Information, inspiration and interviews on writing, self-publishing, book marketing and making a living with your writing. If you need help with writing your book, or you want to learn how to navigate the new world of publishing and book marketing, then join Joanna Penn and her guests every Monday. Also covers the business of being a writer and how to make money with your books.
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Audiobooks, Author Earnings, Global Focus And More. 2014 RoundUp With Hugh McGuire
OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna PennIn today's show, I talk to publishing expert Hugh McGuire about some of the biggest stories of 2014 and how they affect indie authors. We go through the state of audio, exclusivity and subscription models, discoverability and publishing startups, print on demand, Author Earnings and global development. Exciting times!
This podcast episode is sponsored by 99 Designs, where you can get all kinds of designs for your author business including book covers, merchandising, branding and business cards, illustrations and artwork and much more. You can get a Powerpack upgrade which gives your project more chance of getting noticed by going to: 99Designs.com/joanna
Hugh McGuire is an author, professional speaker and publishing expert, the founder of PressBooks, an online book publishing platform built on WordPress, and of LibriVox.org, the largest library of free, public domain audiobooks in the world as well as lots of other things!
Audio has been a big shift in 2014, with ACX opening up to UK authors and a big growth in the audio market. We discuss the popularity of audio and why it might be growing. Hugh mentions how the success of his company Iambik was in the genre fiction categories, which is the same with ebooks. It's still a niche market but worth looking at to extend your rights. As with any content, marketing is still really important to make a dent, although I point out that discoverability might be easier in audio, because there are fewer titles. The more channels you're in, the more formats you're in, the more likely you are to build a long-term business.
“It's perfectly fine to have a writing career that isn't a business, but don't complain when you don't make any money at it.” Hugh McGuire, Pressbooks
* We discuss exclusivity, Kindle Unlimited and subscription models. Authors have to decide what makes business sense in the short term as well as the long term. It makes sense for new authors to use exclusivity to get some movement, but if you have a longer term business model, a wider base of distribution is better. Subscription models are not designed to make money from one individual book, it's more of a way to grow the amount people are reading altogether. These models are growing. You will always be better off growing your own email list so you can always reach people directly.
* Discoverability and how some of the publishing startups looked like a great idea, but haven't worked out quite yet! Hugh talks about how the self-containment of the e-reading eco-systems have stopped discoverability. We talk about Readmill, which focused on social reading and was bought by Dropbox and shut down. We both liked Small Demons, which looked at the cultural milieu around books e.g. what music is referenced within certain books and ...