Publishing Industry Predictions and Plans for 2022
Julie Broad reviews 2021 book sales and makes seven predictions for authors in 2022. Print sales grew 9% despite paper shortages and rising costs. Ebook royalty pools jumped 19% on Kindle, but ad costs are climbing and audio is growing fast.
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Hello. Happy Tuesday, my friends. I am just making sure the sound is working. I had to switch headphones at the last minute. All right. Hello. It is the last Tuesday of January. Can you believe that? Yeah. So as we are wrapping up the first month of 2022, I thought now would be a great time to. To just talk about what's going on in the publishing industry. How did we finish 2021? What can we look at and expect, maybe hope for in 2022? So, as you're joining in, whether you're watching the replay or you're here with me live, make sure you say hello and chime into the comments. Of course, if you're not familiar with my YouTube channel, everybody who comments the day a video is released gets entered to win some free fabulous swag. So when you're watching the replay, keep that in mind. All right, so today's subject we are diving into. Essentially, I want to start off with good news. That's where I want to start. So people are buying books. People are buying lots of books. And while demand isn't quite as hot as it was when the pandemic first set into its early days, we still saw an overall increase in in book sales last year and a 9% increase in print book sales overall. Now, for us folks in non fiction, nonfiction was not the driver of this. It was mostly going from memory, but it was mostly fiction and a lot of adult fiction, as well as some children's fiction books as well. But still, nonfiction was up there. It was doing okay. Now, the stats also showed that unlike some reports, the new releases weren't the drivers of the big sales numbers. It was actually backlists, so older books that were generating the sales. So I'm going to take this as a positive for all authors as well. Your book does not have to be brand new to sell. And if your launch was lackluster, it's not the end of your book's life. That's also why I always try to emphasize that book marketing is a journey. It's not a destination. A launch is not the determinant of your book's success. You don't launch a book and then stop. You launch and then try new things and try more new things and find things that work and find things that don't. And that's why it is a journey. It's a little bit of a mental game, like a marathon. You gotta keep going, take a sip of water along the way. Now, the part that's gonna be interesting in 2022 to a point is that Paper supply and paper demand for papers obviously strong. 9% increase in print books. But the supply of paper has been a real challenge for the industry and there's no end to that supply challenge in sight. Now one of the things that should interest you is where the pressure will hit where actually will start to hit the price of books to the end consumer. So I've got some thoughts on that. Some things I'm already seeing some. So we'll see what that sounds like. So while I'm just gonna take a moment to say hello to everyone who's joined in. So Angela, thanks for being here as always. Efren lakeisha AD Winter, so great to have you here. Martha, long time, long time no see. I'm so, so excited to see you here. And let's see. Kat, hello. I was just commenting, I was just replying to some of your comments on the old videos. So great to have you here and congrats. AD that's exciting. Ad says I'm about to publish my first no February, so good luck with that. And Bill has just joined as well. So hello Bill, welcome. So we're talking 2022. I'm starting off with a little bit of a, you know, sales update from 2021 just to get you guys in the mind of what's going on now with the supply issues. We are already seeing Ingram and Lulu and I believe KDP. KDP's price increase isn't top of mind like Ingram's continuous they increased paperbacks, they're increasing hardcovers. And then Lulu did an increase as well that we didn't even feel like we got notified. It was like all of a sudden our costs were just up a dollar per book that was getting printed. So prices are going up and that should at some point translate to increased book prices, at least on the print side. And we are seeing that a little bit, which I'll come to in a minute. And I think as print prices go up in many genres, many categories, you'll ebook prices going up a little bit. And you're seeing a little bit of that already. Just checking my notes here. Oh yeah. And we are seeing signs of this as the AS 2021 wrapped up with a 15% increase in overall dollar volume of sales. And the notation on this was that it was because of average higher prices. So higher average prices and fewer dollar promotions. So publishers all around were raising the prices of their books and not running discounted prices as much. So that did drive an overall increase in dollar sales volume as well. So we are seeing a Creep in the cost being passed on to, the cost increases being passed on to the end consumer, the end book user, which is good because otherwise that means the author will eat it, especially in indie publishing. But even in traditional publishing, it squeezes the margins on publishers, which means they'll squeeze the royalty rates for authors and they'll decrease the amount of money that they are going to give you as advances, which I've talked about before. To me, one of the only reasons to take a tradition of the only reasons, but one of the things that I would personally look at if I was ever going to consider a traditional deal is the size of the advance as well as my ability to control the rights to a lot of different formats of the material. Those would be two of the main factors. And I would want a pretty sizable advance because that would mean they're going to be putting resources behind the book promotion and they're also going to, they're also expecting and seeing potential for this book. And it's going to be worth my while to give up some of these rights in exchange for that. But again, I would really want to negotiate my audiobook rights, probably all my foreign rights, TV rights, I'd want a lot of rights. So probably traditional publishers and I are just not going to see eye to eye anytime soon on that. And so a lot of this ding it for anybody wondering has come from a paid newsletter called the Hot Sheet, put out by Jane Friedman. It's a great industry newsletter. If anybody's kind of publishing a lot or they're working with other authors, getting the Hot Sheet is a really great investment in knowing what's going on in the industry. She links out to a lot of great research papers so I can get a lot of data from those sources. So while there's more demand for book paper than ever, why the expected supply issues are going to continue is that book paper? The note said book paper currently