Nebulous plans clarified...
I'm putting The Emerald Sword into print to come out during NaNoWriMo this year. I got my Round Tuit and it's time to get this thing launched. kkitten42 has pledged to edit it before the deadline when I upload the manuscript to Booklocker.com (where you can get the free WritersWeekly newsletter, something I highly recommend for freelancers and writers). I chose Booklocker over Lulu because of Angela Hoy's services, prices and support.
At least I hope it'll be out for Nanowrimo. I'll probably send it to Booklocker around the beginning of October, which will give me a four to six week print date and prepublicity run. Meanwhile, next month I am setting up an SBI site, which will give me newsletter software, search engine optimization software, all kinds of support and expertise in driving traffic.
It was a tossup whether I'd send the book to print in September and do the site in October while waiting for the book to go into print, or do the site first to set up to publicize the book when it's ready to sell. Either way I'll do preorders on the book at a discount.
Way back in 2000 when I first put Raven Dance into print, I wanted to do that kind of big online launch for it. I knew that with fanzines, preorders often paid for the printing before the zines were even collated. I wasn't able to, because the homeless shelter did not allow me to purchase a private phone line for $10 a month with unlimited local calling. That would've let me use a free webhost to do a book site, set up a Paypal button for preorders, organize the whole thing and get it rolling with press releases and good marketing.
Instead, I didn't get to publicize it at all till it was out for four months. I wound up in housing that destroyed my health with overexertion. I wound up with my time tied up between medical appointments, diagnostic appointments to prove disability, and recovery time from medical appointments. I didn't have much energy for anything but socializing online. Raven Dance got pathetic marketing. I tried a newsletter for a while but even that ran down as I got too sick to maintain it.
My resources are a lot better now.
I've established a good presence on eBay and have enough feedback to be trusted. One of the ways indie books make good money is the author buying wholesale copies for resale. People like to read books when they know the author. This holds true even for me. I will choose books by authors I have met more than authors I don't know. I'll choose books from authors I've read and liked over authors I don't know. So the whole "buy signed copies from author" thing and selling to friends is just a natural part of how the market works.
I do hand drawn bookmarks as a little freebie with every ACEO that I sell. It's become a bit of a trademark. They aren't difficult art usually, but sometimes come out spectacular. They range from the cute to the sublime. It occurred to me today that I can buy wholesale copies of The Emerald Sword and retail them on eBay in signed deluxe editions, with a limited edition ACEO of the cover art and my usual doodle bookmark included. Not giant wholesale orders, but affording to get something like a box of a dozen would not be out of range since the book is not as fat as RD. The first bulk price rate for author buying wholesale is 26 copies... and that is under a month's income. Depending on sales, I could place bigger orders and get a better wholesale price.
And that ties in with preorders too -- because the preorder money gets set aside to buy the books to send, the more preorders I got, the bigger an author discount I'd get. There's another price break at 50 copies, another at 75, another at 100. Since the point of the preorders is just to get the book out there, I could track the preorders and drop the price on the books as the preorders come in. One of my eBay pals did this with the 52 Card ACEO Deck project. Enough collectors signed up to buy decks, including multiple decks, that he eventually got the thousand deck wholesale price and I wound up getting ten decks at about half of what I signed up for the first few for. (I increased my order as the price went down, with an eye to reselling some.)
It means holding the money and keeping careful track of who preorders, so that if the price drops I can send little refunds to everyone who preordered early by way of PayPal or something. Or doing it like the deck and billing people for their preorders to be paid at the time, which may reduce my PayPal fees. But it means I need a site set up with a preorder page and a PayPal button, and then maybe put a PayPal button anywhere else online that I can do so. On eBay, special rules about off-site links would not let me do preorders -- except as auction items, and that'd be a little different. Basically preordered special editions with the ACEO and bookmark and personal message with the signature could be auctioned and I'd link to that listing. I need the cover art done before auctioning preorders so that there's something visible in a picture to go with the listing... but this could really rock.
I will not start actually taking preorders until I've gotten the manuscript ready to send and sent it off to Booklocker. That's when I'll know what the wholesale and list prices are. I will be doing an inexpensive ebook edition too, and ebooks can be preordered as well as print books. So there's three levels -- deluxe trade paperback, signed with a limited edition ACEO of the cover art and an original doodle bookmark by the author, trade paperback, and ebook. A version for every budget.
So watch for the site and its articles next month. The site will be free to readers. The site is going to focus on fantasy writing, fantasy illustration, art instruction or self publishing -- ultimately I may have sites on all four of those topics, but the first site will connect strongest with The Emerald Sword and be where it lives. I'll start doing writing articles similar to my art How To articles, and pull some golden oldies from some of the places I've posted good writing articles in the past to fill up the roster.
I had planned to do the book first, then the site, because for Raven Dance I had a four month lead time between sending iUniverse the manuscript and actually having my book in print. I checked the Booklocker site and changed my mind on strategy, because now I want the newsletter software in place and the newsletter running before I take preorders.
If I can find out exactly how much the cost is going to be before I send the manuscript, then I'll accept preorders from the point I know how much they'll cost -- what I can afford for a discount. The example on the site is for a 148 page book, but I suspect a 75,000 word novel will be larger than that. Doing it in this order will also let me see if I can include some black and white interior illustrations in the final version, which would give added value and make my art fans happy. That would also increase the number of cool ACEO limited editions I could produce too, I'm considering interior illos in pen and ink for ease of reproduction, then hand colored prints of them for ACEOs.
Keep in mind that I'll probably estimate high on the first preorder listing, but between the time you preorder and the time I put in the order for all the preordered books, your price may go down fast. All of my volume price breaks will be passed on directly. So the more you spread the word, the cheaper your book will be. Plus anyone who preorders Deluxe with ACEO and hand drawn bookmark will get the same proportional discount. Even the ebook will get a preorder discount.
So here's the first announcement, the first ripple. Comment or email me about preordering. If you want to pledge to preorder, I am pretty sure the final list price will be under $20 since Raven Dance has a list price of $25 and it's colossal, over 700 pages. I doubt that a 75,000 word manuscript is going to run anywhere near that high. If you want my email and don't have it, message me about preordering here on LJ and I'll send you my email to stay in touch. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, as soon as I get the software I will have a "subscribe" button that I can probably attach to this blog.
This is going to work. Many thanks to kayara for telling me about John Scalzi and his strategies!
At least I hope it'll be out for Nanowrimo. I'll probably send it to Booklocker around the beginning of October, which will give me a four to six week print date and prepublicity run. Meanwhile, next month I am setting up an SBI site, which will give me newsletter software, search engine optimization software, all kinds of support and expertise in driving traffic.
It was a tossup whether I'd send the book to print in September and do the site in October while waiting for the book to go into print, or do the site first to set up to publicize the book when it's ready to sell. Either way I'll do preorders on the book at a discount.
Way back in 2000 when I first put Raven Dance into print, I wanted to do that kind of big online launch for it. I knew that with fanzines, preorders often paid for the printing before the zines were even collated. I wasn't able to, because the homeless shelter did not allow me to purchase a private phone line for $10 a month with unlimited local calling. That would've let me use a free webhost to do a book site, set up a Paypal button for preorders, organize the whole thing and get it rolling with press releases and good marketing.
Instead, I didn't get to publicize it at all till it was out for four months. I wound up in housing that destroyed my health with overexertion. I wound up with my time tied up between medical appointments, diagnostic appointments to prove disability, and recovery time from medical appointments. I didn't have much energy for anything but socializing online. Raven Dance got pathetic marketing. I tried a newsletter for a while but even that ran down as I got too sick to maintain it.
My resources are a lot better now.
I've established a good presence on eBay and have enough feedback to be trusted. One of the ways indie books make good money is the author buying wholesale copies for resale. People like to read books when they know the author. This holds true even for me. I will choose books by authors I have met more than authors I don't know. I'll choose books from authors I've read and liked over authors I don't know. So the whole "buy signed copies from author" thing and selling to friends is just a natural part of how the market works.
