Buzz, Balls & Hype

The Ad Man Answers #87

Thursday + Gregory Huffstutter = The Ad Man Answers

And now we bring you Part 2 of our chat with Mark Terry, author and blogger, who balances a fiction career with being a writer/editor for technical journals.  

Mark’s latest release, THE FALLEN, is the third in his series featuring Homeland-Security troubleshooter Derek Stillwater.  

For Part 1 of our Q&A, link here.

Mark, in your blog, you've been very frank about book contracts, royalty statements, Kindle sales figures.  What's been the overall reaction by the author community / publishers / agents to you "opening your books" while discussing the real financial challenges to making a living as a full-time writer?

Feedback I get from my current publisher about the blog is positive. I suspect my last publisher didn’t like my candor at all. I’m more careful now to not criticize the publisher on my blog (and in all honesty, I don’t have any particular criticisms of my current publisher, they’ve been great, and I’m not just saying that). I think writers generally appreciate it, although some have accused me of being a Debbie Downer because I don’t slap on the rose-colored glasses and start spewing rainbows and unicorns. If my agent has an opinion, she’s kept it to herself.

From my perspective, publishing—in particular, book publishing—is a business, and a tough business at that. Fiction is an odd business in the 21^st century—there’s probably way too much product in a shrinking market. In the 1980s or so publishers started pushing away from the notion of having 10 authors that each sold 5,000 copies to a single author selling 50,000 copies… or 500,000 copies. Large conglomerates and media companies started buying the major publishers, pushing back at the bottom line and demanding profit margins consistent with other media, something book publishing struggles to do. The returns policy is, at the very best, weird, and at the very worst, archaic and destructive.

An industry that always realized it would typically take 4 or 5 or 6 or more books before a novelist could develop a readership and develop some sales momentum, started dropping writers if their books didn’t sell well enough after 2 or 3 books. Computerized bookstore inventory and sales data allowed bookstores to track which authors did better regionally, but created the “3-book death spiral”—if they order 10 copies of the author’s first book and it only sold 6 copies, they only order 5 of the second book; with fewer copies in the store and less “shelf real estate”, they may sell even fewer books, or if they do sell the 5 they ordered, they don’t order more; then the computer indicates a declining sales trend and they order even fewer or no books for the third book and pretty soon the authors are out of business. So the first book has to do really, really well, which can be tough in a superstore with several hundred thousand books to choose from… book publishing is not for wimps.

How many people do you have on your newsletter distribution list?  How often to you reach out to those fans?  Can you estimate what percentage they contribute to your new book sales?

You know, I really should double-check those numbers. I don’t know. A couple hundred. I try not to “spam” my readers, so I try to only use the e-newsletter when I have something to announce, like a new book coming out or a launch party. Things have changed over the last 5-10 years in terms of e-newsletters and I receive so much email myself—well over a hundred a day—that’s work-related or book-related that I have an itchy delete finger, so the content had either be something I’m interested in or interesting.

You've embarked on a Kindle self-publishing experiment with a couple of unsold titles, and blogged about it here:

Are you seeing any new traction on your eBook sales?  Has THE FALLEN been released on iBookstore yet?  Are you thinking of creating an alternate author website for your YA eBook titles?

When I wrestled the e-rights to the 2 previous Derek Stillwater novels back from my previous publisher, THE DEVIL’S PITCHFORK and THE SERPENT’S KISS, I commissioned new cover art and got those up on Kindle. Those two have been far better sales than my other e-books sales right from the get-go. I don’t have sales figures yet for the Kindle version of THE FALLEN and won’t until sometime in 2011. I was just told by my publisher that it will soon be available on the iBookstore.

That’s an interesting idea about the alternate author website for the YA e-book titles. Haven’t really thought about it. It would be nice if those books did well, but in some way I just didn’t want those 2 (there’s another one, maybe I’ll publish it) stories languishing in a drawer. I hoped at the very least my kids would read them. I’m undecided how much marketing time, money and energy to put into the kids’ books. Still up in the air.

