So I recently read a post by Chuck Wendig entitled “The State Of Being A Published Writer In 2023 Is Really Weird, And A Little Worrisome,” and it struck a chord with me. To be clear, Chuck’s a traditionally published author. His insights, which I highly suggest you read, deal with trad publishing and bookselling as a whole, but he alludes that his indie friends are feeling the pinch as well.
If I’m being honest, that resonated with me, because I’ve felt for a while now that self publishing… well, not that it’s dying, just that it’s a lot harder to succeed in the space than it used to be. Whereas once self-publishing felt like a world of opportunity, now certain factors are making it feel more and more like a mirage.
Why is that? Chuck didn’t go into detail because he doesn’t have perspective into the indie world, but as someone who’s been doing the self-publishing thing for almost a decade, I have a few thoughts on the matter. All of the following are my opinions, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Amazon Owns the Town
The Amazon Kindle was first released in November of 2007, and while the device has come a long way since then, that initial piece of tech launched the self-publishing revolution. To be clear, self-publishing has existed for as long as the printing press has, but in a print world, self-publishing meant ordering a full run of a novel from a printer and hand selling your books to stores, schools, or directly to buyers. It wasn’t a viable career option so much as an expensive, time-consuming way to purchase kindling. The self-publishing revolution was actually enabled because of the ebook revolution. The internet opened a new avenue of distribution for authors, one which didn’t require them to spend thousands of dollars and fill their garages with books to get started, and the Kindle gave tech savvy early adopters a way to read books by folks whom they might never otherwise have found.
While New York publishers and traditionally published authors would thumb their noses at self-publishing for years, risk takers found pay dirt. Hugh Howey was one of them. Wool, published in 2011, earned Howey enough to build his own trans-Atlantic sailboat, and it was recently turned into a critically-acclaimed series on AppleTV. I personally began self-publishing at the tail end of 2014, and I found immediate success. At the time, it felt like as long as you had a great book with a good cover and a catchy blurb, Amazon would place your book in front of reader eyeballs and you could easily start selling books, which… is not the case anymore.
In those days, it was all about appeasing the Amazon ALGORITHM. Why do I write ALGORITHM in all caps? Well, because the ALGORITHM has a bit of a mythological status among indie authors. It’s the God of Amazon: the inscrutable being in charge of which books live or die, who succeeds and who doesn’t, and everyone had their own theories about what you had to do to get it to notice and promote you. Because make no mistake: if the ALGORITHM chose you, you could start selling beaucoup books, and you didn’t really have to do anything other than keep publishing great books to keep the gravy train flowing.
In fact, Amazon’s ALGORITHM was what the whole company was founded upon. Its purpose was simple: get the best possible item a buyer wants in front of their eyeballs as seamlessly as possible. Makes sense, right? If you want to create a great customer experience, you want people to buy products they’re going to love. This worked with all manner of goods, but books especially. If you were really into urban fantasy books featuring female leads and lots of steamy romance, the ALGORITHM would realize that, and every time you’d start looking at books, a carousel of similar novels would bepromoted to you. Awesome! The ALGORITHM worked, but while it was effective at providing a good customer experience, it wasn’t the best at providing a profitable experience for Amazon.
So over time, Amazon made the ALGORITHM less important, replacing most of its recommendations for books or toys or poorly fabricated widgets to PAID ADVERTISING. (I’m capitalizing that one just this once, for funsies). Paid advertising dominates Amazon now. Just about every product you see, from the main page to search results to “Books you may like” carousels are from paid advertising. Unless you’re browsing an active bestseller list, there’s a good chance whatever book Amazon is showing you was paid to be on the screen, not because the ALGORITHM decided you’d like it.
Which, obviously, makes for a worse customer experience. I don’t want to buy some crappy book someone is shilling. I want a book that fits my specific interests. The ALGORITHM knows what I want, but it generally won’t show it to me anymore because it earns Amazon more money not to, at least in the short term. Eventually, buyers will realize the Amazon customer experience isn’t very good anymore and they’ll move elsewhere, or at least they would if they weren’t locked into Prime subscriptions and dependent upon Amazon’s lightning fast delivery network, which is really what the company thrives at nowadays.
