Malik
Auror
This is a rabbit hole for a thread in Chit Chat, so as not to derail the whole thing.
The short of it is, I released Dragon's Trail five months ago (edit: six months, including pre-release and ARCs) nearly to the day, and yesterday everything fell into place at the same time and it popped on a Best Seller list, standing shoulder to shoulder with such luminaries as Joe Abercrombie and Tad Williams.
This was, as best I can figure it, the result of a GoodReads review from a reader who says he/she found it by accident, and who has what I can only imagine to be a massive social network. Apparently the buys from this crowd tripped the Amazon classification system, which nudged Dragon's Trail out of the ginormous Epic Fantasy category and into the way-smaller Military Fantasy category, which I've been trying to get the damned book into since before it launched. Keyword stuffing, emails and calls to Amazon, nothing, and then two nights ago it found its way into waiting arms. This was coupled with a long and steady marketing push keeping the book afloat, even if it meant putting every penny it made back into promo some months while I wrote the sequel, which I figured -- rightly -- would take about a year.
I went through a long period of pushback, derision, and scorn on another writing site that shall remain nameless, with lots of authors assuring me that I was doing this all wrong and was doomed to fail.
I literally woke up yesterday a best-selling author. In the past three days Dragon's Trail has out-earned the previous two months, and it's still going.
----
To be fair, they're doing it differently. And I have five more; they're just not fully written, yet.
I made the argument, in that nameless land long ago, that these are not avocados that will wither on the shelf. I maintained, and still do, that years spent honing your craft (also apparently anathema in that horrid land) will ensure that a book will always be primed for a new reader to find it. It's digital, for God's sake; the pages won't even yellow. I'm still finding books at Goodwill that were published twenty or thirty years ago, and they've gotten me hooked on authors who are still writing today.
If you're writing formula pulps (and most epic fantasy writers don't; it's nearly impossible, the way I see it), then yes, you pretty much have to go from 30-day cliff to 30-day cliff. That's how the market works. And if you can't write well, you can game the market -- marginally -- with some tricks of the trade and make a few bucks. (There's a very small market for poorly-written fiction; Amazon has tapped into a pool of readers who just want the story and will overlook clumsy writing, and that's great, seriously. But it's not enough to build a career on, with a few exceptions who are jaw-droppingly prolific.)
But check this out:
Not my book, mind you, but the math holds up in the long run. I did this over six months; steady low sales until a nudge made it take off.
The thinking on "that other board" is to go for a huge launch, get that initial spike, and then do it again with another book every 30 days as the sales peter out. (Note that Book B, the orange line, made a lot more money.) But to me, as an author who intends to release a 5- or 6-book series over the next as many years, that line of thinking is insane. I've been trying to tell other authors this for six months, now: the way the ranking algorithm is set up, it's in your favor to generate consistent sales, even if they're small, over a long period.
Nobody wants to do this, though. Apparently, some people undertake writing thinking it's a way to become YouTube famous. Even for those who undertake it seriously, very few apparently want to float a loss leader or spend all their writing income for a few months or a year keeping a book treading water in the hopes that it will find its readers later. Which, personally, strikes me as a sign of crippling self-doubt and lack of faith in one's work, but maybe I'm reading too much into it. (Although I hold that if you don't believe in whatever it is you're doing, holy shit, STOP DOING IT.)
FWIW, I have a recent blog post on revamping the entire ebook market and how someone is going to make a hell of a lot of money when they do. Especially if they pick up books that are doing exactly what mine did/does, and there are many. It has the added bonus of Bella Swan's dad, Billy Burke, singing some sexy-ass rock and roll back when I was playing in his band, so enjoy that, too. Outcasts: How and Why Someone will Build a Lit-Fic Empire off the Existing Genre Market | Joseph Malik.
"Just stay on this road, keep goin'
Ain't no use in pleasing no one."
The short of it is, I released Dragon's Trail five months ago (edit: six months, including pre-release and ARCs) nearly to the day, and yesterday everything fell into place at the same time and it popped on a Best Seller list, standing shoulder to shoulder with such luminaries as Joe Abercrombie and Tad Williams.
This was, as best I can figure it, the result of a GoodReads review from a reader who says he/she found it by accident, and who has what I can only imagine to be a massive social network. Apparently the buys from this crowd tripped the Amazon classification system, which nudged Dragon's Trail out of the ginormous Epic Fantasy category and into the way-smaller Military Fantasy category, which I've been trying to get the damned book into since before it launched. Keyword stuffing, emails and calls to Amazon, nothing, and then two nights ago it found its way into waiting arms. This was coupled with a long and steady marketing push keeping the book afloat, even if it meant putting every penny it made back into promo some months while I wrote the sequel, which I figured -- rightly -- would take about a year.
I went through a long period of pushback, derision, and scorn on another writing site that shall remain nameless, with lots of authors assuring me that I was doing this all wrong and was doomed to fail.
I literally woke up yesterday a best-selling author. In the past three days Dragon's Trail has out-earned the previous two months, and it's still going.
----
It kind of makes me giggle a bit too since I recall the discussion elsewhere (place going nameless ahem) about how your book wasn't going to "make it" because you only had the one.
To be fair, they're doing it differently. And I have five more; they're just not fully written, yet.
I made the argument, in that nameless land long ago, that these are not avocados that will wither on the shelf. I maintained, and still do, that years spent honing your craft (also apparently anathema in that horrid land) will ensure that a book will always be primed for a new reader to find it. It's digital, for God's sake; the pages won't even yellow. I'm still finding books at Goodwill that were published twenty or thirty years ago, and they've gotten me hooked on authors who are still writing today.
If you're writing formula pulps (and most epic fantasy writers don't; it's nearly impossible, the way I see it), then yes, you pretty much have to go from 30-day cliff to 30-day cliff. That's how the market works. And if you can't write well, you can game the market -- marginally -- with some tricks of the trade and make a few bucks. (There's a very small market for poorly-written fiction; Amazon has tapped into a pool of readers who just want the story and will overlook clumsy writing, and that's great, seriously. But it's not enough to build a career on, with a few exceptions who are jaw-droppingly prolific.)
But check this out:
Not my book, mind you, but the math holds up in the long run. I did this over six months; steady low sales until a nudge made it take off.
The thinking on "that other board" is to go for a huge launch, get that initial spike, and then do it again with another book every 30 days as the sales peter out. (Note that Book B, the orange line, made a lot more money.) But to me, as an author who intends to release a 5- or 6-book series over the next as many years, that line of thinking is insane. I've been trying to tell other authors this for six months, now: the way the ranking algorithm is set up, it's in your favor to generate consistent sales, even if they're small, over a long period.
Nobody wants to do this, though. Apparently, some people undertake writing thinking it's a way to become YouTube famous. Even for those who undertake it seriously, very few apparently want to float a loss leader or spend all their writing income for a few months or a year keeping a book treading water in the hopes that it will find its readers later. Which, personally, strikes me as a sign of crippling self-doubt and lack of faith in one's work, but maybe I'm reading too much into it. (Although I hold that if you don't believe in whatever it is you're doing, holy shit, STOP DOING IT.)
FWIW, I have a recent blog post on revamping the entire ebook market and how someone is going to make a hell of a lot of money when they do. Especially if they pick up books that are doing exactly what mine did/does, and there are many. It has the added bonus of Bella Swan's dad, Billy Burke, singing some sexy-ass rock and roll back when I was playing in his band, so enjoy that, too. Outcasts: How and Why Someone will Build a Lit-Fic Empire off the Existing Genre Market | Joseph Malik.
"Just stay on this road, keep goin'
Ain't no use in pleasing no one."
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