represents 5% of the overall paper market. However, it's been increasing over time as dwindling demand in other spots, you know, basically shrinks the overall share. But nobody's adding paper capacity for book paper because it's relative to other papers. It's quite expensive paper to make. So nobody's going, I've got a couple billion sitting around, I'm going to invest in a low ROI paper mill to make more book paper. So that's why the supply shortage is not going to change anytime soon. Of course I'm simplifying what's more complex than that. But ultimately, you know, there isn't more supply coming on stream. So you're. And if demand holds steady or even increases, you're just not going to see anything but an option for price increasing further and supply shortages or supply stretching. So on the ebook side, Angela has a link to a K Lytics video which does a great summary of the end of year trends for Kindle. And they note that in Kindle select, which is the exclusive with Amazon program and is probably somewhat reflective of what overall ebook sales did in 2019. But the sales were up by. Or not sales. The royalty pool was up by 19%. So it was. I can't remember the exact number. 450 million in royalties was paid out to authors in the United States in 2021, which was up 19% from the year before. So that's a pretty sizable increase with an already sizable pool. So that does tell you the ebook demand. And ebook people going to the subscription model also. And prob probably getting more and more books in the Kindle Unlimited program is likely quite high and growing. So you guys, if you're a fiction author, this was a pretty good summary video. It talked. It didn't spend much time on nonfiction because it was the fourth biggest ebook category. So they focused on romance, science fiction and something else. So if you're a fiction writer, it's a short video, easy to watch. Might be worth checking out if you want to know some of the trends and in your genre. So some of the sales. So some of the sales. So I was kind of curious, okay, so the sales are up. Where are sales coming from? And there was a research study from Pew, Pew Research that found that there are. That 30% of Americans are now reading books, which to me was astoundingly low. But anyways, especially when you work in this industry and everybody at your company is an avid book reader. I mean, I feel sometimes in our company meetings like the outsider. Because Angela will post a question. What are you reading? And people are listing off all these cool books and everybody knows all these books. And they're like, that's amazing. And I'm going, I've never heard of that one. I don't know about that one. And everybody else is like, oh, that's a good one. And have you read this? So to think that only 30% of Americans are reading books was a surprising number to me. But that is up from 25%. All right, so I'm just coming back to check in on you folks. If you have questions. I see your question 80. Angela will collect them all. And we do Q&A @ the end. And while you're here, give that thumbs up button a little hit. Makes me feel good. Thank you. I see it ticking up now. That's great. Then I know you're here too. You're not just like, you know, snoozing in the background and just a number on the screen and just seeing who else is here. I think I've said hello to everyone, so that's great. If you are here, please do say hello. We have participation prizes and we'll be doing that up in a second. Before I get to my predictions, a couple of them are more like what I Hope happens in 2022. And then most of them are predictions of what I think is coming in 2022. Okay, so speaking of that, so there's 5% more of Americans are reading. That's part of it also, I suspect. And now this is a bit of a suspicion, not necessarily something I have data to accurately back up. But I also think that some of the sales are probably coming in lieu of library borrowing because for a lot of the last year, I think many libraries were closed, restricted. And I also have heard from quite a few people that they have that like that borrowing books has a germ factor to them. So they didn't want to necessarily borrow books from the library. So I suspect library borrowing is down a bit and people have replaced it with things like Kindle Unlimited. So getting a subscription reading program as well as potentially just buying more books. So that's just a guess, but to me it feels like a possibility or a strong potential of one of the drivers, another driver, of course, and we've seen this in the genres is that there are more kids at home, more people have shifted to homeschooling, and you're seeing that in the categories and the books that have that have performed in the last two years, there are more kids at home and more parents are trying to find ways to entertain them and educate them, and they are buying books that fit with that. Okay, so let me dust off my crystal ball. And actually I also need to dust off my metal. One second. So Stephen Searle, who is a wonderful YouTube bestie, he awarded me with this great medal. It is for the Outstanding Creator Awards. Now, unfortunately, I cut it by accident, but we can still wear it. So I'll dust off my metal and my crystal ball at the same time. Thank you, Stephen. And you can submit your book now. It's an official award that you can submit to the Outstanding Creator Awards. So when Stephen watches this video, if he's not here live. He can post in the comments and give you guys a link. So you all know how you can submit your own book and creations to be part of his creator award. So, okay, so my prediction number one, and then we're going to do a participation prize. So I think that more and more authors are going to add direct sales to their channels of distribution. So what do I mean by direct sales? I mean selling and fulfilling through your own store. So I do this through at Self Publish and Succeed. So you can go to self publishandsucceed.com I'll put it in the links if you're watching the replay and Angela can post it in the comments. This is a direct buy page to get my book Self Publish and Succeed. It is fulfilled through Lulu and Shopify. And there's a couple of reasons why I think direct sales are going to continue to increase. Well, of course, as our margins get squeezed, authors are going to find more and more ways to extract value and try to make a profit in this low margin business. And for me, I don't actually make more money per book selling it through Lulu because my costs when I do it through this way with fulfillment and shipping, like printing the book and shipping, it's averaging about $13.50 per book. Right now I'm selling it for 16, so I'm making less than if I sold it on Amazon most of the time. But what's more important to me there is that I am building a relationship this way because I actually get data. I get the email address, I get the address, the mailing address of the buyer, which we don't