The ever-wonderful Jan Oda has an excellent post up at ErgoFiction that describes the conundrum for indie writers in this day and age (by which I mean the middle of 2010). Eli grabbed this same quote for Novelr, but it’s because it’s so absolutely true. I want to start off with it:
If you browse around webfiction stories you’ll see the same tricks and ideas almost everywhere. Donation buttons, incentives ranging from becoming a fan on Facebook to tweeting about the story and so on. If you’ve been around the block a while, like I have, that becomes repetitive. And it stops working.
This is a question of saturation, and as Jan points out, it’s not a question of whether or not you personally use a trick too often, it’s a question of whether the entire weblit community does, too. We can collectively over-do things and sink all our ships at once.
Last year, I wrote often about the nitty gritty numbers related to running my business. This year, I haven’t done it yet, and while some of that can be attributed to having an insane work schedule (in and out of writing), the bigger reason is that things are not going well, and I can’t figure out why. Somewhere along the way, I got shy about admitting to imperfection. I’ll try and fix that now.
On the surface, 2010 has been not too shabby. We saw a big drop in visitors during and after the Big Mistake Web Revision of January 2010, but those numbers are starting to climb back into something I’d call “acceptable”. Last May, I was averaging well over 3,0000 uniques a day, but the peak in May 2010 has been 850. But compared to the rest of the year, that’s actually very good. We have spikes for livewriting, of course, but things have been very weak thus far. We’ve been repairing the damage done by a major revamp.
Which kinda brings me to my first point: we’ve gone through a lot of tricks and cool ideas to help build community in the last 6-9 months, but almost none of them have done us any good. The Stream, while really wonderful from some angles, was a major timesuck for me, and even when I put as much time into it as I could afford, it never managed to become GOOD, just buggy and adequate. That’s a big reason why I went back to Disqus, and tried to emulate some of the functionality with Facebook widgets etc. I realize these widgets don’t stand out, and that to some people, they’re just wasted space on the page… but lacking an alternative, I have to go with what’s easiest.
Here is where we tie into the “everyone does it” idea: any investment in the site needs to be balanced against the possible return. We measure success by readers and money (in that order, assuming that a happy reader will be more valuable than a one-time donation). The crazy ideas I’ve put into play have been popular with the core fans, but haven’t brought in anyone new. Worse yet, they seem to have discouraged the casual fans, actually shrinking our numbers instead of growing them. Given this dynamic, we’ve had to pull back to something “safe”, and try to get a better grip on what to do next. As Jan says, it’s becomes repetitive and boring… but the alternative seems dangerous.
Switching back to stats a bit: our newest series, Tori’s Row, has been doing pretty good numbers in terms of readership. It’s lower than I would have expected a year ago, but it’s still the top product on our roster right now. Serial+, as you may recall, did great business for The Vector last year. This time around, it’s doing almost nothing. One would expect that if people didn’t value the series, they wouldn’t keep coming back, and the numbers would drop off. But the numbers have held steady (and increased) over the run, so it’s not that people don’t like it, it’s that they don’t want to pay for it. We saw the same thing with The New Real 2… big audience, virtually no donations at all. The first in the series, last year, did great numbers on both fronts.
There are lots of reasons this could be happening. It’s a generally sucky economy worldwide, we were dealing with the aftermath of the Christmas holidays (and winter heating bills), and truthfully, I don’t have stats from the first months of 2009 to compare to, because I was mostly focused on kids’ books back then. But just looking at the numbers, and getting a sense they seem to hold true across the board, I think there’s at least a subtle trend towards NOT supporting weblit authors. Not in a vindictive way, but in a “I just can’t, right now” sort of way. And if enough people feel that way, weblit authors are looking at tough decisions about how to proceed.
And herein lies the danger, I think, for the weblit community: Kindle is easy for writers to use. It’s a massive crapshoot, but if you get a reader, you get a sale. Self-publishing used to require proofs and shipping and all that jazz, but now it’s just “upload a file and wait.” It’s like weblit, only with a searchable catalogue. And if the numbers in “free to access and depend on donations” continue the way they’re going, I think we’ll see a massive shift away from true weblit, into something akin to serialized e-book publishing. Not EVERYONE, but enough that you’ll have the inevitable “next generation” of weblit authors stumbling into the fold, thinking they’re the pioneers all over again, not realizing their predecessors just left the building. I don’t want that to happen, personally. I want this generation to be the first to successfully bridge the gap between weblit and publishing… doing both without giving up either. But it’s looking a bit hazy right now.
