Dave Farland on e-Publishing

Dave Farland's most recent Daily Kick in the Pants email post on How to Sell a Million e-Books is so spot on, so detailed, and so awesome, I'm going to repost it here in it's entirety. Dave, I hope you don't mind--all credit goes to you.
Readers, you can sign up for his posts for free at his website, davidfarland.net, which is why I don't feel quite that guilty reposting.

Here it is. Worth more than I can say in this amount of space.


"Every day, sometimes several times a day, I hear from new authors who say, “I’ve decided to publish my book as an e-book. The New York legacy model of publishing is broken, and I’ve got to do something.”
I worry about such authors, of course. There are so many new books coming out from self-published authors that it’s going to be very tough to build an audience. Some authors are trying it and then soon giving up. Their lone e-book sitting on Amazon isn’t much different from a load of self-published books sitting in a garage.
So let me tell you how to do it right. Steel yourself. You may not be prepared for this.
Last year in April, I told you that a new publishing revolution was officially here. It happened in my mind with the sale of the iPad—an e-reader that does far more than let you read. It can be a tool, an entertainment device, even a toy.
The reason that I liked it is that it lets you enjoy stories in any number of formats—as an e-book, an enhanced book, a movie, an audiobook, a videogame, a graphic novel, and so on. The older e-readers were too limiting.
I said that in 2011 we would see the first self-published novelists come along who were genuine millionaire bestsellers. So far this year, we’ve seen two of them reach that height—Amanda Hocking and John Locke.
Many new authors are looking at this and saying, “Maybe I’ll throw a book out there and try to duplicate their success.” That tactic won’t work.
You CAN duplicate their success, and I can tell you how to do it and why it works. Here are some things that these millionaire bestsellers are doing. If you want to duplicate their success, pay attention:
1) Write a series of books. You need to keep readers coming back so that you can build an audience. Generally speaking, this means that you will have either a persistent character/persistent world to the series. But you may also be able to write books of a very similar type (romances) where the emotional draws are consistently the same.
2) Target a wide audience. Right now, thrillers, romance, and young adult novels have a wide enough audience so that you can break out. As more people move to e-readers in the coming two years, I think that you’ll see some authors begin to break out in smaller genres.
3) Get a lot of books up quickly. It generally takes me up to a year to write a book. It never fails that when I get the novel out, I receive fan mails the day after the books release begging to know, “When is the next one coming out?” You have to have “the next one” up and ready to sell within a week or two. (I’m not kidding on this, folks. It may mean that you’ll need to prepare seven or eight novels before you publish even one!)
4) Make the books short. Writing well quickly means that you probably have to write short books. When I write a book that is 200,000 words long, it will take me a year. But I can write a 40,000-word novel in a month and still keep the quality fairly high. (The reason has to do with the complexity of the plotting on longer novels.)
5) Price them cheap. Note that the authors who have succeeded have priced them at 99 cents. No one has gone out yet and self-published a novel at $15 and sold a million copies. No one has done it even at $3. The authors who use this method are trying to build an audience. They’re sacrificing short-term profits in the hopes of building a long-term audience.
If you give your novel away, no one is likely to read it. Why? Because you’ve just told us that your novel has no value.
Years ago, my family had the misfortune of having a litter of extremely ugly kittens. They were all calicos with grisly markings. Their fur was more like bristles than anything else. They were bony creatures, scrappy and altogether unlovely.
One Saturday morning, my wife came to me crying and begged, “Take these kittens up into the hills and put them out of their misery. I’ve gone all through the neighborhood, and no one will take any of them!”
Well, I didn’t want to commit felineocide, especially with kittens, so I came up with a plan. I dressed my daughters—age 6 and 8—up in nice clothes, then had them go down to the supermarket and try to give away the kittens. Now, my daughters were cute, so having them give away the kittens was the equivalent of trying to put a nice cover on a crummy book.
Well, my daughters went out, determined to give away the kittens, but after four hours they came home in tears. No one wanted our ugly cats. You just couldn’t con them into it. You couldn’t beg, whine, or wheedle.
So I wondered, maybe I could get rid of the cats if I suggested that they had a real value? I decided to sell the darned things. At the time, we were thinking of buying a beautiful little kitten for $200. I decided to sell the ugly kittens at a bargain price. On the cutest of them, I put a price tag of $20. Now, you have to understand, the cutest of them was still hideous. It’s uglier kin cost only $10. My daughters went out and SOLD all six kittens within a twenty minutes. As my wife put it, “People crowded around, fighting to buy those ugly kittens.” Why? Because I had the temerity to suggest that they had value.
Don’t let this lesson be lost on you. Charge for your novels.
Now I’m going to tell you a secret. This tactic won’t work on everyone: I won’t read novels that people are giving away. The author is telling me that “This book is such an eyesore, it’s not worth anything.”
In fact, I’m such a snob that I won’t even look at novels priced at 99 cents. You’ve got to raise your prices to convince me that you’ve got anything interesting.
So what’s your price point? I have a friend who runs a small publishing company. He told me last December that he was making about $7,000 per month off of three thriller novels, which he was selling for $10 each. In January he dropped the price to $3 each, and made $18,000—while selling seven times as many books.
Now, there are a lot of people who do buy 99-cent books and who read free books. I’ve read articles by people who say, “After getting my e-reader, I’ve bought 300 books in the past three months, and I only paid $325 for them.” Well, if you’re buying 100 books per month, you’re not really reading them all, are you?
If I sell you a book at that price, the chances are great that you will have wasted your money and I still won’t get a new reader. So I probably don’t want to go that low on my pricing.
Besides, I’m a multiple award-winning New York Times bestselling author. I think my books are worth more than a dollar. I might be willing to buy books for as little as $2.99, so that might be a better entry price for people like me.
But you can’t argue with success. The 99 cent price point is working for some authors. A lot of readers apparently will buy books at that price. So give it a try.
6) Don’t ignore your traditional marketing points: a great cover, strong quotes, an intriguing back copy—all of those traditional incentives are still required to sell your books. And make sure that you market your other works on the back end. Make it easy for the reader to get the next books in the series—just by clicking a button.
7) Last of all, you can do all of that and still fail if you don’t go out and market your books aggressively. This means that you have to do things like “blog,” speak in public, do readings at libraries, get press releases out, talk on the radio, and so on. In some genres, authors spend only 30% of their time writing and 70% marketing. That doesn’t sound like much fun to me, but it’s part of the model.
Now, many of you are going to be reading this and saying, “But, I don’t write books in a series. I don’t write short books. I can’t use this strategy!” You’re right. It won’t work for you.
Even if you follow all of these rules, things are getting tougher. Some conmen are filling Amazon with “spam” books. Very often they’re stealing prose from other authors, cobbling several books together, and then selling it as their own. By doing this, the unwary buyer might read an opening chapter and think, “Wow, this looks great!” But after a bit they discover that they’ve been robbed. The book is a “Frankenstein,” something sewn together from bits and parts of living, breathing works, and then the warmed-over corpse is foisted on the public.
So over the next few months, we’re going to see buyer resistance to self-published works rising. We’re going to see readers looking for more “proof” that a book is good than just the word of a few readers (who might be the con-man’s accomplices posing as readers). This whole 99-cent price point might fail as a pricing strategy.
Given this, there is an alternative plan I find intriguing that just might work for you. I’m going to talk about it in my next installment."

Thanks, Dave. Awesome post.