Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: self-publish

Marketing Monday

March 17, 2021 /
Raether's Amazon Ad

Raether’s Amazon Ad

“So, you have a new novel for me?”

“Yes, sir, I do. It’s a thriller/sci-fi/superhero mash-up with an amazing premise, a smart, sensitive hero, bounty hunters, dogs, aspiring supervillains, monsters, hackers, magic, secret identities, gunfights, and a cure for cancer!”

“Wow-wow-wow!”

Raether’s Enzyme is a story I like. The design of the paperback and eBook are excellent. Readers from my circle of family and friends enjoyed it and wanted to talk about it. I remain confident that there are many more people out there who would like it too, but that confidence is largely a matter of faith.  Sales so far have been scant, but the handful of ratings that have trickled in have been good.

The new challenge is to connect my book with readers who might enjoy it. The name of the discipline that encompasses this endeavor is: marketing. I am now consciously incompetent at marketing.

Cosmic Justice

I spent most of my adult life being unconsciously incompetent at marketing, and proudly so. As an engineer, I disdained the marketing department. They were foolish, superficial people who brought nothing but confused “customer requirements”, suspect “market research”, and undue authority to the product development process. Any failure of our efforts in the marketplace were obviously attributable to the gross incompetence of the marketing department. It is right there in both words: market. Case closed. Engineers rule. Marketing people drool. Any Dilbert fan knows this.

Yeah. About that…

Now that I am responsible for both producing the product and marketing it, I regret my former arrogance and apologize to any marketers out there who are reading this. I’m sorry. I should have had more empathy and respect for the people who work hard to identify potential customers and divine their wants and needs. I should have been more curious about how that side of a business works. Having failed in these ways, I have made a thing—a good thing—without a plan or clue as to how I might show the right people that it exists. There are infinitely many ways to fail at marketing and a small number of ways to succeed. My inability to tell the difference may doom my book to obscurity. If I can’t up my game to a baseline of conscious competence (or get very, very lucky), I fear that I will have squandered the contributions of the friends and collaborators who helped Raether’s Enzyme get this far. I will own these manifold failures from end-to-end. It will be my own damn fault.

Beyond doom and gloom

Recognizing you have a problem is the first step to solving it. As a young engineer, my next step would have been to come up with my own definition of the problem and set about solving it. Asking an actual customer for their input would only have constrained my immense creativity and innovation. As a more mature person working in a domain where I am consciously incompetent, I knew that I would need to learn, experiment, and fail repeatedly to make progress. In the months since Raether’s release, I have divided my time between marketing tasks, drafting The Gray God, and playing Cyberpunk 2077. I won’t claim to have found the optimal balance here, but I have committed one day each week to turning the learn-experiment-fail crank. I call it: Marketing Monday.

Learn

An older post offered a high-level, author’s-eye view of the landscape of the traditional publishing ecosystem as I understood it. I went with self-publishing. That landscape is similar, but there are distinct features that I should document at some point. For the purposes of this post, I’ll call out one such feature. I’m not sure if it fits my para-publishing or para-marketing categories. Let’s just say that there are many people out there who offer insight, advice, plans, and coaching for indie book marketing. Many, many people. Since I haven’t successfully employed any of their advice yet, I can’t make a recommendation as to who one should listen to or pay for. There are some common themes I’ve picked up on.

Marketing begins months before launch.

I launched Raether prematurely. I knew this at the time but didn’t want 2020 to find a way to kill me and/or destroy civilization before I had published at least one book. A prudent and planful book launch includes building buzz on your mailing list and social media, seeding influential reviewers with advance reader’s copies (ARCs), and other networking efforts. All of which require a marketing plan to identify receptive parties and shape advertising copy (which is an art distinct from fiction prose).

The Amazonian Gambit

Amazon wants to sell books. It doesn’t necessarily want to sell your book. If enough customers buy your book for it to rise in the sales and popularity ranks (in general and within the book’s category), your book will earn a position of visibility to book browsers. It falls to the indie author to bring readers to Amazon for your book or to find readers within Amazon via well-placed Amazon advertisements. Making the latter work requires insight, a bit of data science, a good cover, and a great blurb. Marketing and sales stuff. Raether has a good cover. I am working on the rest.

