Innocence Abroad

            Nobody knows me personally in England, Scotland or Wales. The same is true for Germany. Ditto Japan, India and Australia. And I think I know one person in Canada, though it’s been a while since we’ve been in touch.

            Yet in all those countries, I have, or might have, people who know me through my mystery novels. Or so Amazon tells me. Digital copies of The McHenry Inheritance and WashHer Guilt Away have been downloaded in those countries, and I’ve even sold a couple of print books in the UK.

            Not bad for a little-known author.

            The ability to sell books worldwide in modest (all right, very modest) numbers is one of the few unqualified good things about the internet. And since those books are downloaded, I don’t even have to mess with lugging copies to the post office and calculating overseas shipment and customs declarations.

Inventory in the Car Trunk

            In the bad old days, like 10 to 15 years ago, a self-published author had to print up a bunch of copies of his book and try to unload them himself. In practice, this meant a lot of driving around to bookstores, practically begging them to take a few copies on consignment. Even when you live, as I do, at the periphery of a large metropolitan area, that’s a daunting task.

            The rule of thumb used to be that a self-published author typically sold 150 copies of his or her book. There’s a basis for that number. It’s estimated that the average person in America knows about 150 people reasonably well through friendships, work, neighborhood, and religious and affinity groups. Self-published books were sold mostly to friends and acquaintances, with a few being picked up by browsers at the handful of bookstores that carried them.

            Although I’ve had paid sales outside the U.S., most of my foreign downloads have been on days when I did a free promotion on one book or another. One day I had a huge response in Germany; on another, India; and yet another in Australia. Why the books go out the door in a country one day and not another is yet another Amazon mystery.

The Joy of Connecting

            I have some reservations about Amazon, but one thing I can’t kick about is the way they let me put my books in front of the whole world and possibly connect with readers all around the globe. It’s my hope that the numbers will grow as the years pass and more books come out.

            From time to time, well-meaning friends will make suggestions, such as trying to get my books into sporting goods stores, because there are fishing scenes in them. I am dubious. My experience so far has indicated that people who fish don’t necessarily read mystery novels, and someone who doesn’t read fiction is unlikely to read it because it contains scenes about their hobbies.

            No, I think mysteries are read by mystery readers, and my books are out there now for them to see and discover. There’s so much competition it’s not easy to reach an audience, but some people are finding me. If it isn’t as many people as I’d like, it’s still much better than all the years when the manuscripts sat inside my computer, out of the world’s view.

So What's Your Angle?

            When I self-published my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, nearly two years ago, I had to figure out a marketing plan. And I have to say that doing my own marketing for the book gave me a better understanding of why no agent wanted to touch it.

            Modern publishing, for better or worse, is mostly about the big score. Fifty years ago, a publishing house would be willing to nurture a writer whose first book sold five thousand copies; whose second book sold ten thousand; whose third book sold twenty thousand; and whose fourth had a breakout and sold forty to fifty thousand, plus drove readers to buy the earlier books.

            That sort of investment in an author is all but unheard-of these days. Agents and publishers are looking for a book that will sell in six-figure numbers straightaway. And in order to do that, there has to be an easily explained, highly exploitable angle for promoting it. Call it the book’s elevator speech, if you will.

A Good Story Is Not Enough

            Saying you have a good, compelling story is not enough. The marketing question is what makes the book stand out from its competitors; what makes it new and fresh and promotable.

            My angle was to promote the fly-fishing aspect of the book. Quill Gordon, my protagonist, is a man of independent means who can go fishing whenever he wants. The stories in the Quill Gordon Mystery series occur and will occur when he goes on a fishing trip and gets caught up in the local drama. So promoting the fly-fishing angle seemed logical — except that I’m starting to think it wasn’t.

            From the standpoint of selling books, there are two problems with that approach. The first is that there aren’t that many fly fishermen and women out there, so the appeal is being made to a small market niche to begin with. The second is that a lot of people who fly fish don’t read fiction. And I am rapidly coming to the belief that people who don’t read fiction are rarely going to change their ways because a certain work of fiction happens to be about their hobby or area of enthusiasm.

Free Advice and Worth Every Penny

            Well-meaning friends are always offering suggestions for selling the book by connecting with the fly fishing market, but I have grave doubts. Amazon already links my books with other fly-fishing-themed mysteries, and that probably serves to put it in front of most of the mystery readers who are looking for that kind of book.

            With the second Gordon novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, I’ve tried to take a broader approach to marketing the book — stressing the character tensions, the locked-room mystery, the witches’ coven and other aspects. I do believe I have a good story here, and I’m trying to promote it as such in a way that will attract readers who don’t necessarily care about fly fishing.

            The ones who do care about fly fishing will probably get more out of it, in the same way that people who love horses and horse racing get a bit more out of a Dick Francis novel than a horseless guy like me. But the point is, I like Dick Francis and I believe readers can like my books without caring about fishing.

            The ongoing marketing of my mystery series will undoubtedly be a matter of trial and error, trying a bunch of ideas and discarding the ones that don’t work. It will take time to reach an audience, if I ever do, but that’s all right. When you self-publish, you have a boss who can take the long view.

