The Six Commandments of Self-Publishing and Where Advertising Fits Into It

While writing the Career Indie Author, I discovered a new way of thinking about our job. I call it the Six Self-Publishing Principles.

This book is for writers who are in the business for the long-term. It’s for people who want to make money. There is nothing wrong with writing for yourself, or writing books that you have no intention of selling. If you’re perfectly happy turning out a book every year, or every couple of years, and you don’t want to earn enough money to quit that a hated day-job and to live the life that you’ve always dreamed of as a full-time author, then you’ve bought the wrong book. I hope it’s not too late to get a refund.

As I worked through the process of writing this book, I realized something. Over and over, the same core principles revealed them. These aren’t rules, although fulfilling some of them does require you to do certain things. It’s just that you have choices in how you do them. But these principles surfaced again and again that it seemed burned in stone, like what Charlton Heston encountered in “The Ten Commandments.”

Call these the Six Commandments of Indie Publishing.

In order of importance, they are:

1. Thou shalt keep writing and publishing.

2. Thou shalt take care of your health, family, and friends.

3. Thou shalt listen and respond to feedback about your books, sales, marketing, and advertising.

4. Thou shalt pay heed to your online persona, whether it be your website, author and book pages, newsletter, or social media.

5. Thou shalt be aware of potential income streams.

6. Thou shalt bear in mind marketing and advertising.

OK, I’ll stop with the religion humor. Let’s look at the comman—I mean, principles.

The top four are absolutely necessary. You must keep producing material. You should monitor your health to avoid burnout, and stay in touch with your family and friends as a part of that. You should listen to feedback to identify potential problems in your writing and marketing (this doesn’t mean that everything you hear is correct, however). And even if you choose not to tweet, post, pin, or do anything online, reviewing those places where you do exist can help you make incremental improvements. Something as small as adding the latest title in your series to the previous books on their pages might lead to more sales. As you get better writing promotional copy, you can see ways to improve what’s already out there.

So what about principle five and six? Let’s talk about them.

What Are Income Streams

Successful entrepreneurs do not put all their eggs in one basket. They do not build businesses where 80 percent of their income comes from one source. If they do, they risk crashing their company if that source dries up.

I saw this first-hand back when desktop business computers were dominated by IBM. One company in particular held the contract to supply IBM with nearly all of its disk drives. These were the type that accepted thin “floppy” squares 5.25” wide. Because IBM was selling tons of computers to businesses, the company was minting insane amounts of money.

Then the market shifted. Third-party companies like Compaq got into the business creating their personal computers. They undercut IBM’s prices. They opened retail stores. They found their own sources for disk drives.

Then, IBM informed the company they bought the majority of their drives from that they were cutting back. They, too, found cheaper sources. The company that founded its business model on selling to IBM took a huge hit and never recovered.

This can happen to you.

What This Means to You

Say you’re writing strictly for Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. You can sell your paperbooks anywhere. Every audiobook site will accept your product. But your ebook sales can only come from the Zon and Kindle Unlimited.

Now let’s say, through nothing you’ve done, you see a sudden spike in reads on KU. A scammer had put up some terrible books up on KU and hired keyboard monkeys to borrow those books and “read” them. To disguise the scam, they also snare legitimate books such as yours.

This has happened before, and when KU’s algorithms detect the signs of fraud, they quickly shut it down. They delete the phony customers’ accounts, block the books they were borrowing, and seize any payments they were owed.

Including yours.

All of a sudden, you’re out a lot of money, and until you can talk Amazon into understanding that you’re just as much a victim as they were, you’re facing sleepless nights and endless worries about how you’re going to meet your monthly nut.

Defining Your Income Streams

Elsewhere, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of going Amazon-exclusive. Focus for now on the need to have multiple income streams. There are many of them available to you. Some can be highly profitable, others not.

Here are some examples:

* Income from selling books and e-books online, including repackaging your ebooks as box sets.

* Income from creating and publishing audiobooks.

* Income from creating, editing and publishing multi-author anthologies.

* Income from creating graphic novel adaptations of your work.

* Income from selling books at book festivals, craft shows, and personal appearances.

* Income from fan-support sites such as Patreon.

* Income from public speaking gigs, both from the speaker fee and from selling books afterwards.

* Income from creating and selling tchotchkes based on your work.

