Category: Books

a few self-publishing resources

Posted on 3 March, 2009 By Wil

The positive response to Sunken Treasure has surprised and delighted me even more than the fantastic sales of both the print and PDF versions. As of this writing, PDF sales have vastly exceeded my expectations, and though print sales have slowed, they haven’t stopped. I’ve seen a direct relationship between PDF sales and print sales, which is awesome and totally validates what I’ve always suspected to be true, but I was too afraid to try on my own.

This isn’t the first time I’ve self-published, but it is the first time I’ve released a PDF, and used a print on demand service. The entire experience has been so wonderful, I hope I can serve as an inspiration to other authors who may be considering going this route.

In case I am, I thought I’d share a couple of resources I’ve recently come across, as well as two of my own, that may be helpful:

6 ways to publish your own book from Mashable

Just what it sounds like: six different sites that let you self-publish. I’m pretty much sold on Lulu, but it’s always smart to research as many options as you can.

Fixing the Pig Book Model from 1889.ca

This post is all about marketing, eBooks vs. print books, the 1000 True Fans model, and what to expect when you’re self-publishing. If you’re serious at all about not just being published, but actually earning something for your work, this is a must-read.

My interview with the Lulu blog

I’ve posted this already, but I think it’s relevant, especially my advice for writers.

Five simple ways to just keep writing

Another oldie of mine, included here for the sake of completeness.

I’m sure some of you reading this have come across resources of your own that you’ve found useful. I’d love it if you’d be willing to share them in comments, so we can build a more complete and hopefully useful resource for anyone who wants it.

Adding:

Self-publishing review, which has a nice review of Sunken Treasure, as it turns out.

Cult of Done Manifesto. It totally creeps me out when something I’ve had rattling around in my brain comes out of someone else’s brain, better than I could have said it myself. (I especially needed to read this today, having experienced my first truly massive truly EPIC FAIL in a very long time early this morning.)

wil wheaton vs. text 2 speech

Posted on 26 February, 2009 By Wil

There's quite a dustup at the moment about an editorial the president of the Author's Guild wrote in the New York Times, railing against Amazon's Kindle 2, which has a text to speech feature that he claims creates unauthorized derivative works and should be stopped at all costs.

I'm not the only author who thinks this is ridiculous: John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, and Neil Gaiman all agree. (Um. Not that I'm comparing myself to them; they're just people I know, who I respect and admire, who also have a stake in this.)

Scalzi says: "I pity the person who thinks a bland computer text reading of Zoe’s Tale is an optimal experience, especially when Tavia Gilbert’s spectaular reading of the book exists out there to get. Yes, one is free and the other isn’t, but you do get what you pay for."

Cory says: "Time and again, the Author's Guild has shown itself to be the epitome
of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish
posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it
represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang
of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online."

Neil says: "When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud,
have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car
trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc.
This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the
voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an
audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are
thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal
case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and
promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it."

But what if we're all wrong? As an author, performer, and consumer of audiobooks, what does this mean for me?

To find out, I picked a short passage from Sunken Treasure and read it. Then, I took the identical passage, and let my computer read it. I recorded the whole thing and put together something I call "Wil Wheaton versus Text 2 Speech" so you can hear for yourself.

It's about 5MB and just about 10 minutes long.

Download Wil_wheaton_vs_text_2_speech

Edited to add: My friend Jamais wrote an extremely insightful and thoughtful commentary
on the whole text 2 speech issue. He's really smart and you should read
it, regardless of where you currently fall in the debate.

Here's John Scalzi's rebuttal, which everyone should also read, and Neil Gaiman's final word which is also a must-read. Not that it matters, but I totally agree with both of them.

