What a Year 2023 Will Be!!! by M. L. Buchman

USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestseller M. L. "Matt" Buchman returns to share his yearly take on the future of publishing, especially Indie publishing.

FIRST:  A YEAR(s) IN REVIEW

This has become a habit here at Romancing the Genres.

·        My 2019 shots in the dark for the decade can be found here: https://romancingthegenres.blogspot.com/2019/12/so-hows-your-decade-been.html

o   I will note one thing from that long-ago post. Three years is ancient history in publishing but it still holds true: My watchword for the 2020s is "Discoverability." I don’t see that changing anytime soon. More on that in a moment.

·        My 2020 shots in the dark can be found here: https://romancingthegenres.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-wild-year-peeking-into-crystal-ball.html.

·        My 2021 shots are here: https://romancingthegenres.blogspot.com/2021/12/what-year-it-will-be-by-m-l-buchman.html

 2020 RIPPLES CARRY ON:

 I’ll revisit two points from 2020.

First, Simon and Schuster’s fate still remains an unresolved issue. I only mention this because one interesting number did come out of the recent DOJ lawsuit to halt the PRH/S&S merger (takeover, takedown, whatever). One of the traditional press execs stated that (paraphrased): “50% of titles on Amazon (which means pretty much all books) sell under a dozen copies in their lifetime.”

Let’s delve a little deeper into that.

There’s no question of the source. At RWA 2016, Data Guy presented his Author Earnings Report (one of the last times before disappearing behind a $10M paywall). During that report, he made the same statement.

Even without recrunching last year’s numbers (see 2021 above if you’re into math pain), indie titles that sell over a dozen copies still outstripped trad by a factor of at least 50x (more likely 100x). So I’ll stand by my conclusion of last year: And the DOJ is worried about PRH/S&S combination limiting competition? Only in that tiny, waning market called traditional publishing.

Second, on a personal note, in 2021 I had a few revelations based on the reversion of all of my trad titles in a single block. The most interesting one was that 2/3s of my annual income in 2021 was generated by my backlist, not my frontlist. That’s ongoing sales of titles up to thirteen years old. With the reversion of my trad backlist? That is now over 3/4s (more like 85-90%). It is absolutely essential to maintain and promote your backlist once you’ve built one. If you don’t have a deep backlist yet? Think long-term and keep writing as your top priority. Just sayin’.

2022: A YEAR PREDICTED IN 2021

 BOOK PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTION

The growth of mature tools in this sector are truly amazing. Vellum and Atticus, Bookbrush and D2D. I’m not expecting this landscape to change significantly but it will definitely keep getting better.

 AUDIOBOOKS

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

Oy vey! Spotify bought Findaway Voices in 2021 and in September 2022 they launched audiobooks in force on their platform. (That’s 400M monthly users and 180M subscribers. As audiobook penetrate there, this will be huge. Good or bad? Only the long term will tell.)

AI Audiobook Narration slammed into being with Google’s offering. The whole world just changed there. A pro-quality audiobook jumped from $1,000s to acceptable-quality audio for $0.00. This change will become huge as authors struggle to absorb the possibilities. More on that below.

Oh, and adding to the AWESOME tool category for the do-it-yourself, read-by-author audiobook! Hindenburg Narrator is the new Vellum of the audiobook world. Not Hindenburg the blimp, but rather the folks who’ve brought you the technology behind 40-50 years of audiobooks read for the deaf.  This app cuts 30% out of the time to complete a finished hour, and it removes 90% of the complexity. Simply stunning!

https://hindenburg.com/products/narrator-studio/

 TRANSLATIONS

2021: 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.

Not here yet, so maybe 2023-4.

But affordable AI translation backed by a professional bilingual proofreader? Oh yeah, so doable now. Gotta get me some of that.

OKAY! ON TO 2023!

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The pandemic effect continues. All of those programmers stuck at home were able to deeply focus on advancing AI tools and WOW did the landscape shift fast.

·        AUDIO: AI will continue to mature rapidly. Microsoft and Amazon have quietly been gearing up to enter this space as well (on the production side). AI audiobook distribution will also crack wide (if it hasn’t done it by the time this post is published because the landscape changes that fast).

·        AI WRITING: I played with Sudowrite a few months ago. Does it write anything publishable? Nope. A useable snippet generator? Kinda, yeah. Does it work well enough to be a serious idea generator? Much to my surprise, a solid yes. This is still a strange and fairly spendy land of advanced AI, but I watched it get smarter about my style as I played with it (as in under 15 minutes total)!!! If I fed it a couple manuscripts to start with… Look for it to be much less clunky by the end of 2023.

·        AI ART: Midjourney and its companions (OpenAI’s DALL-E2, NightCafe, etc) were simply a given at the last conference I attended. I’m not using it yet, but the results everyone was showing around were hard to argue with. (As a side note: The lawsuits are only just starting to spin up. Whose writing samples or art were used to train the AIs? Who gets a share of the results? Does the AI itself have ownership rights (recent Chinese law says yes)? And so on. An exciting time for IP lawyers.)

 THE OLD PARADIGM

This is perhaps the biggest shift I’ve seen this year.

The business plan that a heavy ad spend was the best and perhaps only route to success took hard hits this year. Corporations (and political idiocy) have bought up ad space in unseemly quantities. It has pushed the prices of ad space to the breaking edge of profitability for something as inexpensive as a book. Even ads for the front of a long series often don’t make it to breakeven.

