More thoughts on the previous post about e-book sales

For some reason, this post of mine didn't cross-post to LJ last night. As I said in a follow-up comment at DW, I spent much more time in this post discussing my disagreements than my agreements with the folks I was responding to, which was the exact reverse of what I should have done. So just to clarify: I'm mainly in agreement with the people who commented on my earlier post, and I'm very grateful for your suggestions. This post is primarily an elaboration on side issues that tantalized me as I reading your comments.

Okay, we've got overlapping comments here in response to this post, so I think I'll address several of you folks at once, if you don't mind. I'm sorry I'm so wordy in my reply, and I'mreally sorry I'm so defensive, but as I've explained to multiple long-suffering beta readers, the way I figure out whether I'm wrong is by saying, "This is how I see it," and giving other people the opportunity to shoot holes in my arguments. So shoot away, guys. :)


FREE FICTION

Can we discuss this topic in the context of the fact that some of my fiction is not available for free? Because some of the replies I've seen so far seem to be assuming that all of my fiction is free. And do take into account that the majority of people encountering my e-books at retailers don't know that any of my fiction is available for free. If the free-fic factor were vitally important, I should still be making considerable sales at retailers.

If I had started out as a self-publisher in 2002, my situation would undoubtedly be very different. But in those days there were only two ways to distribute fiction in any successful manner: sell it to a publisher or e-zine (which I tried, believe me, but there just weren't many markets for gay fantasy in those days) or place it free online. Not until 2007 did self-publishing e-books become a viable solution, when the Kindle store opened. And the vast majority of my fiction was placed online before 2007.

So saying, "Don't give away your fiction for free!" - while it may help me to identify my problem - doesn't really help me to solve it, because I can't rewrite history. :) And I really can't regret the past, because of the enormous benefits I've received from placing my stories online. Unfortunately, money isn't one of them.


WEBSITE DESIGN

I've redesigned it four times since it first came online in 2002. (This is what it looked like in 2002, though the Internet Archive didn't cache the colored background - I think it was beige.) Each time I've revised my site, I've asked all the people who were complaining about its design to please tell me why they found it difficult to navigate and offer suggestions on how I could improve it. Each time I've received no replies. :)

(Well, actually, I once received a very detailed reply from an author to whom I will be forever grateful. It's partly due to her that the page layout is so simple.)

I originally had only two story-index pages - one for what became my Main Bookshelf and one for what became my High Bookshelf - but as the number of stories and series multiplied, those became unwieldy to navigate through, and a number of readers begged that I split the two pages into further pages. So - following the example of other authors with multiple series - I gave each series its own page.

My navigation principle for fiction is this:

Home page > Series page listing all the stories in the series > online story or e-book.

So readers can reach each story or e-book within two clicks. That's the simplest navigation scheme I've been able to think of. For the sake of readers who only arrive for my e-books, I also list all my e-books on a separate page, which is the very first fiction link the readers encounter on the home page. And for the readers who get lost, I have a site map. :)

Keeping in mind that my Website has 14 fiction series, 60 stories and novels (so far), 30 nonfiction sites, and more than 1000 Web pages, some of which contain up to 30,000 words (yeah, I'm prolific), can anyone offer suggestions on how to make the navigation simpler?


COVERS

I'd love to hear some more about this, and in particular what people consider to be the qualities of a professional cover.

My father is a book designer and printing historian; he and my mother owned a typesetting business throughout my teens. (To give you some idea of what sort of household I grew up in: At the breakfast table, my father would critique the design of the cereal box, my mother would point out its typos, I would assess the literary quality of its blurbs, and my brother - the only sensible one among us - would eat the remaining cereal.) So I was given lessons on cover design from the time I was in junior high. (Probably earlier, I suspect, but that's when I grew interested enough to take in what was being said.)

My father has voiced his general approval of my covers (though he and I have agreed to disagree on my choice of typeface); however, I'm the pioneer in my family in terms of designing genre e-book covers, so what my father likes and what my readers want aren't necessarily the same thing. I'd love to hear more about how my covers are coming across to people who view them.

My cover design was based partly on practical considerations: I had to use artwork/photos that are in the public domain or Creative-Commons-licensed (I'm dirt poor and can't afford even stock photos), and the easiest way to lay out a zillion covers and create author-branding is to use the same basic layout each time. But in retrospect, I realized that my covers were unconsciously copying the cover design for the so-called "Black Classics" Penguins, of which you can see an an example here. The Black Classics (which all had the same basic design) used historical art, a black border on the top or bottom, and sanserif type on that border; my covers do the same. I had those Penguins sitting in front of me all through college, so they evidently made their way into my bones.

The Black Classics were published in the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of book covers from the 1960s and 1970s have similar layouts, for example this Signet paperback and this Berkley paperback. When I created the interior layout design for my e-books, I made a deliberate decision to adopt the type of design common in 1960s/1970s books, so I felt that having a retro cover design evoking that era made sense.

Also, quite honestly, it's my aesthetic preference. S. L., I just had a look at your own covers, and their design is really not to my taste. Mind you, it might be that potential readers prefer your type of covers.

