This Crazy Writing Life: Four Million And Counting! Please, Somebody, Make It Stop!

By Steven Womack

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As I mentioned in a previous installment of This Crazy Writing Life, it’s impossible to determine how many books are published each year throughout the world. However, most experts seem to agree that our best guess estimates now pop four million a year.

Four million books a year!

It gobsmacks the imagination. And with the advent of generative AI, that number’s going nowhere but up. It’s indicative of how much alarm this has caused that Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)—Amazon’s indie pubbing platform—now limits you to publishing three books a day. If you’re good with AI, you can produce a “book” in under an hour. There’s evidence that there are thousands of accounts out there uploading more than 100 books a month.

It’s insane.

So when British writer and indie pubbing guru James Blatch (who is perhaps best known as Mark Dawson’s partner in what used to be called Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing Formula before rebranding itself) wrote a Substack post a couple of months ago in which he suggested that KDP should charge $300 per upload…

Well, as we say in the screenwriting biz, chaos ensued.

This sent people straight into panic mode. I get it; most self-published books don’t earn $300 over the course of their entire lives (and a lot of trad books don’t). This would put a ton of folks out of business. And it’s going against the tide of where the indie-pubbing industry is headed. Ingram used to charge to upload a book, but now they’ve dropped that.

Apparently, Blatch (who is a genuinely nice guy; I had dinner with him and Mark Dawson at the Novelists, Inc. conference a few years ago) received nothing short of an avalanche of insults and threats over this idea. In a follow-up to the original Substack post, he wrote that:

Clearly the figure of $300 was the main issue. Even if it covers all derivatives, including translations, it would adversely affect more authors than I considered. But I will stand by the theme of the post.

Blatch makes a good case for putting up some kind of seawall against this word tsunami. If there’s no limit to AI slop, then we’ll all soon be drowning in it. Let’s also not forget The Elephant in the Middle of the Room, which is that a great many human-written indie-pubbed books should have never seen the light of day either (okay, there, I said it).

Of course, I’m not talking about your book or mine, but c’mon folks… We’ve all seen indie-pubbed books that are, frankly, embarrassing.

Prior to AI, my reasoning would have been that the market would have been the seawall. Word gets around that a book sucks and nobody will buy it. But these AI-generated tomes are also encased in AI-generated covers and backed up by AI-generated marketing. And if you’ve ever noodled around with AI covers and marketing (I have), you’ll soon learn that AI can produce some pretty good B.S. Their covers aren’t bad either.

This massive digital landslide hurts serious indie-pubbed writers. Amazon doesn’t give a rat’s rusty flip about you as an author. What they do care about is profit, and how do you protect profit?

By not p^*#ing off your customers.

Blatch wrote that Amazon has achieved this by altering its algorithm so that indie titles are penalized and held back from some chart positions. The algorithm has been tilted to the conservative side, so that books that make the best-selling charts tend toward those with a larger sales history.

I get why Amazon does this.

But it still hurts.

What we’re up against is the business model of AI-generated books. Humans who take writing seriously want to produce quality work that sustains itself over a long period of time. In the early days of my writing career, I imagined that my books would be a kind of annuity that would support me in my dotage and then continue to produce for my family after I’ve gone (reality quickly shut that dream the hell down).

AI-generated books are a new business model. When you’re producing a hundred books a month, if each one sells a couple dozen copies before people realize they’re drek, then you’re on your way to making a good living.

All this sounds like there are people running clandestine AI-slop farms from obscure offshore locations with no extradition treaty, like the folks with exotic accents who call me ten times a day offering me help with Medicare or make an offer on my house. That’s not always the case, though. Consider romance novelist Coral Hart, who was profiled a couple of months back in The New York Times. Ms. Hart is open and aboveboard about it: she creates romance novels with AI (specifically Anthropic’s Claude). She produced more than 200 last year, selling over 50,000 copies, and earning a good, solid six figures. To prove it could be done, she generated one while being interviewed.

It took her not quite 45 minutes.

So that’s what we’re up against. The competition was bad enough before AI. Now it’s even worse, and it’s not going away.

Now this effluent storm has even hit the trad publishing space. Hachette cancelled publication of the horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard in the wake of The New York Times raising suspicion about the book. The cancellation of the novel, originally self-published and then picked up by Hachette after presumably good numbers and reviews, has caused a real ruckus in publishing. Apparently, there was a lot of speculation about AI content in the book from the get-go, but Ms. Ballard has vehemently denied in interviews and statements that she had anything to do with this. She maintains that the editor used AI to change some of her text without her knowledge.

But this begs the question of why a professional author wouldn’t go over the editorial revisions and catch the AI changes. Most writers that I’ve ever known, myself included, go absolutely medieval over a manuscript that’s been touched by an editor. Sharyn McCrumb once told me she was so put out over a copyeditor’s changes to her manuscript that she had two rubber stamps made. The first read Stet. The second read Stet, damnit!

The other issue that pops up here is why didn’t Hachette catch the AI problem before the Times pointed it out. Publishing industry guru Jane Friedman speculated that perhaps publishers need to start taking advantage of tools like Pangram, which are designed to detect AI. Maybe trad publishers are just behind the learning curve on AI.

But, Friedman pointed out, the real issue is that AI has now evolved to the stage where it’s going to get harder and harder to detect it. As she wrote: “I hope (finally?) that this is a wake-up call for publishing professionals. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Jane Friedman is spot on with this one. AI isn’t going anywhere; in fact, it’s going to get a little bit better each day. I read a blog post by a very famous and important writer (no need to name names here) who raged against AI, saying it was the devil incarnate and he’d never have anything to do with, never touch it.

I think that’s short-sighted. For one thing, if you don’t know anything about AI and refuse to even look at it, then you won’t notice it when it sneaks into your life. If you consider AI the enemy (and I don’t, by the way), then the first rule of war is know your enemy.

To circle back around to James Blatch, he wrote recently that he’d had a conversation with a senior Amazon executive, who told him that Amazon would never introduce an AI checker. As soon as you created one, AI would find ways to get around it. The technology moves too quickly on both sides of the equation.

I don’t have an answer to this one. I’ve noodled around with AI and found it to be an incredibly useful tool. I’ve done everything from generating marketing copy with AI just to see what it looks like, to screening stocks for options opportunities, and planning travel itineraries. AI’s like any other tool; it can be used for useful, worthwhile purposes or it can be used to cause great harm.

The one thing I would never do is use AI to generate copy that I then put my name on.

Bottom line: this is the price we pay for, as the old curse says, living in interesting times.

Next month, I’ll have some news on a project I mentioned in a previous column.

Until then, as always, thanks for playing along.

This Crazy Writing Life: When Publishing Throws You A Curve Ball—Again—And The Scammers Circle Above

By Steven Womack

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We plan; God laughs.

In last month’s episode of This Crazy Writing Life, I told you the long, epic saga of a novel that my writing partner, Wayne McDaniel, and I wrote nearly a decade ago; a book called Pearson Place. The novel is based on/inspired by a true-life fact: Pearson Place is real.

Located in Queens, it’s a four-story warehouse that takes up an entire city block. This massive warehouse in the middle of one of Queens’s most industrial areas is the repository of every piece of evidence collected in every investigation of every crime by the New York City Police Department going back decades.

The stuff in there gobsmacks the imagination. Every illegal drug ever synthesized or grown; every weapon you could ever imagine using in a crime, ranging from the most modern high-tech anti-tank weapons to medieval maces and lances… Stolen electronics, illegal pornography. High profile crimes like evidence from the Central Park Jogger case. If it’s evidence associated with a crime, it wound up in Pearson Place.

In 1992, Donald Trump’s then-girlfriend Marla Maples’s publicist stole over two hundred pairs of Marla’s very expensive heels and had sex with them. He was charged with theft, found guilty, and his conviction overturned in 1994. He was retried and found guilty again in 1999. Needless to say, Marla—by then Mrs. Donald Trump—didn’t wanted the abused shoes back and they’re still in an evidence locker at Pearson Place. Wayne’s seen them and described them as icky.

Or as Wayne referred to them in the manuscript to Pearson Place: Mrs. Trump’s Humped Pumps…

Anyway, Pearson Place is the story of a single mother who’s an NYPD cop with a special needs toddler. She’s broke, desperate, looking for any way to make an extra buck. She takes on extra shifts guarding Pearson Place. Then she discovers she’s terminally ill. Even more desperate now to leave a legacy for her kid, she decides to pull off the heist of the century by ripping off the NYPD warehouse she’s supposed to be guarding.

Chaos ensues…

Last month, I described how after years of passes, rejections, and radio silence in response to our queries, we found an editor at an established prestigious house who loved the book and wanted to buy it. Everything’s done by committee, though, and there was one holdout on the acquisition team. She tried everything, including having Wayne and me do a rewrite, before finally giving up.

This took just over a year to resolve itself.

Frustrated beyond belief, Wayne and I decided to serialize the novel on Substack. We broke the manuscript up into digestible hunks, created a Substack account, and were writing supplemental material to go with it.

Then, out of nowhere (as happens so often in publishing), I got an email from a very successful writer and close friend whom I’ve known for decades, literally since she published her first novel in 1987. She read my column, said the book sounded interesting. Were we sure we wanted to go the Substack route?

It may be the only route left, I answered.

Let me talk to my editor, she said. Maybe she’ll take a look at it.

A couple of days later, an email from my friend’s editor landed in my inbox. She would love to read Pearson Place. Send it on.

So the Substack project is, for the time being, on hold.  I’ve been in this business too long to be anything but cautiously hopeful. But this book’s going to see the light of day, one way or another, even if—as Major Kong said in Dr. Strangelove—it harelips everybody on Bear Creek.

There are two publishing life lessons to be taken away here: 1) in publishing, you never know when the next curve ball’s gonna come at you, and sometimes it’s a good curveball; and 2) more than anything else, publishing is a people business.

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Speaking of people, there’s some real bad guys out there these days. Take Sherry J. Valentine, for instance. She sent me the following email on January 27th:

Hi Steven,

Blood Plot is deliciously dangerous, the kind of thriller that blurs the line between ambition and obsession until the distinction disappears entirely.

The premise alone is irresistible: a critically praised novelist no one reads decides to give audiences exactly what they crave, only to discover that authenticity has a terrifying cost. Watching Michael Schiftmann cross from observation into participation, and then into addiction, creates a chilling psychological descent that feels both satirical and deeply unsettling. It’s smart, twisted, and disturbingly plausible.

At Book and Banter Book Club, our readers are drawn to suspense that interrogates creativity, morality, and fame, stories that ask uncomfortable questions about what success demands and how far someone might go to achieve it. Blood Plot is exactly the kind of novel that sparks intense discussion, ethical debate, and “just one more chapter” nights.

We’d love to feature Blood Plot as an upcoming spotlight read, purchasing copies for our members and centering a full month of conversation around its themes and characters. A spotlight feature includes:

• A dedicated month-long focus, exploring Michael’s transformation, the cost of ambition, and the novel’s sharp commentary on the publishing world
• Organic reader buzz, with reactions, quotes, and insights shared across our club discussions and social spaces
• Author discovery, introducing readers to your broader body of work and award-winning career

Book and Banter exists to turn bold thrillers into shared experiences, stories readers don’t just finish, but dissect, debate, and recommend.

If you’re open to collaborating, we’d love to talk about bringing Blood Plot to our readers and giving it the thoughtful spotlight it deserves.

Warm regards,
Book and Banter Book Club

Now what, you might ask, is so objectionable about such a flattering email and an offer to help promote a book that, God knows, could use every little bit of help it can get?