Selling Your Book Is Like Fishing

            The publication of my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, has set me, once again, to thinking about the business of bookselling. I think I learned some things from the publication of the first book, The McHenry Inheritance; now let’s see if that turns out to be the case.

            One analogy that occurred to me in the first turn was that selling books is a lot like fishing, a simile that rings particularly true for the self-published author. With due respect to my readers, especially those who paid for the book, I’d like to pursue the comparison a bit farther.

            To begin with, one has to think of Amazon, the undisputed big boy in the self-publishing world, as a large, nutrient-rich lake teeming with readers, who are symbolized by fish. You know the fish are out there, and in enormous numbers, but for the most part you can’t see them, and figuring out where they are and what they’re biting on, i.e. buying, is an immense challenge.

Into the Boat and Onto the Water

            An author who puts a book up on Amazon is rather like an angler who takes a boat out on the lake, drops anchor and casts his bait into the lake. Assuming the book is good (in other words, that the bait isn’t rancid), the author can fish from one side of the boat, sit tight, and sooner or later catch a fish or two. But the reality is that nearly every other fish in the lake won’t even see the bait.

            In point of fact, not even every fish within catchable distance of the boat is going to see that bait. If the area fishable from the boat can be described as a circle surrounding the vessel, the author with one book is like an angler fishing with one rod and one hook from one side of the boat. That angler is putting the bait in front of only a quarter of the fish within shouting distance, at best.

            Furthermore, even if the bait is perfectly good, it might not be what the fish are in the mood for that day. You could be fishing with a plump, savory salmon egg, but if the fish are in the mood for cheese that day, they will swim right past your egg without so much as a second thought.

Two Rods and Two Hooks

            As a fisherman, I like to say that when you’re catching fish, you know you’re doing something right, but when you’re not catching fish, you often have no idea what the problem is. You could be using the wrong bait or the wrong technique, in which case the failure is on you. But it could also be that the fish ate their fill earlier in the day and simply aren’t interested, or that they have temporarily left the area you’re fishing, or that the weather is temporarily affecting the food supply and the environment. You just don’t know.

            Now let’s say our author/angler puts a second book up on Amazon. That changes the equation. Instead of fishing off one side of the boat, our intrepid angler now has a rod off two sides and is covering twice as much area and, theoretically, reaching twice as many fish with the bait. Also, each rod now has two hooks on it — one for each book. The fish can choose between cheese and salmon egg, and that increases the author’s chances. You have to figure you’ll do better overall.

            Those were the lines along which I was thinking when I put the second book up at the end of April. Next week I’ll discuss the early results.

Talking to the Rotary Club About Publishing

            This week the program chair of the Rotary Club asked me if I could give a talk on self-publishing in the digital age at one of the December meetings. I’d love to tell you I was asked because I’m an internationally recognized authority on the subject, but the reality is that I’m someone they know who has done it, and I’m generally willing to give a talk.

            Actually, one of the points I would make in such a talk is that I don’t believe there are any true experts in that field. There certainly are people who know a considerable amount about some aspect or another, but digital self-publishing is so new, and the options so many and bewildering that no one could really grasp it all. Nor have there been sufficient time and verifiable results for anyone to really know with any degree of certainty what’s most likely to work.

The Known Knowns

            There probably are two things that can be reasonably stipulated. The first is that digital self-publishing has given authors a more cost-effective and return-probable way of publishing their own work. The second is that the internet gives everyone a chance, albeit a longshot, at making a new book known to a wide audience and getting it purchased by enough people to make the effort worthwhile.

            In the old days (less than 10 years ago), self-publishing was a mug’s game. The author had to pay a printer thousands of dollars up front to run off a few thousand copies of a book, then drive to every bookstore for miles around, begging them to take a couple of copies on consignment, then try to keep track of all the books. Not one person in a hundred thousand came out ahead.

            Now there are outfits like Amazon that can process a word document into an e-book in minutes and sell that book around the world, or can format it as a print book and print copies only as ordered, saving the author a huge up-front cost. Game-changer is too mild a word for this development.

            Of course before anyone buys that book, they have to know about it and have a reason to seek it out. If it’s a book about a specific subject, say model railroads, with a number of core enthusiasts, internet searches can generate sales. For a general mystery novel like my book, The McHenry Inheritance, it’s not so easy.

The Unknown Unknowns

            It’s pretty much a given now that an author has to create a web site for his book, and do a video as well. The next question becomes how to drive people to the web site and video. I have been working with an excellent social-media guru on this subject and received some valuable pointers. Still, at the end of the day a lot of it comes down to persistence and experimentation.

            An author trying to promote his or her own book has such a smorgasbord of choices that it’s intimidating. I could easily be working 16 hours a day on book promotion (if I didn’t have a day job) and still not be doing everything I could. Nor would I really know whether the things I was doing were the things I should have been doing. A spectacularly big reaction tells you you’re doing something right, but no reaction simply means maybe. Maybe you tweeted a couple of hours too early. Maybe everybody was simply too busy to see what you put out today. You just don’t know. At this point, I figure all I can do is keep trying, keep analyzing, and pray for luck.