Jeff Haws

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Selling

New Books By Nobodies Don’t Sell Jack

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Sell

In the week since “Killing the Immortals” was released, I’ve been asked dozens of times by numerous people, “So, how are sales going?” These people generally mean well and are just trying to engage with me on the subject of the book, but the answer for pretty much all brand-new authors who have no real platform to sell from and are completely unknown outside a fairly small set of friends, family and acquaintances: “Predictably slowly.” I tend to tell people they’re “trickling in.” That’s pretty much right. It’s also pretty much exactly what I anticipated. There’s a reason new indie authors don’t just quit their day jobs once their book is out. Like any other small business, it takes a long time (and a good bit of luck) to build a following and a foundation for success. I’m a long way from that.

I don’t mind when people ask that. I’ve yet to punch anyone who did so, in fact. I make no promises, but it’s likely I won’t. But, in the interest of addressing the question, I thought I’d take a look at that in this post. Full disclosure and all. One of the things I never could find as I researched the business of publishing was an idea of reasonable expectations. This won’t solve that completely, but maybe it will help a bit. It’s a sample size of one, though, so bring your grain of salt with you. Here we go … [Read more…] about New Books By Nobodies Don’t Sell Jack

Setting Sales Goals for Your First Novel

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Goals

As I get closer to sending my first novel, “Killing the Immortals,” sailing out into the world, I’m starting to think seriously about what I want to accomplish with it, what sorts of goals to set for myself. The Nobel Prize for Literature would be all right, I guess. There may be a step or two to get through before that, though. Admittedly, I don’t know a lot about the committee that decides those sorts of things, but my assumption is that they’ve got a high-ish bar.

So, we all may want to have incremental goals shy of a Nobel Prize that will give us something to shoot for in the meantime, until fame and fortune come to whisk us away. I think goals are important, but I also think they’re challenging to figure out when you’ve never published a novel before. You can look at all the “The average self-published book sells 250 (or whatever) copies” blog posts you want, but how does that relate to what you’re doing? So many factors are going to impact how many people buy your book and how wide a reception it gets, from its genres to its cover to the blurb you write to the following you’ve built up to how much work you put into marketing the book to whether or not your story/writing sucks. What does “average” even really mean when so many books are haphazardly thrown together with visions of hefty royalty checks, mahogany-decked libraries, and new elbow-patched jackets without considering the insane amount of work and luck it takes to become the next millionaire author? [Read more…] about Setting Sales Goals for Your First Novel

Why Cover Design is So Important

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Library

As I move closer to needing to actually sell this novel I’ve written, I have to start thinking seriously about what matters most for doing that — if, for no other reason, than to know where to direct most of the budget I’m willing to potentially waste on getting this thing out into the world of Amazon.

There are plenty of factors that go into that. I talked about three of those in another post. The top one I cited was the book’s cover. Honestly, if your book cover is terrible, I’m not sure much else matters. You can write the next Great American Novel, but if your cover is done by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but once dabbled with Photoshop a few years ago. If your cover looks like it was done in MS Paint, nobody’s ever gonna know if your book is any good. [Read more…] about Why Cover Design is So Important

Three Most Important Factors for Selling Books

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Selling

As I get closer to the editing phase of my story and this whole book thing becomes more real, I’m starting to think about some of the stuff beyond writing that goes along with putting a book into the market that will hopefully maybe possibly start selling a few copies … beyond the 50 or so my mom will buy just out of sheer excitement.

Of course, the writing matters. The story matters. But I’m not sure it matters as much as many think. I doubt you’ll hear this a lot on writing blogs, but the quality of your story isn’t going to be that big of a factor when it comes to selling books. That’s partially because “quality of your story” is really objective; what I think is a great story, you might think is trite and boring. For example, my fiancee thinks “Pulp Fiction” is boring and “The Big Lebowski” is stupid. Let’s just say we don’t see quite eye to eye on those two. Are those “quality stories”? I think most people would say they very much are, but not to her. What does that mean? Not much, other than it’s all subjective.

It’s mostly, though, because, as long as there’s some redeeming quality in your work, there’s probably a potential market out there for it. Thousands of romance and cozy-mystery stories I’d find to be laughably bad sell massive numbers of books every week. There are millions of readers out there; not everybody wants to read Cormac McCarthy or Jonathan Franzen. Not everybody wants you to challenge them. Some just want a 125-page quick read they can knock out at the beach, or before bed.

So, if not quality writing, what are the three most important factors that will go into selling your book? [Read more…] about Three Most Important Factors for Selling Books