Well, friends, let me tell you…

It’s a scam, a complete AI-generated con designed to lure unsuspecting, desperate-for-attention writers (which includes all of us) into a scheme to separate us from as much cash as possible. Once you’ve been around a while and have found enough of these missives in your inbox (I get them several times a week), you begin to develop your very own Spidey sense. The flattering text about my novel is clearly AI-generated. No one really writes like that, even if they’re real and really do love your stuff. There’s something about it that’s too slick, like a TV preacher or something.

And the emails are always from some generic mass-market server. In Ms. Valentine’s case, the incoming came from a Gmail box.

To make this even slicker and more insidious, there actually is an organization of readers and book clubs that share and discuss their favorite reads. Only it’s not the Book and Banter Book Club; it’s the Books and Banter Book Club.

Pretty clever, huh? Almost got that one past me.

A couple of Google searches revealed all this. Plus, I searched for Sherry J. Valentine and while there are lots of Sherry J. Valentines out there, not one of them had any association with the fake Book and Banter Book Club or the real Books and Banter Book Club. There’s also no mention of her on the real book club’s website.

So what’s the takeaway here? As I mentioned in the very first episode of This Crazy Writing Life nearly two years ago, writers have been prey for centuries. In our desperate longing for validation, affirmation, and the inevitable fame and fortune we all deserve, we’re often blind to those whose motives may not be as noble as ours. From the Famous Writers School of the Sixties and Seventies to the contemporary companies who will “publish” your novel and distribute it for a mere thirty-five grand, writers are seen by many as sheep to be sheared.

How do we protect ourselves? As Matty Walker said in Larry Kasdan’s magnificent Body Heat: Knowledge is power. Read the trades, scour the websites, especially SFWA’s fabulous website Writer Beware. It highlights specific scammers and con artists, exposing them by name.

And always remember the adage that’s as true in life as well as publishing: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. A little dose of cynicism never hurt anybody.

That’s enough for now. As always, thanks for playing along. See you next month.

Oh, and Ms. Valentine? Just for S&Gs, I answered her email.

So far, crickets…

This Crazy Writing Life: On Defining a Book By Its Cover—Part Two

By Steven Womack

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Hard to believe this is already the ninth installment of This Crazy Writing Life. Thanks for hanging with me on this, and I hope you’re getting something out of my <sometimes> seemingly random observations on the world of writing and publishing.

Last month, we talked about book covers—what a book cover is supposed to accomplish, how it works, and the challenges to getting the kind of cover that will serve the book the best. This month, I’m going to briefly discuss the different types of book covers. This won’t take long, so let’s dive in.

EBook covers are the simplest and quickest covers to create. They’re only one panel (no back cover or flaps), and you’ve got a little wiggle room. No need to sweat hitting the dimensions exactly (but don’t ignore them either). For Kindle eBook covers, you should shoot for a 1.6:1 aspect ratio, which is a complicated way of saying the height of your cover should be 1.6 times the width.

Kindle also specifies that the ideal dimensions for an eBook cover are 2560 pixels in height and a width of 1600 pixels. That gives you the best quality, especially if you’re reading on a high-resolution device. The cover image has to be less than 50 megabytes, and it should be either in a .tiff or .jpeg format. When you upload the image, don’t compress it.

Now if that sounds a little complicated, let’s compare this with a print book cover. Print book covers have a minimum of three different components: a front cover, a back cover, and a spine. This is it for a mass market or trade paperback edition. So how to you create this?

First, you have to know the trim size of your print book. And with modern, print-on-demand technology, you’ve got more choices than ever before. Just noodle around on the IngramSpark or KDP websites (start with the FAQ pages) and you’ll see some of your options. Or visit your local bookstore and marvel at the array of sizes books come in today.

After you get the trim size, then you have to decide on what kind of paper you want your book printed on. As I observed in an earlier installment of This Crazy Writing Life, my personal opinion for a simple novel is to stay away from white paper, which comes in 50- and 70- pound weights. But if you’re printing a book with illustrations, especially color, then you pretty much have to go with white.

