With GENERATION SHIP coming out in just about a week, I thought I’d address a question that I get a lot. A lot of well-meaning people say “We’d love to support your book. What’s the best way to do that?” It happens enough that I thought I’d put it into a resource where I could direct people. Because it’s not a short answer.

Let me caveat all of this up front by saying that the best way to support a book is any way that you want. Don’t let anything I say here detract from that. All support is appreciated. Any sale is a good sale. So buy it the way you want and talk about it the way you want. What I’m going to share here is specific to those who ask ‘what’s the best way to support you?’

If you’re buying the book

Again, any sale is a good sale, so buy it in the format that fits your reading habits. From a financial perspective, it matters less than you think. Let’s run the numbers.

GENERATION SHIP is out on October 17th in Trade Paperback for $19.99, on e-book for $9.99, and on audio for whatever audio books cost where you get audio books (very few people *buy* audio books — they get them from a service.) Here’s how I get paid:

I get 7.5% of the cover price for Trade Paperback sales, which works out to right about $1.50 per book. If you bought it on sale (for example if you got 25% off from the Barnes and Noble pre-order sale) that doesn’t change what I get paid for it. So by all means — shop the sale.

For e-book, I get 25% of receipts. Receipts are right about 70% of the sale price, so I end up with about 17.5% of sale price. In this case, I get about $1.75. That’s right — I actually make more on an e-book. E-books cost WAY less to produce and ship, so the publisher can afford to give me a bigger piece of the pie. But the difference is pretty negligible.

For audio — it’s hard to say. If you figure out how authors get paid on audio books, you should write a post about it, because we’d all love to know. Suffice it to say that I get somewhere between $1.50 and $2.00 per audio book. My narrator (the brilliant Natalie Nauduss in this case) gets paid a flat fee per hour produced.

So no matter how you buy it, I get right around the same amount.

Let’s Talk About How You Buy It

If the money is the same (and it mostly is), we can look at other factors that help support the book. The best thing you can do is to physically go to the store and buy it. I know, that means leaving the house, and really, who wants to do that? But hey, you asked.

When you go to the store, you do a few things. First, the store sees that sale, and that’s good for bookstores. Anything that’s good for bookstores is good for authors. But more than that, maybe someone in the store notices that and looks into the book and decides to feature it. There’s always a chance. Maybe when you ask for it they don’t have it and have to order it, and since they’re getting it for you, maybe they order another copy to display. At a minimum, it’s in their computer as a sale, which can drive future orders. A lot of how stores order books from established authors is based on how previous books have sold at their store. How much is all of this worth? Who knows? When you’re trying to sell books, there’s a lot of chance involved. You never know how much effect you’ll get from any action, but the more chances you get, the more chances you have that something will take.

If you don’t want to go to the store (or if you can’t), ordering it from your local indie is a good second option. Ordering from any independent bookseller would be next, followed by ordering it from a corporate store. The last option would be ordering it from Amazon. I’m not going to go on a big rant about that–Amazon is often the cheapest way to buy, and if that’s what you’re looking for, you should absolutely go for it. But there’s a reason for that. They drive down prices for producers, which, in this case, is the publisher, which affects how much everybody gets paid. Maybe not for this book, but it affects the bottom line, which affects future contracts.

As far as e-book, I don’t know that it matters much where you get it. It probably does. For audio books, you probably have your service. Audible is the most popular by far, but with that, we’re back to Amazon and why that’s generally not the best option for authors. But as I said: any sale is a good sale, so get it where it’s best for you.

What if I’m Not Buying it? (Or if I’ve already got it)

There are lots of things you can do to support a book release that don’t cost any money. Here are a few.

1. Talk about it. This is, hands down, the most helpful thing you can do. Tell people about it. With all the automation and all the algorithms, people still often buy books based on the recommendations of people they know.
   
   
2. Ask your library to buy it. GENERATION SHIP has initially been purchased by 75 libraries in the US. Did you know that most public libraries have a form that you can fill out that requests that they purchase a book? When a library acquires a book, not only does that create a sale, but it also gets the book in front of an audience of book readers — and all of those people are folks who might tell other people about it (see item #1)
   
   
3. Leave a review. You’ve probably heard this one, and it’s probably a little overrated. I don’t think there’s a magic number of reviews that will automatically propel a book to greater things — I think that’s a bit if an urban legend. But it doesn’t hurt. A short review that gives one thing that you liked about the book can be a big help. Reviewing it via the source where you bought it (ie. on a corporate website) is probably best. Obviously if you have your own platform that gets reader eyes, that’s a golden ticket because it’s access that the author can’t get in any other way. Goodreads is a distant third but still helpful and welcome.

Non-Traditional Avenues

So those are the normal (and real) ways to support a book/author. But what about the non-traditional ways that you probably haven’t considered?

Just a note from our legal department — nothing I say from here on out should be taken as actual advice, and I’m not responsible if you get arrested or create serious trauma.

1. Throw books at random strangers. Is there a car driving by with an open window? Clearly that’s a sign that they want a book. Live in a tourist town? Foist a copy on someone on a street corner by telling them that it’s what all the locals are doing. Tourists are dumb. They’ll probably fall for it. After all, they eat at the crappy restaurant that nobody local would be caught dead in.
   
   
2. Give copies to your kids. Hey, when I was a kid, they forced me to read books that I didn’t want to. What better way to pass on that hatred of reading to the next generation than to repeat the process? GENERATION SHIP is probably less traumatic than LORD OF THE FLIES. It definitely has fewer detailed descriptions of whaling equipment than MOBY DICK.
   
   
3. Two words. Book cannon.
   

If you’ve made it this far, let me remind you that GENERATION SHIP is on sale everywhere in all formats on October 17th. Hopefully this has cleared up for you how to get it. It probably hasn’t. Sorry about that.

Tags: Generation Ship, Michael Mammay, Science Fiction