Kindle Singles and Why You Want One

May 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Earlier this week Howard VanEs, who I’m partnering with on our June 1-2 Self-Publishing Summit, presented a webinar, “6 Ways to Profit from Your Unfinished Book,” that touched on Kindle Singles. This single concept ignited the most number of questions from our attendees, so I wanted to take an opportunity to explain what’s great about them and how they can help you build your platform and earn some money while you’re at it.

What’s a Kindle Single?

• short ebooks, 5,000 to 30,000 words

• priced between $0.99 to $4.99

• Amazon selected

• must be original content

• is NONEXCLUSIVE

On the webinar there was some conversation about whether Amazon owns the rights to your Kindle content. They do not. You are and remain the copyright holder, and, as it turns out (and this is a point of correction on my part), you can use the content in your Single and publish it in a future book. You cannot, however, submit something for a Kindle Single that has been previously published.

How is a Single different from a Kindle Ebook?

• Amazon puts marketing and promotional backing behind them

• They’re a little more prestigious

• Respected by traditional publishers because they’re vetted

• Not anyone can publish a Single—you must be accepted into the program

Traditional publishers are in fact encouraging their authors to publish Kindle Singles to get word out about their longer-format books. Many authors are choosing to publish short stories, essays, or prescriptive, issue-driven topics into Kindle Singles. Bestselling author like Anne Patchett (The Getaway Car) and Stephen King (Mile 81) have published Kindle Singles.

Why Do You Want One?

Kindle Singles do get a little extra promotional support from Amazon. You have the benefit of having been vetted, which goes a long ways for readers who are tired of sifting through content on Amazon trying to determine what’s good and bad.

But mostly you want one as a way to get content out to your readers before your book comes out. The publishing world is changing, and readers are digesting content in ever shorter pieces. Singles are the perfect length for a single-sitting read. They’re short, so they’re also easy impulse buys. If you have a work-in-progress, you can publish a Kindle Single and start to build interest for your book. Using an ebook as a teaser for a print book is a great way to get on your readers’ radar—and it looks good to publishers AND you can make a little bit of money. You get to keep 70% of your sales, which translates to about $2 on a $2.99 book. So if you sell a few hundred, you can make $200-$300. And who knows how many you’ll sell. Plus, you can take advantage of Amazon’s KDP Select program and make your book available for free for a few days, which drives additional interest and downloads.

What’s valuable here is not the couple hundred dollars, obviously. You’ll probably spend that much or more to get the book up on Amazon (mostly due to the cover expense). What’s valuable is that having an ebook means you’re a published author. It means you have a product to sell, and that you show up as an author on Amazon. With just 5,000 words, you can have your presence on Amazon, complete with your Author Central page.

I’d love to hear from any of you who’ve published Kindle Singles and what you’re experiences have been. And/or tips for what you would do differently next time.

Filed Under: Marketing, publishing Tagged With: , , ,

What’s In A Name? (Or, “Right Ho, Jeeves!”)

May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Have any of you read P.G. Wodehouse?  I am devouring the Jeeves books right now (on “The Inimitable Jeeves” and just finished “Right Ho, Jeeves”), and one of the most delicious things about these books, which are like crack if you are a fan of British humor, is the names.  Gussie Fink Nottle.  Bingo Little.  G. D’Arcy “Stilton” Cheesewright.  Tuppy Glossop.  Bertram Wooster.  And, of course, Jeeves.  I consider J.K. Rowling another more recent master of the art, with names that almost eliminate the need for introductions for her characters: Bellatrix Lestrange, Albus Dumbledore, Draco Malfoy, Dudley Dursley.

The names of the character in the novel I’m working on are more of the “I browsed the student-directory of my kids’ school” variety.  I am terrible at making up names.  But in some cases–or for some kinds of books–I think the names matter less than in others.  My book is set in contemporary New York, and my main character, in many ways, is meant to be a kind of every-woman: giving her a silly or unusual name wouldn’t work.  On the other hand, Harry Potter is just the right name for a extraordinary/ordinary English boy, and I’m glad, for instance, that Rowling didn’t name him Charles Smith.  (Though of course if she had, I might now think that was just the thing…though no, I don’t think I would.)

So I’d like to know — what are some of your favorite names of characters from literature?  And, if you are a fiction writer, what are some of your favorite names of the characters in your own books?  

