# Beginning of the end for Indie writers



## Sam Rivers (May 22, 2011)

The future looks bleak for Indie writers. Sales keep going down and expenses are going up. Then there are the scammers who keep the bucket leaking.

Do you think that this is the beginning of the end for Indie writers?


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## H.C. (Jul 28, 2016)




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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

No.


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## Lydniz (May 2, 2013)

No.


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## LittleFox (Jan 3, 2015)

No.


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

No. My own expenses were pretty minimal for a new business starting out. I've only got the one novel and it's selling, not a ton, but then again, my name is unknown. Still, I'm getting page reads, so people like it, and I'm getting buys, so people are interested in buying it. I have only scratched the surface on advertising. Figured I'd do more once I get more books written. I'm quite pleased with my current progress.

The door is opened for self-publishing and I don't see that door ever slamming shut again. If one service provider falters, others will step in because it's a hot market.


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## RandomThings (Oct 21, 2016)

Beginning to sound like there's an echo in here, but... no.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)




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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

Nope.


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## Rose Andrews (Jun 1, 2017)

There are scammers in every line of business. Some people love to cheat. But Indie publishing is still a maturing market. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.


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## BellaJames (Sep 8, 2016)

The gates are opening wider. There are people who never would have thought they could make this dream a reality, living their dream today. Everyone has different goals and for some selling a few books and making rent money is a dream come true, for others its making enough to buy a house, leave their day job etc.

Scammers are not going to stop this industry. Sales are going down for some authors. Sales are going up for others. There are more people realising that trad publishing is not for them. I see a future with more people accepting hybrid deals, more trad authors leaving that world and more ways to sell your stories.


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## Adam_T (Aug 7, 2016)

We aren't in the prediction business, so... maybe?

What it means to be an indie author can change dramatically over the next few years, due in part to the problems Amazon is facing in delivering a legitimate service.  It might be an unrecognizable concept where we are not truly independent any longer.  They could make it easier to become published, but at a price that many here would balk at now, but won't have a choice as everyone else will be doing it.  Who knows.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

* honeymoon phase has long been over
* we're in the commodification (saturation) phase right meow. I do believe this is going to wipe out a huge chunk of SP authors (at least those trying to write as more than just a hobby). Just not going to be worth their time to chase the rabbit down the hole anymore.

https://image.slidesharecdn.com/marketingmanagement2-160410102301/95/product-life-cycle-and-marketing-strategies-3-638.jpg?cb=1460283881

The typical product life cycle doesn't hold perfectly to books, which are an industry more than product, at least in the aggregate. But similar trends nonetheless apply.

The difference is that some will achieve escape velocity by having a unique offering. That's what's great about being a writer, if there's no one like you out there, then you have your own little market that *can* exist in its own little bubble untouched by market trends. Or put differently, it can weather the storm far easier.

This is why I've never understood the "write to market" logic (at least as it's typically communicated). It's like "hey, there's a super crowded market, I think I'll jump in there, not like it will get saturated at any point and commodify". All authors seem to be able to see is "omg, customers over there, must get to them to make money." Brilliant short-term strategy, questionable long-term strategy.

So, yes, I think the next 12-16 months is going to be brutal for a lot of people. But that doesn't mean good writers with great stories won't do just fine.

But those who have kept the train rolling through increased marketing spend and increased production schedules... you can't outswim the tsunami no matter how hard you try.

The only thing that will keep you alive is great books with great stories. (most/many) quality content providers will remain standing when it's all said and done.

(just so I'm clear, I'm not saying I won't drown in the tsunami or anything; just stating my view on the market as a whole).

The bots and silly chit going on in the market right meow are simply reflective of increasing pressures authors are finding themselves under. It's only going to get worse. But those with great stories will only do better and better as readers discover their works.

Slow and steady wins the race. Fast and nimble only works in nascent markets.


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## Jake Decker (Jul 27, 2012)

More competitive than ever, sure. The end, no. This is a long game now. The ship U.S.S. Quick Buck sailed a long time ago.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

No, not the beginning of the end, more like the end of the beginning. (Get your cliches here, folks.) In other words, the gravy train days of publish, bag a spot on ENT and count the dollars are over. The industry is maturing, and those who want to make a career out of it are going to have to shift their approach.

But it's still fun, and it's still surely one of the easiest ways to turn a profit from something that most of us would be doing anyway. I have a couple of nieces who have their own businesses, one selling designer perfumes online, and another designing and making wedding and occasion stationery. What I do is way, _way_ easier than what they do. I sit at my computer making up stories leaving Amazon to do the heavy lifting of shifting product for me, and they have to deal with suppliers, and clients, and packing and postage, or actually making the product. This is still a great life we have, folks.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

No, but between widespread scamming within KU, botting of KU and free books, derankings and account closures hitting innocent authors, rampant miscategorization of books, and other problems, I would go so far as to say that Amazon is becoming a more and more difficult partner for indie authors to work with. That trend is somewhat alarming to me. I hope it gets better, not worse.


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## Cactus Lady (Jun 4, 2014)

Seneca42 said:


> * honeymoon phase has long been over
> * we're in the commodification (saturation) phase right meow. I do believe this is going to wipe out a huge chunk of SP authors (at least those trying to write as more than just a hobby). Just not going to be worth their time to chase the rabbit down the hole anymore.
> 
> https://image.slidesharecdn.com/marketingmanagement2-160410102301/95/product-life-cycle-and-marketing-strategies-3-638.jpg?cb=1460283881
> ...


This is very encouraging to me. I write in a tough, tough genre to sell, and my sales have been horrible lately. But I write what I write, I'm working on some craft and presentation issues that might have been holding me back, I keep my expenses down as much as possible, except for a few brief (and underwhelming) experiments with Select I've been wide from the beginning and I'm staying wide, and I'm still writing and creating a backlist of my unique brand of books. If/when the shakeout happens, I'll still be here for anyone who wants to read the kind of books I write.


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## Red Riley (May 28, 2017)

TwistedTales said:


> Indies will continue, but they'll have to get smarter about what they're doing. It is no longer free to publish (technically you can still throw up any old dross for free, but you'll get bored watching it collect e-dust).


Great, now I have to worry about e-dust as well as regular dust.


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## Colin (Aug 6, 2011)

PaulineMRoss said:


> No, not the beginning of the end, more like the end of the beginning. (Get your cliches here, folks.)


It's the beginning of the end, and/or the start of the resurgence of the beginning of the end before the renaissance of independently-minded writers before it all ends.

Probably.


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## Sam Rivers (May 22, 2011)

I have been publishing as an Indie since 2011. Kboads was a lot more enthusiastic then; now it is doom and gloom. New writers are flooding into the market so the competition keep increasing. There are already more books than buyers. So the future can't be great.


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## Colin (Aug 6, 2011)

TwistedTales said:


> Insidious stuff that e-dust.


E-dusters are now only $4.99 for a pack of three on Amazon.

Hurry, while stocks last!


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Sam Rivers said:


> I have been publishing as an Indie since 2011. Kboads was a lot more enthusiastic then; now it is doom and gloom. New writers are flooding into the market so the competition keep increasing. There are already more books than buyers. So the future can't be great.


Doom and gloom about aspects of the current market. Unsustainability of the KU sub model in its current state. The march to trim royalties so as to combat scammers.

I would say the end is nigh for scammers, one way or the other. Authors? Nah. Some drop out, but that isn't death - it's just the natural pruining of authors who don't have the time to write.


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## Kal241 (Jan 11, 2017)

Indies like us will be fine. Personally, I'd worry more about Trad pub; it's been going downhill for years, thanks to their reluctance to take risks on new series and authors, among other problems.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Sam Rivers said:


> I have been publishing as an Indie since 2011. Kboads was a lot more enthusiastic then; now it is doom and gloom. New writers are flooding into the market so the competition keep increasing. There are already more books than buyers. So the future can't be great.


The easy money is evaporating. That's how all low-barrier-to-entry markets work as they mature.

Folks with good products and great marketing chops will always outlast those who are deficient in either (or both) of those areas.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Trad pubs have always had money on their side from hardback sales. With the move to digital, I can only imagine hardback sales are dropping - especially considering the close of physical bookstores in many places.

Trad pub pricing hardback prices are going into direct competition with indie digital pricing and I just can't see that working out long term for trad pubs.

The death of trad pubs? Of course not. But indies are going to knock them down like Ma Bell got broken up in the 80s.


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## Rosie Scott (Oct 3, 2017)

Seneca42 said:


> This is why I've never understood the "write to market" logic (at least as it's typically communicated). It's like "hey, there's a super crowded market, I think I'll jump in there, not like it will get saturated at any point and commodify". All authors seem to be able to see is "omg, customers over there, must get to them to make money." Brilliant short-term strategy, questionable long-term strategy.


1,000 thumbs up for this. ^

I've written dozens and dozens of novels over the past decade, but I've only read a handful of books, and mostly because there are few books I'd want to read on the market. Indie publishing allows these unique and interesting ideas and stories to be accessible to people who have thirsted for something new, or at the very least, something that isn't infected with clichés. Some of these authors may not be profitable because they don't market or their ideas are just a little "too" niche, but regardless, indie authors are here to stay. There is a need for us. As someone who always wanted to be an author growing up but never wanted to hand over creative control to a traditional publisher, I'm grateful for each book I sell and fan I gain. Writing may never make me rich, but it makes me happy. Thus, each dollar I make off of my books is a dollar I made doing something I love. I consider myself extremely lucky, and will be publishing books until they pull me away screaming.


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## Used To Be BH (Sep 29, 2016)

TwistedTales said:


> I don't see any of that changing without Bezos changing his current paradigm. Many of the problems you're referring to are caused by:
> 
> 1. Scammers and authors behaving badly.
> 2. Amazon relying on bots to trap bad behavior and outright fraud.
> ...


There is a lot of truth in this, but I'm enough of an optimist to believe that isn't the whole story.

#6 actually works in our favor. KU can only thrive with good content. Good content is ultimately reliant on indie authors, unless the trads change direction and embrace KU (which I think is highly unlikely). People who are popular with KU readers are particularly important. For some time, people like that have started migrating out of KU. New authors who haven't yet developed a fan base can keep the number of titles up, but that won't enough to satisfy readers in the long run. Enlightened self-interest will keep pushing Amazon to do something about scammers and to keep the pay rate from falling into the cellar.

True, Amazon's attempts to stop scammers have been erratic at best because of #2--the problem just can't be solved by bots alone. Unless Amazon is willing to let KU go, though, at some point it will have to do more than it is currently. The slight jump up in payout is one indication that Amazon might be worried about the high-selling author exodus. There also seems to be a slowdown in getting new titles and changes approved. This could be a glitch, or it might indicate a little more manual scrutiny. Only time will tell.

I agree with your earlier observations about the market maturing. Writers whose income depends on writing will have to be more strategic in their thinking than some are used to. Self publishing isn't going away, but success will be more difficult to achieve.


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## WyandVoidbringer (Jan 19, 2017)

Nope.

I published Rune Empire in May of this year without a clue or a plan. To date, I've sold over 10,000 books.

As early as ten years ago, this would have been impossible. A book like Rune Empire would probably have never even seen the light of day.

That I can write a book and sell it worldwide with only minimal cost is amazing.


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## Used To Be BH (Sep 29, 2016)

TwistedTales said:


> Ok, I'll bite. I mean these as genuine questions. Why do you believe Trad Pub is going downhill? Do you mean they're losing sales, revenue or margin (loss in each usually means something different)? Or are they narrowing to specific demographics (age, gender, region)? Or is that they're cutting out future areas of growth such as niches? Revenue alone means nothing about the future of a sector other than it still has some momentum. To understand whether it's going anywhere other than downhill you need to get under the revenue numbers to composition and source.
> 
> Answers to those questions, assuming there are any, will give a real insight into whether trads have a future or not, and where indies can capitalize on their strengths. I have an opinion, but I'm more interested in what others think.


