This week’s episode marks my 12th anniversary of self-publishing. I look back on 2 million ebook sales during that time, and reflect on lessons learned.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 155 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 21st, 2023, and today we’re going to reflect on 12 years I’ve spent self-publishing and the 2 million ebooks I have sold in that time.
First up, let’s have a look at where I’m at with my current writing projects. Editing is underway for Cloak of Dragonfire. I’m making good progress and if all goes well, I really want that book to be out sometime in the first week of May, which is coming up soon, so I shouldn’t dally. That book will also be accompanied by a short story that my newsletter subscribers will get for free called Iron Drive. So if you want a free ebook copy of that short story, sign up for my newsletter.
In audiobook news, I’m proofing Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight right now. Hopefully that will be out sometime towards the end of May, if all goes well. Ghost Exile Omnibus Three is now available. You can get that at Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. It is almost 45 hours long, making it the longest audio book collection I have ever put out. So if you get it off Audible, that is excellent value for your credit right there. And once Cloak of Dragonfire is done and out, my main focus will be the next Dragonskull book, Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress. So that is where I’m at with my current writing projects.
00:01:25 Reader Questions
Let’s have a few questions from readers before we get to our main topic. Our first question comes from Jenny, who asks: At the end of Child of the Ghosts, Maglarion says Caina has survived for seven years after she was rescued by the Ghosts. At the beginning of Ghost Aria, it says it’s only been five years since. Is Aria set before the first book? Close, but not quite. Ghost Aria is a short story that is set during the first book. Child of the Ghosts takes place over a seven year span of Caina’s life and Ghost Aria takes place during the time about halfway through the book, when she’s working with Theodosia at the Grand Imperial Opera. So it’s not a discontinuity or anything like that, it’s just the Ghost Aria takes place during the events of Child of the Ghosts.
Our next question is from James who asks: Are there or were you planning on writing sequels to the Malison series? Technically, I already have. All ten books of the Dragontiarna series are kind of a sequel to the Malison series since they take place both in the world of the Malison and Andomhaim from Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword, though I haven’t written any sequels that are set exclusively in the setting of Malison. That said, I haven’t entirely decided what I’m going to do once the Dragonskull and Silent Order are done, so returning to the world of Malison is a possibility that I am considering for the new epic fantasy series I will write once Dragonskull is done, hopefully later this year.
00:02:56 Main Topic: Reflections on Self Publishing
So now on to our main topic this week. This month, April 2023, marks the 12th anniversary since I started self-publishing. If my math is right, by the end of March, I have also reached 2 million ebooks sold. 12 years! That’s a long time. That’s honestly the longest consecutive time I’ve ever done anything. The longest traditional job I’ve ever held was for 10 1/2 years. Like, in the US, you can only be President for maximum of eight years, barring a technicality where a Vice President who becomes president and then is reelected twice. And I think only six UK Prime Ministers have ever held that office for longer than 12 years. 2 million ebooks is also a staggering figure. Thanks for reading, everyone. I’m grateful to still be on the road, so to speak, after 12 years. Since I’m a writer, I will mark this milestone in the most writerly fashion possible: a rambling, freeform essay.
Let’s look back at some of the things I’ve learned over the last 12 years. Learning to finish books is the most important skill a new writer should learn. Occasionally I get asked whether a new writer should be working on their social media presence or website or mail list or whatever, and inevitably they haven’t finished a book yet. Writers have a bad habit of lapsing into endless rewrites or activities that are technically writing related, like working on the website, but don’t help finish the book. So if you’re a new writer, learning to finish things is the first skill you should learn, and since you do have to regularly finish things to be a writer, this will help you learn if you really want to be a writer or not.
The second most important skill is learning to finish the series. This is harder, though. Nothing beats plodding persistence over the long term. A little bit every day adds up over the long term, and something I’ve learned quite forcefully since I’ve bought a house, no matter how well constructed a house, if water damage is not addressed immediately, it will destroy the house in the end. So if to stretch this metaphor even further, let’s say the house is artistic resistance and water damage is your effort. Even if you do just a little bit every day, it will add up considerably if you keep at it. You should do the best job you can with your book, but perfection is only attainable by God, so you shouldn’t beat yourself up trying to reach it.
Comparing yourself to other writers is a waste of time. No matter how well your books sell, there will always be another writer’s books who sell even better than yours, even if you find the reasons incomprehensible. Likewise, if your books sell, there will be people who find that fact baffling and even enraging. Story ideas matter much less than their execution. Like, I’ve published 139 books, Cloak of Dragonfire will be 140 and I still have a million story ideas. It’s just finding the time to write them. If you have a hard time thinking of story ideas, just think of the conflict and expand it from there. Alternatively, if you’re the kind of writer who thinks of interesting settings and characters and doesn’t know what to do with them, just apply a potential conflict to them.
The easiest way to sell books is to write in series and discount the first few books in the series. Acquiring the patience to write in the series is a different challenge entirely, as we mentioned above. It’s easiest to stick to a single genre if you want to make money. I started in epic fantasy with Mazael, Caina, and later Ridmark, and since then I’ve tried to expand to four other genres: urban fantasy with Nadia’s, science fiction with Silent Order, LitRPG, and mystery. Urban fantasy was really the only one that worked out of the gate. And it took a while for Silent Order to get traction. Mystery and LitRPG kind of flopped for me. So if you write long enough, you’ll inevitably want to try a different genre, but be aware that it probably won’t sell as well as your main one.
