Wizard’s Tower

Jim Hines on Ebook Marketing

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

A couple of days ago SFWA published an interesting article about ebook publishing by Jim Hines. I have a few issues with some of the terminology Jim uses — Amazon is a retailer, not a publisher, so if you create an ebook and sell through them you are not “published” by Amazon and you don’t get “royalties” from them, you are self-publishing — but it is a very interesting article all the same.

Basically Jim tried self-publishing some of his backlist as ebooks retailing through Amazon and B&N. In the course of 2 months he sold 37 books for a total income of $75. That’s not a viable business. What went wrong? Well partly Jim acknowledges that the choice of book was poor, but mainly it is a question of marketing.

Here’s the problem. It is all very well having your book available on Amazon, but with millions of other books also available, how is anyone going to find it, let alone buy it? There are things you can do. Good covers, good associated blurb, having more than one book available: all these help. But even so the haystack in which you are trying to get your needle noticed is very large indeed.

This is a problem for anyone trying to sell ebooks. How do you get your wares noticed? It is a problem that bugged me when I was thinking about setting up Wizard’s Tower. That’s one reason why I have Salon Futura: it gives me an opportunity once a month to tell a lot of people about new books. It is also why the bookstore sells books by other publishers. The more good material I have there, the more people will visit and the more chance I’ll have of selling my own books. But that’s probably not enough.

The good news is that December looks like having twice the turnover of November. The bad news is that still means little over £100 in sales which, given the generous terms I’m giving other publishers, is less than half what I need just to cover the hosting costs.

Yesterday Neil Clarke tweeted to ask people where they found out about good ebooks to buy (because he wants to sell books too). I didn’t see many responses, but one person mentioned “blogs and the front page of Amazon”. The Amazon reference isn’t as daft as it seems, because they do recommendations, but even so it illustrates the point. Left to their own devices, people will buy from Amazon. They will only buy from elsewhere if people blog or tweet or whatever about those other places. So I’m very grateful to Hal Duncan and Ekaterina Sedia for pointing people at my store. I’d like other people to do so as well, but there’s a limit to how often you can bug people and at least one person has already decided I’m being too pushy.

It is, however, a feedback thing. If you don’t sell many books, people won’t bother to sell through your store and you’ll sell even fewer. If you do have good sales, more people will want to sell through your store, more people will talk about it, and the more you will sell. Getting that positive feedback loop going is a skill. Over the next few months I’ll find out whether I have it.

And just in case you have forgotten, all Prime ebooks are on sale at the bookstore through to the end of the year.

A Solstice Sale

~ Cheryl

Well I did say I had a little bit of work to do today. Now it is done. We have a bunch of fabulous ebook titles from Prime Books available in the Wizard’s Tower store, and they are all on sale until the end of the year. Many thanks to Sean Wallace for helping make this happen. Happy Solstice, everyone!

Meanwhile, back to my vacation.

People and Money

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

Running Wizard’s Tower is proving interesting and educational in a number of ways. Unsurprisingly, I have discovered that I am not a very good salesperson. Making stuff is no problem. Persuading people to part with money is quite another. Some of that is personal. A Welsh Methodist upbringing drums into you that asking for money for anything except charity is a bad thing to do. And for very obvious reasons of personal history my self esteem is not exactly stellar. However, there are also techniques to be learned, and that’s interesting in a different way.

One observation that I would cautiously advance is that the behavior of human beings en masse is very different from their stated individual behavior on the Internet. No matter how much people may rail against the evils of commercialism, much of it works. I suspect, for example, that it is much easier to sell things if you price them at a ridiculously high mark-up and then offer periodic massive sales than if you were to price them closer to cost, no matter how “evil” such behavior might seem.

The other thing I am learning is that there are all sorts of delicate balancing acts to be negotiated between reminding people to buy and not being irritating. I’m currently erring on the side of caution, I think. Of course it may simply be that what I’m doing is utter rubbish and no one wants to pay for it, but that way lies surrender and I’m not prepared to give up on life just yet.

Here’s an interesting concrete example. I tend to think that it is better to ask for money in return for something than to ask for money for nothing. Hence I’d prefer to have people buy ebook editions of Salon Futura than donate money. But that falls down in a couple of ways. Firstly many of you don’t have ebook readers, and while you can read epubs on a PC, you might as well read the website. Secondly it requires you to actually go to the store and make a purchase. That’s work. It is easier to persuade people to pay money if you make it easier for them to do so.

(This, incidentally, is one reason why most people will still buy their Kindle books from Amazon, rather than from independent retailers like me, even though the Amazon ones are DRMed and mine are not. Buying through the Kindle shop is easier, because the book downloads automatically.)

