Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Downton Abby, the British period drama television show, has a time dilation of approximately 3.1.

Highclere Castle, location of period drama Downton Abby.
Src: Wikipedia

The first two seasons cover the period of time from April, 1912 to sometime in 1918 (assumed to be July 1918), an elapsed time of 6.25 years. But these two seasons encompass two years of our current time, hence time passed on the show 3.12 times faster than it passed in our reality.

This will have some odd effects if the show continues indefinitely. For example, by doing the math, we can see that in 2041, Downton Abby will cover the period of time from 2009 through 2012, overlapping the broadcast start of the series. We can call this the meta-phase of the show, wherein for the next fourteen years, the show will be primarily concerned with the making of the show in previous years.

The real hiccup occurs in 2056, when the show will cover the period from 2056 through 2059. Then it will transform from a period piece to a futuristic speculative fiction series.

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New landing page for
A.I. Apocalypse

I created new landing pages for A.I. Apocalypse and Indie & Small Press Book Marketing.

In the case of A.I. Apocalypse, I felt it needed a proper landing page without the distraction of the blogger right hand nav column. You can find it at aiapocalypse.com.

In the case of Indie and Small Press Book Marketing, it really needed it’s own blog, a place where I could have both publishing news as well as more in depth articles on book promotion. You can find it at indiebookmarketing.com.

Please check them out, and let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

New home for Indie & Small Press Book Marketing

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Wow, somehow I neglected to post my notes from the March Willamette Writer’s talk by William Nolan. Sorry!

William Nolan
Co-author of Logan’s Run
Willamette Writer’s Announcements
·      Open house at Willamette Writer’s House on April 21st from 3pm to 8pm
·      WW Conference will be a little different this year: new tracks on self-publishing, Thursday night master classes.
William Nolan
·      Started writing at the age of 10.
·      Made his first sale at 25.
·      Been writing for 75 years, 60 years of it professionally.
·      My mother kept the first piece of writing I ever wrote. A terrible poem with misspellings. She kept, I still have it.
·      By age 10, writing adventure stories.
·      Wrote a story about a crime fighting snake.
·      You can do a lot of bad writing when you’re young, and you never know it.
·      If I saw those stories for the first time, I’d say that the author should not become a writer.
·      Most famous for Logan’s Run.
o   There’s been a remake in the running for 19 years
o   Would love to see a remake because the 1976 movie had so many dumb mistakes, and lacked special effects.
·      How did you write Logan’s Run?
o   I was 27. It was my first novel.
o   I went to a lecture at UCLA. Charles Beaumont (Twilight Zone) Challenge to distinguish social fiction and science fiction. Came up with an idea, then thought maybe he could make $50 on a short story.
o   Then George Clayton Johnson said let’s write a screenplay.
o   Nolan said let’s write a novel first, and then the screenplay.
o   They took turns writing in a motel room for three weeks, spelling each other at the typewriter.
o   Nolan wanted to just sell it for $250 to Ave.
o   George said “you promised a screenplay”
o   They wrote the screenplay, got offered $60,000 by MGM.
o   Went for an agent. Decided to hold out for $100,000.
o   From Friday to Monday the offer went up from $60,000 to $100,000. (A ton of money for the 1960s.)
o   They threw our Nolan and George’s script
o   The commissioned one has illogical stuff.
o   The directory said “Science fiction doesn’t need logic”.
o   But science fiction needs logic more than anything else. You’re developing a fantasy world, and you need it to hang together coherently.
o   The MGM movie was a disaster. The actors were good, because they were British trained on Shakespeare.
·      Hollywood is just bizarre: Got asked to make a movie just like Zorro, except not named Zorro. They wanted a guy in a mask, with a sword, who wrote his initial on walls, and with a mute Indian sidekick . So he wrote “Nighthawk Rides” at their request, then they sent it to the studio, and the studio rejected it as being too close to Zorro.
·      Written 200 short stories. 88 books.
·      Ray Bradbury, one of his closest friends for over 50 years.
o   Nola did first scholarly article on Bradbury.
o   Would go to the magic castle. Could only go if you were a magician. Ray was. They’d went to a Houdini séance at the castle, but Houdini never showed up.
·      Grew up in Kansas city, for 19 years, then went out to California, then up to Oregon, now in Washington.
·      See The Intruder
o   Written by Charles Beaumont
o   Directed by Roger McCormick
o   William Shatner’s first role
o   Gene Cooper was in it.
o   Lots of science fiction people in it.
o   The actors only got a single sheet of notes each, didn’t even know what the picture was about, or what was going on.
·      Scriptwriting is one thing and prose is another
o   You have to change the whole method of presentation for a screenplay.
o   A novel has a character with interior thoughts and desires.
o   With a screenplay, you’ve got visuals and you’ve got dialogue.
o   You have to completely eliminate interior thoughts.
o   [You have to rely on the director and actors]
o   Novel -> Synopsis -> Coverage (one paragraph) -> Sentence
§  “High Concept”: originated  with a producer who was too coked out to read the coverage
o   The first thing they do when they buy a novel is throw out the novel.
·      Writing is also a choice of what to expand and what to condense.
o   Beginning/bad writers focus on exactly the wrong things: they’ll spend a page on walking into a room, and then say “he meets the girl”.
o    

