2011 December | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Dec

2011: the year in review

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

The astronomer raised his head from the eyepiece of his giant telescope and rubbed his eyes. He had checked all his figures and couldn’t escape the obvious conclusion.

“An asteroid is going to hit the Earth,” he said.

Picking up the phone, he called 911. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.

“Out of our jurisdiction,” said the dispatcher. “Please stay on the line.”

He called FEMA. After several hours of transfers, he got a voice mail. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said. Then he hung up.

He called his representative in Congress. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.

“Your Congressman shares your concern,” said a junior staffer. “He’s working with the other members of the Ruling Party to keep America strong. He’s grateful for your support in the next election.”

I need to think bigger, the astronomer thought (bigly), dialing the metro desk of his local newspaper. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.

“Okay,” came the reply. “Let me schedule an interview for you next month. Also: do you know any people we can quote for opposing viewpoints? Just for a sense of balance.”

“There aren’t any opposing viewpoints,” the astronomer said. “The asteroid is actually going to hit. And is it my job to get these people?”

“I’m not really sure. I’m an intern. We’ve laid off, like, a lot of writers.”

Realizing that traditional means wouldn’t work, the astronomer set off to make a spectacle. He made the biggest sign he could comfortably carry and a thousand pamphlets and headed downtown to City Hall. Once there, after negotiating for space between the LaRouchies and the homeless guys, he hoisted his sign in the air.

“An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.

An asteroid is going to hit the Earth.

Tens of thousands of people passed him on their way to work. Most dismissed him as crazy, because most people with signs outside City Hall are crazy. But a few stopped to listen. Those who did were treated to a quick but informative rundown of the astronomer’s observations. A few people joined him.

“An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” they said.

By now, the astronomer and his friends were a big enough crowd to draw hecklers. “If there’s a real asteroid, why isn’t NASA doing anything about it?” someone yelled.

“I don’t know,” the astronomer replied. “I’m trying to make sure NASA hears about it!”

“Then why don’t you go to Houston, or wherever the hell NASA lives?”

“I can’t afford to! Could you go?” But the heckler had wandered off.

A few people believed the astronomer, but got offended at what he was saying. “So what if an asteroid is going to ‘hit the Earth’?” said one. “Screaming about it in the streets isn’t going to do anything. This country survived the Revolutionary War, the Great Depression and Bud Selig as commissioner of baseball. It can survive an asteroid.”

“An asteroid’s nothing like the Great Depression,” said the astronomer. “It’s an asteroid. And it affects the whole Earth. And I’m not screaming.”

Worse than the hecklers, though, were the well-intentioned critics. “It’s important that you’re bringing this to people’s attention,” said one science blogger. “But by protesting like some crazy hippie …”

“I’m not protesting,” said the astronomer.

“… you discredit the whole scientific community. You make us look irrational. What you need to do is publish your list of grievances as a letter in a reputable journal …”

“I don’t have grievances!”

“… and then submit a study for peer review.”

“Anyone can look at my data,” said the astronomer. “It’s on the web at anasteroidisgoingtohittheearth.tumblr.com. I’m not doing this because I want publication; I’m doing this because I fear for the future of life on this planet.”

As more people reviewed and corroborated the astronomer’s data, the crowd outside City Hall grew. Frowning, the mayor put in a call to the Police Commissioner, who deployed a SWAT team.

“We respect your right to criticize the government,” said the Commissioner.

“I’m not criticizing!”

“… but local statutes forbid interest groups from occupying this privately-owned plaza immediately in front of City Hall without a permit.”

“I’m not an interest group,” the astronomer said. “Unless the entire human race is an interest group, because the entire human race might be in danger from this asteroid that is going to hit the Earth!”

The SWAT team drew their Tasers.

The violent crackdown on the astronomer and his two dozen followers got some media attention. “Scientists are taking to the streets,” said an Opposition Party candidate, “holding the Mayor accountable. And it’s about time. Our nation has lagged behind China, India and other shoe-producing countries in science education for far too long. Unless we make our children a priority, the 21st century is going to hit America like an asteroid!”

“The asteroid isn’t a metaphor,” the astronomer said. “It’s an actual asteroid that will hit the actual Earth.” But he wasn’t on camera, so nobody heard him.

Members of the Ruling Party were harsher. “In this time of economic crisis,” said a prominent Senator, “it’s irresponsible for anyone to suggest spending taxpayer dollars on some anti-meteor laser or giant force field. These are the sorts of boneheaded ideas that ivory tower academics produce all the time. The moral depravity of America’s universities continues to sicken me.”

