirit? What do you mean I’ve got cost per unit to calculate? Go read the article, but let me give you the short version: if you’re Indie publishing, this shit’s not free. No, really! It…

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