The lifespan of an indie book.

Certified Headless turned 1-year-old last month!

That’s me using an exclamation point wrong. Because indie book birthdays: One, aren’t a thing, and Two, aren’t something to celebrated. They’re to be feared. They belong in the same conversation as “the big four-oh,” and over-the-hill jokes.

 Or, put another way, you know how sometimes you’re in the kitchen and you get a whiff of something nasty? And you spend the next couple of minutes walking around taking little sniffs to try and figure out where the smell is coming from? Does the trash need to be taken out because someone left half an egg salad sandwich in it? Or did someone pour something down the sink and forget to run the garbage disposal? Maybe one of the kids left out a glass of milk a couple days ago?

It’s like that. Except in this case, my nose led me out of the kitchen and over to the computer. Because that’s what I was smelling. The rank stench of the indie book I published last year.

According to my completely non-scientific research, the average lifespan of an indie book seems to be about four to six months. Within those first months is when I saw the majority of my sales. It’s when my friends and family purchased it in support. It’s when I actively sought reviews from different people and bloggers. It’s when people asked me things like, “You wrote a book? What’s it about?”

Sure, I got a little bump in sales when the audio version came out, but for the most part, six months after I published Certified Headless, it passed its shelf life. After the initial buzz it just . . . languished, like a hairy middle-aged European man in a speedo at the beach. Not getting better with age.

Because getting sales takes constant marketing. And that shit gets tiring, especially when you’d rather be working on the next book. Which honestly is a marketing tool for the original novel in its own right.

Does this blog entry have a point?

Yes.

There are five indie/hybrid authors whose careers I’ve tracked pretty closely over the years: Glenn Bullion, Drew Hayes, John Conroe, Elliott Kay and Robert Bevan. And while they all have a unique voice; they also have one very big thing in common.

They write a lot of books.

Notice I didn’t say they wrote some books.

They write (present tense) A LOT OF BOOKS. Effing capitalized.

Bullion’s published 13, Hayes has published 20 plus several novellas, Conroe’s published 20, Kay’s published 12, and Bevan’s published 10 plus 6 collections of short stories plus several novellas. And that’s right now. If I wrote this next month, I’d almost guarantee I’d have to change these totals. 

And that’s only in the last ten years, less for some of them.

These guys are my heroes because they put in the work. (And also because their books are awesome. You should check them out.) More importantly (to the point of this blog entry) is that every book they put out helps draw new people to their series, generates new buzz, new word of mouth, and creates new sales of the originals.

Traditional author, Jim Butcher, is amazing, and deservedly so. But in the five years we’ve all been waiting for Peace Talks, these guys wrote like eight books each (or more).

Truly, this isn’t even an Indie phenomenon. Even traditionally published authors like Butcher have to deal with constantly publishing new material, though for them it’s called the frontlist and backlist.

So what’s the problem, you probably won’t ask.

The problem is I don’t write as fast as these guys. One year after CH is finished and I’m still only 3/4 done with a first draft of the sequel, A Ghoul Named Bob. That means three more months of writing, and God knows how many months of editing.

Editing sucks. I’ve probably mentioned that before.

Not putting out a new book means I’m not drawing people back into the series, not having new people see it and discover the original, not generating new sales.

And I likely won’t anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean I give up. Even though I don’t write as fast as those other authors, as a reader and a writer it gives me encouragement to know that there are guys like them clacking away on their keyboards the same way I am right now. And every time I choose to write another page instead of watching old Survivor re-runs, I know I’m building toward something. And that maybe, maybe, someday there’ll be someone sitting on their couch reading my book and enjoying it as much as I enjoy those other guys’ works.