A lot of authors who read this blog (at least two out of three of them!) are publishing, often self-publishing, their first books. That’s a noble endeavor, but what if you’ve been writing for a while, and you have several books already published? What if they’re all related (i.e. stories in a series)? Maybe it’s time to look into putting together an omnibus.

That’s what I did a couple of weeks ago, publishing The Emperor’s Edge Collection on Amazon. It includes the first three novels in my fantasy series, and I decided on $7.99 for a price tag, so it’s a good deal for readers. So far, I’ve sold 50 copies, so it’s sales are low compared to my other novels, novellas, and short stories (though it is outselling my poor children’s story collection — it’s so hard to find 10-year-old readers with Kindles and the ability to buy from Amazon!). That said, 50 sales at $7.99 (putting a little over $5 in my pocket for each book) isn’t too shabby, especially considering I didn’t write anything new for the collection, meaning I didn’t need to pay for editing. Also the cover art and formatting costs were minimal (I got deals on both since we were just re-purposing existing covers/files), and I’ve already recouped those costs.

“Ah, but wait,” you say, “aren’t you cannibalizing your own sales with an omnibus? Aren’t the people who bought those books folks who would have purchased them individually?”

This is a valid point. My first ebook is free right now, so no loss there, but I sell EE2 and EE3 for $4.95 each (although, last I checked, Amazon had price-matched one of those down to $3.99 based on some slow-to-update store out there). Essentially, instead of making $5-something on the omnibus, I could make $6+ if people bought EE2 and EE3 separately.

I have no way to know for certain, but I suspect I am losing money on this deal, at least with the omnibus priced at $7.99 (I may raise the price down the line, especially if I ever “un-free” the first book). Based on earlier sales months, I know that a high percentage of the people who buy Book 2 go on to purchase the following books.

So, why do it?

Well, it’s a way to give the readers a deal, perhaps encouraging those who are on the fence about getting into the series, and it’s still a pretty good deal for me. Also, it gets people to buy the set today rather than the books one at a time tomorrow (if your situation is different than mine, and you don’t have a high percentage of people returning for the remaining books in the series, this may be a particularly good idea for you).

When does the omnibus really shine?

As you can see, with my EE books, creating an omnibus was more of a convenience for the readers than a big earner for me. But, there are instances, especially with e-publishing, where it can be super smart to create an omnibus.

The next one I’m going to put together is a three-story collection of my Flash Gold novellas. Because those are shorter than my novels, I sell them at 99 cents (although the first is free right now), $1.79, and $2.99. The last one, which is the longest at 43,000 words, is the only one that earns the 70% royalty rate at Amazon. I earn $2 on a sale of that one, but I only earn 35 and 60 cents respectively on the first two adventures, because ebooks priced under $2.99 receive a 35% royalty rate.

When I release the novella omnibus, I’ll likely sell it at $3.99 or $4.95 (we’ll see if the first one is still free then). Again, this will be a deal for the reader, who will be getting the word-count equivalent of a full-length novel, but then I’ll be earning the 70% royalty on the whole collection of stories.

The best possible scenario is when all three of your stories (or however many you want to combine) are selling individually for less than $2.99, thus forcing you into the 35% royalty rate. Combine them to get into the 70% rate, and you’ll be making significantly more on your omnibus.

A sneakier tactic to sell more omnibus editions?

As I mentioned, I didn’t write anything new for my omnibus. I didn’t want readers who had already purchased the books individually to feel compelled to buy the collection as well to get new material.

However, that is precisely the strategy many publishers pursue, no doubt to great effect. I know I’ve purchased omnibus editions of books by favorite authors because of new essays or stories tucked into the collection. If you don’t want to worry about an omnibus cannibalizing your other book sales, this may be a tactic to try, as you might get people who already purchased the books individually coming to grab the collection. Granted, you’d need a fan base built up, one that’s into your world/characters to the extent that they’d pay to get their hands on extras, even if it meant double-purchasing some stories.

It’s up to you to decide if that’s something you want to try.

Is a multistory edition good for anthologies and non-series collections too?

