This is Part 2 in a series I’ve started on indie publishing on my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors Substack.
I originally wrote this as a guest post for Joe Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, in 2013,
I’m Alexandra Sokoloff, former screenwriter, fairly new traditionally-published midlist author, brand new e publishing convert.
Last summer I made the leap – I decided not to go for a traditional deal for my new thriller, Huntress Moon. I put it out as an e book instead.
I made more money in the first month of release, just on Amazon, than I’d ever made for a traditional advance. The book has just been nominated for a Thriller Award in the ITW’s brand new Best E Book Original Novel category.
Joe asked me to blog for him about my e publishing experience, and my background and perspective is a little different from some of the other indie authors who have weighed in here, because I’ve also represented writers as a union activist, on the Board of Directors of the WGA, the screenwriters union.
I hate to say it, but writers have a problem. We hate business. We have a further, worse problem. We have a collective suicidal fantasy that we don’t have to understand business because we’re creative.
I’ve made my living solely from my writing since I was twenty-five years old. Making writing pay is not optional for me. That means, much as I hate it, paying attention to business is not optional, either.
I did eleven years as a professional screenwriter before I snapped and wrote my first novel. People thought I was insane to start writing books when I was making a good living as a screenwriter. That’s everyone’s dream anyway, right? Add pension and health benefits and you’d have to be crazy to leave that for something that everyone says will never pay the bills. But the thing is, I had gotten really active in the WGA, the screenwriters’ union, which meant the business side of the business was in my face constantly, unignorable. I saw the film business model changing before my eyes, studios squeezing writers for more and more script drafts for less and less money, and even as bad as I am at math, I could see that in a few years I wouldn’t be able to sustain a living simply because of the work time added without compensation. Add to this the fact that I’m a woman. In a good year women get a whopping 20% of the writing jobs in Hollywood. I had to do something else.
So I wrote a book, and I sold it to a Big Six publisher, and then sold the next. I was used to a screenwriting income, but the book advances plus foreign sales and some film options made publishing doable. Barely. In the meantime, though, I was learning the book business. And it wasn’t looking good.
I was lucky, because early on Joe lectured me on bookstore co-op. And e books, too, back before anyone was talking about e books, but it was his rant on co-op that really got me thinking. I didn’t particularly want to hear it, but you can’t unhear something like that. Co-op means that in publishing, the odds are stacked against everyone but the bestsellers. The publishers pay bookstores for placement to improve on the success of their biggest cash cows, at the expense of all the rest of us. The chances of breaking out of that hierarchy are astronomical. I was working my ass off at promotion, getting nominated for major mystery, thriller and horror awards, but I was quickly learning none of that meant anything to my publisher. By my fourth book I was done with being crippled by someone else’s mediocre expectations. And by then, there was an option. A scary option, but a real option.
I was slower than I wanted to be to self-publish because of just life - several devastating personal losses in the space of a year. It stopped my writing cold. It also took over a year to get my small backlist back - thank God I’m one of the ones who did. But during this really horrible time (the recession on top of everything else…) I finally started writing Huntress Moon, and I was studying e publishing. What authors did and didn’t do. What Amazon and Barnes & Noble did or didn’t do. I read Joe’s blog. I read the Kindleboards. I watched friends like Joe, and Blake Crouch, Barry Eisler, CJ Lyons, Scott Nicholson, Ann Voss Peterson, Elle Lothlorien, Brett Battles, Rob Gregory Browne, JD Rhoades, LJ Sellers, Diane Chamberlain and Sarah Shaber. I read the financial numbers they were so generous about sharing. And I’d like to say something about that, right now. I constantly see and hear people criticize and disparage self-published authors for sharing sales numbers. It’s bragging, it’s undignified, it’s not what REAL writers do.
Bullshit. That is a massive lie deliberately perpetuated by corporations to keep writers happily slaving in the dark. Happens just the same in Hollywood. Don’t ever let the writers talk to each other, because then they’ll figure it out.
Writers talking openly about numbers should be the norm, not a radical political act.
But thank God I know a lot of radicals. Precisely because writers like Joe and the above shared their sales numbers, I knew e publishing for a living was not only doable, but a potentially far more lucrative option for me than traditional publishing. So I studied, and I wrote, and I put up a non-fiction e workbook based on my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors blog, which taught me all the technical things I needed to know. By the time Huntress Moon was done, I was already hearing things like “It’s too late.” “That e-publishing ship has sailed.” But that wasn’t what I was seeing, from people who were doing it right. I took all I’d learned and put out the book as an e book original in July of last year. And prayed.
In the first three months Huntress Moon was out, I made enough money on that ONE book, just on Amazon, just in e-format, to live comfortably for a year. I got flooded with e mail from new readers who had never heard of me but who loved the book and were now buying all my others. My Facebook subscribers jumped from 500 to 20,000 and kept growing - over 78,000 at this writing.
That chunk of money and the steady income stream that followed has given me plenty of stress-free time to write the sequel and start the third book in the series. In the meantime, the royalties keep coming every month. I know exactly what I’m making. I know when I have to adjust, when I have to do a promo. I know by when I have to make another lump sum to carry me through the next fiscal year. The clarity, compared to publisher royalty statements, is breathtaking.
And it’s not just financial. As I said, this month Huntress Moon was nominated for a Thriller Award. I am privileged to have the book recognized along with books by a star list of some of my favorite traditionally published authors. ITW may be the first, but what do you want to bet that by two years from now every major genre award will have added an ebook original category?
And yet I know far too many traditionally published authors, friends, who started out in publishing at the exact same time I did or sooner, who are struggling and sinking, and - even when traditional advances are being cut in half, and the big publishers are consolidating right and left - these writers will not grab for this obvious lifeline. To them, I’d like to say here:
Did I do the right thing, self-publishing? I only wish I had done it sooner.
—Alex
Huntress Moon
FBI Special Agent Matthew Roarke is closing in on a bust of a major criminal organization in San Francisco when he witnesses an undercover member of his team killed right in front of him on a busy street, an accident Roarke can’t believe is coincidental. His suspicions put him on the trail of a mysterious young woman he glimpsed on the sidewalk behind his agent, who appears to have been present at each scene of a years-long string of “accidents” and murders, and who may well be that most rare of killers: a female serial.
Roarke’s hunt for her takes him and his team across three states... and will force him to question everything he thinks he knows about good and evil.
All books in the series available for free with Kindle Unlimited