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This post is part of my Business of Writing series. As part of this series, I discuss law and taxes, so it’s important for you to remember that I’m neither a lawyer nor a tax professional. This is not advice — it’s my understanding and, in many cases, what I do and why. You should take this as the base to develop your own knowledge and understanding, or consult the appropriate professionals. Also, I live in the US, so am really only speaking to US law and the US tax code.

[/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”] Presale periods are a surprisingly divisive issue for authors, with some swearing by them and others … well, there’s some swearing involved there, as well. One of the arguments against them is that, at least on Amazon, sales from the prerelease period don’t “count” toward rank on release day, thus not driving a new release as high in the charts as it might otherwise go. I think that’s short-sighted. Marketing is all about eyeballs – getting more eyeballs on a product, repeatedly, so that it becomes more familiar and more likely to be purchased. Given this, it would seem that sustained, longer-term visibility is more beneficial than a shorter period, even if the shorter period gets more individual eyeballs. And that latter, that a higher rank for a shorter time gets more eyeballs than a lower rank for a longer time is debatable. I’d wager, were I a betting man, that its the opposite — that multiple months in a genres Hot New Release list is more valuable in terms of eyeballs than a week, or even a month, in Amazon’s top 100. A presale period does this by staying on the new release charts longer, exposing the book to eyeballs more often, and my personal dataset seems to bear this out. First by happenstance, then by design, I released three of my four books following the same pattern and at the same time of year. In addition, I do very little marketing, so my sales charts are largely unaffected by ads and are driven almost exclusively by visibility on Amazon. My first, third, and fourth books were all made available for prerelease in August, starting in 2014, with a release date in November, the maximum prerelease period available on Amazon to a self-published author. There were relatively few presales with the first book, but what I observed with the third and fourth was striking. Now, all of the expected YMMV caveats apply – this is data for a series, in the space opera genre, and may not apply elsewhere, especially to stand alone novels. Also, I’m tracking dollars-earned, not number of copies, because, frankly, that’s what I care about.

1. I put my first book on presale in August 2014 for a November release. It had a trickle of presales over that time, and more sales when it finally released.
2. Book 2 went on presale in November 2014 for a February release, which, I think, helped Book 1’s sales after a bit.
3. After which, sales fell steadily through the new in the last 30-, 60-, and 90-day lists.
4. Until Book 3 went on presale in August 2015. Now, it’s important to remember that the dollars for presales don’t register until the book’s actually released, so this jump in sales (of 10x the previous months) is entirely sales of the existing books, not the new one. I did virtually no advertising or promotion during this time, so the effect is entirely attributable to the visibility of Book 3 on the Hot New Release charts, which are significantly easier to get on than a category’s Best Seller chart.
5. So I got 90-days of that visibility, then all the revenue from presales, and still had 30-days of “new release” status going into November.
6. The question I started asking as Book 3 lost that status was: Is that repeatable? Not just the spike of new release sales and initial visibility, but the sustained sales of the previous books while the next is in prerelease? It seemed logical, but so many authors were swearing that the Day One spike was essential.
7. Well, sure enough, it did repeat, with slightly different pattern because Book 4 went on prerelease a bit later in August this time.
8. All of which resulted in, again, more presales of the next book, making November 2016 my best month ever.
9. And projecting December to be better than last year as well, though not as much as it could be because the audiobook of the new release is a bit delayed (Book 3’s audiobook released in December 2015, increasing that month’s revenue.

It could be argued that the higher rank of a Day One, no-prerelease spike might make more money, but given what I know about marketing, I don’t think so. Amazon’s algorithms favor stability of rank over spikes, so I don’t think a higher spike would last as long in its effect. I know that it would take a huge number of sales in 30-days of visibility from no prerelease to make up for the revenue I see in 120-days with one – it doesn’t seem feasible. Marketing is about eyeballs and while some people will buy your book the first time they see it, others will think “maybe” – the longer it’s visible, the more opportunities there are to both get the initial buyers and convert the “maybes” to yeses. I know I plan to repeat this with my next release and hope 2017 will be better still. As you plan your own prerelease, keep in mind that you can shorten it, but not lengthen it. So you can put your book up for a 90-day prerelease, then watch its sales and the sales of your other books. If it turns out that sales of your other books don’t go up, or go up and then fall, or your new book doesn’t make the Hot New Release chart for your genre and stay there, you can always bring the release date forward and have it release early. If yours does follow the above pattern, though, you can maximize its effect on visibility.     [/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