use that, but the email address, we start emailing them and we can build that relationship. That's what that, what that is what matters to me. Potentially they might become a client someday in the future or maybe they'll buy my next book because now we are connected. So that's of value. Side note though, it used to be $12 for me as costs and so I had $4, which was a much better number because I'm also running ads to that page. $2.50 is so low. So we're actually going to in February raise the price on that page to $18. See how that impacts sales. We may have to raise the price to $18 on all platforms just so that it performs. There are some incentives to getting the book through that page that you don't get incentives anywhere else. But yeah, it's just if you're ever running ads and you're doing this $2.50 we're. We're converting. We're converting really well. It's a really high converting page. One of the best that I've ever done, which is always interesting to me, what pages convert and what doesn't. But it's tough to make that. That it. To make that work. We're looking at probably, I think our total costs are about $6 per sale. So it costs $6 to make $2.50, but, you know, we're getting that contact, which is hopefully in the long run, more valuable. But we do want to increase the profit. Sorry, I really took a detour on that. Back to the predictions. Number one, more direct to consumer sales. I think whether it's selling at the back of a room, live events, local libraries, craft fairs, markets, or from websites, I think that more authors are going to sell direct to consumer for so many reasons. More control, you know, all the things. One of the things that really does bug me, and it's kind of a hope, which I'm stealing from one of my future points, but is a hope that there's more transparency in the market. Right now with Amazon and Ingram, you don't really know where your books are being sold. You don't know when a return happens, where that's come from, or why. So you're really lacking data and you absolutely don't get the purchaser's information. So there is a lack of transparency, which is why I think there's going to be more and more authors willing to go to the hassle of selling their books direct. All right, so let's do a participation prize. So if you haven't already said hello, now is your chance. Okay, so let's see my. Let's see, let's see. My birthday's coming up next week, so I am going to go with. Well, actually, that might. That might be too high. The number's probably too high for how many people are here. So we can't go with my age that I will be. I am too old for that with the number of comments in here. So let's just go with the day of the week, which is my standard. Go to what is the day. It is the 25th. All right, so hopefully there's been 25 comments by now. So, Angela, if you can go 25 comments from the top, that will be our first participation prize winner. The prizes that are up today, I believe we still have T shirts. So Angela will have to confirm that we always have copies of Self Publish and Succeed, which I do have right here. Sorry, a little bit of Reaching going on there. So there we do. We do have self publish and succeed. So you can grab a copy of that. Or we have magnets which are really fun. I really love my magnets. So you can let Angela know if you win where to send them and what you would like. Okay. My birthday is February 1st. I am in Aquarius. So hello to fellow Aquarians, Kat. And thank you, Deborah. I appreciate it. So let's see here. Seeing what I'm just waiting for our winner. Well, I'm waiting for the winner. I will head on over to my random name picker where I have put people who have commented on the Tuesday and Thursday or Tuesday and Friday videos for the last two weeks and we will choose a winner right here. So it's spinning. We have some new viewers so it's exciting to see. Maybe we'll get a brand new person to this winning list. Let's just see. I need a drum roll. We need sound effects. Okay. Our winner today is. Oh, you guys need a screen capture so that you believe me. But it is Steven Searle. Congratulations. He gave me an award and now I will give him swag which I'm actually going to take this off. That's kind of funny. Well, congratulations, Steve. When you watch the replay, which I know you will, you can let Angela know if you would like a T shirt, a magnet or a copy of self publish and succeed the print version. Okay. Just making sure that when my headphone fell out we didn't lose sound. It looks like we are still good. So congratulations, Steve. That's funny. This is where I really need you guys to see the screen so you would know that that was the winner. That's awesome. Okay, so heading back over here to find out who our winner was. Evangelina. Hey. Oh, you weren't the winner. She's just saying hello and welcome, Angela. Oh, Lakeisha. Okay, Lakisha. Congratulations. So thank you for being here and let Angela know@teamokwantress.com which prize you would like. So thank you. Okay, so carrying on with my predictions. So number two, I believe print book prices will increase. We're already seeing that a little bit. And I also think that relative to that, you will see ebook prices go up. They kind of have to or there will be no profits left for anybody in this business. It was also interesting watching the K Lytics report the video that I mentioned earlier because they did, they did point out that romance books had gone up about $2 overall in price and that's an ebooks. So I think it was jumping from $2 to $450 was the average price. Now so you are seeing it in genre as well. But I think you have to see an overall increase and your value of your ebook is somewhat relative to your print book as far as I'm concerned. Because if it's not, then you're basically saying that it's the paper that has the value, not the content. So I don't. That's why I don't love selling a book for 99 cents, an ebook for 99 cents and then selling your print book for $27. Because you're basically saying in the consumer's mind that what is printed, what is printed on that paper is worth 99 cents and the paper is worth 27 or $26. So I like promotions are different. You do run periodic promotions and you can price it at a lower price for that for ebooks. But I do think print prices have to continue to go up a little bit to make more profit or they're just. It just won't make sense. Number three, book signings and connecting in person is coming back. It's already back for many folks. Folks in some places it never left. Regardless, we are seeing the resurgence of live in person events. So starting to plan book signings and doing industry conferences and selling books to sell at live workshops and making partnerships and doing or sorry and really meeting people so you can make partnerships and sell books and even meet readers. And so so I'm really excited about this and I've been creating some content to help folks with this. One of the most recent