A note about "Compromised" — The third Quake Runner: Alex Kayne Thriller!
Every book I publish includes what I call “A Note at the End.” In a way, they’re kind of like a blog post in and of themselves. They’re sort of the last thoughts I had as I was finishing up the book, some tidbits about what was going on in my life, what research I might have done, what influences may have crept in. I like them. Readers seem to like them, too.
With Compromised, I wanted to start a new tradition. Sort of a bonus, similar to the Note at the End, but not identical. I guess in keeping with the name of this blog, maybe it’s a Side Note. I like the symmetry!
Something you may not be aware of, unless you, too, happen to be an indie author, is that there is a kind of struggle happening behind the scenes for every book I publish. The objective for every book, obviously, is to not only provide entertainment and inspiration to the reader, but to provide a source of income for the author as well. That’s me. I like money. It’s good to exchange for goods and services.
In the self-publishing/indie author space, something you hear about often is “exclusivity versus wide.” There’s nothing all that fancy about either idea, but people do sometimes get confused. The long and the short of it comes down to this: Exclusive means that a book is limited to distribution through only one retailer, and that retailer is typically Amazon. If you’ve ever heard of or used Kindle Unlimited, the subscription-based service from Amazon that lets you check out books and only pay the $10/mo fee, you’ve benefited from an author being exclusive. Exclusive distribution is very common among indie authors, because Amazon promotes those books to its readers more frequently. The money is a little “easier” to make.
Wide, by contrast, means that a book can be sold by any retailer. Wide distribution is most common with traditional publishers and indie authors who have reached a certain level of notoriety and success. Though not every successful indie author chooses to “go wide,” many do.
At this point in my author career, I have more books that are exclusive than I have that are wide, and that’s something I’m working hard to change. Because as I tell authors all the time, nobody got into this business thinking, “I can’t wait to write books so they can only be sold by one store!”
Plus, from a practical and business standpoint, leaving all my literary eggs in Amazon’s basket is just bad business. Amazon can (and sometimes has) change its mind about how it operates, and suddenly making a living gets that much tougher. If I’m dependent on them for my income… well, then I’m what we in the business call “screwed.”
But it doesn’t have to end like that. There is a better way!
Right now I have dozens of books locked into exclusivity through Amazon, and they account for the bulk of my income. Peeling those out of Amazon altogether would hurt me financially, which I think is the exact plan Amazon has for this deal. The idea, from what I can see, is get authors hooked on the “easy money,” and make it too hard to move away without losing out.
Building a book business is a slow-grow kind of thing. A long game. It takes patience, resilience, and inhuman restraint sometimes. That last one mostly because there are indeed moments where you feel a near-overpowering urge to find Jeff Bezos, even if the guy is in orbit, and throttle him for what he has created.
But that would be crazy. Because cosmic radiation is sure to do the job for me at some point.
Digression aside, simply pulling the plug wouldn’t help me. I’d just watch my income drain away like so much murky bathwater. It would be gross, and sad. And I’d end up living in a hovel somewhere.
When I realized that I was kind of stuck when it came to book income, I started shifting gears and making a new plan.
To start, whenever you’re engaging in a long-term strategy, the first thing is to make sure you’ve sufficiently protected your resources. In this case, that means I need to safeguard my existing income stream. Even though I secretly worry that Amazon will someday shift gears and I’ll be in some suddenly rough financial waters, for the moment that’s my dingy. I’m determined to stay afloat.
What that means in practical terms is I’m forced to leave most of my books where they are, in exclusivity deals, until I can come up with an alternate source of income.
Which finally brings us to Compromised. Or rather, it brings us to the series that Compromised belongs to, namely Quake Runner: Alex Kayne.
The origin of this series goes back about four years, to a point when I was talking with a literary agent who said she really loved my books, but she couldn’t represent any of them due to their being self-published. Traditional publishers, she told me, have no interest in self-published books, even if they’re successful. Unless, of course, they become insanely successful, enough so that they decide they can swallow their pride in exchange for a cut of the author’s royalties.
