Now that many of you have read Forged in Blood I (and tweeted/emailed/Facebooked glowers at me for that cliffhanger), I better let you know that I’m working hard to get Part 2 done this summer. I’m already a good 2/3rds of the way through the first draft and won’t be blogging much until I’ve finished it. But, for those authors who like to follow along and read new posts here, I will have a couple of guest articles coming up.

Today we have Charlotte E. English bringing us information on shared worlds and collaborating with other self-published authors. I grew up reading all those DragonLance and Forgotten Realms books, so I’m particularly intrigued by what they’ve put together. I hope you’ll find the post interesting as well and check out the books in the collaborative world they’ve created.

Sharing a World: When Indies Collaborate

One of the best things about digital self-publishing, in my opinion, is the flexibility it offers: there’s so much freedom to write, and subsequently publish, anything our imaginations can come up with. There is also the freedom to find new and unusual ways to produce, and present, fiction.

There are downsides, of course. One of the objections I hear the most to self-publishing is its isolated nature: there’s no one but you to get your book written, produced and published; no one to help you promote your book, or find its target market. But we’re making the rules, here. What’s to stop authors from forming collectives? Why not take the burden out of world-building by creating a team-built shared world? Why not work with a group of writers, to produce a series that never has to end? Why not create a group who’ll pool their efforts, share connections and help each other out?

Okay, maybe it’s a slightly crazy idea: in the early days, some people said it could never work. But a few of us decided to try it anyway. In January 2012, five fantasy authors got together and started world-building; in April 2013, we published the first few titles.

Building the World

So how did we do it?

It’s probably fair to say that collaboration of this kind doesn’t necessarily come easily to writers. Most of us are used to working alone. The prospect of pouring the ideas of five complete strangers into a pot and coming out with a coherent world was a daunting one at first. Fortunately we had good leadership from our project founder, Joseph Robert Lewis – and this is the first thing I’d say any collaborative group needs. Joe got the ball rolling by taking lists of random ideas from everyone in the group and then getting us to vote on genre, theme, background and significant features in our world. What we ended up with was a steampunk/high fantasy world, a mysterious island floating in our skies, and such diverse features as talking birds, Shadowy assassins, steam-powered cars and flying machines and magical artefacts.

After that, it took a lot of emails and a lot of posts on our wiki site to hammer out the details. Was this easy? No, certainly not. It took months, and a lot of negotiating. We all had to learn to be as flexible as we could; to say “yes” as much as possible, and rarely to say no; to be both generous with sharing our ideas, and not too personally attached to them.

Writing the Books

That was only the beginning, of course: the ultimate goal was to produce a series of separate, stand-alone adventures that would, nonetheless, link up into a coherent series. Tricky. What we did was to give ourselves a big question to answer: what happens when somebody manages to fly up to that drifting isle, for the very first time?

The first three titles all answer this question in different ways. Writing them was an interesting experience, which naturally had its downsides: more than once I had to regretfully put away an idea I liked for my book, because it conflicted with someone else’s. But the upsides were tremendous: I got to work with many ideas I wouldn’t necessarily have come up with myself, and the whole process has stretched all of us as writers, forcing us to think differently, be more creative. It’s telling that we’ve only just published the first few titles, and already there are flurries of emails going around as we swap thoughts, bounce ideas off each other and begin making our way towards the next collection of books.

Sharing the World

Managing all this shared material isn’t as hard as it may sound. For a start, there are no co-written stories; each one of us is responsible for creating our own, separate books and for publishing them, too. That means there is no royalty sharing, and we each retain full rights to our own work and our own characters.

Everything else in our world is the joint property of the group. This, too, isn’t as difficult to manage as one might think. By this time, I struggle to remember which parts of our world were my ideas, and which came from others; we’ve spent so much time merrily digging in our sandpit that it doesn’t feel individualistic anymore. New ideas are always run by the whole group, and difficulties are rare.

What’s Next?

