Author: Stephen Hise

Stephen Hise is the Evil Mastermind and founder of Indies Unlimited. Hise is an independent author and an avid supporter of the indie author movement. Learn more about Stephen at his website or his Amazon author page.

Success Is Not A Meritocracy

There is an old adage that goes, the cream always rises to the top. This ancient bit of agricultural wisdom is widely applied to mean that success comes to those who are worthy of it. I doubt there is a writer alive who does not harbor the fantasy, however deeply, that somewhere, a big-time movie producer or the acquisitions director of some major publishing house is reading his or her book and thinking, “My god! Why have I wasted all my years producing such drivel when this was out there? This person can write! I must sign them immediately, no matter the cost. Estelle, cancel all my appointments and find this author for me.”

That’s the dream. We think success will somehow find our books. Stop rolling your eyes and just admit it. Every writer harbors some version of that fantasy. If you didn’t think your writing was worthy, you wouldn’t put it out there. So you hit the publish button and wait for the calls and offers to start pouring in. They don’t. You find a few minor successes – a few nice reviews, a nice initial bump in the book rankings, maybe your book even won an award. But then everything seems to fizzle and your book languishes.

In the mean time that book, A Half-Hundred Variants of Off-Black has sold a zillion copies even though everyone says they hate it and it is being made into a movie with A-List actors. Probably in 3-D. There’s your cream. Continue reading “Success Is Not A Meritocracy”

Is “Free” Over?

Before the rise of Amazon’s KDP Select, I had serious reservations about the merits of giving books away for free as a means to build readership.

Then the Select program came and shook things up in a big way. For what was likely the first time, indie authors were shooting up the charts on a par with authors who are household names. Numerous early adopters of the program reported post-free sales surges and sales in their back lists. Amazon had figured out a way to make “free” work.

Then they began changing it. The first thing to go was the impact of free downloads on the ranking algorithm. The freebies no longer shot up the charts, gaining and sustaining the visibility they once had.

The next bubble to burst was that downloads did not appear to equate to readership. People seem content to fill their Kindles with free books they never get around to reading, let alone reviewing. Continue reading “Is “Free” Over?”

Superblog!

UK research company Netcraft estimates the global number of active websites sites is 187 million. Alexa is the leading provider of free, global web metrics. As I write this, the Alexa global rank of Indies Unlimited is 66,349. That number is a little meaningless without some context. Imagine a bar that shows the total number of websites, ranked in order of their page views and visitors. At the very top of the bar would be Google, in the number one spot. Indies Unlimited would appear in a position 99.96% of the distance from the bottom of the bar and 0.04% away from Google.

We are in the top 1% of websites worldwide. In fact, we are within the top one-half percent of websites worldwide. Visitors to Indies Unlimited spend an average of 17:55 minutes daily here and view an average of 10.70 pages. On Amazon, people spend 6.26 minutes on site and view an average of 8.25 pages.

Two years ago I launched Indies Unlimited into this cyber-ocean. We have come a long way in a short time, and we did it by providing quality content. No smoke and mirrors. No fancy SEO tricks. No marketing budget.

I want to express my deep gratitude to the readers of Indies Unlimited, not only for spending part of your precious time with us, but also for helping spread the word.

I also want to thank the scrappy band of lovable rebels who are responsible for the excellent content that has helped make this site a valuable resource and a real global presence:

K.S. Brooks, co-administrator
Laurie Boris, associate editor
And evil minions: A.C. Flory, Big Al, Carol Wyer, Carolyn Steele, Cathy Speight, Chris James, D.V. Berkom, Dick C. Waters, Jim Devitt, Kathy Rowe, Krista Tibbs, L. A. Lewandowski, Lynne Cantwell, Mark Jacobs, Martin Crosbie, Melissa Bowersock, Melissa Pearl, Rich Meyer, T.D. McKinnon, and Yvonne Hertzberger.

Post-Collaborative Collaboration

Yesterday, K.S. Brooks gave you her take on our creative collaboration in developing our latest book, Triple Dog Dare (available at Amazon US and Amazon UK).  A couple of weeks ago, my article focused on the general concepts of creative collaboration. Being able to produce a book as part of a team is a pretty neat thing, but the creating is not necessarily where the collaboration ends. You can (and should) also work together to market the book you co-created.

Marketing is an enigma for most of us. It’s not that there aren’t a lot of opportunities out there, it’s just that we don’t always know the best ways to expend our limited energies and capital. Anecdotal evidence of some author’s success with a particular venue or strategy may be interesting, but your mileage may vary. Continue reading “Post-Collaborative Collaboration”