videos I put out was how to prepare for a Book signing Event. And so Angela will drop that in the link and we'll put the link below in the description for after when you're watching the replay and live events like 20 books to 50k and other kind of industry type conferences. You know we're going to IBPA's publishing university coming up in it's in Florida I believe. So Sarah Bean, our book marketing manager will be attending that. And so other industry events in person present a really, really great opportunity for you to meet other authors and you can do things like author swaps, which I also posted a video on recently because this is a great way to leverage even a smaller audience on your side and share it with other authors that have different or have different subjects but. But connect with the same readers and really grow your audiences and serve your audiences together. But it's hard to make those relationships online. It's possible, but it's much Easier in person. And so I'm in a current mission to get everyone to go to 20 books to 50k here in Las Vegas in the fall. It's in November and I don't know, I didn't give Angela a link in advance, but maybe she can do a quick search and pull up a link so you guys can register. I'm not affiliated. I. I get no benefit. I'm not even invited to speak. I just loved the event last year. I found it tremendously informative. It was 300 ticket. It's such high value and I really want to meet as many of you in person as possible. And we're not putting a live event together this year. We're working on it for 2023. But until we have our own live event, I'm going to leverage the work of others and bring you guys to Las Vegas so we could meet all, wear our no boring books, swag together and hang out and learn some stuff and meet other great people. So live events are back and I think you're going to see more and more opportunities to sell books in person in 2022. Okay, number four, the audiobook market will continue to grow and evolve. We haven't yet seen the impact of some of the big news that was I talked about earlier this year, which was storytell buyingaudiobook.com, and, and find a Way Voice is getting picked up by Spotify and I'm excited to see where all of that goes. And Chirp. I did a video on Chirp earlier November or December. Chirp is one of the only audiobook promotion platforms out there and it's hosted or owned by Bookbub and partnered with Findaway Voices. And so far they've rejected Self Publish and Succeed. I've only applied once, but I'm going to apply again here pretty soon and hopefully we'll be able to test it firsthand. But I also think there's going to be more of those kind of programs and platforms that come out of the woodwork because the audiobook market is evolving and is growing and there is demand beyond Audible. And I think we're going to find new and innovative and fun ways to promote audiobooks just as much as we've been promoting, promoting and able to sell ebooks and print books. So I'm excited for where audiobooks are going. That market continues to grow. Some of our authors are seeing more than 50% of their sales are in audiobooks we've seen in the last six months or so. Some of them are just absolutely Crushing in audio, which is really cool. And the first time I've ever been able to say that. Most of the time you're looking at 60 to 70% in print, you know, 15 to 20% in ebook, and then the remainder in audio. But a few of our clients are bucking that trend and their audiobook is crushing. But on my list of hopes, still under the audiobook thing. But on my list of hopes is that ACX allows authors to set the price. Authors and publishers to set the price of their audiobook. This is one of the things that really, you want to send me down a rabbit hole of things I can complain about. It's lack of transparency about returns, which I'll try not to go down that rabbit hole right now, but it really bothers me. And the fact that ACX sets a price for your audiobook and makes it impossible for you to run your own promotions for anything on Audible because they're controlling the price. So I really hope that 2022 is the year that ACX says, hey, you can set your audiobook price just like we can with kdp, set our price for ebook and for print. So fingers crossed. Okay, so let's see what you guys are talking about. And we have another YouTube prize to give. Oh, Martha's bragging up about our YouTube or YouTube our book launchers hoodie. So thank you, Martha. And just seeing what else is going on here. Caitlin wants to go to 20 books. That would be great to see you there. I'm very excited. Myself and Jacqueline Kyle, our production manager, and Sarah Bean, our book marketing manager. The three of us are going to be here and it is going to be so fun. We will definitely have a meetup of sorts somewhere near Bali's, which is where the event is on the Strip. Okay, let's go to our next up prize. So hit my spinning button and let's see who it is. All right. It wasn't somebody new. It is YouTube bestie Bill Miller. Congratulations and thank you, Bill. I don't know if Bill's. I think I know Bill was here earlier. So, Bill, is there anything you haven't won yet, my friend? Are you still here? So if there's anything you have not yet won, please go ahead and pick your prize. Or you can always nominate someone else who is here to win your prize. And Efren just said Spotify is huge and has a wider future. It's interesting about their audiobook angle. I agree. And we haven't seen anything really happen yet with them buying findaway voices. So I'M excited. I really think there's going to be some cool developments as those things were, I think, happening last quarter of 2021. So they should be playing out in 2022. So I'm really, really bullish and happy and excited about what's happening in the audiobook space and hopeful that all the other things happening will really kick Audible's butt into allowing us to set our own price. Okay. I am so hesitant to make a book exclusive to a platform that I cannot control the price 100%. I mean, I'm not. This is sending me down a rabbit hole, but I'm going to go a little bit. So, I mean, I'm not a fan of exclusivity anyways. There are times where it makes sense, and I understand why some authors should go that way. However, it is a dangerous thing to do because as soon as you put all your eggs in one basket for that old cliche saying, you are now giving them all the control and the power, and it is a really challenging place to be in. And the more power you give them, the more ability they have to do crazy things like set the price, not tell you, you know, not explain returns and just pull money out of your account, which we have seen with Audible as well. That was one thing we talked about, I think, beginning of last year was how they had to reverse course on their return policy, which used to allow a listener to return for a full year, and then that Audible didn't care because they just pulled that money out of your account and so you could get hit with returns a year after. And it was really encouraging listeners to listen and return with no repercussions. So now I think it's down to three days, which somebody still could listen and return, you know, for no quality reason whatsoever. But there's. There's a lack of transparency. And I think the more we give power to any one organization, the more that is allowed and that is. Is really enabled. So I'm a big fan of publishing wide to reach as many readers wherever they are and not putting everything there. But, you know, it's tempting. There's some great programs. You make more money if you do go exclusive, you know, so there's good justifiable reasons for it. But as an advocate for all authors, I am a strong proponent of going wide as much as you possibly can when it makes sense for you, because it's going to be better for you and for the readers and for the industry and as a whole. Okay, let's see. Bill. I just saw Bill Say, not my barbecue. I don't know. But you won, Bill. This is hard when you just read one comment. So let's see. Let me go back to my notes here. Okay, so my fifth point for 2022 is ad costs are going up. While they already have Google and Facebook really hammered advertisers in the second half of 2021, Apple made a bunch of changes last year on the technology side. They rolled out a new policy that made it harder to track the behavior of users on the Apple devices. And then they also made it so that you can't track email opens on Apple devices. So this really wreaks havoc with a lot of things advertisers do. Google also made ad format changes. This, you know, we really felt this at Book Launchers because we do a lot of Google Ads through YouTube and changing the format. Like our conversions went down and our costs went up and it took months to fix that. And the benchmark has moved now. So what we're shooting for is now a higher cost on everything. And ad spend or sorry, Amazon ads, I do believe you're going to see, if you aren't already, we're seeing it a higher cost on Amazon because there's just so much more competition. Publishers are finally playing in there and playing big. And a lot of authors are spending a lot of money on ads because they're finally, you know, they figured it out and they're using it, they're leveraging it. They see it as a great way to make book sales. So you're seeing your ad costs going up. But just going back to Facebook, I pulled a stat from Ad Espresso, which is they're an ad agency and so they manage like millions of dollars of ad spend. And so they took their, their cost per click on Facebook from 2020 and compared it to 2021. And in 2020, for most of the year, their average cost per Click was under $0.38 per click. And by the end of 2021, it was closer to $0.50. And this, of course, is a major ad company that has a diverse range of products and things they're advertising. And I can tell you you're going to be lucky if you're getting a cost per click of $0.50 on Facebook. And so anybody promoting a book there, again, this is what I was touching on with self publish and succeed right now because Lulu increased their costs. I'm only making $2.50 for a book there. So that means for every five clicks, if I, if I'm getting a 50 cent cost per click, which I am not. Mine's closer to A$28 on Google for them going to and, and I don't normally know those numbers so. So off the top of my head, but I met with my ad, my ad person right before we've gone live. So it's top of my head. So no cost per click is $1.28. And so I have to be making a sale every one out of well less than five. Not great with math. Every probably every 25, 25% of time I need to be making a sale, which I am not. So you need to find a way to drive those ad costs down or increase your what you're selling on the other side. So for me that's why I said we're probably going to raise the price that to $18 just to give us more room because it's actually costing us about $6 to get a sale. So it does vary widely depending on who you're targeting and how relevant it is. There's a lot of factors that will drive your costs down, but overall ad costs went up in 2021 on Amazon, Facebook and Google and I think you're going to see continued increases in 2022 as well. There's just so many people competing for those clicks and people are buying online more than ever. So that just means more people are going to be on there trying to get that sale. So books are a tough place to advertise. I generally would never recommend somebody try to sell a book on Facebook or Google. I would go for the conversion as far as getting somebody on your newsletter list. So that's what I would be focused on if I was not testing and trying to optimize the sale of self publish and succeed. And I already have a very robust existing Google YouTube ad platform. But starting from scratch, I'm not sure I would really want to be advertising a book, especially a nonfiction one where you're going to see a lot of competition in most categories. I would go for the opt in and try and drive opt ins and then from there be promoting your book and your services and your products and getting an ROI from the overall spending, not just trying to generate a profit per click because that's a tough, tough game with those platforms. But Amazon ads, you know, you can get them profitable. You know, we've talked a lot about that. Even though the costs have gone up, it is still a great place to sell books and I think it's a great place to be. As an author, very rarely would I ever recommend somebody not run Amazon ads for our clients. So, all right, number six. And this is more of a hope, and I kind of touched on this already, but I would love to see more transparency in the distribution channels. I honestly don't know if this will happen in 2022. I feel like there is more people asking for it and more demand for it. But, you know, Ingram is just as challenging in many respects as Amazon and Audible. They have, like, returns come out of nowhere with Ingram, and you don't get any explanation as to where they're coming from. And with Ingram, they tell you they have this wide distribution, but you never actually know where your book is listed unless you try to go and hunt it down. And so you never know where it's selling. So you can't drive promotional attention to an avenue that may already be working. And you don't know where the returns come from or why. So I find that lack of transparency very frustrating on Amazon's side. One of the things that drives me crazy is Amazon ads. It'll tell you say you sold 20 books, but if you had a slow sale month, and maybe Your dashboard with KDP says you sold 15, but your ads say you sold 20, like what? And so there's little things like that. Discrepancies, lack of transparency, the returns that come out of nowhere with no explanation, not knowing where your book is listed. We have more data than a publisher gives an author that's