“Who said anything about a laser?” the astronomer said. “Or a force field?” But a quick search uncovered similar protests in other cities, protests with very specific lists of demands. “Who are these guys?” he wondered.

As the circle of “Kum-Ba-Yah”-chanting protesters linked arms to prevent the SWAT team from dispersing the camp with non-lethal shotguns, a FEMA coordinator struggled through the crowd. He had played the astronomer’s voice mail from a week earlier and had finally caught up with him.

“I believe you,” he told the astronomer. “I checked the data with NORAD and it all makes sense. So now what?”

“I don’t know,” said the astronomer.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Aren’t you the leader of this movement? What’s your agenda? What’s your platform? Where are your bullet points?”

“It’s not a movement,” the astronomer said. “I don’t have an agenda.”

“Then what are you even doing here?”

Having delivered this speech several times over the last week, the astronomer was able to control his patience. “Look,” he said, “I’m an astronomer. I’m not an engineer or a civil defense coordinator or a paramedic. Those are the people who need to know about this asteroid that’s going to hit the Earth. But I can’t make them act.”

“I don’t think a paramedic will know how to deal with an asteroid hitting the Earth.”

“Probably not. But someone out there will, and if I keep saying this loud enough and for long enough, that person will hear this and think about it. And then they’ll come up with a solution. Failing that, if everybody accepts the fact that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth – because it is – then maybe people will start doing what they need to do to minimize the damage, instead of passing it off or pretending that traditional institutions are capable of dealing with it. I can’t make anyone do anything. All I can do is tell people what I know: that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth.”

“Makes sense,” the FEMA coordinator said. “Have you called your Congressperson?”

The astronomer started crying.

Meanwhile, the SWAT team had just received the order to move in. “It’s too bad,” said one officer, checking the non-lethal rounds in his non-lethal shotgun. “I sympathize with these guys, I really do. I mean, who wants to get hit by an asteroid?”

“I’m with you,” said his sergeant. “But we live in a society of laws. If you want someone to do something about an asteroid, you line up and vote like the rest of us.”

“Amen to that. Me and Sully are grabbing some beers after; you want in?”

“Nah, I’m gonna head home,” the sergeant said, looking up at the sky. “It got dark awful early today.”

Dec

you’ve been so kind and generous; I don’t know how you keep on giving

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Three bullets:

First, the number of people who downloaded Too Close to Miss as their first purchase for their Kindle or Nook is overwhelming. Thank you all. The near-total market penetration amongst my friends tells me I need to get my marketing game together, because I’m running out of friends with e-readers.
More on this later, but a quick observation: as of today, my sales on Barnes & Noble have tripled my sales on Amazon. This is so far outside my expectations of how the various ebook platforms would work that I’m treating it as I would a hundred-dollar bill found on the bottom of my closet. I’ll have a lengthier post examining how and why this might have happened come the new year, but for now: thank you Nook users!
The people who bother to read this blog every day (and thank you!) are the closest thing to a mailing list I have right now, so you get to hear it first: I’m jacking up the price of Too Close to Miss on January 1st. I don’t know to what yet, but at least to the magical $2.99 price point, if not higher. I think I’ve plumbed the network of supportive friends and curious strangers about as deep as I can, which is what the $0.99 come-on was meant to do. But to achieve my dream of being a self-supporting writer, I need to (someday) earn a decent amount of revenue per sale. I don’t expect to start earning that total next month, or even next year. But I need to see how much sales will drop – if at all – as the price goes up. I need data more than I need units moving off the virtual shelf.

So if you’ve bought Too Close to Miss already and enjoyed it, please let your friends know that they can only get it this cheap for 4 more days. Send them to Amazon or Barnes & Noble or iTunes. You’ll position yourself as a distinguished connoisseur, that savvy critic who can point out ebook gems in the crowded turf. “I bought his first one at just under a dollar,” you’ll say, gesturing for the waiter to refill your Chateau d’Yquem, “and it’s held its value remarkably well.”

Consume it? Don't be absurd. It's an investment!

Dec

screams from the haters, got a nice ring to it

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

In light of the pending passage of SOPA, several friends have circulated a VICE article titled, “Dear Congress: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How the Internet Works“. I was about to work up a good head of steam and post a counter-rant, but Marie C. linked me to a great response: “Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works” that says about 75% of what I would have said:

What you have to understand is that Congress is saying that they don’t understand the Internet isn’t a failure of Congress. You may think these guys in Washington are foolish — even too stupid to really understand the “mysteries of the Internet.” but look at how our members of Congress talk about the biopharmaceutical industry: I haven’t used the word “biosimilar” once in my life, but Congress used it 70+ times in a single month.

If Congress is complaining that they don’t know about something that you care about, the right answer isn’t to tell them to go get educated. The right answer is to educate them. Congress mentioned the word “biologics” 75 times in a month because a lobbyist spent a long time doing their job: educating members of Congress on the needs of its industry.

Right now, if you want effective legislation around your industry, then you need to pay the right lobbyists, make the right campaign contributions, and write the right legislation at the right time in order to get it out of Washington.

To which I have nothing to add save this:

The complaint, as I understand it, is that legislators in Congress are not experts on the Internet. They are, in fact, extraordinarily ill-informed on the subject and have no desire to get smarter. Now if your message is that “members of Congress are brutish failures living unexamined lives,” I’ll sign your petition and buy you a drink. But among my more outraged friends, I sensed this growing chorus of enraged disappointment. There was a consensus that Congress could, or should, do better.

Guys, Congress is not comprised of experts on any subject. That’s the point. That’s how a constitutional republic is supposed to work. Rather than letting the experts on health care (doctors) determine the cost of health care, or the experts on engineering (engineers) decide where bridges are built, or the experts on logistics (generals) decide where the army gets deployed, the people elect a series of stand-ins to make these decisions instead.

The fear was that if you leave the experts in charge, they will arrange affairs to benefit themselves. And that’s not an unreasonable concern! Quoting James Madison in Federalist #10:

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? and what are the different classes of Legislators, but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine?

So no, legislators are not experts on the subjects they write laws about. That’s the whole idea. Legislators are separate from the factions they govern, in order to preserve objectivity. What the VICE article is describing is not a bug, it’s not a feature, it was the god-damned selling point.

And lest you think I’m taking silly outdated ideas like “bicameral legislature” out of context, consider the healthcare reboot that rammed its way through Congress in 2010. Back then, the concern was passing the bill before the Opposition Party could bog it down in committee. Nancy Pelosi advocated for “passing the bill so that you can find out what is in it” (her words). Sam Baucus, one of the principal architects, proudly claimed not to have read every page (“it’s statutory language [...] we hire experts”). The Ruling Party urged the passage of a bill known to be imperfect through “prompt, decisive leadership,” and letting adjustments to the law come later. Everywhere the emphasis was on speed, not on results.

In other words, the goal was not to craft an ideal piece of law, but to hurry a bill through the process as quickly as possible.

Well, congratulations! This is what you wanted. This is the process you championed: a process where MPAA lobbyists can bring about the end of unregulated Internet speech by rushing a bill through Congress. This is what happens when a body of legislators is invested with immense power: they might use it to do stupid things. Every law that you think is a good idea is the result of a bunch of uninformed self-promoters taking lobbyist money, trading favors and slapping each other on the back. All of them. The bad ones, too.

The problem is not that power is being used for evil. The problem is not that power is in the wrong people’s hands. The problem is that the power exists at all.

Dec

so you find yourself somebody who can do the job for free

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

When I announced that Too Close to Miss was on sale, I also made it available as a free .pdf. Word of mouth is more important to me than revenue at this stage, so I wanted as many people as possible to read it. I also wanted to show consideration for people who didn’t have a Kindle, Nook or iPad yet. (There is a print version coming soon, I promise)

Last week, I quietly took down the free PDF from the site. The initial burst seemed to have slowed. At this point, people were more likely to discover the book through Amazon, B&N or iTunes than through my blog.

So, thank you to everyone who downloaded the .pdf, read it, and spread the word about the book.

What I learned from my little experiment:

First, get a good download tracker if you’re going to try a stunt like this. Google Analytics will tell you that it’s easy to track downloads of a file – just paste some Javascript into the link, set up a Conversion point in your Goal Funnel, and voila! It is not, in fact, that easy. I will never get mad at a client for delay in putting tracking pixels on their website ever again.
If you’re unwilling or unable to do that, then have fun deciphering access logs! I was able to get the raw access data in .csv format from my web host. I then pasted it into Excel, separated out the IP addresses, and filtered out duplicates, since a given IP address might “call” a page more than once in a short time.
The result? 125 people^* downloaded the free .pdf of my novel between December 2nd and December 21st. Again, thank you all!

