Delayed Gratification

            This past week I was reminded again of the virtue of patience, and of the fact that it takes people a while to get around to something they’re meaning to do.

            At my Rotary Club meeting on Wednesdays, people frequently get up and pay a “happy fine” to support the club’s community activities. Last week, for instance, I paid such a fine because I was happy that our son, Nick, had called for the first time since he began basic training at Fort Jackson, SC, and that we had actually been able to talk to him. One of the other happy fines that day caught me by surprise.

            One of our longtime members rose to pay a fine for having read and enjoyed my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, and for having enjoyed my use of names drawn from the local community. I even offered to pay his fine, but he insisted.

Good Intentions Take Time

            Until that moment I had forgotten that my fellow Rotarian had mentioned last year that he’d bought the book , then never said any more about it. More than six months passed between his buying it and reading it, but please don’t think I’m complaining. I’m thrilled to death if anybody reads it anytime.

            What I have to remember is that while my book is one of the most important things in my life right now, for everybody else, it’s at best a to-do item. And it can take a long time for a to-do item to rise to the top of the list. If it ever does. When I’m thinking about it rationally, I figure that the best case is that half the people who mean to read the book actually crack it open to the first page and read it all the way through.

            There are authors whose first book meteorically soars to the top of the best-seller lists, but most of us, if we ever succeed, do it in the style of the old-school businessmen who started in the stockroom after getting out of high school and worked their way to the top over decades. In today’s business world, those folks would be passed over for an MBA who would probably make a hash of the job, but that’s another blog.

Authors Who Start in the Stockroom

            The equivalent for an author is slowly building an audience until you hit a tipping point where your books start getting noticed. Most authors begin with a first book that sells a few thousand copies. With luck their second book sells a few thousand more and the third a few thousand more than that. Maybe on the fourth or fifth book, they crack the best-seller list, triggering some more sales for the earlier books and leading to a bigger audience for the next one.

            In other words, what’s your hurry?

            When my book was first published, I moved a lot of copies as free promotional e-books. Then I started wondering why the people who were buying it weren’t reviewing it. In the past couple of months the reviews, generally positive, have been coming in, and people scanning the mystery section at Amazon can see that a dozen people have read and reviewed the book.

            That gives it some credibility with readers who haven’t heard of me (which is nearly all of them), but it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly going to buy the book. A lot of them will check it out several times over a period of months before deciding to plunk down their $2.99. Like everything else, it takes time.

Who Are These People, Anyway?

            By my best calculation, the last friend to buy my mystery novel did so on January 9 of this year. That was when I gave a talk on self-publishing to my Rotary Club and sold about a dozen copies after the meeting.

            From that point on, I figure every book that’s sold has been to a stranger, someone who doesn’t know me at all. Well, maybe not every one. There are no doubt a couple of stragglers out there who know me and have been meaning to buy the book but haven’t. But the bottom line is that I’ve reached that tipping point that every first-time author has to face. What happens when your friends stop buying the book and your sales depend on people you don’t know?

            This is not an insignificant question. I read somewhere that the average self-published book sells 150 copies, and the number is no coincidence. Sociologists say that’s how many people the average person knows tolerably well, through family, school, work, church, and other organizations. How the first-time author gets past 150 sales is the sixty four thousand dollar question.

Numbers on a Computer Screen

            Since the beginning of the year, when I figure my friends stopped buying it, my book, The McHenry Inheritance, continues to move on Amazon. Almost every other day one of those strangers I wonder about shells out $2.99 to buy the e-book version. The print-on-demand version sells less well, but still gets a couple of bites each month. And when I offer it free as a one-day promotion, the numbers steadily improve. In January, I did two promotional days and “sold” 154 books. For two days in March the number is up to 378.

            (A cynic might argue that the volume of free books simply establishes what mine is worth, and perhaps that’s so. But there seem to be fifteen to twenty thousand free books available each day on Kindle, and a lot of them seem to be moving in single digits, so something about my book must be ringing a bell.)