traditionally published. They're lucky to get a quarterly or semiannual report of sales data, so you get a lot more data that way. But there's a real lack of transparency, which makes it very hard as an author to know exactly where you should be putting your efforts and where efforts are getting results and where there might be potential issues. And so this is an area that I would love to see change. I hope it changes changes in 2022. There's been some momentum. I know IBPA was doing an investigation into these Ingram returns because it wasn't just us that was complaining about it. There have been other authors complaining and saying that there's some issues here, something's not right, something smells a little funny. And so they've been investigating. So maybe, maybe, maybe 2022 will be the year that we get more information as authors. Number seven, my final one, there's a new software out and I did a write with me deep dive a couple of weeks ago where I showcased it a little bit. And again, I am not affiliated with it at all, but it is Atticus by Dave Just Spoke called Dave Dave Perner. Dave from Kindlepreneur. He's one of the partners in this and he is the founder of Kindlepreneur and also publisher Rocket, which is. Is one of our favorite softwares already. So Atticus is really cool and it solves for us in particular, but I think for authors too, a lot of problems now they're not done developing the software, so I am raving about what is to come, not necessarily what is there, but Atticus is like Scrivener meets Google Docs meets Word all in one and simple. There was no learning curve for me to start writing, which was a beautiful, beautiful thing. If you've heard me talk about Scrivener, I wasted four hours and still didn't know how to write my book. So I stopped and I went back to work and. And I just think the best place to write is a place that you're comfortable and familiar. Atticus has that and it also has the ability to lay out your book, have collaboration. It's going to have an ability to deliver secured ARC copies, so advanced reviewer copies. And for us as a company, it will allow us to have greater control, control over all the people that touch a document and have more security. And you know, we have one author who, their computer fritzed on them and they lost some of the changes that they recently made. It was devastating. And if we had Atticus and it was cloud based, we would have a copy, she would have a copy and all would be well. And so there's lots of reasons why I'm really excited about Atticus and my prediction is by the end of 2022, a lot of people are going to be using Atticus for all those reasons that I have just said. So I'm excited. Again, not affiliated. I'm just a fan and I think it's going to be great. It's. I've been using it, it's glitchy right now. It's got a few issues and some of their features are not rolled out yet. Like there's no spell check in it. I have Grammarly on my computer, so Grammarly actually integrated immediately with it and provided that. But Jacqueline on my team was testing it for rolling out to production and she's like, there's no spell check. They are going to integrate with prowritingaid and that is something they're working on right now. But you can upload epubs already. I'm excited. Okay, that's it. Those are my predictions, those are my hopes, my wishes, my dreams for 2022. You know, if you aren't already getting the launch letter, make sure you are signed up. You can get it at book launchers.com forward/7steps or just book launchers.com and scroll to the bottom because I'll be updating you as these things evolve throughout the year. And I'll be inviting you to future Write With Me sessions. The next one is happening on February 5th. I believe this is a casual one. This is not our official deep dive for the month. I'm just trying to get time carved out of my calendar in order to get words down on page for the next book, which is going to be on on book marketing. So I am going to do this and a lot of people at the last deep dive said like when can we do this again? Can we do this regularly? So here it is again, February 5th at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time. We're going to do a casual so Angela does not have to be there and give us her Saturday. It will just be me and you hanging out, doing writing sprints and focus. That's my dog saying hello. Just doing writing sprints and writing focus time. So February 5th right with me and I don't have the link for that, so I'll have to grab it in a second unless Angela can. You could grab it maybe from the newsletter and we'll send it out again next week. There'll be a reminder. The deep dive training session for February is happening on February 19th and I believe it's going to be with I think I got to confirm who's actually going to be joining me, but I think it's going to be with Sarah Bean, maybe Nicole Larson from our marketing team. We're going to be talking about libraries. We're going to be talking about live events and marketing your virtual events and other partnerships ways to because one of my predictions and it's already happening is way more live events. How to pitch to land opportunities, how to promote them when you get them, and how to make the most out of every opportunity. So so we're going to be talking about that on February 19th at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time. That is our February deep dive training to register for that book launchers.com deep dive all right, I'll answer questions in a moment so Angela, you can start posting them for me. In the meantime, let's do our participation. So what is what prediction did I miss? Yeah, that's my participation. So what prediction do you see for book publishing, self publishing, whatever book industry in 2022 that you think is coming that I Did not touch on. Let's, let's hear it. Okay. Okay. Reading your comments over here. Angela says there's a lot of questions, so we'll, so we'll wait for the questions and also wait for your guys's predictions. So I'll see what you guys are chatting about. It sounds like you guys are liking the thoughts of Atticus being software. Caitlin says she's planning to format her next book in Atticus. I'm excited. Haven't quite made the jump to writing online. Atticus is great and Jacqueline's been testing the formatting and for the most part she's been happy with the formatting. There's a couple of weird things that are going on and this might be us because we are at a very professional high level. So we're very picky, but we aren't able to separate like chapter, the word chapter from the number and can't space. And so sometimes in the template or the font there, we didn't like the spacing between the word chapter and the number, so we couldn't adjust that. And then you have to manually kind of play with the spacing below. Like when the chapter starts, you can make it, you can adjust it, but it's a little clunky. And then there's