The problem of judging whether cover art (as opposed to design) reaches readers is particularly difficult. Let's leave aside my leather fiction (though if we were to talk about it, I would scream about the difficulties of finding erotic photos when one doesn't have access to signed releases from any of the models in the Creative-Commons-licensed photos). For the rest of my e-books, I don't aim for the romance reader, for the simple reason that it's hard to find public domain art showing two men kissing. Instead (as S. L. rightly guessed) I aim for the fantasy reader - not readers who seek epic fantasy, which I don't write, but fantasy readers who seek character-driven, emotionally dramatic stories, since that's what I write. I especially target readers who like male-bonding stories, since nearly all of my stories, whether gay or non-gay, fall into that category - hence this cover and this cover, which are not for gay stories. I try to pick art that seems to me to accurately reflect the stories and to grab the reader (a difficult combination, since my stories center primarily on emotional bonding and emotional conflict rather than physical action), and to accurately reflect the subgenre of the work (by using historical art, I hope to draw in readers of historical fantasy and historical fiction), and to accurately reflect the races/ethnicities of my characters. (If you've never tried to find public domain artwork with non-bigoted portrayals of people of color, let me just tell you: I wouldn't wish that fate on my worst enemy.)

I rarely get feedback on whether I've succeeded in all this juggling of goals, so I'm especially grateful to those of you who are speaking up about this in this discussion. I'd like to hear more of your thoughts.


PRICES

When I said that my e-books weren't selling, I was including my Kindle e-books, which all cost between 99 cents and $2.99 (except for the omnibuses). As a matter of fact, that's the reason why my omnibuses cost between $4.99 and $9.99: I'm making much more, in total, from my omnibuses than from my cheap e-books, because the sales numbers are roughly equivalent, but the omnibuses, being priced higher, bring in more money.

I've been experimenting with e-book prices since 2007. The only price that brings me in more sales is 99 cents. And I can't afford to sell my novels for 99 cents. The only other alternative I've been able to think of is to price the e-book as high as the market will bear (I judge that to be $9.99), give the reader their money's worth (I think four novels is worth $9.99, don't you?), and rake in as high a profit I can from my low sales.

This isn't to say that I'm going to stop selling cheap e-books. I plan at a later date to bring out every work of short fiction I've published, including the individual stories within series like The Eternal Dungeon (since I wrote them to be readable on their own), and to price each work of short fiction at 99 cents. (Since most of my "short" fiction is about 30,000 words long, I think that's also a bargain.) But it's easier, designwise, to start with an omnibus and then bring out individual parts of it, than to do it the other way round.


CALLING MYSELF A SLASH WRITER

The word slash is not on my home page (except one reference toward the bottom of the page, in the blurb for my fan fiction series). It's not on my social networking profiles (except among my 150 interest keywords). In fact, until recently, readers had to dig pretty far to find the word slash anywhere on my Website. (I did have it as one of my many keywords on my home page for about a year, but that got dropped during a site revision.) As a result, a fair number of slash readers over the years have assumed that I'm from outside the slash community.

I began my writing career as a journalist and history writer; I was a professional writer for fourteen years before I discovered slash, and I began sending novels to pro SF/F markets several years before I discovered slash. At the time I entered the slash world, I considered myself a journalist and an SF/F writer. These days, I consider myself a cross-genre writer who is especially prone to write in the subgenres that I list in my site's subtitle: historical fantasy, friendship fiction, and gay fiction. Because I aim my fiction at so many different readerships, I'm perfectly comfortable accepting whatever labels my readers like to pin upon me. A lot of readers over the years have called me an original slash writer, and I certainly fit that definition (a writer who posts original fiction in the slash community), though it's not all that I am. So I sometimes call myself an original slash writer in online conversation, just as I sometimes call myself a gay fiction writer or a fantasy writer or a leather writer or a romance writer or any of the various other genres I write in. It all depends on who I'm talking to. Most of the people who have Friended this blog, or who follow my Twitter account, are from the slash and m/m communities, so I tend to use the terms slash and m/m fairly frequently in those two places. But you won't see me using those terms when I post at SF/F forums or leather forums, and the word slash appears nowhere in my e-book blurbs or official bios. I am VERY PROUD TO BE A SLASHER, but it's not a pro term, so I don't use it in pro contexts.

By the way, Catana and S.L., I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on the "slash = sex stories" issue. If you'd said, "M/M implies sex," I'd agree, because m/m authors are usually pressured to write erotic romance, whether or not they want to. But for as long as I've been in the slash community (nine years now), a very large portion of slash stories have been G, PG, or PG-13. Most of my gay stories are PG-13 or R; a small portion of them are PG or NC-17. (And some of them are romance, S.L.; just not all of them. The ones that aren't about romance are often about romantic friendships.)


WIPs

A question, Hopeofdawn: Do you wait until book series are finished before buying them? I'm trying to figure out whether your concern is over unfinished series or unfinished stories, if you get the distinction I'm making.


BUY BUTTONS

Okay, here's what I have on my site. Buy in two clicks. It would be one click, except that I want the reader to see the preview, which requires a page unto itself. I don't use a buy button, because some readers like buying at Smashwords, and some prefer buying at Amazon, so I need to give them a choice. (Also, I'm inherently against image-based navigation, for multiple reasons.)

Can anyone see ways to improve the buying experience? I spend a lot of time thinking about Web navigation issues (probably hundreds of hours since 2002), so any suggestions would be very, very welcome.


BLURBS

Does the fact that nobody has said anything about my blurbs mean that I'm doing okay in that area? Or does it just mean that you ran out of breath before you were about to tell me how awful mine are? :)


Thank you to anyone else who posted replies to my earlier post; I read up to Hopeofdawn's comment before writing this entry.

I'm finding this discussion immensely interesting and am looking forward to everyone's further thoughts, including the longer reply that Catana has promised.