Aaron Pogue, an Indie Publishing Success Story

Aaron Pogue is the author of the Amazon best-seller TAMING FIRE and Director of User Experience for Draft2Digital I Turn Your Story into an Ebook!

We’re kicking off our series on self-publishing with a guest post from Aaron Pogue, author of the Amazon best-selling fantasy novel TAMING FIRE. His success is particularly remarkable since he got his master’s degree in Professional Writing from the University of Oklahoma only in May, 2012. Because he took only a course in screenwriting from me, I take no credit for his success, and in fact am now learning from him. — Win

By Aaron Pogue

I’m an indie-publishing success story.

You probably haven’t heard my name. I’m not one of the superstars–J.A. Konrath or Amanda Hocking or Hugh Howey—but I’m still living some of my wildest dreams because of the indie-publishing revolution made possible by e-books and online retailers.

If you don’t already know the stories behind those other names I mentioned, I encourage you to track them down. Read up. Konrath’s blog was one of the main reasons I waded into indie publishing, and the success of authors like Hocking and Howey kept me focused and fighting even when things turned tough.

It’s been a long yellow brick road.  My reward at the end, though, is a book that in two and a half years has sold over a hundred thousand copies, and sequels which have sold as well.

The Process

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I started writing when I was a kid. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d written two bad novels—I knew they were bad—but I was learning the art.

In college I wrote my first good book. I spent four years drafting it, revising it, sharing it with test readers, and then tweaking some more. It was a monster epic fantasy novel featuring a young orphan who briefly attends a school for wizards before becoming a dragon rider, winning the heart of a princess, and saving the world.

The day after I graduated, I started sending the book out to publishers. I spent two years submitting it to Manhattan slush piles and collecting blind rejection notices before I gave up on landing a deal that way and started shopping my book to agents.

Giving Up

Another year of rejection letters was enough to bruise my spirit. I stopped submitting my book, and for several years, I stopped writing altogether.

That didn’t last. I’m a born storyteller, and I couldn’t stand keeping quiet. But when I came back to writing, I did it without any real intention of wide distribution. I made it my hobby, a pleasant distraction for friends and family, and I told myself I was satisfied with that.

I still believed I was good enough to be published, but I didn’t see enough potential reward to justify the tedious, painful, and degrading submission process.  Instead, I wrote for myself and my friends, and considered it enough to live out my life unpublished.

After all, I knew the humiliating shamefulness of choosing self-publishing. I’d preached against it, warning would-be authors of the stigma associated with it, not to mention the high costs and shoddy quality.

So as I dove back into writing with gusto, I turned my back on all my ambitions of selling stories to the masses. Whenever anyone suggested I self-publish the stuff just to “get it out there,” I politely and firmly explained why doing so would be worse than remaining unpublished altogether. That was 2006. A lot has happened since 2006.

Kindle Publishing

I followed the rise of e-readers with some interest, but it wasn’t until early 2010 that I discovered J.A. Konrath’s blog and started reading about his experiences with self-publishing through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. He waxed euphoric describing the royalties available to authors, and not only the profits but also the low-priced sales opportunities they made possible. An indie author could afford to massively undercut Manhattan book prices, catch book-buyers’ attention, and still make far more money per copy sold than he ever would with a traditional publishing deal.

It was an amazing opportunity, open to anyone savvy enough to sign up for an internet account, and it was essentially free. This was the change I had been waiting for, and one I hadn’t really ever expected to see. For the first time, a self-published author could release a professional-quality book to compete side-by-side with traditional works without facing any real barriers to entry.

I liked what I was reading. I spent six months digging deeper, trying to find the catch, researching, because I was convinced the world couldn’t work that way. I’d spent a lot of time insisting to other people that the world couldn’t work that way. But e-books changed everything. Digital doesn’t distinguish between traditional and indie-published.  The quality of the story carries the day.

