In the checklist I put together in the initial post to this series, I had a bullet about incorporating the feedback from readers of your work before you’ve published. For everything I’m working on publishing, I’ve asked friends and family to read.

To co-opt a saying picked up from someone else, the reader isn’t always right, but they are always the reader. You could also use, where there is smoke there is fire. The point here is that your beta-readers might make observations or commentary that simply isn’t helpful to improving the narrative, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a problem. It’s true that sometimes, your readers simply didn’t engage with the characters or story and are responding to things in a hyper-critical fashion that should give you pause, but don’t necessarily translate into workable revisions. The flip-side of that coin is critical observations DO need to be addressed. We, as writers, have to identify the difference between readers who just don’t like the writing and those who are pointing out fundamental flaws. The takeaway is that we need to make sure issues are dealt with before we publish.

From my perspective, I take every criticism seriously. As I just said, where there is smoke, there is fire. If a reader tells me that a character isn’t working or a bit of plot doesn’t make sense, I revise the work. Often, this results in a better story. Sometimes, the suggestions weaken the story or chip away at the conflict and effectively water-down the plot. This is why you need to have more than one person read your work. If 9 people tell you this bit was good and 1 person gives you a 10-page diatribe as to why it wasn’t. You take the 10-page diatribe seriously while keeping in mind that 90% of your readers didn’t see it that way. Plus, as the writer, you get to choose – did that really seem to work? Did the revision addressing it result in a better book? Is that criticism productive, or did the reader simply not like it for some reason? This is hugely important, and you have to seriously think about it, but you can’t actually decide if the feedback is helpful unless you make an attempt to incorporate the recommendations.

For every book I’ve sent out for readers to review, I’ve had at least 1 reader that didn’t like it. You can usually tell. Often, if they didn’t like the work, they won’t finish it. Sometimes they ‘finish it’ in the sense that they powered through, but stopped actually reading at some point. This happened to me with my upcoming book, The Dark Queen of Darkness. I had one reader who just didn’t care for it. I asked what he thought of the ending, and he couldn’t say because he stopped engaging somewhere in the middle. Other readers went on to explain what character they liked the best. What this told me was less about revisions and more about the audience. This is another essential aspect of having beta-readers, which I’ll delve into in a later post.

Frequently though, you will get consistent feedback involving flat characters, weak plots, or other things. A writer who is unprepared for that criticism will often shrug it off or blister at it. You can’t do this, even if you disagree right out of the gate. Every bit of feedback is helpful and should be seriously addressed. Sometimes, you don’t do anything with it, but most of the time, you should be making revisions.

If you haven’t sent your book out for review, it’s not ready for publication. This is one of the most emphatic things I can say about self-publishing. I suspect a lot of indie writers will disagree, but from where I sit, it’s one of the most valuable steps in the process. If I could get more feedback, I would.

What do you think? Do you have a different experience?

In the initial post to this series, I suggested you need to have developed and memorized both a 5 and 30-second pitch for your book. Actually, you need this for all of your books. I am embarrassed to say that I am horrible at this. In the month or so since releasing Wine Bottles and Broomsticks, I’ve realized just how important this is. If you ignore every bit of advice anyone ever gives you on publishing, this bit had better not be ignored. Imagine the following situation.

Them: You wrote a book? Cool, what’s it about?

Me: Um… Like witches and stuff.

Them: …

Me: …

No sale. You really need to do the following:

Them: You wrote a book? Cool, what’s it about?

Me (5-second pitch): The book is about a regular guy who unexpectedly becomes a witch hunter, and everything goes totally wrong.

Them: how does everything go wrong?

Me: Rick Basket is an FBI investigator who gets transferred to a witch-hunting unit. He meets a red-headed wine bar owner, who helps him find witches, ruins his marriage, and gets him into a chase with a witch that nearly gets him killed. Every step of the way he finds even more witches and all of them seem hell-bent on seeing him dead.

These aren’t the best possible pitches. I know the content of the book, and it’s almost painful to distill the content of the story into just a few breaths. However, it’s essential. I can’t tell you how many times in the past month I’ve been asked: What’s it about? and I’ve stumbled all over the narrative trying to give folks a quick two-breath description that communicates the plot. Every writer is going to struggle with this. Sometimes, the story lends itself to a short description, and it’s a relatively straightforward task to communicate this. A fantastic case example might be The Martian by Andy Weir. Think about his potential pitch:

(The Martian 5-second pitch) It’s about a man stuck on Mars, trying to survive long enough for a rescue mission to get him home.

I could give a 30-second pitch on this, but it’s not my book, so it seems weird. The point is, some stories are going to be easier than others. I mean, could you imagine trying to get a 5-second pitch for something like the Game of Thrones? Yeah, me either.

