One of the more interesting parts of my professor’s lectures on the business of writing this week was what she called “career building.” She started with a hypothetical first book, and worked it through a new writer’s burgeoning career.

That’s the sort of long-term financial projection Konrath likes to work through from time to time to demonstrate the financial appeal of self-publishing. Professor Chester wasn’t taking that approach at all, though. She was just trying to give us a realistic idea what to expect.

Caveats

Before we can really lay out a scenario, we’ve got to consider some of the caveats that go along with the numbers. You may have heard that the average advance on a first novel is $5,000, but how do you actually get that money?

We’re talking legacy publishing here, so I’ll assume throughout that you’ve already got an agent. That’s how my professor approached it, too.

So if you sign for a $5,000 advance, you’re giving $750 of that to your agent in commission. And you don’t get the remaining $4,250 all at once.

You’ll usually get a third of it ($1,417) at signing, a third on submission, and the rest on publication. The way the industry works, that’s going to take about 12-18 months, all told.

Each time the company cuts you a check they actually send it to your agent. He’ll take out his cut, then (within a couple weeks), send you yours.

But don’t go spend it! First, you need to withhold your taxes, or you’ve going to have a really bad day early next year. You canfill out forms and do the math, or you can get pretty close by just keeping back about a third of the check.

So your $5,000 first book advance?  You’ll actually get it in three low, low payments of $472 dollars of spending money.

An Aside

Now, lest you think I’m being too snarky, I should concede that Gods Tomorrow has been for sale for six months now and it’s only earned me a touch over $300.

If I’d signed it with a publisher last October instead of putting in on Amazon, I’d have something closer to $700 on it by now. Then again, I didn’t have an offer at the time. If, instead, I’d started shopping it last October, I might have an agent by now, who might be sending it to interested publishers, who might be offering me a deal sometime in the next year. And that would be worth precisely $0 so far.

A Hypothetical Career

But we’re not talking about real current earnings today, we’re talking about career building. I didn’t take detailed notes on the precise imaginary figures she used, but I can convey the overall idea.

The way it happens, she said, is that you start with a hardcover deal with a medium-sized hardback publisher. You’re a total unknown, so they offer a $2,500 advance. Several months after that your agent finds a paperback publisher willing to pay a $5,000 advance (that deal is actually the $5,000-average-first-book-advance you’ve been hearing about), and maybe he even finds a publisher in the UK who throws $2,500 at you, too.

There are even more complications in how you get paid for that, and those three deals are going to be staggered over more than a year, but eventually (with a few earned royalties) you’re going to bring in about $12,000 on that book. Your agent takes his 15% and Uncle Sam gets 33%, so after a couple years you’ll get to spend about $7,000 of that.

If your book performs well, even if you never earn out your $5,000 paperback advance, you’re going to get better deals on your second book. Not a lot better, but maybe $3,000, $6,000, and $3,000 from the same three publishing companies. That nets you an extra $1,200 (spread out over two years) and, more importantly, some name recognition.

The Escalation

The thing is, if you want to build a career in legacy publishing you need more than those $5,000-$10,000 advances. To get that, you need to get your book in major bookstore chains. Or, better yet, in grocery stores and airports. The only way that happens is if your publisher puts your book there, and they only do that if they believe in you.

“Believe in you” means 5- or 6-figure advances. It means 50,000 to 100,000 paperback sales on your record, and you can’t get that until your publisher is at least pushing you hard at the bookstore chains.

So you start with a $7,000 income over two years and keep your day job. You sell another book your second year and pay down some debt with the $8,200 you get to spend. Maybe you land some big promotion on book three, get some serious sales, and jump up to a higher tier of publisher (and a higher tier of advances) for book four.

ANd by then you’ve got a name. By then your agent is selling foreign rights all across Europe. By then you’re selling movie options to Hollywood. Your US paperback advance might still just be $10,000-$15,000, but across everything your fourth book might clear $75,000 smooth. Even after your agent’s $10,000 and your government’s $20,000, you’ll get $45,000 in spending money.

Spread out over two or three years, of course.

That’s…well, it’s still not enough to let you quit your day job. Of course, if you can maintain those sales year after year, the “spread out over two or three years” doesn’t matter too much once it really gets rolling. It can accumulate into a decent, regular income.

In other words, what you’ve got to do is get a lot of books out there and wait 4-5 years (after signing your first contract). If you do that–and if you have a good book that ends up with a good cover image and good product description–you just might end up with a career in writing that pays your bills.

I’ve talked before about Deborah Chester, the core professor of my Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Oklahoma. She’s a phenomenal teacher, and she consistently displays a deep understanding of the process of writing commercial fiction.

That’s a skill worth having, believe me.

She also teaches several classes on the undergrad level, and when I first started the program last fall it was in the slash-listed course Category Fiction (which I’ve also discussed around here). When I say “slash-listed,” I mean the course was open both to Masters students and to high-level undergrads, and we had a good mix of both.

As a result, the majority of the class already seemed to know Professor Chester pretty well at the beginning of the semester. She’d start talking about some writer’s bad habit of indulging in exposition, then wag a finger at one of the students and say, “Just like you!” And everyone would laugh.

I felt pretty left out of all that. I’ve mentioned my issues with social anxiety, and feeling out-of-the-loop is an easy way to trip into that downward spiral, so as soon as I recognized what was going on I decided to fix it. I sent Professor Chester an email asking to schedule an appointment during office hours just to come in and get to know her. And she graciously obliged.

I was more than a little nervous going into that meeting, but she was friendly and open. She’s made it her life’s work to help writers find their way in an incredibly complicated and punishing career field. And (like so many of us) she’s an introvert herself, so she was pretty forgiving of my nervousness.

And so, eventually, we talked. I learned that she had done her undergraduate work in this very program, and through her professor’s connections she’d sold her senior writing project (a fantasy novel) to a traditional publisher the summer after graduation. Then she came back for the Masters program, and after that hired on to replace her professor primarily on the strength of her sales record.

I told her some of my stories, too. The one where I got embarrassed about my fantasy novel, and the one where I tried half-heartedly to shop my unsolicited manuscript to top-tier publishers, and the one where I gave up on writing for five years at a time. And, to end it on a high note, the one where I got back into writing in 2007 and finished three novels in one year.

And by then we were running out of time, but I had a question strong on my mind. This was last October–about a week before my first novel was scheduled to go up for sale on Amazon–and I wanted to know where she stood on the issue of self-publishing and e-books in general. So I asked.

It was an emotionally loaded question given my circumstances, and I didn’t give her any indication of my circumstances (which isn’t really fair), so she answered honestly. In her opinion, e-books were a flash-in-the-pan, an insignificant portion of sales, and self-publishing was pretty unprofessional and, honestly, a waste of time. Because what can you really hope to get with it? 500 readers? She shook her head and dismissed the concept out of hand.

I disagreed. (If you’ve been reading my blog for the last weeks, you know I obviously still do.) But my opinion is one based on the evidence and arguments of others. Hers was one based on extensive first-hand experience. She’s got 38 novels published. It’s hard to argue with that.

So I kept my mouth shut, kept my head down, and paid attention. I didn’t change my plans at all, but I didn’t speak them too loudly around campus, either. The last thing I needed was for her to get wind of it and consider me an unprofessional hack, when I would eventually need her on the chair of my graduate committee!

But the Professional Writing program is an incredibly small community, and even though I’ve only talked about my self-publishing exploits with a couple of my classmates, word has gotten around. There’s another class going on right now, “The Business of Professional Writing,” and when they started talking about the opportunities in self-publishing one of my classmates chimed in with all kinds of informed opinion.

I’m told the professor asked, “How do you know all this stuff?”

