Here's part 1 if you missed it: ua-cam.com/video/H0qjsbRxRFY/v-deo.html - I'm not a fan of the risks and other complications that come with serialization platforms generally but I am very, very tempted to try this experiment on KDP. Anyone else?
I have a separate comment below, but thought I'd mention an indie author with many shorter works whose approach greatly intrigues me: William Massa. Would be interested in your thoughts on his approach. Thanks again for all of your engrossing content. Cheers.
Don't forget how many Romance authors use ghostwriters to list as many books for sale under their name as they do. I'd call it an open secret, but I'm not sure it is something anyone even tries to keep secret any longer. And since Amazon is fine with it, as long as it is an original work, I guess I can't blame them. I do remember my eyes crossing when that Brazilian Romance author who had books for sale under her name loaded with plagiarism offered up as her defense that it was the fault of her ghostwriters...and nobody had any issues with that, only with the plagiarism. But I guess that's me and I should get with the times. 🤷♂
Ghostwriting is a whole other thing! At that point though, if you've got the marketing machinery optimized and the branding in place, it makes sense to outsource some of the writing, especially if it'll help preserve some of your sanity...though a closer vetting of who you hire would probably be a great idea to avoid issues like that!
Serializing a book is a deceptive trick on the Customer and really needs to be rethought. Not all of us have the time to read page and pages and pages of material that goes nowhere and many of us don't have the money to spend in order to complete the author's sole book which consists of 3 or 4 parts with no endings and sometimes more. If one is going to do this, then indicate it in the text in the description.
KDP is the sole reason why the average IQ of "authors" now matches the mean, 100. And, the longer this keeps up, the more the readers will just come to accept this as the new normal simply for not knowing there used to be better. Smart advertising trick though, I have to hand them that. But it's not something a real, individual author who aspires excellence in their craft to produce single, high quality art can do. Like you said, you simply can't write 12 good novels a year.
Another great video on the business side of self-publishing. Your videos are consistently fascinating. Now having watched this, I'm starting to question my Royal Road/Patreon plan, and thinking the Short Reads route might be better. Do you have to be enrolled in Select to be considered for Short Reads listing? Even if that's the case, the downside might still be worth it given the excellent points you brought up about Short Reads still being weighted the same as novels in the rankings. Of course, being listed among the Short Reads is no guarantee, but I'd imagine KDP would be more likely to do so the more titles in a series you keep releasing. Also, with this model, you're probably going to want to start off with a pen name in a genre with relatively lower costs in terms of cover design given the number of covers required. I suppose that's dependent on an individual author's budget. I don't have the start-up budget on-hand to publish many shorter books in a genre where the cover design level required in order to be competitive necessitates a higher cover design spend per title. So, that likely rules out SFF for me. On Royal Road you can get away with more 'discount level' covers, and you really only need 1 of them for the entirety of your serial. Anyway, you've again provided a lot of good food for thought here, thanks!
Hey Ken, you DON'T need to be in KDP Select for your eligible books to get categorized as Short Reads - Sarra Cannon and Becca Fanning are both wide, for example. The cover thing really is quite varied; you can see Sarah KL Wilson is doing fantasy, for example, but her Heart Phoenix serial uses the same cover art, with just the episode number on the front of the cover and in the title. But yeah, lots and lots of food for thought. I'm just extremely leery of any serial platform where you have to post your entire work and it's not behind a paywall-one of the writers in my writing group serializes on Royal Road and a few other places and his stuff has been pirated, multiple times. That's not to say piracy isn't an issue on KDP, but just having a few more barriers does make it less prevalent.
@@PaperTigerProductions Good point about the piracy. Hadn't considered that consequence. I didn't realize Sarra Cannon produced shorter works, I've watched some of her Authortube content and assumed she wrote exclusively full-length novels. See what you mean about Sarah KL Wilson re: covers. Interesting. I do note the barrier to entry for cover design does seem a bit lower for Post-apoc which falls under SFF, and it doesn't appear there are many producing shorter books on that sub. Kendra Elliott and Melinda Leigh seem to produce a lot of high ranking shorter mystery books, however I think they're APub. Lots to think about.
@@kenward1310 honestly the length of a work is difficult to define other than with respect to the full story, especially if it gets split for publication purposes. I mean, Lord of the Rings was considered by Tolkien to be one story and it was split for publication purposes due to paper shortages if I recall correctly. Since all of these serial works are comparable in length to a full length novel, arguably we're all writing full length works, just some of us are making different publication decisions!