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3D portable printer,
big theme at SXSW 2013

I attended SXSW Interactive for the fifth time this year. My first South-by was in 2003, when hot topics  that year included wikis, blogging, and augmented social networks, and all the panels took place within the confines of the third and fourth floors.

SXSW has come a long way since this, but it’s still a mind-blowing and fun week, full of networking opportunities, chance encounters, amazing speakers, and new technology.

Here are the highlights of this year:

1. 3D Printing is big. No, huge.

Multiple panels covered the topic every day of the conference. 3D printing isn’t just about devices churning out plastic trinkets. It’s about revolutionizing the world of all manufactured objects, in the same way that the moveable type printing press revolutionized printing, and more recently, ebooks and print-on-demand revolutionized the publishing industry.

Future of 3D Printing Session

Current state of the art is single-material composites and metals, but coming within a few years we’ll see multi-material printing as well as embedded circuitry.

Although it wasn’t really discussed, one of the big missing aspects of the 3D talks was the topic of an ecosystem play. In the same way that Apple came to dominate the world of music for years, and then later the appstore ecosystem, and in the way Amazon dominates ebooks, there will be the opportunity for someone to own the object-store ecosystem, which will dwarf every other platform out there.

3D printed custom
doll from Makie

Some of the things currently being 3D printed include: dolls, clothing, dishes and glasses, plastic items of any design, toys. And in the design labs they are experimenting with: meat, living (and re-attachable) mice limbs, circuitry, and morphable objects.

Panels:

2. Artificial Intelligence is the future of user interface design.
Many panels also covered artificial intelligence, but the kind that makes user interfaces smarter, more predictive and personalized. 
A Robot in Your Pocket Session
Examples of this include filtering from among many options to provide the most relevant. An example would be a smartphone transcribing voicemail, using a history of the interaction between two people to figure out the right vocabulary to use, to figure out which “Tom” two people would be likely to refer to, to understand a voicemail reference to “the address I emailed you”, and be able to resolve it.
Example progressions:
  • Progression
    • Analogy: Brakes
    • Digital: Antilock
    • Robot: Crash avoidance
  • Progression
    • Analog: thermostat
    • Digital: timer thermostat
    • Robotic: Nest
  • Information
    • A: Encyclopedia
    • D: Google Search
    • R: Google Now
Panels:
3. Self-Publishing is More Powerful Than Ever
Self-Publishing in the Age of E Session
This is obviously a personal interest of mine. There were actually very few panels at SXSW this year on publishing, content, or journalism, especially compared to years past when there were entire tracks on these topics. I heard a large number of people echo my disappointment. Publishing and journalism are still very much industries in turmoil, changing daily, and it seems like a shock that SXSW has moved on past that.
That being said, there would two very good talks:
4. Design as Innovation / Responsive Design
Design was a big topic, including both theme of designers are the new leaders and drivers of innovation in company, as well as the responsive design, the UX pattern of how to deal with different devices. Although I attended only a handful of these panels, it was a big topic of discussion, and there were many more panels I didn’t get to attend.
Changes from Past Years
SXSW is always evolving. Some things I noticed:
  • They had less total talks. Last year I remember that there were 65 different sessions in a single timeslot. On the plus side, things were more centralized, but on the negative side I heard many stories of people who didn’t get into talks they wanted to. There also wasn’t a journalism/publishing/content track, and perhaps that was one of the things to go.
  • There were many more foodcarts around, and for once it was relatively easy to get food between sessions.
  • Wireless access was better. I had only a single half hour without access, and that was at the Omni hotel. 
  • Twitter and Foursquare still in heavy use.
  • The bar at the Driskill is still the go-to place for networking in the evening.