And my classmate tilted his head, frowned, and said, “Don’t you read Aaron Pogue’s blog?”

And of course the professors talk. I suspect word has finally gotten around, because Professor Chester came into class to talk about the submission process and “getting a book deal” for yesterday’s class.

And she opened it by saying, “There are different processes. There’s the very old one where you mail in actual paper submissions. There’s the newer one where what they really want is email. And then of course there’s self-publishing on things like Kindle. Some people really like the idea. I don’t know much about that, I’ve never done it, so I can’t comment on it. But I’ll tell you all about the other method.”

That wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned self-publishing in class, but it was certainly the most generous she’d been toward the concept. She mentioned it a couple more times over the course of that class, and always in the same way: “I don’t trust it, but some people really like the idea.”

She didn’t look at me. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But I suspect she knows. I think we’ve gotten to the point where everybody knows where everybody else stands, and we’re all very politely not talking about it.

And I’m okay with that. Konrath has five rules for self-publishing, and the last one is, “Wait at least a year.” That’s what I’m doing now. I’m investing that time in perfecting the other four rules, and trying not to pay too much attention to my sales figures in the meantime. If and when I pass that 500 readers mark–if and when I start making serious money off Gods Tomorrow, then I’ll go and talk with her from my first-hand experience. In the meantime, I’m willing to wait and see.

But there are things she said in our “business” lectures that I need to talk about here. Especially after the series I’ve run for the last three weeks. So stick around for more on the business of writing, and what you could expect from a legacy publishing deal.

On Tuesday I interrupted a three-week introduction to the Kindle publishing phenomenon for a case study near and dear to our hearts: Courtney Cantrell’s Kindle publishing success story.

Now, admittedly she’s no Hocking yet. She’s a success regardless. She has already sold well beyond her immediate circle of friends and family, and even out past one remove. She’s not making enough money to pay the bills yet (not even close), but her book is being read by new people–by strangers–and there are more and more of them with every day that passes.

Konrath’s formula for Kindle publishing overnight success goes

• Write really good books, with good covers, and good product descriptions
• Get lots of books out there
• And wait at least a year.

Courtney’s got one book for sale, and it’s been out for a couple weeks. Considering that, she’s doing fine.

But today I want to talk about Konrath’s rules, and why they work (and, by extension, why I can now call Courtney a success with such confidence). It all has to do with some fundamental changes in society–specifically with the end of The Media and the rise of the Global Information Network.

Accessibility

One of the books I had to review for Readings in Mass Communication was Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility, edited by Andrew J. Flanagin. The book was all about how the new generation of “digital natives” views and interacts with mass media. You’ve seen glimpses of their findings throughout my claims over the last three weeks.

One of the most important (and dramatic) findings in their research is that digital natives equate credibility with the accessibility of useful information. By comparison, credibility used to be evaluated primarily by the quality of the source (in our case, that would be the publishers). But digital natives have grown up with ready to access to vast stores of information, and thanks to aggregators and search engines and user-generated content, it’s often difficult to know the true source for any given piece of information.

So they’ve turned more and more of their focus from centralized legitimizing sources to more personal metrics like the speed and ease of access. If those things sound familiar, those are precisely the things we’ve been talking about throughout our discussion of Kindle publishing.

Specifically, Kindle publishing provides authors with speed and ease of access to the publishing process. That’s the primary appeal of it. A direct result of that, though, is that readers gain all the advantages of in their own access to the books they’re looking for.

According to Konrath, publishers are adamantly uninterested in publishing more than one title per author per year. (Incidentally my professor Deborah Chester, who is much-published and a staunch supporter of legacy publishing has unknowingly backed him up on this in lectures.)

Kindle publishers, on the other hand, can release multiple titles in the same time. Consortium Books, my little indie publishing company, is on track to publish 6 titles in 2011 and we hope to publish 12 in 2012–18 titles total, and nearly all of them from just two authors.

