The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (35 page)

2
From Chrisopher Paolini’s website (www.alagaesia.com/christopherpaolini.htm).

3
Adam Singer discusses the importance of a regular posting cadence, and offers other good tips, here: Adam Singer, “Still Making These 4 Mistakes? You’re Not A Media Company Yet,” The Future Buzz (blog), June 14, 2011 (thefuturebuzz.com/2011/06/14/media-company-mistakes/).

4
Hillary Rettig, “Perfectionism in the ‘Tiger Mom’ and ‘The King’s Speech,’” February 26, 2011 (hillaryrettig.com/2011/02/26/perfectionism-in-the-tiger-mom-and-the-kings-speech/).

5
Cory Doctorow, “Free Ebooks Correlated with Increased Print-Book Sales,” BoingBoing, March 4, 2010 (boingboing.net/2010/03/04/free-ebooks-correlat.html).

6
Tim O’Reilly, “Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution,” Openp2p, December 11, 2002 (openp2p.com/lpt/a/3015).

7
Margaret Atwood (!) at www.cafepress.com/DeadAuthorTshirtsandOtherStuff.
More authors should do stuff like this.

W
ell, we’re almost at the end of the book! When I do workshops, I typically say goodbye to everyone during the last break, since once the workshop ends people tend to fly out the door. So I will say goodbye and thank you now, and then again a bit later, in the epilogue.

I thought a good way for me to wind down would be for me to share with you the process and major decisions by which I self-published
The Seven Secrets of the Prolific—
not necessarily because I think my process was exemplary, but because I think it will be helpful for you to see how one writer (me!) made the transition from “being published” to “publisher.” So here it is. (Of course, many of the technologies and business models I discuss will be obsolete practically the day I write about them, so do your own research.)

Building a Team.
The best decision I made was the very first: to not go it alone. I had done some research on self-publishing and was pretty sure I could handle the details if I had to—plenty of writers do—but why would I want to? Recalling Time-Management Principles #2 and #4 (Sections 4.4 and 4.5), I wanted to stick as much as possible to my high-value activities, and bring others on who could contribute their high-value expertise, contacts, and other resources to the project.

So about six months ahead of my intended publication date, I asked my friend Chris Sturr of LeftUp Publishing (www.leftup.org) to help me manage the overall project and produce the paperback book. Chris knew
exactly
what to do, including details like getting the copyright and ISBN, and he also did editing and layout. He also had an existing relationship with premier print-on-demand (POD) service Lightning Source, Inc., so the printing logistics were quite easy.

I also signed on Lee Busch (www.lbdesign.com), a friend who not only does brilliant Web and print design work, but is a brilliant marketing strategist who knows vast amounts about search engine optimization, social media, multimedia, and e-commerce.

In Section 4.8, I discussed the wonderful benefits of working within an empowered community—benefits you sacrifice when you go it alone or overgive. By working with Chris and Lee I got a much better result than I could have achieved alone, and with hugely lowered stress. Both were great at what they did, incredibly easy to work with, and cared a lot about me and my project.

It’s worth mentioning that I didn’t just hire Chris and Lee, I
listened
to them. From my own coaching of others I know that an inability or unwillingness to listen to advice hampers many people’s success. In all areas of my life, I always seek out the best possible advice and then do my best to follow it.

An alternative to hiring Chris and Lee would have been to go with one of the full-service POD companies that offer editing, design, marketing, fulfillment (customers can order right from their websites) and other services. (Lightning Source offers none of these, but provides great printing at a rock-bottom cost.) Many writers use these companies and are happy, but I honestly doubt that I would have gotten as good a result as I did with my dynamic duo of caring experts—and I was happy to keep my money “in the family.”

A final “team member” worth mentioning is Smashwords.com, which Chris and I chose to create the ebooks. Feed Smashwords a text file, and its software will automatically format it for the most popular e-readers, mobile phones, and other platforms. Smashwords also acts as a retailer/distributor, selling the work (for a 15% commission) from its site, and through affiliates like the Apple store (for up to a 40% commission.)