* Income from selling the overseas and translation rights to your work.

* Income from writing articles.

* Income from designing courses, video classes, and other teaching materials.

* Income from unexpected sources such as TV appearances (don’t laugh; I appeared on a cable TV show as an Agatha Christie expert).

The principle behind this is simple: the more products you have out there, the greater the possibility you can support yourself. The more ways you find of putting your work in front of potential readers, the greater the chance they will buy enough of your products for you to kiss the day job goodbye.

At Peschel Press, we have a few income streams. We sell books and ebooks. We have a few books available on Kindle Unlimited. We sell books locally at shows. We have placed our books in local bookstores. Then there was my appearance on “Mysteries at the Museum.”

Do you have to diversify? It depends on the amount of time you have available. If you can afford to, then the answer is yes. If you can’t right now, then wait. Make a note to yourself to reassess your situation three to six months from now. Maybe something will happen in the meantime that will make it possible.

But to see the opportunity, you have to look.

Marketing and Advertising

The final principle is “Keep in mind your marketing and advertising.” I had originally said “Always be marketing and advertising,” but that wasn’t accurate.

When you’re starting out, you want to focus on the first four principles. You’ll be spending enough time on getting them right that you probably won’t have time left over. If you only have one or two books, you want to see how they’re doing with readers before committing significant amounts of money toward them.

(I can see the headshaking out there. “What about Michael Anderle?” “What about ‘The Martian’ author?” “What about—”).

As always, there are outliers. Andy Weir’s first couple of books didn’t do anything. He self-published “The Martian” chapter by chapter on his website and was surprised by the response.

You can’t plan for that happening.

Same thing for Michael Anderle. He wrote quickly. He published quickly. His books took off with the appearance of #5. In a way, he was lucky. His early books were so good that reviewers slammed him for his terrible prose, but still loved his stories. In a weird way, they stood by him. He learned his lesson, arranged to get those books re-edited and rereleased, and made sure going forward that his future books were not unread first drafts.

And he didn’t ignore his marketing and advertising. He heavily promotes his books through Facebook ads and other platforms.

In fact, every best-selling book on those lists got there through marketing and advertising.

So why don’t we all do that? The answer may surprise you.

Resistance to Marketing and Advertising

Recently, my wife attended a meeting of writers. It’s a very cool group, ranging from people who have never published, to those who have extensive experience.

More importantly for this chapter, she found writers who had no interest in selling their books. They didn’t want to do anything to spread the word. No publicity. No website. No Amazon page. They left it all to their publisher.

You’ll run into them as well. They join writers organizations, attend meetings, go to conventions to socialize with their friends, and listen dutifully to speakers who come in to show them how to put together an ad campaign or to boost their public profile. And they choose to do nothing.

To which I can only shake my head and tell myself that if they’re happy with that state of affairs, more power to them. They’re doing what they love and, for now at least, they can keep doing it.

So keep that in mind when you think about the enormous numbers of books that appear in your genre every month. Or think about how many millions of books are out there, waiting to be bought. The majority of buyers are not looking at all those books. They don’t even know those books exist. They won’t know about those writers who are publishing now.

That’s because most book buyers shop by looking at the best-seller or new releases lists, by visiting the library, reading about it online, or from talking to their friends.

And they respond to ads.

Next week, we’ll walk you through the basics of running an ad campaign online. This is not a one-size-fits-all plan. The decision you make will be based on the type of book you wrote, your audience, how much money you want to spend, and your own unique circumstances.

The really neat thing about this process is that you can fine tune it the way you want it and no mistakes are fatal (unless you decide to bet the farm on an ad campaign, but you’re not going to do that are you?).

You’re not going to lose a lot of money, because you’re not going to invest a lot of money to begin with. It sort of like the rule I learned with gambling: never bet more than you’re willing to lose. So if you invest, say, $50 on an Amazon media services ad campaign that returns zero sales, then your only out 50 bucks. But you probably also gained $50 in knowledge about what didn’t work in that campaign that you can fix in the next campaign.

Because remember that your books are evergreen. You can sell these books for the rest of your life. You can put new covers on them, you can rewrite them, you can rebrand them, and you can devise new ad campaigns to sell them. As an indie author you are no longer subject to the “one and done” role of New York publishing.

So I’ll see you next week.