Episode 18: Should I Rapid Release?

JP: Hello, friends. It is December 1st, 2020 as we are recording this morning. I’m your host, JP Rindfleisch. And with me, my amazing cohost… 

Crys: Crys Cain. 

JP: Hello. How has your writing week been going? 

Crys: Not much writing. A lot of other things. I have this terrible thing where I can never remember what I did the week before, which is why I have records because otherwise I’d think I just never did anything.

I guess I did write a little bit last week. I’m just looking at my list… but this week I got on TikTok–the TikToks! I sound like such an old lady–with the romance pen name. So I spent all day yesterday in full romance author costume–wig, makeup, everything–recording tiktoks and just had a blast.

And then this morning, I got up early and got words done on the new romance solo first thing, cause I needed to post it for my co-writer partner. And so I feel very accomplished, especially considering today I will not have a work day after this because I will have my kid all day. 

JP: Yay. I saw some of these tiktoks and they were hilarious, so well done on your end.

I have taken notes for how my writing week has been, because I am in the same boat as you where I let the previous week go forget what happened. I’ve been just keeping my head down on revisions and I’ve been working on revisions, and going through those.

We got our cover for the second book yesterday and we’ve been working through edits on those. I think it’s coming together quite nicely. We also found an editor for the first book. So now I have a more stringent deadline on that, I can’t just play around in revision land.

Those have been the main things. I’ve also been playing around with the website, our website Write Away, seeing what I can play around with and change up. 

Crys: JP is a pretty awesome artist. After one of our first talks, I was like, “Oh yeah, if you wanna just redo the design of the brand or whatever, I literally threw what we currently have together in 15 minutes.” He jumped right on it and got a bunch of stuff to me. It’s been very fun. 

JP: I’m glad you liked them. 

All right. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago, just as a discussion about what my strategy was for the book series that I’m working on. We were going to take the rapid release method, and you bulked against that.  I was curious about your input on itm just to see a different perspective. So my question to you is, should I rapid release? 

Crys: It wasn’t that I balked, it was that I asked what your plan was.

Because rapid release is touted as like, “Here! The end all be all,” in kind of the current atmosphere.  It’s a very good tool, depending on what your goal is.  One of the questions I asked you right away was:are you planning on being in Amazon only, or are you planning on releasing wide and your answer was… 

JP: We wanted to go wide.

I had originally–our plan for this urban fantasy was to go Kindle Unlimited, but we realized that we just have–my coauthor is a Venezuelan, so he wants to do translations in Spanish. We want physical copies. We want audio. So we want all these different functions for it. And so that kind of led us closer and closer.

Crys: Okay. So that’s an interesting–we didn’t talk about all that first and that–being exclusive and in KU does not limit you from those things. So we can come back to that if you want to. But my immediate response was if you are going wide, there is not as much benefit, if any benefit at all to rapid releasing. 

What rapid releasing came out of was gaming the Amazon algorithm, specifically. It’s  fairly common knowledge or extrapolated knowledge that there is a cliff where the Amazon algorithms drop you. You get boosts on being a new release. They do have new release lists that you can find on Amazon. I don’t know how much readers actually use those, but they do feature into things that they send emails out for and other kinds of automatic promotions that they do. 

And so rapid release came out of trying to always have a book that Amazon was helping you promote. And then it developed into this whole monster, not in a bad way, not a bad monster, but a monster,giant thing of releasing as fast as possible because of whale readers, which are readers who read multiple books a day. At least in romance, with multiple books a day. 

I have one reader who posts her reading lists every month and what day she finished books.  A normal day for her is five books. I don’t know how she does it. I don’t think she sleeps. We’ve talked about it a little bit and I just don’t think she sleeps.

 But there are quite a few of these readers, particularly in romance. I know science fiction actually has quite a few whale readers.

So it became like a combo of gaming the Amazon algorithm plus capturing those readers who wanted to binge, particularly in KU. Because your binge readers, if they’re reading five books a day, are not going to be able to afford buying every single one of those books. But that $9.99 or whatever Kindle Unlimited costs right now is very reasonable for them.

Because that’s two to three books normally. They get their 50 to 150 books for the month for that price. And that’s balanced out by people who buy KU and then never use it. S so that’s what rapid release grew out of. 

The algorithms on the other platforms are nowhere near as intense as the Amazon algorithms. I haven’t studied them to figure out really what makes the other platforms tick. I have four books on a dead pen name that bring in, I don’t know, a hundred, a couple hundred a month over the various platforms. I haven’t done any kind of marketing on them. And there are some platforms that they don’t sell on at all, but then something like Google Play, it ticked up until it’s making, that’s my biggest earner.

it outsells Amazon on that series or at least matches it. They don’t have those… that weight towards the new releases that Amazon does. And so that was why I challenged you on doing a rapid release, if you’re planning on going wide.

JP: With rapid release, what is the general accepted longest term schedule? Is it a week, 30 days, 90 days? Like what is the commonly accepted cliff or extension into farther than rapid release? 

Crys: I think when it first started, it was 30 days or it might’ve even been 90 days because there’s. This theory that there’s cliff at 30 days, a cliff at 90 days.

And that could be Amazon algorithms, or it could just be reader attention spans. They keep their algorithms pretty tight. So it’s not a hundred percent, that’s certain, but there’s no line that says this is a rapid release and this isn’t. To some people, anything more thanone a year is a rapid release.

Some people think every six weeks is rapid release, or every two months or every month or every three weeks or every week. Any of those can be rapid release. I think you just have to judge what’s your baseline. If your baseline is traditional publishing, then anything more than one a year is going to be rapid release.

But I think most of us think, we tend towards, around a month or less is rapid release. And I don’t necessarily think that’s a healthy definition. It is definitely not the only definition. 

JP: So what are some alternatives then to rapid release? 

Crys: Just whatever works for you. 

Oh, why am I not going to remember her name? There is a well-known author. Who’s known for her one a year plan. She’s a romance author and she has wonderful videos… JA Huss! She has wonderful videos on YouTube. I think the title is called the perfect year. I’ll have to Google that and put it in the show notes. She has her one a year schedule.

You can do it just whenever you have a book ready. That’s probably not your best plan, simply because you’re running to catch-up. If that’s your schedule, you don’t  have a  system. Yoru readers don’t know when to expect your books. 

Expectation is key. No matter what schedule you set up, it’s a consistent one so that readers know, “Hey. Every two years, you’re going to put out a new book that I’ve been waiting desperately for, or every month on the fifth you’re going to put out a new book or serial or short story, and I know that I can go look every month on the fifth and you’ll have that for me.” Whatever it is, the consistency is super key. 

When my co-writer and I, in one of our series, we managed to publish every month on the seventh. And that series probably showed our most  month to month, engagement because our readers knew on the seventh. 

Amazon knew. Amazon picks up when you are publishing. On the same day, every month they started anticipating it. They start sending emails out for you. Your pre-order email, your new release email. They know that those are coming. especially when you’re doing pre-orders.

I wrote down a few authors that do a few different kinds of rapid release. So we can talk about what rapid release options are being successful. 

Just writing as fast as you can. That’s one. That’s how my co-writer and I both got started. she was writing a 20-30,000 novella every week for the first two months, which is insane. 

I was just writing as fast as I could. I think I generally got a one a month, but there wasn’t consistency. And those still were successful. I think that’s harder now as rapid release has become the norm. And so it’s not stand out, and it doesn’t get you attention for being fast, or you expected to be fast.

That’s a bunch of BS. 

But we’ve got Lindsey Buroker–she does a form of rapid release in that she does write quickly, but she holds back several books when she starts a new series. And then she releases them quite quickly. And I think with, one of her sci-fi series that I followed, she did one week between the first and the second book, two weeks between the second and third book, and then a month until the fourth book. The other books came out at a period of several months, but she always had a pre-order up. So readers knew when to expect it. 

Michael Anderle is the big name that a lot of indie authors know, because he grew from just him writing his books and nothing releasing to a giant stable of authors co-writing in his world and they publish at least one book every week, if not more, which is a level that most of us don’t really care to get to. But it’s an option. 

Amanda Lee is one of the most impressive authors I’ve ever studied. She is a cozy mystery writer. She writes openly under two pen names. She writes a book a month on each. She’s generally six months ahead of her production schedule and she takes vacations. 

Her writing schedule–she’s just a mad, fast typer. She was a journalist and she writes about 9,000 words every morning, but only in three hours. So she’s not spending their entire day doing it. I can’t write 3000 words in an hour, so I’ve given up on being Amanda Lee. 

One of the best examples I have of not rapid releasing is my friend, Rachel Amphlett. She publishes between three and four titles every year. I think it’s three novels and one short story. I think… I could be wrong. She writes, mystery, suspense, and she also writes ahead. 

She is currently done with all of her books that will be published in 2021.  I think I saw a message from her that she had just finished a book that would be for 2022, but she was just setting it aside until it was scheduled to go with the editor. 

That’s my life goals, right there. To be a year out in my production schedule. I know exactly what I’m selling for like the next year and a half. If something happens to me, my production will still keep going.

But I’m not there yet. 

JP: Yeah. I feel like this conversation has been a little reassuring just because when I hear rapid release as like a newer author, I hear, “Hold everything back, release it either every week or like every month.” But for those of us that still are, on the, nine to five and we’re filling in the cracks with writing, that can seem like a huge cliff to overcome. I think I speak for a lot of us when we have that sense that we just want to get our stuff out and we want to be able to have people read them. 

Now, I’m all for holding back and waiting to release a few things until we have that stockpile, but it’s reassuring to hear that rapid release doesn’t necessarily mean every month, it can be every couple of months, it can be, more than one a year. so those were all very reassuring. Thank you. 

Crys: You’re welcome. 

Who do I think rapid release is good for? 

I think rapid release is good for people who do write fast, especially when you’re a new author. If you’re a new author who writes slower or a new publisher who writes slower, I don’t think rapid release is necessarily the best option. 

Because one of the best benefits of publishing is getting the feedback and seeing, did I meet what I was attempting to do? Or did this flop? Am I really as decent a writer as I hope I am? Or was this absolutely terrible and I did not put the time I should have into it? 

So for writers who write fast, you get that feedback fast. You’re able to put it into the next book, release the next book and do that iterative cycle of getting better. A lot of people will say, “That’s not good enough. Your books aren’t going to be good enough if you do that.”

There are a lot of authors who are really good at story and terrible at writing. Those authors still tend to succeed because story is what the readers are going for. And if what you’re working on is getting better at story, I don’t think that’s a terrible thing. Maybe use a practice pen name like I did– that’s the dead pen name I have. I learned a lot and learned it fast and was able to apply it to the next book. I was able to do it on basically zero budget. 

The other people I think it tends to be good for are established authors who know that their audience will buy their books. And then do you want to game the Amazon  algorithms? Lindsey Buroker is my example of that. 

She also has a wide audience. She pre-releases it on her Patreon to her wide supporters so that they have access to it and don’t have to wait while it’s in the Kindle Unlimited exclusive contract. But then she games the Amazon algorithm to reach readers she normally wouldn’t, using KU. Getting KU reads on top of sales, reaching those markets. And then once the series starts to die, she pulls it and she goes wide.

She knows the market is there. She knows from past experience, her skills are there. And so she has the competence that rapid releasing will get her a desired result that slowly releasing Walmart. 

JP: So we have Lindsay Buroker, and you’ve listed a few other authors. If the rapid release model is the ideal for going into Amazon using strict Amazon algorithms, are there any other authors to follow or any other, viable methods that you have seen with going wide that, maybe he was well for 

authors that want to go wide.

Crys: I would follow Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch, for sure. They’ve been in the publishing industry for decades. And Dean’s attitudes sometimes are really hard to take. He is a cantankerous man, and he knows it and he’s fine with that. But Kris, her Patreon is one of the most useful places for publishing information that I’ve found.

