Amazon's Kindle and the Long Tail

Chris Anderson's (the Long Tail) latest book is about promotion through Free distribution:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_28/b4139081403434.htm

How does this relate to Kindle? Currently, I have six titles on Kindle:

Forever Friends
Forever Travels
Four Short Stories
Literature & Fiction Interviews Volume I
Literature & Fiction Interviews Volume II
Mr. Planemaker's Flying Machine

Kindle royalties take two forms: 35% royalties and 70% royalties. To qualify for the 70% roylaties, the download price has to be set at greater than $2.99 (which isn't strictly accurate because purchase tax is added and a $2.99 ebook retails at $3.44, which is the actual lowest price for the 70% royalty).

To date, the total number of my sales is 6. I sent out an email to a group of over 1,200 members asking them to check out Kindle and download a free sample of a $1.14 ebook. This did not produce a single sale. You can draw your own conclusions about why this was the case -- the resultant no sales will be the same.

How does this lack of sales affect the author? Royalties in the US can be sent electronically to any American bank and are paid monthly. This option is not open to non-US citizens. Royalties are paid by check, and only when $100 in royalties has been reached.

This is where the Long Tail comes in. Non-US indie authors, who do not amass enough sales to generate $100 in royalties, receive nothing.

Now let's look at pricing. A $1.14 download ($0.99 plus purchase tax) gives the author 35c in royalties (70% royalties only allowed for Kindle books priced at over $2.99 remember!).

To amass $100 in royalties, the total number of sales would have to be 286.

I have the six sales; now I need to sell another 280!

Now let's look at the higher 70% royalty at the lowest price of $3.44 ($2.99 plus purchase tax) which nets $2.06 per download. To achieve the $100, the total number of required sales falls to 49.

Now, I would only need to sell 43 more!

So, do I set the price at $3.44 and hope for a total of 49 sales or do I set the lower price (which attracted no sales from a mass email)?

These sales figures are low, but for every non-US author who does not amass $100 in royalties, all the money from those sales goes to Amazon (not just the unpaid royalties!).

So, how much is that? If a Kindle book priced at $1.14 was downloaded 200 times (not the 286 required to reach $100 royalties), Amazon would net $228 for those downloads.

If a Kindle book priced at $3.44 was downloaded 40 times (not the 49 required to reach $100 royalties), Amazon would net $137.60.

The maximum Amazon could make without paying royalties at the higher price is 45 x $3.44 = $154.80

At the lower price, with the 35% royalty, Amazon can make a much better profit without paying anything in royalties if the book sells well but does not reach the 286 target.

Considering that the Long Tail is made up of thousands of authors who sell less than 200 books (70 is the average), setting the price at the 35% royalty favours Amazon not authors.

But, you might say that sales will be even lower for a $3.44 download than a $1.14 download and since no royalties are going to be paid anyway, then more readers will be gained at the lower price than the higher price. Which brings us back to Chris Anderson. Maybe it would be better to give the downloads away for FREE. Since you are going to make very little, if any, profit from low sales, maybe it makes more sense to make the downloads free. That way, the author doesn't make any money ... but neither does Amazon!

Smashwords seems to be just as bad as amazon to non US authors.
I think for my next book I will use a UK based e publisher if there is such a thing.

I wasn't in your email list, but when you announced here that "Four Short Stories" was available on Kindle, I immediately bought it.

I bought it because I know Shelagh Watkins from here, want to know her work as a writer better, and trust that I will enjoy reading what she writes.

Remember what I just said.

Lets take another look at the .99 e-book.

(Subequent references to "you" in this post are the collective "you" and do not target Shelagh specifically.)

How many will you sell? How many labor hours do you have invested in the product?

Sales x .35 / hours = your hourly wage. That starts to get depressing when you sell only 6 copies.

Given that minimum wage in the US is 7.75, if you spent 1000 hours writing a book, not an unreasonable labor estimate for a work of substance, you'd need to earn $7750 to make minimum wage. At .35/book, you'd have to sell over 22,000 books to make more than you could make flipping burgers at McDonalds.

"You want fries with that?"

The idea, of couse, and your objective, is that over time you will establish your name among readers of your genre. Your name catches on. That's when you start selling books. That's when you can quit your day job.

"Welcome to Wal-Mart."

They buy based on your name. (Repeat that three times.)

When that happens, when your name is hot, you don't need to promote anything to get their attention. You also don't need to self-publish if you don't want to. No more rejections. Publishers will line up to put you in their stable of authors. But not until you are hot.

It also helps to be writing in a popular genre. Romance and vampires seem to be hot now. So, write about romantic vampires. That's the only path to fame through your work itself, and most of the time it doesn't work.

It helps to understand the dynamics of direct mail campaigns. A one percent return is considered a major success. If Shelagh's 1200-recipient mailing had netted 12 sales, that would have been great. It netted 6. That is considered more than acceptable. If you want to use mailouts, learn to become a spammer.