What if you don’t have the first three books in a series, but you have a collection of short stories that you’re selling at 99 cents a piece? Can you still take advantage of the higher royalty rate by combining them into one ebook anthology or collection?

The answer, of course, is yes, though you may have mixed results when it comes to sales. With a series, it’s more of an obvious buy for folks who like the sample and see that reviews are good for the rest of the books. With short story collections, the more unrelated they are, the less they’re likely to appeal as a collection.

You can always give it a try, though, and see how it goes. If you format your own ebooks and can splice together existing covers to make a new one, you needn’t pay anybody anything to put together works that have already been edited. Even if you only end up selling 10 or 20 copies a month at $2.99+, that might end up earning you more than selling individual tales for 99 cents.

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So, readers and authors, what are your thoughts on the ebook anthology/omnibus? A good deal for all or do you prefer working with individual titles?

Success is one of those words that means different things to different people. For the sake of this blog post, I’m going to define success as “meeting or exceeding your goals,” whether that means making such-and-such amount of money a year, being read by X number of people, or simply putting out a finished book that makes you proud. That said, I know a lot of people dream of writing for a living, so these tips may slant things in that direction.

Note: this short list doesn’t mention cover art, editing, formatting, blurb-writing or any of the basics that have been discussed here and elsewhere before. I’m going assume you’ve already read that advice.

3 Tips for Self-Publishing Success

1. Hone your writing skills before you publish

In the early days of e-publishing, there wasn’t a lot of competition in the Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc. stores, and some people made it big largely because they got in early with decent stories or were the first to price their ebooks at 99 cents. By the time I came on the scene at the end of 2010, it was starting to get more competitive, with many more offerings in the e-stores. So many people were pricing their books at 99 cents that this was no longer a way to stand out. Today there are even more self-published and traditionally published authors with ebooks at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

What does this mean?

You can’t just be there with a pretty cover and an attractively priced ebook — everybody has that. Perhaps as always should have been the case, the writing has to stand out.

Give yourself every advantage by honing your writing and storytelling skills before you publish your first book. I found online writers’ workshops to be a wonderful way to learn. Others prefer to take classes and/or to read books on the craft.

Whatever you can do, it behooves you treat writing as you would any other career. You have to study, to practice, and to get feedback from others before you’re ready to hang out your shingle.

You don’t have to be the best writer in the class (or workshop) to go on to make a living. I was sure never the type to win awards or contests. But, hey, sometimes the ones with the most talent are the ones who never make it. Be willing to keep learning and adapting, and don’t underestimate the power of the will to succeed.

2. Figure out what your unfair advantage is and exploit it

In the process of enduring this apprenticeship period, you’ll probably learn what you’re good at when it comes to writing. It’ll be partly based on your enjoyment of said thing and partly based on the positive feedback you get from peers and mentors (OMG, William, you write the best fight scenes!).

Maybe you have a knack for creating creepy horror scenes that keep people turning the page. Maybe you can craft characters that feel real and are so fun that readers enjoy hanging out with them. Maybe you write dialogue that would make Joss Whedon smile in appreciation.

Whatever it is, it’s up to you to identify this natural aptitude and use it to make your stories stand out from the competition. Example? Well, in my case, I love to write dialogue. I once had an English teacher suggest I look into screenwriting. I’m not the best at world-building, action scenes, or arranging the prose in a pretty way on the page, but I believe my characters and dialogue are strong points. So, I take advantage of that strength. I build scenes in such a way that my characters can interact with each other a lot. It’s rare for me to send a character off alone for more than a few pages, because I know the story is more entertaining when my heroes are doing things together. In other words, I believe a knack for writing characters and dialogue is my “unfair advantage,” meaning it’s something I can do in a unique way that other writers might struggle with (just as I struggle when called upon to create awesome, original worlds or to pen epic battles).

As we talked about, it’s a competitive market out there right now, so it makes sense to figure out what you’re good at and use that to your advantage.