Folks boasting of the success of their $20-40K/month ad spends around the bar last year (so not me), this year were hovering quietly and listening to what others were saying. Nerves were high. Tik Tok embraced then ridiculed. What’s next? What’s next? What’s next?

It reminds me of rookie writers asking for the magic bullet and their sad faces when they finally truly understand that there isn’t one.

Sure, there are still a ton of folks living (surviving) in this ad-driven space, but anyone near the edge has already had the ground eroded out from under them.

A NEW PARADIGM?

I’ve been saying this one for at least five years. I’ve written a few articles on it, the last in April 2020 (ancient history in publishing). This year, I finally decided to listen to myself.

Direct Community!

No, I’m not talking about Social Media (especially not in the form of Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, Mastodon, Slash, Discord, Clubhouse…).

I’m talking about bridging the final gap with the reader.

Vastly simplifying recent history:

·        The publisher had all of the power: publication, marketing (or not), and most of the profits. Who had the customer information? Mostly the bookstores, but the publisher had some too.

·        Then came the distributors (Amazon, D2D, Google Play, Kobo…). Authors jumped from 10% to 70% of profits! All sorts of new ad tools meant that for the first time we could affordably buy our own ad space and, kinda, measure the results too. But who had the customer information? No longer the publisher or bookstore, now it was the distributor.

So, how do we build relationships with those customers?

Direct sales: Author webstores. WooCommerce and Shopify are the two hot tools here at present.

THE LITTLE MISTAKE

With indie publishing, the author takes on the role of publishing.

With a webstore, the author takes on the role of bookstore and distributor (with a big leg up from folks like Draft2Digital and Bookfunnel). We suddenly pocket 95% of every sale. The mistake is thinking that this extra 25% is in any way important.

If you assign a value to your time (plus the cost of plugins, tools, perhaps someone to set it up and/or run it for you, etc), 95% is probably little more than a break-even proposition.

Simple math? One hour working on the store = one hour of IP you never wrote that you’ll never get to sell. Remember that note above about 75%+ of my income is generated by my backlist? Every hour I don’t write is a huge, long-term impact lost opportunity cost. (My life + 70 years kind of impact.)

 THE BIG MISTAKE

However, thinking that’s the whole equation of a webstore is the BIG mistake. The real equation looks like this:

“If I can get someone to read three of my books, they’ll become a fan. If I can get them to read ten, they’ll be a superfan.”

Now look at that backlist. A true superfan will backtrack and read most or all your entire backlist. In fact, stop calling it backlist. Because our books are no longer at traditional publishers (where books died in 30 days, pulled from store shelves, and replaced by the next launch), all of those titles are now simply: Your Catalog.

This is a crucial mind-set change going into the next years of publishing.

Your Catalog is timeless! All of it should be kept active in the long-term.

But how do we get folks to read those 3-10 books? By interacting with them.

A well-designed store (full of high-quality product), backed up by a strong automated e-mail sequence, and thoughtful bonus offers, will engage and captivate a fan much more rapidly than a $1.50 CPC click on an Amazon ad.

THIS was the hot topic of almost every conversation I had with anyone at a conference this year. Read that paragraph again, I packed a lot in there.

 TO STORE OR NOT TO STORE

This is not an in-depth investigation of whether or not to build out a webstore. Those arguments become infinite.

“But if I make a sale at my store, I’m undercutting my distributor sales and will do worse in the algorithms.”

That’s the main one. My answer is simple.

Let’s say you have 20 novels with an average cover price of $4.99. Through a distributor you make about $3.50/sale. If you make another sale, great. If you make a third, it won’t be by your doing any marketing, it will be on: the quality of your writing, the distractibility of the reader, that they didn’t forget about you between releases and have moved on, etc. You’ll be lucky to make $7 from that reader and thrilled if you make $10.50 as they means they’re getting engaged with your writing on their way to fandom.

Now, if you have a way to directly interact with that reader, engage them to not forget that you exist, entice them with some cute and friendly bonus material / offer, then you stand a chance to nurture them to superfandom. Now 20 novels at $3.50 = $70 from that reader. Except you’re making $4.75/sale = $95 from that reader.

Oh, and for your next release, you’ve already got their e-mail. Your automation sequence can see if they bought it yet. If not, it can remind them you exist.

TIME IS YOUR FRENEMY

This is not a fast build, neither on the technology side nor on the reader engagement side. If you’re product heavy (like my 70 novels, 130 short stories, 50 audiobooks…), the pain is amplified exponentially (though it feels even worse than that). On the reader side, think in the time frame of a couple of years. But the upside benefit can be huge, so all the more reason to start now.

COMMUNITY

And I’ll circle back to what I said at the top of this section: Direct Community.

Once we’ve built functionality and how to survive, we can move on to building community (thank you Abraham Maslow). Because that has always been the Number One way to sell books: Word of Mouth.

If we can create belongingness, those folks will go out and talk about that emotional connection with others. There’s the long-term hook.

That connection directly feeds what I called the watchword of the 2020s way up at the top:

 Discoverability.

 AND MOST IMPORTANTLY (my same final paragraph as last year)

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 2023, 2024…

Note: my webstore is still in its early days, but if you want to see what I’ve done so far, hop over to https://mlbuchman.com.

USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestseller M. L. "Matt" Buchman has over 70 novels, 125 short stories, and 50 read-by-author audiobooks. PW declares about his Miranda Chase action-adventure thrillers: “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more.” About his military romantic suspense: “Like Robert Ludlum and Nora Roberts had a book baby.” 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.