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I just noticed that Amazon has put Indie & Small Press Book Marketing on sale for the crazy low price of $3.82 for the print version. (It’s regularly $5.99.)

If you are, or know, an author looking to marketing books, don’t miss this opportunity to get a great book on how to market your books, what to focus on for your website, how to use social media, and how to connect with readers.

Here’s the link to get a copy. Do it before the sale ends to take advantage of this great deal.

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This is part five of a nine part series on How to Accomplish Anything When You Don’t Have Any Time.

Previously I addressed a mantra to stay focused, prioritizing only three things for action, stacking functions, avoiding time sinks, and outsourcing work. Today I’ll talk about avoiding the notion of “the perfect” idea.

Don’t Wait for the Perfect Idea

Purpose: Increase kung fu and avoid procrastination


Gifford Pinchot often says “early learning beats better planning”, and in some ways, this is the entire mantra of the startup movement. Tech startups succeed so often because they excel at doing and learning from their doing, while big corporations excel at planning and never get started on the doing. When they finally do, their plans are out of date, or fail to adapt to changing information.

There’s an often-shared quote from Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking about the value of practice:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Jason Glaspey used to give a talk called Build Something, Build Anything. Jason, who has built multiple successful businesses from scratch, also emphasizes that every new project is a learning opportunity. He interviewed me a few months ago, and we discussed how I’d ping-ponged back and forth: Competing for the Netflix Prize taught me about recommendation engines, which led me to create a customer support recommendation engine at HP, a wishlist recommendation engine for Facebook, and finally led me to write a science-fiction novel in which recommendations engines lead to the first sentient computer software. 

If you were to judge it by personal financial success, competing for the Netflix Prize, the Facebook app, and the HP project were all failures, because none of them netted me anything. (OK, I drew a salary while at HP.) But they did lead to expanding my social network, new technical expertise, speaking opportunities at SXSW Interactive, freedom to pursue new projects at HP, and the idea to write a best-selling novel. 

Build something, build anything. Cultivate a maker mentality, and improve the quality of what you do.

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Many authors focus heavily on the price they set for their book under the impression that there is some unknown price at which sales will magically and suddenly skyrocket.

I don’t think this is true. Whether a book is 99 cents, $2.99, or $4.99, I don’t believe that price alone will make sales jump. But price is an important component of both overall sales success as well as earning potential.

Let’s look at some commonly held beliefs, and then I’ll share how I set the prices of my books. By the way, I’m going to primarily discuss Amazon, but I think the principles hold true elsewhere. I’ll start by talking about ebooks, since that’s where the most price flexibility exists, but then I’ll also discuss print books. All of this is my opinion, of course, and others may have had different experiences.

Strategy #1: Price it Low (99 cents)

Some say to set the book price at 99 cents, and you’ll gain many new readers. I’ve tried this for limited durations of up to two weeks, and my sales have increased about 30%.

I already have exposure through reviews, blog posts, and the Amazon recommendation engine. The fact that sales don’t increase more than 30% suggests that only a few people are making decisions primarily on price.

