I’ve officially finished quality checking my fiction. It should be a good feeling, but I’m extremely tired of doing this. But, I soldier on. I’m approximately 75% complete with my entire portfolio. Now, it’s just my writing books, which should flow much more easily. There’s just so much more to quality-checking fiction than other genres.
Someone asked what exactly I’m doing with my quality checks, so let me break this down into detail again and see if I can explain it correctly.
When you’ve published as many books as I have (66), it takes a Herculean effort to manage your portfolio. For example, are all of your prices in Australian dollars correct and consistent? What about your book descriptions? What about your back matter links? Are they correct or did one of them break?
Also, when you’ve been doing this for as long as I have, things change at retailers, and those changes will lose you visibility and money if you’re not careful. Let me give you three key examples of this that happened within the last year.
First, KDP Print replaced CreateSpace (I think that was in the last year, I can’t remember when CreateSpace went away officially). When my titles migrated from CreateSpace to KDP Print, I noticed that they lost some of their metadata. The categories and keywords I originally chose didn’t carry over. Also, some titles that were in Expanded Distribution were no longer in Expanded Distribution, and I had to check the box again. All of this affects my visibility and sales, and it makes my Amazon ads have to work much harder.
The second event was Google Play’s shift from wholesale pricing to agency pricing. (I won’t go into the details of how both of these work. If you want that, buy my book The Indie Author Encyclopedia—www.authorlevelup.com/encyclopedia). Until recently, Google used to discount your pricing in order to sell more copies. So if you wanted to sell a book for $4.99, you had to list it for around $6.50, and that would make Google drop the price to (around) $4.99. Otherwise, if you listed it at $4.99, Google would discount your book to (around) $3.99, and if your book was lower on Google Play than Amazon, uh-oh—you just violated the KDP Terms of Service. Amazon says you can’t offer the book lower than where you sell it on Amazon. Also, there’s the price-matching problem, so the result was that if you didn’t do this properly, you’d end up in trouble with Amazon or Amazon would price-match Google Play and your books would sell for cheaper than they should have.
To say this was a major pain is an understatement. It’s one reason that many authors chose not to distribute to Google Play. (And, let’s not forget that Google Play didn’t accept new authors accounts until relatively recently).
Anyway, all of this was a major pain and it resulted in many ugly price points around the Google Play Store. Now Google has come to their senses, and the result is that all those authors who had to inflate their pricing in the old days now have books that are vastly OVERPRICED. Yikes…This is not easy to change when you have as many books as I do. So, as part of this project, my book prices on Google Play are dropping by about 25%-40%, which should help my sales there.
The third example is that in the past week, Books2Read updated their links to include separate links for audiobooks and trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Now, I have the ability to showcase audiobooks and paperbacks—that might help increase my sales. Yet, I suspect many authors are NOT going to update their legacy links any time soon because it’s too much work.
Things like this happen at retailers all the time, and it’s our job to stay on top of them.
And of course, these are just items that happened last year. Imagine how much things change over seven years.
Also, imagine how, if you’re not organized, you can make little mistakes that create lots of inconsistencies across your entire portfolio. Not to mention accidental typos or button clicks that you shouldn’t have made…
Like I said, all this little stuff adds up. It seems small, but when you take it all together, it’s quite extraordinary.
WHAT I’M DOING
Here’s a basic guide to what I’m checking on each book.
First, I’m capturing the basic metadata in meticulous detail:
- Title
- Series
- Series #
- Subtitle
- Author
- Page count
- Etc.
Next, I’m also capturing the following items. This is not an exhaustive list:
- which formats the book is available in
- pricing for each format
- links to the major retailer sales pages
- which distributors carry the book
- the interior of the book and what version it is on (so I can double-check with retailers that I have the correct version for sale)
- the version of the book description that is currently in production (Lately, I’ve been including versions just under my book descriptions. This way, if I publish a new version, I can check the sales page to determine whether it has been published).