The next step in our team adventure is to bring in new writers; people who will add to the world we’ve already built, and make use of our existing material. This will stretch us again – but, I think, in good ways. What we’ve achieved so far is only the beginning: now we want to build more on top, plug new pieces into our literary jigsaw and keep it growing.

If this is going to work, it means continuing to be as flexible as we can. One of the ways we’re doing this is genre: while the world is high fantasy/steampunk, there’s no reason why all the stories have to be classic fantasy or steampunk in nature, too. We’re hoping to see writers from many different genres getting involved: why not have a romance set against a steampunk backdrop, or a cozy mystery with fantasy elements? Someone could start a paranormal angle, or write pure comedy. The sky’s the limit, and the more writers get involved, the more stories we add, and the more promotional efforts we’re sharing across the group, the greater the benefits to all.

If you’ve read this far and think it sounds interesting, there’s more information to be found at our website: www.driftingislechronicles.com/. If you’re a writer and you think you might like to participate, take a look at the get involved page where you can download the full participation guide.

If you want to check out the books (and maybe see who you’d be working with), the existing titles are:

Black Mercury by Charlotte E. English

The Kaiser Affair by Joseph Robert Lewis

The Machine God by MeiLin Miranda

Forthcoming title: Starcaster by Kat Parrish.

In Summary…

Working with a group brings a lot of extra work with it, this is true: there are miles to travel to make sure that the world and the stories remain consistent across so many titles and so many authors. But the advantages are, potentially, huge. If you’re looking for new ways to challenge yourself, or you’d like to work with something different; if you want to move beyond your comfort zone and revitalize your ideas; if you want help with promoting your work, or just someone to help watch your back and keep you going; all of these can be found with a good group.

For those who don’t know, the Amazon Associates (or Affiliate) Program is sort of like working on commission for the big seller. You sign up, put links to any of the product pages on your site or in newsletters to your mailing list, and you make a percentage of the sales when people click through and buy within 24 hours. The percentage varies depending on the product type and how many items you sell in the month, but you can expect 4-8% or so.

I’ll admit, that’s not a lot when you’re linking to your own ebooks, which may only run $0.99 to $5, and you may be wondering if it’s worth signing up for the program. After all, it does take a minute or two to log into Amazon and create an affiliate link every time you’re writing a blog post and want to point out an Amazon product.

A lot of authors will probably say no, it’s not worth it, and that they haven’t made any money with the program. I don’t make a lot, but I do earn an extra $75 to $300 a month from Amazon in addition to what they pay me for my book royalties.

That’s money I’d be giving away (giving to them) if I didn’t bother creating those links. And honestly, it takes maybe 5 minutes a month for that money, because I don’t link to products from blog posts very often. I have the links to my own ebooks over there in the side bar, and I link to new releases. I also link to other authors’ books when I interview them on the blog (two years after I interviewed Kate Harper on How to Make Money Publishing Kindle Articles, I still sell copies of her ebook almost every month).

Juuuust in case you’re interested, here are a few more details…

How I Make Affiliate Income from My Author Blog and Newsletter

I’ll be the first to tell you that if you want to make serious money as an affiliate, Amazon isn’t the best program out there (24-hour window vs. the common-in-the-industry 30 days combined with the fact that they don’t offer a high percentage of the sales), but if you’re like me, and your main focus is on writing and promoting your own books, you might be pleased at the extra side income you can pull in by taking a few minutes to add those links.

1. Create a site and build traffic to it.

As an author, you should be doing this anyway. Not all authors choose to blog (or go through the effort of promoting their blog to increase readership), but all authors should at least have a website with periodic this-is-what-will-be-out-next updates, links to where people can buy their books, and a newsletter sign-up form. The address to that website should be on their business cards, on their social media pages, listed in their books/ebooks, stenciled on the back of the car (hey, some people do it!), etc. In other words, you’re going to promote your site anyway. Why not make any Amazon links you have on your site, especially to your own books, Amazon affiliate links?

What this means is you’re essentially earning say 77% on each $3.99 ebook you sell instead of 70%. Can this add up? Sure. You take the effort to create these links once, and they can be there for years to come. Even if you’re not getting a lot of visitors today, that may change as you get more books out and they start selling more copies.