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This post is part of my Business of Writing series. As part of this series, I discuss law and taxes, so it’s important for you to remember that I’m neither a lawyer nor a tax professional. This is not advice — it’s my understanding and, in many cases, what I do and why. You should take this as the base to develop your own knowledge and understanding, or consult the appropriate professionals. Also, I live in the US, so am really only speaking to US law and the US tax code.

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The short answer, for most authors, is don’t. It provides little or no benefit with increased expense and complexity.

The longer answer is maybe, and depends on your specific circumstances — the decision also requires maths, so there’s that.

Let’s look at the most typical options you have for running your author business.

Sole Proprietorship

This is likely where you’re at now if you’re reading this. It’s just you, doing business as yourself. You might have filed a DBA (Doing Business As) for your state, but that doesn’t change that it’s you, personally, doing business.

In this method, you file a Schedule C form with your 1040 and the profit from your business is added to your personal income. You pay personal income tax on it, as well as “self-employment” tax, which is just the portion of Social Security and Medicare that an employer would typically pay “on your behalf”.

As an aside, do not assume that the “self-employment” tax is some sort of penalty you’re paying for being self-employed in your own business. Just because an employer “pays” it, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t come out of the workers’ checks. To an employer, it’s still a cost of having that employee — whether that 8%-or-so is paid to the employee or to the IRS makes zero difference to the employer so far as the costs go. If they weren’t paying it to the government directly, it would likely result in increased wages due to market forces.

Regardless, that’s Sole Proprietorship — it’s simple, easy, and the default state of your author business. There’s nothing you need to do to set it up or continue in that state.

LLC

The next step up the business chain is the LLC, or Limited Liability Corporation. It is a separate legal entity from you — something people sometimes have trouble wrapping their heads around. So far as the law is concerned, the LLC becomes something that can own property and will outlive you.

If you set it up this way, or anything other than sole proprietorship, you’ll be selling the rights to your books to the LLC, then you’ll own shares (typically 100% for an author) of the LLC, and make decisions as an officer of the LLC.

In this instance, for tax purposes, you’ll still be filing Schedule C with your 1040 and the business profit will flow through to your personal income, where you’ll be taxed at that rate and pay the “self-employment” tax. There are no tax benefits to an LLC for a single-owner author, and there are some small startup costs and ongoing paperwork and expenses.

It might run you a few hundred dollars if you have an attorney set up the LLC for you, less if you do it yourself, then there’s usually an annual charge from your state and some paperwork to file. It’s not complicated or expensive, but it is moreso than a sole proprietorship.

The two main benefits of an LLC do not typically apply to authors. These are partnership and liability.

An LLC allows you to divvy up the shares of the business amongst several people — but that’s not something you’re likely to do as an author.

The main benefit of an LLC is limited liability (it’s right there in the name), which means someone could sue the business, but the business owner’s private assets are protected. Meaning they can get the store but not the owner’s house.

The thing is … you’re not running a lawn service company. You have no employee who might drive a riding lawn mower over a five-year old. Your writing is, in fact, unlikely to kill toddlers …

Unless you’re writing Fun Games with Sharp Objects for Five-year Olds, but even then the limited liability isn’t going to help you because you’re an author — if you get sued, it will be for something you wrote, whether you defame someone or the toddler plays Your Towel-Cape is Magic – You can Fly!

Either way, they’re going to sue you, personally, as well as the company, and that corporate veil will go up faster than the curtains in Who Can Find the Most Things that Burn?

The one area in which an LLC is beneficial to an author is in death. Yes, you’re going to die one day, but you’re creating an asset which will live beyond you and may provide royalties to your heirs for decades after you’re gone — those assets will also cause innumerable headaches for your estate’s executor and possibly your heirs unless you take steps to ease the transition. An LLC can do that by providing a smooth transfer of ownership in the rights to your books, as well as obviating the need to change your personal accounts to someone else’s.

I’ll get into estate planning in more depth in a later post, but for now just know that this is really the only benefit an LLC provides to an author.