But in answer to the basic question, yes, I think sales have picked up in the last month and each month seems a little better.

Let's do a philosophical math exercise.  In your blog, you've quoted a 1-2% response rate for direct marketing campaigns... i.e. as a mid-list author if you spend $1,500 sending an e-mail to 500,000 people, with a 1% response rate you can realistically expect your message to resonate with 5,000 people.  Of those 5,000 people, only a fraction will go down the purchase process to actually purchase your book, let's say your conversion rate is 5%, so 250 actual books sold..  The apparent ROI would be 250 book sales vs. $1,500 spend... you're spending $6 in marketing per book sold, which is probably more than your author royalties. 

As someone who currently works for a direct marketing agency, The Ad Man wouldn't necessary dispute that math.  But to play devil's advocate, let's say of every 250 people who buy your book, you create 50 new fans that go into your back catalog for additional purchases, or talk you up to their friends.  Do you believe in "lifetime value" of fans, or sparking "word of mouth" conversations?  Should that not go into the equasion while estimating the ROI of marketing campaigns?  Have you noticed a long-tail effect of previous marketing efforts?

I’m glad you bring that up, because I think it’s a really important topic. I haven’t given it a lot of thought. Why? Because my own book sales history has had so many stops-and-starts to it. DIRTY DEEDS was, technically, the first novel (CATFISH GURU came out a couple years earlier, but it’s a collection of novellas and its publishing history is less traditional than the others), and the publisher didn’t have very good distribution and spent so long making a decision about the follow-up book that my agent and I got them to revise the contract so we could market it elsewhere, but weren’t able to place it. In the meantime, I got the first 2 Derek Stillwater novels published, but after THE SERPENT’S KISS came out, Midnight Ink dropped my contracts. So I then went a couple years before getting another book out, THE FALLEN, and by the time it came out, THE DEVIL’S PITCHFORK and THE SERPENT’S KISS had both gone out of print until I brought out the e-books.

So with that kind of a mess playing around in the background, it’s been hard to market my backlist, such as it was. Now that there are e-books and the new publisher seems willing to publish a book a year and seems pleased with the publishing progress to-date, then I think there might be more value in marketing of that type—and, in fact, it would be foolish not to take advantage of marketing the e-book backlist as well as some of the self-published e-books at the same time. I’m not sure there’s a long-tail effect yet—but I think there will be.

You've kept up a solo blog, This Writing Life, for over 5 years as your peers have gravitated to group blogs like Murderati and Hey, There's a Dead Guy In The Living Room.  Have you been tempted to give up your author blog?  Do you feel like the benefits still outweigh the time-commitment?

I was peripherally involved in a group blog with Midnight Ink authors, but once MI and I parted ways, although the publisher didn’t organize or sponsor the blog, I felt less inclined to take part in it. There are some group blogs that I’d probably be thrilled to be involved in if given the opportunity.

That said, mostly I enjoy it. Maybe I just like writing about myself. I like the community aspects of it and have made some real friends through my blog—one of them currently lives in Arizona and when I was down in Phoenix for a business trip she came up and we spent the day driving around the state checking out Montezuma’s Castle and Montezuma’s Well, and there are a couple other writers, in particular, that I’ve met through the blog that I’ve talked to on the phone and routinely email off-blog that I would definitely call friends. I don’t know about the marketing benefits of blogging—I’d say they’re real, but probably not as significant as we’d hope—but I think the social and creative benefits are both real and significant.

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Thanks again for the insights, Mark!  

Next column, we’ll handle a reader question about movie tie-ins and Happy Meals.  Come on back, y'hear!  

Gregory Huffstutter has been punching Ad Agency timecards for over a dozen years, working on accounts like McDonald's, KIA Motors, Suzuki Automotive, AAA, and the San Diego Padres. His first mystery, KATZ CRADLE is on submission while he's working on the sequel. The first 100 pages of his novel are linked here. For general advertising questions, leave a comment or send e-mail to katz @ gregoryhuffstutter dot com with 'Ask The Ad Man' in the subject line.