It's hard to have intelligent answers without any data, and now that Data Guy isn't publishing publicly anymore, we don't have even what little data we had before.

We can draw some conclusions from the way publishers behave. They still seem worried about the rise of ebooks, though they've relaxed the price gouging a little. (That said, I ran across an instance just the other day of a $16 paperback and an $80 ebook. ) Ebook sales are rising despite their machinations. All they did was drive their own share of the ebook pie down, which may be causing a rethink.

Brick and mortar book stores continue to close, which must also worry trad pubs. There's really not much they can do about that, either.

What they can do--and are doing--is borrow successful methods from indie publishing. I've read that some have at least experimented with faster release schedules, and they seem to be taking better advantage of opportunities like Bookbub. Then there's Macmillan (through Pronoun) becoming an aggregator for indies. There have also been some efforts at creating a hybrid model of publishing, though those first steps have not generally been successful. Still, there are signs of change in the trad pub world.


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## A Fading Street (Sep 25, 2016)

I don't think it's the end for self-pubbed writers. The market is certainly changing and as others have said the authors out there who are savvy with advertising and marketing will survive. I do think there will come a time when some level of curation will come into play, if nothing else than to stop the scamming and botting that seems to be rife right now. I'm not sure what level of curation there will be but I can envisage something like the erotica dungeon where books wouldn't appear in search results for those books that don't submit to the curation process. I can also see there being a charge to go through the process to make scamming a less attractive or simple process. If Amazon were to say charge $50 dollars to curate the book, simply on the grounds of it not being full of gibberish or repeated/regurgitated content, I can imagine that would cut down the number of books being published substantially. I can also see Amazon introducing much stricter controls on categorization at some stage because right now the site is a mess and that can only be holding back sales.
I can't see self-pubbing per se grinding to a halt but I do think things have to and will change because in the end, Amazon is all about the 'customer experience' and right now that is being degraded by the bots.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

A Fading Street said:


> I don't think it's the end for self-pubbed writers. The market is certainly changing and as others have said the authors out there who are savvy with advertising and marketing will survive.


Interesting. I see it the polar opposite of this. I think the advertising and marketing is what's going to kill most SPers. There comes a point (I'd argue we are probably already there) where the ROI just doesn't make sense. When you factor in your time and costs, you need a certain return to justify it all.

What's kept the industry going so far is that it's a "dreamer" industry. Like the porn industry, or hollywood, or music... people will endure untold suffering in pursuit of their dream. But even dreamers eventually wake up and say "this is F'ing nuts". People will have this realization at different times and under different circumstances... for some it might be KU .0035; for others it might be AMS bids of $1, for others it might be spending a ton only to generate bad reviews, for most it will be never materializing revenues, etc. -- any sane individual has a breaking point; if you don't have one then odds are you're nuts.

Only the ones with real talent will get the *signal* from the market (ie. readers) that they should continue on because they "have something" special. Most SP who don't get that signal will look at the insane cost of competing and move on with their life. And good for them, life is too short chasing down a dream that isn't practical.

Even the big boys are going to hit a wall at some point. Heck, they might hit it first. Having crap sales and minimal market feedback actually makes it hard to know if you should stay or go. But if you're making $100k and it drops to $50k (because of ever-increasing competition within the pump and dump crowd) while your opex costs stay the same, it doesn't take a genius to realize you're in trouble.

The market is commodifying which means a lot of the players are going to get washed out in time. The ROI will keep getting worse until that happens, I have no doubt about that. Only those with loyal, high-margin paying readers (ie. direct) will sail through this market turmoil.


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## Kal241 (Jan 11, 2017)

TwistedTales said:


> Ok, I'll bite. I mean these as genuine questions. Why do you believe Trad Pub is going downhill? Do you mean they're losing sales, revenue or margin (loss in each usually means something different)? Or are they narrowing to specific demographics (age, gender, region)? Or is that they're cutting out future areas of growth such as niches? Revenue alone means nothing about the future of a sector other than it still has some momentum. To understand whether it's going anywhere other than downhill you need to get under the revenue numbers to composition and source.
> 
> Answers to those questions, assuming there are any, will give a real insight into whether trads have a future or not, and where indies can capitalize on their strengths. I have an opinion, but I'm more interested in what others think.


Trad pub, once upon a time, was made by investors putting time and money behind authors. Now, big publishing houses chase trends and are much less willing to gamble on new authors, and if you come to them with a series, odds are they'll toss it out simply due to the risk. JK Rowling didn't get rejected twelve times because her writing was poor, or because she was a woman. Andy Weir's _The Martian_ wasn't rejected by publishers because his subject matter was hard to fathom. Authors like them get rejected because not many publishers will risk losing money betting on a new author.

Indie publishing has forced them to confront a harsh reality: that anyone, even the ones they reject, can succeed. They've bet on the wrong horse, and it's hurt them one too many times. They've adapted, sure, adopting ebooks and buying out indie successes like Weir. But it's not the game-changing strategy they need to make it big in the game again. It's enduring, not prospering. Despite all the losses they've suffered by not learning in the past, they haven't changed, and that is why they're struggling to catch up, like a gambling addict chasing that first sensation of winning big.


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## mojomikey (Apr 9, 2014)

PaulineMRoss said:


> But it's still fun, and it's still surely one of the easiest ways to turn a profit from something that most of us would be doing anyway. I have a couple of nieces who have their own businesses, one selling designer perfumes online, and another designing and making wedding and occasion stationery. What I do is way, _way_ easier than what they do. I sit at my computer making up stories leaving Amazon to do the heavy lifting of shifting product for me, and they have to deal with suppliers, and clients, and packing and postage, or actually making the product. This is still a great life we have, folks.


This...

I was a lieutenant on the fire department for 29 years, co-owned a restaurant, and ran a record store for years ( still dabble in it online). Stringing words together and being paid modestly for it is WAYYYY easier than the other ways I've earned my keep.


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

The beginning ended before I began self-publishing (December 2013).
Print is not dead. In some major markets (e.g., France) ebooks have made little headway.
Trade publishing is not struggling. Trade published authors are struggling. The typical advance is about equal to a year's rent on one bedroom in a flatshare in London. The book shops are full of books by lots of different authors. Trade publishing is still selling, but individual trade published authors often do not sell. Meanwhile new indie bookstores are opening.
Changing circumstances require indie author / publishers to adapt. That's just business.


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## Guest (Oct 15, 2017)

I think it's likely both trad publishing and indie will continue to contract. The retail environment in general isn't very healthy. I wouldn't say it's the beginning of the end for indie writers specifically but that there will be a decline in publishing all round.


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

Seneca42 said:


> This is why I've never understood the "write to market" logic (at least as it's typically communicated). It's like "hey, there's a super crowded market, I think I'll jump in there, not like it will get saturated at any point and commodify". All authors seem to be able to see is "omg, customers over there, must get to them to make money." Brilliant short-term strategy, questionable long-term strategy.


That logic, like Fox's book promoting the same, always struck me as Warrior Forum stuff, which focuses on "how to make money online". If that's one's primary intent then yes, the party seems to be ending.


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

Kal241 said:


> Indie publishing has forced them to confront a harsh reality: that anyone, even the ones they reject, can succeed.


I was told for 15 years that no one would be interested in what I write. I'm now in a position where I have to write rejection letters to agents.


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## going going gone (Jun 4, 2013)

Anarchist said:


> The easy money is evaporating. That's how all low-barrier-to-entry markets work as they mature.
> 
> Folks with good products and great marketing chops will always outlast those who are deficient in either (or both) of those areas.


Anarchist is so smart. When I grow up, I want to be Anarchist!

Writing has always been an iffy way to make a living. I've been a writer for 30 years, and that certainly hasn't changed. Luck comes and luck goes. Being optimistic by nature, I keep saying that one has to believe a well-written book with a good, pace-y story will eventually sell some copies. Write more of them, and you'll improve and gain more readers.

If it happens after you die, hey, that's not the luckiest thing in the world, but it might happen then. I find despair not all that useful as a survival strategy. YMMV.

And then some damned thing will happen bad, and it's back to square one. This is how it has always been for authors and actors and musicians and artists. Writers had a pretty cool five years there! Now it's back to struggle-as-usual.

/shrugs.


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## AmpersandBookInteriors (Feb 10, 2012)

I'm wildly optimistic about the future of publishing.

Wildly.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Dpock said:


> That logic, like Fox's book promoting the same, always struck me as Warrior Forum stuff, which focuses on "how to make money online". If that's one's primary intent then yes, the party seems to be ending.


Honestly, this industry reminds me a LOT of the day trader crowd 15 years ago. Everyone thought they knew how to make money, and no one ever admitted to failure. So you had a market where most were failing but everyone said they were succeeding... and everyone would always point to this guy or that as proof that there was tons of money to be made. Then the market tanked, they all took it up the A, and day trading became way less popular and people realized they were all bulls'ing each other about their returns and that most of them were idiots.

There is an unfathomable amount of bs in the SP industry. As a result, we're only going to know the truth of what's what when the market clears. Then we'll see who really had a strong foundation and who was just smoke and mirrors.


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## Ryan W. Mueller (Jul 14, 2017)

From what I've read, it's certainly tougher than it used to be. The number of quality books being published these days is much higher than you saw just a few years ago. That makes it a crowded market. That probably means there will be a higher percentage of authors who don't make it, but it's a good thing for readers, who drive the demand in this market.

If I were looking to make a living from self-publishing, this might worry me, but at this point, I consider it more of a hobby that has a chance to make me some money. That doesn't mean I'm not serious about it. I'm just not going to obsess about sales when I have other career options shaping up.

Of course, I'd love to make a living from writing. I'm just not expecting it at this point in time.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

Something interesting happened to me yesterday. I'm in the process of transitioning half of my books from KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited to wide. Yesterday, three of my books finally expired from KDP Select. I KNOW I unchecked the auto-renew box. (I checked several times over the past week, just to be sure.) However, two of my books were renewed anyway, without my permission.

These two books were big sellers, not necessarily lately, but historically. At one time, these were Amazon top-100 books (top 30, to be specific), and they both made a lot of money off Kindle Unlimited until they ran out of juice. My third book was _not _automatically renewed without my permission. This struck me as odd. Why? Well, because unlike the aforementioned books, this third book wasn't a huge seller.

If it was just a system glitch, why would only my top-selling books be re-enrolled? Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it made me wonder if it was more than a simple coincidence. Is Amazon beginning to notice that they're losing some of their top-performing content?


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

I think way too many people don't get the difference between "write to market" and "write to trend." Yes, writing to trend has a limited shelf life because of the nature of the trend. If you hit it hard, fast and often you can make it work. It's a gamble, though. It's not my thing but I admire those who make it work because they have a knowledge of the trends I simply don't have.
Writing to market, however, is not what most people pretend it to be. To sell books you need a market. Now, it could be a market of one, but that's still a market. There are bigger markets depending on the genre. The simple fact is, though, you have to hit a specific market to be able to sell. You cannot create a market. You have to entice an already existing market. If you don't want to write to market, that's certainly your prerogative. I think everyone should do what they want to do as long as they have realistic expectations. But pretending that writing to market is going away, or that it's somehow bad to give the readers what they want and that will suddenly shift and work against authors, is kind of laughable.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Sam Rivers said:


> The future looks bleak for Indie writers. Sales keep going down and expenses are going up. Then there are the scammers who keep the bucket leaking.
> 
> Do you think that this is the beginning of the end for Indie writers?