That’s not to say that 1889 will do that. Livewriting depends on the weblit interactivity, and as fast as Kindle pubbing may be, it’s never going to be fast enough for what we do here. But we ARE planning some experiments in that space to see what happens. We’ll be having our first eBook-only release in a few months (Kindle or iPad or Smashwords, $2.99), where the only “free” elements will be sample chapters we post on the site. It goes against instinct for us, but we’ve never had a non-free title before, and you can’t make judgements about business plans until you try them. There will be other not-really-free titles, too, and I guess the message is: if you prefer Free, you need to pay for it.
Actually, let me get sidetracked one last time: paying for weblit isn’t just a question of donations. Donations are a one-time event, and while that’s appreciated, it’s not the best thing in the world. Reviews are positively wonderful. Not even complex reviews, either. Go to our titles on Amazon and give us some stars, and we’ll sell more copies. Costs you nothing, but it brings in money for us. Maybe the business plan of the future is this: write it for free online, sell it on Kindle for revenue. If you don’t have cash, rate it and consider it a fair trade. If you DO have cash, buy it (and actually, we’re toying with the idea of nixing PayPal on the site entirely, because an Amazon purchase, while netting less profit, raises our ranking and brings in new readers). Maybe THAT’S how we make weblit really work.
1889 isn’t giving up on weblit, and we’re certainly not giving up on innovation in this space. But at the same time, the readers out there need to realize it can’t be a one-way street… we’re not the big companies charging absurd prices for limited-use mass media; we’re the little guys, trying to make you happy by doing cool stuff for free. The big guys don’t need your help to be successful, but to us, support is the difference between life and death.
Final note: this is not a guilt-trippy post meant to pressure you into giving us donations. I will refund any money that comes in via PayPal for the next few days. Don’t do it. But if you want to help, again, please, visit our Kindle page, drop by the titles you know, and rate, review or tag them. And then go and do it for your other favourite weblit authors. Seriously. A tiny investment of time for a whole lot of good karma.
So much info my brain is exploding. I also have mixed feelings and thoughts. Today feels like a day where I'm having loads of interesting discussions, and yet not the mental (and awake) state to actually make sense of my arguments. Nevertheless, ONWARDS!!
1. Love, Love the Picture.
2. I think I go into the Core Fan category, but I loved The Big Mistake Web Revision of January 2010, I also find it quite sad you call it that. Don't you always say you'll try everything and if it doesn't then so be it, but no hurt feelings? That isn't only the case for writing experiments you know. So call it The Awesomest Website That No One Understood. And for the record, again as a core fan, I miss the Stream, or rather, I miss just posting things on site. All the rest I can live with. And 2 great things you had but that are now lost: Badges! Points!
3. I agree with the financial hard times point. People just have less money around, and cultural things are the first ones to be skipped, I speak from experience alas. And maybe optional payments are skipped even faster.
4. I think Kindle can be a good solution for online novelists who don't make too much use of the interactive aspects of the internet publishing. But webfiction and ebooks are not the same, so I can't see everyone running to it.
5. Couldn't agree more on that paying isn't only about money. It's about attention, and rewarding and doing something in return. And now I have an epiphany I need to talk with you about.
6. Your final note is where you're wrong. Go read Amanda's blogpost that I linked to at the start of my original post. There is no shame in asking for a reward for your efforts.
7. I didn't say what I wanted to say, but this will do for now.
So much info my brain is exploding. I also have mixed feelings and thoughts. Today feels like a day where I'm having loads of interesting discussions, and yet not the mental (and awake) state to actually make sense of my arguments. Nevertheless, ONWARDS!!
