Is Self-Publishing the Way to Go?

By Sarah Baker

Go to any panel on book publishing these days, and you’ll hear the hoopla over self-publishing. Easy to do! More control! A bigger cut of the profits! At a time when advances aren’t exactly advancing, editors are often too over-worked, and publicists are spending the house’s dimes on blockbusters, self-publishing sure sounds tempting. Add to this the allure of royalty rates of 70 percent or higher instead of the 15 percent (at most) from traditional publishers, and it’s no wonder all writers aren’t going indie.

But, wait. Self-publishing might be the word on everyone’s lips, but is it right for you?

“You have to decide what your goals are,” said thriller-writer and self-publishing guru Barry Eisler at a lecture in November 2011 at the Park Plaza hotel in Boston. For him, it seemed like a no-brainer. He had already published three books with a traditional, or what he calls “legacy,” publisher. He has a following, developed when he pounded the pavement one summer, visited 500 bookstores, and called on 1,200 bookstores in 40 states. Other things in his favor: His wife is a literary agent, so he has access to publishing professionals.

As if his platform weren’t enough already, the press from his decision to turn down $500,000 from St. Martin’s and go indie practically made him a household name. The mighty-marketing-machine Amazon is his publisher. He likes control. He likes business. He’s clearly very good at it.

But not everyone has built what Eisler has. For first-time authors, like Boston Globe reporter Billy Baker, who is armed with a literary agent and a nonfiction book idea, an advance from a traditional publisher is necessary for him to take time off from work to report and write. “I don’t have 50 grand in the bank,” he said.

Other authors make the point that they want the strong winds of a trusted publisher in their authorial sails. Pagan Kennedy, author of ten books including Spinsters and Black Livingstone, doubts she would ever go indie. “If you can live with 1,000 readers and not making any money, then fine. But, if you want an audience of 20,000 for your book—how do you get that?” she said.

So what should a writer weigh when considering self-publishing?

“Self-publishing had a stigma,” said Eve Bridburg, literary agent and founder of Grub Street, Inc., an independent literary-arts center in Boston. But she points out some critical new factors: increasingly sophisticated self-publishing tools are available; you can distribute via the Internet (and not just via the back of a station wagon); Twitter and Facebook can help to spread the word. Then there is the payoff: higher royalty rates. So many more serious writers are self-publishing, she added, that Grub is now offering workshops not only in the craft of writing but in marketing and publishing, as well.

Many people are taking the plunge. An article by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in the Wall Street Journal cites an estimate by R. R. Bowker, which tracks the publishing business: the number of self-published titles exploded 160 percent from 2006 to 2010 (that is, from 51,237 to 133,036.)

Some recent success stories—Amanda Hocking and John Locke, in addition to Barry Eisler—have helped fuel the movement. And let’s not forget that some historic bestsellers (What Color is Your Parachute and The Elements of Style, for example) started out as do-it-yourselfers (DIY), the old-school name for the self-published. They were acquired by traditional houses after they were already successful.

Sales figures for self-published books are difficult to track, and hard to interpret, since people choose this route for all sorts of reasons. Many are printing 10 copies of a memoir for the family or 100 for the business. Amazon.com doesn’t share overall sales figures of books, according to Brittany Turner of their public relations department. But, in an email she was willing to say that “John Locke and Amanda Hocking have both sold more than 1 million books using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), 12 KDP authors have sold more than 200,000 books and 30 KDP authors have sold more than 100,000.” Over at Amazon’s self-publishing service site, CreateSpace, she added, former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin self-published his memoir Katrina’s Secrets, which hit the Top 100 Best Sellers in Books on Amazon the week of its release.

(If you’ve seen anyone report on the other end of the spectrum—that is, the number of self-published authors who never surpass their break-even point—please post links in the comments section! The more solid information we all have, the better.)

Even traditional publishers are capitalizing on the popularity. Book Country is Penguin Books new foray into the do-it-yourself world. It’s a place for genre fiction writers to circulate their work, get feedback, and buy self-publishing services. “Self-publishing is a trend that isn’t going away,” said Book Country president Molly Barton to Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.

