This Crazy Writing Life: Some Random Reflections On The Reality of This Crazy Writing Life

By Steven Womack

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A couple of weeks ago, I did a Zoom panel for the Middle Tennessee chapter of Sisters in Crime called Indie Pubbing Mistakes And How To Avoid Them. Chapter President Beth (Jaden) Terrell moderated the panel, and Lisa Wysocky, Jenna Bennett and I had a very lively and engaging exploration of how to survive this crazy business. As I was prepping for the panel (an hour or so before we were scheduled to go on), I came across a couple of statistics that left me kind of gobsmacked.

For some reason or other, I started pondering how many books were published around the world every year. I wondered if it were even possible to find an answer to that question. More importantly, did I even want to know how many books were published every year? I feared that the number might be even more daunting than I expected.

So I cranked up my local internet search engine and wound up going down a rabbit hole that I haven’t managed to pull myself out of yet…

The first step was UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. I don’t know much about UNESCO and have no connection personally to the organization beyond dim childhood memories of collecting money for them at Halloween back in elementary school (oh wait, that might have been UNICEF). One of UNESCO’s missions is to compile statistics and information on the number of books published because it’s an important index of how world literacy is progressing and our level of education, which is directly related to the standard of living.

According to their best estimates, 2.2 million books were published around the world last year.

Let’s all take a moment to get our heads around this.

Two-point-two million published books a year means that, on average, 6,027 books are published every day, seven-days-a-week, around the clock.

So if that doesn’t make your head spin, let me add their disclaimer: this doesn’t include self/independently published books. While I can’t imagine there’s a completely accurate way of determining how many indies are released every year, UNESCO estimates that adding these to the mix raises the number to nearly four million books a year.

That takes us up to nearly 11,000 books a day.

I don’t know what else to say beyond Holy Crap…

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Continuing on down this rabbit hole, I turned to one of the best Substack writers I’ve found in the past couple of years. . . Elle Griffin. Elle, based in Salt Lake City, writes The Elysian, a newsletter that examines the world and the future through the eyes of an essayist and fiction writer trying to stay centered in the shifting sands of publishing, culture, and life. Her stuff is top-notch, and I highly recommend tracking her down and subscribing (her March 2021 essay No One Will Read Your Book, is essential reading).

In April 2024, Elle wrote an exhaustive and fascinating essay on the publishing business—called No one buys books—set against the backdrop of Penguin Random House’s attempt to acquire Simon & Schuster. The merging of these two publishing houses—who between them make up nearly half of the entire market share of American publishing—would have meant the Big 5 would now be the Big 4 (along with Harper Collins, Macmillan, and Hachette Livre).

The Department of Justice brought an antitrust case against the proposed acquisition and a judge ultimately ruled that the 2.2-billion-dollar merger would indeed create a monopoly, thereby putting the kibosh on the deal.

This was no real big surprise, but what was an eye-opening surprise was the testimony of all the experts called at the trial. It was like in the middle of all the flashing lights, booming sound effects, flame jets, sound and fury, somebody pulled aside the curtain to reveal the shriveled up little mean-spirited man who was pulling all the strings. The truth about the publishing industry was stripped naked and exposed for all to see in its hideous ugliness.

And while what I’m putting in front of you now may seem negative and pessimistic in nature, I’ve always believed that in almost any of life’s endeavors, most of the time it’s better to know what you’re up against. And as Matty Walker said in Larry Kasdan’s great Body Heat, knowledge is power.

So some essential, if ugly, truths:

One expert called to testify in the PRH anti-trust lawsuit collected data on some 58,000 titles. Ninety percent of those titles sold less than 2,000 copies. Fifty percent sold less than a dozen.

