Part 2
It turned out to be easier to prove who I didn’t sell books to than who I did. Thankfully, the reports generated from the sites that sell books on my behalf, show me which country they sold in. One bookseller actually tells me what state, but that’s just one out of five booksellers. Three of the five have something in their terms and conditions that confirms they collect sales tax and in which state. My state was one of them. That left just one bookseller. That particular bookseller’s report only tells me which country, so unless my state uses a formula such as 50 states = 2% for one state, I’ll have to pay on all the US income. I’m waiting to hear the verdict now.
Rule #9: Read, well before it’s time to pay.
Find out what the requirements are concerning federal, state, city and local taxes. Download their actual tax form, and find out exactly what is required so you can plan in advance. Or, take your chances with an accountant.
The state might not have noticed me, but I filed under the wrong classification. Oops, maybe doing my own taxes wasn’t a smart idea after all. What classification should I have filed under? Retail. What? I’m the retailer and the booksellers are the retailer too? But then, who am I to argue? After all, I might qualify for a small refund. I can only hope.
I moved to a pass-through state.
Rule #10: Watch out for marketing.
As if the above isn’t bad enough, here comes the hard part. Writing a book is not enough – you have to market it. Most marketing methods cost money, sometimes as much as $1,000.00 for only the one day your ad will appear. When I first started out, there were lots of places I could promote my books. Now, it’s called spam and is extremely forbidden. Authors turned from message boards to social media about the same time everyone else did. Lately, social media no longer lets you promote for free – they’ll sell you an ad, however, a very expensive ad.
Rule #11: If you haven’t learned to read yet.
You’re about to find out how easily it is to become a victim. Ads on social media and other places that sell per click, are tricky. If you’re not careful, you could spend as much as $100.00 a day before you realize it.
There are other ways to advertise. There are sites that offer to promote books through newsletters and social media for a fee. Some are cheap, but do not produce the desired results – which of course is selling books. Some are reasonable and do a better job, and some are pricy but return outstanding results. The thing is, the expensive sites can and are very selective about which books they accept. I know authors who have tried for a year and still haven’t been accepted.
Rule #12: Your cover art may not be good enough.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve paid for or created new cover art for my 50+ books. Literally, I can’t tell you. If you do a search on my first book which begins with Anna, you’ll easily find half a dozen different covers. Sadly, I think the first one was the best, but I listened to people who said they knew what to do, and changed it. I miss that cover with the black horse and the blue/black background.
There are a lot of great cover artists out there, but they don’t know your book. That makes it next to impossible to find one that helps depict your particular story. Sometimes you have to settle for “almost.” Occasionally, I buy the cover before I write the book so I can make it fit.
Some authors will tell you the cover needs to express the genre, and for the most part they are right. If you write a western, your cover art should tell the reader at first glance to expect a western. Covered wagons are good. The trend for romance – hot and otherwise has been half naked men, but those are experience overload in my opinion. Even so, a man and a woman in an embrace on the cover says romance, a man dressed in black holding a knife says thriller, and a cute duck works for children’s books. It’s a difficult trend to ignore.
There are plenty of less expensive cover art options out there, you just have to do a search. The price for a pre-made cover ranges from $10.00 to over $400.00 US and beyond. If you want a back cover too, that’ll sometimes cost extra.
Why is the cover art so important? Because it is the first thing a reader sees on your product sales page. The second thing is the blurb. I already told you about my blurb disaster and I wish I could stay that was the only one. Unfortunately, I’ve written blurbs with misspelled words (shocking), missing words, incomplete sentences, and all other possible mistakes. Fortunately, in this real world industry, it’s easy to fix mistakes.
Rule #13: How not to write a blurb.
“If you like books by Steven King, you’ll love…”
No they won’t! They won’t even buy your book. It has no reviews and the author has the audacity to tell me, the reader, what I’ll love. Worst of all, readers will kill the book with bad reviews if it doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s the reviewers job to tell other readers that they loved the book and that those who like Steven King will love that one too.
