Ode to Trash Cans, and Crap That Doesn't Matter

[renegadefolkhero]

I suffer mightily from sunk cost fallacy, and I've developed a constellation of rulesets to help me navigate this. One of the most effective techniques I've discovered is being able to simulate physically throwing things away.

All my projects have a trash folder, and any time I need to rewrite a chapter or cut something, it goes in the trash. The idea here is if I made a horrible mistake, I can still dig it out of the trash, just like I would in my office at home. Dig rate is like... less than 1 percent. I've dug something out of the trash maybe once. But the possibility of being able to dig things out of the trash has made it a lot easier to cut darlings.

This past week I was trying to decide which story to finish next and I was pretty meh on most of them. I looked at all the drafts and general cruft lying around, and I set up a trash can, and I started throwing stuff in it. I was ruthless. Anything less than X words, gone. Concepts that have been sitting around a few years that I never "got around to" are clearly not interesting enough to pursue, so gone. A muddled concept that split into two drafts, because I couldn't figure out a clear direction? Both parts gone. (These are the worst, by the way.) Hate this idea now? Goes without saying, maybe, but gone!

By the end of it, I'd whittled down my graveyard to such an extent I realized... I'm done? I'm done. I'm finished with this generation of pen names. I did the thing, and it's time to move on. And I felt it this time. It wasn't, "I should retire this pen," it was, "This pen is retired now. There's nothing left to write for it."

As someone who drags pen names around for years, this was very liberating. So I've spent the last few days chasing down outstanding royalty payouts, deleting unnecessary accounts, and turning off auto-renewal on domains. It's very cleansing.

I was going to do another post but forget that noise, I'll put it right here.

Obvious (?) Shit I Learned the Hard Way Cause I'm That Guy

Over the past few years I have been given advice by people who are much better at this, and I have made a point of Questioning the Premise (QTP, see Becca Syme) or going with my gut most of the time. I've sold 6,000 books which is more than average but not "a lot" so take this as you will. Shout out to all the dudes who were right who I didn't listen to.

1 Goodreads doesn't matter.

I think she was right. What I have found is that while organic Goodreads reviews roughly correlate to sales, Goodreads does not drive sales. I've run ARC campaigns where I ended up with MORE GR reviews than sales (which sucks intensely so don't try it for yourself do not recommend). The extra GR reviews didn't help move the book obviously. Social proof is most useful wherever you're trying to actually sell the book. For most people that's Amazon. From what I can tell, reviews aren't nearly as important on other platforms, especially platforms like Smashwords where the review culture is really not there.

2 You don't really need a website.

Istg I hate he was right about this because this is something I'm good at. You need a domain for your newsletter, both so you have an official email to send from and as a landing page for your newsletter signup. But you don't need a site unless you're big enough to sell direct. Readers will cruise your catalog on the ebook site they prefer to buy from. If you're in KU, that's your Amazon Central. If you're wide and use D2D you already have a Books2Read universal link setup. I built websites for all my pens because I genuinely enjoy it and felt it made the pen look professional, but I put a lot of work into listing and categorizing all my books, etc., etc., and at the end of the day very few readers utilized it.

3 Don't bother with listing sites generally.

By which I mean Bookbub, romance.io and all the other random directory/listing sites and yes, Goodreads. Bookbub is a little different because some people leverage the Bookbub promos, but if you're not doing that, don't bother.

I went out of my way to make sure I had an author presence on a lot of sites, but at the end of the day, if they won't sign up for your newsletter or follow you on a storefront, fuck em. I'm serious. Don't spread yourself thin trying to expand your presence across tons of sites. Updating all that crap is a pain in the ass.

4 Don't Agonize over your Backmatter

I might get some hoohah for this and that's ok. There's this idea that if a reader can't get your next book within like 1 click they'll say OH WELL I HAVE ALREADY FORGOTTEN THIS AUTHOR EXISTS and you lost them forever. A tragic story, for sure.

As someone who maintained absolutely meticulous backmatter for years (including updating previous books when new ones came out, which was extremely tedious, and even having store-specific editions of epubs so the reader would go directly to that store's listing rather than a universal link), but started simplifying in the past year, I feel like being insane about backmatter didn't actually move the needle for me. Like, at all. And it was so much work.

CTA (call to action) backmatter is probably more important for erotica than for other genres, because the stories are short impulse buys and you've already got a warm, horny reader interested in your work. So the standard on this is 3 hooks with links.

• A book just like this one (or next in series)
• A book adjacent to this niche
• Your best bundle

And for your hooks, its stuff like, "If you want more sexy bubble-butt baras getting spanked, check out..."

But generally speaking, if a reader loves your book, they're gonna turn the page to your "also by" or they're gonna look up your catalog. They're not just gonna shrug like "oh no Best Author in the Universe didn't place the exact link directly under my finger I guess I'll never read them again" and sometimes, that's what all the ink split on backmatter/CTA seems to imply. I get that we need to reduce barriers to purchase, but don't be weird about it.

Also I get that KU readers are allegedly these undiscriminating knuckle-draggers who hoover up formula books like an elephant narfing peanuts in those old cartoons and if they can't click something with in 0.0000000000412 nanoseconds they'll immediately switch to a competitors books to slake their horrible and ungodly thirst for trope books, and I appreciate that Amazon in its infinite wisdom will mark the story as over before they hit the formal backlist, but that's also not my problem ¯_(ツ)_/¯ haha see ya suckas!

And if you say "Renaldo you don't sell enough books to know squat about anything why should anyone care what you think," that's valid but also fuck you.

ANYWAY, my takeaway is

Don't worry about doing all the things. Do the things you have energy for or like. A lot of "the things" have absolutely negligible impact compared to writing good books, having solid covers that your readership recognizes, and solid passive advertising, unless you're already selling a crapton of books and you are wanting to expand into every nook and cranny.

IDK what my full strategy will be for my next pen but I ain't doin none of ^^^^ that nonsense.

Comments

[lassarina]

I waffle on whether I actually want to publish (either attempt trad, or self) anything ever but I really appreciate these posts of yours because so much of the admin looks from the outside like hella effort for minimal to zero return, and it's nice to see an actual experience.

[renegadefolkhero]

As an outsider with modest sales, I have observed that some people get A LOT of bang for their buck out of newsletters (cheap potentially even free), instagram/tiktok (which is cheap if DIY), and ads (which will set your money on fire if you don't know what you're doing). Book Blasts used to be huge for some people, but it's sorta like Twitter pitch events in that the returns may be diminishing as more people get involved.

What's good about the above is you can outsource those tasks if you hate admin and would rather pay an assistant, and the higher tier authors often do that.

Honestly after I wrote that post I realized I need to get in there and start experimenting again because I suck at marketing and that won't change unless I work at it and get better.

[lassarina]

*cheers you on*