So here’s a question for you. If I were to offer a £1.49 monthly subscription to Salon Futura, via PayPal with automatic billing, would any of you sign up? It is cheap — only £1.49/month — and easy — sign up once and not have to worry again. Of course you wouldn’t have to do it — the magazine will still be available for free online. But it would help pay the bills if enough people do it.

If you don’t want to comment about it here, but would be happy to pay, email me. I want to get a good sense of whether this is worth doing before offering it. Thanks!

What’s In Store? – Dark Spires

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Now that I have this smart new online store, I should talk a bit about what we have for sale. We have a whole lot of issues of Salon Futura and Clarkesworld — I’ll talk more about them tomorrow. I’m also already in discussions with a couple of other small presses about stocking their books. But right now the only book we have on offer is Dark Spires. That’s actually a very important test case. Here’s why.

A week or two back I got into a frank exchange of views with Lavie Tidhar on Twitter. Lavie had tried to say something that, in 140 characters, lost all nuance and came out insulting. We sorted that, but his basic point was that US small presses appeared to him to be much more commercially focused than British ones. As I explained to him, this is nothing much to do with intent, and even less to do with national temperament, but everything to do with economics.

If you set up am SF&F small press in the UK (or Australia, as I’m sure Alisa Krasnostein will testify) your chances of paying SFWA professional rates to your authors are not good. You are unlikely to be able to get into shops (which in the UK means into Waterstones), and shipping to the rest of the world is horribly expensive unless you are a big operation like The Book Depository, so your market is really small. Most of your sales will come at conventions, and sales will be numbered in hundreds rather than thousands. As you are not getting economies of scale on the printing, you’d need to charge far more than the market will bear in order to pay your writers well. PS Publishing manage this by making really high quality books, but I don’t have the skills for that. I can, however, make ebooks.

With electronic publishing the whole game changes. I don’t have to pay the printer, or for shipping. And I can sell to anyone in the world. The first ebook sale for Dark Spires was to someone in Australia! That would never have happened with just a print edition.

So suddenly I have the prospect of a great many more sales. And with that I have the potential to pay my writers substantial royalties. Being able to do that would make me very happy. And for my part, ebook sales will help subsidize Salon Futura, which will also make me happy.

Of course there is still the issue of persuading people to buy the book. I’m not going to wax lyrical about its chances in awards, because it is not that sort of book. Dark Spires was not created to compete with the blockbuster anthologies produced by the likes of Ellen Datlow or Jonathan Strahan. It is not chock full of star names. Rather it was created with the specific intent of showcasing writers from a particular part of the UK. If you want an analogy, it is rather like doing a book using only writers from the Sacramento area and the rest of California north of the Bay Area (complete with a rather rural focus). So you get one or two big names (of whom, for us, Liz Williams is probably the biggest), and a whole bunch of people whose work you may never have read before. Also, because the stories are all locally based, you get some unusual subject matter.

Persuading readers to take a chance on new writers is not always easy, but the ebook is priced at £2.99, which is less than a pint of beer. Hopefully that will encourage people to give it a try. I do, after all, have the whole international SF community to sell to, and if only a small fraction of them buy the book I will still be able to pay the writers a lot more than I could with just a print edition.

In case any of you are concerned about ebooks, I’ll repeat what I said in comments yesterday. There is no DRM on my books. I can’t magically take them back or change them remotely. You can lend them to your friends. And you don’t need an ebook reader to view them. There are plenty of free software packages that will allow you to read them on your PC. See here for more details.

Hopefully a few more of you will buy the book and enjoy it. Then, once I have proved I can pay well, I can start approaching other writers with confidence.

Open For Business

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

One of the main strands of my business plan for Wizard’s Tower has been the need to have an online store where you can buy ebooks. Not just our ebooks, but a wide selection of good quality speculative fiction. The more good books there are, the more likely people are to check us out and spend their money with us.

Of course we can’t compete with the likes of the Kindle and iBooks stores, but we are a specialist retailer. We’ll only be stocking SF&F. What’s more, because the big publishers are unlikely to be interested in us, at least in the short term, we’ll be stocking only books from small presses. Hopefully that will make it a lot easier to find the books you want on our site than in any of the big online stores.

It has taken me quite a while to find an online store system that does what I want, and provides the sort of professional shopping experience people are going to expect. Hopefully what I have now mostly does the job. I’ll be doing some more serious PR later in the week, but before then I’m hoping that a few of you folks will take a look and let me know if you have any issues with the store. I can’t promise to do everything you ask for, but feedback is good. You can find the store here.

One thing the store doesn’t do is allow me to set firm prices in other currencies. Hopefully that will come at some point. Also I’m hoping to offer payment methods other than PayPal, but such things cost money and I need business in order to justify the fees.

As of now, we have all of the issues of Salon Futura and Clarkesworld that have been converted available, plus of course Dark Spires. I don’t have the MOBI files for Salon Futura yet, but they should be available soon.