I do hand drawn bookmarks as a little freebie with every ACEO that I sell. It's become a bit of a trademark. They aren't difficult art usually, but sometimes come out spectacular. They range from the cute to the sublime. It occurred to me today that I can buy wholesale copies of The Emerald Sword and retail them on eBay in signed deluxe editions, with a limited edition ACEO of the cover art and my usual doodle bookmark included. Not giant wholesale orders, but affording to get something like a box of a dozen would not be out of range since the book is not as fat as RD. The first bulk price rate for author buying wholesale is 26 copies... and that is under a month's income. Depending on sales, I could place bigger orders and get a better wholesale price.
And that ties in with preorders too -- because the preorder money gets set aside to buy the books to send, the more preorders I got, the bigger an author discount I'd get. There's another price break at 50 copies, another at 75, another at 100. Since the point of the preorders is just to get the book out there, I could track the preorders and drop the price on the books as the preorders come in. One of my eBay pals did this with the 52 Card ACEO Deck project. Enough collectors signed up to buy decks, including multiple decks, that he eventually got the thousand deck wholesale price and I wound up getting ten decks at about half of what I signed up for the first few for. (I increased my order as the price went down, with an eye to reselling some.)
It means holding the money and keeping careful track of who preorders, so that if the price drops I can send little refunds to everyone who preordered early by way of PayPal or something. Or doing it like the deck and billing people for their preorders to be paid at the time, which may reduce my PayPal fees. But it means I need a site set up with a preorder page and a PayPal button, and then maybe put a PayPal button anywhere else online that I can do so. On eBay, special rules about off-site links would not let me do preorders -- except as auction items, and that'd be a little different. Basically preordered special editions with the ACEO and bookmark and personal message with the signature could be auctioned and I'd link to that listing. I need the cover art done before auctioning preorders so that there's something visible in a picture to go with the listing... but this could really rock.
I will not start actually taking preorders until I've gotten the manuscript ready to send and sent it off to Booklocker. That's when I'll know what the wholesale and list prices are. I will be doing an inexpensive ebook edition too, and ebooks can be preordered as well as print books. So there's three levels -- deluxe trade paperback, signed with a limited edition ACEO of the cover art and an original doodle bookmark by the author, trade paperback, and ebook. A version for every budget.
So watch for the site and its articles next month. The site will be free to readers. The site is going to focus on fantasy writing, fantasy illustration, art instruction or self publishing -- ultimately I may have sites on all four of those topics, but the first site will connect strongest with The Emerald Sword and be where it lives. I'll start doing writing articles similar to my art How To articles, and pull some golden oldies from some of the places I've posted good writing articles in the past to fill up the roster.
I had planned to do the book first, then the site, because for Raven Dance I had a four month lead time between sending iUniverse the manuscript and actually having my book in print. I checked the Booklocker site and changed my mind on strategy, because now I want the newsletter software in place and the newsletter running before I take preorders.
If I can find out exactly how much the cost is going to be before I send the manuscript, then I'll accept preorders from the point I know how much they'll cost -- what I can afford for a discount. The example on the site is for a 148 page book, but I suspect a 75,000 word novel will be larger than that. Doing it in this order will also let me see if I can include some black and white interior illustrations in the final version, which would give added value and make my art fans happy. That would also increase the number of cool ACEO limited editions I could produce too, I'm considering interior illos in pen and ink for ease of reproduction, then hand colored prints of them for ACEOs.
Keep in mind that I'll probably estimate high on the first preorder listing, but between the time you preorder and the time I put in the order for all the preordered books, your price may go down fast. All of my volume price breaks will be passed on directly. So the more you spread the word, the cheaper your book will be. Plus anyone who preorders Deluxe with ACEO and hand drawn bookmark will get the same proportional discount. Even the ebook will get a preorder discount.
So here's the first announcement, the first ripple. Comment or email me about preordering. If you want to pledge to preorder, I am pretty sure the final list price will be under $20 since Raven Dance has a list price of $25 and it's colossal, over 700 pages. I doubt that a 75,000 word manuscript is going to run anywhere near that high. If you want my email and don't have it, message me about preordering here on LJ and I'll send you my email to stay in touch. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, as soon as I get the software I will have a "subscribe" button that I can probably attach to this blog.
This is going to work. Many thanks to kayara for telling me about John Scalzi and his strategies!