@@PaperTigerProductions Ah, right, I get what you mean. A matter of perspective. Really the Hugh Howey approach going back to more than a decade ago still holds up as a possible example to follow. He self-published 'Wool' in 5 shorter installments to begin with, and then came the omnibus which... well, we saw how that went! Amazing to consider that trying the same thing Howey did in 2009 might still work well today.
I think a Penname Group Project might also be an option for this. (Similar, of course to a Ghost Writer situation.) $20KAUS per month ($14KUSD) could easily be split two or three ways, with some money left over for editors (and if you're pre-editing each other's work, you cut out some editing fees.) Obviously splitting the profits quickly eats into that livable wage, this would allow you to go twice as far before burn out, especially if you have a solid relationship with your writing partner. Thoughts?
There's a LOT of romance authors either collaborating openly with both their names listed as co-authors as well as behind pen names. @TheCourtneyProject is a great authortube example of that (she's half of Kennedy Fox). Some of the high profile 20booksto50k self-pub authors (founder Michael Anderle & current admin Craig Martelle for example, in the mil sci-fi/space operas) also openly collaborate in this manner. I'd say the biggest barrier is finding a suitable writing partner. You would need to mesh (enough) in terms of your prose style, your work ethic, your work flow, your level of commitment, your ability to deliver, and a hundred other things. But if you can find it, then theoretically yeah, you could either go twice as long without burnout or double your output in the same period (or somewhere in between).
@@PaperTigerProductions 100%. matching work flows and a solid partnership is a must in this circumstance. You can't pull it off if you aren't both bearing equal weights, or that the lion's share goes to the top lion doing the work. I have a project I want to do in a few years that would benefit from this situation. So there is time. But it has to be done with intentionality. Or what's the point?
I was thinking about doing something like this, but didn't know about the benefits of this model... I don't know about being reliant on Amazon; how long is the contract with being exclusive?
So you don't HAVE to be enrolled in KDP Select to use this approach-you could go wide like Sarra Cannon has done, but I have a sneaking suspicion it might be more effective as a more established author with an existing readership, because there's more risk for the reader...though if you made the first instalment free/permafree that might get around it. KDP Select itself is the exclusivity bit for your books to be available on Kindle Unlimited and you can opt in/out of enrolment every 90 days.
Here's part 1 if you missed it: ua-cam.com/video/H0qjsbRxRFY/v-deo.html - I'm not a fan of the risks and other complications that come with serialization platforms generally but I am very, very tempted to try this experiment on KDP. Anyone else?
I have a separate comment below, but thought I'd mention an indie author with many shorter works whose approach greatly intrigues me: William Massa. Would be interested in your thoughts on his approach. Thanks again for all of your engrossing content. Cheers.
@@kenward1310 I'll check him out! Thanks for the tip 😊
Amazing information as always
Don't forget how many Romance authors use ghostwriters to list as many books for sale under their name as they do. I'd call it an open secret, but I'm not sure it is something anyone even tries to keep secret any longer. And since Amazon is fine with it, as long as it is an original work, I guess I can't blame them.
I do remember my eyes crossing when that Brazilian Romance author who had books for sale under her name loaded with plagiarism offered up as her defense that it was the fault of her ghostwriters...and nobody had any issues with that, only with the plagiarism. But I guess that's me and I should get with the times. 🤷♂
Ghostwriting is a whole other thing! At that point though, if you've got the marketing machinery optimized and the branding in place, it makes sense to outsource some of the writing, especially if it'll help preserve some of your sanity...though a closer vetting of who you hire would probably be a great idea to avoid issues like that!
Serializing a book is a deceptive trick on the Customer and really needs to be rethought. Not all of us have the time to read page and pages and pages of material that goes nowhere and many of us don't have the money to spend in order to complete the author's sole book which consists of 3 or 4 parts with no endings and sometimes more. If one is going to do this, then indicate it in the text in the description.
Wonderful... 👍
KDP is the sole reason why the average IQ of "authors" now matches the mean, 100. And, the longer this keeps up, the more the readers will just come to accept this as the new normal simply for not knowing there used to be better. Smart advertising trick though, I have to hand them that. But it's not something a real, individual author who aspires excellence in their craft to produce single, high quality art can do. Like you said, you simply can't write 12 good novels a year.
The frustrating thing is that it makes so much commercial sense. Hard to argue with effective results!