THE DOCTOR IS IN

NOT AN ELEVATOR PITCH

Several months ago, my friend Jimmy told he he'd seen the play Next to Normal, and that he wanted to see it again, with me. "I know it will have real meaning for you," he said, "and I want to be there with you."

I demurred. Jimmy has an unerring sense of whom and what I'll respond to, and I knew that if I passed up this opportunity, I'd probably regret it. On the other hand, a play about a psychiatric breakdown, in which a psychologist plays a large and not terribly sympathetic role, promised to be a busman's holiday. In addition, the general outline of the plot--a family that fragments after the death of a son--parallels the plot of my novel, which is kind of a raw topic for me right now.

So, week after week, I officially wanted to go, but had something more pressing to do. Finally, he emailed me: "Alice Ripley is leaving the show, and you've got to experience her in this role. We need to go right away." So we did.

Within fifteen minutes, I was sobbing, and the feelings didn't let up for the next hour and a half. Any comparison between the play and my book, or my life, went out the window. The play is its own world, inhabited by three-dimensional people who love and suffer intensely, and studded with pop-sounding songs that evoke primitive grief and devastating aloneness. It was a horrible experience, and I wouldn't have missed it--and I was and am endlessly grateful to have been able to clutch the hand of a dear friend who has shared many losses with me over the years.

Afterwards, I confessed that I'd found the plot description unpromising, and that I still had trouble with the idea of a pop musical about death, loss and mental illness. "I know," Jimmy said. "It sounds awful, doesn't it? And it would be awful if it wasn't written with complete authenticity--if someone set out to write a musical about a dead son and a bipolar mother, because they thought it had commercial potential. But this play works because it's so weird--because it's based in real feeling and experience, and it follows its own logic, and pulls you along."

I've been thinking since then about how irrelevant plot descriptions ultimately are, except to marketers. It almost doesn't matter what a book or play is "about"; what matters is what it means to the writer, and how well this meaning is transmitted to the reader. It would be hard to get me to a play about a guy who drives his girlfriend to suicide because he's fixated on his mother and can't make himself kill his murdering stepfather, or to read a novel about a woman who plots to pimp her boyfriend to a dying rich girl so they can inherit her fortune, either, if I wasn't aware of the beauty, intensity and authenticity of the telling.

Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D.,is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself,she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. She is the author of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity(Seal, 2007). Her Career Coach column appears every Monday on Inside Higher Ed's Mama, Ph.D. blog, and she is a regular monthly panelist on Litopia After Dark. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.

Letter To A Debut Novelist

On the eve of her first novel being published a debut writer wrote me last night and said she was excited, nervous, scared and asked how does one stop worrying that the book won’t do well.

Dear D.,

You can’t stop worrying. That seems to be part of a writer’s lot. It has to do with how much control we have over the book before it gets published. We have all the control.  We create  the characters, move them around on the chessboard, decide their fate. And then we turn our creations over to other people and give up all our control.

But here are some things I try to do.

Live in the moment and enjoy every step.

Manage expectations. It  would be great to be a bestseller with your first book (or any book for that matter)  and have the book make you rich and famous and happy and buy you a Porsche . But that’s a lottery win. And it happens infrequently.  

If what you want  is to have a writing life, then what you need is for the book to do well enough to keep you in the game. And that’s what you have to focus on.

I think our jobs as writers is to keep writing the best books we can until we write the right book at the right time—the one the publisher can get behind and give that magic push to.

For some of us that will be our first novel; for others, our 10th; and some of us will never get it—not for lack of trying or talent, but rather, because our timing just doesn't sync up.

I don't think we should compare ourselves to each other. That's just inviting madness. Who gets the push is all too often not about talent at all but rather the fit of the book and the market and what the stores say they want and the fads and foibles of the day.

So good luck, enjoy seeing your lovely book on the shelf and may the gods of book sales be looking our for you. 

