Episode 175: Should Indie Authors Have Ebooks?

In this episode, we discuss whether or not indie authors should have ebooks, audiobooks, or paperbacks. The episode ends with a preview of the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: WRATH OF THE WARLOCK, as narrated by Brad Wills.

TRANSCRIPT

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF IRON as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF IRON for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

IRONFALL

The coupon code is valid through December 2nd, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up with Nadia’s adventures before CLOAK OF EMBERS comes out (hopefully soon!), why not start with an audiobook?

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello everyone. Welcome. To episode 175 of. The pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 12th, 2023, and today we're going to talk about whether or not indie authors should have ebooks. We'll also have a few updates on my current writing projects. Before we get into that, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audio book of Cloak of Iron, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Cloak of Iron for 75% off in my Payhip store with this coupon code IRONFALL, and that's IRONFALL and you'll be able to see that in the link in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through December the 2nd, 2023. So if you find yourself wanting to get caught up with Nadia’s adventures before Cloak of Embers comes out (hopefully soon), why not start with an audiobook?

Speaking of Cloak of Embers, let's have an update on my current writing projects, of which Cloak of Embers is the main one. I am making good progress on editing it and I am very much hoping I can get the book out before American Thanksgiving, which I believe is November 23rd this year (off top of my head). It might slip past that, but I am optimistic I should be able to do that unless something seriously goes wrong. I am also just about 14,000 words into my next book which I will discuss more once the Cloak of Embers is out.

We also have quite a bit of good audiobook news. Dragon Skull: Wrath of the Warlock is finished recording, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. We just have to get through quality assurance and we will end this episode with a preview from the audiobook as well. Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress is being recorded right now, as is Ghost in the Serpent, which will be narrated by Hollis McCarthy and so hopefully we will have quite a few new audiobooks for you to listen to very soon.

 

00:01:57 Reader Comments and Questions

Before we get to our main topic, let's have a couple of questions from readers. Our first question is from Wayne, who writes in to ask: Hello, sorry to bother you, just have one question. I have begun the Frostborn series with the Grey Knight. Is there a series of books that lead up to Frostborn that I should read first? I did that with a different book series. I read the second series of books before realizing there was a series of books I should have read before it. Hope I explained that right. Really enjoy your work. I've read all the Cloak and Ghost series. Great stuff. Thanks.

Thanks Wayne. I am glad you are enjoying the books. In answer to your question, Frostborn is indeed the first series you should read if you want to do it in chronological order. It would go Frostborn, then Sevenfold Sword, then Dragontiarna, and then Dragonskull. So that would be the appropriate order to read that series if you want to. I intended each series to be stand alone, but I've learned in the years since that it doesn't matter what I intended. Many people still want to read the series in chronological order.

Our next question is from Brian, who writes in to ask: Good afternoon, Mr. Moeller. I have been a fan of your writing for some time. Like, especially during the Ghosts and the Cloak series. However, the Cloak and Ghosts crossover is hard to read as there are some discrepancies. For example, Andromache was killed but yet is alive in the crossover series. The coffee house- not too hard to explain, but it is there some books I miss to explain how the crossover comes to be and how the extremely two different time eras come to merge? That question is, kind of in a nutshell, why I didn’t write any more Cloak and Ghost books after the first three.  Thanks for reading the books, Brian, and for enjoying them all. But Cloak and Ghost, the idea I had behind that was that Nadia meets a version of Caina who lives in her world, that's distinct from the main version of Caina in the series. And I thought why not do that? You know, superhero comics do that all the time. There's parallel universes and all that running around, but it turned out to just really confused people.

It's been over four years since I wrote the last Cloak and Ghost book, and I still get the questions like the one Brian had on a fairly regular basis, which is why I stopped writing the Cloak and Ghost series, just because it was too confusing for people. And speaking of the multiverse stuff, it's no secret that the Marvel movies have suffered quite a downturn in revenues and viewers ever since they turned to doing more multiverse type stuff, so I think multiverses might be something that is more popular in the writers’ heads than it actually is, which is a lesson I learned four years ago, with Cloak and Ghost and which Marvel and Disney seem to be learning the hard way now. Yeah, I'm not writing any more Cloak and Ghost books just for that reason because it just confuses things.

 

00:04:46 Main Topic: Ebooks and Paperbacks for Indie Authors?

Now on to our main topic of this week: should indie authors have ebooks or paperbacks? Indie author Brian Cohen runs something he calls the Five Day Author Ad Challenge every quarter. It's a good experience for coming to the grips with the basics of Amazon ads, and I've recommended it to a lot of people who've had good results with it. I didn't do it myself this year, but I'm still in the Facebook group and see the posts that come up every quarter. One really caught my eye. A new author was resistant to the idea that she should have an ebook at all. She only wanted to sell paperbacks and not bother with ebooks, which leads to the obvious question. Should indie authors have ebooks? Well, yes, not to be harsh, but the answer will obviously almost always be yes. For any kind of genre fiction, it will be far easier to sell ebooks than paperbacks. The Five Day Author Ad Challenge does have a lot of very new authors and very new authors not infrequently have a clear idea in their heads about how they hope it will go. Often they will talk about how they want to hold their paperback book in their hands, see it on the shelf of the local bookstore and local library, maybe have a table at the local book fair where they can sign books. Sometimes there will be a digression about the smell and feel of a paper book. However, this romantic dream then runs into the cold reality of economics.

It's very difficult to sell paperback books. Paperback books are expensive, and because of inflation and supply chains stuff with paper, they're getting even more expensive. The day of the $5 mass market paperback is long past. In the day of the mass market paperback, the author didn't get all that much money, like $0.10 to maybe $0.25 a copy, and sometimes even less than that. Granted, nowadays the margins are better for self-published authors, but the economics still aren't great for paper books. My most recent book, Ghost in the Serpent, is $13.99 in trade paperback on Amazon. If the reader buys a copy of the paperback on Amazon, I get about $3, and if they buy it through another platform, I get a little over $1.00. This is definitely better than the days of a $5 mass market paperback, but it's still very expensive for the reader. By contrast, the ebook of Ghost in the Serpent is only $4.99, and for every sale I get up around $3.50, which is the point. It is much, much easier to sell $4.99 ebook than a $13.99  trade paperback, and I get slightly more money from ebook sale than I do from a paperback one.

So genre fiction will almost always be more profitable in ebooks than in paperback for the indie author. I really mean always, but I said almost always to include flukes of fate and acts of God. Outside of genre fiction, it's a little more varied, but still a good idea to have an ebook. Certain kinds of nonfiction sell more strongly in paperback than an ebook. Children's books, especially ones aimed at toddlers and younger children, do way better in paper than an ebook. The reason for this is logical enough. Toddlers and small children often like to throw things. And are you going to give a four-year-old a $399 iPad or a children's book? They're also various specialty forms of nonfiction, cookbooks, technical manuals, and so forth that do well in paperback. Or if you have a book that has a lot of interior pictures, which is often true of cookbooks and other specialty nonfiction.

That said, most indie writers will have an easier time selling ebooks than paperbacks, which leads to the next question: should indie authors have paperbacks? Especially the writers of genre fiction I just described above, the ones who will probably sell more ebooks than in paperback? The answer to that is yes, if possible, and it’s usually quite possible. It used to be quite a bit harder to make paperback books, especially the interior. You needed to copy and paste the chapters of your book into a specially prepared Word document and formatting it was a serious pain. Now several software programs have come along that can automate the process for you. The one I use is Vellum, which automatically generates nicely formatted ebook and paperback book files for you. I believe you can do the same thing in Atticus and Scrivener, but I've never tried it. You can either make a wrap around cover for your book or you can use the automated tools included with KDP Print and Draft to Digital Print to make a cover. Most indies use either KDP Print or Draft to Digital Print to make their paperbacks. You can also use Ingram Spark and several other services, but Ingram Spark has a way sharper learning curve and tends to be more expensive. You almost certainly will not sell as many print books than ebooks, especially if you're writing genre fiction.

But paperbacks can be a nice bit of bonus income, especially since it isn't all that much additional work to set up a paperback. But that leads to the next question. You've got an ebook and the paperback of your book, should you have an audiobook? The answer to that is, it depends. You know how sometimes you ask an accountant or a lawyer a tax question, and the answer is no, except yes, but sometimes maybe? The reason for that is that U.S. tax law is so immensely complicated that the answer to any question about it can vary wildly depending upon an individual’s or company’s particular circumstances.

The same thing is true with indie authors and audiobooks. If you want to sell an audiobook, you will almost certainly need to pay for a human narrator. At the moment, I think Google Play is the only storefront that allows the sale of AI narrated audiobooks, so long as you do it with Google Play's built-in tools, which I've tested and is actually pretty good. Amazon just started testing AI generated audiobooks for sale, though they only just announced it in the first week of November 2023. That said, I suspect you realistically aren't going to be able to charge very much for it. Imagine the reviews along the lines of, I paid $13.99 or an entire Audible credit for this computer voice. One star, do not recommend. People generally don't like AI narrated audiobooks. My experiment with AI narrated audiobooks on YouTube generated a lot of comments along the lines of I like the story, but this voice sucks. That will almost certainly be true for any AI generated audiobook for fiction or nonfiction with a lot of emotion in it, like a memoir. It would probably work for something very dry book about tax law or real estate licensure.

