by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Blue-footed booby
I had another post I was working on, but life got in the way. So I thought I’d rerun a column on discoverability. It seems apt in this age of AI. Has anything changed? Where we go:
Discoverability is becoming as rare as the blue-footed booby.
According to Bowker, the outfit that registers ISBN numbers, over a million self-published books were issued ISBNs last year.
That’s a one with six zeros after it.
And understand, this does not include traditionally-published books, nor all the ebook-only titles without ISBNs.
Which means there’s a whole lotta books out there, and more added every year. (Most of which are bad. See Sturgeon’s Law.)
Industry observer Mike Shatzkin added this:
I had reason to learn recently that Ingram has 16 million individual titles loaded in their Lightning Source database ready to be delivered as a bound book to you within 24 hours, if not sooner. So every book coming into the world today is competing against 16 million other books that you might buy.
That number — the number of individual book titles available to any consumer, bookstore, or library — has exploded in my working lifetime. As recently as 25 years ago, the potential titles available — in print and on a warehouse shelf ready to be ordered, or even to be backordered until a next printing — was numbered in the hundreds of thousands. So it has grown by 20 or 30 or 40 times. That’s between 2000 percent and 4000 percent in the last quarter century.
Of discoverability, agent Rachelle Gardner recently observed:
How can any single book stand out in that large of a field? It’s very difficult. The problem is known as discoverability and it means the odds are stacked against us when we want to bring readers’ attention to our books.
This is why the publisher needs your help—it’s important to find your audience, that specific group of people who will like your book. They need you engaging with your audience, connecting with them, doing your part to make them aware of you.
Even with all this work, it’s still hard to make your book discoverable. It’s not anyone’s fault. Publishers are not conspiring to make life difficult for you. They’re not being unreasonable by requiring authors to participate in marketing. It’s simply the situation we find ourselves in—there are too many books, so we all have to work so much harder to each one stand out to its unique audience.
One line that jumped out at me is: the publisher needs your help. It used to be the other way around. A writer needed a traditional publisher to get into bookstores. If there were some marketing dollars in the budget, the publisher might arrange to have the book placed on the New Release table at the front of the store.
But now, with bookstore space shrinking, and marketing push going almost exclusively to the A list, authors writing inside the walls of the Forbidden City are expected to do audience building themselves (which has some authors wondering why the publishing houses still take the same royalty split as when they did all the heavy lifting. But I digress).
So how do you build an audience these days? The old-fashioned way. You earn it. (Hat tip to John Houseman).
Book after book. And more than one or two titles. You don’t hit a stride until you have several books out there to go with a steady pace of future production.
Another agent, Steve Laube, also reflected on the Bowker publishing numbers, and offered this advice:
- Write the very best book you can.
- Build an audience who will support your work (i.e. platform).
- Decide whether to self-publish (but only do it the right way) or go the traditional route (get an agent).
- Figure out how to launch a book.
The fundamentals don’t change, do they? That’s why they’re called fundamentals. I’d modify the list a bit this way:
- Write the very best books (plural) you can, at least one per year.
- Keep learning and growing in the craft.
- Decide what kind of writer you want to be. If self-publishing is on your mind, consider:
- Can you be sufficiently productive?
- Do you have the discipline to learn basic business practices?
- Are you willing to invest between $500 and $2,000 for cover design, editing, and proofreading for each book?
- If traditional publishing is your goal, ask:
- Am I patient enough to wait up to 18 months for my book to come out?
- Will my agent fight for more author-friendly non-compete and reversion-of-rights clauses?
- Am I ready with a plan should my publisher drop me?
One word I do wish we’d get rid of is platform. For non-fiction a platform is desirable because there’s a built-in audience for a subject. But agents and publishers push this amorphous concept on unpublished fiction authors, which only adds to their stress and detracts from their writing time.
The best time for a fiction writer to build a platform is 2003. That’s when we weren’t so blog saturated that a new author might actually gain a following. That’s when we weren’t tossing away good writing time on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram (and, worse, thinking that the latter venues are good places to sell books!)
As I argued a couple of years ago, we need to get out of “discoverability thinking” and into “trustability thinking.”
