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Before you start reading, I (Johnny) would like to let you know that my brand-spankin’ new book Fat Vampire 4 is available now and will be free on Amazon on March 14-15. Go here to check out Fat Vampire 4. (Side note – the first three Fat Vampire books are available in a buy-2-get-1 bundle here.)
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This episode was our attempt to get to a bunch of little odds and ends that we’ve been wanting to mention but that don’t warrant an entire show on their own. We also wanted to answer your listener questions. We got to most of them. Yay, us!
This shit takes time
Sean and I started off by recapping our numbers for the Unicorn Western series (check out our handy and inexpensive UW three-pack!) and spent some time underscoring the idea that this brand-new series is not raking in the bucks yet. One of the most important things you can do for your publishing career is to be patient and give your books time on the market to find an audience.
Gareth asked about using and selling stock photography
Dave’s wet dream, Gareth from England, said that he was interested in selling his photographs for authors to use and also kind of asked about where one would buy stock photography. We recommended Shutterstock for both.
Bathtub Girl asked about selling a cookbook — publish, blog, or what?
We thought that Bathtub Girl’s idea to self-publish a photography-rich cookbook sounded fraught with peril and difficult to pull off due mainly to issues having to do with the photos themselves and the nature of selling cookbooks, but saw some promise in the idea of blogging as a method of promotion and becoming known as a Cookbook Bathtub Girl.
An anonymous caller asked about knowing how big her sub-niche is
Because Anonymous Girl says she’s writing in a specific sub-niche of romance/erotica, Dave felt the need to declare publicly that he thinks that werewolf erotica is just for people who want to fuck animals in such a way that indicated that it had been on his mind a LOT lately. We then actually answered the question about determining the size or popularity of a niche. Seemingly.
Kirk asked about outlining and story beats
Sean elaborated some here on the “beating” process he talked about in our earlier episode on outlining and story structure. So we talked about that a lot.
Dave said that he loves Scrapple
Dave pretended that he was talking about this and not this, but I think we know what the real score is. Suffice to say that it’s a cool visual organizational tool for writers.
Steve asked about costs for building and running a website
Our recommendations for writers’ websites are these:
FOR THE DIY’er: You can set up and run a site for less than $10 a month for the site and under $20 a month for the mailing list. Here are links showing you how to handle the website setup and installation and how to set up and use a mailing list, including our recommendations on service providers.
FOR SOMEONE WHO JUST WANTS IT HANDLED: Sean recommended outstandingSETUP, which will do it all for you.
Then, to close out the show, I railed a bit more about how the changes in free and KDP Select are really starting to piss me off.
To view the video version of this episode, go to: Self Publishing Podcast #46 – Q&A, Progress, and the Catch-Up Show
I think Amazon is just like Google was a few years ago.
Everyone tries to game the system, and it sucks, because the rules keep changing.
If a book isn’t selling that much, maybe people don’t like it ? Do you always
think it’s a marketing and obscurity problem ?
I remember that quote from Pixar – “…just because you think it’s a good story,
doesn’t mean your audience thinks so, too.”
Hugh Howey never did marketing, and Wool blew up by itself because readers loved talking about it. Granted, that’s an edge case, but it’s a good example.
At one point do you guys say :
Ahh, despite our efforts, it doesn’t sell enough. Maybe we just drop it instead
of wasting more time marketing ?
I think it comes down to trust in yourself. Something can flop because it sucks, or it can flop because it’s not getting enough attention. I guess I’d say to set aside marketing if it’s not working, and write more. If, after YOU start to catch fire because of something you write later, that book then DOES catch, you’ll know it was worth it after all.
Hi, guys – love the shows!
Story Beats – can you give us a downloadable sample of Sean’s story beats (eg. for “Unicorn Western”)?
It helps to see how other people approach the writing process and this was new to me (I’m not a writer!).
Keep up the good work!
Cheers, Ken
I was actually thinking about this a while back — giving you the stages of UW from beats through subsequent drafts to the end. At the time, we couldn’t do it because it UW had to be exclusive to Amazon and couldn’t be on our site, but now UW is now coming out of Select, so that would mean that we could post earlier drafts here.
What do you think, Sean? Anything in the UW1 beats you wouldn’t want the world to see?