How about the author who doesn’t have much existing exposure and wants to use price to gain exposure? The problem here is that low price, by itself, doesn’t gain you any more visitors to your book page. Perhaps the occasional bargain hunter will find it and buy it. If you’re writing mass market fiction, that’s great, but if you’re writing in a genre that has a particular and small target audience (like science fiction or fantasy), then the odds that a random reader will love it so much they tell others and write a review is exceedingly small.

A final issue is that at 99 cents, you will earn only 30 cents per book sold, because Amazon only lets authors earn 30% royalty at this price. By comparison, at $2.99, you’ll earn about $2.05 per book sold, because most sales will earn 70% royalty. This means you’d need 7 times as many sales at 99 cents to earn as much as you would at the next higher price point of $2.99.

Strategy #2: Price it High, Give the Appearance of Quality ($4.99+)

Some say to price the book higher, such as $4.99 or more, to give the book the appearance of quality. The idea is that you want to stay out of the dog-eat-dog world of low priced books.

I think this strategy makes sense within limits, however it’s important to realize that the biggest indicator of quality is many good reviews. Your primary focus as an author should be getting twenty or thirty reviews. You can do that legitimately by offering people free review copies, and by putting an appeal in the back of your book asking readers who have enjoyed the book to post a review.

The next most significant indicators of quality to would-be buyers are good cover design, an engaging description and book blurbs, and availability of both ereader and print editions.

The problem with pricing at or above $4.99 is that then you’re into the range of traditionally published books, which start at around $4.99 and go up. You’re competing with authors and books that have an extra edge of polish, may have name recognition, and probably have professional marketing behind them.

At this price point, some readers are discouraged from buying a book they’d otherwise try. My experience is that my sales dropped 50% at this price, compared with $2.99, although the net amount of money earned stayed the same.

With the money earned staying the same, I’d prefer to have more readers, as more readers write more reviews and tell more friends.

Strategy #3: The Middle Ground

I price my stand-alone books and books first in a series at $2.99, and sequels at $3.99.

At this price point, I can earn a reasonable royalty per book, compared to 99 cent pricing. My books are still attractively priced to readers, especially compared to any traditionally published books.

They offer a lot of value to the reader for the cost, which is also something important to me. In fact, I’d encourage authors to think about this as a key element of pricing. Many businesses are based on extracting as much money from customers as possible. That’s never something you’d do to a friend. As an author who is in control of their pricing, you have the ability to make prices fair to readers.

Many readers who are in your target audience are willing to try a $2.99 book from an unknown author. If you’re similar in style to any traditionally published authors and Amazon ends up showing your book in the recommendation section of those author’s pages or book listings, then the $2.99 price will compare favorable to those traditionally published books.

For those readers who love your first books at $2.99, they’ll probably be willing to pay $3.99 for sequels, which is not a huge increment. (By comparison, if you price the first book at 99 cents, it’s a pretty big jump from there to $2.99 or more.)

At this price point, without the distraction of pricing games, you can focus on the other aspects of your marketing: sending out review copies, getting blurbs, advertising, building a social media platform, and so forth.

Other Strategies: Free

Many authors have had success offering their books for free, either through a KDP Select promotion (up to 5 free days every 3 months), or by using Amazon’s price-matching (e.g. set the price to free on Smashwords, then tell Amazon). This can either be a temporary strategy to get exposure for a given book, which will translate into reviews and social media mentions to drive sales once the price goes back up, or it can be a longer term strategy to drive sales of subsequent novels.

This strategy does work. Many people who get the book for free don’t end up reading it, so although you may give away tens of thousands of copies, you may get just a few reviews. But if your sales are otherwise stuck, this is a great way to get exposure.

I don’t recommend that you launch a new book as free on day one, however. When you first publish a book, it’s good to start at the intended long-term price. You really want to get some feedback based on that price. For example, you may get lots of positive reviews when it’s free, but when it is priced at $3.99, people complain because they expect a higher quality at that price. You want to uncover these issues early, while it’s possible to fix.