To me, this is insanely stupid. First, if I went to any other industry and offered someone a piece of a product that I can show, without question, is successful, I’d get offers, even if I’ve been selling it myself for awhile. In fact, especially if I’ve been selling it myself for awhile.
If I invented a better mop and sold them from my website, a mop manufacturer would offer to buy the rights to the product because it’s a proven commodity. The same is true for literally any product. Any, that is, except books. Because if I sold thousands and thousands of copies of a book, it’s considered tainted goods.
Crazy.
Even more crazy are the authors who reach that level of mega-success that would make a publisher actually throw their hangups out of the window, and offer to buy a chunk of the rights to the book. Sorry, but no. As a self-published author I can make as much as 70% of my royalty (90+% in some circumstances). As a traditional author I’m lucky to make 3%, and I’m considered some kind of god if I make 5%.
So like I said… it’s crazy. Publishers leave billions of dollars on the table by refusing to invest in a growing bubble of measurable talent.
But that’s a whole other story. Maybe later.
The important bit was that I was talking to an agent and she said that if I wrote something new and original she’d be thrilled to represent it to a publisher. I thought that sounded reasonable, and so I pitched a series. She smiled tolerantly and told me I’d need to actually write the first book, and she’d shop it around for a year or two.
That didn’t sound quite as reasonable, but I figured, why not? And so I took my pitch and wrote the first book. And that book was what eventually came to be title Shaken. The first book in the Quake Runner: Alex Kayne series.
Savvy readers realize that Shaken is another of my self-published titles, and was not published by a traditional house after all. There’s a reason for that.
I realized, once I was done with that first book, that I had something special. Not only did I have a pretty amazing female protagonist and a whole twist to the technological thriller genre, I also had a “way out” from the tar pit that is exclusivity.
“What if,” I thought, “instead of handing this book over and making maybe 3% per sale two or three years form now, I publish it myself, make 70%+, and only do wide distribution?”
A series that was only wide could be the ticket! But only if I could convince readers of my Dan Kotler books to read and love these books as well.
So… what if they were set in the same universe?
In fact, what if the two protagonists—Dan Kotler and Alex Kayne—sometimes bumped into each other and worked together?
It wasn’t a crazy idea. Think about The Avengers, and the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. And in fact, that was just an extension of the Marvel Comics Universe, which had done crossovers between characters and books for decades. Readers loved seeing their favorite characters interact with each other from time to time. This could be a hit!
My first step, though, was to write more than one Alex Kayne book. And then to do a crossover. And that’s how Triggered and The Man Below came to be. WIth the former, I started mentioning Kotler and Denzel as colleagues of Symon and Mayher. With the latter, I had Kotler meet Kayne in a joint adventure.
Readers loved it.
And I knew, as the reviews started coming in, that I had a solution brewing.
And finally, we come to Compromised.
This third novel in the Quake Runner series ties in intimately with the twelfth Dan Kotler novel, The Demon Core. This book references events from that book, and continues some threads I established there. In fact, in some ways The Demon Core was written so that I could set up Compromised properly, along with some plans for future books.
In other words, as of these two novels, we’re stepping onto a path toward ending my reliance on Amazon, and the leash that is exclusivity.
That’s a lot of ‘splainin’ for something that can be boiled down thusly:
I’m writing more Alex Kayne books so that I can start making my Kotler books available to everyone, through every book retailer, worldwide.
Compromised isn’t entirely where that plan started, but it’s the most significant step forward in that plan to date. And I’m incredibly excited about it.
Because the book is good. Because all behind-the-scenes machinations and strategies aside, I wrote this book for the readers, and I know they’re going love it.
In the end, regardless of what kind of business your’e in, that’s a key to success. No matter what your plans and strategies turn out to be, create something that’s for the customer first, and for the plan second.
If you’re interested in gauging the book for yourself, it’s available for preorder and will release officially on Friday, September 4th, 2021.
You can get your copy here: https://books2read.com/QRcompromised.
Be sure to share that link with everyone you know, and help me move forward with my plan to be free of Amazon exclusivity for good!