Kickstarter & Platform Redundancy

The big news in the fantasy book world for the last month has been Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter, which at $30 million dollars is the biggest Kickstarter project in the history of the platform.

I haven’t really had anything to say about it because I’ve been busy (DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES and CLOAK OF SHARDS aren’t gonna write themselves!), and I don’t have any opinions about it other than “general approval”, being pleased that people are willing to spend that much on books, and amazement about the amount of work that went into the campaign. Additionally, I don’t know all that much about Kickstarter, and I don’t like to offer opinions on topics I don’t know enough about. However, I did back the campaign, making it the first Kickstarter I’ve backed in like ten years, simply because the launch video was highly entertaining and I’m fascinated to see how it will all work out.

Sanderson wrote a FAQ about the Kickstarter, which is well worth the read if you’re interested in the mechanics of a Kickstarter project on this scale, and the thinking that went it to it.

Admittedly, his picture of indie publishing isn’t 100% accurate, but that’s fairly common among people who’ve been at a high level in tradpub for a long time.  It’s not necessary to use Amazon Ads (I barely do), especially if your book isn’t exclusive to Amazon. Honestly, while cost-per-click ads work if done properly, they’re less effective in generating sales than other methods like giving away free books, maintaining an email newsletter, and writing consistently in the same series.

Also, I think the difference in viewpoint is one of scale. What I would consider “good sales” and what Sanderson would consider “good sales” is probably different by several orders of magnitude. CLOAK OF IRON and the CLOAK GAMES/MAGE series did really well for me in February, but I doubt it would have covered a month’s worth of salary for Sanderson’s company. To be fair, though, Sanderson’s picture of indie publishing is a lot more accurate than many tradpub people, and it’s a massively more accurate than most journalists. It’s always painful when you encounter an article from a journalist who clearly has no idea about self-publishing – they start talking about “basements full of books,” how difficult it is to buy ISBNs, and how most authors just “want to write” and don’t want to have to think about business details. (To express an off-topic opinion, the ineptitude of the media in reporting a topic about which you are knowledgeable is a good reminder to take all media reports on any topic with a healthy grain of salt.)

What caught my eye was that Sanderson said one of the reasons for pursuing the Kickstarter was that about 85% of both his ebook and physical book sales were through Amazon, and he wanted to set up an alternative sales channel in case something goes wrong with Amazon.

The reason that caught my eye because in my case only about 55% of my ebook sales are through Amazon, with the other 45% coming from Apple, Google, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and various smaller stores. It varies a few percentage points from month to month, but it’s usually around there. I definitely get the concern about having alternative sales channels, which is why most of my books have always been on all platforms, various Kindle Unlimited experiments notwithstanding. If Amazon blipped out of existence tomorrow, losing 55% of sales would be Very Bad, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Less seriously, the benefit of having multiple sales platforms is that if one has a bad month, the others can help balance it out.

That said, it occurs to me there is another good reason to have multiple sales platforms.

Cybersecurity.

It’s no secret that the international situation isn’t great at the moment, and isn’t likely to improve for some time. In the 21st century, cyberattacks and information (and misinformation) warfare have gone mainstream, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they become much more common in the immediate future. A big e-commerce platform like Amazon is a big fat target. Granted, Amazon has excellent cybersecurity and isn’t likely to get hacked in a big way. But Facebook also has excellent cybersecurity, and they still managed to lock themselves out of their DNS servers for a day last year, losing millions of dollars worth of ad revenue.

I don’t think it’s very likely that Amazon will get knocked offline for days or even weeks, but then I bet the big brains at Facebook didn’t think they would accidentally lock themselves out of their own DNS servers, either.

And, of course, there is a spectrum to these things, with international cyberwar on the highest and least likely end, but a whole range of less catastrophic and more likely possibilities further down the scale. You might recall that in October 2020, Barnes & Noble suffered a ransomware attack and couldn’t intake material for a couple of weeks. That was about when I published GHOST IN THE VISION, so B&N readers didn’t get the book for a couple of weeks until B&N was able to take in new material again. That wasn’t international cyberwar, that was just bad luck with a ransomware infection, but it still delayed GHOST IN THE VISION on Barnes & Noble for nearly a month.

So I think it is definitely advantageous to keep as many books as on many platforms as possible. And, of course, the advantage of pessimistic preparation is that it’s a pleasant surprise to be wrong. 🙂

That said, Sanderson’s FAQ is an interesting read about the current state of the book industry, and worth reading if you’re curious about that topic.

-JM