But paid advertising isn’t the only way Amazon has squeezed authors. Remember Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s all-you-can-read subscription service? It’s a great way to get the ALGORITHM to pay more attention to your books, but only if you make them exclusive to Amazon. And while the rates they pay for each page read have always been low, lately they’ve been getting worse, and worse, and worse…
As it pertains to authors, Amazon has essentially become the old west company that owns the gold mining town. They force you into exclusivity, pay you a pittance, and if you want people to actually discover your books? You’ve got to pay for that privilege, too. Every day, Amazon finds new ways to force authors to pay a little bit more for the privilege of reader eyeballs, leaving authors with less and less.
The Downfall of Social Media
In case you hadn’t noticed, social media is a total dumpster fire right now. Like absolute hot, steaming garbage. Facebook has been for years. If you’re able to find even one substantive post hidden among the piles of ads, memes, click-bait videos, and political arguments before you chuck your phone out the window screaming, you have a stronger stomach than I do. For a long time Twitter seemed like a fun, bite-sized alternative, but ever since Elon took over, a fetid deluge of sexism, racism, Nazism, and all of your other least favorite isms has backwashed in, not to mention the site is plain broken a lot of the time. Instagram maybe is the last major social media site standing, but unless you happen to be a fitness model or an inanimate object that’s actually cake, good luck finding any traction there.
Although, there’s also TikTok. I mean, BookTok is a thing, right? It’s how books go viral and find readers now. Except most big Booktokers (is that a word?) are paid influencers, too, and many of them charge thousands of dollars to hawk novels to their audiences. Sorry to burst your bubble, but most of those viral BookTok successes are actually manufactured with cold hard cash.
But who cares, right? Everyone knows social media doesn’t sell books, unless you happen to have a superfan by the name of Bigolas Dickolas who hypes your book so much that it makes it onto the New York Times best-seller list (seriously). But you can’t count on social media to turn your book into a viral best-seller. More often than not, social media is just a way to build community awareness of yourself as an author in general, not to sell individual books.
Unless you’re advertising on social media, in which case it can be effective at selling books. Your mileage may vary, but there are plenty of individuals selling piles of books using social media advertising, and no shortage of folks (Mark Dawson, David Gaughran, etc.) telling/selling you information on how to do it.
In my experience, social media advertising isn’t as efficient or effective as the big names pushing paid courses would have you believe, but it CAN work—or at least, it can when the social media sites are thriving. But in this environment? When the social media sites are saturated with crap, stuffed to the gills with ads, rife with hate speech, and generally on the verge of breaking entirely? That’s not a great environment to be advertising in, and it’s not as if indie authors have a lot of other options. The more mainstream types of advertising (print ads, TV, bookstore displays, hell, billboards maybe) are super duper mega bucks expensive, and they’re not particularly effective either. If social media crumbles or the audiences fracture to dozens of smaller sites, how can indie authors gain awareness? Because not advertising simply isn’t an option. Not anymore…
A Tsunami of Crap
According to Bowker, the company responsible for selling ISBNs in the US (which is a hell of a scam, but great work if you can get it), roughly 283,000 books were published in the US in 2005. By 2021, that number had skyrocketed to over three million books.
Let me repeat that. THREE MILLION books published every year.
Imagine walking into a bookstore the size of a Costco, one with bookshelves that go up to the ceiling where you need a scissor lift to access the top three-quarters of the shelves. Imagine that warehouse-sized bookstore only carried one copy of each book, spine out, with no fancy end caps, and that everything was stored with maximum density in mind. If someone wandered into that store looking to browse, what are the chances of them walking out with your book in hand? Would anyone even notice your book was there?
Keep in mind, that enormous Costco bookstore still wouldn’t carry anything close to three million books. It might carry several hundred thousand, perhaps a million, but not three. You’d need a whole outlet mall full of megabox bookstores to get to three million books.