Except that you can elect to have an LLC treated as an S Corp by the IRS. It’s an option, and gives you the tax benefits of the S Corp (below) with the simplified annual paperwork requirements of the LLC. So that hybrid is likely the direction I’ll go when it’s time.

Incorporation (S Corp)

There can be a tax advantage to Incorporating, but it’s so dependent on your individual circumstances (your book income, any other income, your spouse’s income, etc.) that it’s impossible to make the decision without running the numbers — i.e. doing your taxes as though you were a sole proprietorship, then doing them again as a corporation and comparing the results. This is why I recommend consulting a professional if you’re considering it.

In general, it’s not something you should consider or worry about until you’re making six figures from your book income. If you typically end the year having spent all of your book income on either writing expenses or personal expenses. It’s only if you have money left over, quite a bit of it, that a corporation begins to make sense.

This is because the primary advantage of a corporation has to do with taxes. Basically, you can pay yourself a salary and leave excess profits in the business or take them as dividends/distributions — your salary is taxed personally, along with SS and Medicare taxes, but the profits you leave in the business are taxed separately at the, possibly, lower corporate rate or the even lower dividend rate.

Don’t think you can just take it all as a dividend, though, because the IRS does say you have to pay yourself a “fair” salary out of the corporation. What “fair” is … well, that’s not defined. It should be the equivalent of what salary you’d earn doing that job for an employer on the open market, in theory … but how does that apply to an author?

But you might be opening yourself up to state corporate taxes as well, especially if you live in a state with no personal income taxes. And your salary has to be “reasonable” to keep you from making it too low or too high based on the work. And there are host of other what-ifs that might impact the decision.

Bottom Line

So if you’re making more than six figures and typically have money left over every year, you might want to consult a tax professional about incorporating. Other than that, Sole Proprietor is probably good for, unless you’d like to make things simpler for your heirs, in which case consider an LLC.

[Edited May 2017]

As if it weren’t already complicated enough, President Trump’s proposed tax plan (one of them, anyway), impacts this decision. It’s been proposed to lower the corporate rate to 15% but also allow sole proprietors and LLCs to elect that corporate rate. This appears to be in lieu of rolling the profit over to earned income and paying SS & Medicare taxes on it. So for 2017, there might be a wait-and-see attitude that’s best. Talk to a qualified tax professional about your situation, but also bring up this possibility as they might not be aware of it.

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Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. …read more at Amazon …

I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in how the mind works or why “those people” just don’t understand what’s completely clear to you. It’s both interesting from a theoretical perspective on how we think, or rather react, regarding moral issues, and as an explanation for our differences.

When it gets to politics, the author presents a very non-partisan view. On religion, he manages to not address individual beliefs, instead concentrating on the moral foundations and mental triggers religion builds on in the human mind.

Fascinating and informative — buy it now. 🙂

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ReviewMeta’s an interesting idea. Analyze product reviews and try to weed out the bought and paid for. Lord knows that’s an issue — and one that makes the review system on sites like Amazon less useful for everyone.

The problem is data analysis is hard — facts are facts, but what those facts mean, well, that’s another animal.

David Gaughran took a look and twitted up a storm about it. Then ReviewMeta responded with a blog post. Fair enough, and a relatively common internet kerfuffle.

The whole thing drew my attention and I decided to take a look at a few books — my own first in series, David Weber’s On Basilisk Station, and Nathan Lowell’s Quartershare. I know for a fact that my reviews are organic and reasonably suspect Weber’s and Lowell’s are too.

These three titles progressively show what’s wrong with ReviewMeta’s analysis, at least for books. First, they flagged Into the Dark, with a fail for word repetition:

Is there really any surprise that reviewers would repeat these terms when reviewing the Alexis Carew series?

Then there’s the “overlapping review history”:

Curiously, readers of a space opera / military scifi series also reviewed other science fiction. Go figure.

The results are even more disturbing in Weber’s and Lowell’s series, especially with Lowell’s Solar Clippers series, where ReviewMeta “fails” the title.