But all of this takes time and ingenuity. Martha McPhee, author of Dear Money and three other novels, said self-publishing would be like pushing a boulder up a mountain, and she wouldn’t know where to begin. Claire Messud, New York Times-bestselling author of The Emperor’s Children, equates self-publishing with home schooling.

Would you consider home schooling?

SIDEBAR: Should you self-publish?

If you want a professional-looking book with a chance of success you’ll need four things: Time, Money, Connections, and Gumption. Traditional publishers have been in the business for a long time and a book contract, despite that many authors accuse them of everything from neglect to abandonment, guarantees a professional process. You’ll have a well-oiled machine behind you so that you can focus on writing and promotion. If you want to replace them you’ll need to:

1. Hire a load of people if you aren’t a jack-of-all-trades: Editor, copyeditor, jacket designer, interior designer, publicist, marketer, rights salesperson (for foreign and first serial), Web site designer, printer, and distributor (for print books). If you’re publishing nonfiction you might need a lawyer to check for libel and an indexer to create an index. But buyer beware—these people work for you, so make sure they tell you what you need to hear and not what you want to hear.

2. Verify your account balance and uncap your pen—you’ll be writing a lot of checks.

3. Buy a Starbucks Card or a Nespresso machine. With the amount of work this will involve, you’ll need your caffeine. Self-publishing is akin to starting your own business.

4. Do the hustle. Work your friends on Facebook, your followers on Twitter, your old colleagues in the media, your local librarian, and your buddies in the bookstores to spread the word and buy the book.

Good luck.

{Formerly a book editor at Viking/Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York City, Sarah Baker is now a freelance writer and an independent radio producer. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.}

Thanks Sarah and Constance for a great post! What about you? Have you self-published? What has your experience been?

2. Use your name as your brand.
Did you know you can change your Twitter user name without losing your followers? So if you chose “@hotchica6” and now you have 3000 Twitter followers, it’s not too late to change it to “@HilaryHiggenbottom.” On your Facebook page, once you have 25 likes, you can choose a customized URL (and you can change that URL until you have 100 likes, at which time it’s locked in.) Go out there now and change all your IDs to Hilary Higgenbottom, or whatever your real name is, hotchica6.

3. Post your contact info.
It doesn’t have to be your personal e-mail address, but create SOME way for people to get in touch with you, and post that on your website. (Post it like this to avoid spammers: Hilary (at) Higgenbottom (dot) com.) There’s nothing more irritating than spending half an hour searching someone’s site in vain for a way to contact him. It’s not only frustrating, it makes the author appear aloof and unaccessible. Someone may want to ask you for an interview or compliment you on your latest article in the New York Times, and they may not want to do that in a public forum.

4. Get a professional photo taken of yourself.
You will post your picture everywhere—on your website, on your blog, and on the profiles of all your social media networks, and you don’t want that to be a blurry full-length photo of you and your dog. Wear something simple that isn’t black or white or patterned, put some make-up on, do your hair, and fork out $300 to have a professional photographer take your picture (make sure that includes the digital copies of the photos.) Better yet, have multiple pictures taken of yourself in a variety of settings (at your computer, doing a reading, etc.) Mary Robinette Kowal and Michael Hyatt do this well. Every time you refresh a page on their websites, their photo changes.

5. Interact with your audience.
Whether it’s through a blog, a professional Facebook page (where anyone can “like” you), or a Twitter account, make yourself accessible. Gone are the days of J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. Readers not only want to know about you, they want to talk to you. And they want you to respond. You don’t have to spend all day on social media, but take a couple hours out of every week to connect with your audience. Your efforts will pay off in increased work (Editor Alan Rinzler credits his steady editing work to his blog) and book sales.

If you want to learn more about how you can improve your online presence through blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I have a Social Media Madness class beginning this Thursday, Feb. 2 at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and there’s room for a couple more students. Also check out Lorraine Sanders’ one-day Journalism Basics for Bloggers as well as the full roster of winter classes.

And now what about you? What is one of your favorite social media tips?

