Pub Rants

Category: electronic books

Self Publishing? Excel Is Your Friend

by Kristin Nelson

I’ve discovered that in general, authors are not numbers people. They tend to have vague idea of sales and revenue earned. In fact, most authors probably don’t scrutinize their royalty statements like they should (with a few exceptions of course). And I get it. Authors are creative folks. Math uses the other side of the brain. But if you are digitally self-publishing, then you are your own publisher. And given that, you should be generating your own royalty statements in an excel spreadsheet. Here’s what you should track and why.

TO TRACK:

1) All Price Points – sales especially

2) All editions — including audio/shorter works

3) Copies given away for free

4) All distribution venues where editions are available

5) Percentage splits/royalty

6) Cumulative totals

 

WHY:

If you later want to partner with an agent, that person will need a fully transparent and detailed record of all sales to represent you fully.

At DBW, fellow agent and panelist Steve Axelrod made a good point about how agents are using new metrics to sell an author to editors, to film, to foreign. We are using FB and twitter followers. Visibility on big e-Sites like Wired and Boing Boing. Actual digital sales clearly outlined.

Especially for film and foreign sales. If there isn’t a big publishing deal to start the buzz abroad and in Hollywood (which was the traditional path), well, presenting the facts can make a difference in convincing these two realms to pay attention to the title and license unexploited rights. Keep in mind that electronic book adoption and sales abroad are easily 3 years behind what is going on in the U.S. Foreign publishers must be convinced to license rights to a digital-only title.

But actual sales and documentation of that data speaks volumes – at least that’s what we are finding here at NLA.

So, are you tracking your sales? If not, get started.

 

 

 

 

It Was Bound To Happen

by Kristin Nelson

Well, this is a first. Now that I think about it, I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened before now.  What am I talking about?

I just received an email from a writer who wanted to gift me his/her self-published electronic book on the Kindle.

It’s a lovely gesture but I absolutely cannot accept. I had Anita send the author an email saying I had to decline and to please get a refund for the gift coupon. If I accepted this, it would open a whole gray area can of worms. It’s probably not what this writer was thinking but an agent could accept the gift coupon, not buy the book in question, and get something else instead. In general, gifts to agents feels like a slippery slope. Better just to say no.

So thanks but no thanks.

Truly, you just need to send us a free query letter by email. We will read and consider it. If I want to read more and I know the title is published on the Kindle, maybe I’ll ask for the mobi file. The writer could then send that.

USA Today Bestseller – 6 Years After Publication

by Kristin Nelson

Last week my author Jana DeLeon, who has been digitally self-publishing her backlist titles, hit the USA Today Bestseller list at #98 for the very first time and for the very first novel she ever published: Rumble On The Bayou (originally published in 2007). And the big question is: How did she do that?

It’s a great question. More and more digitally self-published titles are hitting the lists. I’m certainly not a liberty to reveal all the genius marketing ideas Jana has been pursuing but I can tell you one thing that is public knowledge. She’s not doing it alone.

Over two years ago, Jana and 9 other digitally self-publishing authors formed a marketing co-op where they pool ideas, platforms, and resources. Together this group creates aggressive strategies and they’ve seen remarkable results for every member of the co-op.

It gives a whole new meaning to “it takes a village.” I imagine most authors who are digitally publishing tend to go it alone. I’m seeing the real efficacy of marketing in numbers. And I also don’t think grabbing any old person will do. Each member of the group needs to be equally invested and savvy about what it takes to market digital titles.

On a side note, RUMBLE was originally published by the now defunct Dorchester back in the day. I had quite the battle to arm wrestle the rights back when they stopped paying royalties three years  ago. Obviously that was worth doing!

Rumble-#98_UsaToday-BSL

Where Kristin Discusses The Importance Of Metadata

by Kristin Nelson

As many of you already know, I was in The Big Apple last week speaking at Digital Book World. After Mike Shatzkin’s interview with me and Hugh Howey, I sat on a panel with my fellow agents Jane Dystel, Steve Axelrod, and Jay Mandel.

My question was this: “What should Publishers be learning from authors who are self-publishing?”

My answer was twofold: (more…)

Friday Funnies – Anatomy of Book Cover Design

by Kristin Nelson

STATUS: Haven’t had a good video to share in a while. This one is worth the wait.

What’s playing on the XM or iPod right now?  DON’T GO by Yaz

Chip Kidd is a legend in this industry. Video is not short but worth every minute of your time. It’s a small glimpse into the brilliance of mind it takes to create a truly amazing cover. And I’ll give you a hint. It’s not about bells and whistles. It’s about text.

As it should be. Enjoy!