1. Love, Love the Picture.
2. I think I go into the Core Fan category, but I loved The Big Mistake Web Revision of January 2010, I also find it quite sad you call it that. Don't you always say you'll try everything and if it doesn't then so be it, but no hurt feelings? That isn't only the case for writing experiments you know. So call it The Awesomest Website That No One Understood. And for the record, again as a core fan, I miss the Stream, or rather, I miss just posting things on site. All the rest I can live with. And 2 great things you had but that are now lost: Badges! Points!
3. I agree with the financial hard times point. People just have less money around, and cultural things are the first ones to be skipped, I speak from experience alas. And maybe optional payments are skipped even faster.
4. I think Kindle can be a good solution for online novelists who don't make too much use of the interactive aspects of the internet publishing. But webfiction and ebooks are not the same, so I can't see everyone running to it.
5. Couldn't agree more on that paying isn't only about money. It's about attention, and rewarding and doing something in return. And now I have an epiphany I need to talk with you about.
6. Your final note is where you're wrong. Go read Amanda's blogpost that I linked to at the start of my original post. There is no shame in asking for a reward for your efforts.
7. I didn't say what I wanted to say, but this will do for now.
Like Jan, I'm not sure how to respond to your post, other than to say that I think it's a brilliant piece.
I'll have to let my thoughts fester a bit, I think, before I can give you a proper response. (And that's probably going to be on Novelr – because there are too many things to be expressed in a comment).
This bears some thinking about. /puts thinking cap on.
The website in January wasn't a mistake from a creative or technical point of view, but it was a big mistake in that it really, seriously, cut the audience into tiny bits and blew them into the wind. We'd been building a fairly steady traffic flow for months, and it went away very suddenly.
The Kindle thing isn't really a fair comparison, but I think the problem is that for new authors looking at their options, if proper weblit has a reputation for not earning money, and Kindle does… I think they may intentionally give up the interactivity to have a chance at financial reward. Not EVERYONE will do that, but there'll be a shift. They'll become satisfied with delayed interactivity rather than immediate. And if Amazon ever makes it easier to post serialized fiction to Kindle directly… I think we'd see a very big change in the way people work. And not for the better, either.
There's no shame in asking for reward for your efforts, but after a post like this, I don't want to turn around and say to everyone: “feel guilty now? good. now pay up.” If you can pay, I'd love for you to pay. (and not YOU specially. I mean people in general) And I'll ask for money (and I do, often) but I won't guilt trip you into it. I'll guilt trip you all into giving me Amazon stars and reviews, but that's because it's a pretty easy thing to do. Honestly, with all the repeating traffic we get to our titles here, there's no reason we shouldn't have over 200 reviews for each book on Amazon. But most have none, and the rest of 1 or 2. THAT, people should feel guilty about
I like writing things that make people's brains fester. It sounds positively nasty. I will await your thoughts on Novelr
MCM, I appreciate your honesty and forthrightness here. I think in the weblit community we are not always open enough about what has worked and what has not for the purposes of developing economically-feasible models.
I have a theory that the root of the problem, all other things being equal, is that we actually drive away readers by underpricing our wares, because we are afraid to declare that they are of value. I am going to do a lengthy post about this on weblit.us sometime soon.
The other thing I think is that we should play up our strengths, i.e. the things that this medium, and only this medium, can do — such as instant reader interaction and livewriting.
Too much for a comment. Later…
I'm always curious about how to price stuff, actually. You quickly run into the “but it's not a REAL book” argument, which spreads like wildfire. Then again, pricing too low basically plays into that notion that weblit is almost worthless. It's a tough thing to balance. I'm looking forward to your post! When it's up, let me know (because I'm very bad at noticing such things). Thanks!
One little point to make: Amazon has in its TOS that:
“From 5.3.1 List Price. You will provide a list price for each Digital Book you submit to us in accordance with the then current Program procedures for list price submission (“List Price”). You will adjust the List Price as required to ensure that, at all times that the Digital Book is available for sale through the Program, the List Price does not exceed the lowest of: (a) the lowest suggested retail price or equivalent price for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book; (b) the lowest price at which you list or offer any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book on any website or other sales channel…”
That last bit quoted could be a problem for web fic authors. So far, Amazon hasn't been seriously enforcing it, but I imagine with the change to 70% from 35% as the author's royalties, they might start doing so.