Gulp…

The contemporary traditional publishing business model is more like a Silicon Valley venture capitalist’s model than the old myth of a small family firm publishing books they love. In this model, you throw a bunch of money at a bunch of projects and hope that a few of them manage to survive, and even fewer become unicorn breakouts. The ones that do become breakouts get even more money thrown at them. The very top successes get a truckload of money thrown at them. At this level, one consultant reported, this means about 2 percent of the published titles.

Celebrity authors—whether they’re real authors, athletes, movie stars, politicians, or just famous for being famous (Kardashians, anyone?)—get a big hunk of all advance money (and therefore, support) from traditional publishers. Franchise authors—the ones who show up on best-seller lists time after time after time—also get a huge share of the pie. Even then, celebrity authors don’t always sell. Fame doesn’t guarantee a best seller: just ask Andrew Cuomo, Billie Eilish, and Piers Morgan—well-known celebrities whose books flopped like freshly landed catfish.

In evidence provided during the trial, Penguin Random House produced an infographic that revealed for every 100 books they publish, 35 are profitable. Profitable might mean a huge success with truckloads of money coming in or it might mean $.01 over breakeven. As few as 2 of those 100 books account for the lion’s share of profitability.

A traditional publishing house’s backlist, however, is a constant revenue stream of profit. Backlist means all the books the house has ever published that are still in print. Classics—from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to more recent contemporary books like Stephen King’s Carrie—are money machines that houses can count on. Popular children’s books can hang around forever as a new generation of young parents reads the books they loved as a child to their own children. Elle Griffin noted in her essay that Penguin Random House’s edition of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar has been on Publisher Weekly’s bestseller list every week for the past 19 years.

But to get on that backlist, you’ve first got to succeed on the frontlist. 

So with all the discouraging news and mountain-high obstacles, what’s one to do?

For the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been writing monthly columns for Killer Nashville Magazine on independent publishing. If you take nothing else away from this, then understand that indie pubbing (and as I’ve yelled over and over again at the top of my lungs, don’t call it self-publishing) is not just a phenomenon or a ripple in the history of publishing. It’s nothing short of a movement, even a revolution. Publishing houses (and for that matter, literary agents) who acted as gatekeepers in times past are through; they just don’t know it yet.

Run the numbers I cited earlier. If 2.2 million books are published around the world by traditional houses, then you add in indie pubbed books and the number approaches four million, that means that nearly half the books published in the world are indie pubbed. We’re about to cross a Rubicon here if, in fact, it hasn’t already been crossed. In some genres—romance, for instance—it has already been crossed. The mass market Romance paperback is gone, dethroned by the eBook.

This is not, by any means, to suggest that indie pubbing is a panacea, or the answer to all our problems as writers. I turned to indie pubbing because I had projects or out-of-print trad pubbed books that no house would take. When you work that hard on something, you shouldn’t leave it lying in a desk drawer to yellow with age. So I stared indie pubbing and only afterward learned that I liked having control of titles, cover, editorial, etc. And I liked not having to wait years to see book come into print. But it’s an enormous amount of work and I’m still not making anywhere near the money I once hoped to make as a writer of commercial fiction.

So if one of the Big Five (or for that matter, a smaller house) came to me and offered me a sweet deal to publish a book of mine, would I take it?

Hell, yes.

That’s it for this month’s This Crazy Writing Life. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

This Crazy Writing Life’s Conversation with Emma Boyer of Written Word Media

By Steven Womack

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I’m fascinated by origin stories. The most amazing things in life sometimes start as tiny little, almost-random occurrences. The story that intrigued me today was how a digital marketer’s mother wrote a book in 2011 and had no idea how to sell it. So the daughter stepped up, developed some new ideas about how to get an indie-pubbed book out there, then shared those ideas with other writers. The next thing you know, it’s all snowballed and taken on a life of its own.

That digital marketer was Ricci Wolman and out of those early efforts, she—together with her business partner Ferol Vernon—started Written Word Media in 2014, which today is one of the top marketing firms in the indie-pubbing arena.