So, the most important thing you can do as a writer is sell yourself to the reading public. Become famous. Without that, you won't sell enough books to make it worth the effort.

Sarah Palin sold books.

I can hear it now. "There's more to it than the money. I want only to express myself through my writing. My story needs to be told," and all such folderol.

In which case, giving it away starts to make sense. But if you want to earn a living as a writer, you have to sell your work. Which translates into sell yourself.

This is going to hurt. Sorry. The small presses that encourage you to lower your expectations and expect to sell only a hundred copies or so are catering to dilettante wannabes who aren't in it for the money.

"Paper or plastic?"

The publishers that constantly pressure you to buy your own books and buy their auxilliary services are preying on your craving for approval. They're in it for the money. So why aren't you?

Lose the loser mindset. When you plan to fail, guess what happens. Duh. Plan, instead, to succeed. Then, put in the work. Then, get lucky.

Al well said.
Getting known is a big key in any business sometimes it seems like we are trying to fell that mighty oak armed only with a blunt pen knife.
When I was offered publication I had no illusions of fame and had already read many blogs and articles that made me realise it was only a dream. But dreams can become reality.
Every oak comes from an small acorn.
I went ahead knowing it would take hard work and lots of frustration to be succesful. I will write again and again and try again and again until I breathe my last and if I'm lucky I may even win the lottery or even get a book accepted as film fodder or maybe taken on by a mainstrem publisher. Until then it's back to work.
To be honest I just love it, writing is doing what I enjoy, excercising that creative part of me and that means I am succeeding in doing what I was born to do.

My understanding of the Free book is that it's really about "freemiums"; you give something away but sell services around it. That's why I never got its relation to books, even though many reference it when discussing the value of giving away books. What services am I supposed to sell?

Quote :

I can hear it now. "There's more to it than the money. I want only to express myself through my writing. My story needs to be told," and all such folderol.

In which case, giving it away starts to make sense. But if you want to earn a living as a writer, you have to sell your work. Which translates into sell yourself.

Actually, if you just want to express yourself, keep a journal. The rest is indeed folderol. And it doesn't apply just to those who want to earn a living as a writer. I never had the ambition to earn a living writing, my ambition was/is to make side money. And I can't make side money when I believe stuff like, "If you sell more than 300 books you're doing good." These "indie publishers" (not you, Shelagh, I'm thinking of the ones who set up businesses as publishers, and actively solicit authors) are really just about getting lots of authors to sell their own work, which is how the publisher earns money. What, really, is the cost to those publishers to format the author's Word doc, do a cursory edit, slap on a stock photo cover, and POD it?

At the moment, there are plenty ongoing discussions about the value of social networking. I set up a page for Forever Travels on Facebook. I have over 400 friends. I should be able to invite those friends to become fans of the page, but I can't because the software isn't working. The first time I sent out invites, I sent to every friend (which took quite a long time) but not a single invite was sent out. So, like the moron I am, I repeated the exercise a day later with the same result. Then I decided to send just a few invites to see if I'd overloaded the system. That didn't work either. I have been adding daily updates to the page but I have to send these to my profile page so that they go into my friends' feeds (which I would not need to do if my friends had received and accepted invites -- plus I would not be irritating those of my friends who are not interested in the daily postings).

On a facebook discussion thread, there are pages of complaints from facebook members who have set up business pages and cannot send out email invitations to build up a fan base.

Members are catching on to the not so amazing fact that facebook is not really free. The ads, apps and gifts generate money and facebook members are the ones who pay at the end of the day, one way or another. Which brings me to your point. LC, about selling a byproduct. If you give something away, there has to be something else you want people to buy. What is the byproduct of a free book? Name recognition is the only thing that comes to mind. As Al said: "They buy based on your name. (Repeat that three times.)"

How important is a name? Not much if your name is Madonna and you are trying to sell a children's book. A great deal if your name is Madonna and you are trying to sell a CD album.

If you want to make side money, LC, forget fiction. It's a non-starter. Write a blog that is full of something thousands of people want to read, then publish it. It doesn't have to be gossip, it could be about cooking disasters, dieting, plastic surgery -- written with humour and compulsive reading that will attract loyal followers. As you used to say to us, write something for which you have credentials, and you will find a publisher.

I have all of my books and short stories available on Kindle. Some of the books I put there, some of them the publishers did. All of the shorts that I had in the old Amazon Shorts program are now available for Kindle, in several different forms. You can download them as collections, of four or more stories each, for $3.50 each, or as singles for $.99 each. Today is the 24th of the month, and I've had 31 downloads this month. Not enough to say I'm getting wealthy, but enough to know I'm getting some readers. I wrote two brand new stories in the Redneck Riviera series and published all seven stories as a book, and while it's only been downloaded a couple of times, at least it's available.

Still uncertain about the publishing of Sundown Two, the novel that Phil Whitley and I wrote, as we had a disagreement with Sue over the release date and asked for our rights back. Neon Rainbow will be published by RJ Buckley Publishing this summer, and I'm working on my new book every day.