Authors Who Make A Difference

This is the first in a series about authors who made a difference by giving something back to the community. Congratulations to Brenda Novak for what she's done on the page and off. I asked Brenda to tell me about what she does and how she does it.  - M.J. Rose

 I hit the New York Times when I least expected it. I had a million things on my mind (I have five kids so that sort of gives you a clue as to why!) but hitting the list wasn't one of them. So when my agent called, my thoughts didn't immediately reach for the possibility. I could tell by her level of excitement that something significant had happened, but I still didn't clue in. The call went like this: 

"Hi, Kim. How are you?"

 

"Good," she said. "And you?"

 

I told her I was good, too. Then she said, "You're about to be a lot better."

 

At this I caught my breath. "Why do you say that?" I asked tentatively.

 

"You just hit the NYTimes!" she screamed.

 

I felt my jaw drop as I scrambled to figure out HOW this most amazing thing--something I'd wanted since I wrote my first manuscript--had happened out of the blue. TRUST ME had come out three weeks earlier. STOP ME wouldn't be out for another week. Typically, if you're going to hit a list, you do it the first week of a book's release.

 

Scarcely willing to believe her, I asked, "With what book?"

 

She laughed. "TRUST ME! It hit #20, which means it made the print list."

 

And there it was. My moment in time. The dream I'd been working so hard to achieve since I'd sold my first book--almost a decade earlier to the day--had just crystallized into reality.

 

Since then, I've thought a lot about dreams and the power they have in our lives. Why are they important to us? What difference do they really make? How long do we dare hang on to a dream before we give it up?

 

Anais Nin said, "The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle."

 

I felt like I had caught up with my dream and experienced my miracle. But I was excited for another reason. As a New York Times Bestselling Author I would have a bigger platform from which to attain my OTHER dream, a dream that also required the support of a lot of people. Dom Helder Camara was right when he said, "When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality."

 

Fortunately, I'd been dreaming with others since starting my annual online auction for diabetes research in May of 2005. My goal? To raise $1 million for diabetes research. My youngest son suffers with this disease. Since the day he was diagnosed, I've felt a relentless need to fight back, to take a stand against what's happening to him and millions of others, but at first I didn't know how. It took me two years of wracking my brain-- "How can I do this?" --before the answer came. Not only do I have five kids, I write three books a year, and I had just suffered a financial setback with the collapse of my husband's business. Even ten thousand dollars seemed out of reach.

 

Then the idea I'd been searching for hit me-beautiful in its simplicity. I was in the car at the time. I remember pulling to the side of the road, turning to my husband and saying, "I've got it. I've finally got it!"

 

My idea? To utilize the Web site traffic I'd already established via my writing to start an online auction. But I didn't want those who shopped to be doing it out of public virtue. Public virtue is amazing. I admire nothing more. But I've learned that self-interest is far more reliable. So I wanted to give everyone who participated a personal reason to shop, and I decided I could do that by offering fabulous opportunities for published authors, aspiring writers and devoted readers.

 

The good news is that it worked. This year, I had another moment when I caught up with a long-cherished dream. Thanks to all those who have supported my efforts, Brenda Novak's Sixth Annual Online Auction for Diabetes Research broke the $1 million mark on May 28th!

 

But, alas--my dream has already outdistanced me again--because now I'm shooting for $2 million! 

   

New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author Brenda Novak has three novels coming out this summer-WHITE HEAT, BODY HEAT & KILLER HEAT. She considers herself lucky to be a mother of five and married to the love of her life. For more information, please visit www.brendanovak.com

 

Best Review I Ever Got. I Think.

I used to read books like this [The Hypnotist by M.J. Rose] before I discovered smutty worlds filled with vampires and shape shifters. But this book reminded me I liked to read books like this. It even had just humans in it and I still liked it. -- Samantha at Fiction Vixen Book Reviews 

Buying a book for its cover - easy when it's this book/this cover.