I want to point out that these are incredibly hard to do well. It takes a lot of work to get them right and rattle them off without having to think too hard or stumble. All that said, if you go to publish, whether it be indie, or traditional. You MUST have all of this nailed down. This is a sales pitch. It’s not just a sales pitch for your book, remember, as an author, you’re selling YOU and your ability to tell stories more than an individual book.

What’s been your experience with the pitch? As an author, do you have any sage wisdom? Leave a comment.

In the kick-off post to this series, I listed having 4 books ready to go in 12 months as something you should do. This is based partly on advice received from other authors, but also on my own experience in trying to set up marketing and making my advertising dollars go further. The authors I spoke with had much more specific information on this topic, but I didn’t follow-up enough to get more than the essentials of it. After the launch of Wine Bottles and Broomsticks, I understand this principle in a much more fundamental way. The extended bit of advice I’m adding is that of your 4 books, you should have 2 legs of a series. I’d further offer that you need to be prepared to continue publishing at the rate of 1-2 books a year or more. Let me explain.

The first-ever writer’s conference I attended, I spoke with several authors. Most authors, I was surprised to find, were working on just one book or had published one and were poking away at a second. At the time, I’d finished my second and was working on 2 others (both of which are still in some stage of re-writes). Back then, it struck me as counter-productive. When I finished my first book, it felt like leveling up and the experience bonus I got told me, “Have multiple things on the go.” You hear writers say this all the time, but it’s damn near impossible for other writers to listen to it. I know it took me 10+ years to figure it out. At that same conference, I started a conversation with a published author, and I asked her: what is the best way to market a book? She didn’t hesitate: Write a second book. It was emphatic and very nearly the final word on it. She added that having a mailing list helped because people who liked book one might sign up, and you could let them know book 2 was on its way. At the time, all this made sense to me but in something of an abstract fashion. Now, I see it with a lot more focus. The basic gist as I understood it both now and then is that you can use book 1 as a tool to market book 2.

To delve into the ‘why’ a bit, I think there are two critical parts of the equation. One is basic marketing. The other is psychological. The marketing aspect can be a bit of a long game. Publishing books one year apart works fine. You use book one to market the release of book two and three, and so on. This is particularly effective when you’ve got a series. If your first book is enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program, you’ve also got some additional marketing options. One of those options is a free book promotion or a countdown deal. If you have only one book, then giving it away doesn’t make any sense and marking it down might improve sales, but that sacrifice in royalties isn’t working as hard for you as it could. If you have three or four books, then what you’ve done is offer a taste of your work to a potential fan who might go in for a full-priced version of your other work. Essentially, what you’ve got is the potential to market a suite of books for one price. If you’ve only got one book, you’re only using those marketing dollars for a single title. The faster you can get to a list, the sooner you can start maximizing your advertising dollars. Thus 4 books in 12 months.

As I’ve said before in this series of blog posts, I’m not an expert on any of this. I am supplying this advice and information based on the perspective of someone who realizes his advertising dollars aren’t going remotely as far as they could, and it’s really tough to spend $20 in one day for 8 clicks and 0 purchases.

The other aspect of having multiple books gets into psychology. Now, it might read that I’m attempting to manipulate readers into purchasing a book. That shouldn’t be your goal. Your goal should be ensuring that potential fans see material they’ll like, getting it into their hands as effectively as possible. If you’re releasing book 2 of a series twelve to eighteen months after book 1, you might be losing readers who liked book 1 and would have read book 2 but then forgot about it and you. Not great. If you release them in relatively quick succession, then you’re offering content they want in a time-frame that minimizes the risk of losing readers.

Again, as a new author, I can’t actually say I’ve seen this go down. What I do know is that I’ve had more than one reader ask for book 2 of Wine Bottles and Broomsticks. It’s nowhere near ready, and I don’t know when it’ll be released (Apple Pie and Comfortable Shoes). I’d much rather have been able to tell them, it’ll be available on a date certain. That builds anticipation and provides a way for the reader to share with other people. I.e., I know this guy who wrote a book, and I’m looking forward to book 2, which comes out in… very many authors I’ve read have come to me by word of mouth. From my perspective as an author, if I can give readers a way to share something they like with a new potential reader, I need to make sure that happens.

To take all of this further, I can see from indie writers who are making real money that this is a numbers game. The more books you have out, the better you’re going to do. This is not just because more books necessarily mean more sales linearly. It is because every book you have promotes every other book you have. It’s something more like exponential. This does not extend to your social network – those sales are likely to taper as you release more books (can you really see your second cousin buying all 8 of your books? No, but she might buy book 1).

After having said all of that, I’m willing to say: This is how I see it right now, give me 12 months, and I’m as likely as not to come back with a different perspective. The bottom line is that publishing is a numbers game, and connecting with a single reader who wants to read all your stuff is like striking gold. They will tell their friends, and maybe one of them will like your work, and the pattern continues. If I could hit the reset button and do it over again, I’d have set up to release 1 book a quarter for a year.

As an author, what has been your experience? Is it contrary to this advice? Give it to us from your perspective in the comments.