I also don't see a huge upturn in buying no matter how much I use social networks, and posting in forums doesn't do a lot of good either. People still buy as they always did, and that is generally from known writers who they like.

E publishing has made it easy for us to make our work available online, but doesn't seem to be generating all that much in sales for writers that nobody knows.

But we keep trying, hoping to find a few readers now and then, hoping to sell a few books, and in the meantime trying to find new ways to get people to notice what we've written.

BTW, since I first had my short stories published in the Amazon Shorts program, and now for Kindle, I never fail to get a royalty check from them. True it isn't much, but it takes us out to a nice dinner every now and then.

I wouldn't mind earning a good living from my writing, but even if I don't, I probably won't stop doing it.

If you want to keep it, use it, eh, Don?

What a great and candid discussion! It's one most every artist faces at one point or another. However, we don't tell those who act, sculpt, paint on canvass, play a musical instrument or sing that they should figure out how to be a financial success or give up their art. Have you seen some of what passes for art?

I don't consider writing any less. Most any artist requires a "day job" to support their art until it "takes off" whether it actually "takes off" or not. There are many variables that lead to the "take off" which is what I see in this discussion. In the past, artists and authors had "patrons" of one form or another.

Many small presses with which I am familiar began by publishing their own books and grew into publishing others. They are not amassing great wealth either, but doing the work they enjoy and helping aspiring authors see their work in print with at least some other professional passing it through their processes. It's a cut above self-publishing in most cases as discussed on another thread.

Specific to anthologies: though they are gaining in popularity, anthologies by unknown authors are a hard sell. I use them in hard copy as a side seller at book fairs and signings. I use their release as an opportunity for news releases.

Each of us are blessed with a plethora of talents that we may or may not exercise. When we do, they may make us famous or just make us special in our own circles. I have a radio voice and was encouraged to seek as my career - radio and television. I was sidetracked at the time I had the connections, the youth and the ability to be one minded. I had a great experience with life that was entirely different. I wouldn't change it.

I still have the voice and enjoy the few public speaking and training engagements I still participate in. Do I sometimes wish I was the television talk show host? Of course. The motivational speaker guru? Of course. My path just went differently.

Anything worthwhile requires a learning process, ups and downs, successes and failures. Just because writing does not bring fame and fortune does not mean it's not an art worth following. It's a hobby that may even pay for itself with a little left over.

I see Shelagh's frustration because she has done everything right - but so have many artists. There's always that one "extra" moment that makes the difference that might not come into any of our lives. Or it may come when least expected. I agree that the pay practices of ebooks are not favorable. I have never been paid for ebook sales (personal ones) at amazon.com without major correspondence and demands. Finally, when Amazon Shorts closed down I received final royalties from them. It reminds me of gift cards - stores love them since so many people fail to spend them - free cash.

One advantage of small presses is the advance and the steady payment of royalties. I've sold lots of books since 2006, most of them at book fairs and book signings and live presentations. I've also sold a significant number through Amazon.com, print and ebook. As soon as I slow down on promotion, so do the sales. Would I like to sell more? Sure. I need to finish the three books on which I am working. Who knows, one of them may be magic.

In the meantime, Google D.K. Christi and dkchristi. There's about 2,000,000 references that start on Google Page 1. Google Ghost Orchid and you'll find D. K. Christi's Ghost Orchid in the Wikipedia listing that is Google Page 1 for Ghost Orchid as well as Ghost Orchid itself on either Page 1 or 2 with references and images. That took a lot of work - a lot! No more than Shelagh has put into her recognition. We have made a mark. We have put ourselves "out there" for criticism and to share our art, our love for words and a meaningful story.

I credit the Ghost Orchid's Google presence to publishing with L & L Dreamspell that gave me a greater legitimacy in my promotional efforts, their author "team" that is full of ideas, the people of forums such as this for challenging how I see things and providing their own experiences from which I have learned and above all, my own persistence. Did these give me fame and fortune? Nope.

LC wrote:

What, really, is the cost to those publishers to format the author's Word doc, do a cursory edit, slap on a stock photo cover, and POD it?

Well, time is money, LC. I think E. Don answered your question when he said that Weaving Dreams did not meet the agreed release date for one of his books. The same publisher was supposed to bring out an anthology in Decemeber 2010 but there is no sign of it, and on the home page, there is a call for an illustrator for a children's book to be published in March 2012!

Oh, I agree time is money. I just think that an author spends a lot more time writing a manuscript than some of these presses spend turning it into a book. And when you have to mostly market it yourself, what's the point?

How odd that any publisher would have a "call for submissions" for an illustrator. Don't they just go out and hire one? That's what I did when I needed illustrators for my upcoming text (and was reimbursed by the pub). Quality, reasonably priced illustrators aren't hard to find.

eta -why would someone hire someone to illustrate a children's book that wouldn't be out for over a year? When I hired my illustrators, they gave me a two week turnaround.