Amanda Hocking addressed the same issue, when she announced her legacy publishing deal. Even as she’s signing a three-book deal with St. Martin’s Press, she announces she’s also going to release multiple titles on her own before the end of the year. She has no intention of abandoning Kindle publishing because she has a massive backlog of (extremely valuable) books–twenty titles of her own–and it would take decades to get those pushed through the legacy publishing process.

Instead, she’s taking advantage of the speed and ease of access that Kindle publishing creates to get more books out there, and have them selling longer–two of Konrath’s core rules for success. As she does that, she’s providing speed and ease of access to her books to her readers–something legacy publishers can’t do–which increases her credibility.

Social Collaborative Endorsement

The other major method digital natives use to evaluate credibility is something called the “bandwagon heuristic” or social collaborative endorsement. That means, for a given reader, the more of his peers who seem to find something credible, the more he finds it credible.

That might seem obvious. But, to be fair, the point of the study wasn’t to find something shocking, but to understand how we interact with this revolutionary new information network we’re all immersed in. And one answer that’s critically significant to our discussion here is that, in the network era, we’ve taken credibility assessment away from centralized legitimizers (again, legacy publishers) and placed it in the hands of the masses. We’ve crowdsourced gatekeeping.

The easiest way to understand this is that, in broad strokes, popularity equals credibility. That’s why we care about a site’s pagerank, or how many hits it’s gotten. That’s why we care about the number of views a YouTube video has, or the number of downloads of Firefox compared with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

And that’s why Bestseller lists matter. Even as readers reject legacy publishing as a central source of authority, they turn to Amazon’s Bestseller lists to find books worth reading. If a book appears on Amazon’s Bestseller list, that means a lot of a person’s peers have deemed it credible.

Amazon has demonstrated an uncanny grasp of social collaborative endorsement and they’ve done everything they can to build it into their system. They’re constantly refining their recommendation engine to advertise products to their customers based on the preferences of other customers who have exhibited similar tastes (or, in other words, the customers’ peers).

That’s compelling information. Above and beyond sales numbers, studies show that digital natives prefer the reviews or analyses of their peers over the reviews or analyses of professionals or experts.

And there, again, Amazon is ready and willing to facilitate the collapse of the old media. Customer Reviews, one of the most popular features of the Amazon shopping experience, cater to precisely that sort of peer feedback. Amazon even encourages customers to rate the quality of each other’s reviews. At every opportunity Amazon has created a market that caters to social collaborative endorsement.

And as it happens, that market is an incredibly friendly environment for Kindle publishers. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll talk about how an author can get the most out of the global information network.

Tonight is the official launch party for our own Courtney Cantrell’s Colors of Deception. If you’re in the Oklahoma City area, come join us at Vintage Timeless Coffee to celebrate her success.

And, remarkably, it’s already success. Even though the launch party is tonight, the book has been officially “launched” for a week now. That gave everyone time to order their paperbacks and have them shipped in time to get signed at the party tonight. Clever, eh?

And, for that matter, the e-Book was actually on sale the Wednesday before that. So, all told, the book has been available for 13 days now. In that time, she’s sold 109 copies. By the time you read this, it’ll be more.

Now, those numbers are not going to put Random House out of business. But to put them in context, I released Gods Tomorrow on October 12 and hit 111 sales on December 31. That’s 81 days. Courtney should reach 111 sales sometime today. That’s 13 days to my 81. She’s in business.

She’s on the bestseller lists, too.

• #9 in Christian > Science Fiction & Fantasy
• #41 on the Religious > Science Fiction & Fantasy list

She’s been as high as #3 on both lists.

What She’s Doing Right

So how exactly did Courtney blow my numbers out of the water? The answer to that comes in two parts. The boring answer is that the Consortium has gotten a lot better at selling books since we debuted out very first book last October. I’ll talk a little more about that below.

But first I want to talk about what Courtney has done right, especially because that dovetails neatly with the series I’m running on Kindle publishing. This week we’re going to talk about networking as the new mass medium, and Courtney had been working the network like a master.