If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times – JUST WRITE A GOOD BOOK. Duh, I have yet to meet an author who didn’t think they’ve written a good book and maybe a bestseller. Like I said, writing it is the easy part – selling it is when the real work begins. To sell it, you need not just a good one, but a great blurb.
A blurb is a mini-mystery, no matter the genre. It’s the hook. It’s the means by which you hope to entice people to read the sample and then buy the book. When the blurb fails to get their attention, then they’ll simply go on to the next book.
When an author needs four long paragraphs to tell the reader what the book is about, it means the author doesn’t really know. A blurb is not a summary nor a book report.
Rule # 14: Keep your eye on the reader.
It’s really easy to fall into the author trap – thinking of everything from the authors point of view and not the readers. What makes you buy a book? First the picture on the cover tempts you, then you flip the book over, and read the blurb. All you want to know is the gist of the story and a reason to find out what happens. I can do that it in one sentence:
He loved her, he left her and then he killed her – or did he?
I don’t recommend a one sentence blurb, although I’ve been tempted to try one. Instead, I use a simple formula: Choose a character, describe his or her problem, and add a hook. Your first chapter should describe what the initial problem is and who the main character is, so you can practically ignore the rest of the book when you’re writing the blurb. The hook is a little harder to write.
“Will she survive?”
Oh please, of course she will survive. This is a romance and all romance books have happy endings. Here’s the thing. All questions are not hooks but all hooks are questions. You just have to make certain the reader cannot guess the answer. By the way, you only have a few seconds to grab the reader’s attention. Lately, authors are using at tag line. I’m not fond of them, which is probably why they sell more books than I do. Take a look at a bestseller list and see which you prefer.
It took months to come up with this blurb and it works. It’s an example of my formula – Character, Problem, Hook.
ANNA -- In love with a woman he had only seen once and could not find, the Highlander, Kevin MacGreagor was growing older and needed a wife to give him sons. No other woman pleased him, not even the daughters of other lairds, so he finally settled for Anna sight unseen. But when his men went to meet her guard, she was all alone and badly beaten. Who could have done such a thing and why?
I suggest you write your first long-winded blurb and then start eliminate everything that is not really relevant. After that, add a few power words. Here’s another example:
In 1912 Kentucky, Sam Smooth, a Locksmith who was pushing 35 years old wanted a wife. Mary Fields would do if she weren't so tall, Clare Woods might even be pretty if she had all her teeth and Sarah Clink needed more broadcloth to cover her figure than any woman he’d ever seen. Yet finding a wife wasn't his only problem. Old man Sheppard got himself murdered and the nosey Sheriff kept coming around asking questions. Maybe Sam had thought about killing that callous old man, but who hadn't? And now that he was dead, who was that beautiful woman moving into the Sheppard mansion?
Nosey and Callous are power words. Other power words are scandalous, rude, calculating, brash…you get the picture.
Rule # 15: Choosing the wrong author name.
It shouldn’t be a problem, but it is. If a name it too common, it will easily blend in with ten other author names. If it’s too uncommon, readers probably won’t remember it.
I chose to use my own name, but there are other Talbotts that have a business, and I’m related to most of them. They complain that when they search for Talbott, they get several pages of my books. Oops. On the other hand, I chose to use my real name because I thought that even if readers couldn’t remember my titles, they might remember “Marti.” It works, I think. Just not for my relatives.
Still think you want to write a book?
Okay, here are some things you need to know. Your book is copyrighted the moment you upload/publish it via eBook or paperback. It’s pretty hard for someone to later prove that it’s their book and not yours once it hits the market. If you plan to write a lot of books, consider if you want to buy your own ISBN numbers. Keep in mind that you need one for your paperback and a different one for your eBook.
Did I do that? Seriously? Of course not and now that I’m still adding to my 50+ book catalog, the cost of buying my own ISBN number is astronomical. Fortunately for me, the booksellers provide free – I love free – ISBN numbers. Unfortunately, having a bunch of different ISBN numbers can be a real nightmare and does limit your ability to get books into bookstores. Want your books in libraries? There are several booksellers that will do that for you.
Book titles are not copyrighted or trademarked except in extreme cases. There’s been a huge blowup lately over copyrighting certain words that show up in many book titles. As far as I have heard, the copyrights were not issued. Whew! However, you really wouldn’t want your title to be the same as a dozen other books. Do a search to make sure your title is original.
Rule #16: The front matter counts and so does the back.
It took me about three years to get this part right, but that’s because this industry is constantly changing. What was right last week may not be considered right next week. That’s why you have to constantly keep up-to-date on the changes.
Front matter is what goes on the first few pages of your book. Title – page 1, author’s name, © copyright mark – page 2, blurb and/or author’s note – page 3, Table of contents (required by most booksellers) – page 4, Chapter 1 – page 5. Don’t add blank pages. It’s irritating.
Why put the blurb in the front matter? Because readers are sometimes binge buyers and weeks later won’t remember why they bought the book. Sticking the blurb up front refreshes their memory. If they don’t read the book and delete it instead, you’ve still made a sale, but you won’t get a review. Reviews, sadly, are needed to get the book promoters interested in accepting your book.
If anyone could screw up the back matter, it would be me.
In the eBooks, you can add links to your other books in the back. You can’t put links to other stores, however, just links to your book at that specific store. I sell through five different stores, so you can imagine what it was like changing/adding links to the previous books each time I released a new one. That’s five changes to each book and uploading a new version to five different places.
A couple of years ago, I got a little smarter, not much, but a little. Instead, I wrote a paragraph inviting them to find my other books on my website. That idea worked and also let me see how many readers were visiting my website, and which books they seemed interested in. My new back matter is just a simple paragraph with links to my website.
All of the booksellers let me use it in the back of my books. It saves me a ton of work and time.
Rule # 17: The trouble with free books.
Deciding whether to give a book away free is one of those questions that has no real conclusive answer. I have four books that I give away free. They are the first in each of four series and they are a marketing tool. If they like the free book, they’ll usually buy all the rest.
The problem is two-fold – some readers think free equals low quality. Okay, so mine were in the beginning, but they aren’t now. Other readers will only buy free books and never buy the rest of the series, so I’ve lost money. On the other hand, they probably wouldn’t have bought them even priced as low as $.99. If one-third of those who download a free book goes on to buy the next, I count giving the first one away a success.
Do I make or lose money? I have no idea. I’m mathematically challenged.
I certainly don’t regret giving free books to people such as senior citizens who can’t afford them. Call it my little contribution to the elderly, especially since I am one.
That brings me to pricing.
Rule #34: How low could I go? 34?
Early in my career, along came this blog writer guy who told authors that $2.99 was the sweet spot, so everyone and their uncle priced their books at $2.99. In my opinion, he started the crack in a fault line that was sure to break sooner or later. Readers came to expect good books for only $2.99. I remember screaming, outside of course, “RAISE YOUR PRICES!” No one was listening, or so I thought. Funny thing is, he must have heard me because he raised his prices to $3.99. The problem was, that old post about the sweet spot is still there and authors are still falling for it.
There is no sweet spot. There is only try and see.
I sold a lot of books at $4.99 until I took a long hard look at the bestselling list in historical romance. Sure, the traditional publisher were way over-priced, but the Independent authors were making a killing at $3.99 and mine stopped selling at the higher price. So, I lowered mine. Not sure that was smart, but there is no real way of knowing for certain. Some readers won’t pay nearly $5 for a book that is under 300 pages and when I’m done with a story, I’m done.
I had fun writing this. Hope you enjoyed reading it. All opinions are mine and not meant to always be taken literally.