I recently had the chance to have a conversation with Emma Boyer, Written Word Media’s Vice-President of Digital Operations & Author relations. Boyer joined Written Word Media four years ago and has seen the tremendous changes and growth in the independent publishing industry.

Written Word Media started out with its two best-known digital marketing platforms, FreeBooksy and BargainBooksy, but since then has branched out and created new, more targeted platforms like Red Feather Romance and NewInBooks, as well as Audio Thicket, which promotes audiobooks on numerous platforms. They also have a program that creates both Facebook ads and Amazon ads for indie authors. Another program helps authors grow that all-important author newsletter email list.

They’ve also partnered with other digital marketing platforms like Hello Books (created by those Self-Pub Formula guys James Blatch and Mark Dawson), Fussy Librarian, Ereader News Today, and Book Barbarian.

I asked Emma what the biggest challenge to beginning indie authors was. Writing a book is hard enough, but once your book is done, edited and polished, then typeset and uploaded to a publishing platform, the real struggle begins. With so many writers working and competing in the indie pub space, what’s the hardest thing to do?

“I talk to a lot of authors in my role as VP of Author Relations,” she answered. “It’s very much my job and my team’s job to talk to authors every day. What I hear the most from new indies coming into the space is that marketing is hard and that most of them did not get into writing books so they could figure out how to market them. So I think the biggest challenge, on a broad scale, is where to start. There’s a lot of information out there and you have to sift through it to find out what’s good and what’s bad. Usually, indie writers don’t have a big budget to start with, so finding things that are effective to connect with an audience is tough.”

For the past few years, Written Word Media has conducted end-of-the-year surveys to find out more about the authors they work with. The results are revealing.

“Although there are definitely some very business-minded indies out there who are making six-figures and crushing it, I would say a big, big percentage of our authors are just starting out and they just want to find readers. They just want readers to read their book. How do they find an audience? They haven’t even started to think about monetizing yet.”

For many authors who are either new to this or not yet on the Stephen King level, a key marketing strategy is to give books away. Yet for many, this seems counter-intuitive. How can you make any money giving books away?

“There’s a great debate among authors,” Emma said, “over whether or not you should give books away for free. But especially in the beginning of a career, it’s the only way to get readers. But more importantly, it’s a sound economic strategy. And remember, giving away something valuable for free is hardly something indies invented. Almost every company you can think of offers a free trial: the free samples at Costco, for instance. This strategy is not something that’s specific to books. The theory is that giving your book away for free—especially if it’s one in a series—is that for a short, concentrated period of time, you drive traffic to those who are willing to take a chance on somebody who’s not on the New York Times Bestseller List.”

There’s another benefit to this strategy. By concentrating the push in a very short time—a common WWM strategy lasts for three days—the algorithms take notice. It’s common for authors who deploy this successfully to find their Amazon ranking takes off, sometimes to #1 in a category.

This is a leap-of-faith, but Emma emphasized that there’s got to be something underlying the effort.

“You have to believe in what you do. You have to believe that your book is good.”

Then she adds, “If you don’t believe it, then maybe this isn’t the right business for you.”

When everything comes together, then momentum begins to gather. “Motion begets motion.”

One thing I noted that Written Word Media brings to the table—which so many other internet marketers don’t—is that the millions of emails that go out every day aren’t spam. Written Word Media’s business model is to target the emails to an audience that: 1) signed up for the emails; and 2) has requested specific genre book offers. So if you got a Freebooksy email in your inbox offering free Cozy Mysteries, it’s because you signed up for them and specifically requested cozies.

Written Word Media is transparent about the number of subscribers in each category. I recently did a three-day promo for the re-release of my traditionally published suspense/thriller Blood Plot. Day #1 went out to Hello Books, #2 to FreeBooksy, and on Day #3, Fussy Librarian. Over this three-day period, my book landed in over 973,000 inboxes, every one of which requested to see it.

By the end of the second day, Blood Plot was #1 in the “Serial Killer” category.