How do those numbers fare?

Honestly, I’m happy with it. I’ve sold somewhat more than 125 copies of the book each on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Presuming a 1% conversion rate of “reader” to “fan,” I can expect somewhere between one to two fans: people who will proselytize about the book to their social network, which can in turn lead to more sales, which can in turn lead to more fans, etc. Since every fan is precious – I blush at each new Amazon review – I consider it a worthwhile investment.

I don’t count the 125 downloads as lost sales, either. While $0.99 isn’t much of an obstacle to trying me out, I recognize that “free” is even more appealing. There are people who downloaded the .pdf who would never be ebook sales, whether due to platform difficulties or different price points. Besides, at a 30-40% royalty on $0.99, the $45 I (conceivably) lost on free downloads is a worthwhile investment if it produces one fan.

Of course, this is all a grand experiment. It’s all part of my fumbling, newborn efforts to market myself as a writer. And as my CEO told me once, no marketing campaign is truly a failure. You learn something from every dollar you spend^**. So I’m happy to learn, and I’m happy to share what I’m learning.

_________________
* “People” in the Internet definition of the word. It’s possible that a given user may have accessed the file from two different IP addresses, but this is a possibility that afflicts any tracking program.

** Even if it’s “don’t color our regular cola cans the same shade as our diet cola cans, even if it’s Christmas“.

Dec

stronger than yesterday

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Greetings, Carnival of the Indies visitors! I think Joel meant to send you to my post on cover design instead of this one. Check out that post for a detailed walkthrough of my experience in commissioning a cover design. You can also check out my book on Amazon if you want to see the finished product. And don’t forget the rest of this month’s Carnival as well!

Continued outrage at Amazon for its recent tactics (the price-check app, Kindle Direct Publishing Select) has brought out accusations of “monopoly tactics” and “predatory pricing” from Internet commenters. And while I normally don’t say this about the comment threads of any website, I think the accusations have some merit. The ongoing war over digital pricing has definitely uncovered evidence of predatory pricing in the ebook marketplace.

Just not by Amazon.

Look up your favorite big name author’s latest ebook on Amazon – say, Michael Connelly’s The Fifth Witness – and you’ll see a disclaimer under the price tag: This price was set by the publisher. This is Amazon’s way of notifying you that this book is subject to agency pricing, a new model wherein the retailer isn’t actually the retailer. See, the retailer is just an “agent,” facilitating the sale of a digital product, for which the agent gets to keep 30% of the proceeds. The big six publishing houses adopted agency pricing for ebooks early this year after a stand-off with Amazon.

When I first heard of this model, it sounded oddly familiar. Not because Apple had put it into practice already (for ebooks on iTunes). It sounded like minimum advertised pricing (MAP), a stunt that had cost music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars.

In May 2000, the attorneys general of 43 states filed a class action lawsuit against the world’s five largest record distributors (Bertelsmann, EMI, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic Corp., Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group) and three of the largest music retail outlets (TransWorld, Tower Records and Musicland). The suit asserted that distributors and retailers in the industry conspired to fix a minimum price on compact discs, in an anticompetitive measure that threatened the existence of smaller retailers. The industry elected to settle out of court in October 2002 to the tune of $143 million, which, after attorney fees and compliance costs, netted out to a check for $13.86 for anyone who wanted one.

Telling retailers that you’d like them to advertise your products at a minimum price is not illegal in itself. However, the 43 states (and the FTC, in a parallel lawsuit) alleged that MAP was a tactic used to fix a de facto price floor.

There’s no hard and fast rule for when a bunch of firms constitute a cartel, but antitrust law uses several guidelines in a case like this:

Do the firms in question constitute a significant portion of the market?
Are the actions of other firms easy to monitor?
Is there extensive vertical integration?
Do the timing of actions by these firms indicate cooperative rather than competitive behavior?
Are there methods of enforcement available between firms, or between producers and retailers?

The AGs never had to prove their case in open court. However, based on the evidence that they had available (the FTC’s findings in the parallel lawsuit, remarks at National Association of Recording Manufacturer conventions, harsh penalties to retailers who deviated from MAP), it seems clear that they could have^*.

When I heard about “agency pricing,” it seemed like a clear heir to the music industry’s attempts at MAP in the 90s. Would a similar lawsuit against the big six publishing houses – either a class action or an FTC case – yield similar results?