One reason given is that there’s a high ratio of unverified purchases:

Well, Quarter Share is in Kindle Unlimited, and KU readers don’t get the verified flag when they review. And then there’s that brand thing again, but with a wide range between “brand repeaters” and not in the rating:

The Solar Clippers series is pretty polarizing — many people love it and many don’t. So is there any wonder that there’d be a large delta between those who read the rest of the series (repeat the brand) and those who don’t?

There’s a bit more of an issue in their analysis itself, which shows in their description of their methodology:

Now, at first blush that makes a lot of sense — but I’m heading for HonorCon next month. I’ll be promoting my book to David Weber fans at a military scifi convention. These are my people, they’re more likely (please god) to like my books. It’s entirely plausible that there’d be a large influx of high reviews following that convention, as opposed to a streak where I don’t go to conventions and the books are found randomly on Amazon or through Facebook marketing.

Anyway, I tried to make a couple comments on ReviewMeta’s blog post, but they decided they didn’t care for the feedback.

So for authors, ReviewMeta has some serious issues and we should be concerned if people start using it to analyze our books. For other products it might actually be a useful tool, and book series may not be something they took into account in their analysis — but this is a prime example of why you should look at how something’s analyzed and not just trust that the data-guys got their stuff right the first time.

Update 9/28/16: This morning I ran the top ten kindle books through ReviewMeta: 5 fails, 3 warns, 2 passes. Nope, just nope.

 

 

Frank and James think they have the perfect scheme — use the magic Frank learned from his grandfather to scam drug dealers out of their money. Who are they going to complain to if they can’t even remember the deal? Just one problem … near the full-moon, there are some drug dealers that magic won’t work on.

Last month I was taking muscle relaxers for a back injury — along with an over-the-counter sleep aid. The combination … well …

Denholm Carew enjoys a life most would envy. Scion of a wealthy family on New London, he can have almost anything he wants. But what he wants more than anything is the freedom to make his own way and build his own legacy to pass down to his children. Together with his wife, Lynelle, he sells everything to buy shares in colonial company and settle the newly discovered world of Dalthus IV.

I know you’re all anxiously awaiting the release of HMS Nightingale (Alexis Carew #4) later this year, but I’m pleased to announce that Planetfall, the Alexis Carew prequel, is complete, off to the editors, and available for preorder.

Remember, though, if you’re a subscriber to my mailing list, you’ll receive a link to download Planetfall for free as soon as the editing is complete and before its release date of August 1st!

I’ve had a busy start to the year, with some significant lifestyle changes (all for the better, I assure you), and it’s taken a toll on the writing time. I truly appreciate all the emails and social media comments about how much you all enjoy the series and are awaiting the next book … though I do come up with my best ideas on long walks, so that whole chaining-me-to-the-keyboard thing might be counter-productive. 🙂

HMS Nightingale is about 30% done and writing is getting more regular. I have pages of notes to work from for the story, so it’s coming along nicely. It will still likely be the second half of the year before it’s released, but I do want to make sure it’s up to the standards of the rest of the series, so I’m taking my time with that.

Planetfall, the novella prequel to the series, has been broken up into two parts. Part One will cover the time from the Dalthus colony’s landing until the death of Alexis’ grandmother and will be from Denholm’s (Alexis’ grandfather’s) point of view.

The second half will be from her father’s point of view and cover the time until Alexis is around three years old.

When I originally conceived of Planetfall, it was supposed to be a 20,000 word novella — now each of the two parts will run about 30,000 words.

Both parts of Planetfall will be given free to mailing list subscribers.

Thank you for your patience and thank you for reading Alexis’ story — I’ll keep you updated and get the next bits out to you as soon as I can. 🙂

The epic, behind-the-scenes story of an astounding gap in our scientific knowledge of the cosmos.

In the past few years, a handful of scientists have been in a race to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only 4 percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every planet, star, and galaxy. The rest—96 percent of the universe—is completely unknown.

Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of how scientists reached this conclusion, and what they’re doing to find this “dark” matter and an even more bizarre substance called dark energy. Based on in-depth, on-site reporting and hundreds of interviews—with everyone from Berkeley’s feisty Saul Perlmutter and Johns Hopkins’s meticulous Adam Riess to the quietly revolutionary Vera Rubin—the book offers an intimate portrait of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have fueled their search, redefined science, and reinvented the universe.

View on Amazon