Also, this post has attracted a lot of traffic, and people are asking me about my own audiobooks. I'll point you to my virtual bookshelf, where you can learn everything you ever wanted to know about all my books, including the audio versions.

just paint what you see

Posted on 24 February, 2009 By Wil

Five (Three sir!) Three quick Sunken Treasure items:

1. I was interviewed for the Lulu blog about the book. Fun fact: It was while I was writing the answers for this interview that I sent Twitter the fateful question about $5 DRM-free PDFs. I finished my answers and sent them back right before I put the PDF version on sale, so the incredible success and overwhelming response to the PDF isn't reflected my answers.

2. Speaking of the PDF: Sometime overnight, the total PDF sales exceeded the total print sales. I've still earned more via print sales, though PDF is rapidly catching up. Here's something cool about the gap between them: whenever it looks like PDF is going to overtake it, a bunch of people (presumably because they read the PDF) buy the print copy, and it leaps ahead. I wish I could do an animated visualization of the sales, like a little horse race, because it sure would look awesome.

I never would have done this if Cory Doctorow hadn't put the idea into my head (and so many other heads) years ago. I see some chatter around the 'tubes giving me credit for blazing a trail, and I'm really not; I'm just walking the path Cory told us was there all along, if we were just willing to take it.

Still, I really hope my story about this little book and how I've released it inspires other indie authors (and big, successful, mainstream authors, too) to do something similar. I don't know what it would be like for other creators, but it's been an unqualified success for me, and I want all of you who have been involved in this to know how grateful I am. Because you've chosen to support my work in the past and especially with this release, I'm going to do a bunch of original stuff this year that's above and beyond what I already do on my blog. A big part of Operation Crazy Idea was to find out if I could make Kevin Kelly's model work, and for the first time since I got the crazy idea, it feels like it's a real, tangible, I-can-almost-see-it-just-over-the-horizon possibility. I am incredibly optimistic about the potential for the other projects I'm working on right now, and if they work out the same way Sunken Treasure has, 2009 is going to be The Year When It All Happened. \m/

3. Finally, Val Trullinger, who created gorgeous flyers and banners for The Happiest Days of Our Lives, created some gorgeous flyers and banners for Sunken Treasure. Feel free to grab them and use them however you'd like, if you're into that sort of thing. Small request: please don't hotlink them; bandwidth is expensive.

Small banner:

Big banner:

Both banners and a PDF flyer:
Download Sunken_Treasure_Promos (1MB Zip file with both banners and PDF flyer)

in which an electronic version of sunken treasure goes on sale

Posted on 23 February, 2009 By Wil

Note: I'm not going to bury the lede: If you have $5 and want a non-DRM PDF copy of Sunken Treasure, you can buy it here and have it in just a few minutes.

Now, here's the story behind my decision to offer this format…

I took some time on Saturday afternoon to answer a bunch of e-mail, including a brief interview about my experience with Lulu and the release of Sunken Treasure (short version: it's been awesome. Longer version coming later this week.)

While I did this, I had Twitteriffic open, and was doing my silly Twitter thing, which, as many of you know, was the style at the time.

At 1:38pm, I sent the following message to Twitter: "Hey Twitterverse: how would you feel about a digital version of Sunken Treasure for about $5?"

I expected that a dozen or so people would be interested, but I hoped for more. Within ten minutes, over 100 different people said they were not only interested, but wanted it RIGHT NOW PLZ KTHX.

"Wow," I thought. "That was a more positive and emphatic response than I was expecting!"

I told Twitter: "Wow, so it
appears that quite a lot of you want PDF versions of this book for $5.
I didn't think it would be so many, honestly. Hmmm…"

Responses continued to pour in. I started making hash marks on a note pad.

A lot of people were asking about Kindle versions, Sony eReader versions, and other versions. I made a lot more hash marks on my note pad, and noticed that the page was almost filled.

I looked around the Lulu publishing options and told Twitter: "Many questions
about other formats for digital versions of my books. Short answer: all
I can do at the moment on my own is PDF. Still want?"

Short answer: Yes. A whole lot of people wanted it, even if it was in a PDF format.

I've always wanted to do digital versions of my books, but I've never
had a way to do it that doesn't involve me manually accepting payments
and sending out links or something equally complicated. My POD experience with Lulu has completely changed that. I logged into my Lulu account, clicked a couple of buttons, filled in one box with $5.00, and I was done.

I took a deep breath and told Twitter: "Okay, Twitterverse! You asked for it, so here it is. Sunken Treasure in DRM-free PDF for $5: http://tinyurl.com/sunkenpdf"

I admit that I had a brief flash of doubt. "Did I just screw myself? Did I just sell one and end up giving away a hundred?"

"No," I reminded myself. "People who will steal from me were never going to support my work, anyway. You're doing the right thing. You're making it available to people at a really fair price, in a super portable format. And maybe people will like it and want a paper copy for themselves or to give as gifts."

I hoped that PDF sales would be solid … well, they were solid, for about ten minutes, and then they exploded. In less than an hour, the total PDFs sold exceed 1/5 of the total print copies sold. People were e-mailing positive feedback, people were Twittering positive feedback, and people were starting to talk about it on their blogs.

"Okay, this is awesome," I thought. "I definitely did the right thing."

Over the next 24 hours, I checked sales every hour or so (hey, can you blame me?) and I watched total PDF sales close the gap with print sales, but something really awesome was also happening: the print sales, which had slowed to about 2 a day a month after release, suddenly picked up! It wasn't a ton, and I'm still not getting rich off of this effort, but it was still pretty remarkable. Feedback from buyers suggested that a lot of people read the PDF, liked it, and wanted a physical copy of their own as a result. Any doubts I had about the demand for this format, or the wisdom of trusting my instincts and releasing a DRM-free PDF at a reasonable price point vanished. I started thinking about other work of mine, and how cool it would be to offer digital versions in a similar manner.

I noticed that, coincidentally, Just A Geek had become available on O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf. I also noticed that Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot's sales rankings on Amazon had climbed by several thousand points in just a day. Also a coincidence? I'm not sure, but I'd like to believe it wasn't.

I just checked, and as of 10:00 this morning, not quite 48 hours after I announced it, PDF sales of Sunken Treasure have nearly caught 4 weeks of print sales (PDF is 17 sales short of overtaking print sales, so if you get it now, you could be part of, um, history!) Print sales in the last 48 hours have been better than print sales in the last 5 days. I'm not getting rich off of this, but it's certainly answered any questions I had about publishing this way.

The best part of all of this (well, other than the surprisingly enthusiastic response) is how easy it was for me to do it. Because I already had the PDF uploaded for printing, making the PDF itself available was simply a matter of making a choice and investing about 40 seconds of effort to throw the switch.

Let me close by answering a few FAQs (which I'm going to update throughout the day, so check back if I don't answer you in comments):

Q: I have all your other stuff already because I'm awesome like that. Is there enough new stuff in this to justify the purchase?

A: Dude, thank you for supporting my work! That is totally awesome, and so are you. Now, someone who is not me is probably more qualified to answer this, but here's what I think: there are some small excerpts from Just a Geek and Dancing Barefoot, but that only makes up a tiny portion of the book. It's mostly outtakes from Happiest Days (that may or may not make it into the Subterranean Press edition), various things that I've written in my blog, and an unreleased sketch that I wrote for a show at ACME. I also reformatted and rewrote my Criminal Minds production diary.

If I paid five bucks for this, and I'd already read Just a Geek and Dancing Barefoot, I don't think I'd be unhappy about it, but I'm not as objective as I'd like to be. Hopefully, someone will address this in comments, and I can link to it.

Q: I see there's a World and a US edition. What's the difference?
A: The World edition is a slightly larger format, due to legacy printing issues. There is no difference in content.

Q: So why did you make two different digital editions available?
A: So people who use direct links instead of visiting the storefront would see that there's a $5 PDF available.

Q: Oh, that's nice of you.
A: That wasn't a question, but thanks.