Taking the Leap

I finally decided I believed. I negotiated a deal with an artist friend to get myself a cover, with an editor friend to review my work, and with a programmer friend to help me format it properly. Then I considered all the stories I’d written over the last ten years.

I did consider tossing out some book that didn’t much matter to me, just in case it crashed and burned, but that seemed like a recipe for failure. I figured if it was going to be a fair test, I had to give it my best.

My old dragon rider story didn’t make the cut. I’d spent more years improving as an artist, after all, so I looked to my newer stuff.

I settled on my newest. It was the first book in a near-future sci-fi series with a strong female protagonist and a very cool premise. I still think it’s probably the best book I’ve written. In October of 2010, I listed it for sale at Amazon. By the end of the month, I’d amassed a couple hundred sales. It was enough to recoup my minimal investment in production costs, and for the first time in my life, I was getting paid for my fiction. That was rewarding.

By the end of the year, I had maybe a hundred sales more. Strangers were reading my work! Honestly, I was thrilled.

Learning the Ropes

I wasn’t finished, though. That book had a sequel, and now that it had readers, I felt like I owed them more. So I published book two in February.

I was working on a third book in my sci-fi series that I’d hoped to release in June, but working other jobs set me back a bit. Anxious to meet my challenge, I started looking through my back catalog for anything that might be ready to go. And there, battered and abandoned, was the old manuscript for my dragon rider story.

TAMING FIRE

I didn’t expect much. I was just filling a spot, killing time until the August release of my next sci-fi novel, which I genuinely expected to sell in the dozens. I scrounged up a cover, cobbled together a product description from the contents of ancient query letters, and published Taming Fire one lazy Friday afternoon.

Saturday morning I woke up and checked my sales numbers, just to see how the sci-fi books were doing. I hadn’t even announced the dragon rider book yet, so I wasn’t expecting anything there.

To my surprise, the book already had a dozen sales. It had barely been live for that many hours. I’d done nothing to promote it, but apparently Amazon had recommended it to some people who had bought dragon books before.

They kept doing that, and people kept buying. By the end of the day, Taming Fire had outsold my sci-fi series for the whole month. By the end of the week, it had outsold that series for all time. That was the summer of 2011. Over the next two and a half years, Taming Fire sold more than 100,000 copies. The sequels have sold as many again.

And that success hasn’t gone unnoticed. I’ve received offers from agents, editors, audiobook producers, translators, and international publishers, all interested in Taming Fire and its sequels.

Early last year, 47North, a sci-fi/fantasy imprint owned by Amazon, approached me and offered a three-book deal for a new property based on an outline.

I quit my day job to become a full-time writer.

Yes, I’m an indie-publishing success story. And it’s all because of a book I’d given up on, a book that an entire industry had spent three years roundly rejecting.

I can’t tell you how to do it. There’s no secret path to success. The beauty of this revolution isn’t any kind of guarantee. But is a door open to all.

Tell your story, and let it find its place. That’s my advice. It worked wonders for me.

Footnote from Win:  Aaron is absolutely right about undercutting Manhattan prices and earning far more money per copy that you would with a traditional publishing deal.

Traditional: Hardbacks are generally priced at $24.95, with a royalty of 10%, less a 15% agent’s commission.  That means about $2.12 to the writer, at a price that puts off readers.  The publisher will publish the e-book the same day, usually priced at about $12.99.  The writer’s royalty is now accepted as 25% of what the publisher receives.  Since amazon pays the publisher 35%, the royalty comes to $1.29, at a price that is still high.

A kindle edition would be at the price of your choice.  From pricing of $2.99 to $9.99, Amazon pays a royalty of an impressive 70%.  So if you choose $9.99, attractive for a brand new book, you get $7.00 per copy sold.  Do the arithmetic.

Be sure of this: There are also reasons not to publish digitally.  We’ll get to those in blogs soon.  But these basic dollar figures will not go away, and digital is the medium of the foreseeable future.

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