Red Room began as the Red Room Writers Society in 2002, where Madison personally helped hundreds of aspiring and professional writers complete their books. A frequent keynote speaker and panelist on writing, entrepreneurship, and social media, she has been a guest lecturer to the faculty and writing coaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Stanford Publishing Course. Trained as an attorney, Madison was Editor in Chief of her Law Review, interned at the California Supreme Court, and served as a Law Fellow at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Her adventures have also included episodes as a New Orleans restaurateur, radical feminist politico, and torch singer at the Plush Room. Her feminist-mafia-noir graphic novel, Huntress: Year One, was published by DC Comics in February 2009 and is now in its second printing. It tells the origin story of a strong female superhero. Madison is twenty-nine.

MW: What gave you the idea to create a Red Room online bookstore?

IM: Well, it didn’t make any sense to me that authors were doing all the work marketing their books—on Red Room, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites—and then handing the profits and the customer relationships over to Amazon. We wanted to change that and dramatically improve the future for authors.

I’m also concerned about the stranglehold Amazon has on our culture and our
industry. Jeff Bezos was a hedge fund manager who evaluated numerous retail
categories looking for the one with the biggest upside at the time, which
was books. I think I read it was almost women’s shoes. To Amazon, books are
a retail category, period. But to you and me, books are *not* just another
retail category. They are the world of ideas. They are our culture. They are art, politics, parenting, history—books are everything. Books change the
world.

The reality is that at least half of all book sales have moved online. Of
course we want you to shop at your local independent bookstore, and people
reading this blog probably do more than the average American, but most
people buy most of their books from Amazon. We want back that half of
American book sales that take place on Amazon. They make more money from all
of their other products, so we can take back books and they won’t even feel
it because we’ll be buying everything else on earth from them. And
regarding independent bookstores, we’re trying to figure out right now how
we can support them through Red Room. One idea on the table is to allow
shoppers to pick an independent bookstore, and we’ll give that bookstore
part of the profits. We want to preserve book culture, and there may be a
way to do that *without* ignoring that most consumers buy from large online
retailers and are not going to stop. So we’ll build an online retailer that
supports book culture.

As a side note, I’ve *always* wanted to run a bookstore; I love bookstores
and libraries. I worked at Book Passage [a local independent bookstore]
when I was fifteen years old. In my twenties I looked into opening my own
bookstore, but economically, I could see it was an almost impossible
business model. I used to go to the library all the time, before the
Internet. One of my [unpublished] novels stars a librarian working at the
San Francisco main branch.

MW: Does the Red Room bookstore carry all Red Room authors’ books? If not, why not?

IM: We carry about 95% of our authors’ titles. Since we don’t want our authors to miss a single sale, if we don’t carry it, we offer a link to other retailers. We’d like to carry 100% of our authors’ titles. Right now, we’re working with the largest distributor in the world, and they have almost everything, but we will work with other distributors, too, so we can fill in the gaps.

MW: What does an author have to do to get stocked in the Red Room bookstore (and how much does it cost)?

IM: Soon we’ll be selling *all* books, not just the books by our authors. So you’ll be able to find any book on Red Room that you can on Amazon. It’s completely free for you to join as a “Community Member” and for us to stock your book. Free to shop. And consumers don’t need to set up a public profile in order to shop.

However, just because your book is stocked, doesn’t mean readers will find
you. If you’re an author, you’ll want an annual “Premium Membership” so you
can take advantage of how we help you market your book. When you’re a
Premium Member, your profile looks and feels different with numerous
additional features. We’ll showcase all of your titles on your homepage, and when
people view your book, they’ll see a personal note from you about it, what
other authors are recommending it, and lots of other premium benefits
designed especially for authors.

Premium Membership costs $250 a year. For authors doing the math, part of
that is you get unlimited “Red Room Royalties” of *15% of your book sales*, so unless you sell fewer than about 85 books a year, you’ll make back your membership fee and be enjoying Red Room for free, and we’ll be sending you checks. Also, we know that authors who are really broke need this program the most, so we offer scholarship rates for authors in financial need—if you’re an author who can barely pay, send me a note, we want to help you be a part of this.