Q: Can I even read it on my iPhone?
A: Yeah, it's a regular old PDF file, so it will totally work on your iPhone.

Q:How will it look on my iPhone, though?
A: I don't own an iPhone, so I can't say from firsthand experience, but I've heard from a lot of people who have read it on their iPhones, and they were very happy with the experience.

Q: What about other formats?
A: I'm looking into it. I know lots of people want it for [DEVICE THEY OWN] and I'm working on making those formats available. I can't tell for sure if Lulu makes it possible for me to sell a digital version in a non-PDF format, though, so that may be a non-starter.

Q: Why not just sell it through Amazon for the Kindle?
A: I may eventually do that, but right now I don't know if I can sell enough copies to make up for the massive cut of revenue I'd have to give Amazon. I'm happy as hell to be selling in the hundreds, but if I went that way, I'd have to either increase the price significantly, or hope to sell in the thousands. I'm not sure that there are thousands of people who a) want to read this and b) also own Kindles.

Q: If I buy this, can I convert it to a different format?
A: Sure. You can use calibre to convert it to a ton of different formats. Calibre is free (speech and beer) by the way. Incidentally, if you're one of the Kindle owners, you can use calibre to convert the PDF to a Kindle format. I've seen screenshots from some people who have done that, and it looks cool.

Q: I already bought the print version. Can I get a copy of the digital version?
A: Sure you can. It's just five bucks.

Q: I see what you did there.
A: Again, not a question, but thanks.

Q: Can I give this to my friend/husband/wife/mom/girl or boy I'm trying to impress?
A: Once you have it, I can't stop you from doing whatever you want with it, and I certainly wouldn't expect you to treat it any differently than you would a paper book. However, I hope that we all understand the difference between sharing with our friends/spouses/famies and "sharing" with an entire forum, or hundreds of people simultaneously. I'm not trying to be a dick about this, and I'd rather people read it than not, but it's only $5, you know?

Q: If I buy this, can I make my own print copy?
A: As long as you don't sell it, absolutely. If a print shop doesn't want to print it for you, show them this: I give you permission to make a print copy of this book for personal, non-commercial use.

Q: If I make my own print copy and bring it to a con, will you sign it for me?
A: Hells yes I will. That'd be pretty cool, actually.

Q: So, this is awesome and I want it now, but I'm not interested in scrolling back to the top of this entry. How do I get it again?
A: I'm so glad you asked. If you have $5 and want a non-DRM PDF copy of Sunken Treasure, you can buy it here and have it in just a few minutes.

WIRED Review: “Sunken Treasure is full of gems”

Posted on 19 February, 2009 By Wil

Sunken Treasure got a really nice review from Geekdad:

Wil Wheaton came up with just the right word to describe his new book, Sunken Treasure. The subtitle is Wil Wheaton's Hot Cocoa Box Sampler, and sampler
is an excellent metaphor for what this small, sumptuous snack
represents. This is a variety box loaded with the delicious,
hand-crafted geeky confections Wil is so well known for, from sweet
'80s nostalgia filled with video arcades and Star Wars toys, to
affectionately snarky looks back upon his tenure on ST:TNG, and even a
few family stories with gooey centers full of win.

Wow, that's … awesome. Andrew and I thought we'd put together something cool and unique, but I never thought readers would like it this much. I think I did something right in the descriptions, too, because even though it's short — it's supposed to be short — people aren't complaining about that, which was a concern of mine. I wanted to make it very clear that this was a short collection, so people knew exactly what they were getting. So far, it appears that I've successfully done that, which makes me happy, because it was important to me.

If you picked up a copy of Sunken Treasure (thank you!) and you've written a review for your own blog, or you've written a review on its product page at Lulu (US Edition or World Edition), please let me know about it. I'd like to put all the reviews together in one place on my virtual bookshelf.

And now, a question from me to you: who wants a digital version? If enough people ask, I'll go ahead and make an eBook version available.