I do have one name in my novel I’m proud of — it’s the name I’ve given to the fictional physicist who invents…well I can’t say more or I’ll give too much away.  But her name is Dr. Diane Sexton.  She’s named for my mentor and friend the late Diane Middlebrook, who wrote an award-winning biography of the poet Anne Sexton.  The real Diane was not a physicist, but of the fictional Diane, who retains much of her daring, panache, and brilliant determination, I believe she would have been proud.

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: ,

How Do We Write What We DON’T Know?

April 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Back in January, I had a bad fall.  I broke my collar bone so badly, in fact, that it was smashed into three pieces, and when the orthopedist looked at it, he walked out of the room, whistled to the x-ray technician and said, “Wooh, that’s a nasty injury!”  Surgery, right away, was the only way to fix it.  Having never had surgery of any kind, I didn’t know what to expect.  The night before the procedure, I told my dad on the phone, “Well, maybe it will be good material for a novel some day!”  My mother, who was with me that night and who has had three major, painful surgeries before, grimaced.  As she told me later, she didn’t want to tell me how bad it was going to be.

The pain in the twenty-four hours that followed the surgery, which was, incredibly, out-patient (thank you, overburdened health care system), was unlike any I’d ever known.  It felt like a clamp had been placed on my shoulder, and a sadist with superhuman strength was squeezing it as hard as he possibly could, and then plying it backwards.  There are far worse things, I know, unimaginable things.  But they are just that to me: unimaginable.  I haven’t experienced them.  And now I wonder — having seen the extent of the gap between what I imagined the surgery and recovery would be like, and what it turned out to be — is it possible to credibly write about something I haven’t experienced firsthand?

The answer, of course, has to be yes.  How else, as writers, can we create?  But the first sentence uttered by most creative writing teachers is “Write what you know,” and with good reason.  Often the biggest missteps and least authentic passages in a piece of writing occur when an author has strayed so far beyond his or her experience, in either the emotional or the physical realm, that the reader can no longer suspend her disbelief, and the spell that is bewitchingly good writing is broken.  

So I would like to know — have you had to write about things you didn’t know in your own work, and how have you faced the challenge?  Research?  Interviews?  

Or perhaps a better question is — what kind of truth matters most in our writing?  Is it more important to be able to describe, in exact detail, the physical pain specific to shoulder surgery, or to be able to describe the way it feels to be vulnerable and injured, the way it feels to have your life derailed, the way it feels to fall and crack and depend on the people around you to recover?  

Because those things, I already knew something about.

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: , ,

Supporting indie bookstores in the new publishing era

April 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon, as most authors either do or should. There are a lot of things not to like, as is the case with any monolithic entity. They were founded on selling books, and yet their practices aren’t very author friendly. Their discounts and other pricing and advertising practices are so extreme that they’ve enraged publishers from the beginning. Most independent bookstores will not carry books created from CreateSpace (Amazon’s self-publishing division), and you can’t really blame them for asserting their power in the very limited ways they can.

And yet . . . what’s great about Amazon is that they, like Oprah, are single-handedly responsible for making books more accessible. They have leveled the playing field for the independent author. They make self-publishing a possible endeavor. Without Amazon, there would be talk of profiting from self-publishing. They’ve been one of the leaders in the digital revolution, and there’s evidence that more people are reading since the advent of eReaders. And publishers, whether they like to admit it or not, clamor to participate in any Amazon promotion (like the Top 100 or Daily Deal) their books qualify for. They’re competitive, and they sell books!

Whether you’re traditionally published or self-published, you are probably hearing it’s a worthwhile endeavor to try to pre-sell your book, or to do a “book bomb,” where you ask your readers to all buy your book on the same day. For publishers, Amazon pre-orders serve as an indication of the viability of your book to other sales reps in other territories. The idea here is that advance interest or buzz on Amazon means there’s a market for your book. The book bomb is a whole other thing, and it has to be done on Amazon because if you do this in a scattershot way, sending your readers to bookstores or to any online retailer, you won’t see the impact of that bomb on your Amazon ranking, which is not an indication of book sales but instead makes your book more “visible” (likely to come up) on Amazon searches. (Read more about what Amazon rankings mean on this post by Richard Mabry—still good even though it’s a couple years old and there’s no more Borders.)