also no ability right now for you to pull out, like do like we call them pull outs, but like a grayed off box, for example, like a quote or an article that you might have an excerpt, like a 500 word excerpt. There's not that ability in the layout, but their templates are great. It's smooth. It's going to be really, really wonderful. And I've seen what they do with publisher Rocket, so I know how they just keep updating and improving and improving. Which by the way, Publisher Rocket now has the ability to give you audiobook data. That's exciting. Okay, so seeing your predictions here. Okay, what is the prediction for the overall increase in nonfiction versus fiction? I don't know. I don't think it's going to change much this year. I don't see how it's going to keep growing again because I always look at where is that growth coming from. I don't think it's going to keep growing. But you know, if more and more Americans start reading because that 30% up from 25 is a good sign, then you might see an increase. But I think rather than seeing overall volume increase, I think you're going to see certain genres, certain topics, certain books kind of ebb and flow like it always does. Mindful Eats prediction, more AI being used by authors. Yes. One of the predictions I did not put on here, but I do think is coming is more and more authors launching with NFTs and doing more in that space too. But I do think AI is coming and is going to be a big player. I had that in my list last year. So I was like I'm doing something different. But I completely agree. Great prediction mindfully. And Kimberly, hello. And Cloud, I just got Atticus and so far works great. Wonderful to hear it. And it looks like. Oh, here we go. Efren says paper void not going away. Costs will continue to. I'm assuming that's rise and Kat's been doing research on nft. All right, Mindful Eats I do believe. I mean I think we tried to send you a T shirt and that was abysmally. That did not go well. But let us know what prize you'd like because I think your prediction is the one that is going to win today. So thank you for that. And we have some questions to answer, so I'll start tackling those and let us know what we can send you if anything Mindful Eats and if not something, then let us know who you would like to pass your prize along to today. Okay, Question one from Winter for my first book, I'm not expecting to make any money, but I'm hoping to collect email addresses. Is there an average number of subscribers for first Books? So a lot to unpack there. So if you are planning to use your book to get subscribers, there's a few ways to do that. So one is the way I'm doing it at self publishandsucceed.com where when you buy the book we get your email address and of course we sell you the book and make a few dollars. So that's one way that works fairly well. But you know, we're maybe getting 30, maybe 30 sales a month right now. That way maybe at one point when they were really humming along before the ads changed and we had to dial it back, it was costing too much. It was, we were closer to maybe 50amonth on that page. So. So not a super speedy way. Although we are being very moderate in how much we're spending there because it is, we're losing money every time. But if you are putting calls to action inside of your book to get subscribers, you might be seeing, I mean still I don't think you're going to see depending on the sales volume of your book, you're probably still only seeing, you know, 10 to 50 new email subscribers a month. That way where you can see a nice lift is in the promotion of the book. So going on podcasts and giving people a call to action to a reader magnet. So I don't know exactly what you mean by collecting email subscribers and an average number of subscribers for first books. I mean it varies widely depending on your topic. I think you were doing a novel, so I'm not that experienced in fiction. I don't even really read that much fiction to be totally honest. So I'm all of my experiences around nonfiction. But I know some people do give away the first book in the series free for email addresses and that can be incredibly effective. And there's some great free book websites out there and I'm sure that you know that would perform well. Again, 20 books to 50k. Phenomenal event for you to be at. There were so many successful fiction authors doing serials and doing the first book free to get email addresses. So there'd be some great advice at that event for you. Q2 or Q2? Question 2 Where did it go? My screen just jumped. Lakisha Would it be cheaper to put a book into ebook or paperback? Well, cheaper as far as cost. I mean it's in layout wise it is only a little bit more to do both. Like once you've done the hard work of a good layout, it's not much more to with do just do it in both. So to put it into it really doesn't matter print or paperback. There's I guess there's some cover adjustments that you make for print. So I guess it's slightly more expensive to put it into paper. But when you're doing nonfiction, you really, really should be selling a paper version of your book. Because like I said, we only have a couple clients that are an exception to this rule. But most of them are selling 60 to 75% of their books and imprint. So if you're not putting it in print, you're missing a huge chunk of your market. Let's see. AI UG Efren doesn't like AI Apparently I love holding my book in my hands. I do too. It Never gets old. Q3 mindful eats how many books have you sold of self published and succeed to date? I don't know. I never look. It doesn't matter to me. It is not so. It's funny because my first book I was really obsessed with sales. I mean I got number one on Amazon. I refreshed Amazon that sales ranking like a billion times because it was so fun to watch it climb and watch it sell. I cared a lot, I guess because of all the hype and being rejected by a publisher in the first place and then selling thousands of books in a week, you know, that was awesome. And then seeing, you know, books continue to sell, that was great with self published and succeed and even with. And then I put out the new brand, you. And I mean, it didn't do spectacularly well. I mean, I think I sold 500, 600 copies in the first six months. And maybe, maybe a thousand. I don't think it broke a thousand, though. I don't think it quite broke a thousand. And then it just kind of became like, okay, what can I learn from this? And one of my big takeaways is that for me, my measure of success is not book sales. So I don't even look, I don't care. In fact, somebody on my team the other day said we really need to look at the book sales because we were analyzing some pieces. I look like I did an ebook sale over Christmas break. And I looked to see how many sales were made. And I. I think it was like somewhere between 50 to 90 sales. Ebook sales on certain days. And for me, I was looking at that not to see, like, how many books have I sold, but