*The good news?* The world will likely end long before the Indie Writer does.
*The bad news?* Have you SEEN the state of the world lately?


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

TwistedTales said:


> That's a convenient "glitch" for Amazon, but you have a three day grace period where you can write and tell them to remove the books from KU. I used it this year when I accidentally renewed something.
> 
> Write to them and ask to have them unenrolled.


Sorry, I should've made it clear that I did this. So it's all cleared up (yay!), and I'm publishing wide today. But it still struck me as odd.

But thanks for the insight. I really do appreciate it!


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## Sam Rivers (May 22, 2011)

I don't like the term hobby writing so I call it part-time writing. It sounds more professional.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I think way too many people don't get the difference between "write to market" and "write to trend."


because people constantly refer to write to market and write to trend interchangeably.

Just look at the top books in any of the sub cats (although I only follow scifi)... i swear 95% of them have the same stale plot and you can't differentiate the covers from each other. That's what most authors consider "write to market"... copy whatever the best sellers are (or framed nicely "give readers what they want"). The irony being we don't even know just how much of a best seller any given book truly is.

now and then I'll see a genuinely original book in the list and it's like manna from heaven - YES finally someone writing for the love of writing and not just trying to tap a market vein.

a ton of indies are following a formulaic process of book creation because they think it will help them sell. I just never understood it.

to be clear, I'm not being critical in the sense that anyone is free to write whatever they please. I've just always found *differentiation *was the key to long-term success in most industries... replication or imitation is always the hallmark of a commodified market (it's the cheap chinese knock off model of doing business).

It's worked so far, but I think those days are winding down, simply due to saturation.

But we'll see. Right now the scifi category is honestly nauseating. It's basically carbon copies through and through. And I do not think they are selling at rates required to keep those ranks, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors going on there.


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## antcurious (Jun 2, 2017)

Seneca42 said:


> Honestly, this industry reminds me a LOT of the day trader crowd 15 years ago. Everyone thought they knew how to make money, and no one ever admitted to failure. So you had a market where most were failing but everyone said they were succeeding... and everyone would always point to this guy or that as proof that there was tons of money to be made. Then the market tanked, they all took it up the A, and day trading became way less popular and people realized they were all bulls'ing each other about their returns and that most of them were idiots.
> 
> There is an unfathomable amount of bs in the SP industry. As a result, we're only going to know the truth of what's what when the market clears. Then we'll see who really had a strong foundation and who was just smoke and mirrors.


I traded forex for a while, and I see the similarities. The only thing I hold onto is that a book's rank equals x amounts of copies, so there is some way to see if those around you are making money, without numbers being mentioned. At least, that's what I tell myself.*

* Please don't shatter this illusion.


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## Colin (Aug 6, 2011)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I think way too many people don't get the difference between "write to market" and "write to trend." Yes, writing to trend has a limited shelf life because of the nature of the trend. If you hit it hard, fast and often you can make it work. It's a gamble, though. It's not my thing but I admire those who make it work because they have a knowledge of the trends I simply don't have.
> Writing to market, however, is not what most people pretend it to be. To sell books you need a market. Now, it could be a market of one, but that's still a market. There are bigger markets depending on the genre. The simple fact is, though, you have to hit a specific market to be able to sell. You cannot create a market. You have to entice an already existing market. If you don't want to write to market, that's certainly your prerogative. I think everyone should do what they want to do as long as they have realistic expectations. But pretending that writing to market is going away, or that it's somehow bad to give the readers what they want and that will suddenly shift and work against authors, is kind of laughable.


Thanks Amanda. Once again you've nailed it.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Seneca42 said:


> because people constantly refer to write to market and write to trend interchangeably.
> 
> Just look at the top books in any of the sub cats (although I only follow scifi)... i swear 95% of them have the same stale plot and you can't differentiate the covers from each other. That's what most authors consider "write to market"... copy whatever the best sellers are (or framed nicely "give readers what they want"). The irony being we don't even know just how much of a best seller any given book truly is.
> 
> ...


Just out of curiosity, who is succeeding on a massive level and not writing to market? I'm honestly curious and would love to see some examples. I tend to have mass market tastes. I write what I like to read. I don't want something vastly different because I already know what I like. I think the majority of readers are that way. However, I'm always open to being educated, so I would love to see examples of people not writing to market who are selling quite well. I tend to believe you have to deliver what readers want to sell so I'm a proponent of writing to market. However, on the flip side, I don't think writing should be a slog so I think people should write what they want. I honestly am curious about who is hitting it big without writing to market, though. I think it would be an interesting case study.


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> You cannot create a market. You have to entice an already existing market.


I would argue that this is only partially true. You can't aim for a market that doesn't exist, but you can, in fact, create a market by writing something that no one else has.

I have done very well with a novel that was passed over nearly 50 times because there was "no existing market."


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Just out of curiosity, who is succeeding on a massive level and not writing to market? I'm honestly curious and would love to see some examples. I tend to have mass market tastes. I write what I like to read. I don't want something vastly different because I already know what I like. I think the majority of readers are that way. However, I'm always open to being educated, so I would love to see examples of people not writing to market who are selling quite well. I tend to believe you have to deliver what readers want to sell so I'm a proponent of writing to market. However, on the flip side, I don't think writing should be a slog so I think people should write what they want. I honestly am curious about who is hitting it big without writing to market, though. I think it would be an interesting case study.


George orwell? Margaret Atwood? Yann Martell? Andy Weir? Philip K dick? I don't know, a thousand other authors who have a unique voice and aren't carbon copies of each other.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Joseph Malik said:


> I would argue that this is only partially true. You can't aim for a market that doesn't exist, but you can, in fact, create a market by writing something that no one else has.
> 
> I have done very well with a novel that was passed over nearly 50 times because there was "no existing market."


That doesn't mean there wasn't a market. That means that whoever you shopped the book to didn't see a market. That's vastly different. I mean, how many people turned down J.K. Rowling because there wasn't a market? There very clearly was a market. They simply didn't see it.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

TwistedTales said:


> Good to know you got it sorted. Best of luck going wide. You should apply for a BookBub.


Thanks!!! Alas, one of these books was just featured in a BookBub within the past couple of months. In fact, it was one more thing that convinced me to take this book wide. Even though I made decent money off the BookBub promo, it didn't translate to much traction as far as Amazon algos or also-boughts. Now, I'm kicking myself for wasting a BookBub when I was still exclusive to Amazon. Drat!

(I can't reapply for the other two books, because they're all part of the same series. Double-drat!)

I'm bummed that I didn't wait until my book(s) was wide, but the information was good to have anyway. I'm also having problems getting traction off Facebook ads. I still make money, but sales dry up the instant I stop advertising. It's like there's no tail on Amazon at all. Whatever they've done, it's just one more thing pushing me to go non-exclusive.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Seneca42 said:


> George orwell? Margaret Atwood? Yann Martell? Andy Weir? Philip K dick? I don't know, a thousand other authors who have a unique voice and aren't carbon copies of each other.


Yeah, and they're making it big in the indie market of today? Andy Weir tried a different form of publishing, the online serial, and it caught on but I hardly think it wasn't written to market. I mean it was basically an isolated survival story set on Mars. We've all seen those multiple times. It was kind of Alien without the alien, or Lost without the others and polar bears. It was basically Castaway on another planet. Technically I don't think Philip K. Dick is all that different either. He told some great stories but they were written to market. Margaret Atwood basically wrote dystopian that hit upon an interesting idea but it's not current (even though the television show is) and it wasn't vastly different than everything else being put out because it was post apoc, just with a more female bent (which is fine and I wish more things were geared toward women). That was also written to a post-apoc market, though. It hit all the appropriate tropes. While Orwell is a favorite and I appreciate his work, he's hardly a current contender in this market. I want to hear about the current contenders that aren't writing to market and proving that all those writing to market are going to disappear with the morning dew.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Seneca42 said:


> George orwell? Margaret Atwood? Yann Martell? Andy Weir? Philip K dick? I don't know, a thousand other authors who have a unique voice and aren't carbon copies of each other.


Trad builds authors differently than indie does. Also Atwood and Orwell and Dick are different era. Can't really compare that. Martell was also built with lots of trad marketing money. Weir is an amazing writer, but his story is a story we've read before (Castaway, Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe ... but on MARS!). SF is super popular right now, as is Mars with all the talk of actually going there with humans etc. The Martian has all the things SF readers want from science to man vs nature themes to a cool space sequence to humor etc... It's absolutely a book written for its market.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Yeah, and they're making it big in the indie market of today?


hehe you guys are just being silly now.

You can only use indie books (when the very problem I'm talking about is this copy catting formulaic bs... which is obviously the top spots because the top authors are doing this).

Moment I bring up anything other than indies "oh no, we have to discount all those books and the thousands like them, they aren't like us."

Silliest attitude I've ever seen towards books. If indies don't consider themselves playing in the same market as all theo the other books in the world... then heaven help this industry cuz it truly will die a painful death.


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## A J Sika (Apr 22, 2016)

Whenever I come to kBoards these days it's oh, KU is killing us! Oh, indie publishing is dying! Oh, you can't make any more money writing! Oh, it's overcrowded! And it leaves me feeling gloomy and depressed.... Then I go and check my accounts and realize that I've already made double what I made last year (and last year wasn't bad) simply by presenting better and getting more market savvy.

Conclusion: We'll survive.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Seneca42 said:


> hehe you guys are just being silly now.
> 
> You can only use indie books (when the very problem I'm talking about is this copy catting formulaic bs... which is obviously the top spots because the top authors are doing this).
> 
> ...


Yes, people are clearly going to stop reading books with mass market appeal. It's right around the corner.
We're talking about the current market, which was vastly different when others were holding the keys to the gate. It doesnt change the fact that many of your examples were actually written to market.


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## MmmmmPie (Jun 23, 2015)

TwistedTales said:


> Things work very differently once you're wide. To be honest, it really is a lot better.


Thanks so much for the info and encouragement! That's a huge help and helps me know where I should focus. Thanks again!


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Yes, people are clearly going to stop reading books with mass market appeal. It's right around the corner.
> We're talking about the current market, which was vastly different when others were holding the keys to the gate. It doesnt change the fact that many of your examples were actually written to market.


I'm saying that I've never understood the write to market crowd. It worked for early phases of self-publishing, i don't think it will long term. I think we'll return to a more traditional curation of content based on quality, not marketing spend and rapid release schedule and 10,000 books with lookalike covers and stories.

Not sure why you have to be passive aggressive just because I have a different opinion. Hell, not even saying I'm right, just that's how I see it.

Y\ou asked for examples of books that sell without looking like every other book. I gave them to you, you don't like those examples. So agree to disagree then.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Seneca42 said:


> I'm saying that I've never understood the write to market crowd. It worked for early phases of self-publishing, i don't think it will long term. I think we'll return to a more traditional curation of content based on quality, not marketing spend and rapid release schedule and 10,000 books with lookalike covers and stories.
> 
> Not sure why you have to be passive aggressive just because I have a different opinion. Hell, not even saying I'm right, just that's how I see it.
> 
> Y\ou asked for examples of books that sell without looking like every other book. I gave them to you, you don't like those examples. So agree to disagree then.