Another great video on the business side of self-publishing. Your videos are consistently fascinating. Now having watched this, I'm starting to question my Royal Road/Patreon plan, and thinking the Short Reads route might be better. Do you have to be enrolled in Select to be considered for Short Reads listing? Even if that's the case, the downside might still be worth it given the excellent points you brought up about Short Reads still being weighted the same as novels in the rankings. Of course, being listed among the Short Reads is no guarantee, but I'd imagine KDP would be more likely to do so the more titles in a series you keep releasing. Also, with this model, you're probably going to want to start off with a pen name in a genre with relatively lower costs in terms of cover design given the number of covers required. I suppose that's dependent on an individual author's budget. I don't have the start-up budget on-hand to publish many shorter books in a genre where the cover design level required in order to be competitive necessitates a higher cover design spend per title. So, that likely rules out SFF for me. On Royal Road you can get away with more 'discount level' covers, and you really only need 1 of them for the entirety of your serial. Anyway, you've again provided a lot of good food for thought here, thanks!
Hey Ken, you DON'T need to be in KDP Select for your eligible books to get categorized as Short Reads - Sarra Cannon and Becca Fanning are both wide, for example. The cover thing really is quite varied; you can see Sarah KL Wilson is doing fantasy, for example, but her Heart Phoenix serial uses the same cover art, with just the episode number on the front of the cover and in the title. But yeah, lots and lots of food for thought.
I'm just extremely leery of any serial platform where you have to post your entire work and it's not behind a paywall-one of the writers in my writing group serializes on Royal Road and a few other places and his stuff has been pirated, multiple times. That's not to say piracy isn't an issue on KDP, but just having a few more barriers does make it less prevalent.
@@PaperTigerProductions Good point about the piracy. Hadn't considered that consequence. I didn't realize Sarra Cannon produced shorter works, I've watched some of her Authortube content and assumed she wrote exclusively full-length novels. See what you mean about Sarah KL Wilson re: covers. Interesting. I do note the barrier to entry for cover design does seem a bit lower for Post-apoc which falls under SFF, and it doesn't appear there are many producing shorter books on that sub. Kendra Elliott and Melinda Leigh seem to produce a lot of high ranking shorter mystery books, however I think they're APub. Lots to think about.
@@kenward1310 honestly the length of a work is difficult to define other than with respect to the full story, especially if it gets split for publication purposes. I mean, Lord of the Rings was considered by Tolkien to be one story and it was split for publication purposes due to paper shortages if I recall correctly. Since all of these serial works are comparable in length to a full length novel, arguably we're all writing full length works, just some of us are making different publication decisions!
@@PaperTigerProductions Ah, right, I get what you mean. A matter of perspective. Really the Hugh Howey approach going back to more than a decade ago still holds up as a possible example to follow. He self-published 'Wool' in 5 shorter installments to begin with, and then came the omnibus which... well, we saw how that went! Amazing to consider that trying the same thing Howey did in 2009 might still work well today.
I think a Penname Group Project might also be an option for this. (Similar, of course to a Ghost Writer situation.) $20KAUS per month ($14KUSD) could easily be split two or three ways, with some money left over for editors (and if you're pre-editing each other's work, you cut out some editing fees.) Obviously splitting the profits quickly eats into that livable wage, this would allow you to go twice as far before burn out, especially if you have a solid relationship with your writing partner. Thoughts?
There's a LOT of romance authors either collaborating openly with both their names listed as co-authors as well as behind pen names. @TheCourtneyProject is a great authortube example of that (she's half of Kennedy Fox). Some of the high profile 20booksto50k self-pub authors (founder Michael Anderle & current admin Craig Martelle for example, in the mil sci-fi/space operas) also openly collaborate in this manner.
I'd say the biggest barrier is finding a suitable writing partner. You would need to mesh (enough) in terms of your prose style, your work ethic, your work flow, your level of commitment, your ability to deliver, and a hundred other things. But if you can find it, then theoretically yeah, you could either go twice as long without burnout or double your output in the same period (or somewhere in between).
@@PaperTigerProductions 100%. matching work flows and a solid partnership is a must in this circumstance. You can't pull it off if you aren't both bearing equal weights, or that the lion's share goes to the top lion doing the work. I have a project I want to do in a few years that would benefit from this situation. So there is time. But it has to be done with intentionality. Or what's the point?
@@AndrewDMth you'd certainly have to start looking for your partner now!
I was thinking about doing something like this, but didn't know about the benefits of this model... I don't know about being reliant on Amazon; how long is the contract with being exclusive?
So you don't HAVE to be enrolled in KDP Select to use this approach-you could go wide like Sarra Cannon has done, but I have a sneaking suspicion it might be more effective as a more established author with an existing readership, because there's more risk for the reader...though if you made the first instalment free/permafree that might get around it. KDP Select itself is the exclusivity bit for your books to be available on Kindle Unlimited and you can opt in/out of enrolment every 90 days.
@@PaperTigerProductions thank you ☺️ that's what I thought, but I haven't taken a serious look yet.