If  you get into blogging, you can interview other authors and include (affiliate) links to their books, as I mentioned earlier. You can also try other types of posts, such as lists of 99-cent titles in your genre, and promote those posts on Twitter, Facebook, etc. I don’t do a lot of those types of blog entries myself, but here’s an example one from last year (I remember making a few dollars in affiliate income from the books linked to, and every now and then one of those titles still pops up in the current month’s report): 10 Free or 99-Cent Steampunk Ebooks.

2. Create a Mailing List and Use Affiliate Links When You Mention Your Own Books

Every author should have a newsletter or mailing list. As I’ve mentioned before, this allows you to email your readers when you have a new release (or any other important news — say you’re running a Kickstarter Campaign or a special sale for fundraising purposes). If you’re new to this idea, check out my post on Newsletters 101: Email Marketing for Authors.

You’re going to tell these people about your new releases anyway, so it just makes sense to use an affiliate link and get the extra 7%. As your list grows, your earnings will grow (both from direct sales and from affiliate commissions).

Those were my affiliate sales from this weekend from the release of Forged in Blood I. I didn’t use my affiliate link on Twitter or Facebook (I’ve been lazy and haven’t checked to see what their policies are in regard to using affiliate links lately), but I did use them on my website and in my mailing list. I’d wager at least 350 of those 428 came from the newsletter.

Note: I haven’t been active with them but Apple and Barnes & Noble have affiliate programs too. If you find you’re selling quite a few books there, you might want to sign up for their programs too.

Obvious question: Should you promote books other than your own?

This is up to you. I don’t when it comes to my mailing list (a rare exception was when one of my beta readers came out with her first book last fall); these are your dedicated readers, remember, so you don’t want to push them away by trying to sell things to them every other week. Just because they’re interested in hearing about your newest releases, doesn’t mean they want to buy a lot of other stuff. However, if you read a truly awesome book in your genre and think they might love it too, then it probably wouldn’t hurt to mention it or even share your own review of the book as one of your newsletters (authors often wonder what they should talk to their list about in between releases).

Money Aside, Other Reasons You May Want to Be an Amazon Affiliate

You may be thinking, okay, you made an extra $150 when you released your book, but didn’t you sell thousands that weekend anyway? Like a hundred bucks matters… And like this would work for me if I only have three people on my mailing list and I’ve only published one book…

Okay, fair points, but I still think it’s worth taking the extra couple of minutes to craft affiliate links when you’re going to link to something on Amazon anyway. Seeing what your readers/blog visitors are buying can give you a little extra insight into what people want — AKA market research.

A couple of months ago, I participated in a group book promotion and wrote up this post with everyone’s books: 10 Fantasy Romance Novels from Up-and-Coming Authors. I used affiliate links (this post is an example of one where I spent far more time than usual getting links and inserting book covers, because I did it for ten books, but I did end up making about $40 or so in affiliate income from that post), and it was interesting to see which of the titles sold best and which barely sold at all. Dragon Rose was the winner by a long shot. If you’re curious, go check out that post and take a peep at the cover and the blurb, and compare it to the others (it’s worth noting that it’s not at the top of the list, so it’s not as if people were simply picking the first book).

You can also see from my own screenshot up there that people, after clicking my links, buy quite a few books in addition to my own. You can get a better idea of your target audience and what their interests are by seeing what else they bought (I believe these sales reports are a little more concrete than the also-bought lists on Amazon book pages). Sometimes it’s even entertaining (I’ve found everything from soldering equipment to erotica titles to lawn mowers and baby gates in my affiliate reports).

The information is all anonymous, of course, so you’re not snooping into any particular person’s buying history, but it can give you a broad idea of what other titles people are buying. If you haven’t decided on what you’re going to write next, you might want to take a peep and see what sorts of books your readers are really digging (in addition to your own).

If nothing else, you might get some ideas for new books to read for yourself — hey, if these guys like your books, they must have good taste, right?