And that’s what’s being released EVERY YEAR. Have you ever visited a bookstore that only carries new releases? Of course not. They’re still selling Harry Potter and Game of Thrones and Heinlein books from the 60’s and Raymond Chandler novels from the 40’s. As an author releasing a new book, you’re not just competing with the other authors releasing new novels, but everyone who’s released a novel, ever (or at least one written or translated into a modern dialect—not a whole lot of people reading Sumerian nowadays). But you’re also competing with TV and video games and the internet and, like, people actually enjoying each other’s company or spending time outside not staring at a screen. You are a minuscule speck of dust in an entertainment landscape chock full of others.
But wait, it gets worse, because that three million number from 2021? Yeah. That’s already super outdated. Why? Because in 2022, something called generative AI burst onto the scene like the Kool-Aid man shouting, “Oh, yeah!”
If you’ve been living under a rock, generative AI is a sort of black box software that’s been trained on hundreds of thousands of books/articles/illustrations/videos/what have you, digests all that content in a mystical, inscrutable way, and then barfs back up a jumbled mix of those same things based on text-based prompts. Some of it has gotten scary good in a short period of time (the image generators, for example, although human hands still get portrayed as fleshy, hellish meat tubes), but other generative AI still produces stuff that is… not great, the ones that generate fiction being among those.
Because these technologies are so new, there are tons of unresolved issues around them involving copyright, ethics, and, of course, who makes money off it, so of course, entrepreneurs and users alike are waiting patiently until all these issues are resolved before using the technology.
…
AHAHAHAHAHAH! Just kidding. No. Of course not. AI companies are sprouting up like weeds, and people are diving in headfirst without any regards for the ramifications of these technologies. Authors are now using AI to generate books faster than ever before. Sorry. “Authors.” Because most of the people using AI to generate books aren’t interested in writing and never have been. They’re almost exclusively members of so called hustle culture, people looking to make a quick buck from the e-publishing landscape (because it’s sooooo easy, don’t you know?). But that hasn’t stopped people from trying, like this guy who made $2000 off the 97 AI generated books he “wrote.” Which if we do the math, over nine months, carry the one, is… not a hell of a lot. But it doesn’t matter! What matters is one dude published 97 more titles in the blink of an eye, and if you think he’s the only one, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. And every single one of those books, good, atrocious, or otherwise, is now competing with your book in never-ending Costco bookshelf hell.
(Oh, and did I mention the ALGORITHM promotes authors who have a high release cadence? Supposedly, anyway. Maybe it has changed, or maybe it was always an urban legend. At least in the old days (read: 2021), if you wanted to publish a lot of books you had to write them yourself, or at least pay some impoverished nobody in Sri Lanka or Pakistan to ghost write them for you, but now? Just have a computer barf up some more content for free!)
So how do you get people to notice your book among the millions and millions of other titles flooding the market? Advertising, of course! And just as that thought crosses your mind, Amazon sticks its hand out, demanding you fork over more dough as you glumly pick up your wordsmithing pickaxe and shamble back to the mines… But you don’t have to use Amazon. You could advertise on Facebook, or Twitter, or… oh. Right.
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Anyway, here we are at the end of my longwinded rant. My point is that we have this illusion that in most fields, the cream will eventually rise to the top, but in modern indie publishing, it’s more like you’re dumping cream into your septic tank, which has a bunch of silt at the bottom and oils and beef fat at the top and a gross layer of stinky poo water in the middle. Some of that cream might eventually rise to the top, but it’s a weird, gross, unpredictable path to getting there.
It’s not enough anymore to write a good book with an eye-catching cover and a snappy blurb. Now you have to WORK. You have to have ads running, constantly, otherwise sales dry up. You have to be a mailing list ninja. You have to have a better understanding of SEO than a ten million dollar-a-year online supplements company. Like Sisyphus, you have to keep pushing and never stop else the boulder in front of you rolls back onto you and crushes your bones into dust. And hopefully you can do all of that while still retaining your love for the writing itself, because if not… why are you even here?
I do want to end by saying that while I believe being successful as a self-published indie author is much harder than it used to be, it’s not IMPOSSIBLE. I know many people who are enjoying phenomenal success thanks to self publishing, and for as bad as it feels, there are still so many more people making a living as authors now than there were before the ebook revolution. So if you’re looking to jump in, don’t despair. Just know that it feels a lot harder than it did a decade ago.