Planning, Profitability, and Pricing.
I knew from the beginning that I wanted this book to be a profitable venture, earning more money being a huge motive to self-publish in the first place. So I did what responsible business people do and created a
profit-and-loss statement
(P&L, also called an income statement) that projected my income and expenses month by month over the first couple of years of the project. The hard part of a P&L isn’t the math, by the way—that’s simple addition, subtraction, and percentages—but anticipating expenses, justifying your sales figures (if you say you’re going to sell thirty books a month, you have say where and how you will do it), and then having the stomach to cut costs and raise prices, probably more than you want to, to ensure profitability.

I calculated my upfront capital needs to be $12,892.82 (P&L precision!), with about $3,600 of that going to printing 1,500 paperback copies (1,300 for me to sell, and 200 to give away to bloggers and others for promotion). The rest would pay for ebook production (some additional formatting and other work required), art, improvements to my website, and other online and offline promotion (see “Marketing” section, below.)

Obviously, I could have started with a smaller print run (although the per-book printing price would have been higher) or invested less in marketing—and if my “crowdfunding” (see below) turns out to be weak, I may have to do just that. But 1,500 seemed like a reasonable number for me to sell within a couple of years, and I also have enough faith in the book that I really wanted to print a lot of copies to use for marketing.

Pricing is a very important consideration, since it has a strong influence on sales. I initially thought a $19.95 price (plus shipping, handling, and applicable taxes) for the paperback would be reasonable, but couldn’t make the numbers work. So I wanted to price it at $24.95. However, a bookseller persuaded me to price it at $29.95 so that he and other retailers (including me, at my readings and speeches) could offer discounts. (Customers
love
discounts.) A price of $29.95 also ensures that I get a healthy profit even after discounts and even after PayPal takes its 2.9% cut from sales made via www.hillaryrettig.com.

At $29.95, I will have to sell 431 books just to cover my startup costs. With discounts, of course, the number will be much higher.

The ebooks were a simpler calculation, since (a) they cost almost nothing to produce and are therefore profitable at any price, and (b) savvy authors treat them not as profit centers but loss leaders—meaning, something they sell cheap to catalyze other business. So my plan is to follow the examples of Amanda Hocking, J.A. Konrath, and other self-publishing heroes and price low: the full ebook at $3.95 and each chapter at $.99.

Capitalization/Crowdfunding
.
I could have scraped together the $12,892.82 startup costs myself, but that’s not just bad business—businesspeople like to hold on to their cash—but outmoded and unhealthily isolationist 20th-century thinking. Twenty-first-century thinking, in contrast, is to “crowdfund” via an online appeal that not only engages your audience and gets them to invest, but attracts new audience members and gets them to invest as well.

So I put up a pitch up on the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo.com asking people to prepay for their books and offering a big discount if they did. My target was $7,500: lower than what I needed, but I knew that it would be far better to succeed publicly at reaching a low target than to fail publicly at reaching a high one. Honestly, I wasn’t at all sure I could even reach that number—$7,500 is a lot of money to ask for, especially if you’re asking for it mainly in $25 increments—and I only had around 1,600 people on my mailing list. Part of me was terrified I’d only raise a thousand or two, which would be a mortifying public failure.

The fundraising turned out to be a lot more work and stress than I had anticipated. A good crowdfunding pitch turns out to have a lot of components, and some require a lot of thought. For instance, you have to decide on which levels of “contributions” you’ll accept, and which perks you’ll give for each level.

You also need to post book excerpts, testimonials, and updates.

And you also need to stay in touch with your community more or less constantly throughout the fundraising process, giving progress reports, answering questions, and exhorting people to pay.

AND it all has to be done very professionally, or not only will people not pay, but you’ll damage your reputation.