3. Have an attitude of gratefulness instead of one of entitlement

I’m not one to talk about mindset a lot, and you’ll never catch me writing self-help books, but, based on comments I see on people’s blogs and social media channels, I think a lot of authors set themselves up for failure by feeling that they deserve a readership just because they wrote a book. Writing a book is the beginning of the journey, not the end, so here’s a rare mindset piece from me:

The wrong attitude

What, I only sold seven books this month? I went on blog tours, I handed out flyers, I tweeted a zillion times, and I bought sponsorships. I sent twenty review copies out, and I gave away free samples. This game is so rigged. All the successful people are only selling well because they got in early. So-and-so doesn’t deserve to be a best-seller. I’ve read his/her book, and it sucks. If the people that read those sucky books just read my book, they’d realize how great it is, and I’d be a best-seller.

The right attitude

Seven complete strangers bought my book this month? Holy smokes, that rocks! What can I do to make sure their experience is great? Maybe I can post some extras on my blog or give away some signed paperbacks. Maybe if I keep writing good books and continue to develop my skills as an author, even more people will give my work a chance. If I work my a$$ off, maybe in a few years I’ll have earned a readership large enough to support me as a full-time writer.

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Do you agree or disagree with any of my tips? Or would you like to add some of your own? Feel free to do so in the comments!

Last week, we looked at reasons why new, independent authors often feel they need to price their novel-length ebooks at 99 cents (and why they probably shouldn’t). Perhaps as a backlash against all those 99-cent ebooks, and the fact that some readers may assume cheaper novels mean inferior novels, some self-published authors are heading off in the other direction. They’re bumping prices up to Big 6 rates of $7.99 and above.

I sell my Emperor’s Edge fantasy novels for $4.95 (with the first one free), and I feel that’s a fair price all around. They’re full-length novels (over 100,000 words each), so readers get the equivalent of 400-500 paperback pages for $5, and, since I’m an indie and get the 70% royalty, I earn about $3.30 per sale.

The last I heard, traditionally published authors were averaging around 25% of that 70% on ebook sales, and then 15% of that number goes off to the agent. I’m too lazy to do the math, but I know that’s less than $3 per book, even on an ebook that sells for $8 or $9 instead of $5. This is part of why I feel like I can afford to price my ebooks at lower rates than the Big 6 (and because I’m currently selling enough to make a living at the $4.95 price).

Not everybody feels that way though. Some independent authors believe that $7.99 or $8.99 is a fair price, since that’s what the big boys charge. (Though, interestingly, the ebooks Amazon publishes under its own imprints tend to be in the $3.99 and $4.99 range; there are lots of news stories out there about how they’re trying to drive ebook prices down, and they seem to be leading by example with their own authors.)

I’m not going to say there’s anything wrong with indie authors charging more for ebooks (hey, if it’s working for you, go for it), but I’d be curious to hear what others think, both readers and authors.

How much is too much?

• Readers, what’s a fair price for a novel-length ebook, what’s less fair (but not so unfair that you wouldn’t buy), and what’s unreasonable?
• Self-published authors, do you feel that your novels should sell for the same price as Big 6 published ebooks? Or do you feel that the higher royalty you receive means you can make your books more affordable?

In case anyone is wondering, no, I’m not planning on raising the prices on my own novels (no matter what the results are of this informal poll). I just thought we might get some helpful feedback for those who are deciding on a pricing model for their work.

Pricing is one of the most hotly debated topics in the e-publishing world. Traditional publishers and self-publishers alike are trying to figure the magic number for ebooks, and the big kahunas (i.e. Amazon) are applying pressure by making it more lucrative (offering a 70% royalty rate) for those who price their ebooks between $2.99 and $9.99.

Despite the appeal of that 70% royalty rate, a lot of new independent authors choose to sell their full-length novels for 99 cents. Why? This is what I usually see as the reason:

I’m an unknown author so I need to price my ebook at 99 cents to get people to give it a try.

Let’s talk about this idea today. As long-time readers will know, I’m not against 99-cent or even free novels, but I tend to recommend that to those who have multiple ebooks out and can use that price as part of an overarching marketing plan. For example, giving away the first ebook in your four-book series for free might earn you far greater sales on Books 2, 3, and 4 than if you’d simply priced all of the adventures at $3.99.