Their Failure is Not Mine – Guest Blogger Mari Mancusi

by Kristin Nelson

For some reason, Internet Explorer is not showing the blog so had to delete last post and redo. My apologies to anyone who commented.

Don’t worry, Fridays With Agent Kristin video rants will resume next Friday! This week seems to be all things Dorchester.
–Kristin

I still remember the day my dot.com company dragged us all into the conference room on Friday afternoon—pay day—and announced there would be no pay checks distributed at the end of the day. Not today—and not ever again. We were summarily dismissed and suddenly found ourselves unemployed–with no way to make up the money that was owed to us. It was devastating, to say the least. I felt powerless and weak and alone.

Fast forward 10 years and bring on the déjà vu when I opened my mailbox to find a royalty statement from my long time, traditional publisher, Dorchester. While the statement clearly stated I was owed money, there was no check inside. Dorchester was having financial difficulties, just like my dot.com and chose not to pay what it owed.

But this time, I wasn’t going to just lay down and die. Maybe I’d never see a dime from Dorchester, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t make a dollar on my own. And so, as Kristin worked tirelessly to get the rights back to my books (even the ones she didn’t represent the first time around!), I started researching how to publish these backlist titles on my own. For many reasons not detailed here, I decided to use Kristin’s digital liaison service to launch the books rather than self-publish them on my own. Together we began the process of working with cover artists, copyeditors, and converters to breathe new life into these old books. I even did some rewriting! One of the advantages to digital publishing—you can always update and tweak your product. (Though my husband likes to tease me and say I’m like George Lucas in that regard…)

Today we launched Tomorrow Land, a post-apocalyptic, dystopian YA romance previously published as Razor Girl in Dorchester’s crossover Shomi line. Best described as a post-apocalyptic pilgrimage to Disney World in a zombie infested wasteland, the story follows two teens who had fallen in love before the apocalypse and then separated, Casablanca style, only to be reunited four years later and forced to find a way to trust one another again. All the while trying to deal with those pesky, flesh eating zombies!

The artwork, by the way, was custom created for the book by artist/illustrator Tony Sahara. He’s amazing, isn’t he? He’s also did the artwork for Alterntiy, my next young adult dystopian release, coming May 1st.

I can’t tell you how awesome a feeling it was to wake up this morning and see Tomorrow Land up for sale on Amazon and know—without a shadow of a doubt—that I’ll get properly paid for each and every download. On a book that will never go out of print and costs half the cover price. So not only do I benefit—but readers do, too! Total bonus.

I know that I will never get that last check from my dot.com company. And there will never be a royalty check in the mail from Dorchester. But you know what? Their failure is not mine. I’m determined to make the best of this bad situation and come out on top in the end.

NOTE: My heart goes out to my fellow Dorchester authors who were not able to get their rights back. It sickens me that this company would not only steal earned money from its hardworking writers, but then steal their intellectual property as well. I hope you find a way to get your books back in the end.

Kristin’s NOTE : If you are a Dorchester author with rights in question and titles currently still available online for sale, you lose nothing by reaching out to the various electronic distribution venues and finding out exactly what you need to do to get those titles removed from sale. Will it be a lot of work? Probably but potentially worth it in the end. I, of course, also recommend you consult with an attorney. I would also reach out to other former Dorchester authors and see how you might be able to help each other.


About Tomorrow Land


Can true love survive the end of the world?

Imagine finding your first love, only to be ripped apart by the apocalypse. Peyton Anderson will never forget the day she was forced to make a choice–between her family–and Chris Parker, the boy she’d given her heart. And now, four years later, as she steps from the fallout shelter and into a dead and broken world, he’s the only thing on her mind.

All Chris “Chase” Parker wanted was to take Peyton away and keep her safe from harm. But he waited for hours in the rain on judgment day and she never showed–breaking his heart without ever telling him why.

Now the two of them have been thrown together once again, reluctant chaperones of a group of orphan children in a post-apocalyptic world where the dead still walk…and feed. As they begin their pilgrimage to the last human outpost on Earth, can they find a way to let go of old hurts and find the love they lost–all the while attempting to save what’s left of the human race?

“A high-stakes, high-octane tour through a devastating and deftly imagined future. This is Mancusi at the top of her game.” –Diana Peterfreund, author of For Darkness Shows the Stars

UK–How Stubborn You Are

by Kristin Nelson

STATUS: Have to run out the door in 15 minutes.

What’s playing on the XM or iPod right now? HARD TIMES by David Newman

Not to put too fine a point on it. The book selling market in the UK is between a rock and a hard place. Booksellers in trouble. Publishers selling half the books sold at high discount levels, etc. Consequently, UK publishers aren’t buying that much. As of late, it’s one of the hardest territories to sell into unless a title sold for a lot of moolah in the US.