You will notice, when you visit the store, that each product also comes with a donation option. That’s deliberate policy. It is an idea I got from Bandcamp.com (thank you, Amanda Palmer, for the tip). We hear a lot these days about how people are not prepared to pay “too much” for ebooks. But the meaning of “too much” can vary wildly from person to person, dependent on your financial circumstances and how much you like the author in question. So I wanted to give people an opportunity to not pay “too little” either. Think of it as a tip jar. And if you don’t know whether you want to tip or not, you can always come back later and make a donation when you have read the book.

100% of any money received in donations will go to the creators concerned. Of course they may have to pay tax on the income, but we won’t take any of that money.

Talking of taxes, the business is currently below the turnover threshold at which UK companies are obliged to charge VAT. That’s a good thing, because while paper books are zero-rated for VAT, ebooks are regarded as “software” and attract a 17.5% tax (shortly rising to 20%). Much as I’d like the business to grow, I’d like to stay VAT-free as long as possible.

If anyone out there runs a small press, or is an independent author who has made ebooks of their out-of-print back catalog, and is interested in having us stock their books, please get in touch (info [at] wizardstowerpress [dot] com). We will be selective about what we stock, and in particular we will insist on well-made ebooks (though we can help you clean yours up) but I very much want to see the stock grow. Also I want to talk to prospective partners about contract terms to make sure we come up with a deal that people are happy with.

Anyway, please take a look, and feel free to ask questions here. Tomorrow I’ll talk a bit more about what we have on sale.

Another Long Day

~ Cheryl

It has been another very long day in front of the keyboard. This time I have been working on the Wizard’s Tower Press website and on Salon Futura #2. I think I have everything sorted now, but I am very disappointed with the quality of ecommerce plugins available for WordPress. It looks like I will have to sign up with one of the stand-alone ecommerce solutions, which will further add to my monthly expenses.

Still, I did need to be up late anyway. The San Francisco Giants are now just 2 innings away from a place in postseason play. This is little short of a miracle. Excuse me while I stop looking at computers and stare at the TV instead.

The Wylie Announcement

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

Many of you will have seen the fuss that exploded on Friday over the announcement that a major US agent, Andrew Wylie, has launched his own ebook imprint. If you didn’t, there is plenty of material online, for example here, here, here, here and here.

You may also be wondering how this relates to what I am doing with Wizard’s Tower. The good news is that obviously ebooks are a burgeoning market (though it might have been wise to get in earlier). But does this mean that the big boys are going to move in and destroy my business plan? I don’t think so. The main reason why the publishers have got themselves into such a panic over this is that Wylie is threatening to take away ebook rights for some of their best-selling authors. He, and they, are not much interested in the midlist writers that I want to help. I don’t see a problem there.

The other controversial thing about Wylie’s deal is that he’s planning to publish only on the Kindle. The idea that ebook publication should be tied to a particular hardware platform does not appeal to me in the slightest. I may have to offer books on a limited selection of platforms because it costs time and money to support lots of different formats, but priority will always be given to open source formats that you can read on a wide variety of platforms.

One Giant Leap

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

As you may remember, in order to get back to the US (go to conventions, see Kevin, etc.) I need to be able to get a visa. The only way this is ever likely to happen (short of miracles) is if I have a business that requires me to go to science fiction conventions. So I have started one.

This is doubtless going to get me into all sorts of trouble, but hopefully it will also do a lot of good. Much of the thinking that went into it was along the lines of, “if I have to start a business, how can I do most good for the community with it.” Bearing in mind, of course, that I don’t have huge sums of money to invest and lose.

The thing that is likely to attract most comment is the magazine, Salon Futura, which is scheduled for launch at Worldcon. This is not a re-launch of Emerald City. It is very much a paying venue, despite being non-fiction. I have always believed that people who write non-fiction well deserve just as much payment and adulation as those who write fiction well. Also, if Wizard’s Tower is to be a credible business, it has to pay people good money.

Note that the payment rule doesn’t apply to me. I will be writing material for Salon Futura to begin with, but I don’t see it as an exercise in self-publishing and will happily step aside for others if what I do isn’t popular and we can afford someone better. I very much hope to make money from the business in the long term, and the UK tax authorities will be upset with me if I don’t, but the first priority will be to pay other people.

Talking of which, some of you very kindly offered to give me money to help pay for an immigration lawyer. I turned that down because the sums involved were way too large for that sort of appeal. It would be more than enough money to run Salon Futura for a whole year. On the other hand, having the money to pay for the first issue or two would be very handy. Also, while that money indirectly helps me because it helps establish the business, it doesn’t go directly to me. So if you do want to help, we have a startup finding appeal.

We are open to submissions, and I’ll write more later about the sort of thing I am looking for, but for now I have Finncon to attend to. I’m scheduled pretty much solidly today from noon until I get to bed.