Filed under shit you probably don’t need to be worried about: Over the past few days, I’ve noticed some writers in a couple of groups over on Facebook have suddenly become rather…concerned over the newly important issue of faces on covers. Yes, this is suddenly a thing. Evidently we don’t want to put faces on covers to drive off people of certain genders or ethnicity. Or people who prefer to imagine what the MC looks like on their own. Or people who get upset about seeing faces on covers. Because 50 Shades doesn’t do it.
Ermagherd! Ferfty Sherds! This bugs the fuck out of me on two levels. First off, a reality check. I mean seriously folks. As an author, I’m not looking to appeal to every single person on the planet. That’s a superpower that is completely beyond my scope as a human being. It is flat out impossible to do. Moreover, some of the readers people used as examples of “good” reasons not to put a face on your covers are, quite frankly, people I really don’t want to go bending over backwards trying to please. One commenter’s sister gets so deeply offended at the author trying to impose their idea of what the character should look like on her by putting that image on the cover that she won’t even consider a book that does it. Another thinks that the reader should be able to see themselves as the main character and that putting someone on the cover gets in the way of that. And so on. What they’re describing is a kind of hyper-sensitive, highly reactionary reader that you just can’t please. Ever. This is the reader who leaves two and three star reviews of nearly everything, then leaves a five star review on a book the rest of the world sees as a steaming pile of rhino shit, but then one stars the same author’s very next book and talks about feeling betrayed because they didn’t take the story in the direction they thought it should go. Granted, they are thankfully few and far between. But they’re NOT the kind of person an author should be bending over backwards to please, no matter how stridently they speak out against you. They represent a small segment of people and they are NOT your problem. Like any author, I have an audience that I DO appeal to, an audience who, for some odd reason, digs what I write the way I write it. And I’ll grant you that my audience might only ever be a few thousand people. But they are MY audience. They either like seeing a face on my covers, or they really don’t care one way or another and just dig my writing style. Whatever the reason, my work just resonates with them, and that’s cool. We have an easy relationship to maintain. That large group of readers, that’s my bread and butter as an author, and they are the people I’m really looking to thrill. So I’m NOT going to worry about the group of folks who don’t like my cover choices. I’m not going to worry about driving away a small segment of potential readers with something that minor. Odds are good that the people it DOES drive away would never be one of my readers anyway. And yet there are people who say I should worry about that. No, I’m going to worry about keeping MY audience happy. That brings me to the second thing that drove me batty about all of this. Fucking REALITY people. So, there are all these writers, many of whom are not published, who are debating how putting a face on a cover could drive readers away, theorizing and postulating, or in some cases, pontificating, about how it’s better not to, or what to put on the cover and what not to instead of a face, and still falling back on “Fifty Shades doesn’t do it.” And not a single piece of hard data to back these theories and pronouncements of Gospel Truth up. None. It took me ten minutes to go to Amazon and pull the top 100 pages for four sample genres. And THIS is where it gets hilarious. In Paranormal, more than half of the top 40 titles had a face on the cover. More than half. Empirical evidence for the win, right? But, not satisfied with that, I went to Women’s Fiction. Only three of the top 20 featured faces on the cover. Okay, so maybe it doesn’t hold true in all categories. But the number 3 title in that genre had a close up of a face. But over in African American Women’s Fiction…wow, look at all of those people on the covers. Most of those featured full faces on the cover. The same held true in African American General fiction. My conclusion: Of the four samples I checked, three showed that faces on covers still seemed to sell in the top 20 as often as other images did. In other words: It depends on your genre, so do your research before you go telling someone what will or won’t work on your damn cover. Otherwise, you’re yelling at yourself in an echo chamber, and giving one size fits all advice that goes contrary to reality. Or, you’re getting all worked up over a non-issue when you could be writing.
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Recently, fellow Missouri author Lisa Medley posted a blog post about the cost to self-publish her first book. Now, some folks have given her a little flack for paying for things she didn’t have to, and the amounts she paid and so on, without understanding the context of her choices. They’ve claimed some of her expenses were mistakes. But while she made some different decisions than I did, I think I’d rather have made her mistakes than mine. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Lisa through a local writers’ group, and I was thrilled for her when Harlequin picked up her Reaper series a few years back, right around the time I was first published by Pendraig Publishing, a small press out of California. Oddly enough, we both had some similarities in our experiences, in that we both got picked up by publishers, and we were both disappointed by the results. And we BOTH went to self-publishing. Now, here is where our experiences differ. First off, Lisa writes in the VERY competitive romance market, specifically in paranormal romance. I write urban fantasy and zombie fiction. Technically, the zombie novels are post-apocalyptic sci-fi. And I will tell you from a total lack of experience but from knowing folks who know the business…romance is an expensive genre to write in. Sci-fi and fantasy…not so much. So it stands to reason that though we’re both following a similar path to publishing, our costs were different. Lisa broke her costs down pretty thoroughly for her first book, and I thought I would do something similar for my first self-published book. However, I’ll also break down some of the costs for one of my later books as well. Lisa chose to do a few things that I didn’t, mostly because she’s a class act and I’m a hack writer. So, where our paths differ, understand that my choices don’t reflect on a disagreement with hers or anything like that. So, on with the show. Here’s how the expenses for Zompoc Survivor: Exodus played out. Zompoc Survivor Exodus Write the book: Time and energy, $0 Recruit beta readers in place of an editor: Time and energy, mention in acknowledgements, $0 Make cover myself: Time, effort, $0 Format myself on Smashwords & Amazon: Time, effort, headaches, stress, $0 Get ISBN number from Createspace for print copy: $0 Let Amazon assign ASIN instead of ISBN to e-book: $0 Createspace proof w/ slow boat to China level shipping: $6.36 Advertising via spamming on promo groups on Facebook: 2-4 hours daily, $0 10 copies from Createspace: $35.50 Prize shipping: $30 Total cost: Time, effort, Sanity, hair loss, $71.86 Now, notice one HUGE thing I did different from Lisa: I did a LOT of the work myself. Formatting, cover, editing, all me. Some folks might think this is a great idea. But while some folks have pointed out on Facebook that Lisa paid for some things that might not have been strictly necessary, I am here to tell you, she made the better decision! First off, the editing. This is something no writer should try to handle on their own, in my personal opinion. Here, let me get on my soapbox and shout that out with a megaphone and some neon lights. DON’T DO IT! If you love your readers…if you want to ever HAVE readers, don’t edit your own work if you can avoid it. Even if you can’t avoid it, at least get some good beta readers. See, I was very lucky when I went searching for beta readers. I asked other successful writers who they had beta read their work, and I went to talk to those people. Best bad decision I ever made, that. One of those beta readers now has her own business as an editor and proofreader. So, I wasn’t smart, I was lucky. Second dumb thing I did that ended up turning out okay: the cover. For my cover, I went through some of my photos and found one in my files that I could alter to the point you couldn’t tell who it was or where they really were with ease because of the composition of the photo. Then I took it from color to black and white and ran it through a water-color wash and BAM, instant iconic image for my cover. Then, I did one other smart thing. Remember how I talked to other successful authors about beta readers? Same thing here. I found out what worked and made the changes they suggested. And it worked. Of all my covers, it’s by far the most amateurish, and it shows. But again, luck favored me in many ways. Finally, formatting. Dang, that was a learning process. I wish I knew then what I know now. The print version of ZS: Exodus doesn’t have page numbers because I didn’t know how to insert them. The front matter is painfully bare. It took several tries to get it to actually read the way I wanted to. And for the record: I still do it myself, and I still hate doing it. But I’m getting better at it. So, my first book cost me less than $100 to self-publish, but as Lisa also points out in her blog, as the publisher, all of the responsibility for getting it done right was on me. And somehow, I was up to the task, even if it was entirely by accident. Because, like Lisa discovered, having the right people in your corner is crucial. Now, here is another place where my experience differs slightly from Lisa’s. For ZS: Exodus, the bar to break even was low. So, I had some leeway to do something that I believe has had a tremendous impact on my career. I practically gave my first book away. My initial price point was 99₵ and I kept it there for a month. Now, at that rate, I would have had to have sold just over 200 copies to break even. I sold over 2500 in the first month. Later on, when I raised my price to the full $2.99, my ranking was so high, I still recouped my costs several times over. However, even if I had spent more on the first book, I would have still done the same thing, because the high initial rankings got me sales at the higher price point. More importantly, the high volume made up for the loss in potential income with repeat readers. In the end, ZS: Exodus ended up making me enough to hire professionals to handle the two things I should never touch again: editing and covers. When it came time to put ZS: Inferno out, I paid a LOT more for those two services, an easy $500-600 for editing and covers. I made that back in the first month it was out. In short, my second book presents (and thus sells) a lot better than my first book did because I spent more money on it. So, the lesson here is that it IS possible to self-publish a book for less than $100. But it isn’t a good idea. Lisa’s initial offering presents a lot better than mine did. If you’re going to make mistakes, follow Lisa’s example and err on the side of quality. That’s the better decision. If you’re going to make my mistakes, you’re going to have to make them EXCEPTIONALLY well. As in the “you’re going to have to roll sevens three times in a row with loaded dice” kind of well. And trust me, you don't want to rely on luck more than skill. Your first book is an investment, and truth be told, if I had to give one piece of hard to swallow advice, it would be this: Don’t expect to make a lot back on your first book. Your first book is an investment in your fan base, and your royalties from that book are an investment in your second book. Assume a loss early on that is going to pay off in spades in the long run. What is that pay-off? Consistent sales. So far, I’ve self-published three books. Because of the investment in my first book with the low price point and high volume of sales (and a lot of luck), all three books have hit the top 100 in their genres in the first month they’ve come out. The first book attracted a strong fan base. The second and third got them to come back, and they brought friends. In conclusion: Write a damn good book. Invest in it. Write another damn good book and invest in it. Repeat as necessary.
In Reflection:
At the beginning of 2014, I had this plan. I had three books I wanted to release about 3 months apart. One was dystopian, one was a zombie book and the third was portal fantasy. The genres are important, you see, because nothing went the way I planned for it to this year. Of the three I had planned, I had the dystopian book already “done” and close to publishing. Except the premise ended up being broken. So I scrapped that idea and sent it to the rewrite pile. That left the portal fantasy and the zombie story. Of the two, the portal fantasy was closer to being done, really. But, I went back to look at the zombie story, and said, “Well, let’s see if I can get this in a little better shape.” I also planned on a lot of other things. Things to do with my website, minor ideas I wanted to pursue. But most of all, I was still writing and still hopeful. On February 28th, Zompoc Survivor: Exodus hit Amazon. My carefully crafted plan for the year was already scrapped, and I was sitting back trying to decide how to rescue or revise it. Then, on March 6th, something amazing happened: ZS: Exodus exploded on the Amazon rankings. Suddenly, I was selling more books in a day than I ever had before. 2014 became all about getting the next book out, and suddenly, everything was coming together. It looked like, after years and years of writing, after two previous books, I was (and am) on the cusp of the life I have always wanted, a writer’s life. The one thing I didn’t plan for. I spent the rest of the year playing Xanatos speedchess. It’s been a year of changes, of losses and gains. We saw family members return home after years away and the birth of a new grandson. I lost friends, but I gained new ones. I was blessed to see friends take the first steps into their own success. I got back one of my old books and released it anew. Through it all, I think the biggest lesson from 2014 was that persistence pays off. You never know when you’re going to hit that moment where everything comes together. When suddenly, you are standing at the threshold of your dreams, and you realize that nothing is like you thought it would be. Some things are not so glamourous as you imagined, but other things are even better than you dared hope for. There are days in this writer’s life that are hard, when all I seem to do is work on the business of writing. But those are the moments when I stop and remind myself “It’s my business that I’m having to deal with. Not someone else’s. I’m working for me.” Let me tell you, that’s an epic feeling. So, as 2014 closes, I have one message for you: Keep fighting for your dreams, because anything worth dreaming is worth working hard for. Never give up. Looking forward: Stepping into 2015, I realize that most of the year has already been mapped out for me. Some of it still needs to be refined, but it’s already looking like a good year. That, I find, makes all the difference. I start the New Year off knowing the following: I am Mighty. I am Epic. And so are you. Go forth and do Epic Things! Be a force for the Awesome!
It's finally here. I've been waiting for this moment for weeks, and my new cover is ready to reveal!
This book has a special place in my heart. It was my first. When I first wrote The Demon's Apprentice in 2010, it was a labor of what seemed to be Herculean effort. I started writing it in 2006, after reading Jim Butcher's Dead Beat, the seventh book in The Dresden Files series. It was my first exposure to Jim's work, and even after going back and reading all of his other entries in that series, it still ranks as one of his best for me. The thing that stood out about that story was the voice. Snarky, smart and most importantly, SMART ASS! I read to the end and remember hearing echoes of my own voice resonating through it. It was the book that made me think I really could have an audience. That maybe, just maybe, I could make a career of writing one day. Everything about The Demon's Apprentice was backwards. It wasn't exactly the book I set out to write. An agent contacted me to ask for a full read through on it (she passed on it, but still, that was pretty damn cool). My eventual publisher asked me to contact him about publishing it. All of it, delightfully backwards. I wrote another book in the series, and then decided to try my hand at zombie fiction and self-publishing. Needless to say, the results were very good. So, I got the rights back from my publisher a few months ago and started looking for a cover artist. Enter my life long friend Angela Gulick. Angie is an artist with a few credits of her own, so at some point, we started talking about what I was looking for in a cover as I looked for potential artists. And then she showed me HER concept and I had my cover artist. Okay, rant time here. Wrap your sensitive sensibilities in bubble wrap and hide them from the wrath of my self-righteous frothing of the mouth. The thing is, I’m not even mad about anything anyone has done to me personally. This is more of a “Think of the children!” sort of pissed-offedness. In this case, the “children” aren’t children, they’re aspiring authors asking for advice. Of course, being mildly successful, I’m always ready to dispense my wisdom at length…or ad nauseum, depending on whether you agree with me or not. So, here’s the splinter in my ego. In multiple author groups…no, let’s narrow that down just a weeeee bit further. In multiple indie author groups on Facebook, that place where I procrastinate when I should be writing (you do it, too. I’ve seen you), there are authors who are asking for advice on VERY specific kinds of things, some of which have to do with things other than (gasp) writing! They have questions about sales and marketing, the dirty side of writing that, back in the day, a REAL writer didn’t have to sully their lily white hands with. I mean, between being depressed alcoholic drug addicts who had this Divine access to the Muse 24/7, who had TIME to worry about things like an author platform or visibility? If you weren’t writing, you were supposed to be on a whirlwind book tour or at a bar with your other writer friends lamenting the sorry state of the Art because of all those hack writers out there stinking up the joint. Or something. All you needed to do was write a good book, and POW! You were famous. Publishers beat down your door and made sure of that. Isn’t mythology fun? So, back to the questions. And more importantly…the answers. No, wait, these aren’t answers. Hell they barely qualify as fucking platitudes! “Write a great book! That’s the secret to sales!” "Concentrate on your writing, not sales!" “Don’t force your writing! I can always tell when a writer is forcing it and I’ll stop reading a book the minute I see that.” (Oh, wait…that’s another pet peeve. I’ll kill that one in a different post.) AAARGH! Those aren’t answers. They’re NOT helpful. Hell, they’re beyond useless. They’re fucking BUMPER STICKERS! You can’t build success in twenty words or less. You. Just. Can’t. Granted, I can boil my writing success down to three basic concepts (Persistence, Practice and Reading), but there’s a whole damn BOOK worth of other info behind those three words. What’s worse is that most of this advice didn’t work in the good old days, either. But let’s look at this non-advice. "Write a great book! That's the secret to sales!" Like hell it is. Effective Marketing is the secret to sales. You could write the best book ever but if no one knows about it, they’re NOT GONNA BUY IT! One person said “WRITE A GREAT BOOK AND MARKET THE HELL OUT OF IT!” Just like that. In caps. With a smiley face. That’s like saying “Wanna fly? Build an airplane and become a pilot!” Two things you need vast amounts of very specific knowledge to do. But hey, it’s that simple, right? Because marketing the hell out of a book always works. Sure, you carry a sign with you everywhere you go with your book title and Amazon link printed on it. And you email five thousand random people every day with links to your book. You marketed the hell out of it, but did you convince even one person to buy it? No, because you marketed the hell out of it, but you didn’t market it EFFECTIVELY. Huge difference there. Writing a good book is still crucial, make no mistake, but it's less than half of the equation for an indie writer just starting out. Marketing, cover art, editing and formatting are just a few of the things a budding indie writer HAS to either become good at, or be willing to spend money on. Even if you're willing to spend money on some aspects (God knows I have zero skill at making covers, for example), you have to know enough to hire someone who will do a good job. The whole “Write a great book” cliché deserves its own rant. Right up there with the Muse. "Concentrate on your writing, not sales!" No! Write, yes but don't neglect the other parts! (Caveat: My advice always assumes you want to write for a living, not a hobby.) The publishing industry has changed drastically in the past few years. DRASTICALLY. There, I put it in all caps so you knew it was true. Opportunities are more abundant now than ever before for an aspiring writer. Opportunities exist now that never did before. In order to take advantage of them, we have to learn to take on new roles as authors and publishers. If we don't master new skills, and put our heart into the entirety of the process, we're going to get left behind by those who do. Wait, that wasn’t harsh enough to reflect the reality of the situation. Let me say it with some more meanness and sharp pointy edges. If YOU don’t master new skills, and YOU don’t put your heart into the entirety of the process, other writers who DO are going to leave you behind (I imagine that I’m one of those writers, but time will tell what I master). I could write a book that was filled with the good advice other authors have given me. A pretty thick one, too. Because the advice they gave me…the really GOOD advice that worked…and is STILL working…wouldn’t fit on a bumper sticker. The young authors that are asking these questions deserve better from the writing community. They NEED well thought out answers, answers that will work. Not trendy catch phrases. Not literary platitudes. Not “conventional wisdom” that hasn’t worked for you so far. And certainly not mythology that doesn’t work anymore. Or that never worked in the first damn place. The world of publishing is evolving. Our answers need to evolve with it. Stop with the bumper sticker advice. Please. I said it nicely. So, imagine this as the premise for a science fiction movie:
In 1994, a lone technician at NASA hears a mysterious radio signal coming from deep space. As he tries to track it, he discovers something amazing. The signal is moving. Faster than a planet or a stellar object. It's also getting closer. Then, he finds the source of this mysterious signal. A comet! NASA however, decides to keep this a secret until they can investigate further. Working with other space agencies, they propose and design a probe to catch up to the comet and investigate using a small lander. Eight years later, they launch the probe but still keep its real mission secret. What mysteries will they uncover? What answers will they find? Sounds almost too cool to really happen, right? But wait....what's this? (Personally, I think the film itself is pretty cool...) <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/H08tGjXNHO4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Too bad the other part didn't happen, right? Because, that would have been cool. I mean a comet emitting radio bursts? How cool would that be if it were real? Surprise....it is. Evidently, the whole thing (except the part about the lone technician) happened pretty much the way I described it. NASA appears to have known about the radio emissions for twenty years. The ESA just confirmed it with the eerie recording in the link above. Truth really is stranger than fiction. Now, a lot of speculation has cropped up about what this all means. Some folks claim to have seen a radio tower on the surface and a flying saucer flying above it in one of the images released by the ESA. I took a look at the picture they are using as a source, and while I can honestly say that there is a formation that bears a resemblance to a radio tower, I can't say that it actually is. It looks like a rock formation to me, but I'm also not an image analyst. The other part of the image does look like something circular and white is casting a shadow on the surface while not appearing to actually connect to its shadow. Is it a flying saucer? No idea. Not gonna even try to guess on that one. (Having a hard time finding what I'm talking about? The saucer shaped thing is easier to find, it's on the upper globule, in the big depression on the right. The tower like structures are almost due south of it in the image, outlined against the black of space behind it.) All of this happened while we weren't looking. The Rosetta Mission has been in space for 12 years. NASA evidently heard the radio signal 20 years ago. And we just found out about it yesterday, right? No, word about this has been wandering around since September 29th, via an email from an anonymous whistle-blower at the ESA. No one believed them...one writer even constructed a well-put together arguments against the very possibility of this happening. Comets can't emit radio signals! Pshaw! Balderdash! Such a thing couldn't happen...until it did. In the end, does this mean we're going to meet aliens before the end of the year? Probably not. If there is intelligent life in the universe, I think it hasn't contacted us yet because it hasn't' found enough intelligent life on this planet to justify the risk of letting humans off the planet. More than likely, this is a cool magnetic thing that will teach us more about comets. Maybe we'll find some amino acids that help explain how life on Earth began. Baby steps. It's a big universe, and we need to stop shooting each other over stupid shit before anyone is going to let us eat at the big kids table.
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Ben Reeder
Author of the Zompoc Survivor and The Demon's Apprentice series. Occasional wit. Constant smart ass.
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The Books Books By Ben Reeder: The Demon's Apprentice The Page of Swords Vision Quest Charm School In Absentia The Verge Walker:Book 1 Zombies by Ben Reeder: Zompoc Survivor: Exodus Zompoc Survivor : Inferno Zompoc Survivor: Odyssey Ash Fall The Gathering Horde |