I asked for current books that sell without writing to market. That's not the same thing as books that were written thirty, fifty and seventy years ago. As for quality, I find a lot of quality in mass market books. That's what I find entertaining. Quality is subjective, though. I'm sure I would find a lot of what people term "quality" books to be boring enough to drop in the first chapter.
I guess we will have to wait and see, but I'm willing to bet that books with mass market appeal will always sell more than their not-written-to-market counterparts. And I do mean always.
As for being passive aggressive, you might want to look at your posts before throwing stones at my house.


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## Rose Andrews (Jun 1, 2017)

Seneca42 said:


> because people constantly refer to write to market and write to trend interchangeably.
> 
> Just look at the top books in any of the sub cats (although I only follow scifi)... i swear 95% of them have the same stale plot and you can't differentiate the covers from each other. That's what most authors consider "write to market"... copy whatever the best sellers are (or framed nicely "give readers what they want"). The irony being we don't even know just how much of a best seller any given book truly is.
> 
> ...


Yes, but then us new authors are told we're doing it wrong if we don't have covers that are the same or plots that are the same, etc. Niche books are a hard sell and it's highly tempting to just write what everyone else is writing that's making them money.

One thing that concerns me are fellow authors who come into this publishing industry expecting to do super well right away. I admit, it's been harder to gain traction than I realized. Books with sub-par craft sell like hotcakes even though some of that prose is incomprehensible. I will never get it. Anyway, I worry about my author friends who are discouraged right from the beginning. They are talented, create beautiful stories, and I see a lot of potential in their work. But because they don't sell right away and struggle for every reader, they think that maybe there's something wrong with them or their craft or their books.

A lot of times, yes, it is the craft. But in these cases I'm thinking about, it's just that gaining traction takes freaking time. For example, we have a church friend who sells baked goods out of organic ingredients (gluten free etc). She's been doing this for several years now and has finally reached the point of having an extra kitchen and hired help. But for the longest time, she sold the goods out of her home, out of her car, and had to really work to build trust with suppliers in order to get them to sell her products. It has taken her years and she still has a long ways to go for what she envisions in her business.

I had this reminder by a fellow Indie here on these boards in the summer and I'm glad it was brought to my attention. It's easy to get stardust in the eyes when we read of folks who hit it big--since we all think we are talented and deserve success. The reality is much more sinister. Getting anywhere in life for anything just takes hard work. Not scamming. Not cheating. Hard work. So I worry about my author friends who think they should be seeing success now after their 2nd or 3rd book when in reality it's never been easy.

Patience. Continuing to grow and learn in the craft. Being open to new opportunities. This is how one builds a career: one brick or stone at a time. Build it on a foundation of rock, not sand. Speaking of carbon copy books, it's hard to deviate from what readers expect as a newer author. I tried to be somewhat original and it's been a struggle but I'm going to keep doing it anyway because I love writing so much. But yeah, there are some types of books I just don't read anymore because it's so overwhelmingly populated--unfortunately, I write in one of those subgenres.


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

The Girl with all the Gifts is unique, I'd say - to the point where it probably sparked some controversy and some shocked reader reviews. It's also recent, and a bestseller.

I LOVE that book, and I love that it so well despite being so different. I guess the fantastic writing had a lot to do with it.

https://www.amazon.com/Girl-All-Gifts-M-Carey/dp/0316278157


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

C. Rysalis said:


> The Girl with all the Gifts is unique, I'd say - to the point where it probably sparked some controversy and some shocked reader reviews. It's also recent, and a bestseller.
> 
> I LOVE that book, and I love that it so well despite being so different. I guess the fantastic writing had a lot to do with it.
> 
> https://www.amazon.com/Girl-All-Gifts-M-Carey/dp/0316278157


It's a zombie book with a cool premise. And again... with a big publisher marketing behind it. We are not playing on the same field as the big publishers. Our audiences have some cross-over, but there are absolutely books and ideas that won't work well indie that might be great for a publisher to take a chance on. When people ask me for specific advice, I often talk over the ideas they have, the subject and feel of their books, what their plan is (series, stand alone etc) and sometimes tell people they would have a better chance going trad for what they want for their goals.

Nobody is saying write cookie-cutter books (I don't think...) but there are more commercial genres with a bigger % of readers in the ebook market for which certain kinds of books will do better. That's the biz. Publishers know it, too.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I asked for current books that sell without writing to market. That's not the same thing as books that were written thirty, fifty and seventy years ago.


No, you thought you'd prove your position by simply trying to make me (and hoping I'd fail) to prove mine. Then when I laid out my position, you simply discount books you don't agree with. There's no way to discuss the subject if you define what can and cannot count as an applicable book.

A book is a book. Atwood is top of the charts. Orwell is top of the charts.

I don't subscribe to this notion that indie books have to fit a "mass market" formulaic pattern. I think it's going to hurt indies long term. There's nothing wrong with pump and dump pulp, I'm just saying I don't think it will have the legs to last in its current form.

Books written 50 years ago that are still read today to me are the epitome of success in the publishing world. I don't care if a book is indie, or TP, or written 2,000 years ago, great books are great books. And the notion that this write to market stuff is anywhere near their league is honestly, sort of laughable. None of these books will be read in 10 years beyond a 50-book 99c boxset.

I'm honestly not trying to be contentious or start an argument, it's just my view on where SP is going on its current trajectory.

I get that some might see that as me attacking indies (which is kind of ridiculous given I'm an indie). I've said it myself, I may not be around... who knows if I have the talent to survive the coming evolution in publishing. But this notion that thousands of books a day with zero curation or quality control can be dumped into the zon store and that will never impact the market negative is not logical to my mind.

But I can tell you this, in 50 years from now people will still be reading Orwell and he'll still be top of the charts.


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## C. Rysalis (Feb 26, 2015)

It's a zombie book, yes, but I've never seen anyone pull off a zombie story remotely like this - and I read / watch a lot of zombie stuff. They were probably scared of doing it. Because... THAT takes some serious writer guts.

But yes, I'm sure the publisher helped.


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## Dale Ivan Smith (Oct 13, 2015)

FWIW, this newish indie feels pretty upbeat. Yes, it's tough out there, but as others have said, writing fiction for a living has always been a challenge. I have a number of trad-pubbed friends, and their road is also hard. Always has been for many writers. I'm very happy to have the opportunity to digitally self-publish, especially now in 2017 with all the resources, cover artists, editors, tools etc.


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## Sam Rivers (May 22, 2011)

> But I can tell you this, in 50 years from now people will still be reading Orwell and he'll still be top of the charts.


I agree with you since many novels keep selling. Good example are 'Gone with the Wind' and 'To Kill A Mocking Bird.'


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

I don't think it's the end, just a new reality. The publishing world is changing, again. There's nothing we can do except try to adapt and forge on. I do think a lot of folks self publishing now will not be here in a couple of years. I'm likely to be one of them. It makes me sad, because being a writer is all I've ever wanted to do, but life keeps knocking me down, and with Amazon's little sh*t shots it's getting harder and harder to keep going.

I'm one of those people who can't do the stuff I'm "supposed" to do. Social media, spending on ads, writing to market -- which, when you dig down to it really means writing what's selling now, which really isn't that much different from writing to trend. I know that upsets people, but from what I see when people talk about WtM, that's all it is. Now, in general, I believe you need to look to reader expectations, but at a broader level, at base genre level. Like, what is it UF readers want? Romance? Mysteries? There are basic things readers expect to see in the books they like, and they should get that. But how they get it can sometimes be different.

Anyway, my two cents, which are worth nothing, because what do I know?



> The difference is that some will achieve escape velocity by having a unique offering.


There's always hope, I guess, but it seems the people in the know don't agree.


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## Vale (Jul 19, 2017)

Is dystopian not a hopping market right now? Like, if someone released 1984 right now wouldn't it be "written to market?"



Seneca42 said:


> * we're in the commodification (saturation) phase right *meow*.
> ...
> The bots and silly chit going on in the market right *meow*


Has Seneca been hiding the word "meow" in all of their posts this entire time and I just never noticed?


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Vale said:


> Is dystopian not a hopping market right now? Like, if someone released 1984 right now wouldn't it be "written to market?"
> 
> Has Seneca been hiding the word "meow" in all of their posts this entire time and I just never noticed?


Sometimes i hide little things in my post just to make myself laugh. Clearly no one here has seen Super Troopers. Come on meow, surely someone has seen it.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Rosie A. said:


> It's easy to get stardust in the eyes when we read of folks who hit it big--since we all think we are talented and deserve success. The reality is much more sinister. Getting anywhere in life for anything just takes hard work. Not scamming. Not cheating. Hard work. So I worry about my author friends who think they should be seeing success now after their 2nd or 3rd book when in reality it's never been easy.


Keep in mind the true story of self-publishing will never be told. The path a lot of authors take to the top is not legit, it's not cheap, and it's not even a solo path. Obviously, I'm not saying everyone, but this is an incredibly easy industry to present yourself falsely in given it's all relatively anonymous. And new authors are incredibly gullible (even me, who is naturally a cynic, believed a lot of the bs when I first started out). It's only after you realize "wait a second, that only works when you spend $2k" that you start to see what's really going on.

If a book is in KU, I instantly discount it now in terms of telling me anything about the market as a whole. I know lots of those books are legit, but there's no way to know which, because lots are gamers.

Now, you find a book that's doing great on zon *AND* wide, with authentic reviews, that actually tells me something (actually a lot) about the market.

Use those books as your guide and above all else, reader feedback. Your readers will tell you what you need to know.


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## 10105 (Feb 16, 2010)

The problem with writing to market is that the market won't hold still long enough to get a good book into it, unless, that is, we descend into binge writing and stamp them out like automobile fenders. I suppose I could do that but I won't. There's a lot I won't do artistically merely to gain a fleeting commercial success.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

Yes. You should probably give up, because it's over for the indie writer. Just like some people on this board predicted . . . 6 years ago? That was the beginning of the end. Maybe we're in the middle of the end now, or the second quarter. But the end, she's comin' soon! At least _definitely_ before Jesus comes back or the scientists at CERN bust a hole in the fabric of existence with the Hadron Collider and we all wink out of existence. Definitely before then. Maybe.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> Just out of curiosity, who is succeeding on a massive level and not writing to market? I'm honestly curious and would love to see some examples.


Litrpg.


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## whistlelock (Jun 30, 2015)

No.  The indie writer is the inevitable end of the publishing industry.  I don't mean that in some sort of false bravado meant to prop me up.  No. It's the end of publishing.  How do I know?  Look at porn.  The whole of the entertainment industry follows the lead of porn.  VHS, DVD, and streaming were all adopted first by porn.  Everyone else followed along.  Now, you're probably thinking "oh, he's talking about erotica on a kindle and how no one can see what you're reading." 

Nope. 

I'm talking about porn studios going under because they aren't making any money. I'm talking about Porn Hub making money because of all the private camera shows you can get, shows that cater to your specific kink for a reasonable price exactly when you want it.  

Amazon is the distribution hub and we're the private cam show delivering to their specific tastes.  You want space opera with aliens with just a dash of Lovecraftian horrors from beyond?  You want vampire/werebear shifter romance with a subplot of AI gone rogue?  Not a problem, and it's only 99 cents. Oh, hey, and if you sign up to this list here, sugar, you can get another one for free.  

We are the inevitable conclusion of content on demand.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Laran Mithras said:


> Litrpg.


People writing Litrpg are absolutely writing to their market. There's a big readership for it, obviously, and those who do well pay attention to what Litrpg readers want.