which ad performed right. Because we ran ads in different ebook places on each day of this sale. And so I wanted to see, okay, I paid $100 for an ad, and it sold like, I had four ebook sales that day. So I'm like, that ad did Nothing. But this $25 ads hold almost 92 books. So in that little peak, I wanted to see what was performing. So that's why I care about sales. But overall, all I care about is that it's getting out there in the world. I've got some great partnerships. I just did this really awesome promotion with a company called Bedside Reading. The book got listed in all of the Hamptons hotels that they have partnerships with. It was on their E Readers. There was physical copies in all of the VIP gift bags at the Hamptons Film Festival. They've been featuring me on their webinars. I was in Publishers Weekly through that. Like, that was really cool. And I couldn't have done that without the book. And then I've also been. I'm partnered with North Street Book Prize. So anybody who enters North Street Book Prize this year will be receiving a digital copy of Self publish and Succeed. There's thousands of people who enter that award every year that are now going to get a copy of my book. And that is something I've done as a partnership. So there's an exchange happening there. It's a relationship that we've built. But I'm getting the book out there and it's getting book launchers out there. So that's what I care about. And that's why I don't look at the books. Because for me, it's not about how many books are getting sold, it's what am I doing that's working to reach my readers, have an impact and ultimately grow Book Launchers and the Book Launchers brand. So, yeah, different perspective on it. I know, but. But that's what matters to me. Okay, so let's see what's next. Q4 Martha Martha says what kinds of genres of books are crushing audiobooks? The one is kind of an alternative investment strategy that is on our side and then I'm trying to think of what the other one is. I don't even know because Jacqueline was telling me about them. So I don't see the sales, but I know the one was an alternative investment type strategy. And the other one, I believe was one of our clients who has a younger audience. And a lot of I think his audience is podcast driven, but I'm not certain on that. And so, but I don't think it's the genre necessarily. In some cases, I think it's the audience. Who's your audience if they're a millennial or if you've got a podcast listening audience, an audience that does go towards that, or you've already got an audience in that space that can make a big difference in others. I think it's the keywords that are really driving the sales there. They're searching and they're finding it. And Amazon is showing audiobooks first. In a lot of cases, if you go to the bestsellers and you start clicking on them, you're going to land on the audiobook page a lot of times. So that audiobook is either converting or they expect it to be the one that converts out of the three formats. So I think Amazon's driving a lot of people to audio as well right now. So I think that's impacting it. I didn't do a deep dive into the audiobook sales right now. That's something we could actually talk about in the future. We're doing a client only deep dive and I think couple of weeks and we're going to be talking about audiobooks and I'll probably pull some audiobook data and get Jacqueline's help to get some of our client audiobook data in Preparation for that call. But. And so, you know, email us, Martha. We can hook you up. Okay, let's see. Q5. Oh, we only have four minutes left. Okay. Okay. Anyone tried Kindle? Vella? I can't answer that because I have not. So see if anybody else has. Q6, Efren says. Is there an average or conservative estimation of book return rates per book? Unfortunately, no. And we're seeing. And it's a little wild right now, Efren. It's kind of why there's a bee in my bonnet on this subject. We've seen some authors kind of almost out of nowhere get hit by like a chunk of returns. For some, that chunk might be 12 books. For some that might be a hundred. And that, you know, some of that is dictated by previous sales of the book. You're not going to get hit by 100 sales, 100 returns if you haven't had many hundreds of sales. But, but yeah, there's a. There isn't an average. And in some ways you really have to go digging to find these returns. It's not obvious on the surface where, where people really see them is with in they'll get when they aren't and when they haven't made enough royalties in a month. Like if you get hit with 100 returns, that is more money coming out of your account than if you had sold 100. So some people get money that they owe and that's when they really start doing the investigation in there. But there isn't an average returns. And that is again, some of the lack of transparency in the industry. And we're seeing more returns now in the last quarter to six months than we have seen before. Now we're working with more authors than we used to work with. We've published more books. Obviously, every year that we're in this, we have more books to draw from, so we would see more. But again, this is why I've kind of flagged it with IBPA and some of the people, and I'm talking to people about it because I think there's something funny going on. Maybe I'm just overly suspicious, but I feel like something funny is going on. Q7 or question 7 Daniel Katimini exploitives in my dialogue tag possibly hurt my book sales. Depends on the audience. Some audiences are totally cool with it, some audiences aren't. And that's what it's going to come down to. I think that's it. Oh, no. We got one more question and then that's it. We're wrapping after this one. Do you recommend making book trailers? You may have spoken on this, but I walked away for five minutes. Oh, how dare you. Book trailers are okay. There's value in having them. I wouldn't spend thousands, which is what some people charge for book trailers. They're great to put on your Amazon author central page. If you have a true crime book, I highly recommend you do some sort of a teaser trailer and post it on Reddit. We've seen that do phenomenally well. But I mean, book trailers aren't what there was a. For a while there, people thought you had to have a book trailer. A lot of major publishers don't invest in book trailers anymore, which tells you what the ROI is on them. But, you know, for some fiction, I think it can be great. For some nonfiction, there might be value in it, but I wouldn't spend tons of money on one. You know, get it, get. If you can get one for a low cost and it looks great and you're proud of it, do that. All right. That was a big one. All right, so hopefully see you guys on the 5th for the writing session or the 19th for the deep dive. Otherwise, we'll be back here, same place, same time, in two weeks. I can't wait to see you all then.
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