The insights you need include a list of books and authors whose readers are likely to enjoy your book. This list allows you to bid for ad placement on the pages for your targeted books. Then, if your cover is good and your tagline is great, a reader might just click on that sponsored product link and consider your book as well. These kindred books may also lead to further insights as to how to best categorize your book. ‘Thriller’ is a broad category. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense\Thrillers & Suspense\Technothrillers is a more specific category that gets you closer to readers who like a little science and technology in their thriller. Fortunately for Raether, which includes elements of thriller and science fiction (in the most general ‘what-if?’ sense), Amazon will let you file your book under multiple categories.

Amazon will also let you associate keywords with your book. These are invisible to customers but not to Amazon’s search engine, which may use them when a customer isn’t searching for a particular book but is in the market for a story with a ‘strong female lead’ or ‘dystopian fiction for adults.’  You only get to assign seven keywords to your book in KDP’s self-publishing system, but you can use many more in an advertising campaign. Picking keywords starts with your own ideas as to what readers might be looking for when they don’t yet know they want to read your book. You should test your ideas by searching for them on Amazon and seeing if your book fits in with the rest of the results. Alternately, tools like PublisherRocket will mine Amazon for you. This process may result in additional insights regarding similar books and authors.

With the right categories and keywords, you can, in theory, become visible to readers. If some of them buy, enjoy, and rate/review your book, the odds of it creeping up the sales ranks improve.

Finding your book’s Facebook friends

Your friends read your book because they are interested in you. Who is inclined to be friends with your book? Advertising on Facebook is a test of how accurately you can describe your ideal reader. What age range do the fall in? What educational level do they have? What interests do they pursue? Those interests can be genres (categories), authors, or specific books. They can also be medieval Scotland or space exploration. Facebook will use its creepy insights into strangers’ lives to target your ad without those strangers having expressed a desire to buy a book about a medieval Scotsman travelling to Mars. On the plus side, you can reach readers who didn’t know they wanted a book like yours. On the downside, they may not be in the market because their to-read stack is already full, thank-you-very-much.

Organic crops are labor-intensive.

I confess that I harbored a ridiculous fantasy. I told myself it was nonsense but deep down I hoped that I’d tell two friends and they’d tell two friends, and the miracle of exponential growth would popularize my book by word-of-mouth. 100% organic success. I wouldn’t have to work for it and could put all my energy into the next project. This didn’t happen. Duh. Not that my friends let me down. They helped me and my book with generous plugs and the book launch was much stronger for their contributions. I am heartened and thankful.

The book marketing coaches say that authors—and new authors in particular—benefit from being recognized contributing members of bookish communities. If readers (and writers, who are also passionate readers) know who you are, you’re not some unknown author to them. If you’ve entertained, enlightened, or encouraged them, they already value what you write. This needs to be a long-term relationship. You can’t just parachute in, flood the zone, and pitch your book.

As someone who burned out on the dramas and politics of online communities before many people knew such things existed, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make this work.

Another approach is to build an author platform. Make yourself known as an interesting person. Your platform can consist of a blog, a podcast, a Facebook page, general recognition of your expertise, all of these, and more. Having earned an audience in this other domain, you have potential readers who will trust you when you say, “Hey, gang, I’ve got a book coming out. I think you’ll like it.”

Having a platform is critical to non-fiction authors. It answers a reader or publisher’s first question: “Who is this person and why should I care what they think?” Having a platform works for new fiction authors who can say something like: “If you’ve enjoyed my articles on medieval Scotland, check out new novel. It’s set in medieval Scotland.” Established fiction authors have their prior work to build their platform on.

As someone whose labored in obscure bowels of tech behemoths until recently, this platform thing has a chicken-and-egg flavor to it. Building the platform entails the same work as marketing my book.

Experiment

So far, my experiments have all been baby steps.

Raether Zero

The simplest Amazon ad campaign you can run is to set automatic targeting. Amazon will use your categories, keywords and whatever secret sauce seems appropriate. If a customer clicks on the ad, you pay for the click based on a bidding range you set. My automatically targeted campaign named Raether Zero generated 7,780 impressions (it was shown to that many customers), 7 clicks, no sales, and had cost me $15.85 by the time I turned it off and scratched my head. The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) was low and the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) was high. This can be attributed to poor placement or a bad ad. The problem is that the ad is the book cover and a short bit of text. I’m committed to the cover and will need to scratch my head some more to improve the tiny blurb the ad allows you to work with.