You should be thinking that each new offering is an opportunity to prove to readers that you deliver the goods. As you do this, time after time, trust in you grows. Consumers buy more from businesses they trust. Readers are consumers and you are a business.
This applies whether you are traditional or indie, commercial or literary, tall or short.
Or have blue feet.
So … are you about to dive into the cold Atlantic of content, knowing full well how vast and choppy it is out there? Have you taken swimming lessons (studied craft and market)?
Or are you already swimming?
How’s the water?
“Write the very best books (plural) you can,” – “at least one per year.”
Which leaves out a lot of people who would love to do that second part, but CAN’T.
Getting the interest of an agent seems like the only avenue you’ve left us – but the that agent will have to wait 15 years for the second book. That’s asking a lot of an agent and a potential publisher.
You don’t have to lower your writing standards when you’re chronically ill and/or disabled – but few of us who write under those conditions have the capacity for doing it quickly.
I’ve spent the last 24 years thinking about that marketing conundrum – attempting to get help from the fast-moving ‘real world’ – to little avail. The first book took 15 years, the second only 7; the final mainstream trilogy volume is at least 5 more years in the future.
Any OTHER ideas? Many thanks!
I think that the first book takes a long time for most writers, even without illness and disability. Even so, look at the positive: you halved the time to write the second novel, you’ve done the hard work of world building and establishing characters, you probably know how it ends. There’s every reason to think you’ll halve the time again on book 3. And if you start another trilogy, it probably won’t take as long because you’ll be 20 years and three novels smarter than you were when you set off on this journey.
My question is: How do you go about finding your audience? How do you find the reader who enjoys your genre?
Jim, for me writing has always felt like swimming against the tide but the breakers are now tidal waves.
Author/editor/ghostwriter Keir Graff says writing a book is like buying a lottery ticket that takes a year to fill out. Yup.
But we gotta write whether the odds are 10 to one or 10 billion to one.
My audience is small but loyal, built one reader at a time. We’ve met through personal appearances at book clubs, fairs, teaching, conferences, and radio interviews. In this disconnected age of virtual reality, people crave connection with a real human.
Is this efficient marketing? Nope. Do I make money? Snort! But these friendships are far more rewarding than squandering my limited time and energy on advertising, social media, keyword manipulation, dancing videos, etc, etc, etc.
I’m dog-paddling along, writing because I enjoy it. I was fortunate to have been around during the “golden age” of indie publishing, plus had a couple of serendipitous breaks, which gave me a nest egg to keep going. My productivity has dropped from 3 books in some years to two, and now, given a major commitment for 2025, probably only one this year.
And I had the privilege of seeing a good number of blue, red, and brown-footed boobies on a trip to the Galapagos.
Thanks for running this column again, Jim. The wisdom here is evergreen.
“Trustability” is indeed the way, IMHO, rather than discoverability. I remember when SEO was the rage among indies, 12-13 years ago. Not so much any more, because its a bid for discoverability rather than a focus on what we do, which is write the best books we can, and publish them.
As far as my own current experience in the choppy waters:
My five-novel urban fantasy series, The Empowered , published 2017-2020, still brings in little streams of income each month, despite having not marketed it for some time(I am doing a book promotion for book 1 on Tuesday, the first time in a few years). My two stand alone novels sell a copy or two every now or then, but no surprise, it’s the series that endures.
My Meg Booker 1980s library cozy series has not broken out so far, and perhaps never will. Near-historical cozies are not a thing—the vast majority are set in the eternal present. Now, I currently only have two Meg Booker novels out, with the third book waiting to be revised. Right now, I’m getting ready to write something else—either the fourth Meg Booker novel, or a return to fantasy. There’s a strong argument to be made to double down on Meg so that I can have four books out in the not too distant future, which is a goodly number to know if this series will ever fly with readers or not.
However, as noted, it’s a bit of a black swan when it comes to cozies. I’ve thought about writing one set in the eternal present—that’s in the idea garden at the moment.
Fortunately, my success with my urban fantasy has given me a decent publishing fund in the bank, so I can cover book publishing costs for a few years still.
Love the swimming metaphor, Dr. Bell.
Because I’m a swimmer. Always have been. And swimming is a great teacher.
Regular swimming teaches one not only about improving skills, but also about perseverance. Sticking with it no matter the current or the chop. You just keep your head down and never stop stroking.
Swimming is also well-suited to the independent-minded person/author. For swimming is a lonely sport. It’s just you and the water. Lap after lap, mile after mile.
But the dividends are there. For both swimmers and independent authors.
Just keep stroking.
Great analogy, Harald.
I think about this all the time.
For me I have to believe it’s the art of creating a story that is my reward. I can’t pay the rent with that, but it pays my spirit and soul to create and spend time with those characters.
Today, as I was going through old folders, I discovered a one-page begging. As I was reading it, I thought, “damn, this is good, who wrote it?” and then I saw a reference that could only have come from me. I felt in my spirit that on that day long ago, I had the “magic”, and years later it still spoke to me even though I can’t remember writing it! (I am thinking it was a writing prompt from a class. Not drugs or alcohol!)
Have a good week.
I decided early on to try and carve a lane for myself in writing. I aim to entertain thoughtful readers with clean mysteries that feature clever plot lines and interesting characters. My readers know I won’t insult their intelligence or their sensibilities with my stories. I hope that satisfies the “trustability” quotient.
So the water is okay. Colder and choppier than I thought it would be, but I’m still afloat and moving forward. 🙂
This is such a good review of how the publishing world has changed and why it’s so hard to gain visibility for our books. Lots of good advice. Thanks for reposting!
In the late Eighties and early Nineties, romance writers started to do their own promotions, and their publishers were irate and told them to stop because that was the publisher’s job to do or not do. Emphasis on “not do.” Then the best promoters started climbing the charts, and the publishers shut up. Other genre publishers started paying attention and, soon, their authors were shoved into personal promotion. The good news for everyone was that most genre publishing exploded in popularity as more readers were introduced to the genres.
Dean Wesley Smith has more ideas for getting books out there than any collection of indies I’ve ever seen. He has books for sale in Humble Bundle collections and signed paperbacks all over ebay. He says to never underestimate the rabid secondary market on ebay, but most indies don’t know it exists.
Dave Farland had an article where he talked about promoting his Runelords books. He had the idea to go commission an artist to paint 12 pictures for a calendar. The art was so compelling that people bought the calendar and the books, too. Later on, his publisher used some of the calendar paintings for book covers.
That got me thinking. In the book How to Get People to Like You in 90 Seconds or Less, one of the things he talks about is Capturing the Imagination. On the internet, people are looking for something to catch their imagination, and people LOVE stories. The Runelords calendar obviously did just that, so how much more effective would the same approach be now? I’m an artist, so I started drawing character sketches and things. (I see people do this with AI, and I suppose it’s better than nothing.) I have a superhero fantasy book series, and I started turning that into a graphic novel and sharing the pages online. The further I get into the story, the more people are running out and buying the book to see what happens next, or even the whole series. I successfully captured their imaginations with the comic. I’m not a bestseller or anything, but I’m investing in my backlist. Each page is a potential entry point for new readers, and so far I’m up to 93 pages.
Also, Substack is great. I’ve connected with a ton of new readers by posting a new book as a serial there, and by posting fun articles, and schmoozing other authors and readers on the Notes section (which is like a facebook feed). Never underestimate the value of good schmoozing!
Every book has an audience, even if it’s only one person.
I began writing, well aware it wasn’t going to make me a millionaire. I did it because I knew what I wanted to read and hoped there was at least one other person out there who would read the books I’ve written. (more than one have read all of them.)
I’ve looked at all the marketing ‘advice” and what I’m supposed to be doing. If I did that, I’d never have time to write. So I’m working on learning how to write the best book I can for an audience of at least one and hope for more. Yes, I connect with others, but my goal isn’t this huge following. It is for those readers who enjoy what I’ve written. So I use my email list to keep in touch with those few writers.
I’m lovin’ the comments as well as your excellent post. I’ve written 18 books over the last 12,years and have a pretty solid fan base for a trad-published,Christian-themed romantic suspense writer. Can’t quit the day job (retirement) because I can’t not write.
Hopefully fans of my books will keep buying as I slow down a bit, but planning on at least one book a year.