Why is this critical? Different papers have different weights and take up different amounts of space. A 300-page book printed on 50-pound Crème is going to be thicker than the same number of pages printed on 38-pound Groundwood.

Oh, and did I mention you have to actually have the book typeset before you start work on the cover? Why is that?

Because the thickness of the book will determine the dimensions of the spine. And that depends on the number of pages in the book and the type of paper you choose.

There are a couple of other considerations that don’t directly affect the size of your cover. A paperback print-on-demand book from Ingram can have either a matte cover or a high gloss cover. Some specialty printers that have come into existence to serve the indie pub community (Book Vault, for instance, which I’ll talk about in a later column) can do even higher-end options like embossed covers, gold leaf lettering, and spray-on marbling. Pretty heady, exotic stuff…

If you’re going for a hardcover, the process gets even more complicated because you now have flap copy.

If this sounds a little overwhelming, just remember: once you have all this data (trim sizes, page count, etc.), then the book manufacturers can feed this into their program and spit out a template. A good cover designer is going to be able to walk you through this without too much agony.

So there’s enough to get you started. Both IngramSpark and KDP have lots and lots of information that’s easily accessible. And like every other task in modern life, you can always search YouTube...

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I wrote last month about how essential a good, inspired, effective cover was to marketing your book. Lots of really good books get passed over because their covers aren’t eye-catching enough, or don’t accomplish what a cover is supposed to do.

Sometimes, though, it works the other way around. As I mentioned in previous columns, my inbox gets inundated several times a day with email pushes marketing books, primarily indie-pubbed books. BookBub, FreeBooksy, BargainBooksy, EReader News, Robin Reads, Hello Books… I get daily visits from them all. And I actually read the emails and scrub down through the book offerings, not because I have time to read all this stuff (who would?) but because I like to just keep an eye on what’s out there. As I’ve also mentioned, even though your crazy Aunt Agnes’s Chihuahua has more graphic design talent in his back paw then I have in my whole brain, I can still tell when a cover works and when it doesn’t.

So imagine my delight when one of these push emails landed in my inbox last week and there’s a cover that quite literally left me speechless. It was gorgeous, beautifully rendered, the colors jumping off the page. It was an homage to those great classic hardboiled paperbacks of the Fifties and Sixties. Square-jawed handsome men in the background, a teary-eyed woman in the foreground, and the front end of a Sixties-era Cadillac off to the side, against a fire-engine red color scheme with brilliant yellow type.

The cover just worked…

Needless to say, though I’m saying it anyway, I downloaded the book immediately. It was an indie-pubbed book, the author’s debut novel. I Googled him and found his website, then wrote him a nice note and told him how much I loved the cover—the blurb on the cover was equally effective—and how much I was looking forward to reading his book.

And by the way, would you be willing to share the name of your cover designer?

The author wrote me back, was happy to share his designer’s name with me. He found him on Fivrr.com and his rates start at twenty bucks for an eBook cover!

As Bill Murray said in Ghostbusters, Holy Mother Pus Bucket…

Then I sat down to read the book. Now you may have already noticed I haven’t mentioned the title of the novel or the author’s name or even the broad brushstroke plot. There’s a reason for that. I’m too nice a guy to slam another writer’s work, except under the cloak of anonymity (for the unfortunate author, not me). 

But this novel was one of the worst things I’ve ever read in my life. Literally, by the second page I’m shaking my head and asking myself Did I just read that? If KDP offered a purple-ink option, this guy should’ve taken it. Purple prose so overwritten that it dripped off the page. Clearly, this writer never met an adjective or an adverb he didn’t fall in love with. Clichés that were literally on par with heaving bosoms and throbbing…

Whatevers.

I went into the kitchen and read an excerpt to my wife, who broke out laughing. This literally could have been a winning submission for the Bulwer-Lytton contest, except it was a whole damn book.

Which just goes to show, you can have the best cover in the world, the best marketing plans, the best intentions. But if your book sucks, it ain’t gonna work. Rule #1: Write—At The Very Least—A Passably Good Book.

What the hell, I found a good cover designer, though.

See you next month.

The Indie Pubbing Journey Continues—Part Four: Navigating The Distribution Maze

By Steven Womack

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So you’ve written your book, rewritten your book (any number of times), and like the good little professional you aspire to be, you’ve paid an outside copyeditor to get the book in the best shape it can possibly be. You’ve studied the market, maybe queried a few agents (most of whom never even responded), done your due diligence, and decided that in today’s publishing environment, your best bet is to go the indie route.

You’ve done a deep dive into the freelance market that’s sprung up in the last decade to serve the needs of indie pubbers, and you’ve found a cover designer you absolutely love. You’ve either chosen an app to format your book or you’ve decided to spend the bucks to outsource the technical stuff.

Little by little, piece by piece, your dream is coming together. You can see the finish line—pub date—and you get a shaky, excited feeling deep in our gut that this is finally becoming…

Real.

Hundreds of hours of work, planning, following months or even years of writing your book. You’re excited, but at the same time, exhausted emotionally and maybe even physically. But you’re nearing the end, right? The finish line’s in sight.

Hold your horses, cowpokes. The reality is, you’re just getting started.

You think writing that book was hard? Try getting the book out there, grasshoppah…

This month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life is going to—as the head of IT at the film school where I used to teach often said—start to start the process of getting your book out there. There are two main avenues by which you’re going to get your book into the hands of readers: eBooks and print books.

We’re going to start by tackling the question of eBooks, since as we established in an earlier edition of this column, that’s how you’re going to reach the largest number of readers and bring in the largest number of bucks. And in the world of eBook distribution, there is only one question to answer which will determine your eBook distribution strategy.

Are you going to go wide or are you not going to go wide?

What does that even mean, in English?

Okay, time for another [brief] history lesson. As the eBook revolution ramped up in earnest in the first decade of the 21st Century, there was a certain wild west feel to it. There was the Kindle e-reader from Amazon, then Sony came out with the Sony Reader in 2006, and Barnes & Noble came out with the Nook in 2009. So there were three different mainstream e-readers out there, each with different specs and technical requirements.

Then a whole slew of eBook distributors came online. There was Amazon (of course), and then Apple got in the game, followed by Rokuten Kobo, which is a Canadian eBook retailer owned by a Japanese company, known primarily as Kobo. Over the years, scads of other companies emerged as eBook retailers, distributors, or publishers—Tolino, Barnes & Noble, Overdrive, Books-A-Million, Hoopla, etc. etc. etc.

It was a complicated landscape. The administrative load alone to distribute through all these channels was overwhelming.

So in 2008, a book marketing guru, publicist and novelist by the name of Mark Coker rolled out a company called Smashwords, which was the first eBook aggregator. Coker’s groundbreaking and innovative approach brought all these varied distribution outlets into one place. Now indie pubbers could sign up with Smashwords, pick the outlets they wanted to distribute to, and then upload one file to one place, rather than one file to fifteen places. Coker also wrote a number of reference guides on formatting eBooks to meet all the technical needs of the various distributors and did all the accounting and setup. They created tools and guides to help indie publishers navigate this complicated landscape. Smashwords uploaded to the outlets you picked, tracked incoming payments, even did tax reporting and bookkeeping, and distributed payments out to the individual authors and independent publishing companies, all for what was actually a reasonable and fair cut of the earnings.

Coker’s idea—and Smashwords—was wildly successful. Within a few years, they were distributing hundreds of thousands of eBooks.

In 2012, three young entrepreneurs—Kris Austin, Aaron Pogue, and Toby Nance—decided it was time for Smashwords to have a little competition. So they opened Draft2Digital (often shortened to D2D), headquartered in Oklahoma City. D2D took a similar approach as Smashwords, but streamlined some of the processes and offered up a competitive set of user-friendly tools to help indie author publish their books with enough time and energy left over to write more of them.

