I’m going to waffle on here about a few topics: writing a book,
credit swapping, and Inkshares business model.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m not a natural author. I don’t consider myself a writer, but a storyteller. It comes from my gaming background. The ability to think quickly on the fly, the ability to plan and anticipate what the rats inside your maze might do. These are the things that make a good GM - but only some of those skills transfer over to being a writer and it’s been a steep learning curve.
To calm the voice in my head from a story that just wouldn’t shut up, I made the decision to tell this story to a significantly broader audience than just a few friends. I started not knowing what medium that was. Graphic novel? Write it as a script? Write it as a novel? I honestly had no idea, and someone said write it as a novel and then it can be anything. Enter Nanowrimo and a co-author - and now I have something, Something that really excites me. Something that I can see the shape and feel the texture. Something I think that will excite others.
So now I just need to find them and I chose Inkshares. Like many here, I’m not exactly flush with lots of friends and family that can financially support the project, certainly not enough to get it into production given the target.
So what to do?
I looked at novel swaps - and have done a few, but honestly, it feels icky. I can’t tell if people doing the swapping are genuinely interested in the project, or just doing it it to get one order closer to that magic threshold. The whole business of getting credits revolves around referrals. So, am I meant to spam the people who’ve been kind enough to follow the project with constant referrals? (Sure feels that way given the number of recommendation messages I get - 300 recommendations in a week?!?!). You know what? I don’t care about credits. When I get them, great, I’ll go look for something to support. Will I attempt to spam refer and novel swap? No, no I will not.
I’ve used my credits in the goodwill train on projects that I’m genuinely interested in. I’ve made rare referrals, on things I genuinely want to see made into a book, but I’m over credits.
As an author I don’t need credits, I don’t need to waste time jumping through hoops to try and get them so I can somehow game the system. I need access to an audience of people who will genuinely want to see my project come to fruition.
What would I like to see?
It’s harder than I thought to connect to readers on the Inkshares site. A big part of that is my fault. I need to write a synopsis that doesn’t give away the plot bunnies and sounds engaging enough to have someone plonk down some dollars on the hope that one day this will be an actual book. At the moment its a half-assed job, but I’ve been so busy in doing the edits and getting to that wow this is really exciting stage that its fallen by the wayside. It’s something I’ll work on shortly, but the crucial thing here is time. I don’t have enough of it. I imagine I’m not alone in this.
Part of this is Inkshares fault. The way the system is now, I don’t know if I am wasting what little precious time I have or not. I know they are a new startup and still figuring out this whole hybrid model of publishing, but the current model and process is making things harder.
I read some of the content in the recent Reddit Q&A and there was an interesting stat in there. At present there are about 10 readers for every author project (and they are working to increase this to 100:1 or 1000:1). Cool - that’s what this author needs, an audience, it’s what every author here is looking for.
So lets look at the readers, do an example, and click on
Thaddeus Woodman. When I click on Thaddeus I’m looking for clues to whether or not Thad would like the project enough to plonk down some money. What clues have I got? He has some text under his name - Great! (many times it’s blank, or has a generic ’an avid reader’).
Cofounder of Inkshares; producer of code and books. Questions about Inkshares? Email me: thad@inkshares.com - Okay that doesn’t tell me whether he’d like my book, or whether I’d waste my time in pitching him. Ooh he has some circles on his picture indicating he’s supported other books - Great! Hovering over each of these tells me what these projects are.
Blasted by Adversity, Slim and the Beast, the cats Pyjama’s, Abomination, The future of men. Are any of those in my genre?
I go look at each one Memoir, fiction narrative, childrens book, historical fantasy, non-fiction book. Not looking good.
Then I can go through his recent history - Ooh he followed a sci-fi! and when I look on the right hand side, he’s recommended one as well.
So maybe he’d be interested in my project. Pitch.
How much time did that take?
Now let’s put on our time travelling hat and travel into the future where Inkshares is a thousand times bigger. While now there is likely to be far more people who will like my book, I still have to find them...somehow. I still have to laboriously pan for flecks of possible reader gold in the muddy water.
Suggestions
Credits
I don’t care about credits - it makes me wonder what your reasoning was in introducing them in the first place. It’s free money, and it just makes people nuts. What did you think would happen when you throw suitcases of filthy cash into the air in a crowded place?
As an Author I don’t want credits, give them to Readers, ONLY to readers. More cashed up readers = good. More cashed up authors desperate to get their novel published = ticket to crazy town.
Pay me when the book reaches target, and make that process as easy as possible.
If you HAVE to give me credits - give me something I can gift as a prize to my loyal followers. Have Author Credits - transferable and Readers Credits - purchasable.
Readers
It would be far more time efficient to find an audience if I knew what genre of books readers liked. Sure, can’t hold a gun to their head and force them to tell us, but Inkshares should make it easy for Readers to connect to Authors.
Send out a survey, (reward participation with Reader Credits), find out what genre they want to read and pass this info on to Authors. Feed us pitches, feed us leads, we are trying to SELL something after all.
A searchable option for authors to FIND those people would be amazing and save enormous time and effort...especially when Inkshares gets much bigger.
Okay - Waffles and rant over. Back to editing.
Julian
I don’t think we can expect any other authors to go through the effort of scrutinizing a reader’s profile page before sending a pitch - people are just going to send a pitch. One reader who doesn’t like scifi getting a scifi pitch isn’t going to hurt Author A at all; they’re going to methodically send 100 pitches a day, hoping to gain some interest. It won’t matter if a reader’s profile says "Interested in: scifi" or not. No one is going to go to that level of effort before deciding to pitch.
(If you want a tip for who to pitch to, just go to a book that you think shares your target audience and pitch to all of its readers.)
It would be cool if Inkshares allowed readers to identify what genres they’re accepting pitches from for a given month, and then the system could automatically stop pitches from other genres from going through. Authors could just receive a "[Reader] is not accepting horror pitches at this time" message, and then maybe readers would actually READ THEIR PITCHES instead of disregarding them because there are sooo many.
The fact that readers can’t browse by genre needs to be fixed immediately. We as author should also be able to tag our projects with key words that readers can search by. These would improve the reader experience immensely.
(Now that I’m on a roll...) The fact that I can search for "Matt Sobin" and @Matthew Isaac Sobin doesn’t show up as a possible search result is frustrating. Same goes for searching for "A Life Engineered" when I really mean "The Life Engineered". These things need to be fixed.
I’m not a fan of requiring a fee to post a project; I don’t see the point of that. There’s already a limit to the number of pitches you can send to a given reader: one. I don’t see how asking an author to pay $15 would do anything to recruit readers.