So I asked Emma the obvious next question: how did you guys compile such a huge database of potential customers?

“Well, not overnight is the answer,” she said, laughing. “We’ve been in business for fourteen years and we work hard to find those readers. But one thing I will say is that we have been very rigorous in making sure that we have high-intensity matches with readers and authors. We ask our subscribers very specific questions about what they want and what they do not want. I think that’s why people are happy and active and remain on our list. They forward it to their friends. And our subscribers can change their preferences any time they want.”

The partnerships with other platforms have also helped grow their customer base.

“We’ve been able to grow our audience by magnitudes that we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. That’s a win, win, win…”

What’s the best way for a new indie author just coming into the indie author space to take advantage of what Written Word Media offers, I asked. Is there a secret handshake?

“What I hear sometimes from new authors,” she offered, “is I’m overwhelmed. I don’t even know where to start. So I think my real, true, concrete advice is to write to us. You can send an email to hello@WrittenWordMedia.com and someone from my wonderful team who loves books and authors will answer you. If you don’t know where to start, if you’re not really sure what genre your book falls into, if you’re not sure your cover looks enough like a fantasy/romance, if you’re not sure what kind of promo you need to start with, then the answer’s different for everybody. You don’t even have to be our customer; we’ll be happy to answer your questions. Just shoot us an email and we’ll point you in the right direction.”

As our conversation came to a close, I asked Emma if she had any last word of advice to offer indie authors.

“I think the takeaway that I always want to impart to authors is that it’s a lot harder to start than it is to keep going. So once you kind of have some momentum, keep it going, in whatever capacity you can. I would encourage anybody to just start.”

In that respect, the marketing of books is kind of like the writing process itself. Get moving, gain some momentum, and then keep going.

If you’re thinking about taking the leap, it’s a lot to think about. That’s it for this month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life. As always, thanks for playing along.

Oh, and my three-day promo for Blood Plot? Readers downloaded just over 3,900 copies of the book, which I guaran-damn-tee you, is more than it sold when one of the Big Five published it a long time ago.

Collaborations Can Be As Easy as 1-2-3 / Author Steven Womack

Writing with someone else is tricky. Most writers have their own toys, their own ideas, and they like to write in their own way. How do you keep the other person from being an intrusion rather than a partner? How do you find another person to write with at all? As a kick-off to a panel Edgar-winning author Steven Womack and Wayne McDaniel will be leading on “Collaboration” at Killer Nashville this year, Steve tells his story of working with a collaborator, how the process came to be, and what he learned from the experience. It’s excellent advice and couldn’t be timelier. Several of you have told me you are thinking of working with someone else and I’m about to start a detective series with another author myself. I love Steve Womack. I’ve known him for almost 20 years. He’s one of the best writers on the planet. He’s bright with a strong dry wit and, when I’m old with Alzheimer’s, I’ll still be remembering Steve’s wonderful fictional Private Investigator Harry James Denton until the day I die. I’ve just started his new book Resurrection Bay; the first page hooked me. You’ll definitely see a review in our Killer Nashville Book of the Day series.

So, let’s get started. Here’s Steve. Happy Reading! And best of luck to you in your collaborations.

Clay Stafford
Founder of Killer Nashville

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The writing life is a lonely life. Writers sit in a room alone, stare at a blank screen, and live inside their heads while they try to create a world and characters that don’t exist and yet will feel completely real.

No wonder we’re all bats#!+ crazy…

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Almost by chance, I’ve found a way to combat the solitary aspects of this process. Before I go into detail, though, I need to deliver a little of what is known in the screenwriting trade as backstory.

About three years ago, I found myself at a bit of a crossroads. I was between books, teaching full-time and Chairing a department, saddled with whopping child support payments and health insurance premiums and was, frankly, tired and discouraged. Nothing was really ringing my bell, and while I knew I’d never completely give up writing, I was definitely in a trough.