Let’s run down the criteria:

Do the firms in question constitute a significant portion of the market?: Robert Pitofsky, then-chairman of the FTC, found that the named music industry defendants in 2000 (BMG, EMI, Warner-Alektra-Atlantic, Sony and Universal) constituted 85% of the market. While I can’t find exact numbers, I would be shocked if the largest publishers in 2011 constituted any less. The Big 6 (my thanks to Scott Marlowe for the extensive list) are Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Random House (itself owned by Bertelsmann, also of BMG), and Simon & Schuster. Unless you’re big into self-published titles, almost every book on your shelf is printed by one of those houses or an imprint of one of them.

Are the actions of other firms easy to monitor? In the case of the publishing industry, I’d say yes – especially with regards to Amazon pricing. If one of the Big 6 relaxed their “agency pricing” arrangement with Amazon, word would spread remarkably fast.

Is there extensive vertical integration? I was tempted to say, “No” to this one at first. Traditionally, publishers would sell books to retailers (local bookstores, Borders, Wal-Mart, etc), who would then sell them to consumers. The publishers may have had cozy relations with book buyers, but they didn’t literally own the storefronts. However, by adopting an agency pricing model, the Big 6 may have brought more trouble on their own heads. Technically, Amazon is not retailing an ebook anymore: they’re an “agent” acting on behalf of the publisher. This isn’t quite vertical integration, but it’s much closer than the traditional model.

Do the timing of actions by these firms indicate cooperative rather than competitive behavior? Let’s see. In January 2010, Amazon caves to pressure from Macmillan and lets Macmillan use agency pricing to sell its ebooks. Shortly thereafter, the other five major publishing houses tiptoe onto the agency pricing model as well. Funny how none of them wanted to take a chance on the increase in volume (and possibly revenue) that would come of letting Amazon set its own price for ebooks.

Are there methods of enforcement available? This is the tricky one. While the Big 6 publishing houses function as a monopoly (sole seller) on books as an intellectual property, Amazon functions as a near monopsony (sole buyer) of the wholesale product. So the Big 6′s threat, implied or explicit, to pull product from Amazon is just as serious as Amazon’s threat to remove the ‘Buy’ buttons from all Big 6 books.

What we’re faced with is the latest round in a cold war between the world’s largest online retailer and the world’s biggest publishing houses. Amazon’s size and market power make it hard to pose as a victim of corporate manipulation. Amazon’s recent tactics certainly paint it as an aggressor, not a knight of virtue pure. But I suspect the reason we haven’t seen a class action lawsuit against Amazon yet is because the lawyers for the Big 6 know that they could be tarred with a lot of the same brushes.

There’s fresh and extensive precedent for what happens when attorneys general, or the FTC, allege price fixing against a publisher cartel. Legacy publishers are already hemorrhaging money. They don’t need a multi-million dollar settlement on top of that.

(P.S. The E.U. Competition Committee agrees with me)

(P.P.S. I should clarify: I’m not hoping that the FTC sues the Big 6. I’m just laying out the precedent as I, a non-lawyer with a B.A. in economics, understand it. Asking which side the FTC would consider a monopoly/cartel, Amazon or the Big 6, is like asking who would win a nuclear war in 1970, the U.S. or Russia. Nobody wins in that scenario, which is why we don’t see anyone shooting first.)

_________________
* I wrote a paper on the case in 2003, though I was coming at it as an economist, not a lawyer. We can chat in the comments if you want to discuss the 2000 case further.

Dec

I can lift a car up all by myself

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

One of the most rewarding parts of ceaselessly promoting a (good) novel has been seeing feedback. I don’t expect everyone to love Too Close to Miss – it’s very brief and it’s written in a particular noirish style that doesn’t work for everyone. But the feedback I’ve seen so far has been very encouraging.

(That’s one of the beauties of social media and the digital distribution era: I can get an instant assessment of how I’m doing. Of course, if I weren’t doing as well, that would turn into instant criticism, so I’m still compelled to give this my all)

I’ve taken a lot of pull quotes and turned them into promotional material for the book; you can click through to the Amazon.com description to see some of them. But my absolute favorite quotes so far have been quotes I can’t use.

For instance:

“I didn’t think anything could drag me away from Skyrim for more than twenty minutes, but from chapter one, I couldn’t put the damn thing down.” – from a friend who works for BioWare. That’s fantastic validation right there, but my target audience isn’t going to appreciate the importance of dragging someone away from Skyrim. If this were a Cory Doctorow thriller, maybe.

