Guest Post from Bella Andre (aka Lucy Kevin) (aka Bella Riley)

Bella is yet another one of those self-pub success stories (there seem to be so many.) She's got an unique perspective, and I'm pleased to have her guest blog. Here she is:

Joe got in touch with me a while back and asked if I’d like to comment on how my experiences in independent e-publishing have differed from my experiences with New York publishing. I’m pretty sure the Neely Tucker article in the Washington Post covered a lot of that but I’m always happy to answer additional questions. (So ask away!)

In the past year, I’ve released 12 self-published books in the past eighteen months in two genres under two different names--Bella Andre and Lucy Kevin. My latest release, FROM THIS MOMENT ON, hit the Apple and BN Top 30 bestseller lists immediately, and is currently #27 on the Kindle Contemporary Romance list.

Self-publishing has been a thrilling, amazing, very busy whirlwind--and I'd like to talk about a strategy that I believe could benefit other independently published writers: Diversification across genres and author brands.

In April 2010, I began e-publishing with two sexy, contemporary, backlist Bella Andre romances. After having a bit of unexpected success in those early months, I knew my chance had come to finally write the book my readers had been sending me emails about for five years. When LOVE ME did better than I ever imagined--Joe and I spoke on the phone last summer and I remember telling him I was shocked to have sold 1000+ copies of that book. He cheered!--I realized there was something to this whole e-reading business.

Of course I quickly went out and bought a Kindle and then a Nook later that fall and most recently an iPad. I released a couple more backlist books in October 2010 and then an original sequel to my Bad Boys of Football series that had been released through Pocket a few years back.

Amazingly, GAME FOR LOVE went to #28 at BN.com and was one of the top 5 erotic novels on Amazon for months at $5.99. This June 20th I launched a 8 book contemporary romance series about the Sullivan family with THE LOOK OF LOVE. It hit #19 on BN.com right out of the gate and has been a consistent Top 30 romance bestseller at Apple. Frankly, the whole thing continues to blow my mind.

Meanwhile, my husband had been watching my e-numbers rise for these self-published Bella Andre books and he kept saying, “Put out those fun chick lit books you wrote that no publisher ever bought!” Because I’d written them several years earlier, they needed significant rewrites, but I had always believed in the novels...and I like my husband to feel like I listen to him now and again. :) But since those books were very sweet (and snarky all at the same time), I knew they couldn’t be published as Bella Andre books.

Lucy Kevin came into being on a cold January morning in the Northern California wine country. Honestly, I figured 6 people would buy her books. To say that I was shocked when more than 25,000 people had downloaded SEATTLE GIRL and FALLING FAST by the end of February is a huge understatement. I released a third Lucy Kevin book in March titled SPARKS FLY.

The thing people are surprised to hear is that I didn’t draw from my existing Bella Andre readership for the Lucy Kevin books. In fact, until the Washington Post article came out, no one knew that Lucy and Bella were the same person, because I wasn’t sure the readerships would overlap between my teen-friendly books and my super-sexy romances. With the Lucy books I got to experience launching a new digital author--and building that readership--entirely from the ground up. It's been a lot of work, but I've loved trying to figure out what made people want to take a chance on a book. Heck, I’m still trying to figure that out :) and then find enough hours in the day to actually make it all happen!

Amazingly, here’s what happened--in some cases retailers were more excited to feature Lucy Kevin because the chick lit/sweet romance novels could reach a bigger mainstream audience. It simply didn’t seem to matter that no one had heard of Lucy Kevin. The fun, flirty covers (Oh, hello new graphic design skills I never thought I'd need!) seemed to draw people to the books and I’m guessing the $.99 to $2.99 price points helped, as well. Once I’d developed relationships with retailers via my Lucy books (I’m a “PubIt! Pro” for Barnes & Noble’s self-publishing wing), my recent launch of the more mainstream Bella Andre THE LOOK OF LOVE became even bigger and better.

I took things another step further in April when I decided to incorporate multimedia in my latest Lucy Kevin young-adult romance, GABRIELLE. In my previous career I was a singer-songwriter, so I wrote five original songs (rather, my songwriting heroine, Gabrielle, wrote them during the course of the story) and linked to them via Youtube and iTunes as an ebook package to create not only added value and excitement for my readers, but also another potential revenue stream.

Here’s what I’ve learned from it all so far: I really like not having to depend on one author name to maintain--and build--sales. Having two brands means I can build sales with new books while offsetting risks. We all know that diversifying our financial portfolios is a good money strategy. I’ve found that diversifying my e-book portfolio has not only been a good financial strategy, but as importantly, it had been a really lovely creative strategy, too.

