Monday, November 6, 2017

That post-conference high.

I came home with a reading list...
It happens to me every November. I leave town for a writing conference for a few days, and come home all fired up about writing more books and, uh, somewhat less than fired up about returning to real life.

You're hearing from me a day late this week because last night -- or more accurately, very early this morning -- I came home from three days at the 20 Books to 50K conference in Las Vegas. It was my first time in Vegas, and it was both more and less than I expected it to be. But I'll leave the impressions of my trip for another time. Tonight I'd like to talk a little bit about what this conference is all about, and why I skipped this year's World Fantasy Convention to attend.

The conference name is somewhat self-explanatory: the idea is that if you write books in a popular genre and market them properly, you can expect to be making $50,000 a year by the time you've published 20 books. As someone who has just released her 18th book, I found the concept intriguing.

And as an indie author, I was getting less and less out of attending the World Fantasy Convention. It's a meetup for professionals, mostly, who either are chasing a contract with a traditional publisher or who already have one. So while the panels are often interesting and give me food for thought for my own writing, the emphasis behind the scenes is on schmoozing with editors and agents, neither of which -- as an indie -- I'm interested in.

Anyway. I didn't go into the 50 Books conference knowing much beyond what I explained above. What I was hoping for was a blueprint for how the indies who are making money at their craft got where they are. While I didn't get a straightforward answer, as the weekend progressed I got closer to the Big Picture.

First, you need to publish a lot of books each year, and for that you need to write fast. There were several presentations on methods for outlining a book, because it's quicker to write a story when you know where you're going with it. You also need to create characters who readers will fall in love with and want to read more about. Then your cover needs to fit in with others in your genre, your blurb needs to be well crafted, and your book itself needs to be professionally edited.

Next, you need to market it well, and for most authors these days, that means shelling out for advertising. There were several presentations on developing advertising campaigns for both Facebook and Amazon (and I bought books on those subjects written by Michael Cooper and Brian Meeks, two of the presenters at the conference). Another presentation talked about the strategy of doing a rapid release: you release four books, one each week, for four weeks straight. That takes an enormous amount of planning ahead, both for advertising buys and for writing time. But with four titles out at once, they work together to boost you up the sales lists at Amazon -- and the more books you sell, the more money you make.

Some of these concepts were new to me, but some are things we've been talking about at Indies Unlimited for years. (K.S. Brooks and I literally cheered when one of the presenters said his first question about any book cover is how it looks in thumbnail size.)

To sum up, organizers Craig Martell and Michael Anderle did a bang-up job pulling the conference together. And I'm going to be doing a lot of thinking over the next few weeks about how best to deploy some of these strategies next year. Stay tuned...

***
Just before I left for Vegas, I pushed the "publish" button on Maggie at Moonrise. With that, the Transcendence trilogy is complete. I'll pull together an omnibus version pretty soon, but in the meantime, enjoy the new book -- and thanks in advance to those of you who have already bought a copy. You're my new best friends.

***
These moments of bloggy enthusiasm have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

No comments: