Option 3--At Last!

Okay, Folks. Here, at last, is Option 3. It's loaded with merits and possibilities. And there are a number of people who have seen it work. I'll explain what it is first, describe it's strengths next, and pose some of the pitfalls last.

Option 3: Raise Funds In Advance Through Kickstarter.com

Ever heard of kickstarter.com? It's a website designed to help people raise capital to fund projects of almost any kind. Really, the sky is the limit as long as your project is for profit. I suspect there are legal issues over a non-profit venture.

Research the site and look around a bit. You'll see what I mean about the possibilities. I saw a lady raising money to support her while she paints a room. Others raising money to create apps for iPhones. And, of course, to publish books.

The basic idea is that you explain your project in detail, using a video if your are really serious. You set a target goal, say $3,000, that you need to hit to fund your project. Then you provide incentives to people to provide money for your project. For a $5 donation perhaps you email a thank-you. For $50, a signed copy of your book. Then you market the heck out of your project and direct traffic to your listing at kickstarter. The best part is that no one is obligated until you meet your funding target--they don't provide the cash, and you don't have to give them the product until the goal is met.

The donations provide you the funding before you actually spend the money--or spend a lot of it. My feeling is that you want to get moving as quickly as realistically possible, keeping in mind you need to produce high quality writing, professional artwork for your cover, and professional editing, production, and binding, as well as digital formats.

Here's how I'd do it:
1. Research publishing and selling books on kickstarter.com under Writing and Publishing. You can then limit it to subcategories, such as Children's or fiction. Get an idea of what products hit their target and why. What incentives did they use that worked? Is a quirky attitude good? Is real product beneficial? Why will people like your product?
2. Research the following costs so you can build a credible and realistic plan:
a. Cover art (don't skimp here). Lots of resources are out there for this. I'll discuss what I've researched thus far in a later post.
b. Layout and production for both soft and hard copies
c. Editing (don't skimp here, either)
d. Distribution, whether through an online service, such as createspace.com, or a local production company.

2. Come up with a creative pricing structure for what you will give based on various levels of donations.
3. Determine a Funding Goal that will pay for your costs and provide you with the capital you need without setting it so high that you'll never reach your goal, and thus never get any funding.
4. Once you've pre-sold your books and met your funding target, you end up with a number of additional copies you can either sell yourself through your website, amazon.com, or market to a traditional publisher with a proven track record.
5. Write a really, really good book. First. Before you try and pre-sell it. If you already know about kickstarter, then do this first. If not, go check out the site so you have a goal in mind.

Here are the benefits:
1. First and foremost, you pre-sell your books and wind up with a number of additional printed copies--all paid for. No out of pocket expenses.
2. Remember: this is highly dependent on: finding the right funding goal, creative incentives for donations, quality control on writing/editing/production/art, and good marketing. Do that and you've got a chance.
3. If you set your goal properly, as mentioned in 1 above, you should wind up with books completely paid for that you can sell yourself for full gross profit.
4. This model is not vanity press publishing because you are not out any costs--not in the long run--and you still maintain complete editorial and artistic control.

Negatives:
1. Not many, really, unless you haven't developed a decent marketing strategy or creative incentives. The kickstarter.com website doesn't do much in the way of promotion. You have to do that yourself. Remember, the goal is to be read and to sell books, not just to convince your family and friends to buy them. You haven't created a following if you do that, and that means you aren't going to be able to create a real career out of this.
2. You have to create a solid product first. Not many people want to pay you to learn the craft of writing, but they might be interested in funding the production of a decent product that only lacks the means of production and distribution. You still have to master the craft, so don't go out there and make a bad name and reputation for yourself. I've seen even the most successful authors lose credibility and readers this way.
3. Legacy publishers and new indie publishers still have great power and, if they continue to evolve, will have great power to market and promote you. Do a good job and you may be able to sell to them. Do poorly, and you may not. Still, I'm not sure there's harm here.

So, I've necessarily had to slow down my personal efforts in pursuing this route because of time commitments, but I'm interested in your thoughts. What do you think? What should Option 4 be?

New Thoughts on Option 3 Coming

Hi Folks,

I've been a little quiet lately--one of the natural repercussions of some serious time commitments in my life over the last week. I see that happen to a lot of writers, and in my opinion, sometimes you just have to take a little time off.

Don't sweat it in your own life. It's not worth feeling guilty over it. Life throws curve balls--and it's all right to swing and miss once in a while. I believe that we create too much anxiety over not producing as quickly as others think we can, or say we can, or we think we are supposed to, when the reality is that life is a journey. We enjoy the journey when we give our best, but also when we accept the limitations inherent in our best.

Do both and you'll find joy in that journey. I guess that's good advice for me, too!

So, watch out for a new post on Option 3 that I promised a few weeks ago. I think I'm ready to provide some interesting ideas on a new platform that may just work.

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.