Writers in the Storm

by Lisa Norman

I recently attended the 2021 Publishing Year in Review: Opportunities & Continuing Trends, an online publishing seminar put on by Ingram Content Group. The entire presentation was encouraging and fascinating.

One moment caught my attention during the presentation by Pete McCarthy, the Director of Consumer Insights from Ingram Book Company. This is a man who makes it his business to be up on the trends among readers. With his permission, I'm going to share some of these trends with you.

The Visible Trends

He pointed out the trends both before and during the pandemic. Note that the growth in the e-book and audiobook markets are good, but perhaps less than we would expect. Print was essentially flat, whereas reading in any format is up. It has fallen from 2011, perhaps, but not by much.

This is great news. People still like to read books!

Print vs Digital

He described 33% of the book readers as omnivorous. They'll read a book in any format depending on price point, availability, and other factors. These folks just want to read.

Next, he shared information showing that most people buy books both online and in physical stores.

The takeaway here is that the modern consumer will buy a book in any format and from whatever location is most convenient.

E-books

Then he did a deep dive into e-book statistics.

Are e-book sales up or down? He said the answer is nuanced with the range being dependent on genre. Adult fiction is doing well with some areas up 6%. In general, he sees overall growth in e-books.

But then he showed something fascinating.

Non-Ownership Reading

"Non-ownership" reading refers to areas like Kindle Unlimited and libraries, where it is possible to borrow a book and read it without necessarily being tracked in the sales numbers.

This area is growing significantly, but doesn't show up on the trend charts.

The Invisible Readers of the Future

There's another readership that doesn't show on any of the charts, an invisible demographic.

Most of the statistics we track are for adults, but younger readers are interacting with stories in a completely different way.

Wattpad, WebToon, and others are extremely popular among younger readers. These are websites and applications that get numbers like 400 million monthly visits with average time spent on the apps in excess of 20 minutes each visit. Online statistics for Wattpad show that it had 90 million monthly users as of November 2021.

If you haven't seen these venues yet, they're places where people share stories. Like Kindle Vella, these stories are often released periodically or episodically. These stories are generally free, often supported by Patreon or Ko-fi donations.

And there are more venues like this. Venues like Archive of Our Own, one that my daughter loves. She loves the fresh and unusual voices of the authors. She loves that this is a place where fans can hang out and write fan fiction as well as create new worlds in fresh ways. Here are their statistics from 2020, where they were tracking in excess of 50 million views per day.

These statistics and trends are difficult for us to compare and quantify to industry standards, but they are examples of digital reading. According to Pete McCarthy, this is a massive trend. He said that he doesn't want to overreact, but he thinks this is a trend worth keeping an eye on in a big way.

Not Just for Kids

These websites are not just attracting children.

A press release from Wattpad in 2021 claimed that the platform boasted 90 million readers and 5 million writers. Eighty percent of their users are Gen Z (born after 1997). These works are not all amateur, either. Almost 1,500 Wattpad stories have been either published as books or adapted for TV or film. You can see insights into the trending topics here.

Pete said that Archive of Our Own is reporting 400 million monthly visits with an average time on site of 17 minutes.

Digital reading is up much more than the 6% that shows in the official statistics. Pete showed that consumer engagement with online media is also up, and this includes engaging with stories in different media formats: audio, gaming, and streaming content being up, while time spent watching TV was down.

People are engaging with stories online in non-traditional formats, not just with paper books, e-books, or audiobooks.

Types of Content People Spend Time With on the Internet

This chart only shows the top 20 types of online content, and books are #19. He sees this as very positive.

I've added my own highlight to entertainment and games because my research shows that these are also ways in which people are engaging with stories.

In my research of WebToons, Wattpad, Archive of our Own, and other similar trends, I've noticed a movement among the younger generations towards a passion for transmedia content: stories that transcend the format they are presented in, stories that can be experienced in many different types of media. I suspect that a lot of what is classified as entertainment content is interacting with stories in the form of games, online short-form reading, fan fiction, movie adaptations, and animations.

What is Transmedia?

To understand transmedia, think of Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, or DC Comics.

There are movies, games, books, animated shows, graphic novels, comic books, fan fiction, and many more ways that fans are interacting with these elaborate story worlds. Fans get together for conventions. They talk in forums. Want a non-science fiction example? How about Sherlock Holmes?