Yeah, that would be really great! And if there was anything Sean was too coy about from the beats, well, you could “redact” them by blackening the words, phrases and sentences out – that would be cool and intriguing and we could all have great fun trying to guess what was redacted.
Then you could publish a special edition of UW with beats, redactions and readers’ best/funniest guesses of what Sean might have written. I’d buy that!
Who knows, it might sell even more than the original. – lol.
Cheers (from England), Ken
I like the idea! Johnny we should talk about this on Thursday.
Also, it’s a cool new way of interacting with your readership to build/maintain/repair the relationship and an innovative marketing approach that’ll probably win you awards in the Internet Marketing world.
AND it’s a great way to get paid twice for the same shit!
I LOVE this idea! Let’s definitely talk about it when we “meet” on Thursday, Sean.
Yeah. About bigfoot… LOL. WRONG.
I admit I got very nervous when I called and I should probably have explained better. And maybe not have used the word “erotica” because it obviously brought to mind something entirely different than what I meant. I meant romance novels/stories with a lot of sex in them. 
Romance is a HUGE market. But there are definitely niches within romance that don’t sell as well, such as the old fashioned, short Regency romances I used to buy from Zebra and Signet when I was a kid… (NOT my market by the way, I’m just trying to use them as an example.) Say you take a Regency, add time travel to it, and sex (which traditional Regency romance didn’t include unless the couple was already married), make the hero disabled, give the heroine an unusual trait, and then you find yourself writing in this niche every time you write because you just can’t help yourself. I was interested in discovering if you guys had tips on how to interpret the information you find on Amazon when you search for books similar to your own to determine if they’re selling. That’s all. LOL. But hey, bigfoot might have to make an appearance in a future book, just because hirsute fellas are not unattractive! And isn’t there this saying about big feet? Or is that big noses? 
I jumped into self-publishing in Sept of 2011 with the first book in a romantic thriller series and man, I would have KILLED to have your pod casts available back then. You guys are outstanding. Seriously. It’s so interesting to watch/hear other writers debating the same issues I’ve been questioning. The death of KDP Select free, being the big one, because that was how I was able to constantly push sales. My book was wildly successful in Select, but I’ve seen the Select effect diminish by the month on the titles I’ve been tracking and I won’t be enrolling the new books in that program, instead I’m going to try to crack the B&N and Apple markets.
My romantic thriller series took a detour, so I haven’t had anything self-published since August of 2012, but I’m getting ready to step back into the self-publishing arena this spring with a romantic suspense, and I’m mapping out a new romantic thriller series I plan to start putting up during the fall of 2013. Your podcasts have been a great resource and inspiration for me as I gear up to get back into the self-publishing industry,
Like the three of you, I could never get any traction on B&N/Apple/Kobo/Sony, so Select was a no-brainer for me- but I do think there are ways to get traction on the other sites these days. I’ve had several friends pull their catalogs from Select and upload them at the other distributors and within a couple of months were hitting the B&N top 100. BookBubs is remarkable for getting traction on other outlets, as is using a multi-author promo sale.
For example, a bunch of authors in my genre recently got together and advertised each others books through a special email promo to their fan lists. Each of these authors dropped one of their books to .99, and then each author sent out a email blast to their fan base featuring the covers, blurbs and buy links for these .99 cent books. Quite a few of these featured books hit the B&N top 100, on both the featured book as well as successive titles in that series. For several authors this was the first time they cracked B&N.
I think you’ll start seeing a lot more cross author pollination like this, as authors start tapping into eachother’s fan bases.
Anyway- just wanted to let you know how much I’m enjoying your pod casts, I’ve been going from the most current back, since the industry changes so quickly and I want to hear your takes on the current climate in self-publishing first. But I am going to work my way through all of them.
This is some really cool stuff to think about… thank you!
On the BookBub’s ads, make sure you mark it for delivery to all the retailers (assuming the book is up everywhere) they have a large B&N and Apple mailing list. Kobo doesn’t matter as much. I don’t know anyone who has had a run on sales at Kobo after the ad. Boxed sets seem to really fly. And of course the book you feature needs a lot of reviews, and a high review average. Although the boxed sets, don’t. Apparently they go by the individual book’s reviews, that ate in the set.
FYI- I bought Fat Vampire, it looks great.