            The sales figures for my book are mere numbers on a computer screen, and I wish I had some way of knowing more about who is buying the book and why. The people who actually paid for the book (albeit less than they’d pay for a latte) clearly had to make a decision, but what about the ones who take it when it’s free?

Literary Hoarders

            I wonder all sorts of things. How much time do they spend considering the book before adding it to the cart? What’s the tipping point that makes them buy? How many free books do they “buy” in one shopping spree? How many are seriously interested, as opposed to simply locking it in for nothing, just in case they feel like reading it later?

            There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that quite a few of the free sales are to people I would characterize as literary hoarders, people who can’t stand to pass up a free book because maybe some day they’ll want to read it. Many, if not most, will never open it, or if they do, won’t read beyond the first few pages.

            What I have to hope for is that a handful of those who impulsively snapped it up free will eventually read it. That probably won’t be for a while, because they didn’t really set out to buy it.  But if they like the book, and tell their friends about it, those friends might actually go to Kindle and pay for it because they want it. I can only hope.

           

                       

Talking to Rotary About Publishing

            Wednesday afternoon I gave a talk to the Rotary Club of Watsonville about “Self-Publishing in the Digital Age.” If you’re wondering how I got such a gig with my meager qualifications, I should mention that I serve on the club’s program committee and can call my own number at any time.

            With only a half hour, and wanting to leave time for questions, I could only skim the surface. I began by bringing up the memory of one our late club members, Sherrell Watson, who had self-published a book on steam locomotives in 1995, and tried to draw a contrast between that era and 17 years later, when I published my mystery, The McHenry Inheritance. The primary focus was the rise of Amazon and social media, which can give a hustling self-published author a modest shot at success.

            I do a lot of public speaking and (braggadocio alert!) like to believe I’m pretty good at it, which includes reading the audience reaction. This group was clearly interested, and when I finished the prepared talk and asked for questions, a half-dozen hands shot up instantaneously. That’s a sure sign they’re listening.

Interested in the Marketing

            As might have been expected from a business-oriented group, the questions were mostly geared to the business and marketing aspects of book publishing, as opposed to the work of writing a book. In fact, the closest thing to a writing question was whether I’m planning a sequel. The answer is yes, but not a continuation of the story, rather a new adventure featuring Quill Gordon (my main character) in a different setting with different characters and a fresh story.

            Beyond that, I tried to answer the questions in a complex and sophisticated fashion. A few examples:

            Q: Fifty Shades of Gray was self-published and became a huge best-seller. Do you think your book can do that?

            A: Probably not. I forgot to include any bondage or S&M scenes.

            Q: How do you make any money selling an e-book for $2.99?

            A: No problem. You just sell a million of ‘em.

            Q: How many people would you guess bought your book because they thought it was written by Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes?

            A: Not nearly enough.

            Yeah, we had some fun.

Surprised by the Response

            There were some good questions about tracking sales and about marketing the book as a straight mystery or emphasizing the fly-fishing angle. (Gordon is on a fishing trip in the High Sierra when he gets caught up in the murder and intrigue.) All in all, I was quite pleased with how it went.

            One pleasant surprise came out at the end. I had mentioned in my talk that I had probably maxed out on selling the book to my friends and had to be getting it into the hands of strangers now. I really believed that, figuring that if anyone who knows me hadn’t bought it after five months on the market, they weren’t going to buy it at all.

            Not so, as it turned out. In the course of the talk I mentioned that I had brought some books for sale (I’d recently ordered a dozen from Create Space, Amazon’s print-on-demand program) and that I would give $3 from each sale to the club’s community service fund. When the meeting adjourned, there was a crush around the head table, and when it finally dispersed, I had sold ten books to an audience of approximately 60 people. Nice work if you can get it, and not a bad day’s work at that.