This page at Archive of Our Own lists all fandoms they currently explore.

Increasingly, fans want to interact with the stories they consume. Fans still enjoy the printed word. They just want to have more interaction with the worlds their favorite authors are creating.

This trend isn't new. Any reader who has ever become immersed in a book has had that moment when they close the book and wish they could stay with it, stay in that world.

With modern technology and modern transmedia storytelling, readers can. Readers become a part of the story.

I loved one quote that Pete put on the bottom of a slide:

"Opportunity is everywhere — stay agile, adapt, try new things."

What are you doing to engage with this hidden demographic of readers?

About Lisa

Lisa Norman's passion has been writing since she could hold a pencil. While that is a cliché, she is unique in that her first novel was written on gum wrappers. As a young woman, she learned to program and discovered she has a talent for helping people and computers learn to work together and play nice. When she's not playing with her daughter, writing, or designing for the web, she can be found wandering the local beaches.

Lisa writes as Deleyna Marr and is the owner of Deleyna's Dynamic Designs, a web development company focused on helping writers, and Heart Ally Books, an indie publishing firm. She teaches for Lawson Writer's Academy.

Interested in learning more from Lisa? See her teaching schedule below.

Classes:

• May: Digital Organization Skills for Authors
• June: Crazy Easy Awesome-Author Websites
• July: Crazy Easy Social Media for Authors

Credits:

Top Image by maximiliano estevez from Pixabay

*Slides Reprinted with permission of Ingram Content Group

by Eldred Bird

It started like any other writing session. Drink in hand, I made my way to my office and plopped down in front of the computer. The welcome glow of the monitor lit my face as I settled in for what I felt would finally be a productive writing session—my first in quite some time.

Fresh ideas swirled as I opened the data directory and positioned the mouse pointer over my current work in progress. I clicked the button and waited. Nothing. I clicked again. Still nothing. I double-clicked and triple-clicked.

No response.

Panic began to set in as I attempted to open folder after folder. Still nothing! I listened for the familiar whir of the Network Attached Storage (NAS) on my desk next to the router but was met with silence.

I rebooted the drive, hoping beyond hope it would reconnect. I could hear the drive spin up, the heads jumping back and forth across the surface of the disc, searching for the missing ones and zeros that made up my life’s work.

The drive slowed, and then it stopped. I tried again, then again, with no success. Death hung heavy in the silence.

My data was gone.

A Writer’s Worst Nightmare

A real modern horror story, right? The scariest part is this actually happened. To me. This month. The NAS running the private cloud in my home failed one week before I was going to replace it with a newer model. All my writing, as well photos and household data, were inaccessible.

Adding to the stress was the fact that I hadn’t run a full back-up in years. How embarrassing is that? I was an IT guy in my pre-writing life. I know better than to get into this predicament.  But, between crazy life and parental strife, that vital habit had fallen by the wayside.

It felt like my entire life had been wiped out.

Recovering from Disaster

The first step in recovering from this kind of failure is don’t panic. (I know, I know. Easier said than done).

Remaining calm is key to not causing more damage.

Here are the steps, in order, to increase your chances of recovering from this kind of crisis:

1. Unplug the drive

Unplugging the power and network connections are the first steps in preventing further data loss. If you’re dealing with an internal drive, shut the computer down. Shutting things down will prevent further physical damage to the surface of the disc, increasing your chances of recovery.

2. Call a professional

Unless you do data recovery for a living, don’t mess with it yourself. Odds are you will only make it worse. As I mentioned, I’m a retired network engineer and IT professional, but I recognized very quickly that this was beyond my skillset.

3. Do your homework

Not all data recovery firms are created equal. Price is a consideration, but reviews are more important. You may only get one chance at this, so be picky and ask a lot of questions.

If you’re in the Phoenix area, I highly recommend Desert Data Recovery. They work miracles and do it at a reasonable price. Nicky also has a lovely British accent that’s very calming, a more important quality than you might think in the middle of a crisis.

4. Search for hidden files

While your drive is with your chosen recovery service, search for older versions of files in case your data can’t be retrieved.