And I want to reiterate that people who aren’t marketing their book—readers,
journalists, librarians, publishing industry folks—can all create a profile and blog and shop and participate for free.

MW: To clarify, although all authors will eventually see their books stocked in the Red Room bookstore, only premium members will benefit from the 15% commission?

IM: Yes, in the near future, we’ll be selling “all” books and ebooks, at which time only authors who are Premium Members will get “Red Room Royalties” (15% of their sales).
 
So, at that point, if you’re an author there are three possibilities: Your book could be for sale and you aren’t a member (no benefits or special marketing), your book could be for sale and you are a free “community” member (same—you get nothing), or your book could be for sale and you are a Premium Member (so you get all the benefits).

MW: Besides the 15% Red Room royalties, what other advantages are there for authors selling their books through Red Room?

IM: IM: Ah! I forgot to mention the biggest thing. We call it “Red Room Relationships,” and it means that for the first time in history, you meet your book buyers. Imagine if you had the names and contact info for everyone who bought your last few books, so you can market directly to them on your next project. For a bestselling author, this could change your life.

On the author side, the author writes a customized thank-you note for each of
her book titles in which the author can say something that pertains to that book,
and then the note is automatically sent to her book buyers. The customer’s info then gets sent to the author’s “customers” file. Red Room is a social network, so this is similar to when people like you on Facebook, but it’s much more useful, because it shows their real name, ZIP code, what book they bought, and when. Readers are *excited* about being connected to their favorite authors—that’s why they don’t generally opt out.

When I talk to bestselling authors, like Po Bronson or Maxine Hong-Kingston, the thing they are most interested in is not the money, it’s the customer relationships. Think about if you’ve sold millions of books and if you had all the names of all of those customers, so you don’t have to start from scratch when your next book comes out. “Red Room Relationships” can deliver that if an author plants the seeds wherever they link to buying their books.

MW: The Red Room website states, “We’re not offering a new publishing model, we’re offering a new retail model.” Can you explain what that means?

IM: Sure. Right now, everyone is talking about disintermediating the publishing supply chain, meaning cutting out publishers and printers and agents and distributors, leaving only the author and the reader with whomever is attempting the disintermediation (Amazon, for example) in between. Red Room’s model doesn’t cut any of these traditional players out.

Despite the big hype around a few successful self-published books, most
books being purchased are traditionally published books, and despite the
excitement about ebooks, at the moment, the majority of books being sold
are still print books. So how can authors make more money on the majority
of books selling today? We’ve come up with a way. You can double your income if you successfully route your sales to Red Room.

Why should you give Amazon your customers, anyway? Red Room’s new retail
model breaks down what I call “the retail wall” between the author and the
customer. It’s going to change everything. Authors do all the work marketing themselves all over the web—we make it possible to close the sale with exponentially more benefits.

We give you some of the most important benefits of an author’s collective,
except that you don’t have to take turns dusting the shelves or cleaning
the kitchen. Just update your blog, please. I know some readers are going
to say, I’d rather clean the kitchen!

MW: Amazon heavily discounts books. For example, the list price for Haruki Murakami’s new hardcover, 1Q84, is $30.50; the Amazon price is 50% of that—$15.25. What motivation is there for readers to buy books at list
price through Red Room when they can get them for half that on Amazon?

IM: This is the million—wait,* **eight-b**illion*-dollar question. Our first task is to eliminate every other advantage Amazon has, and then we will be in a position to address this. First of all, studies have shown that price is not the primary reason people shop on Amazon. The number one reason you buy on Amazon is because you’ve bought previously from them and they have your credit card info and shipping address on file. That’s referred to as “convenience.” And shows how important initial customer acquisition is.

Also, Amazon often only discounts books 20%, and the majority of
books only 2-5%. Once we’re selling a higher volume of books, we may be able to compete on price—so buy on Red Room, please! The biggest challenge for
us is that they discount the bestsellers 40-50%. We may someday be able to
do that, but books cost retailers between 45%-65% of their list price
through most distributors or publishers, depending on your volume, so we
may get close but not all the way.