Which would mean having it for free to read on our sites would result in Amazon taking down the Kindle versions, or even possibly booting us out of the DTP program.
And not being able to sell on Amazon would really hurt earning potential for us.
Now THAT's an interesting (and scary) question… if the start counting “free” as competition, it will make it very hard for us to keep control of things. I guess one way around it is to claim (and in some cases, it's true) that the “book” version has added content or better quality than the site versions. But yes, if they start enforcing that, I think it will screw things up quite messily… yeesh…
seems like there is a constant and nagging diconnect between cost, value and worth. Cost is often hidden, which is unfortunate, or a complete red-herring (I can pirate this, because the CD only costs, like, 10 cents!), value is created by consensus, and worth is a much more long term approach. I have a feeling that if you charge $2.99 for a kindle version, you are giving it value, but not worth, and you are attempting to reach parity with cost. Using a donation model, particularly paired with approaches like live-writing, you're aiming more at worth, which is tricksier, right?.
The value of a book is driven by how much you charge for it. The worth of a book with how much you net by it, and the size of the audience you reach with it. There are hybrid approaches, where a book starts out at a fixed cost and either becomes more or less expensive the wider its audience grows, but this is plain confusing (IMO).
The funny thing is, there will always be a majority of people who ask “Oh, they made a movie? I liked the book…” or v. versa, and this extends to live-writing v. kindle; they are different media, and they attract different audiences with very little overlap, I expect.
Anyways, I agree with Karen on many points, but in particular, don't drive away readers by not valuing your work products, and as always, thanks for sharing with honesty and forthrightness.
I think the reason Tori's Row isn't doing as well for upgrade purchases is that you can only buy the current arc at once.
But the main reason we have income problems is that we don't have enough readers. Most people won't donate, won't buy merch etc. Webcomics that do well financially tend to have huge visitor numbers (5 even 6 figures daily). Most weblit sites have 3 figure visitors daily. Even if we could monetise all of them – impossible, most would leave if we tried to force the issue- we wouldn't be earning a living.
That's why it gets old – its the same people reading every site. Even the best contributors don't donate to every site they visit.
This is why I don't ask for donations yet – I'm waiting to hit a certain number of readers (not unique hits as a: some of those will bounce and b: not all readers return daily) before asking. For now I'm buying ads and hoping the upward trend in readers continues.
That's very true, and gets back to the insular nature of the weblit field. Most of our readers are shared, so we're very seriously competing with each other for the same eyeballs. That's part of why I'm doing the 1,000 stories project… because I want to try and reach people who might not otherwise “get” what weblit is all about. I'd run ads too, but they generally don't do as much for me as a good #3D1D would.
This is why I think Kindle is possibly the biggest threat to weblit, because if you're looking at needing 50,000 daily readers to break even, it almost makes more sense to invest your time and money in marketing your ebooks and getting a fraction of those numbers for double the return. I mean, if your type of fiction would work as an ebook, which is not usually the case. But the mere fact that that theory exists could sway a lot of writers in directions they might not otherwise have gone.
The ebook thing seems to make sense until you consider that the number of purchases is still the tip of the iceberg, just like the number of donations.
To get people to buy the ebook you still need to get them to the books page on your website or amazon or smashwords or wherever. Then you need to coax them to read the excerpt. Then you need them to want to finish it enough to part with their moolah. So you may end up needing just as many daily hits to break even. (The operative word being may, it depends on conversion rate). And the people who come, read the excerpt and leave (and who might well become regular readers in a weblit enviroment) even lose their marketing value too since they are unlikely to rec you.
But for the question of getting more readers I've been musing on this and made a post on weblit.us about one possibility. Input welcome. http://weblit.us/content/do-we-need-war-chest
Is it a matter of people not wanting to pay, or being able to wait for the story to finish? I'm curious if there's any difference between the stories that makes it more palatable to wait for a new chapter with some stories, but with others the waiting game just can't be played.
