I only ever once bought a book solely based on a review. It was not a good review by any stretch of the imagination. But the review made me so curious about the supposedly bad ending that I wanted to see for myself. I read the book and saw where the reviewer came from. The ending was unusual, in that one of the characters made a decision that would not have been mine (neither would it have been the reviewer’s, I guess).

The funny thing is–because of that very negative review, I bought the book, and to date, I still remember the book, whereas I’ve forgotten countless other books I read around the same time. I spoke about the book at home, and my daughters read it as well.

So, yeah, one bad review, and three reads. Mostly, I don’t care about ratings at all. Sometimes I read the reviews. What I’m looking for in reviews is more setting and subject matter related comments, and much less what the reviewer thought about them. I find the bad reviews a lot more interesting than the good ones.

Do bad reviews stop you picking up a book?

I did some very unscientific research. I looked at the Amazon reviews of a number of my favourite big-name authors. By far the majority of books averaged 3-3.5 stars, sometimes over hundreds of reviews, including many one-star reviews. Obviously, bad reviews do not stop buyers.

Patty has graciously invited me to appear as a guest on her website’s blog, and write about why I decided to venture into the world of self-publishing. My name is Judson Roberts, and I’m the author of the Strongbow Saga, a historical fiction series set in the 9th century world of the Vikings.

In order to explain why I chose to try my hand at self-publishing, it’s necessary to provide a little history, both of my own writing career, and of the amazing transformation that has occurred in the publishing world during the last few years. I started somewhat late trying to become a writer. For most of my adult life, I worked in the field of criminal law, including as a city police officer, federal agent, and organized crime prosecutor. When I finally did decide to try my hand at writing fiction, my early efforts did not meet with success—it took almost ten years, and several unpublished novels, before I finally landed a contract with a big traditional publisher, HarperCollins, for the Strongbow Saga.

Initially I was ecstatic. I thought my dreamed-of new career as a writer was finally about to take off. But in my own case, at least (everyone who has worked with a big traditional publisher has a different story, although I have heard far too many similar to my own), what followed brought mostly disappointment, discouragement, and frustration. I’ll summarize briefly.
I had always intended the series to be adult historical fiction, and I wrote the first volume, Viking Warrior, as such. But the agent I’d secured ended up selling the book to the Children’s/Young Adult Division of HarperCollins. Her rationale was that the protagonist was teen-aged, and there is a strong coming-of-age aspect to the story. The editor at HarperCollins who purchased Viking Warrior, plus the next two books in the series, agreed. So my adult fiction series ended up being published as adult fiction.

I’ve spent years researching the Vikings, and one of my goals in the series is to try to portray their culture accurately, which has very rarely been done in fiction—although most people today tend to imagine the Vikings as brutish barbarians, they actually had a very unique, evolved culture, characterized by such things as a highly developed legal system and oral literature tradition. The real Vikings did not dress in rough animal skin garments, as they’re often pictured, but rather wore clothes made of linen, wool during the colder months, and sometimes even silk. In fact, the Vikings’ culture was in many ways quite similar to that of the Mycenaean Greeks, written about by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. But like the Mycenaean Greeks, the Vikings could at times be quite violent, and that violence often figures prominently, and is portrayed frankly and explicitly, in the story of the Strongbow Saga. Fortunately, even though HarperCollins elected to publish the series as young adult rather than adult fiction, I was never asked to tone down the violence in the story. But little else about the experience went smoothly.

For example, someone in the marketing division decided that the covers of the books should be designed with the particular aim of attracting the attention of teenaged girls, so they ran focus groups using various options, and ended up with a series of covers featuring close-up images of a brooding young man in Viking costume, making the books appear more like romance novels than serious historical fiction. Then, when the series was launched in 2006 with the release of the hardback edition of Viking Warrior, some other genius apparently forgot to ship out advance review copies, because none of the major review venues—which back then were critically necessary to bring attention and awareness to the existence of newly published books—covered the release and reviewed the book (my agent said she had never seen the release by one of the big-five publishers of a new hardcover series receive no reviews or coverage at all). So the only way readers had to discover the existence of the series was literally to happen upon a copy of Viking Warrior on the shelves of a bookstore, in the children’s/young adult section.