There was an op-ed in The New York Times recently that was essentially saying, “What Price Amazon?” A Pulitzer-Prize winning author, whose name I forget, argued that while their prices may be lower, it hurts local communities, destroys our local tax base and infrastructure, and our culture as a nation.

I don’t know how many consumers, out of the $8 billion in Amazon book
sales, will be willing to switch, even if they’re encouraged to do so by
the authors. If Walter Isaacson’s book on Steve Jobs had been on Red Room
in the first two weeks it was out, and Isaacson had, when promoting his
book, directed readers to Red Room, Isaacson could have made up to an
additional $3 million more than he did. Not to mention that he would have
gathered the names of 500,000 of his customers to sell his next and his
backlist books to. Anyway, let’s say he only got a measly 10% of his book
sales to move to Red Room from Amazon. That’s still $300,000 and 50,000
names.

The authors are already their own sales force, Red Room is a mechanism that
allows them to get more out of closing the sale, wherever and whenever
they’re marketing themselves.

MW: How many authors use Red Room? How many authors sell their books through the Red Room Bookstore?

IM: Three thousand authors use Red Room. About 500 of them haven’t filled out their profile enough for us to sell their books yet, but the other 2,500 sell their books through the Red Room Bookstore. And when we launch selling “all” books, not just our official Red Room author titles, the other 500 authors’ books will show up, plus we’ll have about eight million additional
titles. I’ll let you know when that launches.

MW: How can Red Room authors reach more potential readers through Red Room?

IM: We have numerous testimonials from authors saying they get far more readers of the same blog posts on Red Room than they do on their other platforms. Some authors have reported between 15,000 and 500,000 readers. We provide analytics, so you can see your traffic on Red Room. Blogging regularly (something I don’t like doing, and I understand why others don’t like to do) is, as everyone knows, a good way to get new readers. You’ll be showcased
on our blogs page, and we can feature you—if you wrote something fantastic—on our homepage or in our newsletter. Another great way to promote yourself is to comment on the blogs of other authors you authentically like. Don’t sell, just add to the conversation. Readers will see you there and look you up.

I gave an hour keynote talk on how to market your book through social media
at the Stanford Writers Conference a while back, so I have a whole
methodology I suggest to help people spend a limited amount of time online
but make the most marketing impact. If you’re on Red Room, call me and I’ll
give you a short coaching session tailored to your situation. Seriously,
I’m happy to do it. I don’t like authors out there feeling overwhelmed or
intimidated or guilty about what they “should” be doing on the Internet. I
like to see authors getting their next book written, blogging and
participating strategically in a limited way that doesn’t waste their time, and gathering over time a lengthy email list of real book buyers. We get notes all the time from authors saying what a support we were and how much we helped them succeed. That’s what we’re here for.

MW: For authors who already have a website and a blog, what advantage is there to blogging on Red Room? Do I have to have a Premium Membership to blog on Red Room?

IM: You can have a beautiful Red Room home, and you can blog on Red Room for free. It’s called a “Community Membership.” (As I mentioned earlier, you only have to get a Premium Membership if you want us to showcase and carry your books.) Blogging on Red Room is the most pleasant blogging experience you’ll find on the Internet because of the quality of the people on Red Room—no weird comments, no spam comments. And you’ll be in really good company, as you know, from seeing who’s already on Red Room. Plus, it’s an elegant site. We just rebuilt and redesigned the site from the ground up, and it looks great. And we always provide email and phone support from our editors in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Red Room isn’t exclusive. You can still post elsewhere and sell books
elsewhere. But we’ll become your favorite. Most of our authors are on
Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and Red Room. A significant number also have
a personal website and a blog elsewhere. We know it’s time-consuming to
maintain all of these sites, so we keep up with technology and improve the
design, so Red Room can be your only home if you want it to be, but we also
don’t mind you linking to and showcasing your activity on other
sites. Because you’ll start linking where to buy your book from all of
those other sites back to Red Room, so you can find out who’s really buying and so you can earn your Red Room Royalties of 15% of those sales. We amplify the
success you have on all the other sites. We play nice with everybody.

Except Amazon. Which is kind of ironic, because I think I would get along
really well with actual amazons.

* * *
Thank you, Ivory, for a great interview! Readers, what do you think about Red Room’s new online retail model? Do you use Red Room? Will you buys books through Red Room? If you are a published author, will you link to Red Room on your website?

Now, here’s an exercise to determine whether you are blogging to the wrong audience:

Profile your audience. Make a list of the different groups of people you imagine buying your book. Who are they? Are they teen girls? Middle-aged women? Men who like to read thrillers? How old are they? What do they do for a living? How do they spend their free time? What products do they buy? Make lists. Then, once you’ve got that down, think about what topics those people are interested in reading about. What concerns them? What are their thoughts preoccupied with? (Boys? Sex? Making money? Finding God? Decluttering their homes?) Make another list.

And finally, ask yourself: Are you blogging about the topics on that last list? Why or why not?

By the way, there is some value in attracting other bloggers to your blog for the simple reason that they are more likely to blog about you and your work than non-bloggers. But you need both. You need to reach as many potential readers as possible, and there are many ways to do that.

Now, you tell me. Are you blogging to the RIGHT audience? Are you blogging to your potential readers, or are you only blogging to other writers? What’s stopping you from making that leap?

As someone who just finished the last revision of my manuscript Monday night (Hurray! I’m taking the day off to go to the hot springs tomorrow, my favorite reward), this rang true for me. I sent an earlier draft of my memoir, Paris On Less Than $10,000 A Day, out two years ago to five agents. All five requested fulls, and all five had positive feedback but ultimately turned the book down (No wait, there was a sixth, the fabulous Nathan Bransford, from whom I received a form rejection, but who hasn’t received a form rejection from Nathan?) Rather than send it to more agents, I spent the next two years rewriting the book. I don’t regret that decision because I think the book has greatly improved, but now, as I prepare to send it out again, I have one goal: No matter how many rejections I get (assuming I get some) I’m not allowed to revise my book again, unless an agent specifically requests that I do so.

I’m confident that my book is well-written and marketable. I’ve read enough publishing blogs to know not to take rejection personally. It’s an impossibly tough market, the business is incredibly subjective (It’s all about finding the right agent, the who will fall in love with my story), etc. etc. I know all that. And yet …

I also know myself. A month from now, after having received three or four rejections, I’ll begin to doubt myself. I’ll doubt my book and my writing in general. I’ll analyze rejection e-mails for clues as to what could be improved. I’ll kick myself for not having gotten my book out there sooner. I’ll wonder if having a bigger author platform would make a difference. I’ll tell myself that memoirs are a thing of the past (unless you’re a celebrity from the 80s), that modeling books are out, that the only chance I have of getting published is to sleep with Oprah’s hairdresser. I’ll wonder if my book is too serious. I’ll tell myself that if only chapters 1, 6, 9, and 18 were as funny as 2, 7, and 41, it would have sold by now. In other words, I’ll be plagued by self-doubt.

Back when I was rock climbing, I wanted to get my lead card at my local rock climbing gym. I’d heard from several people that no one passes the first time they take the lead test. Climbers often have to take it two or three times to get their cards because their lead has to be PERFECT—perfect clips, smooth, strong climbing on an overhanging 5.10B or 5.10C, and no stepping on or behind the rope. I passed on my first try. Not because I’m a great climber, but because I was so afraid to fail that I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced long after any sane person would have taken the test. I would not take the test until I was confident that I could do it flawlessly. Why? Because I’m plagued by perfectionism, the cousin of self-doubt.

Perfectionism can be a good thing. It can lead to great accomplishments. But it can be damaging, too. It can slow us down, it can prevent us from putting ourselves out there, from taking risks. And in order to get published, we need to be willing to put ourselves out there. We need to take risks—in our writing and in our lives.

What about you? Are you plagued by perfectionism and/or self-doubt? Do you find that men are more confident than women when submitting their writing for publication? How do you remain positive in the face of rejection?