Not that I think other factors are also at play. I can't make educated observations on the donor thing from my perspective – Peacock King gets a donation about every six months, and hasn't had a WFG review since last year. I can say, though, that hits have dipped tremendously in the summer months, most notably in June and with a big dip in May and a precursory slump in April. Others have reported similar hit shifts, and MeiLin said it's been a seasonal thing on her site over the years.
I do wonder if people have come to just expect weblit, though, and are taking it for granted. On my own end, I can't complain about the donations – I neither require them nor ever imply that PK is a work that needs to be funded. I'm not sure if I even want PK to be my living. I'm more concerned that it be read, and so that makes me a pretty crappy salesman.
I agree that getting people from the site to Amazon is a bit of a climb, but the problem is the appearance that it's somehow more effective to sell and promote directly from Amazon, rather than going through your personal site. So the funnel isn't through you at all, it's entirely dependent on big channel partners. It's not stunningly realistic, but does seem like less work. Don't concentrate on getting lots of readers, concentrate on getting PAYING readers. For anyone looking at making ANY money in this field, one's mind will go in that direction (until you've learned to think otherwise, that is).
Here's the thing: you have 10,000 readers, and 10 regular supporters. The system looks like it's doing ok, because at least you have those 10. Not great numbers overall, but you feel good. Then you look at Kindle, where (as far as you know) the 10 readers you have are ALSO the 10 supporters. 100% pickup rate. Perfection. In that context, straight weblit looks unappealing. If some of those 10 weblit supporters drop out, it might push you over the edge.
Not me, I should say. My MO requires me to work in full public view the way I do. But i can still understand the frustration. And I think that pushes many authors over the edge is the (recently explained to me) admission that some some readers make that they not only have the MEANS to support us, but also talk at length about the traditional books they've bought and trashed in comparison to the weblit they read. I don't think anyone necessarily has a sense of entitlement, but readers do kind of trend towards “taking us for granted” when they say things like that. If you had $12 to spend, why did it go to Random House, rather than the authors you read every week? Like I said, I can understand the frustration, but it won't stop me from doing what I do. But the problem is that a lot of on-the-fence weblitters are not going to stick around in that scenario, and the community will be losing good voices to the iffy Kindle-only route.
I got badly off-track here. Long night last night. Heh.
Well there is the apples-to-apples issue. I can't say for sure that Tori's Row is doing less business than the Vector because of a seasonal shift, but it seems more likely than the alternative, because all our stats are down across the board. What I'm interested in is what causes the seasonal shift… why are people less likely to become engaged in the January-June period? Well, summer I can understand, by why early in the year?
Put another way: TV works in a season pattern where you have the major shows airing September-May, which (aside from the weak New Year numbers, which may be 100% my fault for changing the site) lines up nicely with how my stats go. So maybe they're on to something… write new series in a burst from September to May, and then basically do fluff and unimportant stuff for the summer? Or reruns? I dunno. We're basically looking at an 8-month schedule for weblit (at best) with the other 4 just being dead time (at least monetarily… though even if you're not looking at money, the lack of readers in a certain period kinda freaks me out because I'm afraid if I were doing a longform serial, people will get too far behind if they took that much time off).
Interesting questions. I wish there were answers
We need to make the on-the-fencers aware of why it won't work, then. Before bad maths makes them commit to a poor course of action.
If you need 10,000 regular readers to get 10 contributors you'll need 10,000 views on your preview on Am to get 10 sales and you'll be limiting yourself to peeps who buy kindle books (as in not me or any Brit with a brain, I would happily download kindle for pc, but even though I own no whispernet ready device and would thus have to download the old fashioned way I would still have to pay the extra charge as if I did). Leaving that aside Amazon will sell your work but they won't market it. It will still fall to you to make people aware of your work. You'll very possibly be working just as hard for little or no improvement in your monetary renumeration and less overall renumeration.
On a tangent I've been thinking, and thinking hard about what lies ahead, because while we need to look for new things that work, we need to remember not everything will – and the webcomic bods tried a lot of things to monetise while they were learning and many didn't work. We can probably assume what didn't work for them likely won't for us. It's likely time to study how the webcomic model developed in detail.
It's also time to start thinking about how to get more people into the weblit reading community in general.
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