Then an email arrived in my inbox from my former agent Nancy Yost. She had a friend who knew a guy who was trying to write a novel, was having some struggles with it, and was looking for a collaborator. She had no financial interest in the deal, she added. She was just trying to do someone a favor.

Was I interested?

For a moment, I almost said, “no.” I’d collaborated on a novel about ten years ago and while it was a good experience, it was a hell of a lot of work and the book never sold. Then, almost on a lark, I said “Sure, put us together.”

So Nancy introduced me to Wayne McDaniel, a screenwriter in New York City. Wayne explained that he’d written a spec screenplay called Resurrection Bay, which was loosely based on and inspired by Robert Hansen, Alaska’s most famous serial killer. The script had been optioned by Lawrence Bender, an A-list producer with a long list of credits, including a few movies directed by that handsome young feller Quentin Tarantino.

As Wayne related the story, the project was moving forward. He’d gotten notes and was in rewrites when, out of the blue, a package arrived in Bender’s office. It was the script to Inglourious Basterds.

“There went my movie,” Wayne said. The script to Resurrection Bay, like so many others in this business, disappeared into the black hole of development hell.

Wayne’s agent recommended he write a novelization of the screenplay and sell that, thereby putting the script back in play. Not a bad strategy, except, as Wayne explained to me, he’d never written a novel and was finding it a challenge.

We talked, made nice, and he sent me the script and what he had of the novel. The script was dynamite; the partial novel manuscript was good, but I could see where it could use some help. Plus, it needed to be finished…

To cut to the chase, we made a deal (Wayne very generously brought me into the project as a full partner), went to work, and a year-and-a-half later, took the manuscript to market. Resurrection Bay was sold to Midnight Ink and will be published in June 2014. The experience of working with Wayne on this book was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had professionally. In fact, we’ve become friends and are already considering another collaboration.

So what did I learn from this? How do you make a literary collaboration work? Three things:

No. 1: Check your ego at the door. A literary collaboration is an equal partnership. Sometimes your idea is the best; other times it’s not. Either way, you can’t let it get to you. As Queen Elsa sang in Frozen: Let it go!

No. 2: A literary collaboration is like any other partnership—including marriage—in that the ability to listen is vital. When your partner is pitching you a scene, an idea, a plot twist, an off-the-wall suggestion that on the surface doesn’t make a lick of sense, then listen. And hope your partner does the same for you.

No. 3: Keep your perspective. It’s not about you and it’s not about your collaborator. It’s about the project, so remember that every bit of thought, effort, creativity and energy must, above all else, serve the story. If you do that, then you’ll serve the reader as well.

Wayne and I are waiting to see what happens with Resurrection Bay. Like all parents, we’re sending our baby out into the world with the highest of hopes.

But here’s the odd part: unlike most parents, Wayne and I have never actually met each other, never even been in the same room together. When he gets down here in August for Killer Nashville, we’ll all get to meet him for the first time.

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Steven Womack began his first novel when he was eighteen-years-old. A short eighteen years later, he finally sold one. His first published novel, Murphy’s Fault, was the only debut mystery on the 1990 New York Times Notable Book List. Since then, he has published ten more novels, winning an Edgar Award for Dead Folks’ Blues and a Shamus Award for Murder Manual. His latest novel, written in collaboration with New York City-based screenwriter Wayne McDaniel, is Resurrection Bay, published in June 2014 by Midnight Ink Books.

A scriptwriter as well, Womack also co-wrote the screenplays for Proudheart, which was nominated for the CableAce Award, and Volcano: Fire On the Mountain, an ABC television movie that was one of the most-watched television movies of the year.

Womack lives in Nashville with his writer-wife, Shalynn Ford Womack, and teaches screenwriting at The Film School of Watkins College of Art, Design & Film. Visit his website at www.stevenwomack.com

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(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks to author Tom Wood for putting this blog together.)