If your book didn’t get picked up well by the chains or by independent bookstores (meaning your distributor wasn’t able to sell your book into what’s called “the trade”), then you can’t really send your readers to their local bookstore if they live in another part of the country. Self-published authors will especially feel this limitation. I was able to get one of my local bookstores, Book Passage, to carry my book, but that’s because I’ve had two events there and I’ve met the buyer myself. (Book Passage, by the way, is one of those bookstores that will not take a CreateSpace book, so it’s a good thing I didn’t use them!)

One good way to support your local bookstore is to put a link to their website on your website. You can express to your readers that you care about indie stores, but it’s hard to crusade for local bookstores when you’re desperately trying to compete with thousands of other books and you need to sell, sell, sell. Amazon is convenient, and you’re going to want readers to buy your book however they can get their hands on it. That said, also link to Powells.com and Indiebound.com, two other great sites that ship effectively.

Amazon is not going anywhere, and the truth is that no other entity out there is doing for authors what Amazon is. They’re kind of like a benefactor you’re bound to and don’t really like. They make things possible, but they don’t treat you super well. So create your Amazon Central page, check your rankings, do your book bomb. Self-published authors, attend to your KDP account! Avoiding Amazon or going to great lengths to send readers elsewhere isn’t in your best interest as an author, so embrace what they have to offer you as an author, and try to walk your talk by buying locally and letting people know when you’re doing so by talking and writing about it on your blog or on Facebook.

Filed Under: Marketing, publishing Tagged With: , ,

Battle For The Title: Do Authors Know Best?

April 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Last night I attended a cocktail party (an event designed to raise the profile of the charity I chair, Girls Write Now, with women in publishing), and fell into conversation with one of my favorite leaders, innovators and prognosticators in the publishing industry, Jane Friedman.  (No, not that Jane Friedman, though she’s fabulous too.)  Jane has lived many lives in her publishing career, and is credited with, among other things, inventing the author tour by taking Julia Child on the road.  Her latest incarnation is as head of the digital publisher and multimedia content company Open Road Media.  Jane is always up to something exciting, and a story she told about her latest project last night caught my attention.  On Tuesday, Open Road reissued William Broyles Jr.’s memoir “Brothers In Arms” (the book that inspired the television series China Beach) but with a new title.  Or, more accurately, with an old title, the title the author always wanted in the first place: “Goodbye Vietnam.”  That title gave me chills.  The first title made me think of Dire Straits (dating myself), and has now become the name of smash hit violent video game series.

Which got me to thinking: when it comes to a title, who knows best?  The author, or the marketing department?

I had a truly terrible title for my first book.  Taken from a line in my vows, it was “The Rest of My Life Will Never Be Long Enough.”  My publisher, thank god, came up with the far catchier “I Do But I Don’t,” though the risk of a catchy title is that its very catchiness will catch up with you — if you search “I Do But I Don’t” on Amazon, you will find “I Do (But I Don’t)” the A&E movie starring Denise Richards, “I Do & I Don’t,” a 2010 comedy starring Jane Lynch, and a whole bunch of other things, and it will take you a heck of a lot of scrolling to find my book.  (I realize this is also because my book is out of print.)  My agent and I battled over the subtitle with the publisher, however, as many writers I know have, and this battle is glaringly in evidence when you look at the hardback cover of my book versus the paperback.  (Hint, the subtitles are not the same.) Titles and subtitles are hugely important, of course — part of the reason we changed my subtitle for the paperback was that the original subtitle implied I’d written a how-two book, which my book decidedly wasn’t, leading to some pissed off readers who felt they’d been sold a false bill of goods.  And a great title can be so great it has value all on its own; I actually know authors who have had only the titles of their books optioned by television production companies, not the books themselves.

So I want to know: have you ever battled a publisher over a title or a subtitle?  Have you ever been saved by a savvier soul than yourself (as I was), or condemned by a fundamental misunderstanding of your book to misrepresent it in the marketplace (as I, with my original subtitle, was too)?  Alternatively, have you ever had a title-battle with yourself, an editor, or a friend?

Please feel free to share multiple titles and their more or less fortunate incarnations. I’d love to see them.  Oh and a final note…I just typed the working title of my novel into Amazon books’ search bar and found no fewer than SIX books of the same name. Back to the drawing board?  Or does it matter?

Filed Under: publishing, Writing Tagged With: , , ,
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