So, there you have it — why I bother with the Amazon Associates’ Program. What about you? Do you use affiliate links or are you thinking of giving them a try?

I’ve avoided Amazon’s KDP Select Program since the beginning because it requires exclusivity (you can only sell your books at Amazon as long as you’re enrolled). It came out a year after I started publishing, and I already had readers following my work through Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Apple, etc, so I wasn’t willing to take my books out of those stores. The program does offer some promotional opportunities, though, and other indie authors often ask me if it’s worth it for those starting out. I cringe a little at the idea of giving any one store exclusivity, but some authors like to try KDP Select for the required ninety days, then move their books out of the program and into other stores once they build up some momentum.

I invited Joe Turkot here to talk about this, because he has the experience with the program that I lack. He’s been using KDP Select to help market his Black Hull books and recently had his best sales month after taking advantage of the free days. But I’ll let him tell you more about it…

Using Amazon KDP Select for Book Promotion

The main reason that all but one of my ebooks are in the KDP select program is the free book promotion tool. Sure, there are two other benefits to going exclusive with Amazon: %70 royalties in Brazil, Japan, and India (not important to me because I sell no books there), and entrance into the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL), which helps authors find readers in the growing number of Amazon Prime members. The KOLL is neat, and the affirmative power of seeing people lend your books to other readers is awesome. I don’t average a lot of lends per month (maybe 10-15), but each time someone borrows one of my books, I actually earn more than if they’d bought it. I charge .99 cents for all but one of my books, which amounts to a whopping .35 cents royalty per sale. Each borrow, on the other hand, racks up about $1.50 in royalties (the exact amount fluctuates depending on Amazon’s current allocation of KOLL funds). It’s pretty nice to see Amazon deposit two checks into your bank account—one for sales, and the other for total borrows.

The real exciting part of KDP, however, is the free book promotion tool. It can be vitally important to the burgeoning author who has absolutely no quick way to reach a wide audience of readers (I humbly place myself in the burgeoning author category). There is another reason this promotion is great: it is non-restrictive—you’re only stuck in it for 90 days at a time. If you feel you are getting a big enough fan base to spread your wings, or simply want to see the results you’d have going the multiple vender route (B&N, Kobo, and the many other venders where Smashwords distributes your ebook), you can simply remove your book from the Kindle Direct Program.

The free book tool lets you schedule 5 free days for each 90 day block of Amazon exclusivity. You pick the days—they can be back to back, two at once, or one day at a time spaced out over the three months. The bottom line is that the free book tool gets your book into readers’ Kindles, but one sad truth must be stated: the free book tool is not what it once was. It used to be, so the legends of indies before me tell, that a book’s free days transferred into huge sales once the free days expired. This had to do with the Amazon ranking system, where a book’s rise up the free charts translated into a rise on the paid charts afterwards. This so-called KDP “gold rush” is over. To make matters worse, the way Amazon promotes the KDP free days does not amount to many downloads anymore. Depending on the popularity of your genre, you may only see thirty or forty downloads in a free day. In the past month, I tested a free day for various episodes in my Black Hull series. Without additional promotion on my part, the books received about forty downloads. Bummer. But there are still ways to maximize this tool, bringing you new readers, fans, borrows, and hopefully, some good word of mouth.

The first tool that I used to promote my KDP free days was Kindle Nation Daily’s Facebook promotion. This is a good way to get one to two hundred downloads in a low-interest category such as fantasy or science-fiction. As a rule with any giveaway, if you have a polished product, your numbers will be better. Whatever your success with KND sponsorship, your free book promotion tool is no longer free—KND sponsorship, at its cheapest, is about $35.00. Here’s what I stumbled upon to maximize my free days: Author Marketing Club’s Free Kindle Book Submission Tool. The concept is simple: they’ve gathered logo links to all the sites you want to submit your free book to in one place. Here’s what I did for promoting my most recent Black Hull: Episode 1 KDP giveaway days:

I started at the top-left link, Pixel of Ink, and submitted my book. Then, I kept the main window open and methodically went through each link on the Free Kindle Book Submission Tool. Occasionally, the site I submitted to would tempt me to purchase a featured spot for about $10.00 or $15.00. I rationalized that it would be cheaper than using KND, so I bought a couple of the featured spots when they prompted me. Keep in mind, you don’t have to spend anything using this tool if you don’t want to or can’t: each site listed takes your submission for free. But given the small amount of money I paid, relatively equal to what I’d spend on a KND Facebook sponsorship, I received a massive amount of downloads. For the two days I had Black Hull: Episode 1 available free, I garnered over one thousand downloads. For a military sci-fi episodic novel that received forty downloads with Amazon’s promotion alone, there is no comparison: Using the Free Kindle Book Marketing Tool is a must. Black Hull skyrocketed to number one on the Military Sci-fi free book charts, and number two on its other category, High Tech Sci-fi.

Given that Black Hull is my first attempt at publishing a serial novel, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The free promotion worked much as I’d hoped though, for once readers read Episode 1, some of them went on to purchase the rest in the series right away. The free promotion pushed me to my first month with over 300 sales.

The idea of publishing your novel serially isn’t new, but the idea that you can promote a single episode on this scale, leading to readers purchasing each successive episode, is very similar to the concept of keeping the first book in a series free. The only difference is the pricing really—you can charge $2.99 or up in most cases for a full-length sequel in a series, whereas the serial novel, in my opinion, should be 0.99 cents per episode to be competitive.

The most annoying thing about the KDP free book promotion is that, ironically, you actually have to do the promoting yourself. Gone are the days where the system was good enough to do wonders on its own. If you couple the Author Marketing Tool with sites like Konrath’s recommended ebookbooster.com and your social media presence, you can probably achieve results far better than mine.

I’m a learner in the indie publishing scene—I’ve been absorbing from those who have been doing this before me (a la Lindsay Buroker) for about six months now—but I have learned that Amazon’s KDP, and specifically free book promotions, is a wonderful place to start your indie writing career. Beyond the number one spot on the free chart, I went from one review on Black Hull: Episode 1 to seven. Before you run your free book promotion, be sure you have a nice afterward that politely asks readers who enjoyed your book to review it. Now, I wish I had learned sooner about wasting those precious five days—never give the book away for five days in a row. I learned that law of conversion too late from the blogs of more experienced authors. Schedule one or two days in a row, and give yourself ample time to promote the heck out of those days. And yes, you can promote without spending any money, and keep that KDP free book promotion free. Start with the Author Marketing Club’s Free Kindle Book Submission Tool, and then go promote somewhere else if you’re willing to put in extra effort. The process can seem very repetitive and time consuming, but it works. The more time you put in, the better your results will be.

If you want to hear more from Joe, or you’re interested in his books, check him out at his blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

When you first release your book, you’re excited to share it with the world, and you’re ready to devote tons of energy to marketing. Blog tours, forum posts, interviews, guest posts, tweets, Facebook updates, advertising campaigns… if you can do it, you will. And, if you’re lucky, you’ll have a great launch, jumping to the top of the Amazon sales rankings. (Don’t worry — we’re not all that lucky, especially with first books, but it’s possible to “win” the slow-and-steady way too, especially if you’re committed to making a career of writing and publishing.)

Inevitably, your time and enthusiasm for marketing wanes, or maybe you feel you’ve exhausted your options (as awesome as Bookbub is right now, they’re only going to promote the same book so many times). Other authors come along with fresh new releases and fresh enthusiasm for marketing. You scowl as your awesome book gradually drops in sales ranking, falling out of the Top 100 lists, and daily sales drop as well. You remember some pundit saying how awesome ebooks are because, unlike with paperbacks, they can stay on the shelves forever, putting money in your pockets year after year. That’s only true, though, if people continue to find and buy your books.

So, how do you keep your sales rolling in, month after month, year after year?

It’s been almost two and a half years since I released my first Emperor’s Edge book, a negligible amount of time to those authors who have been in the biz for decades, but a small eternity in our new e-publishing era, one in which independent authors are making full-time incomes solely on their ebook sales. The Amazon sales charts are particularly volatile, with their rules changing and algorithms being tweaked all the time. Top sellers come and go. Some of the authors I interviewed last year or the year before who had hot new break out books have fallen off the radar in the 12-24 months since.

