During the past week I read several interesting things about the state of publishing today. One was the results of a survey conducted earlier this year of numerous authors (and if I recall correctly, I was among the respondents) by the Authors Guild, which addressed how much authors make today. According to the survey, which compared its results with a similar survey conducted in 2009, author incomes are trending sharply down. The average income of full-time author respondents, which in 2009 was $25,000–hardly a living-high wage to begin with–has dropped by 2015 to $17,500. Only 39% of author respondents in the 2015 survey reported that they could support themselves solely with their writing, and the amount of time the average author must now spend on marketing, including by social media to try to make contact with readers, has increased 59%. In other words, authors are having to spend much, much more time trying to market their work instead of actually writing, but despite these increased efforts, most authors are seeing their income decline.
I feel these authors’ pain, because I’m one of them. When The Strongbow Saga was originally published by HarperCollins, I could not even come close to being able to make a living from my writing. Harper’s sales of my books were dismal, and their efforts to market them were nonexistent. But I was able to get the rights to the series back in 2010 and 2011 and republished the first three books myself, then completed and published book 4 in 2013 (and book 5 is coming in 2016!). As a self-published author I was finally able to support myself with my writing–my wife, Jeanette, was even able to quit her day job, and we were able to move to Oregon, and buy the small farm where we live today.
Things change. Over the past year I, like so many authors, have seen my sales, and my income, drastically decline. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. A large part of selling books today depends on how well your books show up on various internet search engines and programs, like Google, or Amazon’s search and recommendation engines. In previous years, The Strongbow Saga had high visibility in these kinds of channels. Now, apparently that’s not so. Ironically, part of the reason appears to be the success and popularity of the History Channel’s “Vikings” television series. There didn’t used to be very many fiction series set in the Viking period out there, but the popularity of the “Vikings” show has changed that. Nowadays the internet search engines are as cluttered with Viking fiction as my end-of-summer garden is overgrown with weeds, and it is hard to stand out when there’s so much static filling the channels. And it is a vicious circle–the less your books stand out in search engines, the less they sell. The less they sell, the less they show up….
Admittedly, I have not until now put much effort into marketing of The Strongbow Saga, simply because I have not needed to. But as I said, things change. I’m now scrambling to learn, from authors more skilled at such things than I, how to reach a larger base of readers and fans. Apparently, in this day and age authors MUST have a presence on Facebook. So now, I have an author page there, and I am hereby pledging to post on it regularly. My days as a social media recluse are over. If you spend time on Facebook (and apparently almost everyone in the entire world, except me, already does), please visit me, and follow my page, at www.facebook.com/halfdanlives. And I’ll soon be on Twitter, as well, at @StrongbowSaga. Very soon there I will begin telling a tale of horror–and it’s all true–told in tweets.
At the start of this post I mentioned that over the past week I had recently read several interesting things about the state of publishing today. Another, besides the Authors Guild survey, was about Amazon’s 20th anniversary, and all of the numerous ways in which Amazon has been an agent of change during that time to transform publishing. You can read the full article here, but let me list just a few. In 1995, Amazon launched its online bookstore (Did you remember that they used to sell only books? I didn’t.). In 1999 Amazon began using complex computer algorithms to give readers personalized recommendations (“Other readers who bought this book also bought X”–one of those very important search engines The Strongbow Saga has become increasingly less visible in.) In 2007 Amazon introduced its first Kindle e-book reader–and also introduced its Kindle Direct self publishing platform which allowed authors for the first time to publish their books directly, without having to depend on one of the big publishers. And between 2007 and 2011, Amazon almost single-handedly developed the market for e-books, increasing their sales from being little more than a concept to becoming, in the United States and increasingly so in the rest of the world, a major percentage of all book sales.
In the course of transforming publishing, Amazon has greatly democratized it, giving more power to authors and lessening the stranglehold on book publishing that a few big publishing houses once held. But Amazon has also empowered readers, as well. Book reviews used to be written only by an elite and fairly small cadre of professional reviewers whose reviews, published in periodicals like Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Times Book Review supplement, could mean success or failure for a new book. Good reviews in these journals would mean libraries would purchase the books, and bookstores would stock and prominently display them (and as an aside, one incredible blunder HarperCollins apparently did when they launched The Strongbow Saga back in 2006 was to fail to send out review copies. As a result, no reviews at all were obtained in the big journals, and the series’ launch, indeed its very existence, went mostly undetected among libraries and bookstore buyers).
Today, that power rests with you–the readers. Another of Amazon’s innovations was to allow, encourage, and prominently display readers’ reviews of books–and once Amazon got into the business of selling everything else under the sun besides just books, reviews of those items, as well. For the first time, readers could shop for a book by finding out what other readers thought of it, rather than just some elite New York reviewer.
You, the readers, have been given a tremendous power. If you like a book, if you like an author, you now can give them your support. If an author has given you pleasure, give them something back. Write a review. Post it as many places as you’d like, but by all means include Amazon–the world’s largest seller of books today. Those reviews are among the factors than can affect search and recommendation engines. I’m speaking here not just for myself, but for all of those many, many struggling authors whose financial woes are reflected in the Authors Guild survey. Please–use your power. If you like what we have given you, please take the time and effort to give back.