What a Year It Will Be! by M. L. Buchman

 FIRST: A YEAR IN REVIEW

In preparing this post, I went back and looked at my last year’s predictions: https://romancingthegenres.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-wild-year-peeking-into-crystal-ball.html. I’m actually impressed at how they played out. Yes, there were some gross generalities, but the scope wasn’t far off.

Here’s a quick recap in case you don’t have the patience, or the heart, to plow back into the madness that was 2021.

·       The post-election was even more painfully dramatic than I expected. The January 6th Capitol Riots made Charlottesville look like a training ground and are still reverberating across the political and news landscape.

·       The Covid summer release did indeed happen and for most folks I talked to, the normal summer fall-off in book sales did not happen. People indeed continue to consume story the ginormous rates they’d grown accustomed to during lockdown. Great news for us storytellers.

·       Delta, Omicron, vaccines, growing trade wars, and returning cold wars continued chewing up news cycles, but nothing at the scale of the post-election disasters. Even the Big Quit hasn’t noticeably slammed book sales.

·       I’d said that those authors who were nimble with their business plans would survive/thrive, and those who weren’t wouldn’t. I’m sorry to say that I saw a lot of evidence that says my latter prediction was depressingly accurate. I saw so many authors quietly fold up and go away that it hurt my heart to watch. They are supplanted by the vast number of new lockdown authors who took hardship and turned it into opportunity. I’d bet that there was a record amount of churn both down and up in the author community that is perhaps unparalleled since the distribution collapse of the ’90s paired with the end of the Cold War (1st Cold War).

·       Audiobooks didn’t just take off, they exploded. (More on that below.)

·       Translations aren’t taking off, they’re also exploding. (More below.)

 

2021: A TOUCH OF PERSPECTIVE

or…Big 5 to Big 4, but not

There were a couple of odd events that defined the 2021 traditional publishing industry. And I think the appropriate term for them is Chaos.

The Big 5 traditional publishers attempted to become the Big 4. Simon and Schuster (#3) was the object in play starting in 2020 when ViacomCBS put them up for sale. This turmoil was strangely ridiculous in so many interesting ways:

·       Simon and Schuster represents tens of thousands of titles of IP that have such traditional and draconian contracts with the authors that they represent an unprecedented resource for creating streaming and film at little to no expense to the owner.

·       ViacomCBS ignored this when they put S&S up for sale in 2020.

·       Apple, Netflix, Disney… None of the giants who could have grabbed up that massive source of locked up IP, using only petty cash, did so.

·       Instead, Penguin Random House finally stepped up to the plate. They want the books, but no one is looking at all of that streaming/film IP that just went to a firm that doesn’t do that directly. Now those other laggards are going to have to pay if they want the any of that lush bounty of film IP.

·       First move? S&S contracted with every right-wing extremist ex-government official (or not) for a biography, tell-all, spout-their-agenda book they could land. Second move? Cancel almost every one of those when the entire editorial staff threatened to depart in protest. Can you say collapsing reputation?

·       Finally, everything settles down and is moving forward, until a full year later, in November 2021, the US DoJ says “Hold up that merger, boys and girls. That there thing on the horizon looks like a monopoly.” And they blocked the sale.

I have to say, that I have no idea how traditional publishing is still a going concern like that. On top of which, if the DoJ looked at the real numbers, the Big 5(4) control a massive chunk of the traditional market. But, unnoted, the indie market has grown so much that S&S is fast becoming no more than a rounding error.

S&S published approximately 2,000 titles last year.

PRH published 15,000 in 2021.

Indie publishers released approximately 1,000 titles—every single day last year.

And I think that number is low because Bowker in the US alone, back in 2018, sold 1.7M ISBNs which equals about 4,600 titles per day. And most indie books still don’t have an ISBN unless they add print or audio.

And the DoJ is worried about PRH/S&S combination limiting competition?

Only in that tiny, waning market called traditional publishing.

 

2021: A PERSONAL NOTE

An amazing thing happened to me, that opened a whole new train of thought. This was cemented for me in answering a question on an author’s panel last month.

