On Social Media.

Louis Shalako

When it comes to simple posting of content on social media, I use three or four websites pretty consistently to discover content.

Digg.

Long-form journalism on a host of topics that probably won’t make the headlines today or any other day. Yet these stories are important, in-depth and well-written.

Ars Technica.

Plenty of tech stories, internet, gaming, (not my biggest priority), privacy, surveillance, drones, all kinds of interesting stuff there.

Fark.

Mocking the news, tend to be shorter stories. I do like the bizarre, the maudlin and the slightly-creepy.

Reddit.

A vast compendium of stories submitted by internet-cruisers. The style and the substance are different and therefore complementary to other sites.

***

Facebook.

On Facebook, I have resisted the urge to build up to five thousand followers as quickly as possible. I add friends slowly, as often as not taking a quick look at someone’s profile page before sending that friend request.

When notified that x-number of friends have birthdays, I go to their page and find something to like. If someone has given them a big virtual birthday cake, I click on that. It’s a way of acknowledging someone. It’s a way of keeping track of people whom you might have friended ages ago. If they’re not particularly active, if you habitually click like on the same small group, the other folks drop off of your time-line. After a while, you can’t see them and they can’t see you. It’s a way of keeping things fresh, and constantly rotating through the friend-list so that everyone gets a bit of your time.

Etiquette.

After people have had a chance to observe you for a while, they can quickly tell if this is your schtick. We as writers have an online presence. People understand it is an act to some extent. 

We are what we choose to present, and I’m a fairly funny, sometimes impulsive guy.

The other day I posted on Twitter: “I’m going to kill all of you.”

No one said boo, and that’s probably a good thing. It’s just part of the entertainment after a while and no one takes it all that seriously.

Facebook is a bit different. Let’s say I like someone. I tend to click like on their stuff.

If they haven’t responded, and the impression is that they’re never going to respond, the best thing to do there is, if necessary, to break myself of the habit, is to unfollow at the very least. 

That way they’re out of sight, out of mind.

To constantly click like on someone is probably a bit needy. If I can’t take a hint, I’m probably just tormenting them to some degree and it’s better to walk away from any sense of entitlement.

You really can’t make someone like you.

Sometimes it’s just better to accept that.

Twitter.

On Twitter, when I get up in the morning and check my email/notifications, I very often find that someone has re-tweeted something I posted the day before. As often as not, they’re experienced Twitter users, and they will often have a pinned tweet. The problem there is that they’ve often re-tweeted me before and I’ve already re-tweeted their pinned tweet, sometimes more than once. In that case, I’ll just pick someone at random from their feed; tweet them out and see what happens. Sometimes you get a new follower, someone who’s interested in internet marketing, and they catch on pretty quick.

Some folks spend a lot more time on Twitter than I do. They’ve seen my tweet go by in real-time, where I’m just checking notifications the next morning. The odds of them ever re-tweeting my pinned tweet are small, and there’s no sense in resenting that.

I just do the best I can with what I got.

Does Social Media Sell Books?

Yes. I've never had a  traditional publishing contract. I have sold or otherwise distributed over 100,000 books since September 2010 when I published my first title. That first book actually sells, where some of the other ones don't.

I've never had a story in a pro magazine. So far this year I have not placed a single story in any other market, not even at a penny a word, and I haven't given away any stories either.

When people say social media doesn't sell books, they may be right...up to a point. What are they hoping to achieve? Some of us are pretty wrapped-up in the idea of being a bestseller, attracting the notice of a literary agent, all that sort of thing. In which case it might work and it might not.

You never can tell just what is going to work. 

END

Exponential Growth.

Louis Shalako

Setting a rational sales goal, month to month, isn’t all that difficult. Making it happen isn’t all that difficult either, since it’s a rational goal. Here at Long Cool One Books, over the last three months, we’ve seen sales increases of ten percent or greater. It’s a kind of exponential growth, but like interest rates, whether you owe money, or you`re earning money on an investment, sales increases are compounded upon the previous month’s sales increase.

It is analogous and so the math works just fine.

Let’s assume you sold 100 books in December 2014. A ten percent increase would translate into 110 books as of January 31. That`s a straightforward, ten percent sales increase. By the end of February, you should be up to 121. It’s not ten more books a month, but ten percent more books per month. This results in sales of 132-point-something by March. There is a factor, and you can multiply Month One sales by that factor to project what sales might be in Month Twelve, if in fact you meet your sales goals, month-by-month, for an entire year.

The factor, using simple interest compounding techniques as a substitute for sales compounding, is 2.138428377. Simply put, if you can meet your ten percent sales-increase goal, month on month for twelve months, then you will be selling 213.8 books the next January for every 100 books you are selling this January. Ten percent increases are a form of exponential growth.

The math is pretty simple and here`s another link.

Beating Your Personal Best.

“Each week, her goal was to drop time in her races--not win, but beat her own personal best. Sometimes she only cut one-tenth of a second from her previous performance, but it was an improvement nonetheless and worth celebrating.”

This is exactly what we`re trying to do. This is why I go swimming, and try to see how far I can go. This is also why by the end of the season I can go farther than in the beginning of the season—I`m in training, and I`m keeping track accurately, and I`m trying to beat my personal best.

So our goal here for the month of September isn`t so much to attract a literary agent. Our goal here is not to make the New York Times Bestseller List. We know very well we`re not likely to release a novel and sell 100,000 copies. We`re unknown, but we`re also independent.

It is our greatest strength.

We don`t give a shit about any of that. What we want to do is to take last month`s (August, 2015), sales total and increase it by ten percent. That`s all, ladies and gentlemen. That`s all, ladies and gentlemen, month after month. We just have to keep going—that`s all.

In July, we sold 362 books. In August, 395 books. For September, we`re hoping for about 450 book sales across a bunch of platforms, all of which have strengths and weaknesses, and which must be treated on an individual basis. It is true, that a traditional publisher wouldn`t be interested in these kinds of numbers. They have a long tooth-to-tail ratio. For every book I sell, they would have to sell a thousand, maybe even ten thousand books just to break even.

They are no better at business than you or I.

The thing is, after twenty years on a disability pension, I really can`t succumb to that sense of entitlement and turn my nose up at a couple of hundred books a month. Especially since I`ve been seeing sales grow lately, when everyone else is blogging doom and gloom, everyone else is writing about the Top Ten Thousand Mistakes You Amateur Newbie Author`s Make, and WHY YOU`RE NEVER GOING TO BE VALIDATED BY SOMEONE IMPORTANT.

(There really shouldn`t be an apostrophe there in authors, Louis. – ed.)

(Point taken. P. S. Fuck off. Louis.)

So, you`re no doubt thinking, how do we achieve these ten percent increases in sales.

The simple answer is that we work ten percent harder, or for ten percent longer, or do our jobs ten percent better. WE WRITE TEN PERCENT MORE BOOKS. These are our own personal algorithms that we are gaming, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

Here at Long Cool One Books, we could write our product descriptions ten percent better. 

We could make our book covers ten percent better, okay, that sounds silly when all of art is so subjective. But merely working, pushing ahead at a constant rate, becoming better-skilled and more professional every day, probably helps.

Producing more products, each and every month, probably helps.

Becoming a better writer, and learning more about what people read, probably helps. Writing the sort of books that people want to read, might not actually help—that`s because those product categories are already extremely crowded by people following a trend. Finding a niche that is underserved, or badly-served, might help quite a bit.

Here at Long Cool One Books, reading the rules set down from on high for other people has been very illuminating for us. They`re the ones that told us to raise our prices to where we can make a living at it—which would price our books at about a hundred and eighty-five bucks each; and no one would ever buy one. They`re the ones that told us not to check our accounts, when that is a wonderful source of data and feedback. It will just depress you, or so they said.

They forgot to mention just how much it will empower you.

(They`re the ones that told us never to use a semi-colon. – ed.)

(Point taken. Now fuck off again. Louis.)

Here`s an interesting point. Let`s say you are lucky enough to land a traditional publishing contract, signing up, in your very first contract, with a small press. It looks like a lucky break. 

Someone else believes in you. They believe they can make money off of your work, the only question is why you don't. But how big is that advance. A couple of grand, five or ten grand tops. They`ll print up anywhere from 750 copies, (selling at forty bucks in an independent, brick-and-mortar store) to maybe, if you`re lucky, 2,000. You will never earn out your advance. You will likely never see a royalty cheque, and it takes years for the contract to revert. And you`ve sold somewhere between 750 and 2,000 books. The only street credibility you get is that you`ve been published.

This is the way to attract an agent. Or so they say. This is the way to make the bestseller lists—or so they say.

We`re going to continue to buck that trend, to reject all such advice, and just keep on doing what we`re already doing well. For one thing, we`ve distributed well over a hundred thousand books in five years. It`s taken that long to get where we are now. But you could submit books forever, without actually getting anywhere. That`s why so many people talk about luck in this business, when it`s really art and science that will get you to where you need to go.

Fuck them, anyways. I don`t have time for that shit.

To hell with the rest of the industry. But I will promise you this: guys like me are going to take a billion-dollar bite out of this industry in 2015. And next year, at least one-point-one billion. Maybe even one-point-one-one billion.

It`s called thinking outside the box, and they`ll lecture you on that too.

