Books for authors part 2. Check out part 1 here.
The first book I came across in this series was Write to market. I’ll confess the title and concept turned me off and I was pleasantly surprised to find these 4 books interesting and worth a read.
So why did the title “Write to market“ turn me off?
Mostly because I assumed he (Chris Fox the author) meant: write what’s popular (whether you love it or not) to make money (e.g. sell your soul pumping out more crap that’s like everything else out there). I was wrong. It’s not exactly what the book is about.
I initially included a long section in this post about why I am not a fan of that concept – but I’ve decided to put it in a separate post, and just keep this one about my thoughts about this book series. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Chris Fox wasn’t saying “cash in your soul” in his book. (He was a little), but mostly Write to market is about writing books in a market you enjoy (although he does mention hitting the tropes). He also writes about how you need to sell books to make money as an author (obviously). I don’t see a lot of books really working the maths out for your though… depending on how much money you want to make as an author, you’ll need to sell a lot of books (especially if you’re only getting 35cents for a 99c book). Chris’ theory/ solution is that the best way to do that is by delivering a book in a genre that is “hungry” e.g. relatively new and isn’t yet “saturated”. The problem is, when many people do this, they saturate the market and then you have to go and find a new market.
Moving on to my thoughts about the other 3 books.
In a nutshell – as I said above, I was surprised to find I liked this non-fiction series (even Write to Market) and found interesting points in each of the short books. Six Figure Author and Launch to Market-were both quite interesting (I know, that word again, but I can’t see the point in using a different one when “interesting” is what I mean).
The title “Six Figure Author” turned me off too at first to be honest, and mostly because I’ve stopped believing anything titled “six figure anything” will actually deliver the results promised (and not for lack of action taking from the person purchasing said product). But in this book Chris writes about Amazon algorithms (a strange piece of magic in itself), the different sales “tiers”, and how many books per day people at number 1, the top 100, the top 1000, 10,000 etc. on Amazon.com are making. (It’s fascinating! Considering I’ve sold a total of >500 books and <1000 I don’t know the actual number but I think it’s about 700 now taking print and ebook sales into account) since I started indie publishing 3 years ago and I’ve had about 3K downloads of my free cookbook in the last 5 months, the thought that someone at number 1 is selling thousands of copies a day is like trying to picture the edge of the universe… you know it’s there and it can happen but it’s kind of hard to picture because it’s so far away. In these books Fox also writes about “also boughts” and the algorithm “cliffs” which are (sorry to use the word again) interesting because it was the first time I’d heard about those things.
Re Launch Your Novel. I liked this book too. The concepts were very simple and logical but it’s a worth a read if you plan to relaunch a book.
Anyway, that’s enough non-fiction. Next post… I’ll chat about the fiction I read between June and December 2017:-)