My traditional publisher screwed up. I published 13 titles with them between 2012 and 2016. Sales have been falling off and I was beginning the work to have my rights reverted per contract. This is typically a painful, multi-year battle, but a friend of mine said that it pays to be the squeaky wheel.

So, for 2 years I’d been squeaking. Being an annoyance. Hopefully pushing until it would be easier to revert the rights rather than to put up with my constantly asking for this title back or that one.

Their mistake was giving me two very different sets of numbers: my royalty statement saying that 5 titles were eligible for reversion, and a separate report rebutting that stating that those numbers weren’t right. Which meant they were lying on one or the other, both of which they’d delivered via e-mail. (Read up on mail-and-wire fraud if you want to see why that’s such a heinously bad thing on their part.)

When I pointed this out, my anticipated multi-year battle turned into all 13 titles reverted on 5 days notice to make me go away. It worked. (They didn’t even require a non-disclosure agreement, which was pretty damn dumb as it let me write the above paragraph without fear of repercussion.)

Those 13 titles were the front end of a 42-book universe that I’d been unable to market well because I didn’t own the front books. Now, I suddenly did.

REVELATION #1

Re-organizing, re-proofing (which they needed desperately), and re-issuing 13 books (and recovering all 42) is a massive task. Redoing the marketing blurbs for every one, redoing whole sections of the website… It was ultimately 4 months of work for my tiny company (2 of us).

REVELATION #2

On a writers’ panel, we were asked how do we calculate the ROI on a book:

·       1-2 book fiction authors looked at costs, hand-selling expenses, or simply didn’t care because it was a hobby.

·       Non-fiction authors (even 1-2 book ones) knew to the penny how the book was complimenting their business as a speaker or consultant.

·       Multi-book fiction authors were tracking a rough budget per book and watching individual title sales like a hawk.

·       For a long-term productive author (a category I finally belong to), I realized that no longer applied to me. I look at ROI on an annual basis. I wrote this much, that fed the front end of the machine. But if I break down how much of my annual income is from backlist titles…

One-third of my annual income is derived from current year releases. Two-thirds are from backlist sales.

When this really sunk in, I began to work on refreshing my backlist:

·       New stories to introduce new readers to old series

·       Updating covers to old series

·       …and the 4 months that I spent reorganizing and refreshing the 42-book Emily Beale Universe? Time incredibly well spent…that I don’t expect to really see start paying until 2022. Why? Because on November 30th, I just re-released Night Stalkers #1 The Night Is Mine, a Booklist “Top 10 Romance of the Year.” I’ll be releasing the subsequent titles every 2 weeks for the next 26 weeks as well as refreshing all the other covers.

REVELATION #3

Opportunity in the next year is going to vary drastically on what level of author you are. You must choose what is going to work best for you and your readership.

 

2022: A YEAR TO COME

BOOK PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTION

This is so easy with the current tools that its hardly worth mentioning. Vellum and the upcoming Atticus make this utterly painless. Bookbrush’s and D2D’s cover design tools are fast making this step far less painful as well.

Distribution is continuing to improve, and author direct-from-website store tools are starting to come on-line more and more easily. Shopify and WooCommerce are going to have some great competition in 2022 and beyond.

AUDIOBOOKS

Yep! Audio exploded in 2021 and is set to do far more in 2022.

Spotify, the biggest music and podcast streamer, just bought Findaway, the biggest audiobook distributor in the world. Not Findaway Voices that we indies know about, but the goliath Findaway that lurks in the shadows behind FV. We don’t know what new distribution models are coming, but we know that it will be big and will push audiobook availability and consumption ahead even faster.

For the home narrator: Released in 2021, Hindenburg Narrator ABC is the first real Vellum of Audiobooks. Meaning that it automates almost all the hard work other than narrating the book itself. For the home narrator this is a HUGE boon. Look to see a major shift from flailing about with Garageband and Adobe Audition to Hindenburg. No obvious competitors in the wings yet.

AI AUDIO

I’ve been a part of AI Audio beta tests on and off since 2018. This year, it leapt ahead. Through mid-2021, AI Audio could synthesize a narrator’s voice and do a credible, if passive, job of turning written text into an audiobook.