Places to look might be old external drives and memory sticks floating around the house or office. Also, check out the Recycle Bin on your computer’s desktop. If you haven’t emptied it, there may be previous versions of your work you can use to rebuild. If you have an online cloud account, check to see if any of your data is backed there.

5. Restore deleted files

Even empty drives and memory sticks may yield some data when you run an Undelete utility on them. There are a lot of choices out there, but my personal favorite is Glarysoft File Recovery. They have a free version that works well, but for big jobs I would recommend the pro version.

My Journey to Recovery

The good news is that my story has a happier ending than most. The data recovery service was able to fully recover 100% of my files from the malfunctioning drive.

I immediately made a full copy of the recovered files and put it in my safe in case there were any other problems during the restoration process. Crisis averted…for now.

A New Strategy

As you can probably guess, things are going to be much different in the Bird house going forward. Backing up data will be taking a much higher priority.

To make the process easier, here are the steps I’m taking:

1. Data Organization

As I am restoring my data to the new NAS, I’m taking the opportunity to reorganize the files and folders into a more logical order. This will help speed the backup process, as some files are updated more often than others and require more frequent maintenance.

2. Culling Duplicates

One thing I’ve found a lot of while going through the recovered data are multiple copies of files, especially images, strewn around the drive inside various folders. I’m terrible about remembering where I’ve saved things and then end up resaving them somewhere else.

Eliminating the duplicates not only saves drive space, it also speeds up the backup process because there’s less to backup.

3. Scheduling Regular Backups

The most important change being made is the regular scheduling of backups. I can assure you that these will be performed religiously in the future!

In addition to the new network drive, I now have two additional large-capacity external drives that will be put into rotation. The latest backup will be stored in our fire-safe and the older one will be plugged into my desktop computer.

Backups will run automatically from the desktop computer, as it’s the one machine in the house that is always up. After each backup runs, the external drives will be swapped with the latest going back into the safe.

Some Final Thoughts

After going through this experience, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of regular backups. There are so many options that there’s no excuse anymore. Cloud services like OneDrive, Apple’s iDrive, and a multitude of other online services make it easy to keep your important data safe. Removable drives, USB drives, and network attached storages are also options.

Bottom line—find something that works for you and then use it!

Do you have a backup strategy? How consistent are you at backing up your files? Share what works (or doesn’t) for you in the comments below.

About Eldred

Eldred Bird writes contemporary fiction, short stories, and personal essays. He has spent a great deal of time exploring the deserts, forests, and deep canyons inside his home state of Arizona. His James McCarthy adventures, Killing Karma, Catching Karma, and Cold Karma, reflect this love of the Grand Canyon State even as his character solves mysteries amidst danger. Eldred explores the boundaries of short fiction in his stories, The Waking Room, Treble in Paradise: A Tale of Sax and Violins, and The Smell of Fear.

When he’s not writing, Eldred spends time cycling, hiking, and juggling (yes, juggling…bowling balls and 21-inch knives). His passion for photography allows him to record his travels. He can be found on Twitter or Facebook, or at his website.

by Lynette M. Burrows

Being an independent author-publisher isn’t for everyone. I chose that path, but my path is mine. You must choose your own path. If you are weighing your options, this “Things I Wish I Knew Before I Published” series may help. Part I and Part II discuss big picture issues to consider. This is part III, the last post in this series.

Things I Wish I Knew About Rules 

The advice you can find about the “rules” of writing and publishing goes from one extreme to another. Some say there are no rules. Others give you a list of rules. 

Traditional Publishing

When you consider traditional publishing, remember that these big publishers are corporations and they have both public and more private rules. They call their public rules “submission guidelines.” Often those guidelines are about how to format your manuscript. 

The harder to find or see rules are those common to corporations. Certain departments handle certain things. One publisher may tolerate stories that include guns or sex scenes. The next one won’t. Often these corporations do not share internal policies such as risk tolerance or political leanings or their alignment with causes you care about. 

Even the editors you submit to have rules. They don’t call them rules, yet they have certain expectations. They expect stories to be entertaining, to progress from beginning to middle to the end. Each editor has genre expectations and life events that influence their interpretation of your story. Some editors are flexible and open to having their expectations exploded by a skillful author. Others will not be.