So, why don’t I recommend 99 cents when you only have one ebook out (or when your novels aren’t related)?

Because of the way Amazon and Barnes & Noble offer royalties, your per-book earnings are going to be mediocre on anything less than $2.99. For a 99 cent ebook, you bring home 35 cents per sale. Unless you’re able to leap up to a sub-1,000 sales ranking on Amazon (selling hundreds, if not thousands of copies a day), that money is going to take a long time to add up.

You also may deal with the stigma that some folks associate with “cheap” ebooks. Even if there’s not a lot of truth to it in the e-publishing world, people have been trained to associate low prices with inferior products.

How do I get around that with my free first book? It’s possible that I don’t entirely, but if you check out the book’s Amazon page, you’ll see that it’s free via price-matching, so the regular price appears to be $4.95. Because the price and Kindle price are both listed ($4.95 and $0.00 respectively), people think they’re getting a deal on a product that’s usually priced higher. People love deals like that (think Costco — good deals on otherwise expensive “luxury” items). I may put my book back up to $4.95 eventually, but right now I’m choosing to leave it “on sale” because that’s increased my earnings overall.

Okay, I’ve given a couple of reasons why selling your ebook for 99 cents may not be optimal, but I haven’t yet addressed the part about being an unknown author.

The “But I’m an Unknown Author” Argument

This is common thinking, but, really, we’re all someone else’s “unknown” author.

One of my favorite authors is Lois McMaster Bujold, a lady who’s been publishing smart, character-driven science fiction and fantasy since the early 80s. She’s won heaps of awards, including the coveted Hugo. She sells well enough that her back-list has remained in print, and you can find at least a few of her books in any bookstore. I can’t tell you how many times I mention her to other SF/F fans only to find out they’ve never heard of her. This is an established, traditionally published author with over 20 books out.

I recently asked my mom, an avid mystery/thriller reader, if she’d tried anything by thriller author JA Konrath (see my post discussing his $140,000 earnings month). She’d never heard of him, despite his traditional publishing career and his infamous indie fame of the last couple of years.

The point is that 99.9% of the traditionally published authors out there are unknowns to a lot of readers, even readers in their own genres. Very few self-published authors have achieved measurable fame either. But you know what? They still sell. Authors in both camps are doing this for a living, some a very good living.

Please don’t bargain price your book because you think you have to. If you have a few reviews on your book sales page, a professional-looking cover, an interesting (preferably typo-free blurb), and strong sample pages, you’re ready to compete with any other author in the e-store.

Sure, you may have to bust your buns a little to get those first 5-10 reviews on your book page (I got a lot of my early reviews through giveaways on forums, Twitter, and through doing book blog tours — some of the tour hosts would choose to read and review the book as part of posting about it), but after that you’ll be on even playing ground with a lot of 20-year veterans, at least at first blush. All the reviews don’t even have to be glowing, so don’t sweat that. As many folks will tell you, people often trust reviews more when they’re not all 5 stars. Just look at how many one-star reviews the popular authors have. That doesn’t keep people from buying their books!

In the beginning, it’s hard to make sales at any price point (as they say, obscurity is our biggest enemy). Try not to get discouraged (I know, always easier said than done). You often have to hand-sell (via Twitter, your blog, blog tours, forum posts, Facebook, etc.) your first 1,000 copies. After that, on Amazon at least, the store’s algorithms tend to start helping you out, automatically recommending your title to readers in your genre and also showing your books in other authors’ “also bought”s.

Of course, as we discussed on that post about full-time independent authors, the best thing is usually not to worry too much about that first book or two and to instead write, write, write and get more work out there.

Early on in my e-publishing career (ya know, last year), I realized there was no reason to limit oneself to full-length novels when it comes to ebooks. In the print world, the economics of book binding might dictate that stories need to be at least 60,000 words long to make sense, but in the digital world… they can be any length at all. Because of that, I e-published some of my short stories and started a series of novellas, but one thing I haven’t experimented with (yet) is serialization. That may change one day, as quite a few authors are giving it a try, and it’s working well.

A couple of months ago, indie fantasy author Gregory J. Downs gave us a guest post on Finding Success with Serialized Ebooks. Today, we have a great interview with W. Brondt Kamffer, another fantasy author who’s hitting the best-seller lists with his serialized story. I’ve known Brondt through Twitter and his blog for about a year, and I’ve watched him try to find the magic bullet of book promotion that would increase his sales. It didn’t seem to be happening with his first series, but I checked the fantasy Top 100 at Amazon the other day and noticed his new ebooks were all over it! Here’s the story of how he’s made that happen…

Interview with W. Brondt Kamffer

You’ve been e-publishing for a year or two now, I believe, and have a few books out there, but it’s your new series that’s really taken off. Do you want to tell us about your books and what you’re doing differently this time around?

Thanks for the public forum, Lindsay, to share my journey. I’ve just passed my first anniversary as an indie author. 2011 was a very rocky road for me, very discouraging on the whole. I released three full-length novels between April and July and did all the required promoting that came with choosing to self-pub, but I never saw more than a dozen to a score sales in a month. I had an active blog, a podcast targeted to a fantasy audience, an active Twitter account, ads on Goodreads, a free novella on Amazon. None of it was doing a thing to shift books; not even the freebie!

In September I began writing the book that would eventually become The Scion of Abacus with the intent to publish the story in two parts, split evenly down the middle, at about 105,000 words a piece. And then I read about the success that Gregory Downs was having, as well as Sean Platt and David Wright. The thing these writers had in common was that they had chosen to publish their novels as serials. This got me thinking.

I was very busy teaching in the Fall of 2011, and so I made slow progress on my own novel, slow enough that I had plenty of time to think about splitting the story from a duology into a six-part serial. I figured that since nothing else I’d tried had worked thus far, I would give the serial format a shot, hoping that the regular release schedule offered by shorter volumes might generate some interest.

I was tired of and burnt out on Twitter. I’d slowed down on my blog and podcast. I’d long since given up any form of paid advertizing. All I had were plans for a serial and a feeling that I’d simply go ahead and see what would happen.

As expected, month one, with only one volume out, was slow, with maybe ten copies selling. Month two saw some increase in sales with two volumes and some KDP free days, up to about 300 copies sold. But the real kick off came at the release of volume three. My previous novels had seldom delved below the 50,000 rank on Amazon. With the release of volume three of The Scion of Abacus, the serial began to live in the sub-30,000 zone. And then sub-20,000. And then sub-10,000. When volume one hit 5,000, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

And then I released part four. The series’ sales had accumulated in some sort of snowball effect, all without a single ounce of marketing. No Twitter announcements. No ads. No posts on Kindleboards. I signed up for KDP Select, and I think that helped a little, but downloads on free days never totaled more than about 200 a day. Now, I’m selling many more books than that in a day. It was a gamble born out of frustration, and like many before, I seem to have gotten lucky at last.

What made you decide to serialize your latest book? Do you want to talk a bit about length and how you’re breaking things up? Are you leaving people hanging with cliffhangers?

As mentioned, I’d read about the success a couple of authors were having with the format. I was frustrated at seeing no success with my previous books, and so I decided to try something radically different.

The structure of my story lent itself nicely to a six-part division. I had in mind a single novel in two volumes with a standard three-part structure for each part. Interestingly, the moment I decided to go with six volumes, the divisions presented themselves immediately. There are cliff-hangers, but in many ways each volume stands alone at the same time as being intricately connected to the previous and following ones. This is, after all, really still a single long novel. This allows me to control revelations in a timely manner, giving the reader enough information to want to read the next volume while at the same time providing a complete mini story arc per volume.

As soon as I decided where the divisions would go, I realized that each volume would be close in length. It took a little bit of rewriting to get volumes to near-identical lengths, a commitment I made to myself and future, hypothetical readers as I did not wish any volume to seem lighter than the rest—ironically, all bad reviews either on Amazon or by email have complained about volumes getting shorter, when in reality they have been getting longer. The story must getting better the deeper things get!