“My mom is loving your novel.” – speaking of target audiences … since most novels, especially in the thriller genre, are bought by women, it’s really important to me that I resonate with the 35+ female demographic. And I’ve heard this more than once, so it’s reassuring!

And my favorite:

“It’s so nice to see a self-published book whose first page doesn’t make me want to scratch out my eyes.”

If you have kind words and coronets of your own, please leave them on the Amazon page for the book, or even the Goodreads page. The indie publishing revolution has, as both a bug and a feature, flooded the market with product. Standing out in the crowd requires good word of mouth from trusted sources. If you read a lot of indie product, you know how hard it is to find something good – and if you think my stuff is good, please spread the word!

Dec

don’t look at my hands in my pockets, baby

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Amazon attracted the Internet’s ire last week for its 5% discount for users who scan an item in a physical store, then buy it online. But amidst all this hubbub, Amazon also rolled out another program that’s stirred up similar furor, albeit in a smaller circle: Kindle Direct Publishing Select.

KDP Select allows independently published authors (read: me) to take part in the Kindle lending library. Every author who participates gets a share of a $500,000 fund, proportional to the number of times their book is “checked out” of Amazon’s Kindle library. They also get the opportunity to promote their book by offering it for free for up to 5 days, an option which was traditionally only available to legacy publishers.

The catch: the author has to remove their ebook from all other platforms – Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, iBookstore – for 90 days. Failure to do so will result in getting booted from the program, and possibly getting barred from KDP overall.

Some authors (such as the ones in the article linked above) are thrilled at the notion. Other ebook distributors are furious, with Smashwords firing off the first response:

The new Amazon KDP Select program strikes me as a startling example of a predatory business practice. Amazon has the opportunity to leverage their dominance as the world’s largest ebook retailer (and world’s largest payer to indie authors) to attain monopolistic advantage by effectively denying its competing retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, Sony, etc) access to the books from indie authors.

I don’t know how compelling I find this argument, considering the monopolistic behavior that legacy publishers engage in to keep ebook prices on Amazon artificially high. I guess everyone’s a giant from a certain scale. But whether you like it or hate it, it’s a tactic in the same vein as their price-scanning app: going out of their way to deny competitor purchases by offering lucrative deals to consumers (price check) or producers (revenue sharing).

I received an invitation to add Too Close to Miss to KDP Select late last week. After giving it some thought, I decided against participating. Here are my reasons:

My reward: an unspecified share of a $500,000 prize. Amazon’s apparently bagged the biggest indie authors already, like J.A. Konrath and Patricia Ryan. They’ll likely take up the biggest slices of pie. So I’ll be sacrificing my availability on B&N and iBooks for … five dollars? Maybe less? Unlike every other aspect of the ebook market, this is a platform where another author’s success would hurt me.
I would also get to promote my book for free. This would be a bigger deal if I weren’t (currently) pricing it at $0.99. Maybe when I get to be a bigger fish that option will be worth it, but not today.
In terms of raw sales, Amazon is already beating out B&N and iBooks, combined, by 9X. However, it’s not about raw sales for me (currently). I have several friends who’ve already read Too Close to Miss on the Nook. I can’t afford to shut these friends out. I’m enough of an unknown quantity where I still need passionate advocates for my work more than I need some marginal revenue.
Finally, I’m new enough to self-publishing and e-publishing that this strikes me as a hassle at best, dangerous at worst. To take my book down from iBooks, Kobo and several other markets, I have to unpublish it from the Smashwords platform. What if Apple leaves it up a day or two longer, or if I miss some market that I didn’t even know I was live in? If Amazon spots my book anywhere else, I could get barred from KDP. Not worth the risk.

None of this is to say that I think KDP Select is a bad idea. The numbers just don’t make sense for me at present. And that’s the reason I elected to self-publish in the first place: because the numbers made sense there, not in legacy publishing. If you stick to your vision, understand the landscape and crunch the numbers, you can be sure you’re making the smart choice.

Dec

one little, two little, three little, indie rap

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

It was a couple years ago, probably from Tim Ferriss, that I first read the Peter Drucker quote, “What gets measured, gets managed.” But it was only recently that I realized that wasn’t a threat.

I’m not even kidding here: it was years before I realized I was supposed to read that with a knowing nod. That doesn’t sound like a threat to you? Who wants to be managed? I’d like to be coached, sure. I’d like to be inspired to do great things. I’d like to be directed to where my talents can be put to the best use. But being managed sounds as much fun as being inventoried.