I covet this book. They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover - but buying one for its cover is fine esp when its this book. One of my top ten ever. Do you love this cover as much as I do? Or hate it? It's pretty radical. FYI - This is part of Penguin's 75th anniversary reissues. If I had the shelf space I'd buy the whole collection.

The Business of Being an Author

 More and more I realize that authors need to educate themselves on the business of being an author. Not the craft or the art. But the confusing and complicated mess that is the business of publishing. How can we navigate if we've never learned to drive this car - and most of us haven't. Most of use come from other disciplines and learned those jungles but then get into this one and have an agent and a publisher and let them duke it out. And we should let them duke it out - we want to be the good cop in the good/bad cop scenario and let our agents take the heat. But we need to know what questions to ask. We need to know what the options are and the ramifications are. We need to know what the contract means  - not just sign it. And that's hard to learn by osmosis.

Last week a top agent opened an ebook publishing company and one of the top publishers said they would stop doing deals with that agent while this fight was fought. 

The Authors Guild says publishers have brought the current climate on themselves. Here's their statement. 

I've got a line written on an index card over my desk -  writing may be an art - but publishing is a business and an oft broken business at that. 

Well, it got more broken and complicated last week. What do you think is going to happen next? 

THE DOCTOR IS IN

RETHINKING MY VOICE

I spent last week with three friends--Beth and Antonietta, my "boogie woogie women," and Florrie, another good singing friend (that is, she's a good friend and a good singer)--at Beth's cabin in Maine. We called it our personal Lilith Fair, and though we swam in a cold, quiet bay, explored Acadia National Park, and attended a wonderful concert at the Monteux School, the focus was on singing and its attendant (for us) activities, laughing and exchanging life stories. It was one of the best vacations I can remember.

One of the topics that surfaced repeatedly for us is role models. We all admire a number of different singers, but for each of us there has been one person whose music has particularly inspired us and shaped our taste. For Beth, it's Julie Andrews; for Antonietta, Nina Simone; and for Florrie, Judy Garland. Each of these friends has vocal qualities similar to those of her idol, and tends to choose songs and presentation styles accordingly.

I'm not that lucky. The singer I would most love to sound like is Ella Fitzgerald, and the comparison is kind of a bad joke. I can hit the notes (usually), and after a year of intensive instruction adn practice, my voice is larger and richer than I ever imagined it would be--but seriously.

One night in the middle of our song/gabfest, Beth's neighbor, who is a fabulous guitarist and singer, came over, and we harmonized on old rock and folk songs all night. The next morning, Beth said to me, "I don't ever want to hear you say a song is too high or low again. You were all over the place last night--and where did you learn to harmonize like that?"

I grew up harmonizing--in a structured way in my church choir and school musicals and glee clubs, and spontaneously with my brother and friends. "That stuff is easy," I said. "It's straight singing that's hard!"

"Uh, nooo," Florrie corrected me. "You think it's easy because it's easy for you."

"You sounded fantastic," Antonietta added.

Later that day, we were all marveling over a video of Leontyne Price when I burst out, in the "shortmouth" one develops in a continuing discussion, "Yeah, but I'll never be Ella!"

"So what?" Beth responded, sharply for her. "You're already frigging Mary Travers!"

I am? Really?

Since then I've been thinking about a conversation I had with Susanne Dunlap a few weeks ago. I was moaning about my agent having dropped me after being unable to sell my novel. "You have such a gift for creative nonfiction," she said, "maybe you should concentrate on that."

I have no plan to give up fiction, or Cole Porter. But sometimes it's helpful to listen to the assessments of smart friends, and to be reminded that if something comes naturally to us, it's not necessarily because it's a negligible skill--it could be that we're just good at it.

Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D.,is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself,she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. She is the author of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity(Seal, 2007). Her Career Coach column appears every Monday on Inside Higher Ed's Mama, Ph.D. blog, and she is a regular monthly panelist on Litopia After Dark. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.

Interesting new blog:

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com

Linktopia - The Shift

Is this the day we'll look back on and remember the summer of 2010 when ...

The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.

Keep reading the story here.