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## AmpersandBookInteriors (Feb 10, 2012)

Annie B said:


> People writing Litrpg are absolutely writing to their market. There's a big readership for it, obviously, and those who do well pay attention to what Litrpg readers want.


yeah, this totally is its own fledgling market. That people have created a new one doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Here's an author that sells well and isn't really writing to market. She writes literary erom, essentially, with a lot of psychological/social commentary within the text. Her current ranks are slow down for now but when she gets new releases out her whole catalog blasts out of the water and she does extremely well.

https://www.amazon.com/Suanne-Laqueur/e/B00L2C9ML8


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## RightHoJeeves (Jun 30, 2016)

For what it's worth, I'm only at the start of my indie career, but I'm very excited. While I'd obviously love to earn six figures, and would certainly do what I can to achieve that, I'd also be happy with far less.

Sometimes I wonder if people here think that earning less than $100k a year is somehow a failure. Even $10k a year is still $10k a year. And given that it would be from something I'd be doing for free, anyway...


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## Dpock (Oct 31, 2016)

whistlelock said:


> I'm talking about porn studios going under because they aren't making any money. I'm talking about Porn Hub making money because of all the private camera shows you can get, shows that cater to your specific kink for a reasonable price exactly when you want it.
> 
> Amazon is the distribution hub and we're the private cam show delivering to their specific tastes.
> We are the inevitable conclusion of content on demand.


There may be some truth there, but porn producers are suffering not due to lack of demand but to piracy and sites like Tumblr and free tubes. Anyway, I'm not sure there's an analogy to be drawn between that subject and what Amazon is doing to the publishing market (beyond ruining local bookstores, similar to internet porn ruining local triple X theaters).

I'm also not sure the average reader (of what was once referred to as mass-market paperbacks) even knows the difference between traditional and indie books. It could be that this ignorance gives indies a leg up. They sit on the virtual bookshelves alongside traditionally published books and famous authors (especially if they go "hybrid" with one of Amazon's imprints. Look at what "publishers" currently surround Orwell's "Animal Farm" in literary fiction).


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Al Stevens said:


> The problem with writing to market is that the market won't hold still long enough to get a good book into it, unless, that is, we descend into binge writing and stamp them out like automobile fenders. I suppose I could do that but I won't. There's a lot I won't do artistically merely to gain a fleeting commercial success.


You're describing writing to trend. Marketable books don't have to shift according to trend.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

Litrpg didn't exist 3 years ago. That meant several authors decided not to write to market.


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## Caimh (May 8, 2016)

Joseph Malik said:


> I would argue that this is only partially true. You can't aim for a market that doesn't exist, but you can, in fact, create a market by writing something that no one else has.
> 
> I have done very well with a novel that was passed over nearly 50 times because there was "no existing market."


I am in exactly the same boat. I firmly believe if you do something different and it is of a high enough quality, not following a trend means you are the one setting it. My editors big note to me a year ago was 'get the book in front of people and good things will happen' and I think he is absolutely right. You've got to hustle to make it happen but modern publishing provides plenty of avenues for you to try. That's not to say I don't find Chris fox's work useful. The stuff about not polluting your also boughts is gold. Being smart means listening to what smart people have to say and then figuring out how to apply it to your individual talents.


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## Rose Andrews (Jun 1, 2017)

ParkerAvrile said:


> your story can't just be story, it has to paint a picture. Whether you're indie or trad is not important. What's important is having something that can appeal to the eye, the heart, and the mind. Something cinematic in scope.


You speak to my heart, fellow author. There's still plenty of room in originality from genre. Lots of room to explore, plenty of opportunity to create a book that has a personal stamp on it. I find this is where I'm most happiest, which is why I'm ditching the western brides in 2018 after I finish the darn series.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

I didn't say Dick was writing to market (though clearly there was a market for his stuff, the new wave of SF early, perhaps).  I said he was writing in a different era of publishing, with a publisher supporting him. You cannot compare indies to the trad authors who have big publishers behind them. Those are different markets for the most part (look at the top paperback list and the top ebook list... not a lot of crossover between those books and what there are will be mostly big-name trad authors built with big trad marketing budgets).

You can totally be as original as you want. As long as you are writing books people want to read. (and also keep in mind there is nothing new under the sun, just your own unique way of telling the story, so don't fret and write it good  )


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## RightHoJeeves (Jun 30, 2016)

ParkerAvrile said:


> With all due respect, Philip K. Dick did not remotely write to market, certainly not the market of his day. There is a famous story about the aftermath of The Man in the High Castle (which is, itself, not remotely written to any market) where, on the heels of his success, to cash in on his brilliance in writing WW2 alternative universe the next book he turned in was... The Martian Time-Slip. (Imagine Arcade Fire's The Suburbs on Mars only it's a book instead of music and it was written in the 60s.) This writer was the despair of his editors and agents because his mind simply didn't work like other minds. He lived in the future. Which is probably why his work endured and also probably why he saw so little of the millions his work has earned since his death.


Didn't Dick also die in poverty and as an unknown? At any rate, I've never thought it made much sense to compare one's own career to people like Philip K Dick, or George Orwell, or JK Rowling. They didn't become the most famous authors ever simply because they either wrote to market, or didn't write to market, or anything so simple. They are the 20th century's most famous and well-loved authors because of not only mind-boggling talent, but also just because the circumstances were exactly right to propel them to stardom.

Would George Orwell's talent flourished as it did if he had been born 30 years earlier or later and didn't fight in the Spanish Civil War? Would JK Rowling have written Harry Potter the way she did if she had lived a comfortable middle-class life? Or been born in America? Would Hemingway's modernist style have flopped if he had come of age in the 19th century instead of the 20th?

Interesting questions to wonder, but pretty meaningless to say "JK Rowling did this, so therefore this is the way things work". No one can properly explain the success of The Greats in any greater detail than "they had the right book in the right place at the right time".


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## Rick Partlow (Sep 6, 2016)

Wow, all this doom and gloom and somehow I've made more money from writing this year than I've ever made in any job I've ever worked...


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

P.J. Post said:


> From reading your posts on the subject, it sounds like you're really just having fun writing to genre...


No. I don't write to genre. I mash multiple genres together and then use them to write to market. I understand the difference. I'm not going to get in a huge fight about The Martian but it was easy to see where it was written to market. Ultimately it doesn't matter. Some will sell, some won't. It will be relatively easy to see how it shakes our.


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## 9 Diamonds (Oct 4, 2016)

Sam Rivers said:


> The future looks bleak for Indie writers. Sales keep going down and expenses are going up. Then there are the scammers who keep the bucket leaking.
> 
> Do you think that this is the beginning of the end for Indie writers?


No.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Sorry, no. Best time ever to be a writer. More specifically, best time ever to be a writer willing to play the long game and be actively learning from every story they write, every book they publish, and every book they read. The writers who are invested in their own learning and growing their business acumen and cultivating their stick-to-it-iveness, are going to continue to do well. The lazy writers are going to fall by the wayside over time, along with the ones who think that slapping together a book and throwing it on KU and sitting back to wait for the Benjamins to roll in is enough.

Writing is work, but it's joyful work. Name another industry where you can sit in a room, by yourself, make shit up, publish it to a global audience with a few mouse clicks, and then do it again and again, and someone pays you for it if you've done it to some degree of 'right'.

The indie writers who are constantly learning and pushing themselves to write better stories that readers want to read, again and again, are going to be around for a long time. The writers who aren't, won't. They'll become 'whatever happened to's'.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

Rick Partlow said:


> Wow, all this doom and gloom and somehow I've made more money from writing this year than I've ever made in any job I've ever worked...


Some doom and gloom, and some sunshine. A lot will perish, but some will thrive. This has been my best year (mind you out of only two) by a lot. if I were just using my own situation I'd say "woohoo selfpub is growing by leaps and bounds.". But I know it's not (you don't see the squeeze we're seeing if it were), I'm just lucky enough to be bucking the trend (at the moment).


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## Rose Andrews (Jun 1, 2017)

Some of my happiest writerly years (long after I quit querying and decided to just write for fun) were right before I started self-publishing and all I wrote was Skyrim fanfiction and fantasy romance. I eventually shifted gears in what I wrote when I decided to publish. Of course, I enjoy writing that stuff tons too but my point is I was just happy as a clam writing to a small audience of Skyrim lovers. My little stories were well received on that site and I did it just for the fun of it. Best time ever. Publishing is fun too but now it's adult time not fun and games kid time. Taking it back to the love of writing is what will keep me writing, even if one day I no longer publish (like, when pigs fly lol).


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

Rosie A. said:


> One thing that concerns me are fellow authors who come into this publishing industry expecting to do super well right away. I admit, it's been harder to gain traction than I realized. Books with sub-par craft sell like hotcakes even though some of that prose is incomprehensible. I will never get it. Anyway, I worry about my author friends who are discouraged right from the beginning. They are talented, create beautiful stories, and I see a lot of potential in their work. But because they don't sell right away and struggle for every reader, they think that maybe there's something wrong with them or their craft or their books.


The friend who got me into writing is one of these who published a book, got discouraged, took it down, wrote another, published, got discouraged. Now he is busy trying to pay the bills with jobs he hates and is too depressed/discouraged to write anything more. Sometimes he perks up and gets the idea that he needs to take down his current book and completely rewrite it. He's got a really distinctive author voice for his characters that I wish I could pull off for mine, and he has some really fun ideas and has huge potential. But because nobody bought his stuff, he thinks he writes garbage.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## dgcasey (Apr 16, 2017)

Sam Rivers said:


> The future looks bleak for Indie writers. Sales keep going down and expenses are going up.


What expenses? Other than some artwork for covers (which I design myself) I have no expenses.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

dgcasey said:


> What expenses? Other than some artwork for covers (which I design myself) I have no expenses.


Marketing. 99% of us have to spend something to be found by readers.


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## WordSaladTongs (Oct 14, 2013)

P.J. Post said:


> ... he did not write the book with any thought toward markets, therefore it could not have been written to market.


I'm not sure that's right. I think an author could/can easily write to market without knowing they've done so. The author may very well be IN the market they are writing for--so in writing for themselves, they write for the market.


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## RightHoJeeves (Jun 30, 2016)

> he did not write the book with any thought toward markets, therefore it could not have been written to market.


Andy Weir clearly didn't write _The Martian_ to market in the sense that he went to Amazon and discovered that there is an under-served Robinson Crusoe-in-space genre... but it's pretty clearly written to market in the sense that its written to entertain SF readers who love exciting stories.

Like, it couldn't really be a more crowd-pleasing pulpy adventure story if it tried. People love those kinds of stories. They have for 100 years.

It's really just a story with an inherently commercial premise.


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## The Bass Bagwhan (Mar 9, 2014)

This discussion makes me wonder when Zon will ever go hard at cleaning up its Books department. Looking at it now, there's a fair mess that you'd expect that someone eventually will decide needs an overhaul. Someone mentioned curation, which I think is good idea - although probably difficult to implement - but there's little sense in attempting to impose quality control on new books when the catalogue is already so devalued by so many poorly-produced and abandoned titles. It's argued that bad books "disappear" anyway with ultra-low rankings and don't affect search results, but you'd think that Zon would still want to clean these out to ensure its quality "customer experience". Bricks and mortar bookstores have always returned, remaindered and even pulped bad titles - not stocked them forever.

While my understanding is that Books are a drop in the Amazon ocean of income and who knows just how much Zon "cares", Amazon needs a healthy indie publishing scene to avoid being held to ransom by the trad/big publishers. It sells Kindles based on the idea that Kindle owners can access millions of quality books, and it doesn't want to rely on trad publishers to provide them all. So the indie book industry isn't going anywhere, but Zon might start to demand demonstrably more professional production values from indie authors.