If you don`t believe it, just sit back and watch. Sit back and listen to them bitch, and whine, and piss and moan.

You will see, ladies and gentlemen.

End

Another article.

http://shalakopublishing.blogspot.ca/2013/09/production-goals.html

Spreading the Nets: Passive Discoverability

And now we sitz and waitz.

Louis Shalako

Here at Shalako Publishing, home of Long Cool One Books and Larga Fresca Uno Libros, our latest project is to get our books and stories uploaded in (or on) a few more online bookstores.

The basic premise is that the whole package has to be free, and the service provider must have their own bookstore. Additional distribution channels are a bonus if we can find ones we don’t have access to already. This all goes to extending the reach and the impact of passive discoverability.

The interface must be easy to use, accept our files, have provision for using our own book covers, and other considerations.

For this experimental addition to our digital publishing machine we will be looking for provision for Canadian and overseas authors to sell ebooks and PODs without withholding tax.

That being said, in some circumstances we may be willing to accept a penalty of thirty percent withholding tax, if we think the website will grow, succeed and eventually be able to provide this service. Any additional sales are significant. We will be looking for maximum flexibility from all platforms, free analytics, site appearance, ease and quickness of problem resolution, questions answered, etc. Assuming we made a hell of a lot of money, which doesn’t seem very likely, at some point in the future it would make sense to do U.S. income tax returns and get a refund.

Hell, if things go really well, I've always wanted to live in the southwestern U.S. anyway. 

I might even immigrate, ladies and gentlemen.

It might take a few days, in terms of the man-hours required to upload a hundred and thirteen titles to some new bookstores and aggregators. This is the sort of work that doesn’t pay off immediately. It pays off in the long run, which is why we say we are playing the long game.

If passive discoverability really does work, then being an early adopter of any platform might pay off at some time down the road. If it doesn’t work, then each and every site will need some degree of promotion.

This is the sort of experiment where a couple of initial sales might impress the author, however it is only over time that we can really get a good idea of which sites work for us and which sites don’t.

So we’ve gotten into Kbuuk, with three titles published so far. Here is Heaven Is Too Far Away, with a cover using a pro marketing image and designed in Microsoft Word.

Each site is of course a bit different in terms of operating details, and each site represents a new learning curve. For example the Kbuuk cover system looks a bit iffy unless I can fiddle around in there a bit and find some adjustment in the cover field. Designing a cover for each site for each book looks like a big job.

In terms of learning curve, Booktango wouldn’t accept Epub at first go, so I simply used a .doc and it went.

However, the Booktango system kept giving me error messages. I find it hard to believe that the original file had many, many hard returns in the middle of the line. The Smashwords system might introduce one hard return as it converts your original .doc file into what is presented as your original file. I say that because I check every book, page by page, using tools like the Amazon Kindle previewer, Nook for PC, Kindle for PC, etc. I also have Adobe Reader, the latest version. When I couldn’t find the original on my PC, I have used the SW original file and that’s when I started finding the odd hard return in the middle of a line.

There is no way that I’m going to spend hours fixing errors introduced by a system that obviously has different requirements. For example in the case of this document, the thing doesn’t seem to like three spaces or even two before the next chapter heading. That’s one reason I think it is an artifact of the systems involved. Also, at this exact moment in time, I’m not prepared to make a table of contents for a dozen novels. All of the short stories and novellas have them, but those books were written and formatted at a later date, when it was a requirement for iTunes distribution through Smashwords. A simple solution is to upload anything that already has a TOC and not worry too much about the novels for now.

Initially, I started off by searching ‘free ebook aggregators’ and similar searches. I began last night. 

What has been accomplished so far?

We're in Bookrix.

I’ve taken a few off of the list, including Booktango, Bookbaby, Fastpencil, Blurb, Indiebound, Lightning Source, (ebooks and PODs) as well as taking a look at Lulu, where simple .pdfs in their store might generate a bit of revenue over the course of time. It's either that or learn how to embed fonts! But we don't need their extended distribution anyways.

We couldn’t find a way to get into Versent, for example, so some of the other links we found were quickly written off.

Just one minor point might put us off. If someone charges $49 to set up each title, then that’s quickly going to run into a lot of money, with virtually no idea of the sales potential is.

If it ain't free, I move on rather quickly these days.

Other than that, I’ve got a handful of titles up on two or three platforms, all for free, and all using the simple tools provided.

As for the question of whether it sells books or not, we won’t know that for a year or two!

END

http://www.bookrix.com/_ebook-louis-shalako-heaven-is-too-far-away/

http://kbuuk.com/kb/book/4316/core-values.shtml

http://kbuuk.com/kb/book/4317/the-case-of-the-curious-killers.shtml