We are struggling to land a licenses there.

In fact, it’s probably why a lot of UK booksellers are buying US stock wholesale and offering it for sale there (and this would maybe show on a royalty statement as an export sale). It would be hard to track down.

So when we sell North American rights only and then request that the US publisher pull down their edition from the UK market, we aren’t looking to screw UK readers. It’s simply that the author might not get legitimately paid for those copies. If it’s not in the grant of rights and not showing up on any royalty statement…

But authors who haven’t sold into the UK are getting creative. In fact, some authors are taking matters into their own hands and are making their titles available electronically through the different ebook venues in the UK.

So even though the physical version might be a hard to find, titles can still reach UK readers.

Selling Territories Publisher Doesn’t Have The Rights To

by Kristin Nelson

STATUS: Have morning chai, will work.

What’s playing on the XM or iPod right now? LET LOVE RULE by Lenny Kravitz

Late last week, I got an email from a client asking why her latest release wasn’t available as an eBook in the UK. Bemused, I emailed her to say that we had only sold North American rights to her US publisher and hadn’t done a subrights deal for that territory as of yet. The US publisher didn’t have the right to make its edition available in Great Britain. In fact, there shouldn’t be any edition of her book being sold in that territory.

She then sent me a link to amazon.uk where her US book was clearly for sale.

Well, that made her question make a whole lot more sense. No wonder she was confused.

The point of my post? As authors, you should randomly check bookseller sites abroad and if something pops up, then you need to inform your agent and he/she needs to track it down. Because the US publisher didn’t have UK in the grant of rights, this would never show up as an itemized list on the royalty statement.

But if the book is for sale there and we discovered that, then the Publisher needs to do a couple of things. 1) Take the edition down and 2) let us know how many copies were sold and how they plan to account for them.

Another favorite story, which didn’t happen all that long ago either, is when an author received several emails from Italian fans who loved her work but were complaining about the poor translation.

Uh, Italian license had never been done for the book. There should be no Italian edition–badly translated or otherwise. I reached out to the Italian publisher and they were mortified. They thought they had an agreement in place but the contract was never done and the author was never informed.

I give Italy kudos though. When the problem was discovered, they stepped up immediately to make it right and paid for the edition they had published. As it was also out of print, they officially reverted the rights they actually never had. *grin*

All’s well that ends well…

Just another day at the office.

Talking NLA’S DLP

by Kristin Nelson

STATUS: This morning I thought I had a mild day in front of me. After the third fire before 10 a.m., I gave up that notion.

What’s playing on the XM or iPod right now? REMINISCING by Little River Band

So yesterday’s announcement is not the be all end all of this topic. I’m happy to chat some more about our new Digital Platform.

As I said yesterday, we developed our model in conversation with our clients. In fact, their input modeled it. I went to them and said, “If an agent was going to offer a supported environment for self publishing, what would make sense to you? What would be of concern? What would make it worth an agent’s commission?”

And they told me. They also were gracious enough to review various model outlines and the DLP agreement that any author interested in using the DLP would need to click “I Agree” to use it.

And their help was absolutely invaluable and I feel quite comfortable that what we’ve created is the right approach–that we have not created something that will be a conflict of interest in representing clients and is a very ethical way for an agent to provide yet another facet of services to our authors.

My client Courtney Milan was gracious enough to post a blog entry on the topic today if you’d like some insight from an author who is currently self pubbing happily and successfully and not through our DLP–which by the way, bothers me not at all. I support her choice. Another client plans to do a guest entry on why she is using the full-service option and why she has been over-the-moon to do so.

Just wait until you see her totally kick-a** cover–something I don’t think she would have gotten on her own. It’s stunning.

I imagine that if a writer believes that all an agent does is sell books to publishers, there might be questioning on why an author would bother using an agency’s DLP. After all, a writer can certainly write the book, convert the efiles (or pay someone to), and put the titles up on Amazon, BN, Smashwords, Apple, what have you.

But you see, my authors know I do so much more than that.

And as an agent, I have relationships with folks that most writers can’t even imagine. Will all of them be valuable? No. Have some already proven to be? Yep.

But let’s talk DLP stuff.

1) First a correction. In yesterday’s entry, I realized that I typed “term of license.” Oi! In our DLP agreement, it’s a “term of liaison.” Not quite the same thing in a rather big way. So my apologies. For our full-service option, NLA foots all the upfront costs–which is why we specify a 2 year term of liaison. Could you imagine plunking down the money and have the author pull it a month later and we are simply out of luck? Quite frankly, my authors are awesome and I can’t imagine any one of them doing that but as an agent, I still have to be smart about it.