So if you have a new idea or platform – if you want to try something completely different from what you’re doing now – I say go for it! Even if you think no one will be interested, the truth is that until you put your book out there, you'll never know.

Joe sez: There's a lot to like about this story. I'm a huge believer in luck, so it's great to see that Bella got lucky with two different names. A lot of her sales are on Barnes & Noble, which shows that it is possible to make a lot of money someplace other than Amazon. She's so self-effacing, and so enthusiastic, that you can't help but be happy for her success.

What does all of this mean for other authors?

Write. Then write some more. You can even try a different, and invent a new name (Jack Kilborn and Joe Kimball, anyone?) But the key is to keep putting quality work out there.

Bella has put out 12 ebooks in 18 months. Before you get depressed about your sales, reread that number.

Then write. And write some more.

READY TO BE PUBLISHED?

Yesterday, I did a workshoppish eventish thing for aspiring writers at the Stirling Off the Page festival and I promised that I'd put something from it up here. I'd created a list of questions that I think writers need to ask themselves to assess their readiness for publication. And here it is!

If you find the questions hard to answer, that suggests you and your book are not yet ready for

Over

So I just returned from my friend Raymond Benson's booklaunch party.

It made me feel a little nostalgic, a little sad, but mostly very relieved.

Raymond had a decent turn out, selling copies of his newest (The Black Stiletto). Everyone was upbeat and happy to be there, and it was nice to see many familiar faces. I had booklaunch parties for most of my paper books, and I still count many of those as fond memories.

But I don't see me making any new booklaunch memories. As I was there, I was struck by the likelihood that not only would I never have another launch party, but I may actually never attend another book signing, for me or for anyone else.

This is the end of an era.

The end has been on the horizon for a while. Years, even. I remember attending events like the Chicago Printer's Row Book Fair, and Book Expo America, and relishing the excitement of being a new author, the energy in the air, the burning need to get my name out there.

This summer, Printer's Row seemed to be about half the size it was back in 2007. The same thing for BEA.

One of my favorite bookstores, Waldenbooks in Peru, IL, just closed its doors a few days ago. The manager there, Greg Swanson, has handsold over 2000 of my books in that location.

Nope, that ain't a typo. Over 2000. It's probably more than that--I stopped asking a while ago.

Greg, and two other bookstore gurus named Paul Pessolano and Jim Munchel have handsold so many of my books that I named three characters after them in my novel Fuzzy Navel. That came out in summer, 2008.

Three years later, their bookstores have all closed.

It's not even the beginning of the end. We're firmly in the middle of the end.

I spent a lot of hours in bookstores, and at writing conferences. While I won't miss paper books, I will certainly miss the camaraderie of booksellers, and hanging out at events. But I don't see myself doing many more. In fact, I don't see there being many more.

This bitter pill is made much easier to swallow with the new publishing paradigm. A lot of my peers are doing well with ebooks--much better than they did in print. I saw an old friend, Al Ansorge, at Raymond's party.

"I sold 2000 ebooks on Kindle last month," he told me. "It's all your fault."

Greg took five years of fulltime 9-to-5 to sell 2000 of mine, and Al did it on his own in a month.

Rock on, Al. (And check out Al's book Crossing the Centerline, only 99 cents.)

Change hurts. But this is ultimately a change that's better for the authors. We no longer have to travel all over and handsell paper books. We no longer have to depend on booksellers to stock us. We can reach more readers and make more money and do it faster and easier than we ever could in the old system.

The party is over. We had a lot of fun, but all good things must come to an end. Kiss the hostess. Grab your coat. It's time to go.

Digital Me

I finally did it.

I got rid of a bookshelf, and about 300 paper books.

To understand the significance of this, a few things need to be known about me.

1. I collect stuff. Mostly media. Books, magazines, videogames, music, movies. I'm one of those obsessive-compulsive types who acquires all the books an author has written, even the out-of-print stuff. My house is filled with shelves, each loaded with rare stuff, all well-organized and neatly accessible. When other collectors come over, they drool.

2. My oldest and biggest collection is my personal library. I have over five thousand print titles. Many of them autographed. Lots of them hard-to-find.

3. I don't part with things easily. I've got the ownership bug, and once I own something, I want to keep owning it. I'll lend out things to friends, then wind up buying a replacement for myself when I don't get it returned in a timely manner. That empty slot on the wall bugs me until I fill it.

Now, at a few points in my life, I replaced formats. My LPs and cassettes became CDs. My RCA Videodisc collection became VHS, and then DVD and Blu-Ray. These newer formats were improvements over the older ones, so I didn't mind upgrading. Like any collector, I wanted the best.

Then things began to get weird.

I had a wall of CDs. A whole wall of them. After the Herculean task of ripping them to mp3s, I noticed I wasn't listening to the physical CDs anymore. My stereo spent a year gathering dust, because I had good speakers on my computer, and an iPod. That lead to an iPhone, iPad, and auxiliary jacks in my car stereos.

Finally, I embraced Apple Airport, and set-up speakers throughout my home, so I could stream music from my computer to any room using my iPhone and iTunes.

The stereo, and the CDs, went bye-bye.

I still like to collect music. I simply no longer needed the tangible object that held the media (LP, cassette, CD.)

Slowly but surely, the same thing is happening with my movie collection. On each of my TVs I have WD Live Hub devices. These stream video files from my computer. It only takes a few minutes to rip an HD DVD to an mkv or iso file, which then sits on my hard drive and can be watched in any room in the house. It can also be taken when travelling--much easier than taking a stack of CDs.

I became so used to using iTunes as a way to organize my music, I bought a program called Movie Collector to keep track of the movies and TV shows I own. Now I can browse my collection on my computer, or my iPhone. I'm also happy streaming Netflix and Hula from the WD devices.

So my physical music collection is gone, and my physical movie collection may some day be gone.

But I always thought I'd keep all my books. Books are special. There's a much greater emotional attachment to them.

At least, I thought there was.

But, like music and movies, I realized all I really cared about was having a copy available if I needed it. And that copy didn't need to be made of paper, taking up space in my house.

I knew this would happen eventually. I predicted it would, a year and a half ago. (In that past year and a half, it turned out I was right about a lot of stuff, and it's worth following that link and all the links mentioned in that old blog entry because they're more relevant than ever, and they'll likely answer all the objections that come up to this post.)

In that same year and a half, I've bought ten paper books, mostly from my peers when attending their signings.

I've also bought over 200 ebooks. Including many that I already had in paper.

So now I'm doing what I did when I got digital copies of music and movies I already owned--I'm getting rid of the hard copy.

I was shocked at how little this bugged me, to actually give away books. Some of which I've had for decades.

But it was easy. And it won't stop with this first batch.

As I buy more ebooks, I'll get rid of the paper versions.

In some cases, I'm getting rid of the paper versions without having the ebook replacement. Simply knowing I can get the ebook if I need it is enough peace of mind to allow me to let the paper version go.

I've got ComicZeal4 for my iPad, which reads color pdf and cbr files brilliantly. So long to all of my mags and comic books.

Some say that the cloud will eventually replace all ownership. Rather than have a movie or book in your personal collection, it will be available to you whenever you need it, in any format, for a rental fee or as part of your ISP. I'm skeptical about this, because I believe people still do want to own media. But that media doesn't have to be physical. It can be a digital copy.

Correction. It will be a digital copy.

You got rid of your 8-track tapes, and floppy disks, and Betamax. You got rid of your Razr and bought a smart phone. You threw out the tube TV and went with an HD flatscreen. You sold your Atari 2600 at a garage sale for $5, and now play Wii with your family.

The new tech replaces the old tech. Books are just more of the same.

You may not believe me. You may think you'll take your paper books with you to the grave.

Do me a favor, and bookmark this page. Look at it again in 18 months.

You'll see I was right.

MRS DARCY VISITS, BRINGING ALIENS

Today, my blog has been invaded by aliens, barely controlled by Jonathan Pinnock. I tried to tell him that this was no666tonbutarrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghhhhh...
YOU WILL LET THE MAN SPEAK, MRS MORGAN

"Yes. I will." *eyes wobble alarmingly*

Over to Jonathan.


MRS DARCY VERSUS THE ALIENSOn page 246 of Nicola’s excellent book, Write to be Published, (you have all got a copy, haven’t you?), she

Not Caring

One of the greatest skills you can acquire as an author is a thick skin.

Once you unleash a story onto the world, it no longer belongs to you. When it was in your head, and on your computer during the writing/rewriting process, it was a personal, private thing. But the moment your words go out into the world, they are subject to the opinion of strangers. What was once personal is now public.

Do yourself a huge favor, and don't listen to the public.

This goes for more than your literary endeavors. If you blog, or speak in public, or tweet on Twitter, you are a Public Figure.

That means some people aren't going to like you.

And you shouldn't care.

You shouldn't care about people liking you, either. Praise is like candy. It tastes good, but it isn't good for us.