A lot of the fundraising examples I studied were either extremely witty,
très
artsy, or both, and many included professional-looking videos. After studying these for a while, I started to feel totally inadequate. But I soldiered on, doing my best to come up with what I thought was compelling fundraising text.

Lee read my first attempt and wasn’t impressed. “You need some
drama
, honey. Pathos. A mission,” he wrote after reviewing it. And then he helped me revise. Honestly, I don’t think I could have written it without him.

The two main crowdfunding sites, by the way, are Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. Kickstarter wasn’t an option for me because they don’t accept self-help projects. IndieGoGo did, and seemed business-friendlier in general. IndieGoGo also pays out the funds as you collect them, as opposed to Kickstarter, where you only get paid if and when you meet your fundraising target. So IndieGoGo was a great choice from the standpoint of cash flow.

As I write this, my IndieGoGo site has been live for about four days and I’ve raised just under $2,500, or one-third of my goal. So I am saved from the “mortifying public failure” of only raising “a thousand or two,” but still have a ways to go. I’ve been hustling like mad—sending out announcements and personal emails to dozens of people, including some I haven’t communicated with in a while. I’m sure I will have sent out hundreds of emails before this is all over. I am determined to meet my target.

You’ll have to check the blog at www.hillaryrettig.com to see how I did. But even now I can tell you that crowdfunding was a very worthwhile project because it got me to think about my project in a very customer-focused way. And getting back in touch with some people I hadn’t communicated with in a while was also a nice plus—and many of them did buy the book.

Art.
Being a “word” person, I tend to devalue art and design. But experts agree that a good cover is crucial to book sales, so I knew I’d have to have some good art.

I also knew I wanted the cover and other illustrations to be fun cartoons that would defuse the seriousness (and, for some people, scariness) of the topics I cover, and so I was thrilled when Chris introduced me to the wonderful cartoonist Barry Deutsch (www.amptoons.com). I paid him around $1,300 for the cover plus interior illustrations.

When I got the first draft of Barry’s cover cartoon, it was a thrilling moment! And then when Lee embedded it into a full-fledged cover design, I was thrilled all over again! Seeing that cover was hugely motivating, so in the future I’ll do my covers earlier in the process. I can’t convey how absolutely proud I am of the cover of this book, and how happy it makes me feel every time I look at it.

By the way, Barry’s got his own passionate fan base, so I’m hoping that some of his fans will buy this book. For every one who does who wouldn’t have otherwise heard about me, it’s the equivalent of lowering his fee.

Marketing and Sales.
I described the basic marketing strategy I use in the last section. Here are some other things I’ll be trying for this book:

Testimonials (a.k.a. “blurbs”).
These are hugely important to sales, but most of the writers and other luminaries I solicited for my first book,
The Lifelong Activist,
either didn’t respond or turned me down. So I am a bit discouraged about this tactic. However, I’ll be setting aside two hundred copies of
The Seven Secrets of the Prolific
to mail to influential bloggers and others in hopes that they blurb me and/or review or recommend the book. (Total cost of copies and mailing will be around $1,600.) And I’ll do my best to reciprocate for those who support me.

I probably won’t be sending review copies out to book reviewers at newspapers and magazines because many are biased against self-help and self-published books.

Workshops and speeches
. I’m putting a calendar and budget together in which I aim to visit a different state each month and a different part of the country each quarter. This doesn’t sound like much of a commitment—and the truth is, I’d like to do much more—but, as mentioned in the last chapter, travel costs money, and trip logistics take up a huge amount of time. Hopefully one day I’ll be famous enough that people will seek me out and beg me to do workshops—speaking of which, if you’d like me to give a workshop at your organization, please email me at [email protected]!

Public Relations.
My topic—overcoming procrastination and writer’s block—is a perennial, so this might work for me. Hiring a PR agency would be expensive—a good one costs thousands each month—and also a bit of a crapshoot. But I’ve worked in journalism and know how PR works, so I’m going to try to cultivate a few good journalist connections myself and see if I can get them to write me up.