So each volume turns in at about 35,000 words, which, depending on your Word font, is 100 to 140 pages, a nice and hefty chunk of story every month. Oh yeah, the other thing folks complain about—and was anticipated—is having to wait four weeks for the next installment, but I take that as a good complaint to receive!

Would you like to talk about your pricing strategy? It looks like you’ve made the first part of the series free at Amazon and others are 99 cents and 1.99.

I thought about this one for a long time. I decided on 99c initially because I thought that was all I should charge for what was essentially an incomplete portion of a whole. An early reader emailed me, when only volume one was out, to say he’d be willing to pay more per volume. This was encouraging, but I was hardly ready to change things up. I made the final decision to charge more for volumes four through six only after part one had cracked rank 5,000 on Amazon. I figured that folks might be willing to pay more to see the end of the story.

Some folks have not reacted well to the decision, but as soon as I’ve explained that the length (well over 200,000 words) is roughly that of two novels and that $4.50 is not so unreasonable for a novel [(99x3)+(1.99x3)=8.94/2=$4.47], those complaints have generally melted away. I have enrolled the individual volumes in KDP Select to make books free on occasion, but I’ve used the program sparingly after the first two months, as I was not getting much in the way of downloads.

I remain slightly unsettled about my pricing strategy, knowing that I am inviting criticism, but it seems not to have affected sales at all, as part four sells equally as well as parts two and three, which are a little bit behind the first volume overall.

You have simple but striking cover art for The Scion of Abacus series (and I notice you’ve redone your old covers too). Do you think that’s played a role in your success?

It is possible. I changed the covers of the old books to coincide with the release of The Scion of Abacus, opting for a more stylized cover art. I design my own covers, so I had to really think long and hard, playing around with various effects, looking at popular novels, etc. I have never entirely bought the argument that a good cover is essential, though, as I have seen some pretty horrendous covers on best-selling indie novels. That being said, I certainly don’t think the covers have hurt. Perhaps they are part of the overall formula that found success.

Are you planning to release an omnibus edition of the series once all the smaller pieces are published? Any thoughts on how you’ll price that?

I do plan to release an omnibus, and I am even contemplating using Createspace to make hard copies available too, though I’m undecided at this point. Regarding price, I am still mulling this one over, as I’d like to come up with a price incentive to buy the omnibus over the individual volumes. Your author audience with understand the financial concerns here, as I need to balance price for the consumer with royalties earned. The good thing about the state of indie publishing is the ease with which an author can change the price of his or her books. If whatever I decide to charge initially fails to shift volumes, I can always experiment with lower price points.

Lastly, would you like to talk about future projects or is there anything else you’d like to share with readers?

Given the success I’ve met with the serial format, I am planning on my next project to be in a similar vein, though not identical. I have plotted out what I’m calling a trilogy of trilogies. Essentially, I plan three long novels each about the size of The Scion of Abacus, each of which I will write in three distinct and smaller parts, bringing the final count to a total of nine shorter volumes. Volumes will necessarily be longer than the current 35,000 but a great deal shorter than the standard 100,000.

But, at the end of the day, it all comes down to two things, as I see it: Regular releases keep your name in the readers’ minds, and publishing really is a total crap shoot.

To the first I would say that I feel the serial model offers an interesting opportunity for success by creating regular releases for the audience. Your name never gets old and always shows up in the new releases section in the Kindle store. That being said, this is still no remedy for a poor story, and it does take some amount of planning and a lot of foresight to make it work. But regular seems to be a real key.

Regarding the second point, as I’ve said, I do no promotion anymore whatsoever. In fact, the moment I stopped promoting, I started selling better, and I’m pretty sure I was not one of those obnoxious self-pubbed types we all hear horror stories about. But the real point is this: If your books are not selling for whatever reason, don’t be afraid to throw the baby out with the bathwater (yes, you read that right!) and opt for a completely different approach.

Thanks, Brondt! Best wishes for your continued success!

If you want to learn more about Brondt, or try his books, you can pick them at Amazon, or stop by his website for more information.