The quality is already astonishing. And if the listener is selecting a 1.5x or 2x listening speed, it may become indistinguishable from live-narrated audio in many markets.

Now however, a passage may be highlighted and given an emotion: intense, sad, happy, wry, etc. Look for these tools to improve very rapidly over the next months.

So here’s the key question about AI Audio. Rather than costing $100s per finished hour to create audio, it may now cost $10s per finished title! This is going to turn the economics of Audiobook creation on its head. Were you banking on a 2-year payoff for audio? What if it pays off by the second or third sale? At 1/2 the price?

Yep, 2022 Audiobook production is going to be fascinating.

TRANSLATIONS

At the last pre-Covid writers’ conference I attended in late 2019, translations were a curiosity topic. How much did a translator cost? And an editor? Manage it yourself or hire a company?

Two years later at the same conference, it was perhaps the hottest topic of the entire seven days.

Most of it was still slanted toward traditional translation, but not all of it.

AI translation takes minutes and costs pennies per book, well, maybe a couple dollars, but cheap. Hiring a clean-up editor and proofer is now entirely possible, fairly cheap to fix idiom and other foolishness.

Okay, now it’s coming down from $7-10,000 for a finished title to $1-2,000 for a finished title.

But that’s not the end of it.

Right now, it looks as if we are 2-3 years from:

·       I upload a title in English

·       I enable foreign translations

·       The user opens the book

·       They select Dutch, Italian, Malay…

·       The app translates it on the fly.

I say 2-3 years now. Does that mean that we’ll see it in late 2022 or 2023? Probably. Now even the economics of a translation at $1-2,000 per title comes into question. Wild!

THOUSAND QUESTIONS

First, each author must realize their own level. That will completely alter the questions they must ask themselves, and the answers that are appropriate, in order to succeed.

One book does not a career make.

10-20 quality books in a single genre are well on the way to that.

A massive backlist creates not a headache, but opportunity to market and captivate new readers.

Do I market for a book sale or a superfan?

Non-fiction: Do I turn my books into classes? Consulting work?

This is the upper level question I’ve been asking lately that has altered many of my business decisions.

By knowing my read-through, I can think about this.

·       If I sell a single copy of Night Stalkers #1, The Night Is Mine, there’s a 70% chance that I will sell the next 6 titles in the series.

·       There’s a 45-50% chance that I will sell 15+ books in the extended series.

·       There’s a 5% chance I will sell all 42 titles in the Emily Beale Universe.

·       And there’s a couple percent chance that I will create a superfan who will buy all 70 novels and 100 short stories.

The thousand questions are all about thinking for the future. If you think book-to-book, that’s what you’ll get. Of course, in the beginning that’s all you can do as it’s all you have. And it is what you should be focusing on.

But long-term success belongs to the person who keeps asking those questions every day. If I ask myself three questions a day for a year (about 1,095 questions + 3 for leap years), a couple of those have to pay off, right?

Which series should I focus on writing?

Which series should I focus on marketing (today, this week, this month)?

Is it time to refresh a title (a series)? Add a sequel?

Am I ready for audio, AI audio, translation, AI translation?

How else can I creatively market my IP? A giveaway story? A game? A short film / trailer? (There are as amazing film tools out there as there are writing ones. Maybe create a marketing “Deck” and try sending that around.)

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY

How much time am I spending writing?

It better be over 25 hrs/wk if you’re a full-time author. Over 10 hrs/wk if you’re still in the aspiring mode.

Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! is more effective than the next book for ensuring that your backlist grows, your future expands, and you’ll be in the best position to take advantage of 2022, 2023, 2024…

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USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestseller M. L. "Matt" Buchman has 70+ action-adventure thriller and military romance novels, 100 short stories, and lotsa audiobooks. PW says: “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more.” Booklist declared: “3X Top 10 of the Year.” A project manager with a geophysics degree, he’s designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, solo-sailed a 50’ sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and he quilts. More at: www.mlbuchman.com.