- whether I have backup copies of each book on file both on my computer, in the cloud, and on an external hard drive, and which formats I have (some formats needed to be updated, such as .DOC. I converted those to .DOCX)
- the cover designer, when the cover designed, the copyright arrangement, information about models, stock photos, etc.
- the editors, when the book was edited, and whether I have the edits on file
- Audiobook details and whether I have the MP3s on file
- The dates when I did the checks
That’s just scratching the surface, folks. I capture around 100 data points for each book, so this is long, tedious, and exhausting work. It’s a lot of effort to capture this data because I have to create it from scratch, but next time around, it’ll be much easier.
However, there is one thing I am NOT doing: I’m not re-editing the books or looking for typos. I already paid editors to do that. Sure, if I see a typo, I’ll fix it, but that’s not my primary concern. For the most part, I don’t touch the interiors of the book except to update the version of the book, and maybe the back matter pages. (I include versioning on my copyright pages so I know what version of the book has been published. I keep a log of all my books so I can tell what I updated and when.)
I’ll share more about this in an upcoming book, but basically:
- I’m CAPTURING all the metadata for my books.
- I’m VALIDATING whether that data shows up correctly at retailers. For example, if I put on the spreadsheet that a book costs $2.99 ebook and $12.99 print, is that what shows up on Amazon, Kobo, Google, etc.? Or did I make a mistake?
- I’m MEMORIALIZING WHEN I validated the book information so I can remember the last time I checked a book. This makes it stunningly easy to say one morning, “Which of my book descriptions haven’t been updated in greater than three years?” I can create a simple pivot table and find out in seconds which books may need new sales copy.
Why do all of this? A few reasons:
- If you create intellectual property, you’re responsible for it. Just like bringing a kid into the world or adopting a pet, you have a responsibility to make sure that it is always in the best possible position for sales.
- Failure to do this will result in lost sales over time. See my Google example above. As you become prolific, you cannot afford to not solve this problem.
- It’s helpful for my heirs. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, they can pull up the master spreadsheet and see what books I’ve published, where they are published, and in what formats.
- It helps me understand what’s going on in my book portfolio. I THINK I know, but I don’t always do. This exercise helps me see my books as they are, not how I think they are performing.
I liken it to being a landlord who owns many buildings across the city. As the landlord, you’re responsible for the building and for maintaining them.
If a tenant calls you to fix a toilet, you’ve got to fix it or hire someone to do the job. Maybe the plumbing in that building needs to be replaced in a few years.
Yet, it’s impossible to know what’s going on at all of your porperties at all times. Usually no news is good news, but sometimes no news is bad news.
Since 2015 or so, I’ve taken the approach of viewing my IP portfolio as a portfolio of assets. Joanna Penn wrote about this earlier in the week and I recommend you read her blog as she’s been saying this for years as well. Other longtime professional authors all see their books this way and manage them accordingly.
When you think about your portfolio as a series of assets, then you’ll manage it differently.
When you think about your portfolio as a block of data, you’ll especially manage it differently.
Hell, the very thought of building a new website gives me anxiety. There’s no way I’m going to create a book page for each of my books one by one. No way. This spreadsheet can help me with that problem because I can give it to a developer and have them populate book pages based on the metadata captured in the spreadsheet—book description, cover, retailer links, etc. All we have to do is settle on the design/format of the page. The spreadsheet will provide the remaining details.
In other words, the long answer to “why am I doing this” is that I’m positioning myself for a future that’s coming where authors will need to manage their books as data. Technically, that future is already here, but most are not thinking this way right now. As we move into a new future of Web 3.0, artificial intelligence, and new and unique opportunities for authors to leverage their work for income, there are many, many opportunities that will come from having a portfolio of well-managed and up-to-date intellectual property, especially when you have a big catalogue like I do.
If you have 1 book, this is not a problem for you. If you have 5 books, this is not a problem for you.
If you have 20 books, this will start to become a problem.
If you have over 50 books, then you’ll start thinking like I am. Better to start sooner though.
Anyhoo, time for bed. I did not get to see the northern lights last night—the skies filled with clouds so I couldn’t see them unfortunately. Maybe next time.
Have a good night.
