In early January I had a chance to visit with Jim Kukral about his outlook for self-publishing in 2018, and his new venture helping authors get book reviews (read that here).
For those that don’t know Jim, he is the founder of Author Marketing Club, a prolific author, and co-host of the Sell More Books Show (and upcoming conference summit).
Jim’s first two answers are in response to my question about 2018 trends to watch. The third is his take on releasing an entire series of books at once, Netflix-style, rather than individual releases spread out over months or years.
David: What is a top trend to watch in 2018?
Jim Kukral: I’ve been saying for the last couple of years that audiobooks are going to be the new frontier. The problem with audiobooks is that it’s very difficult and expensive to get one produced. Also, Audible or ACX (Amazon’s division that helps authors produce audiobooks), kind of has a strangle hold on the marketplace.
You have to go to the ACX marketplace, find a narrator, negotiate a deal, and pay thousands and thousands of dollars up front to retain full royalties. You shouldn’t have to pay that money. It’s expensive and time consuming to have somebody narrate your book.
Nevertheless the market for audiobooks is exploding. It’s a simple matter for anyone to use Bluetooth to connect their phone or their tablet to play the audiobook directly into their car. Or easily listen while they’re on bus or at a doctor’s appointment or whatever.
Audiobooks are going to be a huge thing and I’m encouraging every author to go out there and get their audiobooks done because it’s just a booming market.
David: Do you have a second trend authors should be paying attention to in 2018?
Jim: I have always been a fan of the short story books. I know that people who write traditional-length books do well, but I believe we are moving to a society where people want shorter hits.
I think that people who are writing shorter stories that are broken up into shorter chapters are really going to change the world. Look at wattpad.com. Have you ever been to wattpad.com? They are doing billions, trillions of views over there. People are having a lot of success writing stories and transitioning to publishing books and self-publishing and all kinds of things.
There’s even an app out there called Tap. This is a fascinating app that I think is on the cusp of exploding. Basically, you can upload your book and people read it like text messages.
I think that that kind of stuff is going to take off in the future, based where society is going and everybody is always staring at their phone. They want quick hits. But there’s still a place for the long form.
David: Shifting gears, it’s an accepted fiction publishing strategy to write a series of books rather than standalone novels. But what if instead of releasing them individually, as written, they are released Netfix-style; all at once?
Jim: Netflix has changed the way that we watch television. A series comes out of Netflix and you want to watch the whole thing. How annoyed would you be now if you had to sit and wait to watch an episode, one per week?
It’s about what consumers want, how they want to consume the content; whether it’s television, music or books. People have transformed into a society where they want to consume everything quickly, the way they want it, as fast as possible.
If I’m going to Amazon where most people are, and I was writing a series of fiction books, I would definitely wait until I have 2 or 3 books and then I would launch them all together.
You launch the first one; you could even make that $1.99 or free for a while, and get people hooked. Then launch the next. That’s the formula. I would probably do it that way.
The problem is if somebody reads book one, and they’re like “okay, that was really good, I can’t wait to read book 2”, but it’s not for sale yet. I want to be signing those people who read book one to my email list or connected to my Facebook page so that I can tell them about book 2.
Amazon is not sharing that customer data with you. If somebody bought that first book, you gotta remarket all over again. Amazon does let you follow an author and they’ll send out an email that says they released a new book. But you are counting on somebody to click that follow button. I mean, it’s probably not going to happen.
So, I would do it that way if I was releasing fiction books, I would release them in a manner where I have the first one discounted or free. Then I will lead people into the other books. Then I would follow that methodology for every series down the road.
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Don’t miss these short 3-question interviews: