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The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win belongs to that rare category of books: a business novel. It’s written as fiction but it teaches us something serious. The most well known book in this category is The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt. The Goal is a long-term best selling business book and required reading for nearly every MBA student for the last twenty-five years.

What The Goal did for lean manufacturing, The Phoenix Project will do for managing IT.

Bill Palmer is the reluctant protagonist who is thrust into managing IT Operations. He inherits a world of hurt: new business innovation projects are so far behind that the corporation’s ability to remain competitive is threatened; standard business functions like payroll, data storage, and point of sale systems suffer from recurrent outages like lights flickering during a storm; and the whole IT organization is so buried firefighting that critical maintenance is neglected.

I immediately resonated with the situation. In fact, if you work in a business of any size, in IT or not, you’ll quickly find similarities.

In my day job, over the years I’ve found myself wondering why small startups can outcompete two hundred person strong development teams, why certain deployments are multi-day affairs that nearly always fail, why we must wait months for to release software, why the releases that do get to the light of day are nearly always missing key features, and why we seem incapable of fixing bugs so awful that we drive our customers away.

In The Phoenix Project, the protagonist Bill Palmer encounters all of this and more. It’s written as a fast-paced business thriller (I couldn’t put it down and spent much of Christmas day hiding from my kids to read — in fact, once I hit the halfway point, I literally did not stop reading it except for bathroom breaks.) But it’s also a serious business book about managing IT.

Through an enigmatic board member, Bill is forced to question his assumptions about IT. What is the role of IT Operations, and even all of IT? What are the four kinds of work that IT must do? What’s the silent killer of all planned work? What does the business need?

Through comparisons with how work is managed in a factory and examples from The Goal, authors Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford show how the time tested techniques of lean manufacturing (also the Toyota Production System) apply to IT work. By applying these principles, Bill Palmer is able to:

  • speed up the time it takes from implementation to deployment by reducing work in progress
  • increase the amount of useful work completed by reducing dependencies on key resource bottlenecks, whether those are people, hardware, or systems
  • reduce outages by addressing technical debt on fragile IT systems (such as old databases, tricky routers, etc.)
  • increase the IT contribution to the business by gaining a better understand of the business requirements, and focusing effort on those features that make the largest beneficial impact to the business.


One of the authors, Gene Kim, is the original creator of Tripwire, a widely used tool for managing IT changes; cofounder of the company by the same name; and author of The Visible Ops Handbook. I’ve seen him give talks on these concepts to a packed audience and receive a standing ovation.

For years, I’ve wanted to be able to bring these ideas back to my company because I’m convinced we could be ten or a hundred times more effective and delight our customers if only we could overcome our IT dysfunctions.

I’m thrilled to see them now in written form. If there was one book I’d want every employee of my company to read, it would be this one. You can get The Phoenix Project in kindle or hardcopy.

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Several years ago, before I’d published any of my books, I read Charles Stross’s essays on the publishing industry.

His essay on writing income, in particular, was quite discouraging to a new would-be writer. 
My favorite author, a good mid-list author, could just barely scrap by on his writing income. And it turned out the writers have the highest income inequality of nearly all professions. He quotes from a research article “The top 10% of authors earn more than 50% of total income, while the bottom 50% earn less than 10% of total income.”

Fast forward a few years. While the economics of the traditional publishing industry has stayed much the same, the economics of the indie publishing industry are very different. 
The ratio of inequality may still exist, as there are many people self-publishing, but in terms of absolute terms: the number of writers capable of being supported by writing as a full time career has grown.
Here’s why:
A Bigger Bite of Pie
Self-published authors get a bigger bite of piece with every book sold. The exact figures seem to vary, but on average, traditionally published authors get about 60 cents for every book sold.
By comparison, when selling indie-published ebooks at $2.99 (a common price point, and the medium that self-published authors tend to sell the most in — see my essay on pricing), authors get about $2.00 per book. 
A traditionally published author would need to sell 125,000 books to earn a $75,000 income, while a self-published author could earn the same income selling 37,500 books.

More Slices
The number of books many readers buy is limited to a portion of their disposable income. At $10 each, traditionally published books are expensive.
With the exception of non-fiction books that address a niche topic, most books are fungible. That is, a reader wants to read a book they’ll love in genre X, and any of thousands of different books will fulfill that need. (I differ from Stross in this regard, as he says books are non-fungible.)
If a reader who is budget limited can buy indie-published books at $2.99 as compared to traditionally published books $9.99, they will buy more of the less expensive books. 
They can afford to buy 3 times as many, therefore, the total number of books purchased is greater.
Not all readers are budget limited, but if we assume that half are, then we’re floating the entire book market by 50%.
Conclusion
Since the indie-author’s royalty per book is higher, and their books are priced such that readers can afford to buy more books, the total royalties available to indie writers are about 4 1/2 times greater than that available to traditionally published authors.
Even if indie authors are subject to the same income inequity as their traditionally published brethren,  the economics will still support five times as many writers being supported by writing indie books.
If the income inequity is better or worse, then this difference will be magnified or diminished. Also, to be fair, we should realize that the traditional publishing industry supports a great many jobs (editors, proofers, designers) that don’t exist or are greatly diminished in the indie portion of the field. So we can’t look at it and say the indie movement is growing jobs as a whole, merely that it’s growing writers as a portion of that industry.
If you dream of being a full-time writer, it’s never been a better time to do it.

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I frequently see authors panic when they discover that their years-long labor of love has appeared on a bit torrent or other filesharing site. Reactions range from tear-filled “How could they?” to more pragmatic “How can I get that site taken down?”

Not all authors reaction this way, but most do, especially new authors.

Don’t panic. It’s not the end of the world. In fact, it may help you sell more books. Here’s why:

  • Some people are looking strictly for free content. They’ll read any books they can download for free. They go to bit torrent search engines or sites that like books that have been pirated, and they get stuff that sounds good. They are extremely unlikely to buy a book if it’s not available illegally. They’ll just go read something else that’s free.
  • Some people buy books. They have an ecosystem that they love, whether that’s Amazon, iTunes, Smashwords, or Kobo, and they buy content in that ecosystem. They’re extremely unlikely to forego buying a book just because it happens to be available on a pirated content site somewhere.
  • A tiny percentage of people, probably far less than 1%, do fall into the category of people who will download for free if they can, and buy otherwise. But this truly is minuscule.
What does this mean?
First: It means that pirated copies are of your book are not likely to cost you very many sales at all, because few, if any, of the people who download pirated copies would have bought it.
Second: If your book is good, you’re likely to get additional word-of-mouth advertising from pirated copies. Just as with paid copies, a small percentage of readers, probably about 1%, will tell others what a good book you’ve written, either through face to face interactions, social media, or blog posts.
Third: If your book has been pirated, congratulations! Someone thought it was good enough to share. And many more people will now read it! (Surely you want people to read it, because if all you wanted was the money, there’s easier ways to make money.) Rejoice and celebrate: people like your book and they’re reading it, and that will drive sales.
Does this mean I want everyone to steal my book? 
Definitely not. I’d like to have enough legitimate sales to support myself as a writer. But I’m pretty sure most people will buy it, and that’s enough for me. Even though authors who have given their books away for free online (Cory Doctorow comes to mind) are making it as professional writers, so clearly the free availability of a book doesn’t preclude making a living from writing.
I do have a request:
If you download pirated books, support your favorite authors by recommending their books: tell friends, post on Twitter and Facebook, and write blog posts about it. Words cost you nothing but mean everything to authors.

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Many authors focus heavily on the price they set for their book under the impression that there is some unknown price at which sales will magically and suddenly skyrocket.

I don’t think this is true. Whether a book is 99 cents, $2.99, or $4.99, I don’t believe that price alone will make sales jump. But price is an important component of both overall sales success as well as earning potential.

Let’s look at some commonly held beliefs, and then I’ll share how I set the prices of my books. By the way, I’m going to primarily discuss Amazon, but I think the principles hold true elsewhere. I’ll start by talking about ebooks, since that’s where the most price flexibility exists, but then I’ll also discuss print books. All of this is my opinion, of course, and others may have had different experiences.

Strategy #1: Price it Low (99 cents)

Some say to set the book price at 99 cents, and you’ll gain many new readers. I’ve tried this for limited durations of up to two weeks, and my sales have increased about 30%.

I already have exposure through reviews, blog posts, and the Amazon recommendation engine. The fact that sales don’t increase more than 30% suggests that only a few people are making decisions primarily on price.

How about the author who doesn’t have much existing exposure and wants to use price to gain exposure? The problem here is that low price, by itself, doesn’t gain you any more visitors to your book page. Perhaps the occasional bargain hunter will find it and buy it. If you’re writing mass market fiction, that’s great, but if you’re writing in a genre that has a particular and small target audience (like science fiction or fantasy), then the odds that a random reader will love it so much they tell others and write a review is exceedingly small.

A final issue is that at 99 cents, you will earn only 30 cents per book sold, because Amazon only lets authors earn 30% royalty at this price. By comparison, at $2.99, you’ll earn about $2.05 per book sold, because most sales will earn 70% royalty. This means you’d need 7 times as many sales at 99 cents to earn as much as you would at the next higher price point of $2.99.

Strategy #2: Price it High, Give the Appearance of Quality ($4.99+)

Some say to price the book higher, such as $4.99 or more, to give the book the appearance of quality. The idea is that you want to stay out of the dog-eat-dog world of low priced books.

I think this strategy makes sense within limits, however it’s important to realize that the biggest indicator of quality is many good reviews. Your primary focus as an author should be getting twenty or thirty reviews. You can do that legitimately by offering people free review copies, and by putting an appeal in the back of your book asking readers who have enjoyed the book to post a review.

The next most significant indicators of quality to would-be buyers are good cover design, an engaging description and book blurbs, and availability of both ereader and print editions.

The problem with pricing at or above $4.99 is that then you’re into the range of traditionally published books, which start at around $4.99 and go up. You’re competing with authors and books that have an extra edge of polish, may have name recognition, and probably have professional marketing behind them.

At this price point, some readers are discouraged from buying a book they’d otherwise try. My experience is that my sales dropped 50% at this price, compared with $2.99, although the net amount of money earned stayed the same.

With the money earned staying the same, I’d prefer to have more readers, as more readers write more reviews and tell more friends.

Strategy #3: The Middle Ground

I price my stand-alone books and books first in a series at $2.99, and sequels at $3.99.

At this price point, I can earn a reasonable royalty per book, compared to 99 cent pricing. My books are still attractively priced to readers, especially compared to any traditionally published books.

They offer a lot of value to the reader for the cost, which is also something important to me. In fact, I’d encourage authors to think about this as a key element of pricing. Many businesses are based on extracting as much money from customers as possible. That’s never something you’d do to a friend. As an author who is in control of their pricing, you have the ability to make prices fair to readers.

Many readers who are in your target audience are willing to try a $2.99 book from an unknown author. If you’re similar in style to any traditionally published authors and Amazon ends up showing your book in the recommendation section of those author’s pages or book listings, then the $2.99 price will compare favorable to those traditionally published books.

For those readers who love your first books at $2.99, they’ll probably be willing to pay $3.99 for sequels, which is not a huge increment. (By comparison, if you price the first book at 99 cents, it’s a pretty big jump from there to $2.99 or more.)

At this price point, without the distraction of pricing games, you can focus on the other aspects of your marketing: sending out review copies, getting blurbs, advertising, building a social media platform, and so forth.

Other Strategies: Free

Many authors have had success offering their books for free, either through a KDP Select promotion (up to 5 free days every 3 months), or by using Amazon’s price-matching (e.g. set the price to free on Smashwords, then tell Amazon). This can either be a temporary strategy to get exposure for a given book, which will translate into reviews and social media mentions to drive sales once the price goes back up, or it can be a longer term strategy to drive sales of subsequent novels.

This strategy does work. Many people who get the book for free don’t end up reading it, so although you may give away tens of thousands of copies, you may get just a few reviews. But if your sales are otherwise stuck, this is a great way to get exposure.

I don’t recommend that you launch a new book as free on day one, however. When you first publish a book, it’s good to start at the intended long-term price. You really want to get some feedback based on that price. For example, you may get lots of positive reviews when it’s free, but when it is priced at $3.99, people complain because they expect a higher quality at that price. You want to uncover these issues early, while it’s possible to fix.

Worse yet, if you launch and the book still has typos or formatting issues that need to be fixed, it’s better to discover and address when you’ve sold twenty copies, rather than 20,000 copies.

Print Book Pricing

I currently sell my print novels at $9.95, and my shorter non-fiction books at $5.99. I make less per book on print than I do on ebooks, even though the price is higher. I’ve learned a few lessons here.

First, pricing above $10 is a strong psychological barrier to sales. Above $10, a reader has to be really committed to an author to buy a book. Unless you have a long track record and a large, established fan base, I doubt you’ll sell more than a handful of books above $10.

Below $10, you’ve reduced the psychological barrier, and the book becomes eligible for Amazon’s 4-for-3 promotion. I don’t know the exact criteria by which Amazon picks books for that promotion, but they do need to be below $10.

Assuming you’re using Createspace for your paperback, it’s hard to price much below $10, because of the cost structure: print-on-demand books cost slightly more to make; and both Amazon and Createspace take a cut of royalties. In fact, in 2012/2013, your book must be under 240 pages to be sold for $9.99 and be eligible for expanded distribution.

Most large-print run, traditionally published paperbacks sell in the range of $7 to $10, so in this case, traditionally published books have the price advantage.

In early 2012, I sold 90% ebooks, and 10% print books. I also learned that, in aggregate, Amazon sells about half ebooks and half print books. This led me to suspect that if I could get the price of my print books down, my sales of paperbacks would increase until they equaled the sales of ebooks.

Because of the length of my fiction novels, I couldn’t get the price any lower. But I did have short non-fiction books of 70 and 100 pages to experiment with, so I set the prices of those at $5.99, which makes them slightly less than most traditionally published, mass market paperbacks. Within weeks, sales of the paperbacks increased (without cannibalizing ebook sales) until they were a respectable 40% of all sales.

Lessons learned:

  • Keep print book prices under $10, even if you have to jump through some formatting hoops to keep the page count under 240 pages and even if you have to forgo some royalties.
  • If you can lower the price further, especially at $4.99 through $5.99, sales will increase significantly.
Thanks for reading through my thoughts on pricing. If you enjoyed this article, please check out my book Indie & Small Press Book Marketing. It’s available on Amazon for, you guessed it, $2.99 for kindle and $5.99 for paperback.

In Indie & Small Press Book Marketing, I explain how to get ready to publish, conduct a book launch, get reviews and exposure, discover your target audience, and connect with influencers to achieve breakthrough sales.

I also have a free 8-page marketing cheat sheet available for download. 

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I read an interesting comment on a blog recently, although I can’t remember where, that made the point that as the pace of technology accelerates, we’re going through massive shifts more and more quickly, such that it becomes exceedingly difficult to predict the future beyond a certain point, and that point is coming closer and closer as time progresses.

A writer in 1850 could easily imagine out 100 years. They might not be right about what society would be like, but they could imagine. Writers in the early 1900s were imagining out about 75 years, and midcentury writers 50 years, and so on.

I’m writing now, and I enjoy the act of grounding my society in hard predictions, and it’s hard to go out beyond about 25 years because pending changing in the technology landscape are so radical (artificial intelligence, nanotechnology) that it’s really hard to conceive of what life will be like in 50 or 100 years from now, and still have it be an extrapolation of current trends, rather than just wild-ass guesses, e.g. a fantasy of the future.

If it really is harder to extrapolate trends out any sort of meaningful distance, I wonder if that exerts a subtle effect on what people choose to write.

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Like the checklist?
Also read the book:
kindle, paperback

This free book marketing cheatsheet is the culmination of more than a year of research, experimentation and expert feedback into how to market books, particularly in the case where the author gets little to no help, as is typical for indie and small press published books.

Based on my own experiences selling fifteen thousand books in my first year as an author, it will help you create a better book, get reviews, incrementally build credibility, reach influencers, and sell more books.

If you find the cheatsheet valuable, you may also want to check out the companion book that explains in more detail how to implement the marketing plan. Indie & Small Press Book Marketing is available for kindle and in paperback.

Click below for your free download: 
Here’s some early praise for the book:
“Finally, a structured approach to marketing books.”
– Tonya Macalino, author of Spectre of Intention and The Shades of Venice

“Even for the traditionally published author, this book is full of great stuff! It takes a detailed, easy to follow approach to promoting your book. Highly recommended!”
– E.C. Ambrose, author of The Dark Apostle series 

“Chock full of actionable marketing tips I wish I’d known years ago.”
– Gene Kim, author of The Visible Ops Handbook and The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Too many authors say there isn’t any way to market your ebook. The answer they say is to just write another. Will Hertling’s story demonstrates there is another path and now he has put that path down in a book that is easy to execute and full of useful information.”
– Erik Wecks, author of Aetna Rising: A Snowballs’s Chance in Hell and Brody: Hope Unconquered.

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I joined up with five other authors  (Judson Roberts, Ruth Nestvold, Del Law, Luc Reid, and Annie Bellet) to start a contest that runs all through the end of December, 2012. First prize is a brand spankin’ new Kindle Fire HD with 13 eBook novels and collections of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction. There are also 10 second prizes of three eBooks from your choice of those 13.

You can enter the contest through Twitter, Facebook, and on our contest Web page by simply listing the three books that most interest you from the list. You can enter a maximum of three times, once via each of the entry mechanisms.)

You can enter and get all the details here: http://www.kindlebooksonfire.com/.

Contest books include my own Avogadro Corp and A.I. Apocalypse, Luc Reid’s Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories and his novel of Vermont backwoods magic, Family Skulls. Some of the other books are Judson Roberts’ deeply researched and action-drive Viking trilogy, Del Law’s unique and engaging fantasy novel of humans and non-humans in overlapping worlds, Annie Bellet’s novel of crime in fantasy city called Pyrrh, and Ruth Nestvold’s Arthurian Romance-Adventure novels.

Enter the contest today!

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Via Techcrunch:

Famed inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist Ray Kurzweil announced this afternoon that he has been hired by search engine giantGoogle as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing. He starts this upcoming Monday, according to a report issued on his website.

And from Ray’s website:

“In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast forward a decade — Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It’s easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we’re really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the forefront of much of this development.

“I’m thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions into reality.” 

The singularity is a little closer now. — Will

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Like to read? Me too.

You can win a Kindle Fire HD and a bunch of great books, including Avogadro Corp and A.I. Apocalypse.

You can enter the contest easily by tweeting to @WinBooksOnFire or posting to the KindleBooksOnFire Facebook page with the names of the three awesome books you want from the contest page: http://www.kindlebooksonfire.com/.
You can enter twice (once via Twitter and once via Facebook). In addition to the first prize, there’s ten second prizes of the three ebooks of your choice.

Enter today! For the official rules and the list of great books visit the Kindle Books on Fire website.