Worse yet, if you launch and the book still has typos or formatting issues that need to be fixed, it’s better to discover and address when you’ve sold twenty copies, rather than 20,000 copies.

Print Book Pricing

I currently sell my print novels at $9.95, and my shorter non-fiction books at $5.99. I make less per book on print than I do on ebooks, even though the price is higher. I’ve learned a few lessons here.

First, pricing above $10 is a strong psychological barrier to sales. Above $10, a reader has to be really committed to an author to buy a book. Unless you have a long track record and a large, established fan base, I doubt you’ll sell more than a handful of books above $10.

Below $10, you’ve reduced the psychological barrier, and the book becomes eligible for Amazon’s 4-for-3 promotion. I don’t know the exact criteria by which Amazon picks books for that promotion, but they do need to be below $10.

Assuming you’re using Createspace for your paperback, it’s hard to price much below $10, because of the cost structure: print-on-demand books cost slightly more to make; and both Amazon and Createspace take a cut of royalties. In fact, in 2012/2013, your book must be under 240 pages to be sold for $9.99 and be eligible for expanded distribution.

Most large-print run, traditionally published paperbacks sell in the range of $7 to $10, so in this case, traditionally published books have the price advantage.

In early 2012, I sold 90% ebooks, and 10% print books. I also learned that, in aggregate, Amazon sells about half ebooks and half print books. This led me to suspect that if I could get the price of my print books down, my sales of paperbacks would increase until they equaled the sales of ebooks.

Because of the length of my fiction novels, I couldn’t get the price any lower. But I did have short non-fiction books of 70 and 100 pages to experiment with, so I set the prices of those at $5.99, which makes them slightly less than most traditionally published, mass market paperbacks. Within weeks, sales of the paperbacks increased (without cannibalizing ebook sales) until they were a respectable 40% of all sales.

Lessons learned:

  • Keep print book prices under $10, even if you have to jump through some formatting hoops to keep the page count under 240 pages and even if you have to forgo some royalties.
  • If you can lower the price further, especially at $4.99 through $5.99, sales will increase significantly.
Thanks for reading through my thoughts on pricing. If you enjoyed this article, please check out my book Indie & Small Press Book Marketing. It’s available on Amazon for, you guessed it, $2.99 for kindle and $5.99 for paperback.

In Indie & Small Press Book Marketing, I explain how to get ready to publish, conduct a book launch, get reviews and exposure, discover your target audience, and connect with influencers to achieve breakthrough sales.

I also have a free 8-page marketing cheat sheet available for download. 

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Like the checklist?
Also read the book:
kindle, paperback

This free book marketing cheatsheet is the culmination of more than a year of research, experimentation and expert feedback into how to market books, particularly in the case where the author gets little to no help, as is typical for indie and small press published books.

Based on my own experiences selling fifteen thousand books in my first year as an author, it will help you create a better book, get reviews, incrementally build credibility, reach influencers, and sell more books.

If you find the cheatsheet valuable, you may also want to check out the companion book that explains in more detail how to implement the marketing plan. Indie & Small Press Book Marketing is available for kindle and in paperback.

Click below for your free download: 
Here’s some early praise for the book:
“Finally, a structured approach to marketing books.”
– Tonya Macalino, author of Spectre of Intention and The Shades of Venice

“Even for the traditionally published author, this book is full of great stuff! It takes a detailed, easy to follow approach to promoting your book. Highly recommended!”
– E.C. Ambrose, author of The Dark Apostle series 

“Chock full of actionable marketing tips I wish I’d known years ago.”
– Gene Kim, author of The Visible Ops Handbook and The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Too many authors say there isn’t any way to market your ebook. The answer they say is to just write another. Will Hertling’s story demonstrates there is another path and now he has put that path down in a book that is easy to execute and full of useful information.”
– Erik Wecks, author of Aetna Rising: A Snowballs’s Chance in Hell and Brody: Hope Unconquered.