Traditional publishers, as well as the major bookstore chains, measure a new book’s success by something called sell-through. Basically that means how fast, in the first months of a book’s release, shipments of the book sell out and are reordered. Because new books are constantly being released, in the traditional world of book publishing and book selling if a new book does not become successful quickly, it falls by the wayside. If bookstores elect to continue carrying it at all, they will keep only one or two copies on their shelves, and return the rest of the copies shipped to them by the publisher for credit. And if the first book of a series does not meet that quick sell-through measure of success, the publisher will print far fewer copies of later books in the series.

Although both my agent and my editor at HarperCollins had predicted that the Strongbow Saga would find a large audience (my editor even went so far as to predict that over time the series might gain as large and loyal a following as The Lord of the Rings), needless to say, thanks to HarperCollins’ efforts and lack thereof, that did not happen. And because that did not happen, I made very little money off of the books beyond the original advances, which were not that large, and even before the third book was released HarperCollins decided to kill the series, rather than continue it.

Fast forward to 2010. HarperCollins began taking the three Strongbow Saga books they had published out of print. Meanwhile, Amazon was beginning a visionary campaign that would turn the world of publishing upside down. Prior to 2010, the market for e-books was miniscule. Most readers preferred real books. But Amazon predicted that the market would grow if (1) e-book reading devices, which heretofore had been fairly expensive, were priced lower, and (2) if e-books themselves were priced significantly lower than print editions. In order to expand the e-book market, and to carve out a dominant position in it, Amazon was willing to take a large loss up front. So in 2010, Amazon made the first of what has since been a series of dramatic price cuts for its Kindle e-book reader (and for personal computers, smartphones, and other devices it offered a Kindle reading app free), and it offered Kindle edition e-books, including current best sellers, at $9.99 or less, substantially below the cost of the same books’ print editions. Millions and millions of the lower-priced Kindle readers were purchased in the months before Christmas of 2010, and suddenly in January 2011 there were millions and millions of new Kindle owners eager to buy e-books for their new devices. E-book sales exploded.

Although it was Amazon, not the publishers, that ate the losses incurred by selling e-books below the publishers’ list price, nevertheless the big traditional publishers were not amused. They feared—correctly, as it turns out—that growing e-book sales would erode their sales of print books, and even more, they feared Amazon gaining dominance over the e-book market. A battle of wills followed, with the big publishers trying to force Amazon to price their e-books at the same list price as print editions. Apple, also fearing Amazon’s growing dominance in the e-book market, threw its lot in with the big publishers, and allowed them to set the price of their e-book editions sold in the Apple store for the widely popular iPhone and iPad. Faced with the possibility that the big publishers might pull their e-book editions altogether from the Kindle store, and offer them exclusively through Apple and other e-book sellers such as Sony and Kobo, who were compliant with the publishers’ pricing demands, Amazon conceded, and also accepted what is now known as the “agency pricing model,” under which the publishers set the price for which their e-book editions must be sold (ironically, the publishers’ short-term victory may prove costly—in the past few months Apple and several of the big publishers have come under investigation for conspiracy to commit price-fixing of e-books).

Amazon obviously had anticipated at least the possibility of its losing battle with the big publishers over e-book pricing, because also in 2010 they launched what would prove to be a brilliant flanking maneuver: a program, in Amazon’s Kindle Division, under which authors could directly self-publish their own books as Kindle e-books, without the involvement of publishers, agents, or any other middle-men who would take a cut of the author’s potential profits. When a Kindle e-book was sold, the proceeds of the sale would be divided between only two parties—Amazon and the author—and to encourage authors to join in this new venture, Amazon gave the authors the lion’s share, 70% percent of the sales price of each e-book sold, so long as the author agreed to set their books’ prices no higher than $9.99. This was in contrast to the 10% to 15% royalty typically paid to authors by traditional publishers to authors from the price of each book sold.

During the early days of Amazon’s self-publishing program (i.e., way back in 2010), a number of authors began experimenting with pricing the Kindle editions of their books at very low prices—typically ranging from $.99 to under $5.00—and many found that by selling their books at very low price-points, when combined with the 70% royalty rate, the much higher volume of sales they achieved more than made up for the loss of royalty per sale when the books were priced higher, but sold fewer copies. One such author, J.A. Konrath, began realizing some truly amazing levels of sales and income, and he made extensive efforts to publicize his own success and to encourage other authors to take control of their own writing careers by self-publishing through Amazon.

I heard Konrath speak at a writers’ conference in October of 2010, and decided, since the rights to my books were beginning to revert back to me, to take the plunge. I have since re-released the first three books of the Strongbow Saga as adult fiction, and am currently working on book 4 of the series. Although I’ve released them as e-books in other venues besides just Amazon, and have also released new print-on-demand print editions, it is in the Kindle editions where I’ve found success, and my books have finally found their audience. For the first time—at age 60—I can truly say that I have a writing career, one that allows me to support myself and my family, and has even allowed my wife to retire early.