I'd be keen to sell ebooks direct from my own website. It would let marketing, promotion... everything... be more effective. But as far as I can figure it out, I can't provide that one-click-and-the-book-is-on-your-device delivery service. Aside from that obstacle, still perhaps the successful indie author of the near future will _have _to be based on an impressive website with engaging social media, etc, and use Zon _just _as a sales portal. I realise that plenty of authors do that now - I'm suggesting it will become almost mandatory.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

The Bass Bagwhan said:


> Aside from that obstacle, still perhaps the successful indie author of the near future will _have _to be based on an impressive website with engaging social media, etc, and use Zon _just _as a sales portal. I realise that plenty of authors do that now - I'm suggesting it will become almost mandatory.


I'm not sure anything can solve the saturation issue unfolding. This is a hell of a crowded market. You can disperse the channels to market, but does that really solve anything? We're seeing some people go this route by going wide, which will alleviate some of the pressure, but only temporarily.

Like an elevator with a weight capacity, the greater market has to have some kind of saturation capacity as well. I don't know what it is, but at some point it collapses under its own weight. Does the world need 50 million books? Are there enough readers to support that kind of weight?

Another poster said this is the best time in history to be a writer. I'd play devil's advocate and say there's never been a time in history with this *many* writers. We're in unchartered territory here. It's yet to be seen whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. Saturation is a very real threat; any ecosystem requires balance, overload it and the whole thing can fall apart.

If you went to the movie theatre and there were 500 movie choices, it wouldn't be good. Then if the movies were fake reviewed and the producers were putting mannequins in the seats so the theatre seemed packed... at some point consumers start to get p*ssed off at the experience.

All to say, I think at best the future for SP is a 50/50 one... I ain't counting any chickens just yet.


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## wingsandwords (Nov 1, 2016)

For the record, you can totally write to market without _realizing_ you're writing to market. Grave Mistake was a for-the-love-of-writing book for me. The story had been in my heart and mind since I was a child, and I finally sat myself down and wrote it, without ever looking at the Amazon charts or wondering what was selling right now or even thinking about selling the book, and then decided hey why not? Let's publish it.

Idk, from what y'all are saying, my book wasn't written to market, but it damn sure hit the tropes of UF and sold because of that. It's written to market. I just didn't know it.

I don't see how on earth anyone can honestly think books not 'written to market' are going to outsell the 'written to market' books.

And when I say 'written to market' I mean books, either intentional or not, that have a premise a large audience wants. Because that's what writing to market is. It's knowing what an audience wants and giving it to them. And you can do that in a unique and interesting way! Heck, I'd say you'd better do that, unless you want to be forgotten.

Amanda writes to market, but she does it in an interesting and unique way, making readers fall in love with her take on things, and her audience isn't going anywhere.


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## jaehaerys (Feb 18, 2016)

I think oversaturation is a real concern. I also think the Orwells and Atwoods of the world will survive when the bottom falls out of the pump'n'dump pulp bubble we're currently experiencing across multiple genres.


It may be foolish of me, but I've completely gone back to the drawing board with my approach the past couple of days and re-thought everything. I'd had it in my mind to churn out "what works". I think I'm being false to myself as a writer, about who I am and what I really want, with that approach. I guess what I'm saying is, I really am about the art and hoping a full-time income follows my more organic effort.


So, instead I'm going wide with fiction that while, yes, does fit within a certain genre, also hopefully is so unique that it stands the test of time. It's a big swing and probably even arrogant to think I can do it, but I do see the currently en vogue pump'n'dump as a bubble and I'm hedging on staying clear of it hoping that whatever I do manage to build as a writing career doesn't end up in pieces when it inevitably bursts forcing me to climb that "unique approach" mountain all over again at square one.


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## Rose Andrews (Jun 1, 2017)

wingsandwords said:


> For the record, you can totally write to market without _realizing_ you're writing to market. Grave Mistake was a for-the-love-of-writing book for me. The story had been in my heart and mind since I was a child, and I finally sat myself down and wrote it, without ever looking at the Amazon charts or wondering what was selling right now or even thinking about selling the book, and then decided hey why not? Let's publish it.
> 
> Idk, from what y'all are saying, my book wasn't written to market, but it damn sure hit the tropes of UF and sold because of that. It's written to market. I just didn't know it.
> 
> ...


I love when you post. 



jaehaerys said:


> I think oversaturation is a real concern. I also think the Orwells and Atwoods of the world will survive when the bottom falls out of the pump'n'dump pulp bubble we're currently experiencing across multiple genres.
> 
> It may be foolish of me, but I've completely gone back to the drawing board with my approach the past couple of days and re-thought everything. I'd had it in my mind to churn out "what works". I think I'm being false to myself as a writer, about who I am and what I really want, with that approach. I guess what I'm saying is, I really am about the art and hoping a full-time income follows my more organic effort.
> 
> So, instead I'm going wide with fiction that while, yes, does fit within a certain genre, also hopefully is so unique that it stands the test of time. It's a big swing and probably even arrogant to think I can do it, but I do see the currently en vogue pump'n'dump as a bubble and I'm hedging on staying clear of it hoping that whatever I do manage to build as a writing career doesn't end up in pieces when it inevitably bursts forcing me to climb that "unique approach" mountain all over again at square one.


But if you're writing to a tiny audience, how will you survive an already saturated market that's hard to gain visibility in? (You as in general) How can a tiny audience even allow you to survive the tsunami? Seems to me the smartest plan is to have more books that serve a variety of audiences/niches/but you love writing all of them. At least that's my plan. Let me get back to you in 5 years if I'm still alive and tell you how it goes!


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## jaehaerys (Feb 18, 2016)

Rosie A. said:


> But if you're writing to a tiny audience, how will you survive an already saturated market that's hard to gain visibility in? (You as in general) How can a tiny audience even allow you to survive the tsunami? Seems to me the smartest plan is to have more books that serve a variety of audiences/niches/but you love writing all of them. At least that's my plan. Let me get back to you in 5 years if I'm still alive and tell you how it goes!


I'm not aiming for a tiny audience - at least not purposefully. I'm hoping to build a large readership while writing based on concepts that speak to me. I want to write what I love without paying any mind to 'serving' an audience. You're right, it's probably not the smart approach given the current pump'n'dump sameness that pervades and clearly works, but it's what I have to do.

Again, I know it's arrogant to say in front of others, but I want to be read decades from now. I also think much of what comprises indie fiction at the moment is a bubble and it's growing larger and larger and will pop, forcing a great amount of pump'n'dumpers into total insolvency. By that time I'm hoping to have a solid readership built on a backlist populated by titles that are the opposite of "more of what you the reader want, cheaper, better, faster".

Impossible? Probably. But I have to be genuine and be authentic to myself...corny though that sentiment may be.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

jaehaerys said:


> It may be foolish of me, but I've completely gone back to the drawing board with my approach the past couple of days and re-thought everything. I'd had it in my mind to churn out "what works". I think I'm being false to myself as a writer, about who I am and what I really want, with that approach. I guess what I'm saying is, I really am about the art and hoping a full-time income follows my more organic effort.


you will never go wrong in life thinking and re-thinking things. It's frustrating but it's only through that process that you can start to see what path is right for you. Simply following others is rarely the right move; even if it occasionally leads to success, it's never the type of success that is satisfying.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

I don't think this is the end for indies.

Not in the least.

What I think is that the market grew and saturated. Amazon created KU and Amazon Imprints and that changed the game for indies in terms of visibility and competition. B&N is imploding. Brick and mortar is declining. More and more services have developed for indies and now, we must pay to play, the way publishers have always done. It's leading to the sorting out of authors who can't or won't adjust or compete. Some are leaving because what worked then isn't working now. Some have lost heart because it is hard, even when you've had success to maintain that success. 

But do I think readers are going to stop buying eBooks? Nope. Do I think indies won't be able to sell their eBooks? Nope.

It's just a saturated maturing changing market and that means the competition is fierce. We indies have to learn and adjust the way any business does that wants to survive long-term.

How?

There are four elements to success as an indie, IMO:

1. Write a book that readers will want to read and who tell their friends about it. 
2. Package that book in a way that appeals to the readers who will want to buy it. 
3. Make sure to promote the book so that those readers will find it. 
4. Rinse. Repeat.

The trick is doing the first successfully. If you don't do that, the others will only have limited or no affect.


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## AlecHutson (Sep 26, 2016)

sela said:


> I don't think this is the end for indies.
> 
> Not in the least.
> 
> ...


This. Great answer.


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## wingsandwords (Nov 1, 2016)

Rosie A. said:


> I love when you post.


Aw, thank you <3 That was really sweet.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

sela said:


> There are four elements to success as an indie, IMO:
> 
> 1. Write a book that readers will want to read and who tell their friends about it.
> 2. Package that book in a way that appeals to the readers who will want to buy it.
> ...


I definitely think this is one way to do it. And very accurate for specific genres and definitely the model SP has used to date. I do suspect though a lot of that succcess has come from filling in gaps in the market that TP has left vacant; versus actually competing against TP head to head in ambitious storytelling. Like indies bash literary fiction... not really sure why, other than it's heavily dominated by TP and they feel they can't compete or something.

But take someone like me. I write in scifi, but I'm not typical scifi. The general feedback I get on my writing is either "omg I loved it. Made me cry. The best book I've read in years" or "too preachy, didn't like it". Scifi is full of male readers, but it's the female readers that go nuts over my stuff (males are 50/50 split; some love, some don't) - i had zero clue that would happen. I could probably go write romance and make a killing, but I have zero interest, so I don't.

The thing about something unique is there is no way to appeal to all readers or to even know who is going to like it. And there's just no way to be loved by everyone unless you write to market... you find an established niche where readers are very particular about what they want and then you give it to them. It's formulaic and thereby safe as much as writing can be.

That's never going to be me. I write stories that I love, that push my own mental capacity, and that mean a lot to me. Whether it resonates with readers, I really have no clue until I release it. Heck, sometimes I don't even care if people like it... the story is what the story is. It's a journey that's not always meant to leave the reader feeling good at the end.

I recently polled my readers to find out which of my books they liked the best and wanted to see expanded. Of my three standalones it was a 33% split among them all. haha. Who the hell really knows what readers want, I don't think they even know half the time. Different things strike a chord with different people.

I get why people in very defined niches where the story expectations are well defined feel that writing to market is the only way. But I don't think it is.

I honestly think indies can compete in any category... litfic or whatever. Just that for some reason the consensus seems to be bare-chested male covers and spaceships are where the monies at.

But I really do believe there are no boundaries on what an author can do. Success may take longer, but it's just as feasible offering the market something unique that it may not even realize it needs yet.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Seneca42 said:


> I definitely think this is one way to do it. And very accurate for specific genres and definitely the model SP has used to date. I do suspect though a lot of that succcess has come from filling in gaps in the market that TP has left vacant; versus actually competing against TP head to head in ambitious storytelling. Like indies bash literary fiction... not really sure why, other than it's heavily dominated by TP and they feel they can't compete or something.


I don't think we have to compete head to head with TP.

TP has a particular business model and selects books based on what it thinks will make the most profit / garner the most acclaim, etc. They had to pick books that they thought would keep them in business. That meant a whole lot of books that might have a smaller audience were turned down and never saw the light of day. Those books were left in the slush pile because their sales prospects just weren't good enough to prop up TP's bottom line.

IOW: when TP was dominant there were a whole lot of books that could have sold decently and made good money for the author but there was no infrastructure to get those books in front of readers. Amazon did that. It created the infrastructure that allowed those smaller books to get in front of their readers.

Amazon monetized the slush pile and all those smaller books that don't make sense in the TP business model can find their place.

