Little Free Libraries

Since I got to Illinois, I have become fascinated by little free libraries. These are free-standing boxes that people fill with books; they have two or three shelves in them, and maybe a see-through door; people are encouraged to bring books and take them at will. The question is: do people use them? It's an interesting question.

I have very weak paperback ratings; nobody buys my paperbacks except my own family, and not even them usually (excuse my casual syntax). So I was thinking, maybe I should make more of an effort to get my books out to the market by putting some in little free libraries. An aggressive campaign to get them out there. But it wouldn't much do to put them out there if in fact nobody's reading them. I need to study the market, obviously.

A few years back, maybe ten, the Rotary took up the cause in this town (Galesburg, Illinois), and put up a number of them. Of those, I have found three or four. Only one appears on the LFL guide; that one is just up the street. One a street over is in disrepair; its door is hard to open. I found one in a park about four blocks away and I read about one in a park downtown. Finally, I saw one way over on the east side on my way out to the interstate, going to Peoria. So, five altogether that I know of, only one on the official register.

They also have them in Monmouth, a small town near here, where, while I lived there, I found about five. Small towns I would think would be better because that's where people have time and get bored, and kids grow up reading in the absence of trouble to get into. Most of the spare books I have sitting around are haiku; I was never able to get anyone to buy them either, and I think if I scatter them in these libraries they will most likely just sit there. But that's ok; I'm getting more story books to distribute as time goes by, and all my books get new covers, so my plan is to systematically get books out into the LFL's, and in return bring home some books to study. I also have a houseful of books that I've never thrown away, and even moved this far, yet nobody reads; these are not by me, but might be useful in some LFL or another.

I know they had them in New Mexico; I know they were a national phenomenon. What I don't know is how much of an active system they represent. Do people actually notice or see what's in them? I actually saw someone using the one on my street the other day; they had a subaru-type vehicle, they walked up to it with a few books, and walked back with a few more. When I walked past it today, my own book was in a visible place (I had tucked it in among other books, but somebody had apparently at least looked at it). I'm not sure what to think of this.

The point I think would be to be well-equipped when I travel, and willing to take the time to find them and stock them wherever I go. I have always been a bit shy about giving them away. But having new covers on some of them actually gives me others that I won't sell anymore, won't even try. I am experimenting with covers and therefore rendering lots of the books in my possession obsolete.

Some authors would never stoop to giving books away when they intend to make money on the whole deal, and need to keep up an image of being of high value. I have the opposite approach, more like Andy Warhol. I figure, on some level, many people have to know who you are before you get anywhere at all. You have to blanket the world, if only by starting in this little corner of western Illinois. If this system of little libraries scattered around towns like Galesburg or Monmouth is any indication, people still read books enough to have them out in their front yards in little house-shaped boxes. I'm not sure it really means anything at all; lots of them are in poor repair; some don't seem to have any books anymore. But some, I think, are being used and used well.

People I think enjoyed the no-due-date aspect of it. You could read part of a book and just sit on it for a while. Has this been going on for years? I'd like to meet people who are into actively transfering books. I'm also curious about the quality of books in them. I found stories by Kafka in one here in Galesburg - is that because of the college? Are there people who are trading Kafka for steamier fare?

What you see here is me developing hypotheses about ways to market. Any progress is real progress, no matter how incremental. I left my book on the top of its little stack - and will check on it in a day or two, maybe add some stories to that one. I have books of stories, that are just sitting there, making my moving harder. There was no reason to hang on to the books I did hang on to, and even less reason as time goes by.

Out of a total of thousands of readers, only a fraction will read, then finish, then like your books - and only a fraction of those will pick up another one you wrote. I'm not sure if it's ok to drop off older, outdated, or even imperfect (older version) books when that would just decrease, presumably, my odds. But this is a town where I can at least observe LFL customer behavior and see whether it's worth my time at all. My strategy (small towns are better) may or may not be misguided. But my travel plans will not be based on it anyway. I'll only be hitting the LFL's in the towns where I'm going anyway.

The theory of separate markets

This theory is just that: My explanation of how things work. The primary division of markets for indie book-writers is kindle, kindle unlimited, paperback, wide, acx/audible. Wide means you sell in all indie markets, Barnes & Noble, etc., everywhere you can, whereas sticking with ku means promising not to do that. But the theory of separate markets means that if you don't appear at Barnes & Noble, for example, you lose some people altogether. People are less likely to shop for books in various places, and mostly go to the same places over and over again.

This is especially true of the ACX/audible people, who have decided that it's worth their while to get books they can listen to, while driving or whenever, and now they always read their books that way. Being known in that world does not transfer over into another world. They are not more likely to buy your hardcover or paperback because they heard your book. We think they might be more likely, but I have no proof that they are.

So I carry on with what I've got. At first I was so discouraged at having no paperback sales, that I almost gave up. But when I found out I could increase kindle sales by heavily marketing online I got hope again. As a result I have some books that do pretty well on kindle, and still barely sell at all out on the open market for paperbacks; my paperback ratings have been dismal since forever. So I have to say, on an absolute level, there are very few of my actual paperbacks out there because nobody buys my paperbacks. Yet on kindle I sometimes break the top five hundred.

The online kindle/ku community is the one I know best. The reason I consider them separate is that if someone has ku, that's how they get their books, and they don't go buying books other places because they've already put $10/mo. down on having enough to read. If they are kindle but not ku they might be checking the free and half-price deals on Amazon, and I do sometimes go after that crowd but am not sure I've made any real inroads with them. I know that if you only get 1/3 cent for a page someone reads you have to have more than a ku audience to get anything going financially.

But even these markets are fractured into independent, separate markets. So of the people who have ku and use it primarily for their source of reading, some check the amazon ads, some check other places to find good ku reads, and sometimes they get bored because whatever their source, they've dried it up. If you look at it entirely from the reader's perspective you have a strategy that goes like this: Use the usual source, over and over, do whatever is easiest, as long as you keep getting acceptable results, and then when it starts drying up, start looking for other sources. But in this process do you find people who say, "Maybe it's available on ACX/Audible?" My theory is no, they're not going to switch over. Because reading in a car is so fundamentally different from the other kinds, that they don't really consider it in the range of possibility. Now they might have switched altogether over to Audible/ACX, but that's more because they got a job driving a truck, or uber, or spend hours in the kitchen needing something to think about.

I'm curious what others think about it. I just put this out there because it's worth learning more about it. You heard it first here.

New covers

e pluribus haiku 2016
https://www.amazon.com/pluribus-haiku-2016-thomas-leverett-ebook/dp/B01FOLGWCE

e pluribus haiku 2017
https://www.amazon.com/pluribus-haiku-2017-thousand-moments-ebook/dp/B071WNYXTK

e pluribus haiku 2018
https://www.amazon.com/pluribus-haiku-2018-thousand-moments-ebook/dp/B07DCJD3KP

Jumping Trains

I must say that there has been an explosion of Facebook author/reader train sites - sites where authors basically read each other's work, give it honest reviews, and in return gain a single reader - someone who will presumably do the same. It is a laborious way to pick up a reader but this method has been invaluable to me for several reasons. One is that I need to see what indie authors are producing out there, and see what the norm is for various genres. Another is that I literally have found no other way to pick up an audience of any kind as an unknown indie author. What audience I have, is basically other writers who have found me on the reader/author train sites doing what I call read marketing.

Here are the nine sites I've found: Book Trains for Indie Authors, Self-publishing Book Club, Book review train, Book review swaps for free, Indie Author/Reader Subway, Authors/Readers United Book Trains, Author Reading Trains, Independent Book Reviews, Authors, Readers & Books Unite, and Book Review Group and Trains. They are in flux: a couple of them are on break, or in and out of the trains business. I can tell you which of them were the first and who runs them in some cases. I have respect for the moderators because I know it's a lot of work and I can also tell that many authors are unscrupulous: willing to reap the reward without necessarily doing the reading, or doing as shallow a job as possible. Moderators are getting better at stating and enforcing the rules clearly, and also identifying the trains clearly with cool train pictures at the top. Many of the sites are now running smoothly whereas they used to be plagued by fly-by-night hucksters who were basically very inconsiderate to their fellow indie authors.

I have twenty-six books on the market but only about a dozen that I am actively hustling; I have given up on the haiku pretty much, in terms of marketing, as I don't believe I can even get a fair number of people to read it, much less leave a review. But I care a lot about my reputation as a short-story writer; I have nine volumes out there, and I really want people to read them. I care more about them, perhaps, than even the biographies, which I wrote for family but which prove to be unusually popular with other writers. I refuse to push my autobiography but it kind of sells on its own and does ok. My perception of myself on the market is colored by the fact that most of my audience is other writers. And fortunately they respect the fact that I have very thin skin and learn best inductively - seeing what works and what doesn't, seeing what their reviews don't say, that kind of thing. You need to have your work read in order to learn anything about the way you are seen on the market.

I have a number of theories which I will lay out on this blog if you are patient and can wait until I put them on the table. First is that the various markets don't overlap. I can do well on kindle but that won't affect how well I'm doing on paperback or ACX sales, because people who read on kindle keep reading on kindle, and don't tend to cross over and read in two or three different ways. Second, even within kindle, different audiences (like other authors, readers-only, ku-only, amazon deals customers) don't tend to cross over. People use single sources to buy from and shop from, and if they used that source yesterday they'll use that source today.

Another is that we are dealing with very small percentages. If three out of a hundred people who read your book like it, and only one out of ten of those like it enough to go out and buy another one, you have to cast a wide net to get a lot of people to read that first book in order to get the ball rolling in any way. And even writers like Steven King, though his percentage may be five out of a hundred and two out of ten, is still dealing with low percentages. So whoever you are, you have to cast that wide net and get started hauling in what you can. It's not going to be an easy road. And those percentages won't really change unless you become a better or different writer. Your experience will help you become better but won't raise your percentages significantly right away; it's going to be a long and steady process. So you have to dig in for the long game.

These sites, to me, have been a godsend. I now know some of my readers; I know them by their work. I now have some information about what works and what doesn't. It's like fishing, and keeping track of what you can dangle that will get some bites. Eventually, you dangle the right thing. Many thanks to the moderators who make it all possible. More about the other markets: paperback, acx, ku, etc., later. I can't say I'm an expert. But I've lifted myself out of the basement, and am scrambling up into contention, all without digging into a precarious family budget.