In short, for full-service, it needs to be on our DLP for 2 years and that’s it. After that, authors are free to do as they please and we will even give them their files. After all, they own it. They didn’t grant rights to us.

If we haven’t recouped in 2 and they take it, are we screwed? Yep. But I’m betting that it’s so worthwhile, that they are happy to keep it there. Nothing is in perpetuity. Why would an author do that?

For distribution only venue, an author can come and go as they please. All we are providing is access to venues they can’t access. It’s our standard 15% commission. For anyone who doesn’t think that’s worth it, they obviously have not wrestled with google’s very unfriendly platform. Not to mention, we have venues that authors individually do not have access to. And let me tell you, having been there and done that, it’s probably not worth the headache for an author. Amazon and BN have designed it to be easy. Not all venues have done the same.

2) Now remember, the author is in full control of their work. In the full-service option, they have access to a rather in-depth list of resources for cover artists, copyeditors, proofreaders, developmental editors, publicists, web designers, etc. They choose; we pay. The only exception is the developmental editor. The only reason for that is because we have no say in the revision process and I could see an author running up a rather big tab on the agency’s dime by doing endless revisions for months on end. Probably unlikely but once again, we need to be smart about things.

Now, keep in mind, as many of my clients can attest to (for good or for bad *grin*), I’m an agent who edits–probably to the level of a developmental editor.

3) On our full service, we rep the subrights–foreign, film, etc.

One commenter asked “It seems an inherent conflict–the agent has a vested interest in the author NOT publishing with a publishing house else, but instead self-publishing using services NLA benefits from financially.”

Actually no. The author client is self-publishing so it’s not even a choice for me. I have no say on whether they are on the DLP or not. If they are looking for an agent, my assumption is it’s because they want a finger in all pies and are looking for a print/ebook deal with a “traditional” publisher (for lack of a better word). I’m not taking on writers who just want to use our DLP.

That is not the point of offering this service.

Hopefully I’ve answered all questions. It’s after 8 p.m. and all I really want to do is go home and eat dinner.

The Rapidly Evolving Role of Agent

by Kristin Nelson

STATUS: What a way to start the day. Our ISP had a huge network outage that lasted for 45 minutes. No emails coming in or going out. It’s a Monday!

What’s playing on the XM or iPod right now? UPSIDE DOWN by Jack Johnson

Last Thursday I highlighted that the AAR has made some observations on the role of agents in ePublishing. If an agent is both an agent and ePublisher, well, that’s pretty much a conflict of interest. If the agent has a biz interest stake in a client’s decision, it rather eliminates our disinterested and objective viewpoint when giving guidance to a client.

But the digital landscape is shifting so rapidly and the agent’s role is evolving so quickly, what is an agent to do if clients want assistance making backlist titles available in eFormat?

Well, I can tell you what NLA is doing. And because I believe in involving greater minds than my own, I used the best resource of all–our own clients. Working in partnership with them, we developed NLA’s Digital Liaison Platform. My lawyer was also a big help but he simply formulated the agreement language once we had nailed down the model.

So what exactly are we doing?

We created a platform where NLA clients can self-publish their content within a supported environment. This is not a publishing house.

Before you say, “isn’t this a matter of semantics?” The answer is no. In a publishing house model, the author grants her rights to the publisher and cedes control in that grant.
That is not what we are doing. In our model, our clients maintain full control of their titles. They are not granting them to us. They have full say on covers, editing, pricing, etc. The program is voluntary so if they want to participate on our DLP, they can, but they are also welcome to handle their backlist themselves.

We offer two different options. The first is full service where we hook the client up with cover artists, copyeditors, publicists, and we do the file conversion and make it available on all the electronic distribution venues. We use our individual leverage with all the venues to promote. The second is a distribution-only venue. In this option, the author handles all the details of self-pubbing and conversions themselves but simply want access to venues they can’t reach on their own. Overdrive (main source for libraries) would be an example of a venue that individual authors can’t reach but we can.

If they are on our full-service DLP, we ask them to commit to a two-year term of license [correction: it’s a two year term of liaison, not license. My apologies for not proofreading more thoroughly. There is quite the difference between the two!] since we undergo all the expense and that would be rather uncool for a client to let us do that and then pull the title a month later.

Our agency commission split is the same as it’s always been.

Indie Booksellers–we are also on Google eBookstore and Ingram but if you have your own dedicated eBookstore, feel free to contact us directly as we are happy to add your venue to our platform.

Our Launch Title:

SKATER BOY by Mari Mancusi $3.99
The first novel in the sweet, tween-oriented First Kiss Club series.

Amazon
BN
Google
Apple – access through iTunes