Indies are the slush pile of TP and now, we can publish our books that TP didn't want. There's no shame in being the slush pile. It's merely the books that TP didn't think it could monetize and make a profit off. Amazon found a way of doing that. It has afforded a whole whack load of us a decent living or income who would't have got a book contract before due to TP's business model.

We don't need the numbers that TP needs to be successful because we don't have the same costs or overhead. So we can sell fewer books at a lower price point with lower investment and still make a living.

Very few TP authors make as much as I do. I've made $1M+ since I started in 2012 and I bet there are few TP authors who have made that much in the same time. This is not to brag, but to make a point. Indies can write our books that TP didn't want. They may be smaller books than the books that TP thinks it needs to be profitable. But our books may sell enough for us to do this for a living, given our business model.

I repeat - we don't need to compete with TP head to head in the sense of writing the same kind of books or selling the same numbers -- although we already do. We may not compete in the print world. But we do in the digital world. We're side by side with them.

We can sell a whole lot less and at a lower price point than TP and still do well. And we can write quirkier books that have smaller audiences because they do fit with _our_ business model.

I seriously think it is a true golden age for authors but it's just getting started and there's going to be a lot of change in the next decade. We have to become / stay nimble.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

sela said:


> There are four elements to success as an indie, IMO:
> 
> 1. Write a book that readers will want to read and who tell their friends about it.
> 2. Package that book in a way that appeals to the readers who will want to buy it.
> ...


I agree with almost all of this except that I think the trick lies in #4. I've seen a lot of people achieve #'s 1, 2 and 3, some intentionally and some accidentally, but repeating that over and over for years? That's much, much harder.


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## Kathy Dee (Aug 27, 2016)




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## antcurious (Jun 2, 2017)

PaulineMRoss said:


> I agree with almost all of this except that I think the trick lies in #4. I've seen a lot of people achieve #'s 1, 2 and 3, some intentionally and some accidentally, but repeating that over and over for years? That's much, much harder.


Early days for me but I can imagine this is true like it is for most things. Always comes back to hard work, doesn't it? dammit!


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## lmsorrell (Sep 9, 2017)

Joseph Malik said:


> I was told for 15 years that no one would be interested in what I write. I'm now in a position where I have to write rejection letters to agents.


Ahh, happy days


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

People complaining about saturation have never walked into a used bookstore.  There have always been a lot of books and a lot writers. Now there's more of both. Access to a larger audience is now possible for authors.


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## Sarah Shaw (Feb 14, 2015)

P.J. Post said:


> @Annie and Amanda: The Martian was not remotely written to market, if it were, Weir wouldn't have gone with first present. I think you may be confusing writing to market with simply writing to genre. Genres are wild and unpredictable things, while market-based products require research, meetings with accounting and the ticking off of little boxes. WTM confines stories and restricts possibilities, especially where the narrative can go, because it's already been preordained by prevailing consumer expectations. WTM, or market-based product development, as defined by Universities and Business Schools, states that even the characters's hair color is determined by its revenue potential. Ever noticed how all of Disney's modern-day Princesses look almost exactly the same?
> 
> From reading your posts on the subject, it sounds like you're really just having fun writing to genre...


This makes a lot of sense to me. Genres are broad and long-lived. Most of them have been around for a couple hundred years. They grow out of a what's usually a single, unique book or author that satisfies a craving people didn't know they had. Subgenres arise when someone does something different within a genre that hits a chord and other people imitate. Genres and subgenres come in and out of fashion and new ones arise because societies are always changing and societies are built on story. When things change enough that the old stories no longer fit we look to books, music, film and art either to tell new stories or to give us shelter from new realities that make no sense to us (because we don't yet have new stories to explain them) by retelling the old stories in a simple, satisfying way. I think it's these two quite different functions of art that has always caused the friction between 'pulp' and 'literature'. (Curiously, as Ursula LeGuin points out in one of her essays, this kind of distinction doesn't really exist in the other arts. Classical musicians regularly pay tribute to pop, and vice-versa. Other arts seem to understand that you can't tell new stories without understanding the old ones and the old ones need new twists to keep them satisfying to younger audiences.)

Does Indie publishing have a future? Anybody's guess. I suspect at some point we'll get some kind of curation system based on our personal preferences that will keep people buying. Actually, I'm surprised Amazon hasn't done this already. With all the data it has at its disposal and all the big data and machine learning techniques we have now I should be getting highly targeted reading recommendations instead of the crap I see now. At very least they should give me more of the authors I've already bought lots of rather than just pumping the latest books in genres I read into my 'recommended' list. At some point we may get machine written books targeted particularly to us, based on what we've read and liked in the past- but hopefully I'll be long dead by then!


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## Joseph Malik (Jul 12, 2016)

Caimh said:


> . . . modern publishing provides plenty of avenues for you to try. That's not to say I don't find Chris fox's work useful. The stuff about not polluting your also boughts is gold. Being smart means listening to what smart people have to say and then figuring out how to apply it to your individual talents.


There are lessons from the genre market and the speed writers that can benefit those of us who take a more lit-fic, artistic approach to the craft, and vice versa. This whole concept of "my way is the only way" is insane and unnecessarily divisive. This is art, but it's also the art business. On that, though, it's not like anyone is stealing readers from anyone else, so best practices don't have to be treated like trade secrets; as long as a book costs less than a beer, there will always be enough readers to go around. This is also why it's nuts to think that this is "the beginning of the end." It's still the beginning of the beginning.


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## Sailor Stone (Feb 23, 2015)

wingsandwords said:


> For the record, you can totally write to market without _realizing_ you're writing to market. Grave Mistake was a for-the-love-of-writing book for me. The story had been in my heart and mind since I was a child, and I finally sat myself down and wrote it, without ever looking at the Amazon charts or wondering what was selling right now or even thinking about selling the book, and then decided hey why not? Let's publish it.
> 
> Idk, from what y'all are saying, my book wasn't written to market, but it damn sure hit the tropes of UF and sold because of that. It's written to market. I just didn't know it.
> 
> ...


*For the record (again):* 
I remember when I was researching markets and rankings and whatnot on Amazon earlier this year and I came across _Grave Mistake_.
I was immediately attracted to the title. It was a great title that fit the genre(s) to perfection. Then I saw the cover and I had to read the blurb. That took me to the Look Inside and upon reading the first line it was like my mind heard the gun at the start of a race and I had to keep going. 
Even the author name, whether it is a real name or pen name shouted, "I'm a fantasy writer!".
_Grave Mistake is one of the books that I keep an eye on to see how it does long term, and just checking it today I see that it is still doing well.
I don't read much urban or space fantasy, but from the perspective of a reader, a writer, and an admirer of good writers, I can say that this book is the definition of a KBoards home run._


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

I like how there's a certain contingent that seems to think absolutely no thought goes into books that are released quickly. That's clearly how it works. Oh, wait ... 
Either way, it really doesn't matter. This is one of those topics where there's a lot of preaching and derogatory comments that don't really hold weight because the proof is in the publishing. We can easily see what's selling and what's not. That's the joy of the business.
I'm sure someone will fire back with "bots" or "inflated rankings," and those are issues for some people. Most authors aren't using black hat tactics, though. There are honest authors making a living out there. If there weren't real authors making money off specific genres and publishing plans, no one would try to scam their way to the top with similar books.
As for writing to market, I think everyone should do what he or she wants to do. That's another joy of this business. I think learning for ourselves is the best discovery tool we have.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

I see reading potential expanding. Back in the day, coughcough, to read a book, I had to sift through titles at a brick and mortar store with no search parameters. Imagine that!

For the time spent picking up a book and reading the back cover and all, today I could find 20 books in the same amount of time.

Further, back in that day, coughcough, I had to carry the book around. Not always practical. I had considered myself a voracious reader, but I couldn't read everywhere. Today, download to your phone and you can read while driving.   I imagine I could have read 10X as many books when I was a youth if I had today's access.

Saturation has to come at some point, yes. Many authors will get discouraged. Authors who write better, stick to their plans, and keep producing books people want to read will ride the tsunami.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

At the end of the day we each have to forge our own path and also decide when / if it's time to bow out.


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## 10105 (Feb 16, 2010)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> You're describing writing to trend. Marketable books don't have to shift according to trend.


Semantics. The market follows trends.


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## sailingthevoid (Oct 4, 2017)

Laran Mithras said:


> Today, download to your phone and you can read while driving.


PSA: Please don't do this


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## Donna White Glaser (Jan 12, 2011)

Actually this thread has been very encouraging to me. For the last year and a half I've been really struggling with feeling like a failure. One of the obstacles has been that I haven't been able to write so my production has been nil, and of course that effects everything. I've been trying to prop up my existing series with a plethora of marketing approaches, but it's like trying to keep goop from sagging. That just added to my discouragement. 

But this thread clarified two things for me: 1) markets, in general, behave in similar ways and we've definitely passed the boom phase.  So (aside from the damage I've done myself by not writing/producing) the current environment is a natural development of a maturing market. It's not the death of the ebook market. It's the natural flow of business.
2) I do have more control over my situation than what I've been acknowledging because I can pull my head out of my... well... I can focus on the one thing I CAN control, which is to write. No more goop support. 

Time to get busy.


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## sailingthevoid (Oct 4, 2017)

sela said:


> There are four elements to success as an indie, IMO:
> 
> 1. Write a book that readers will want to read and who tell their friends about it.
> 2. Package that book in a way that appeals to the readers who will want to buy it.
> ...


Also my plan, except I'm really not putting much effort into #3 until I have a few more books out. I can't for the life of me remember who said it, but years ago I read a lesson about how the more books you have out, the more impactful marketing will be because every new reader has more product to purchase, so don't worry about it too much for the first few books. Focus on writing good books, producing them well with profressional editing and covers, getting them out there and telling whatever mailing list/friends/strangers you have, then get back to writing. So I'm not going to worry about a marketing strategy until I'm ready to release my fourth book that'll be the final one in this initial series.

On the topic more broadly, I'm lucky enough to have a day job that I enjoy, that also allows me the spare time to do some writing. I won't be getting anywhere near thinking about making a living at this for some time.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Al Stevens said:


> Semantics. The market follows trends.


No. Cozy mysteries are a market. They never go out of style. Bad boy romance with bikers and hearts of gold are a trend that ebbs and flows with popularity. You can easily write and sell to market without following trends.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Sam Rivers said:


> The future looks bleak for Indie writers. Sales keep going down and expenses are going up. Then there are the scammers who keep the bucket leaking.
> 
> Do you think that this is the beginning of the end for Indie writers?


Is that a serious question?


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## 10105 (Feb 16, 2010)

The Bass Bagwhan said:


> I'd be keen to sell ebooks direct from my own website. It would let marketing, promotion... everything... be more effective. But as far as I can figure it out, I can't provide that one-click-and-the-book-is-on-your-device delivery service.


Amazon is able to do that because the customer must register the e-reader device/app with Amazon and Amazon knows how to get inside that device. iTunes does the same. The more difficult part is the one-click registration. (Difficult only because I haven't reverse-engineered how it works.) You can email a book to a Kindle. That means you have to get a customer's kindle e-mail address. They made side-loading less than simple to keep us from readily going around their system in order to sell books directly. If we make it harder than one-click, most readers won't do it. They'll just go to Amazon and buy a different book.


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

Yes, its all over. So stop writing now so I can catch up on my gazillion series I am so behind in reading. 

Thank you.


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## 10105 (Feb 16, 2010)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> No. Cozy mysteries are a market. They never go out of style. Bad boy romance with bikers and hearts of gold are a trend that ebbs and flows with popularity. You can easily write and sell to market without following trends.