I haven’t been doing this long enough to swear that I know the answer, but I’ll tell you what I’m doing to keep my Emperor’s Edge series selling and to keep the monthly paychecks high enough that I’m able to continue to pay the bills (and buy chocolate bars and lattes — we all know how important those are for a writer).

First off, I’m continuing to write and publish.

I know this sounds obvious, but some folks get so hung up in the marketing side that they put the writing on the back burner. I’m averaging about three book releases a year right now, and I usually sneak in a short story or novella or two in there as well. My writing schedule isn’t that grueling, and I’ve come across authors who spew out a lot more words a day than I do. If you’re trying to figure out how to get more done each day, you can check out one of the books like, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love. 10k sounds a little insane to me, but even if you manage 1,000 words a day, you could get two novels out in a year fairly easily. That was my word-count goal when I was still working the day job.

Continuing to release new books in my flagship series is the most important thing I do to keep my name out there where people can stumble across it. Because I’ve gotten to the point where many current readers automatically buy the next book when it’s published, a new release will rise up into the Top 20 of my genre category at Amazon, at least for a while, and this is one way new readers find me. They spot the series for the first time via the new release, and, if they think it sounds interesting, they can go back and try the first book. If they like that, they can go on to buy all of the titles.

I’m planning to publish the last book in my series’ current story arc at the end of the summer, but I won’t do something crazy like killing off the main characters until I’ve written another series that has proven itself capable of being the bill-payer. Fortunately, I still enjoy writing about those characters, so this isn’t any sort of hardship for me. The point is, though, to think like a business person as much as like an artist. Once you figure out what’s popular, it’s probably worth making that your focus.

Note: as I’ve stated before, it’s important to get your readers to sign up for your newsletter, and/or follow you on Facebook/Twitter/your blog so that you can get in touch with them when you have a new release. Don’t assume people will just know that you have a new book out and buy it without any input from you.

Second, I continue to engage in high-result/low-time-investment marketing tactics

I’ve never had a lot of luck with blog tours and interviews and such. They’re a lot of work (time that could be spent writing the next book), and unless you can get onto a very popular blog, they’re unlikely to result in many sales.

On the flip side, advertising can deliver small to huge results (depending on the popularity of the venue) and it only takes five minutes to fill out a form and send money to a site. It’s a struggle to find those popular sites that actually deliver sales, but they are out there. Right now, Bookbub is moving a lot of books for folks, and I’m still hearing good things about Ereader News Today, though I haven’t used them for a while. Pixel of Ink is another big site, though they’re not taking new sponsors at this time (I did, however, have them pick up EE1 a few months ago when it jumped into the Top 100 free at Amazon, thanks to a Bookbub ad).

Watch the Writers’ Cafe on the Kindleboards to see how people’s ads with various venues are going. It’s a good site for keeping up with what’s working and what’s not this month. (Note: I don’t actually have an account there; I just watch. Forums can be a huge time sink without much of a return, insofar as selling books go. If you join, do it because it’s fun and something you’ll do in your free time.)

I also post on Facebook and Twitter (and keep meaning to get more serious about Google+). This is less about selling books and more about keeping in touch with my readers between releases. If you follow me on Twitter or peep at my author page on Facebook, you’ll notice that I don’t plug my books very often (typically only if I’m running a rare sale or releasing a new book), but I believe there are a lot of intangible benefits to connecting with readers this way. Social media sites can be the beginning steps to building a community that has a life even when you’re not around, and there’s no limit to the ways a community can help you, should you ever need it. Also, it’s really fun to hang out with people who share your sense of humor (and they must if they enjoy your books, right?)!

Neither Twitter nor Facebook need to take a lot of time each day. If you grab the apps for your phone, you can check in while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store or watching the kids’ soccer practice.