Working in a data heavy industry as I do, I take care to ask the right questions and to get the right numbers. If you have a spreadsheet full of data, it’s trivial to compare column A against column B and get some “A per B” metric. Is that metric useful, though? What does this actually tell us? Is it worth adding this level of detail when this larger trend tells us all we need to know? I take these precautions because I know that sifting data can turn into a job in itself. It feels productive, sure – look how much time you spend with SQL queries! Look how pretty those charts are! Number the cells of my spreadsheet and the bullets of my slide! But little is actually done.

As I embark on the start of a writing (and publishing) career, I have to keep this in mind.

The whole reason that self-publishing has shaken the world of legacy publishing, prompting op-ed denials and soothing internal memoranda, is because of some high profile successes. Self-publishing didn’t spring full grown from the head of the Kindle. Authors have been printing their own trade paperbacks for years. Even electronic distribution is as old as FTP. But it’s taken people like Joe Konrath, John Locke and Amanda Hocking to demonstrate what’s really possible.

Now Joe, John and Amanda would be the first to caution you that no one should expect tremendous success straight out the gate. Especially not a first-time author whom no one has heard of. Even as Joe posts his six-figure sales on his blog, he reminds people that it takes professional design, quality product, good marketing and a decent backlist to make it as a writer.

But you can’t help but hope.

When I launched my book on Friday, I got wonderful encouragement from every corner of my life. I flexed every network I had – Facebook, Twitter, word of mouth, Overthinking It – to promote the book. And it worked, too! I sold a decent number of copies – more copies than I have friends with Kindles, which meant word of mouth was spreading.

Then things slowed down a bit.

I know I shouldn’t expect overnight success. Given the realities of digital publishing, I know I’ll be lucky to make back the cost of releasing the book. But Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords put so much data at your fingertips. It takes a trivial effort to check. I just need to mouse over to that link, log in to my Author Central account, and see what the new total is. If I check every day, I can figure out my drop-off rate per day. I could lay it out in a chart, with every day pegged to a particular marketing initiative, to see if …

And you see the problem. When you’re surrounded with numbers, it becomes easy to get immersed. As pattern-seeking animals, we’re great at combining numbers in different ways to get new numbers. But that doesn’t mean all our combinations are useful. If checking my numbers every day adds more stress to my life, or drives me to try spurious experiments in the hopes of boosting them, then the data isn’t helping me.

This isn’t to say my marketing efforts are wasted. I know I need to keep promoting myself (what do you think this blog post is for?). But I’m so far in the hole when it comes to market presence that I don’t need to micro-manage my marketing strategy. Any effort I make, short of something sleazy or exhausting, is worth it at this stage. I’m a neophyte. I’m not even a six of clubs yet.

So for the time being, I’m choosing not to look at my numbers^*. I promised myself when I started this that I wasn’t in it for the money (and I’m not; my day job pays well). I wanted to make my name as a writer in the most effective way I saw available. And it’s working. For now.

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* Because I know you’re curious: between Friday morning and Monday night, I sold 100 copies of TOO CLOSE TO MISS on Amazon. The overwhelming majority of those were on Friday and the pace has slowed every day. It’s the slowing down that I would find frustrating, if I let it, but I’m putting it out of mind. A month in which I sold 100 copies would be a notable success for a first-time, unknown, self-published author; a weekend in which I sell 100 is a triumph. But the temptation to keep checking is there, unless I consciously silence it.

Dec

too close to miss

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Mara Cunningham knew that sleeping with a married man was a bad idea. But when her lover shows up in the hospital after his wife and son are murdered, the rumors about her turn dangerous. Now she’s the prime suspect in a double homicide, and the real killers will stop at nothing to silence her. Mara’s race against time takes her from the dense heart of Boston to the dark woods of New Hampshire, from gritty streets to the halls of power. Before she’s through, she’ll learn just which of her friends she can trust – and she’ll stare death in the face.

As of this morning, TOO CLOSE TO MISS is available on Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, with other platforms coming soon. Current price is a beggarly $0.99. That’s less than anything you can buy anywhere. If you’re sitting at your desk at work thinking about whether or not to get this book, by the time you decide you’ll have already earned enough to pay for it.

If you like the book, please tell your friends via your preferred method – Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, that word of mouth thing. If you don’t like it, drop me an e-mail and I promise to take it in stride. As the price might indicate, I’m not in this for the money: I’m trying to build a fan base.