Said another way, the market makes trends.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Al Stevens said:


> Said another way, the market makes trends.


I'm sure the market does make trends but writing to market is not the same as writing to trend, which is the base argument.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

In the face of new information, the first question one should always ask is what would change if the new information were true. If the answer is "nothing," carry on as before.


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## 10105 (Feb 16, 2010)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> I'm sure the market does make trends but writing to market is not the same as writing to trend, which is the base argument.


And what I addressed before the argument became one was writing to market. You can subdivide market if you like. Today there's a market for this, tomorrow there's one for that. Call it trends, I don't really care.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Al Stevens said:


> And what I addressed before the argument became one was writing to market. You can subdivide market if you like. Today there's a market for this, tomorrow there's one for that. Call it trends, I don't really care.


And yet there's always sales in certain markets without trends. Trends are one thing, markets are another.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> And yet there's always sales in certain markets without trends. Trends are one thing, markets are another.


This.

Contemporary romance is a market. Bad Boy Billionaire BDSM Baby is a trend _within_ that market. You can make a living writing contemporary romance novels that serve that larger market of readers or you can write to the current trend in that market, which comes and goes.

Both exist at the same time but the trend is temporary while the larger market is evergreen. Trends are hot right now and you can write a trendy book quickly and get it out to capture the trend readers, but you can also write a basic to-market contemporary romance and it will sell (if it delivers) no matter what trends are currently popular.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

sela said:


> This.
> 
> Contemporary romance is a market. Bad Boy Billionaire BDSM Baby is a trend _within_ that market. You can make a living writing contemporary romance novels that serve that larger market of readers or you can write to the current trend in that market, which comes and goes.
> 
> Both exist at the same time but the trend is temporary while the larger market is evergreen. Trends are hot right now and you can write a trendy book quickly and get it out to capture the trend readers, but you can also write a basic to-market contemporary romance and it will sell (if it delivers) no matter what trends are currently popular.


So much like.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

Also, just want to say, that I've been on this board for three years and some variation of these sky is falling threads occur fairly regularly.

I think what is always true is that what once worked doesn't work anymore, so it always feels as though the sky is falling. The good news is that something else does work, you just have to keep your mind and eyes open.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

sela said:


> I don't think we have to compete head to head with TP.
> 
> TP has a particular business model and selects books based on what it thinks will make the most profit / garner the most acclaim, etc. They had to pick books that they thought would keep them in business. That meant a whole lot of books that might have a smaller audience were turned down and never saw the light of day. Those books were left in the slush pile because their sales prospects just weren't good enough to prop up TP's bottom line.
> 
> ...


I think this is absolutely right, sela. Looking at my own experience ... I've sold about 12K copies of my second book. But to sell those, I had to distribute a huge number of free copies of my first book over the course of five and a half years. I don't really know how many copies are out there, since it's been distributed in boxed sets, but I'd guess it's over a million. So, my readers exist, but finding them is like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. There's simply no way for trad pub to do that sort of thing, but the tools we have as indie authors make it possible.


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## jaehaerys (Feb 18, 2016)

Jim Johnson said:


> People complaining about saturation have never walked into a used bookstore.  There have always been a lot of books and a lot writers. Now there's more of both. Access to a larger audience is now possible for authors.


Yes, there have always been lots of books and lots of writers, but I would argue since 2010 the amount of content out there compared to before is akin to the infamous hockey stick graph.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

jaehaerys said:


> Yes, there have always been lots of books and lots of writers, but I would argue since 2010 the amount of content out there compared to before is akin to the infamous hockey stick graph.


To me industry evolution can a lot like the stock market, which is to say there's some guess work going on there and market signals don't always match reality.

Lots of smart investors say it's insane to be in the stock market because it's massively overvalued. They were saying that way back at DOW 15k. But, it's only gone up (making them look like fools, even though they are not fools at all). Even if it's rigged, it's still working, the floor hasn't fallen out. Same with many Ponzi schemes, Madoff clients weren't worried (even though they should have been).

If someone says the sky is going to fall, and it doesn't, that doesn't necessarily mean that their logic was faulty. It sometimes just means their timing was off.

And people over ascribe meaning to people saying things will get harder to everything will burn in a fiery apocalypse.

When people have time they should watch the movie The Big Short. Especially Christian Bale's (Michael Burry) character. One of the best examples of a guy who was right while everyone was telling him was wrong.

No one should be too cocky on either side of the spectrum. It's all speculation until the market plays out.


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## 10105 (Feb 16, 2010)

Amanda M. Lee said:


> And yet there's always sales in certain markets without trends. Trends are one thing, markets are another.


Tomatoes. tomahtoes...


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

I'm pretty sure I can agree with the whole difference between the market and a trend.

At least in erotica, I primarily write to market, though I love writing what's in my heart. Sometimes my heart leads me outside the expected tropes (into a non-existent trend) to see if there's a base for it.

I have some very good-selling market books. All of my trend experiments have failed. And by trend, I don't mean identifying the hot new thing, but trying to break new ground with a mixture of tropes.

Someday I might find new ground to break. "Flat-Chested Bimbos From Under the Sea." We'll see.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

The question was asked: is there anyone who has NOT written to market and who has done well? (I'm paraphrasing.)

I don't know what 'well' is.

I don't know that we can all agree on what 'writing to market' even means. In my interpretation, it means understanding the market you're writing for and writing a story that fits in that market.

I wrote a sci-fi first contact story without having read a sci-fi first contact story since the 1980's. I wrote a series about an immortal man that is urban fantasy, sci-fi, and historical fiction, which doesn't entirely fit in any of those categories (because of the existence of fantasy creatures in a world without magic.) I've never read anyone else's immortal man stories, but I assume it's a market. And I haven't read an urban fantasy since 2002.

The Immortal series is doing very well. The Spaceship Next Door is doing _incredibly_ well. I wrote them without any a priori consideration of their market or even what market they fit in, or how to sell them.

Now. If you want to say 'they fit an underserved market and you just didn't know it, ergo, you wrote to market', then I don't know what to say. You can counter very nearly any argument with that claim, but at the same time you're changing the definition of 'writing to market' in a way that no longer makes any sense to me.

If you're saying my definition of 'well' isn't as good as yours, then I also don't know what to say. Uncle.


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## Sarah Shaw (Feb 14, 2015)

GeneDoucette said:


> ...
> The Immortal series is doing very well. The Spaceship Next Door is doing _incredibly_ well. I wrote them without any a priori consideration of their market or even what market they fit in, or how to sell them.
> 
> Now. If you want to say 'they fit an underserved market and you just didn't know it, ergo, you wrote to market', then I don't know what to say. You can counter very nearly any argument with that claim, but at the same time you're changing the definition of 'writing to market' in a way that no longer makes any sense to me.


Agreed. Defining 'written to market' as anything that sells well, regardless of whether the author made any attempt to determine whether there was a market or to write to it is just circular reasoning- and doesn't give us any useful information. Yes, books that sell well have a market. That's what having a market _means_. Writing to that market, however, is supposed to mean something other than finding out after the fact that the book you wrote because it was the book you wanted to write has a market. If it doesn't, then 'writing to market' has no specific meaning at all and it's no more helpful to tell people to do it than it is to tell them to write a best seller.


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## 10105 (Feb 16, 2010)

Laran Mithras said:


> I'm pretty sure I can agree with the whole difference between the market and a trend.


Me too. The question wasn't are they the same. The question was what was I addressing in the post that got all this started. I was addressing a shifting market. Someone decided I was addressing something else. Look up "shifting markets."


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

Sarah Shaw said:


> Agreed. Defining 'written to market' as anything that sells well, regardless of whether the author made any attempt to determine whether there was a market or to write to it is just circular reasoning- and doesn't give us any useful information. Yes, books that sell well have a market. That's what having a market _means_. Writing to that market, however, is supposed to mean something other than finding out after the fact that the book you wrote because it was the book you wanted to write has a market. If it doesn't, then 'writing to market' has no specific meaning at all and it's no more helpful to tell people to do it than it is to tell them to write a best seller.


Who defined it as anything that sells well? I've seen multiple books written to market not sell well. That's hardly the argument.


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## Sarah Shaw (Feb 14, 2015)

GeneDoucette said:


> The question was asked: is there anyone who has NOT written to market and who has done well? (I'm paraphrasing.)


I was referring to this question. Gene gave himself as an example of someone who has NOT written to market and has done well.


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## Laran Mithras (Nov 22, 2016)

I think no matter how we define it, the end is not nigh.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## The Bass Bagwhan (Mar 9, 2014)

Al Stevens said:


> Amazon is able to do that because the customer must register the e-reader device/app with Amazon and Amazon knows how to get inside that device. iTunes does the same. The more difficult part is the one-click registration. (Difficult only because I haven't reverse-engineered how it works.) You can email a book to a Kindle. That means you have to get a customer's kindle e-mail address. They made side-loading less than simple to keep us from readily going around their system in order to sell books directly. If we make it harder than one-click, most readers won't do it. They'll just go to Amazon and buy a different book.


Yes, this. But it did take my musings towards asking how many people actually browse and read on a Kindle, and whether I might be able to directly sell at least to non-Kindle users somehow. To answer myself, no... I still can't beat the one-click buy. But I'm leaning heavily towards really well-designed landings pages for my books with reseller links, rather than pointing any marketing to the reseller product pages. I know many people feel that any extra click to reach the book is potentially a click too far, but I think I can make my web pages far more attractive than (for example) Zon's product page. And my own pages won't feature heaps of advertising for everyone else's books!



Boyd said:


> Me too. I think Sela just dropped the mic.


Please, please, don't encourage this. I'm a professional live sound engineer and you've got no idea how enraging it is to see some idiot decide to drop your $1K radio microphone to the stage to make a point. In the past, I've managed to get on foldback/talkback fast enough to say, "You drop it, you're paying for it" and it's surprising how fast the idiot suddenly decides the point isn't worth making.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

The Bass Bagwhan said:


> Please, please, don't encourage this. I'm a professional live sound engineer and you've got no idea how enraging it is to see some idiot decide to drop your $1K radio microphone to the stage to make a point. In the past, I've managed to get on foldback/talkback fast enough to say, "You drop it, you're paying for it" and it's surprising how fast the idiot suddenly decides the point isn't worth making.


"Why did you drop the mic?"

"I wasn't going to, but those posters on KBoards suggested it!"

*gotta go run with scissors now, be back later*


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## jaehaerys (Feb 18, 2016)

Scarcity drives value, and we're hurtling into a post-scarcity ebook world.


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## 10105 (Feb 16, 2010)

The Bass Bagwhan said:


> Yes, this. But it did take my musings towards asking how many people actually browse and read on a Kindle, and whether I might be able to directly sell at least to non-Kindle users somehow. To answer myself, no... I still can't beat the one-click buy.


I believe you can. Calibre does it. I connect any of my devices to the USB port, and Calibre recognizes it and sideloads to it. It's just a matter of finding out how. Directly from your website might be a bit touchy though. I'd have to think about it some.


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## Seneca42 (Dec 11, 2016)

PJ Post... now that's what I call a post! Some actual fundamental logic.

But let's all forget we saw it and believe that market fundamentals that apply to every industry in the world don't apply to indies because... because... uh... *TP is going to die! * Ya... ya, that's the ticket. See, TP's are gonna die and we're all going to be billionaires... billionaires I tell ya!


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## Cherise (May 13, 2012)

Rick Partlow said:


> Wow, all this doom and gloom and somehow I've made more money from writing this year than I've ever made in any job I've ever worked...


Congrats. 

My pen name can relate.

There's something wrong with me though, because I love these threads full of arguments, lol!


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