There are many people who despise and revile Amazon, but I am not one of them.

This weekend, I’m offering the Kindle edition of Viking Warrior, book 1 of the Strongbow Saga, free on Amazon. I hope you’ll take a look—after all, at that price, what do you have to lose?

Learn more about Judson Roberts, the Strongbow Saga, and his free book offer at his website:
http://www.judsonroberts.com/

Viking Warrior (The Strongbow Saga) – direct link to the book

People like having a character on the cover image, so I made up a character file for Hadie. She will return in later stories anyway.

The image is kinda physically impossible. When you’re on the surface of Titan, all you can see is an orange murk, but never mind. Reality is for whimps and wusses, and an image of just the girl with the light could make people think that it’s an inspirational/religiuos story, so I needed the space element. Also: a murky orange background is boring.

I also took another approach to the title.

The really cool thing about ebooks is that you can muck around with covers as much as you like. I guess you can do this with the text itself, too, but I have not done that yet.

Which image design do you like better, the left or the right?

The image on the right is one of the very first ones I made in Photoshop. It came together by accident while I was mucking around with the program. I’ve since seen that every writer and their dog (or rather, their cats) uses NASA images featuring the disk of a moon or planet. You wouldn’t believe how many covers there are with full orbs of the Moon, Mars or Earth. So even if I keep that idea, I have no option but to do something different with it.

Editing is not a magic box

Editing falls squarely in those categories.

Now, I’d be the last person to argue that a skilled editor won’t improve your work, but, as I said in the post a few days ago, editing can enhance, but not save, your work.

In self-publishing-land, there are all sorts of claims about editors:
- That you must absolutely get one
- That they can be found for as little as $200
- That they magically fix everything that’s wrong with a book

All these claims, even the first, are false.

So… if a couple of independent people look at a book, and say that ‘it needs editing’, what they really mean, and what they’re far too polite to say is: this author needs to learn to write.

Such author ‘desperately in need of an editor’ cannot be saved by an editor, and any editor with half a sense of pride should refuse the job and tell the author kindly to go and do some writing courses and join a crit group, or some such.

But, this author finds a steal of an editor for $200, who goes through the manuscript and fixes typos and punctuation, and then claims the work has been ‘professionally edited’. And gets really angry when the ‘this needs editing’ claims don’t go away.

Think about it. You do not need any qualifications to call yourself an editor. There are degrees you can get that include editing. Large publishing houses choose editors with such degrees, or people who have a proven track record of experience, preferably both. These people are professionals, and they will not work for $200. You might be able to get a student for $200, but as soon as this person gets a reputation for being good, they’ll want to charge more. For $200, you can get a glorified crit from a fellow writer. Or from someone who will give the manuscript a cursory look, rubber-stamp it and collect the money.

If you pay peanuts, it is quite likely that you will get monkeys.

And moreover…

A well-written and well-plotted piece of fiction will likely be improved by editing, but will be both readable and enjoyable with a light proof-read from a nitpicky writerly friend. If you can afford a couple of thousand $$$ for a good editor, go for it, but because your work will be readable, there is no flying hurry to do this.

A poorly-written piece of fiction will not be saved no matter how much money you spend on editing.

I have invited a real professional editor to write a guest post on what to look out for when you choose an editor for your books.

_______________________________________________________________

Patty Jansen is a sometimes backyard editor with no editorial credentials except a handful of courses, six years of workshop experience and two issues of ASIM, and no greater editorial aspirations. She very much prefers to write fiction over editing.
Patty is a member of SFWA and has sold fiction to Redstone SF, the Grantville Gazette and was a winner of the Writers of the Future contest. She has a story forthcoming in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

When I’ve done a good day of writing, I reward myself with some time to play with graphics. In this setup, I went to play with shadows and light.
I have no idea who this woman is (some sort of law enforcement authority), where she is (some sort of space station) and what she’s doing here or why she has a gun. Feel free to speculate.
The cabin has a light in the sleeping alcove and there is a much stronger light in the corridor, which reflects against the wall where the camera is (you can’t see this wall) and back onto the woman. The back wall isn’t really there, so I had to create a third light.
All three lights have raytraced shadows. Hint: this takes forever to render, especially the part that has the hair. Below is a close-up of the woman’s face. I like the way the light hits the hair from different angles.