What can you do? Know what’s important to you. Research the publishers and editor you’d like to publish your work. Ask questions of authors, agents, editors, and librarians. Can’t do it in person? Try social media.

Don’t be so eager to be published that you sign your first contract without knowing what it means to your book and to your values. Decide which issues are a no-deal for you in advance.

Rules in Independent Publishing

You may get the impression that there are no rules in independent publishing. You’d be wrong. There are tons of rules. Amazon has a set of rules. So do Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Draft to Digital, and Ingram Spark. There are cover sizes and images they will and will not tolerate on covers. Genres they will and will not allow on their sites. Advertisers have rules, too. Those are a tiny part of the rules associated with independent publishing.

While independently published authors don’t have to contend with corporate editors, we have to please the readers of our genre. Readers have expectations and those are their “rules.” 

There are also the expectations or rules we impose upon ourselves. Sometimes, independent author-publishers impose harsh, unrealistic, unsustainable rules on themselves. 

What I Wish I Knew About the Rules Before I Published

The anonymous “they” say that you need to know the rules before you break them. I wish I’d understood the unsaid part of that advice. If you break the rules, there are consequences. Sometimes, the consequences are that the editors and readers love what you did. But if you break too many rules and expectations, you may alienate some editors and readers. Your book may not sell.

As an independent publisher, it's up to you to understand the rules and what consequences may result if you decide to break a few.

Things I Wish I Knew About the Writer’s Life

No matter the publishing path you follow, you are a writer. A writer’s life is not as advertised. Hollywood films set up expectations that writers solve crimes or have exciting adventures. Magazines and other media hold up the rags to riches stories of fabulously successful and wealthy authors as something all writers can become. 

Hollywood vs. Real Life

While it depends on what you call adventures, few writers get much in the way of real-life adventure. Many of us do some traveling associated with our writing, but it’s rare that a writer is a successful detective or devious murderer or a terrified kidnap victim.

Most of the time, we sit at our writing device of choice and write. If we aren’t careful, we develop physical limitations because of too much sitting. Most of us self-isolate. It’s nearly impossible to get into the creative zone and socialize at the same time. 

It used to be very unlikely for a writer to earn a living. Thanks to independent publishing it is less rare today, but for every Stephen King or J. K. Rowling, there are thousands who do not earn enough to break even.  

The Get Real Numbers

Getting numbers specific to fiction books can be difficult. In July 2006, Publisher’s Weekly reported: 

— in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen BookScan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. Those blockbusters are a minute anomaly: only 10 books sold more than a million copies last year, and fewer than 500 sold more than 100,000.

Keep in mind, the Nielsen BookScan does not gather statistics on most independently published books. If you’d like to see statistics from 2020, Chris Kolmar has compiled an informative post.

But don’t let the numbers scare you. Independently published books that don’t go out of print may sell fewer than 1,000 copies per year for many years. In the long term, also called the long tail, the book may earn out and make the author money. 

What I Wish I Knew Before I Published

I wish I knew how much I would love it. I work way more than I ever did at my 40+ hour per week regular job and it doesn't feel like work. If I had known, I would have published sooner. But all anyone can do is make the best possible decision based on who they are, what they need, what they want, and how best to achieve those things. I hope this series of blog posts has helped you see your path a little more clearly. 

What is the best thing about your writing life and publishing path?

About Lynette

Lynette M. Burrows loves coffee, reading physical books, and the crack of a 9mm pistol—not all at the same time, though they all show up in her stories. She writes thrilling science fiction about characters challenged to rise from who they are to what they can be. 

Her series, The Fellowship Dystopia, presents a frightening familiar American tyranny that never was but could have been or may be. In My Soul to Keep, Miranda will fight the tyrants, even if they are family, even if it means her death. Book two of the series, If I Should Die, will be published in late spring 2022. The series companion novel, Fellowship, and all her books can be found wherever books are sold online.

Lynette lives in the land of Oz where two Yorkies have fooled her into thinking she’s the one in charge. You can find her online at her website, on Facebook, or on Twitter @lynette

Image Credits

• Top photo by Vlad Deep on Unsplash
• Second image by Arek Socha from Pixabay 
• Third image on left Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash, on right image by 1820796 from Pixabay 
• Final image by 1820796 from Pixabay