I worked it back up to 55, and it held steady for a while. I had come up with a “system” to maximize my ROI without working too hard, and I was happy. Then the sky fell when Klout changed its algorithm on October 26. My score plummeted to 46 overnight. And then, through some bug, it bottomed out at 10 (then popped back up to 46 the following day.) I wasn’t alone. Thousands of Klout users were incensed that their scores had dropped 10 to 20 points in one day (most of those with high scores saw a drop while those with low scores benefited from an increase.) To soothe my bruised ego, @missuku sent me this great xtranormal video about the inanity of Klout. And in response to one commenter’s lament that he had spent months getting his Klout score into the 70s only to see it drop back into the 50s, TechCrunch published an article titled Nobody Gives a Damn About Your Klout Score.

Back in April, when I wrote this blog post about Klout, that was true. When I interviewed agents and editors in the publishing industry, none of them had ever heard of Klout. They definitely weren’t checking writers’ Klout scores before deciding whether to take them on.

But all that has changed. Since April, Klout has expanded to include not only Twitter, but Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare, WordPress.com, Blogger, and more (I can’t check their site for the complete list because I refuse to look at my Klout score), and now literary agents and social media gurus are telling us that the size of one’s Klout score DOES matter. In fact, in this blog post, literary agent Rachelle Gardner says you should include your Klout score IN YOUR BOOK PROPOSAL along with your number of Twitter followers and page views on your blog. Kristen Lamb, author of We Are Not Alone, a social media guide for writers, responded in a post titled The Dark Side of Metrics—Writer Friend or Ticket to Crazy Town?. For me, Klout was a ticket to crazy town.

When I first started using it, I watched other Tweeters to see what raised their Klout scores. I noticed that getting any kind of mention helped, so I @replied and retweeted people each night hoping they would @reply and retweet me back. It worked. But it felt like a waste of my extremely valuable time to spend half an hour (sometimes up to an hour) on the Internet each night writing tweets like, “Hey, how are you?” or “I loved that movie, too!” in order to raise my Klout score. There were some aspects I liked about it. I was connecting more with people and we all know social networking is about being social. I worked harder at writing tweets that would get retweeted. I tweeted more frequently and more regularly, instead of 10 times one day and none the next. I was happy with my progress. 55 was a good score, and 60 was on the horizon.

What frustrated me most about Klout’s new algorithm is that I couldn’t figure it out. I no longer knew what to do (get my Twitter followers, get more FB likes, get more retweets) to increase my score. Whereas before, my “True Reach” was a transparent number—my number of Twitter followers plus my Facebook likes, suddenly my True Reach was a mysterious 700 while a friend, who has a fourth my Twitter followers and no Facebook page, had a True Reach of 3000. And another friend, who doesn’t have a Twitter account or a blog or a Facebook page (only a personal Facebook profile), suddenly had a Klout score of 43—just three points behind mine. And she HATES social media. How was this possible? My husband found the answer in this article. According to Annie, and I think she’s right, what matters is the percentage of your followers who are actively engaged with you. In other words, you’re better off with 50 friends who retweet everything you say than 10,000 followers of which only 500 retweet everything you say. The algorithm is clearly flawed. And it’s not the only one.

I’ve been to Grader.com to score my website and my blog. My blog gets penalized for having infrequent posts that are long (the highest scores go to blogs with frequent, short posts) and for not having links to Twitter and Facebook. Uh, sorry Grader.com, but I have not one but TWO links each to both Twitter and Facebook on my blog. In other words, these scoring websites make mistakes. Big mistakes. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

So I’m taking a break. That’s not to say I’ll never check my Klout score again, but for the month of November, while all your Nanowrimo writers are cranking out 1666.66 words a day, I will be assessing my social media influence the old-fashioned way—by instinct. And until Klout reveals what exactly goes into its cockamamy (I always thought it was “cockamany” but Dictionary.com disagrees with me) algorithm, I won’t take my score too seriously. I’d rather spend my late-night hours playing games the old-fashioned way—sitting around my dining room table with friends, producing coffee and tobacco, and laying track between Palermo and Moskva.

What about you? Do you care about your Klout score? How was it affected by the algorithm change? Do you care? And have you found the secret to increasing your “new Klout” score?