Ten years later, in 2022, Draft2Digital acquired Smashwords in a friendly deal that kept Coker on board as part of the team. Today, D2D is the 800-pound aggregating gorilla in the indie pub space.

So that, in a nutshell, is going wide. Get your book out there in as many different channels as possible and just wait for the tsunami of bucks headed your way.

What’s the alternative? And why would anyone want to consider it?

Enter Amazon, the exciting, attractive, funny, smart, creative person you’ve always wanted to date but found incredibly high-maintenance. In July 2014, Amazon rolled out Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service that for $9.99 a month gave you unlimited access (with a few restrictions) to Amazon’s entire library of books and audiobooks—as long as those books were enrolled in Kindle Select (in typical Amazon fashion, nothing’s ever easy or simple; if you’re an author you have to enroll your books in Kindle Select in order to get them into Kindle Unlimited). Think of it as Netflix or Spotify, only for books.

There isn’t time or space here to go into the convoluted history of the Kindle Unlimited program. If you’d like to do a deeper dive into that, here’s a link to an excellent article:

https://www.hiddengemsbooks.com/history-kindle-unlimited/

The important thing to remember is that the way KU paid authors has evolved over time. The first payment method was rife for scamming and bad behavior. Amazon tackled that and went into a second generation of KU and now they’re in the third. But basically, in laymen’s terms, when you check out a book in KU, there’s a little widget or something inside the file that enables Amazon to count the number of pages you’ve read (well, hello there Big Brother) and authors are paid a fraction of a fraction of a cent for each page.

Five or so years ago, when I decided to dip my toes into indie pubbing, I chose what I thought was the obvious best route. I created a D2D account and listed all my books on every channel possible. Then, not knowing any better, I started buying Amazon ads and BookBub ads (more on that in future installments) and promoting them on social media and my meager newsletter subscriber lists and doing everything I thought would move books.

The result? Bupkis…

Oh, occasionally I’d sell a book here and a book there, but it’s the understatement of the day to say I was disappointed.

A couple of years or this and I was really burning out. So I reached out to an acquaintance, a fellow Edgar winner who, like me, wrote books set in New Orleans. Julie Smith and I both came into print about the same time, were publishing at about the same level, and encountering the same career struggles. Where our paths diverged was when Julie fully embraced the indie publishing movement in the early days of the eBook revolution and turned her career around.

She began publishing under her own imprint—booksBnimble—and brought back her backlist and later new work. Then she branched out and started publishing other writers. A few years later, she opened up a book marketing division to help indie pubbed authors. I reached out to Julie and after careful thought, signed on with her company.

Julie’s got a marketing plan that won’t work for everyone. Standalone books are a tough sell, as are literary books, nonfiction, and memoirs. But if you’re writing genre novels—romances, mysteries—and you have a series with at least three books, then they’ve got a plan for you.

When she takes you on as a client, you’ve got to get with their program. And the first step is to pull your books down from every distribution channel and enroll them in Kindle Select. This sounds counterintuitive, but truthfully, within a couple of months, I was grossing four figures a month.

I’m running out of space here, but the moral of the story is, don’t discount Kindle Select/Unlimited just because you don’t like Amazon or think you’ll get better results with a shotgun approach. In next month’s issue of This Crazy Writing Life, we’ll take a deeper look into how you make all this work. Thanks again for playing along.

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Decades ago, when I lived in New Orleans and was a newspaper reporter during the first term of the wonderful Edwin Edwards, I learned a great local term: lagniappe. Lagniappe means “just a little something extra; a bonus.”

So here’s your lagniappe for this month’s column. I just read a fantastic book called Love In The Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed The Rules of Writing & Success by Christine M. Larson. It’s simultaneously a history and analysis of how publishing has changed since the 1980s and how romance writers were the first ones to understand these changes, adopt them, and beat the big publishers at their own game. Dr. Larsen is a professor of Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, but don’t hold that against her. The book’s a bit academic at times, but it reads like a well-written story, one we’re all still right in the middle of. It’s well worth the time to read.