They talk a lot about doing what you can, consistently keeping at the job, not burning out, and leveraging your intellectual property and thinking about them beyond just being books. 

We talked about RPGs in our last episode. My friend, Tammy Veldura, has a world that she’s I wanting to build on RPG out of. You probably will have multiple worlds that you want to build RPGs out of. If there’s a game that your characters play in your. in your book, you can take that out and make it a real thing in the real world. And emblem, symbols–

A book I will recommend for the long haul authors, and this will get into a conversation on merchandising that I’m going to have with our friend, Alicia McCall, is you’re gonna need a bigger story and it is not in Kindle and I’ve lost different copy and I’m so angry, but I will order another one someday.

It is really good about looking at your work, especially if you want to create a giant world that you write multiple books in, and how to create a franchise or at least set up the scaffolding for it. Because in the long run, for us authors, the big dream for most of us is to not just earn our living off of books, but to earn our living off our intellectual property, the ancillary stuff.

Kris is pretty open that a lot of her money comes from subsidary. She has sub-licensed, some of that’s TV options, some of that’s translations–there’s a game, that–I’m not remembering the game studios name,–but there’s a game that uses her world as the basis.

 Audio is considered a subright. All of these things are going to build up to create your business, eventually. In the long run. Now, should you be focusing on all creating all of those right away if you’re not doing that ? 

No. You need to focus on creating books. 

You need to focus on creating your stories, creating your intellectual property bucket that you have to draw from.

But when you aren’t looking at the Amazon churn, in the Amazon hamster wheel, is the way you’re going to make money because that’s not going to last forever. Nothing lasts forever. When you look at the grand world of things, not just wide, there’s going to be a lot of ways to bring in $100 here, $500 there, $20,000 there.

And that’s all going to build up into an actual living income at some point, if you keep at it.

JP: I think that’s a good ideology that we should have, not to put everything in one basket. We mentioned this before in our Plan B episode, where if we have everything in one basket, what happens if that basket falls?

I think that taking this idea of rapid release and calming it down and focusing on the potential of being wide, it’s beneficial for a lot of authors. In the Creative Penn episode where Joanna Penn had Erin Wright on to talk about going wide, she just really brought an emphasis to the fact that, if you start in and then you switched to going wide, you are reaching an entirely new audience and it may not be beneficial for an author to do that. Because you’ll lose the original audience you had, and then you’ll have to build this work to get your wide audience again.

And I think that’s why my coauthor and I want to go wide, is that we want that broader audience. And we know that Amazon isn’t the key running factor in other countries that we want to reach out to. 

Crys: One of the reasons I would choose KU,, outside of doing rapid release is if you’re a new author who is overwhelmed. If you just want to dip your toes in, I think KU is a great way to do that because it is a much lower barrier to somebody reading you.

The problem that a lot of us get into is then we get addicted to the KU income. And that’s because that’s “certainty”, that isn’t certain at all. Just like you said, you get used to this audience and then having to build up another audience takes a long time.  

There’s nothing evil about rapid releasing. There’s nothing evil–though some would argue with me–about being exclusive in KU as an author. It might be evil or Amazon to try and trap people, but that’s a whole nother discussion.

It may not be right for you, for any given author, if they look at what their end goal is and say, “Okay, these are the things I actually want out of my author career. Here are the longterm strategies that are going to get me there. And here are some short-term strategies that I’m willing to do to get to the longterm.”

You have to be conscious about that and not just take the advice that rapid release is the best way, because you’re not taking into account all of the other factors. What are other people’s goals? How are they different from your goals and why does rapid release work for them? And everybody’s different.

JP: Yeah, I think that’s a good take on it. And it’s not saying that rapid release is bad. It’s just saying that there are alternatives. And I think that the space right now is very loud about using rapid release. So I just wanted to hash this out and hear what, what some other opinions were.

Crys: I will put all of the links of everything I’ve mentioned down in the show notes. And what is our question for our dear listeners? 

JP: I would like to know, do you rapid release and if so, what is your method? What  is your timeframe that you release in?