Newsletter #73 — Agonies on All Fronts
January 1, 2024
Newsletter #73 — Agonies on All Fronts
PreSale Agonies — Well, maybe not all fronts. Let's say I'm indulging in hyperbole: doing so makes me feel better. But the steps leading up to publication of a book are not easy and they are not simple. As you can surmise from what you've read over the last several months, these steps take a lot of time.
And, in some cases, a lot of thought. Such as whether or not to offer a book for Presale. You would think this was a no-brainer with the obvious answer of Yes: Offer It for Presale. The main reason for presale offerings is that if you build up orders on places that allow presale, such as Amazon, then brick-and-mortar bookstores will notice and they in turn will stock your book. Plus, having a lot of presale orders will alert your publisher to print enough books to ship out well before publication date.
But the big knock against putting a book on presale is that if you aren't a world-famous author, people will not want to pay for your book three months before they receive it. I myself feel this way about a lot of books offered for presale. A very few I buy on presale, but for most I wait until the book is actually published. And so, this bit of advice goes, you will have a presale book sitting out there on Amazon for maybe twelve weeks, and the sales will stay flat.
Amazon will note this and will be much less likely to promote your book than if you had simply published (with no presale) and your sales, even modest ones, rose steadily. It's all about algorithms.
My instincts are to not put my books on presale. However, there is another agony involved, and this one may eclipse the presale one.
Interlude Between Agonies — It used to be that readers bought or borrowed books for two main reasons: recommendations from others, and reviews in national or local periodicals. With the growth of Amazon and the internet, this has changed dramatically. Now the main reasons readers buy or borrow books is either because they are fans of the author, or because a book has thousands of on-line reviews.
And so most authors work hard to get reviews — which leads me to the second agony.
NetGalley Agonies — For several years there have been publishing services that allows authors to receive advance reviews (as well as post-publication reviews) for their books from people who get the book for free. That is the bargain: you receive a free book, you promise you'll write a review of it. One such service (possibly the biggest, and definitely the most-used by publishers) is NetGalley. An author pays to submit her book digitally to NetGalley for however many months she wants, and anybody who has permission to download it is ethically bound (in my opinion) to leave a review. Instead of paying $20 for a book, the reader gets it free . . . with the understanding that she/he will leave a review. Based on the experiences I had with The F Words, my guess is that maybe one-third of all such readers leave reviews. Turns out I'm being overly-generous — online articles say that only one-quarter of such readers leave reviews.
I'm thinking of providing NetGalley with a copy of Exit Velocity for three months, in the hope that I will receive reviews (mainly posted on Amazon). This costs me money. But I think I should do this because the reviews will help me sell more books . . . if people are honorable and leave reviews.
My agony is not over people being honorable (that situation causes me ire, not agony), but over how to coordinate placing my book on NetGalley and offering it for presale. Let's say I start NetGalley on March 1, 2024. This means that readers must have a place to leave their reviews. Which means that my book must be on presale at that time. If it's on presale, it's listed on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and everywhere else, and reviews can be left at any of these places.So, it looks as if the modern-day need for reviews is going to determine that I put Exit Velocity on presale. Right now I'm thinking of March 1 as the presale date, which is three months before the June 4 publication date.
Review Journals — In December I submitted Exit Velocity (or a query about it) to nine journals. In January I will submit to an additional three journals. In February to three. In March to three, and in April to twelve. (They all have different dates for submission.) By the time I finish these submissions I will be well into the last two months before publication.
I can't even begin to relate how time-consuming this has been. In order to submit to Library Journal, for example, I had to get the PDF to them six months in advance (I did it in six months and seven days, thank you). As part of the proces I had to fill out all kinds of information, including downloading an Excel sheet, filling it in, and uploading it back to Library Journal. I am not a fan of Excel sheets. However, this had to be done and I do not have a Publicity Department to do it for me.
Titles — In my January 1 blog I discuss Exit Velocity vs. Escape Velocity as well as titles in general.
Happy New Year — Sending you my best wishes for an agony-free New Year!