Lastly, I don’t worry about sales ranking — I just pay attention to the bottom line

I know that if I can sell 400 ebooks a month for each of my Emperor’s Edge titles, I’m making a nice monthly income. Your requirements will vary, of course, depending on how many books you have out and what their sales prices are (most of my EE books are $4.95 so I take home $3+ from each sale), but once you know how many you need to be selling and what you have to do to achieve that, it becomes a numbers game rather than a cross-your-fingers-and-hope game. If you’re crossing anything, you’re not ready to rely solely on this income.

For me, giving away a lot of Book 1s in my series (often via an ad) will result in a very good sales month, one that’ll carry over into the next month. Not everyone who tries Book 1 will go on to buy the rest of the series, but lots of people do. This month, April, is a slower sales month for me. It’s been a couple of months since I released anything (and that was my sequel to Encrypted, a novel with some fans but one that never sold as well as my core series), and it’s also been a couple of months since I had a big boost from running an ad on a popular site. I did run an add on a small site earlier this month, but it only resulted in a few hundred extra downloads of my free book. That said, I’ll still sell 400+ ebooks a month across my EE titles this month.

If people enjoy your books and if you keep the publish-and-plug cycle going, you’ll continue to have readers in different parts of your series, and sales will continue to trickle in. The longer you’ve been publishing and the more fans you have who spread the word, the more of those steady trickle-in sales you’ll get. As long as your book continues to sell, Amazon and the other sites will continue to help you, too, with your books appearing in other authors’ also-boughts and in personalized email recommendations.

I expect May to be a good sales month for me, because I’ll have a new EE book out. As I already pointed out, nothing helps more than releasing a new book, especially in a series that’s already proven itself. The great thing about independent e-publishing is that you can find out quickly which of your books/series are most popular and have the most potential to bring home the bacon each month. Those are the ones you probably want to focus most of your energy on. This doesn’t mean you can never branch out and try new things (it may be the next adventure that really takes off, after all), but I believe that having a series like that is key to getting to a point where you can rely on your book-publishing income month after month.

Do you have any thoughts on this topic (some extra tips for people?) or questions? Let us know in the comments!

Of all the questions I get in regard to writing, marketing, and publishing, the ones on law and taxes are the ones I’m least likely to have a clue about. I still can’t help you with taxes, but I have someone here today to answer common questions on copyright, contracts, and other legal topics related to books and publishing.

Attorney Laura Kirwan, who specializes in literary and publishing law, practices here in the Phoenix area and maintains a blog that should be helpful for authors all over the U.S.

Hey Laura, thanks for stopping by! Let’s start with this one… What are some of the pitfalls self-publishing authors should look out for?

The biggest mistake I see self-published authors make is not taking their work seriously enough, particularly with e-books.  Just because you’re self-published, the reader is not going to give you a pass on typos and misspellings and sloppy editing.  And they likely aren’t going to give you a second chance to convince them to buy another book.

As a self-published author, you’re not just an author.  You’re also a publisher.  So you need to understand the business side of things and act like a business owner.  Successful business owners understand the industry in which they operate and take good care of their customers.  They honor their obligations.  They hire help when they need it.  They sweat the details.

At a bare minimum, you need to pay for a good line editor. If you start making money, you need an accountant not just for tax prep, but for financial and tax planning.  And if you don’t understand any agreements you run across, hire a lawyer.  It’s not a divorce, it won’t cost $30,000.  An experienced lawyer can review a contract, tell you where the problems are and help you negotiate a better deal and it generally won’t cost you more than a few hundred bucks.

I’m an author, too.  I know what goes into writing.  There’s that Ernest Hemmingway quote about sitting at the typewriter and opening a vein.  You’ve put energy and love and tears and untold hours into your work.  You’ve built a world.  Don’t cheap out and starve it to death on the publication side.

Do you need to file a copyright in order to protect your work?

You hold the copyright to your work as soon as you create it.  Copyright registration isn’t required to create or maintain your copyright, but it’s a good practice.  It creates a public record of your ownership of the work and it provides some specific benefits in the event you have to sue someone for copyright infringement.  I have more detailed information on copyright registration, as well as how copyrights are created and how to use a copyright notice on my website.