Thank you all for the support you’ve shown me over the years, especially the enthusiasm over the last few weeks leading up to today. It’s a weird crazy feeling.

Dec

feel like a touch, a touch too much

Posted by Perich at 7:06 am

Greetings, Carnival of the Indies visitors! You can check out what the finished product looks like by visiting its Amazon page or continuing to read. And definitely check out the other great articles featured in this month’s Carnival as well.

(Part 2 of my continuing series on the new novel, leading up to the big announcement on Friday)

The great part about self-publishing is you get to take responsibility over decisions traditionally left to a big publisher: editing, layout, cover design, etc. As it turns out, that’s also the daunting part. None of us got into this gig because we love obsessing over bleed lines.

When it came time to design the cover, I turned to Ryan Sawyer, who I’d worked with before in promoting Discount Shakespeare. He’d done up some catchy, colorful postcards that I really liked. We had a good relationship: friendly enough that we both felt compelled to give each other our best work and feedback, but not so friendly that we’d have a hard time asking for invoices or deadlines¹.

Having worked in the ad industry for years, I knew the frustration of dealing with vague client feedback (“I like it, but can you make it … pop a bit more?”). So now that I was a client, the first thing I did was to create as specific a list of guidelines as I could for my book cover. This was tough for me, as I knew the motif that I was going for – paperback thriller cover – but not the specific vision.

I told Ryan the following:

+ Generally dark, muted colors: blacks, nighttime blues, blood reds, etc.

+ Title in block letters, author’s name in smaller letters beneath

+ The novel is about a female reporter investigating a disappearance. So a female silhouette in an action pose (running, or looking over her shoulder, etc) would work. Just an idea; not at all required.

+ Also just an idea: city skyline (doesn’t have to be of Boston, though novel is set there), lake cabin surrounded by trees (critical portions of the novel take place at Lake Winnipesaukee), suburban house with front door ajar (double homicide takes place here). If any of these are used, a color filter or wash should be applied (see first bullet).

+ Also, the female protagonist is a photographer, so if any of the above is captured through a camera lens / reticule, that’s fine too. Again, just an idea, not at all required.

+ The general appearance I want is “would not look out of place in an airport bookstore.”

I also gave him a list of covers as sources of inspiration: P.J. Alderman’s A Killing Tide, Michael Connelly’s The Black Ice, Lee Child’s Second Son, Tess Gerritsen’s Harvest.

After a few days, Ryan came back with the following (click for larger version):

click for larger version

Of these, I thought the first had potential. I really liked the second, but told Ryan it was a little grittier than I had in mind. The third seemed like something I was sure I’d seen before. Ryan was almost apologizing as he sent it, so we discarded that one early on.

Over the next 4 weeks, we went back and forth on several variations of #1, Ryan actually going so far as to track down a real Glock to photograph. I liked them all, but they looked a little static. Nothing about them commanded attention.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about the second version.

By the time I had the penultimate draft of Too Close to Miss ready, I was already thinking about the next book. So every thought I had about the production process was colored by how I would market a series². And the more I thought about design #2, the more I thought it would work in a series. The same bold title up top. The same test pattern background, but with different color bars. And some different element of violence as a garnish – a bloodstain, a burn mark, a jagged tear.

What turned me off of design #2 initially was that Ryan, craftsman that he is, had made the blood spatter frighteningly realistic. It had texture. If I saw someone lying asleep on the couch with that book on their chest, my reaction would be, oh shit, what happened? So I asked him to tone the blood spatter down, putting it behind the title. We also did some back and forth on the width of the maroon bar at the bottom that had my name in it, as well as fonts and sizes.

The final result:

The process of turning a book from manuscript to novel had become a bit of a slog. But seeing that got my heart racing. That’s a professional cover. If this were a paperback book, that would jump out on the shelf. I felt proud to have that cover introducing my work³.

If you want to check out the finished product, you can download TOO CLOSE TO MISS off of Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes. Only $0.99 for a limited time!

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1 By which I mean: Sylvia is also a graphic designer, but I would never ask her to design a cover for me, largely because I don’t want to subject our relationship to my perfectionism. “I’d love to get a drink, sweetie, but shouldn’t you be experimenting with font sizes? Isn’t that a better use of your time?”

2. For instance, the next two books in the series are already titled. Each of the titles is four words. Try and guess what the first and third words are.

3. What I’m saying is, hire Ryan Sawyer to design your book covers.