INDIE JOURNEY : Peter Bowerman

Becoming a "Well-Fed Writer"

Okay, so I've been a "paying-all-the-bills-and-then-some" writer since 1994 and just released my fourth book. Of course, I do wrestle with a philosophical question akin to the unwitnessed tree falling in the forest: If I've never written a magazine article or short story, never worked for five cents a word, and never dealt with a publisher, am I still a "writer"?

Guess I'm Mr. Contrary. I wanted to be a writer, but I also wanted to eat. And keep my home, drive a reasonably late-model car, stay out of debt and take a vacation a few times a year. Not terribly high expectations, are they? So, I started out writing marketing copy at $50 an hour (with regular raises since). No interest in being that tortured soul laboring in a drafty attic garret, dodging the landlady, chain-smoking, and eating kidney beans out the can.

Sorry. I didn't read the rules. Especially the one that says that all writers have to suffer for at least a few years, preferably longer, ideally forever...

When I wrote my books, I found a publisher immediately. In the mirror. Truthfully, I only made a half-hearted effort to find a publisher. Why? Probably because I'm a control freak (only half-joking...). Not sure what gave me the sense I could do it (since I had zero experience in publishing of any kind), but what I WAS sure of was that the "deal" being offered by traditional publishing houses was no prize: You give up the rights, control of the creative process, control of the timetable and almost all the profits. And then you're still expected to do most of the marketing yourself. And this is considered the pinnacle by most authors?

An author with $20 retail books like mine might make $1 a book through a publisher. Even on the low end (i.e., through the bookstores and Amazon, where you're giving up 55% of your retail out of the gate), I'll still make 4-5 times that as a self-publisher.

Sales on my own site? I can net $13+. And that doesn't even count the potential to market companion ebook products to web site buyers that they'll purchase along with the hard-copy book, and which represent pure profit-often $20-30 on top of the profit on the hard book. Obviously, the companion-ebook model is easiest to implement with a how-to book that naturally spawns additional high-value content.

When my average web site sale is $35-40, with a hard cost of only about $6, you absolutely annihilate the $1-a-book-or-less traditional publishing model. Plus, I pick up a healthy trickle of after-market, all-profit sales from bookstore and Amazon buyers because I "tease" those e-products in the books themselves. Visit the "Book" links of www.wellfedwriter.com and www.wellfedsp.com to see what I’m talking about.

The potential of such a strategy? Well, I just released my fourth book, combining the heavily updated content of both my first book, the 2000 release, The Well-Fed Writer, and its 2004 companion, TWFW: Back for Seconds. I launched it near the end of June 2009 only to my own list of ezine subscribers, and offered two companion ebook products for sale along with the hard-copy book. In two months (before the book’s gotten near bookstores or Amazon), I completely recouped my entire upfront cost to produce 6000 copies plus an additional 20%. Largely thanks to the ebook strategy.

I don’t think one has to be some marketing wiz to pull that off. Sure, as mentioned, how-to books lend themselves to that model far more than, say, fiction, but if you’re in the how-to genre, ponder the possibilities. As I see it, success as a self-publisher is far more about a lot of things you have to do, than some way you have to be. People need to lose the idea that you have to have a certain "personality" to be a self-publisher.

Related to that, I earnestly believe hat as a self-publisher, your ONLY job is To Build Demand for Your Book. Period. Yes, you have to oversee the physical production of your book: sourcing and vetting competent creative resources (i.e., cover/interior book designers, editors, indexers, etc.), ditto with printers, etc.

But beyond that, anything not related to those tasks I outsourced to others: web site creation/maintenance, actual book fulfillment, and even marketing grunt work (i.e., contacting hundreds of sites catering to my target audiences to get review copies into their hands), which I put in the hands of interns armed with cut-n-paste email pitches; they could do that just as easily as I could and at usually less than $10 an hour, it freed me up to focus on bigger fish (find great, cheap admin help on www.elance.com).

Yes, the marketing job is a big one, but nothing beyond any reasonably intelligent person. Over the years, I've been approached by three traditional publishing houses, asking whether I'd considered that route. While I was flattered by their attentions, there was nothing they could do for me that I wasn’t doing far more profitably on my own.

Having just released my fourth book, the process is easier. I know what I'm doing, and what things need to happen when. Plus, I have an established group of people out there in my industry – call them the "key influencers" – who know me and my work, respect what I'm doing, know I put out quality products, and are happy to promote my work to their communities.

So, life's good. What's next? Who knows? I don't set goals. Seriously. Or write business plan. Yuck. Everything I've created has taken shape pretty much organically, when the time was right. Got a few ideas cooking, but they'll keep. It really is about the journey.

Peter Bowerman is the self-publishing author of the 2000 award-winning Book-of-the-Month Club selection, The Well-Fed Writer, its 2004 companion, TWFW: Back For Seconds (which, together, paid all the bills and then some for over five years), and the 2009 updated compilation of both (www.wellfedwriter.com). He chronicled his self-publishing success in the 2007 IPPY-award-winner, The Well-Fed Self-Publisher: How to Turn One Book into a Full-Time Living (www.wellfedsp.com). He lives in Atlanta, and yes, still writes marketing copy.