The opinions of strangers, good or bad, should have no power over you.

Now, I'm not saying that your should live in a vacuum, oblivious to how you effect the world. In order to be a good writer, and a good person, it is important to have trusted allies pressure-check you.

These allies include family, close friends, and your agent, assuming you have a good relationship with your agent.

These are the people whose opinions do matter. You trust them, because they know you and your writing.

But anything outside of your inner circle should best be ignored.

Getting angry with reviews, or critics, or anonymous trolls, is a waste of energy, and serves no purpose.

Getting an inflated sense of worth because strangers praise you is one of the shallowest, emptiest ego boosts around.

In all cases, it is better not to care.

If you're lucky enough to be read, you will attract detractors and sycophants. You will be ridiculed, celebrated, roasted, venerated, criticized, analyzed, and talked about.

You have no control over what people say about you.

You have full control over how you react to what people say about you.

Not caring doesn't come naturally. In order to truly not care, you need to be confident, self-aware, and mentally healthy. You need to be deliberate. You need to understand your effect on others. You need to understand your needs, and how they're met.

The world is filled with a wide variety of people. But only a few of them should really matter to you. The rest are just white noise. They can amuse. But don't give them more power than that.

One of the greatest journeys in life is overcoming insecurity and learning to truly not give a shit.

But don't take my word for it. My opinion shouldn't matter to you at all.

How To Succeed

I get pummeled with email, often from people either thanking me or asking me things.

Here's a quick encapsulation of the questions I get, and how I'd reply if I had the time.

Q: What's the secret to selling a lot of ebooks?

Joe: There is no secret. Write good books, with good descriptions, good formatting, and good cover art, sell them cheap, and keep at it until you get lucky.

Q: I have an ebook, but it isn't selling well. What should I do to market it?

Joe: Write another ebook, and another, and keep at it until you get lucky.

Q: I've changed my cover art 56 times, but sales are still flat.

Joe: You need to keep writing until you get lucky.

Q: Joe, I've followed your blog, and you're the reason I decided to self-publish. How did you get so many sales?

Joe: I kept at it until I got lucky.

Q: Joe, you're a pioneer. A hero. A guru. You deserve all the success you've gotten. To what do you attribute your success?

Joe: I simply got lucky.

Q: You talk about luck a lot. How do I improve my chances at getting lucky?

Joe: Keep writing good books, with good descriptions, good formatting, and good cover art, and sell them cheap.

Q: Aren't talent and hard work more important than luck?

Joe: They can help you get lucky.

Q: I've done everything you say, but I'm still not selling. What's the problem?

Joe: You haven't gotten lucky yet.

Q: Isn't the self-pubbing road was paved with riches?

Joe: No one deserves to make money writing. The world doesn't owe you a living, and you aren't entitled to huge sales. You simply need to work at it, until you get lucky.

Q: How long does it take to get lucky?

Joe: It took me twenty years and over two million written words.

Q: What if I never get lucky?

Joe: Then you didn't try hard enough, or long enough. Or maybe your writing simply isn't good enough.

Not everyone can be a Major League Baseball player. It takes a combination of traits, including luck.

But everyone seems to think they can be an author, simply because they can string some words together.

Some poorly written ebooks will sell well, just like some poorly written legacy books sell well. But if you write shit, you're harming your chances at getting lucky.

I believe cream will rise to the top, and shit will sink. Ebooks are the perfect opportunity to test this theory, because there are no longer any barriers to entry. Prior to ebooks, legacy gatekeepers decided what got published, and even then many good books failed to find an audience because they never had the proper chance to.

Ebooks have an infinite shelf life, and ebooks stores have infinite shelf space. If your book is good, it has forever to be discovered.

Forever is a long time to find an audience.

Q: Can it really take forever to be successful?

Joe: I wrote the book ORIGIN in 1999. It's the book that landed me an agent. She tried mightily to sell it on three separate occasions, in 1999, 2005, and 2008, garnering more than fifty rejections by every major house in NY.

Right now, ORIGIN is ranked #274 in the Kindle store, and has received over one hundred 5 star reviews. I've sold tens of thousands of copies.

It took more than ten years for ORIGIN to find its audience. I'm going to write a sequel to it, because I get so much fan mail about that book.

You can quit if you want to. Or you can stick with it until you get lucky.

The are no easy answers. No quickie fixes. No direct paths to success.

No one is forcing you to do this. You have to love it, and to believe in yourself. Even when you fail.

Especially when you fail.

If you aren't failing, you aren't trying hard enough.

And if you aren't trying hard, it's going to take a lot longer to get lucky.