Realistically, if you want to make any money from a fiction audiobook, you will almost certainly need a human narrator, and I mean almost certainly in the same sense I meant it above. So when I say it depends on whether or not you should pursue an audiobook, what it depends on is your financial status and business requirements. To get a good narrator, you will expect to pay in the $200 to $400 per finished hour range. You can also get a narrator via royalty share where you don't pay the narrator up front, but then you and the narrator split any royalties from the book for seven years. Generally I found the more experienced and qualified narrators prefer to be paid in the $200 to $400 per finished hour range. If you do pay upfront, depending on your business structure, there's a very good chance that this will be deductible and may help you greatly at tax time, though, as always, this website and podcast is not financial advice and for tax advice, you should consult an accountant qualified for your taxing jurisdiction. It's also important to know that self-publishing audio is bit like regular self-publishing but on hard mode: the mechanics are the same but everything is more difficult. Whether to pursue audio or not is a question that must be left up to the individual author and publisher. So to sum up, should indie authors have ebooks, paperbacks, and audiobooks? For ebooks and paperbacks, definitely yes. For audiobooks, if your circumstances allow for it and it's the kind of work you're interested in pursuing.

When I talked about this on Facebook and my blog, I had some interesting comments. So let's read a few of them here. Our first comment is from Jesse, who asks: does make me wonder how many indie authors take a crack at narrating their book themselves these days. Home studios aren't anywhere near as hard as to get set up as they once were, and even a good to mid high end and vocal workhorse microphone can be had for around $300.00 and last you for years. I guess it depends on motivation, but it seems like it'd be doable from equipment standpoint to at least (source: been doing home studio work for a long time). Jesse is right, it is in fact quite possible to put together a pretty good audiobook recording setup for not a significant amount of money. Obviously you need the microphone. You would need a computer with enough storage to handle the audio files and you would need some method of blocking out exterior sound and getting through the good the sound level you're supposed to have. I know during COVID many narrators, who usually go to a studio, and because of COVID, the studios were closed, set up home recording setups where they found they could record successfully in their closet because all the hanging clothes prevented echoes or they were able to build like a wooden framework over their desk and then hang blankets over it and that would prevent echoes enough to the point where they could record. Obviously that would get hot in summer, but that meant you could still work, and some indie authors do record their own audiobooks.

The difficulty is that recording your 10 to 12 hour long audiobook is a lot harder than most people think it is. I mean, think about this like twenty minute podcast episode you're listening to right now and think how many words I've flubbed or I've said the wrong word, or I sort of trail off randomly (exaggerated pause for comedic effect) in the middle of a sentence like that. Think of how many mistakes I've made just in this twenty minute podcast episode with my speech, and then imagine having to maintain absolutely perfect speech for like 8 to 12 hours at a consistent tone, not speeding up, not slowing down randomly, just being an acceptable level of audiobook narration is a lot harder and more physically and mentally demanding than many people think it is, so that's the big hurdle, not the equipment. I mean, you probably get the equipment to record your own audio book for around $1000 (maybe less if you get some of it secondhand), which while is a significant outlay of money, it’s not like you know, capital gains kind of investment, but the hard part is not the equipment. The hard part is being able to physically do it and record the audiobook at an appropriate speed for 12 hours or more.

The next comment was from M., who writes to say that $200 to $400 range for a narrator seems low to me. I have no experience whatsoever in the field, though. How many hours of work does that translate to? I think the SAG-AFTRA minimum rate for narrator is $325, where if you're a member of SAG-AFTRA Guild, you have to charge a minimum of $325 per finished hour, though that may have changed in the aftermath of the strike this year. Obviously celebrity narrators can command much higher prices. If you see an audiobook that was narrated by a famous actor, you can be pretty sure that his or her agent negotiated a higher rate than $200 to $400 per finished hour. Usually the rule of thumb is that for every finished hour, about two to three hours of prep work goes into it. Because you have all the editing and the corrections you need to do and you just can't sit down with a, you know, a book, open it up and start reading. You need to go through it first, make sure that you know how to pronounce everything and know what the structure of the sentences are and so forth.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful and interesting. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com and many of the older episodes now have transcripts attached. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week. Since we just spent a lot of time talking about audiobooks, it seems only appropriate that we close out the show with a sample from Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock as excellent narrated by Brad Wills, and that should hopefully be out before the end of November.