She talked about it on her blog just today, with an article sharing 3 newbie lessons from getting published. I’ll let her explain it in her own words.

Thus far, Twitter, Kindleboards, Facebook, and blogging have been my greatest allies in promoting Colors of Deception. I’m tweeting and posting — and to my delight, followers and friends are retweeting and reposting. (Thanks, everybody! You guys are cramazing.)

The result of all this networking isn’t just book sales, though — it’s connections all over the place. It’s encouragements coming in from all sides. And it’s tweets and messages that deserve a personal response.

Right now, I’m happily responding, and I’m making the social media work for me.

The next word after that quote is “but,” and it’s worth reading the article because she makes a very important lesson out of it, but that doesn’t detract at all from what she’s said here. I told Courtney a year ago that she needed to start participating on Twitter to build her brand and for the sake of her blog (which didn’t yet exist). I told her three months ago that she had to get involved at Kindleboards and become a part of that community. If she did, I promised, it would sell books.

Courtney practiced what I preached. I haven’t. I haven’t maintained a regular Twitter presence since that time a year ago when I was first recommending it, and I’m only moderately and grudgingly active at Kindleboards. I could recognize both as valuable media, but Courtney actually put in the time and made them work.

And they’ve worked. If Courtney maintains her presence on those bestseller lists, she’s bound to find her audience eventually, and that will mean the kind of success we’ve been talking about for the last two weeks.

What We’re Doing Right

Now, even though I haven’t been hitting the social media as hard as Courtney has, it would paint an incomplete picture of the situation if I left the conversation at just that. Part of the reason we’ve seen so much better numbers for her is that we, as a publisher, have gotten much better at publishing books.

• A week after Gods Tomorrow went live at Amazon someone convinced me to set up its product page at Goodreads. I took my time, but over another week or so I got the book’s details filled out, added lovely cover art, uploaded a digital sample for Goodreads members, and finally started my own author page there and started filling that out.
• Sometime later I was poking around on Amazon’s forums and read a passing mention of the value of Amazon Author Pages. I’d never heard of them. So I did my research, filled out the request, and sometime in November I had my own author page there, too, with links to my book and blog and a bio and a pretty profile pic (courtesy Julie V. Photography).
• While my sales ticked steadily in, I kept doing what I could to improve them. I reread my product description a couple times, but couldn’t really find any way to improve. Then back in January I thought to name Joshua Unruh our Marketing Director, and asked him to give the description a once-over. He hadn’t even read the book, but he immediately spotted some major flaws in it and helped me rework it to find more zing.
• In February I dropped in at Kindleboards.com for the first time ever. It’s a phenomenal community built around the people who own and love Kindles–which is to say serious readers who love books. Every Kindle publisher needs to have a presence at Kindleboards. I started building mine in February. I learned the ropes, figured out how to format a signature that would passively promote my book without irritating the heck out of all the readers, figured out what we could get away with in terms of self-promotion and what sort of conversation got the best return on investment (which, incidentally, was also the most fun sort of conversation: idle chit-chat).

After I launched Gods Tomorrow, I spent the next six months figuring out what information needed to be out there, and where, and how to make that happen. When we launched Courtney’s book thirteen days ago, all of those pieces were already in place for her.

• She had a Goodreads page for Colors of Deception
• She had an author profile for Courtney Cantrell at Goodreads
• She had an author page for Courtney Cantrell at Amazon
• Her book’s description had received critical reviews from me, from her editor, and from our Director of Marketing.
• And the day the book went live she had a beautifully-crafted signature ready for her introduction, her series page, and even her idle chit-chat posts over at Kindleboards.

We’re learning as we go. We’re getting better and better. I’m thrilled with Courtney’s success, and I see all kind of promise in it. We’re already seeing accelerating returns, and it should only get better from here.

Random House…watch your back.