Raether’s Kindred Books

The next experiment involved targeting the ad at two books I think are related my story. Raether overlaps in style, setting, and plot elements with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. Raether’s dystopian aspects and concern with a young woman losing claim to her body relate it Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Perhaps readers interested in these successful books would show an interest in my unknown novel. 11,202 impressions, 16 clicks, no sales, and $10.73 later, the answer appears to be no. Again, it may be that the ad doesn’t cut it. It may be that the book itself, as reflected in the cover and short blurb, doesn’t appear to be relevant.

Rocket 1

After pouring through How to Market a Book and Amazon Decoded, I decided to revisit my book’s categories and keywords and build a new campaign with a longer list of keywords and targeted books. PublisherRocket was my friend here. It allowed me to quickly test new keyword candidates, explore the categories of related books, and cross-reference books, keywords, and categories. I launched Rocket 1 and turned it off after 2,819 impressions. Most of the keywords were generating no or few impressions. There were only two clicks. Back to the drawing board. I may start it up again after revisiting the ad blurb and fortifying the book’s page.

The first one’s free…

Facebook kindly offered me a $10 credit to apply to advertising for my page. I had prepared an ad based on the assets supplied by my designer prior to launch, so taking Fb up on this offer was easy. I set up a (crude) audience profile and pointed the ad at Raether’s page here on my blog. Seven hundred or so impressions later I had not one nibble. This could be my ad. Or the imprecision of my audience profile. Or both. Or neither. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I am deeply ambivalent about Facebook. I enjoy seeing the good things my friends and family choose to share. I understand that employing programmers and keeping the servers running costs money and that Facebook needs to make that money somewhere. It makes it by selling advertising opportunities based on its creepy insights into its users’ likes and lives. And that bugs me on a gut level. I haven’t made peace with engaging with the ads they show me. Does it make sense—is it even right—for me, with my attitudes, to pay them to insert my ads into strangers’ feeds? I haven’t solved this conundrum, so I’ve been ignoring Facebooks endless notifications about how I can improve traffic to my page with their ads. A $20 credit with my next $10 of ad spending is generous, but I don’t want to give them my credit card number.

I must move past these blocks if I’m going to use Facebook advertising. I’m told it can be quite effective.

Fail

I cannot correlate any of my advertising experiments with a single sale of my novel. Bummer.

If at first you don’t succeed…

Repeat

I plan learn more about modern indie book marketing and experimenting with these channels and others. I expect I’ll fail again. And again. And I’ll repeat the process as needed. I owe it to my book and that’s what one does on Marketing Monday.

Welcome to the World of Raether’s Enzyme

October 21, 2020 /

Raether’s Enzyme is now a book, a paperback that you can hold and an e-book that you can download to your devices.

  • Amazon (paperback and e-book – including Kindle Unlimited)
  • Your favorite bookstore can order the paperback from Ingram.
    (ISBN: 978-1-7351839-0-9)
  • The paperback can be ordered directly from IngramSpark!

Reaching this milestone required trial, error, work spanning many years, and the advice, encouragement, and support of my friends and family.  Talented editors and artists transformed my manuscript into an experience that surpassed my expectations.

Previous posts on this blog told the story of this book’s creation. The story of its life will be written by readers like you.

A Dream of Launching

October 20, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In The Prints of Proof, I resolved the burning question of which book design for Raether’s Enzyme to bring to market by creating paperback proof copies of each design. After studying the proofs and consulting with my trusted beta readers, I settled on one of the three excellent designs. Eager to get the book to market before the murder hornets descended on me, I uploaded the book’s files to Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark, and Smashwords. Hilarity ensued.

Covering my assets

With the great power of self-publishing comes great responsibility. Promoting my books is up me.  For my soft launch, I’ll be announcing the publication of Raether’s Enzyme on my social media. With a little luck, some of my friends, family, and will find the premise of the story interesting. Some of those good folks will enjoy the book enough to recommend it to their friends. Word-of-mouth will spread.

To reach readers beyond my social network, I need to advertise. The twenty-first century is awash in advertising opportunities. To put it mildly. Exploring and exploiting them requires ad media tuned to the various marketing channels. Facebook, Twitter, et al have idiosyncratic requirements for what makes optimal ads on their platforms. As I prepared to engage my designer’s talents, my research revealed that the number of ad formats was daunting. When you add the number of images required to fortify my web site, Facebook page, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, the project was too large. And any or all these requirements were subject to change without warning.

Rather than ask him to produce all the ads and artwork I would need, I asked him to set me up with graphical assets that I could combine and arrange for all the scenarios I was facing and might face over the life of Raether’s Enzyme. The cover art for Raether is amazing. The title typography is dramatic. The background is a fascinating biofluid texture. He provided me with the title in SVG vector form and extracted the biofluid from the cover art as a PNG file. To round out the package, he rendered the cover as a paperback book and on a tablet (for the e-book). These building blocks empower me to apply my (admittedly modest) Photoshop skills to build ads that play off the strengths of his cover designs.

Ad-ing it up

I set to work building the images I’d need to announce the publication. There wasn’t room for the full back cover blurb. I distilled it down to three sentences, two of them quite short. Putting them into the artwork, I hit my first speedbump. The back cover text is in a font called Thonburi. The only free-to-use version of Thonburi I could find for Windows is for Thai systems. The text of my English sentences rendered as fragments of Thai characters. After consulting with the designer, I settled on Franklin Gothic Medium for my ad copy.

I knocked out the ads and banners on my checklist with time left to pursue a stretch goal: producing a video teaser trailer. By default, I resent PC makers pre-installing third-party ‘bloatware’ on new computers. It’s mostly crap I don’t need or want. The nice folks at MSI preloaded PowerDirector14 on my machine and I’m happy they did. The free portion of its feature set was enough to do the job. The learning curve wasn’t too steep. Before long, I had combined my assets, a few transition effects, and sound effects from soundsnap to create an intriguing thirty second video that had the flavor of a movie trailer. Minus the epic “In a world…” voice.

I was pleased with myself. I downloaded it to my home theatre PC and watched it on my big screen over and over again. The final image features the mock book and tablet. After working on the ads and the video for days on end it finally hit me: a dreadful certainty that the paperback cover I had uploaded to Amazon KDP and IngramSpark was still too dark. It failed to deliver on the promise of the ads. It was one week before Raether’s scheduled launch and I had to fix the cover.

Re-cover-y

Looking back, it was clear that I had settled for a darker cover too readily. My frustration with the screen-to-print issues got the better of me. I should have worked through the problems with the aid of the designer and landed a version of the cover art that printed well back in September. I had run an experiment on my own with an enhanced version of the cover art and a matte cover, but abandon it because the matte finish made the biofluid look chalky. I needed to recreate those enhancements and make them work with the glossy cover finish that worked so well with the liquid theme of the art.

Prudence recommended contacting the designer to ask for a version of the cover with the enhancements I believed would rescue the art from the CMYK darkness. Pride, courtesy, and desperation argued against that. I owned the mistake so I should fix it. It would have been rude (and unprofessional) to interrupt the designer’s work for other clients with my fire drill. The designer is in a different time zone, so even if I was willing to inflict my panic on him, it would be more efficient if I could make the changes and test them with KDP’s previewer on my own.

Easier said than done. I don’t need programs as powerful as Photoshop often enough to justify subscribing to Adobe’s software-as-a-service. For my occasional needs, I have work-alike programs from Affinity. They are generally potent beyond my ability to fully exploit. When I opened a copy of the cover PDF file in Affinity, I ran into two problems. The bleed portion of the cover image was missing. Affinity showed only white. That had the risk appearing at the edges of the paperback cover. The second problem was my old nemesis: Thonburi. All the back-cover text was a mess of arbitrary Thai characters if I had the font installed. Absent Thonburi, the software substituted another font. In the course of ‘fixing’ the imagery, I was breaking the typography.

Necessity is the mother of subscription. I couldn’t bring myself to buy into the full Adobe Creative Suite, but a seven-day free trial of Acrobat Pro DC enabled me to convert the cover PDF into a PNG file that combined (flattened) the image portion with the text. I adjusted that to match my matte cover experiment, boosted to contrast for good measure, and saved it as a PDF. KDP raised no alarms when I uploaded it. I ordered a new proof copy with next-day delivery and told myself to hold off on uploading the new cover to IngramSpark.

Hold the WordPress

My plan was to share the video from this very website, which is powered by WordPress and lives on a BlueHost server. WordPress had other ideas. My attempts to upload the video to the site’s media library failed. “Sorry, this file cannot be uploaded for security reasons.” What?! It’s a simple MP4 video file! It plays just fine on my desktop and my iPad! I consulted various oracles and tried different WordPress plugins to no avail. One of the plugins revealed that MP4 files were on the list of permitted file types. Something else was going sideways during the process and WordPress was barfing up an incorrect error message.

Well, bugger. I didn’t have time for a trip to Techsupportland.

I created a YouTube channel for Tensile Press and uploaded the video there. That should work, but viewers will have YouTube spraying ‘watch next’ content at the end of the video. Because YouTube.

Pressing the button.

The jolly, candy-like button. KDP advises that when you press the paperback publish button, it may take up to 72 hours before the files pass through final review and the book is available for purchase on Amazon. I was slipping inside that window and the proof copy with the new cover had not arrived. The new cover looked better and brighter in the previewer. No guts, no glory. I pressed the button. And waited. No guts, no glory. I uploaded the new cover to IngramSpark. And I went to bed.

The next morning I received e-mail from KDP. My files had failed the final checks. The message’s wording was that of a human being. At long last, actual human eyes had evaluated Raether’s files. It wasn’t the new cover that was the problem. It was the interior PDF, which had passed the automated tests over a month before. The interior design brings the biofluid effect inside the book. You see it in the front matter and in each chapter heading. It is super cool. The biofluid extends to the edges of the pages it appears on. For printing purposes, that means the artwork must extend past the edges of the books page into the paper that gets trimmed away, into the bleed. The interior file I had uploaded ended at the page edge. It did not include the bleed. This should have been easy for the automated tests that run when you upload to detect, but they didn’t. The final human-powered check discovered problem. This error also explained a few problems with the test copy I had ordered from IngramSpark. The designer supplied me with a full-bleed version of the interior. I uploaded it to KDP and IngramSpark, which accepted the update. I pressed the KDP publish button a second time. And waited.

The next morning KDP’s e-mail congratulated me on having published my book. That afternoon, the proof copy with the new cover (and bad interior) arrived. It looks amazing. The colors are a close match to the vibrance of the art on-screen. I hope you relish it as much as I.

The Prints of Proof

October 10, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In A Dance with Designers, three talented teams of freelance designers produced covers and interior book designs for Raether’s Enzyme. Each team’s cover captured a different aspect of the story and were viable keys to unlocking readers’ interest. The teams mastered the layout challenges posed by the manuscript’s stylistic flourishes. The dance ended with a cliffhanger: I had three great designs and could only bring one to market. There was one last test.

Kindle Direct Proof

The final test was to upload the designers’ files to Amazon KDP and request proof copies of the paperbacks. This would get me as close as possible to what a real reader would experience. I had prior experience with the system that gave me cause for concern. This time I had professional design products, not dev. I was optimistic. Too optimistic…

I’ll break here and to say that the trials I recount here are 21st Century First World Problems™. KDP and IngramSpark afford indie authors an amazing opportunity to create real live books without the overhead of a full-blown print run. Raether’s Enzyme would not be available in paperback if it wasn’t for Print On Demand.

Okay, back to our story. I chose the design I favored ever-so-slightly for the first proof. With the files uploaded and the automated tests passed, the online preview of the book looked promising. The cover was a bit dim, but the interior tracked the designer’s PDF file perfectly. I ordered four proof copies and sat on the porch steps waiting for the delivery.

The covers were rather dim. Areas that glowed on the screen with red were like dried blood. The magical cyan was the green of chalkboards. Whole areas of subtle detail were lost in the darkness.  I’ve worked in and with computers long enough to know that unless the screen to printer pipeline is calibrated, what you see on the former isn’t what you’ll get on the latter. The additive colors on your screen work differently than the subtractive colors used by printers. Gamut mapping is a science. But it struck me that in the years that KDP had been serving indie authors, it should be able to print the users’ cover files with greater fidelity.

Diving into the KDP community forums revealed that dark covers were a persistent issue. The best advice anyone had to offer was to print on glossy paper (I had chosen a matte finish) for a 10%-20% boost in brightness. That was useful. I would try that. But that would mean another week or so before the next (single) proof copy arrived. The process was broken. For the time being, I had to deal with it.

I imagined ways it could be better, wrote them up, and posted them to the section of the KDP community forums dedicated to feedback and feature requests.

First things: I’m still new to this but have been in the system since CreateSpace. I know that printing cannot deliver the luminosity and range of colors that you can see on the screen. I recognize that an ideal pipeline would include calibration of the monitor to the printer. I understand the difference between RGB and CMYK but am not versed in the art and science of gamut mapping.

KDP has done an excellent job with my books’ interiors. The covers of my proof copies are invariably MUCH darker than source PDFs and images. The new previewer hints and the darkness to come, but IMHO understates it. The availability of proof copies on demand is a miracle of 21st Century publishing, but the one-week time between requesting a proof copy and having one to evaluate makes an iterative approach to getting the desired cover very, very slow.

Any or all of the following would improve productivity and reduce resource use. Please consider implementing these features for KDP.

COVER PROOF COPIES. Allow the author-publisher to request a printing of just the cover.

FILTERED COVER PROOF GALLERY. Like a cover proof copy, but with multiple miniatures of the cover on a single sheet. One displays the cover as uploaded. The others show the printed results with variations on the cover. RGB vs. CMYK. Selected embedded color profiles (community wisdom is that these are discarded by KDP, so maybe not). Gradations of enhanced saturation and/or brightness. Label each so that the customer can adjust their cover to match the one that looks best to them.

SMARTER COLOR MAPPING. Amazon’s a smart, capable company. Do a better job at translating the customer’s colors to what the printer can deliver. Train a machine learning system to provide customer-satisfying results. Something to keep my spirits from falling when I open the box of proof copies.

GREATER TRANSPARENCY AND BETTER GUIDANCE. Community members have done heroic work in offering workarounds to weaknesses in KDP. They aren’t in a position to solve our problems with this aspect of self-publishing. KDP should tell us up-front how to get the best color fidelity for our book covers. At the very least, it should document which printers to target so that we have a better chance to get things right the first time.

KDP is an important partner in getting Tensile Press books to market. Addressing the issues around cover color fidelity will make it a cherished partner.

Thank you for your attention.
Sean Flynn
Tensile Press

This is a “compliment sandwich” with some “plussing” in the middle. These was no response from the KDP team. Various jaded community members took time out of their days to tell me that it was foolish to expect any improvements to the system. One helpful soul recommended that I send the same message to KDP tech support. I did. The response was a polite email thanking me for my input and assuring me that they would forward the message to the business unit. Time will tell.

With help from the designer and a glossy cover, the second-round proof copy looked great.

I still had two more designs to proof. Swapping in their cover and interior files one after the other would take weeks—possibly months if changes were required—before I would have all three in front of me to compare. I cheated by creating two new books with slightly different titles and KDP-supplied ISBNs. With the files uploaded for each, I ordered both as proof copies. In these cases, the covers and interiors were fine.

Proof of spines

Now there were three real-world copies of Raether’s Enzyme, each a unique embodiment of the story. The fruit of the dance with designers lay on my dining room table. I studied the covers under sunlight, LEDs, and the sky. Magical. Sophisticated. Electric. I paged through them all, weighing how each rendered the general text and played my various formatting games. A favorite emerged. A personal favorite. For a final final test, I met separately with two of my stalwart beta readers and asked for their impressions. Both preferred two of the designs. To my great relief, one of the two was my favorite. My marketing-savvy reader told me that an image should contain one, or at most two messages. He pointed to one of the proof copies and said that it had the most direct message. It was the design I had chosen based on the emotion in its cover and the way the design infused the interior. Sometimes marketing and personal taste converge.

The Bill-ion-aire, and the rest…

Amazon (via KDP) is a big market for independent authors. It is not the only market. I want Raether to available to as wide an audience as possible. Or at least as practical. Alexa will tell you that I’m quite fond of Amazon, but she doesn’t know that I like my local bookstores too and favor them when it comes to new books from my favorite authors. Readers enjoy their books on tablets, phones, laptops, desktops, and eReaders. They check out print books and e-books from their local libraries. Raether’s Enzyme should meet them where they want to read.

The self-publishing ecosystem makes this possible in numerous ways. After research and deliberation, I decided to split my non-Amazon betting by putting the print edition and the e-book into separate channels. Part of this was for eggs-and-baskets reasons. The other was to learn more about these channels for future projects.

Sparking Raether’s Enzyme

IngramSpark, that is. In many ways, IngramSpark is like KDP. Authors upload cover and content files. IngramSpark’s printing arm, Lightning Source, prints copies of the book on demand. KDP is a vertically integrated tentacle of the vast quasi-monopoly that is Amazon, who prints and sells the book. IngramSpark is part of Ingram Content Group, the largest book distributor and wholesaler in the United States. In that role, it is the ally, rather than adversary, of bookstores large and small. Adding your book to Ingram’s catalog makes it visible to your friendly neighborhood bookstore, Barnes & Noble, and your public library.

As in KDP, after your files are uploaded, IngramSpark guides you through setting the price of your book. This was my first real contact with life outside of the Amazon basin. I learned why paperback books cost what they do. To make money, bookstores need a wholesale discount. IngramSpark recommends 55% off the cover price. When I combined the price I had set for the paperback on KDP with the discount and the cost of production, Ingram calculated that my profit would be negative. I would owe for each copy sold. I needed to raise the list price by…a bit. To maintain the goodwill of the non-Amazon universe, my Amazon price would have to rise to match what I needed to charge to make things work with Ingram.

Bookstores very much want to be able to return unsold books for a refund. Margins are small. They need to manage the risk of stocking new authors. I understand and respect that. Tensile Press (which is me) can’t afford to be on the hook for a big return. Or a multitude of little ones. So, at the very real risk of Raether never appearing on a bookstore shelf, I opted out of offering a return policy.

Smashing all the words

The prospect of plugging into all myriad e-book stores daunted me. There are several outlets that will handle the multiplexing for you. I went with Smashwords. It has a good reputation and I have some pleasant memories of working with (what I think is) its founder, Mark Coker, back at Apple in the 1980s. When you upload to Smashwords, there’s little room for shillyshallying.  You’re either in the pipeline for immediate publication, or you’re available for pre-order. I freaked out. I hadn’t set a date in my mind, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t that day. I picked a release date a few weeks in the future. And I found a button on the dashboard to ‘unpublish’ the e-book. I clicked it.

Finger on the trigger

I sat there and asked myself, “If not then, when?” It was 2020. The murder hornets appeared here in Washington in the second act. Chekhov’s Gun required they be used before the curtain fell. Did I want to risk dying in whatever ether, cocaine, and peyote infused madness the 2020 writer’s room had in store without having published one book?

…………………Bang.

The answer was no. I republished on Smashwords with the original release date. I set the release date on IngramSpark. I set the (e-book) release date on KDP. The hammer struck the firing pin. The firing pin hit the primer. The powder began to burn. Raether’s Enzyme was on its way down the barrel and into the world.

Two days later an excited email arrived from one of my beta readers. Raether’s paperback edition was available for preorder on Amazon. After a moment of confusion, I realized that the IngramSpark had pushed the preorder to Amazon. As I write this, I’m working through Amazon’s support network to override that edition with the KDP version. Over the next few days, the e-book preorder surfaced on Apple’s bookstore. Print and e-book on Barnes & Noble. Kobo.

I am committing the quietest, softest, weakest book launch imaginable. I have flouted all the online guru’s advice for building interest. I haven’t sent advanced reader copies to influential book bloggers. I haven’t sought out the online communities where my (potential) audience dwells. I haven’t commissioned reviews to decorate the ad campaign I haven’t even planned. I haven’t raised an army of flying monkeys to trumpet the news to the far corners of Oz. My marketing-fu is rubbish.

Nonetheless, here it goes. There is much left to do before I can at least make an announcement via my limited social media.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

© 2024 Sean L Flynn

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