The longest book I wrote was 146,000 words and the shortest, about 40,000 words. How long does a book need to be? As long as necessary to adequately tell and resolve the story. Anything longer is useless padding and anything shorter will just leave your readers feeling cheated.
Change just keeps on happening. When I started out, I uploaded Demonsouled to Amazon KDP, Barnes and Noble PubIt, and Smashwords because that’s all there was at the time. Now there’s Kobo Writing Life, Google Play Books, ACX, Findaway Voices, Payhip, Book Funnel, Book Bub, Shopify, and a ton of other new services and platforms. There are also a lot of software tools that didn’t exist back then: Vellum, Atticus, Book Brush, and others. My process for turning a finished manuscript into a properly formatted book is completely different than what it was 12 years ago. There is also all the generative AI stuff, which will turn out to be either a big deal or a scam for people easily parted from their money, like all those people who bought Bored Ape NFTs.
Now, to be fair, I was very hostile to Amazon ads and Facebook ads when they first came along, and now I use them all the time. Speaking of Amazon ads, I wonder how long Amazon will remain the dominant force in self-publishing. Without Amazon pushing ahead with Kindle, self-publishing as it is now probably wouldn’t exist and I wouldn’t be recording this podcast. That said, the wheel of fate never stops spinning, does it? Amazon right now kind of reminds me of Internet Explorer in the summer of 2004, absolutely dominant in in its market. Yet Summer 2004 was the first time ever that Internet Explorer usage dropped as Mozilla Firefox started to emerge on the scene. It didn’t seem significant at the time, it was a drop of about like 1/10 of a percent from 95.2 to 95.12, or something close to that. Yet it never went back up. And 20 years later, Microsoft has abandoned Internet Explorer. Microsoft is no longer the hegemon of the technology space as it was in the 1990s. You can kind of see the same little cracks starting to form in the Amazon Empire: how Amazon ads has made the overall shopping experience on the site worse, all the problems with Audible, labor relations trouble, first ever layoffs, increasing antitrust scrutiny, and increasing ease of individualized ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Woo Commerce, and so forth.
In fact, when I wrote this out to record on April 17th, 2023, Amazon ads hadn’t really been working properly for the last several days. Of course, Microsoft isn’t the hegemon of technology anymore, but it’s still a powerful cloud computing company that happens to make client software for its products, and Amazon is likely on a similar trajectory. Eventually no longer dominant, but still powerful. Jeff Bezos himself said that Amazon will one day be disrupted, which might be why he went off to build rocket ships.
I think Cloak Mage will be the last really long series that I write. The trouble with double digit or more series length is that the readership drops a little with every book and it gets harder to draw new people in. I think in the future, I’ll stick to series that run about 5 to 6 books long with seven as the absolute maximum, if the story merits. Though I might write multiple five to seven book series with the same main character, if the character is compelling enough.
Audiobooks are harder to sell than ebooks. To use a video game metaphor, audiobooks are self-publishing on hard mode. If you do a royalty share contract on ACX where you split your royalties with your narrator, the contract lasts for seven years, which is not an unreasonable amount of time for a self published audiobook to earn back its costs. To put it in context, since 2018 I have recorded Frostborn 6 through 15 (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) in audiobook, and of those ten books, number six through 10 have paid back their production costs and are now turning a profit. Of the Ghosts audiobooks (as excellent narrated by Hollis McCarthy), the first five or six have paid off their costs and reached profitability stage. I’m confident that all 10 Frostborn audiobooks will earn back their production costs and will earn back their production costs and turn profit, but it will take a few years to get there. I freely admit that the biggest business reason I do audiobooks is so I can take the production cost as a tax deduction. Given how expensive audio book production is, if you don’t have a solid business plan for selling them or good business reason for producing them, it’s probably best to avoid audiobook production until you have either a good business plan or a good reason.
Not everyone will like your stuff. I had an amusing reminder of that recently. A reader mentioned that he liked the new covers for one of my series so much better than the old ones and wondered when Amazon would update to the new ones. I was curious because I had updated those covers some time ago. Then I realized that I had forgotten to update my website with the new covers and the reader in question thought the old covers were actually the new ones that he liked much better than the “old ones.” But there’s no denying that the new covers sell better than the old ones.
The fact is, not everyone will like your writing and sometimes will be eager to tell you at length about it. That’s fine. Always bear in mind that you’re not obliged to respond to anyone who’s annoyed. I try and respond to most emails, but if one gets annoying, I’ll let it past. There are something like 1.5 billion English speakers in the world. And if one of them doesn’t like your book, well, there are a few more to go through yet. Always be grateful for your readers. Remember, the economy isn’t very good. Money is tight, and yet people will still spend money on your books. Be respectful of that.
So in that vein, thank you all for reading the last 139 novels I wrote. I hope you stick around for however many more I end up writing. So that’s it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