What about ISBNs? Most e-bookstores (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, etc.) don’t require them for ebooks, and Smashwords provides a free one. Createspace also provides one for paperbacks. Are these okay to use or should you buy your own?

Legally, it won’t affect your copyright to get your own ISBN or use one provided by book production companies like Smashwords or Createspace.  There’s no legal significance to an ISBN.  It’s an inventory management tool.  So, despite the more hysterical claims I’ve run across on the internet, using a book printing company’s free ISBN by itself does not grant that company any rights in your work.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t sign your rights away in a contract you enter with them.  So, again read and understand every contract before you sign it.  That includes the one you click through on the company’s website when you sign up with them.

So, it’s really more about the appearance of it. One of the reasons I want to self-publish is I want to maintain control over my work.  I don’t want someone else to pick my cover or my title or tell me to change the names of my characters, etc.  (A lawyer and a control freak.  Go figure.)  I want to self-publish.  Which makes me the publisher.

ISBNs get dramatically cheaper the more you buy, you can hold onto them and use them as you need them, and you can write them off as a business expense.  To, me it’s worth the expense and a sign to the rest of the industry that I take myself seriously as a business owner and an author.

If we get popular as authors, we’ll be approached by agents and publishers. Can you talk about when or why we might want to hire a lawyer instead of an agent?

It’s not an either/or decision.  Lawyers and agents serve different roles and can help you in different ways.  The one time when you absolutely need a lawyer instead of an agent is when you’re reviewing a proposed agency agreement.  I heard an agent say at a writing conference that his agreement was on his website and if he decided to represent you he’d be happy to sit down with you before you sign it and explain what it means.

And my lawyer bells started ringing. His duty of care to you does not begin until the agreement is signed.  Which makes it a conflict of interest for him to advise you on it. What an agent should tell you is that you should review the agreement with an attorney before signing it. (That agent I mentioned? His agreement basically lets him, and his heirs, collect a commission on any deals you make even remotely related to the original book for the life of the copyright.  Ouch.)

Agents get paid on commission.  So they have strong incentive to fight hard to get you the best deal they can.  The good ones, and most are, represent you because they believe, often passionately, in your work and your talent. Lawyers, at least the kind that you’d want to hire for this sort of work, generally get paid by the hour. They may not fall in love with or even read your book and they get paid about the same regardless of the deal you reach.  They’re going to take a dispassionate and skeptical look at the proposed deal.  They’re going to ask questions you and your agent never even considered. Lawyers are trained to spot potential problems and legal potholes. A good lawyer is skilled at imagining the myriad and spectacular ways your deal can go sideways, and help you avoid them.

And there’s more to a publishing contract than just the publishing stuff.  An agent can guide you on the intricacies of subsidiary rights and royalties.  But your agent is probably not going to be quite as adept at explaining what the term “indemnify, defend and hold harmless” means.  Think of the agent as the substantive editor and the lawyer as the line editor.  They bring different eyes to the project and will help you in different ways.

What if approached by publishers in other countries who want to negotiate for foreign rights on our books? Agent? Lawyer? Do it ourselves?

Well, I’m kind of biased but I think you should always have a lawyer involved when you’re entering into a deal to sell any of your rights whether you have an agent or not.  Not necessarily for the negotiation stage but to review the contract.

If you want to seek out buyers for your foreign rights, then an agent experienced in that area can be a big help.  If you already have an agent, you need to look at your agent agreement and see what it says about negotiating foreign rights.   Have your lawyer review whatever contract the purchaser provides or have your lawyer draft the contract if the purchaser doesn’t provide one.

If you don’t have an agent and you receive a foreign rights offer, or know how to shop for one yourself, then you don’t need to go out and find an agent.  A knowledgeable copyright attorney can help you negotiate the terms of the deal and prepare or review the paperwork.

Thanks, Laura!

If you guys have any more lawyer-esque questions, please leave them below, and I’ll try to get Laura to pop in and respond.