Someone said about my post yesterday that it was depressing to read how many potentially good stories are not published. It is true that a good magazine gets many, many more submissions than it can use. It even gets many more good submissions than it can use.

Being a writer can be depressing. You start off the year with good hopes, but as sale-less months pass, you feel less like a writer and more like hack.

This is normal, and another reason why you shouldn’t get too hung up about rejections. Although I made a really good sale this month, I sold absolutely nothing after 6 January last year. This is because I raised my own standards, and because I didn’t write as many short stories.

Everyone gets rejections, and the high of a sale usually lasts less long than the dry periods in between.

Rejectomancy = over-worrying about rejections, trying to analyse, no-matter-what, why the editor didn’t buy your story, a compulsion to ‘learn from each rejection’ in order to find the holy grail to publication.

ASIM 53 has gone to print! This finishes up another editing project. Being on the other end of the rejection process gives you some insights on why stories are bought and why they’re rejected. Apart from the regular slush reading gig, this is my second editing project, and the more I’m involved with editing, the more I realise that the acceptance, or rejection, or stories is a pretty random process.

Just to be clear, at ASIM, stories that have been ‘approved’ by three slush readers go into a pool from which editors, sometimes several editors at the same time, can choose for their respective issues. These stories have already been vetted against standards of grammar and plotting.

Why do I choose one story and not another?

Of course, the story has to be well-written. But, actually, more important than well-written is a kind of spark. If the story has enough spark, I’ll put up with a certain level of pedestrian writing. I want spark.

And, here comes the rub, what is a spark for me is not a spark for someone else. And that someone else can also be an editor, who would have chosen a completely set of different stories. I like hard SF (there is some of that in the issue), I like space opera (some of that, too), and I like concepts that make me laugh.

A good number of the stories that I looked at and didn’t choose will be returned to the authors with a rejection letter that says that the story was good enough to go into the pool and may well sell elsewhere. There will also be reader comments. Each of these comments are the opinion of one person. They may not even be the reason that the story was rejected. The reason that the story was rejected may not be that the story wasn’t any good. It was just that no one felt any spark while reading it.

A rejection means one thing, and one thing only: the editor couldn’t use the story at that time.

Whatever the rejection letter says does not matter. A line like ‘please consider us for your next story’ may be standard for that magazine. Or it may not. Either way, it means nothing. Regardless of what the letter said, you’d likely send them something else anyway. You may think you’re getting closer with that publication, but that doesn’t mean you’ll actually sell something there. It doesn’t matter whether the editor says this or that, or whether you got through one round and was passed to the editor-in-chief. It doesn’t matter that they kept your story for a month where the average rejection time is two weeks. It doesn’t matter…

It just doesn’t matter.

They didn’t buy your story. At this point in time, your best hope is to send the story elsewhere and send that particular magazine another story.

Some data points from my own stack:
magazine 1: first story I sent them got a personal rejection. I’ve been unable to raise a peep from them since.
magazine 2: never received anything except form rejections. Then a sale.
magazine 3: I have a string of (quite rare) personal rejections longer than my arm, but cannot seem to sell anything there.
magazine 4: two rejections, then a sale
story 1: everyone likes this story. I have a string of almosts from every big magazine. Still unsold
story 2: my WOTF non-winning finalist. Do you think I can sell this story?
story 3: sold on first submission

These data look random, because they are random. Editors are people, and they have preferences. Preferences are not set in concrete and will change from issue to issue. They will depend on what else is in the issue.

Stop worrying about the meaning of rejections. Just send the story somewhere else, and write another story.

Smashwords has no ridiculous charges or further hoop-jumping based on the author’s or the buyer’s country of residence. Seriously, Amazon, if documents are transferred electronically, what is it with the RIDICULOUS surcharge for ‘delivery’. I call that straight profiteering.

Smashwords treats all authors and buyers as equal as they can.

Smashwords does not keep subdividing the world into ever-diminishing markets and retaining a reserve of sales money for each of them.

Smashwords distributes to a whole host of other online sellers where it’s hard to get your book listed otherwise.

Best of all, Smashwords uses paypal. For anyone who whinges about paypal fees, I have this to say: go to your bank and ask to become an independent credit card merchant. Ask how much they charge. OK, done that? Point made.

