Books Don’t Spoil….
But Covers and Sales Copy Need Refreshing At Times…
At WMG, this is an ongoing thing. Kris and I are always doing new projects that take priority on the publishing side. For example, the new Fey novel I showed you last night. New issues of Pulphouse. New Collides series volumes, and so on.
But we also have over a thousand titles up, or getting put back up, right now. And we have learned a lot in the last ten years and are a thousand times better cover designers than our old staff could ever dream of being. So we have a lot of books that need refreshing.
A lot, to say the least.
I just brought four thriller novels up from the dark years and gave them new life.
But we are very small company considering how many books we have. Only so much time in any week, even with Kris and I doing a ton of things as well as Steph and Chris and the staff of VAs.
Books don’t spoil, but their covers and sales copy does age.
And it is wonderful in this indie world we can fix that problem and keep our books finding new readers and making us money.
Kris and I and Steph teach 2025 techniques and looks. But every-so-often we get some person looking at one of our older books that needs a refreshing that we have not had the time to get to yet, and sends us a nasty-gram about how we are not doing what we teach. We are running as fast as we can, but we want to focus on the new books first. Okay…
In the start of indie, I did 200 titles up to Amazon, Smashwords, B&N, and iBooks (the only four available) in six months and all the covers were PowerPoint covers and the books were put into format by the different sites’ “grinders” which is what they called them.
We made enough to launch WMG and hire help. But it took us years to refresh those first 200 titles with new covers, and then new interiors, and better sales copy. But what we fixed those with now needs to be refreshed as well. My PowerPoint covers were often better than what we replaced and we spent no time on sales copy.
So now it has been 15 years. (WMG started in 2010 and became a corporation in 2012.)
(Can’t tell a nasty-gram about a 14 year old title caused this blog, can you? (grin))
Just remember… Books don’t spoil. And I keep reminding myself that people who write nasty-grams about our work because of their own ignorance never seem to go away.
6 Comments
LM
I’ve been recovering FINALLY from some life rolls, and while finishing stories again is thrilling! I admit, I’m not looking forward to rebooting the pub process, since the one I originally developed is defunct. (D2D migration anyone, yes, I’ve been down for the count a long time)
But you remind me just keep persevering, one step at a time, and it’ll turn out fine in the end.
Vincent Zandri
1,000+ titles. That’s incredible. Even if only 1/5th of that library sold one copy per day (no way would that pass muster in 20th century-based trad world), at an average price of 3.99 per book, you’re bringing in around $560 per day, or about $17K and change per month. And that’s just book sales, not including KS’s, classes, workshops, anthologies and magazines you might be included in, etc. Whever I see stuff like this, it amazes me the power of establishing one’s own indie imprint.
VZ
dwsmith
Yeah, sort of makes the old days of traditional publishing look sad, huh? (grin)
topaz
Hi Dean,
didn’t you also once recommend an old pulp writer who changed the titles of his stories, too?
Do you recommend to not only update covers and blurbs but also the titles? (This would result in a new book entry on the store sites and unpublishing the old version.)
Thanks for this lovely post.
Best wishes
Topaz
dwsmith
Nora Roberts used to change titles with every reissue and really pissed off her fans. I can see little reason to change titles unless the title was bad to start with, wjhich two of the thrillers I just reissued were. So mostly no reason on titles in my opinion.
Glyn
Knowing what you do and how much storytelling you have out there, it makes me wonder how many stories the (nasty grammer) has out there. Nowhere near you guys, me thinks. There was a Carry-on film that could relate to this. Carry on: Regardless. There is always one that complains.