I wanted to sell fifty books. That had been my big goal.
In the Spring of 2007 I had finished writing Wintertide and no one showed any
interest in reading it. No one. Not a soul had read a word of Emerald Storm even though that book had
taken me almost two years to write (the process interrupted part way due to the
move to DC,) and had been finished for six months. At the same time my first
agent had stopped emailing me. Hadn’t heard a word on her search for a publisher
in almost a year. My hope of getting published, which had seemed so possible a
year and a half before (when I signed with the agent), was quickly fading.
All of that was deflating, but what put me into a depression
was that even my wife hadn’t read the books. She’d stopped after Nyphron Rising
two years before. She was working hard and just didn’t have the time.
I didn’t want to say anything. I saw it as supremely
selfish. She was struggling to keep food on our table and a roof over our heads.
Robin was stressed and I couldn’t complain that she didn’t read my stupid
books. She noticed I was growing more and more miserable as spring came on and
eventually coaxed out the truth.
Discovering that my agent had suspended her business due to
personal problems and that traditional publishing had already rejected The Crown Conspiracy, my wife suggested
we try self publishing. This was crazier than it seems.
Some new authors have complained how hard it is to become
successful in self-publishing today as opposed to “the old days” like when I
started. But in the summer of 2007 the Kindle didn’t exist. Ebooks were mostly
unknown. Self published novels were known
to be the product of vanity presses, the foolish and egotistical result of
talentless hacks. Success stories in self-publishing were insanely rare and
usually restricted to non-fiction. This was the bottom—the place authors went
to die.
We hired WendyJo Dymond, an editor we found on the Internet
(who I was very pleased with.) I created a CGI cover of a dagger and a crown in
a puddle of blood, and laid out the book for print. We even scrapped the cash
together for a print run of 300 books that arrived right around Christmas time
at the end of 2007 while I was busy writing Percepliquis.
Robin was educating herself on how to get reviews, how to get the books into
bookstores, and how to use social media to promote. There were no guides, no
books, no websites on self publishing back then. We had to figure it out on our
own and invent stuff. Then Robin asked me what our goal ought to be. How many
books did she have to sell for me to feel I had achieved a level of success.
“Fifty,” I replied. I thought I was being ridiculous
shooting for the moon, asking for the impossible, and just to be really mean I
added. “Fifty to strangers, not
family or friends.”
“I can do that,” she said smugly.
I wasn’t at all certain she could. Such was the state of
self-publishing in 2007.
Those original 300 books are still in my closet because on
January 1st 2008, we found the email from AMI saying they wanted to publish me
and the notion of self-pubbing was abandoned. Instead Robin used her newly
acquired wealth of knowledge to hold free seminars to help others taking that
path.
Given my goal of selling fifty books, I was thrilled to sell
out the first print run of 2200 Crowns
that AMI printed. This was success in my eyes—huge success. I was pretty
content. And sales continued to rise as more of the series was published even
after AMI was out of the picture and we finally did self-publish. I was so
pleased I walked with a swagger. I had done it, I had achieved the impossible.
The thing is…I didn’t know what was possible.
I don’t think most new authors do.
When you write a book you hope to get published. You hope to
sell several thousand copies. Ten thousand would be fantastic, because most
books don’t sell that many. If you managed to achieve this, you figure that’s
it, that’s all that can reasonably be expected. Sure there’s always the
far-fetched dream of a movie deal, but that’s like winning the lottery. No sane
person ever thinks someone will actually make a movie from their book. So if
you sell several thousand copies, you’re done. Time to write the next and hope
it does as well. That’s what I thought, but I was very ignorant as you’re about
to discover.
The first surprise came from foreign sales. I had some
overseas publishers approach me before I joined with Orbit. I didn’t think much
about them. I’d heard that overseas publishers didn’t pay anywhere near what a
US publisher did. And this is true. I think I got about $3,000 from my first
deal. What I overlooked was that there’s a lot of foreign countries in the
world. For some strange reason I never imagined how big that market was. Then
of course there was the Orbit deal. Something else I never thought would
happen.
So now that I landed Orbit and fourteen foreign overseas
deals, I figured I had finally squeezed out the last bit of toothpaste from
this tube. I was confident in my conclusion. I was also wrong.
Orbit got the audio rights when I signed with them. That is
to say, they had the right to sell them to an audio publisher. Of all the
venues, I figured audio was the weakest, so no big loss. I was concerned Orbit
might not bother to even make an audio book, but I’d live with that. As it
turned out they sold the rights to Recorded Books. Cool, I thought. So I have
an audiobook for the twenty-five people in the world who would be willing to
spend the $40 to buy it. I thought of it as a novelty, (is there a pun there?)
A few months ago I received a bonus check from Audible, who
sells my audiobooks. Robin and I were pleasantly surprised to get anything. We
did a little dance, because that’s just what you do at times like that.
Then this week something strange began to occur. My author
rating on Amazon improved dramatically. Since the inception of the Author Rank
(in October) I would fluctuate between 95 – 115 for FantasyAuthors (which meant
I was off the top 100 often). Then yesterday I was in the 50’s and today in the
40’s. We couldn’t figure it out. Sure, it was Christmas time. Okay so people
might be buying gifts. I had a podcast recently released. I was on a few
yearend lists and a few most anticipated books of 2013, but I found it odd that
any of this would take me from about 100 to 41. I was beating Neil Gaiman on
the Action & Adventure list!
This morning my wife finally sleuthed the mystery: audio books.
Like most authors, I—well okay, my wife does the looking and
reports to me—watch the Amazon lists for ebooks and print, and she also checks
in on the audible lists. I’m always doing fairly well on each. There was a time
during the lull in the summer when only the ebooks were still showing up on the
Historical Fantasy Bestsellers list. Then as fall approached my print sales improved
and both print and ebooks were there. Today all three of the audio books joined
them, and the audio for Theft of Swords
was at #4! Now that is strange.
Pick for 2012. So that might have been the reason. But a
little more digging showed that
Theft
also made two other lists:
The first one is the real shocker. My book is listed along
with titles by J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Vince Flynn, and Ken
Follett. As it turns out we completely underestimated the audio market. Theft of Swords now has 200 reviews on
Amazon. But—on Audible.com it has over 800 with an amazing 4.5 rating!
All I ever wanted was to sell fifty books. According to
royalty statements, unit ledgers, and including my self-pubbed numbers, I’ve now
sold over a quarter million. And that doesn’t include foreign language or…audiobooks.
Thank you Tim Gerald Reynolds (the narrator of my audio
books), thank you readers, AND listeners, and thank you audible for making
audio versions so popular. You’ve made this a very Merry Christmas.