However, recently, I’ve pulled my three oldest fiction titles off Smashwords to enrol them in the Amazon KDP Select program. Why? Simple: because they didn’t sell on Smashwords, or B&N, or Sony, or the iBooks store. The KDP Select program allows me to set days the book will be free for promotional purposes, and strangely, giving books away helps sales. It helps in getting reviews and getting the work read.

But I’m no great fan of Amazon, their chaotic site and their monopoly. Many other people aren’t fans either. There’s only one thing to do, right? Buy books on sites that aren’t Amazon.

In that vein, I have Fire & Ice on special for 99c this weekend. Don’t make me put the trilogy on KDP Select as well.

This month marks my one-year anniversary at Smashwords. I started with His Name In Lights, which had been published previously, and now have sixteen items up, ranging from hard SF to non-fiction to fantasy. Short stories, novellas and novels.

Here are a few things I’ve learned in the process shared here for the beginning self-publishing writer.

1. You know Amanda Hocking, and Joe Konrath and them?
Yeah, you are going to forget their names and the fact that they’ve had phenomenal successes right now. They exist in a different universe where possibilities and probabilities have been interchanged and where luck smiles down on everyone. That is the universe you’ll find if you take a right turn at the sign that says winners only. But the way is almost always blocked.

2. Don’t expect anything
That way, you’ll be pleased with modest successes, because modest, they will be. Most of the successful self-publishers have a few things in common: they have already sold well in paper or, they have a large stable of available novels, preferably both. They are also likely to have a fair bit of experience in the literary world. And luck. See point 1.

3. First, make sure you can write
This issue should be an open door, but you only need to visit the Kindleboards briefly to see that some authors rely on their Amazon reviews to tell them what’s wrong with the book. For crying out loud, don’t slap your first finished novel on there without having an inkling of whether it’s actually any good style and technique wise. Join a workshop, a critique group or similar. Do they tell it it’s all fine and dandy? Go and find someone who tells you your writing sucks. Listen to this person’s arguments. Tighten your prose. Fix meandering plots. Learn to write. Sell a few short stories first. I made the pact with myself that I wouldn’t self-publish until I had met the criteria to join SFWA as full member. Make sure you can write. I cannot say this clearly enough.

4. Don’t go overboard with expenses – make your writing self-sustaining
Remember point 1? Your sales are likely to be very small initially. If you have numerous titles, it is easy to spend lots on covers, formatting and editing. Most of that money will take a long time to recoup. If you get discouraged, you’ll never recoup it.
Editing is expensive. Any editor who charges $200 can’t possibly do a good job, because of the amount of time it takes. A good editor will charge at least $1000. That’s a lot of books to be sold. You have to remember that editing enhances a work. It does not save it. If you need editing to save your work from bad grammar or bad plots, go back to point 3 (in other words: learn to write). Do the best you can and then swap books with a fellow self-publisher for an el-cheapo copy-edit. You may get all the missing words and other things spellcheck doesn’t pick up. You may not. But the level of error will be within acceptable levels.

5. If you’re going to spend money, do it on the cover first
A professional cover artist is expensive. There are countless people on DeviantArt who will do a decent job for not all that much money. Alternatively get Photoshop and do something yourself. No, it won’t be professional, but it can be two other things: pretty and effective. Pretty and attractive draws eyes on crowded web listings. Make up a few alternative covers and ask people what they think about the cover and what they think the cover suggests the book is about (the latter should match your genre). Adjust according to comments. Use it for the book until you have sold enough to justify a good cover artist.

6. Many roads lead to Rome
Don’t forget to keep submitting your work to traditional publishers. Having published in both ways can reinforce your name. There is no need to be snobby about ‘the publishing industry’. Unless you know a lot about it, and can demonstrate that knowledge, you’ll just end up looking like a dick.

7. Paid advertising does not work
Goodreads ads, Facebook ads, I’ve heard very few good results. They may work once you’re a known name, but for an unknown, you’ll end up sounding like every other wannabe out there. Only more desperate. Desperate is bad.

8. Don’t forget to keep writing
The only thing that’s sure to increase your sales is the release of a new book.

9. Whichever way you publish, making sales is never easy
See point 7. Every promotion activity has limited effect, and I think books sell because of the cumulative effect of the cover, the blurb and various other factors, such as author name. But until you have a name, your name won’t sell. Building a name is not easy. It’s slow and happens through a great variety of factors, the most important one of which is to write a gripping book. Yelling into a mass crowd ‘buy my book’ is very unlikely to be successful.

10. Love your books
Because at times, you’ll feel nobody else does. Treat your finished books with love and respect. Don’t disparage them, don’t talk them down.