Episode 333 - From Data to Discovery: ALLi's Indie Author Bookstore with Melissa Addey
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Melissa Addey discusses FROM DATA TO DISCOVERY: ALLi's INDIE AUTHOR BOOKSTORE, including what three years of income surveys reveal about indie versus traditional publishing earnings, how ALLi's new Indie Author Bookstore works as a curated shop window for thousands of indie books, what browsing thousands of listings has taught Melissa about cover quality and metadata mistakes, how AI search rewards books listed on multiple platforms, and why self-publishing is becoming plan A instead of plan B for a new generation of authors.
Melissa Addey is the Campaigns and Bookstore Lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors. She writes historical fiction and has her own website at melissaaddey.com but right now she’s very excited about the ALLi Indie Author Bookstore and bringing it into the world! And she also has an update for us on the 2025 Indie Author Income Survey.
Episode Links
https://bookstore.allianceindependentauthors.org
https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org
Melissa’s previous appearances:
Episode 238 - The Big Indie Author Data Drop 2024 with Melissa Addey
Episode 150 - Hands-off Merchandising for Authors with Melissa Addey
Companion episode:
Episode 233 - Data-Driven Publishing with Pamela Fagan Hutchins
Summary & Transcript
Melissa Addey is the campaigns and bookstore lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) and a historical fiction writer. In this conversation, Melissa traced a line from three years of ALLi’s data collection—including the indie author income survey and industry-wide research—to the launch of the ALLi Indie Author Bookstore, a curated online showcase that gives indie-published books a browsable home of their own.
THE DATA THAT SET THE STAGE
Melissa opened by describing a gap she found startling when she moved from a business background into publishing: the near-total absence of reliable data about self-published authors. ALLi began filling that gap in 2023 with its indie author income survey, and the headline finding was significant—self-published authors were earning more than traditionally published authors. Authors Guild data released later that year confirmed the result to within a couple of hundred dollars. By 2025, the mean income for self-published authors had risen to $13,500, growing at six percent year over year, while traditionally published authors were earning nearly half that and declining.
Other data points reinforced the picture. Direct sales among indie authors had grown from twelve percent to thirty percent in three years, with another thirty percent planning to start. Data from Author Earnings showed that self-published authors made up over fifty percent of Kindle’s top 400 books, captured thirty-nine percent of Kindle royalties, and—crucially—were rated by readers as equal in quality to traditionally published work.
GENERATIONAL SHIFTS
Melissa highlighted two generational trends. Gen Z readers are reading more, particularly in paperback, and actively seeking diverse stories and storytellers. Meanwhile, younger authors—those under forty-five—are increasingly choosing self-publishing as their first option rather than treating it as a fallback after failing to land a traditional deal. Melissa attributed this in part to how younger creators view content production generally: they see indie bands, YouTube channels, and self-published books as equivalent to their traditionally produced counterparts, not as lesser alternatives.
AI AND DISCOVERABILITY
Melissa cited a talk by Ricardo Fayet at the Self Publishing Show about how AI is changing search. AI crawlers fan out across the internet looking for consistency—if they find the same book, title, cover, and metadata in multiple places, they rank it higher. That insight became one of the practical arguments for the bookstore: having books listed on an additional platform beyond Amazon, Kobo, and an author’s own website gives AI search engines more data points to work with, which improves discoverability.
THE BOOKSTORE AS SHOP WINDOW
The ALLi Indie Author Bookstore launched after two years of planning and currently lists around 5,500 books, with hundreds more added each week. Melissa described it not as a retailer but as a shop window: readers can browse by genre, format, and tags, and when they find a book they want, the purchase link takes them to whatever destination the author has chosen—Amazon, Kobo, their own direct sales page, or any other retailer. Authors load their metadata once and do not need to maintain pricing or inventory the way they would on a retail platform.
The homepage features new releases (showcased for six months), randomly generated books of the day, and three rotating monthly theme sections that highlight genres, formats, or categories where indie authors are particularly strong. Melissa singled out memoirs as an example: traditional publishers only acquire memoirs from celebrities, but indie publishing has opened the door to ordinary people with extraordinary stories—a NASA employee, a hospice worker, a spy.
The bookstore is available only to ALLi members, which Melissa framed as a feature rather than a limitation. It means every author on the platform is part of the ALLi community, making it easy to find collaborators for newsletter swaps, social media cross-promotion, and other partnership opportunities through ALLi’s SelfPubConnect forum. Authors can also browse award-winning books in their category to identify awards worth entering.
WHAT THE BOOKSTORE REVEALS ABOUT COVERS AND METADATA
Having reviewed the bookstore daily since its November launch, Melissa offered candid observations about what indie authors are getting right and wrong. On covers, she gave high marks to thriller, crime, sci-fi, and fantasy authors for tight genre signaling—their covers are instantly recognizable and consistently professional. Historical fiction, her own genre, was more uneven. Poetry covers, she felt, were missing an opportunity to lean into the beauty and aesthetics that poetry readers would expect.
On metadata, Melissa’s biggest frustration was authors cramming in every possible genre tag rather than choosing one or two that accurately describe their book. The result is that readers searching for a specific genre encounter books that do not belong, which produces an unpleasant reaction rather than a happy discovery. She singled out “literary fiction” as the most frequently misused tag—authors treat it as a marker of quality rather than recognizing it as its own genre with its own conventions. Her advice was blunt: one accurate genre tag is worth more than ten aspirational ones, and the cover needs to match.
A SHIFTING INDUSTRY
Melissa closed by noting that the data and the bookstore together reflect a broader shift in the publishing industry. Traditional publishers are beginning to approach successful indie authors directly, offering dashboards with real-time sales data—a transparency that would have been unthinkable a few years ago but is now necessary to attract authors who have been tracking their own daily sales for a decade. The indie author world, she suggested, is not just growing but reshaping the expectations of the entire industry.
This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Melissa Addey. Hey, Melissa, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Melissa: Hi. I’m good. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:07] Matty: It is lovely to have you back, and just to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Melissa Addey is the campaigns and bookstore lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors. She writes historical fiction and has her own website@MelissaAddey.com. But right now she’s very excited about the
And she also has an update for us on the 2025 Indie author. Income survey. And so we were chatting,a little bit about this before I hit record. And these things are like more intertwined than, I think I appreciated when we talked about the topic. So Melissa, I’m just going to kind of open the stage to you and let you tell us what is going on
[00:00:45] Melissa: Great.
[00:00:52] Melissa: So what I do is sort of set the context a little bit. So I’m very excited about the bookstore. We’ll get to that, but just a little bit of context of why that would be a good thing to have. So, the first thing is going, back through the last three years really, ALLi has been collecting a lot of data.
so either through their own, indie author income survey, which, was a huge. Gap of data prior to those, so that was back in 2023, they started, and there was this real gap in the industry. So I came from a business background and it was unthinkable that you didn’t have data at
You know, should the director meet you in their lift or something, you were expected to have everything right there. And I came into the industry and I was like, uh, where, where is all the data? Where, why do we not have. Stuff like this. And ALLi started, first of all doing its own indie author income survey, which is great.
But then on top of that, reaching out across the industry to anyone that could share data, share information, share insights, so, all kinds of organizations. Also people doing their PhDs on self-publishing, all kinds of things like that. And gathering it together in a report each year. So that’s been really interesting as well to look at.
[00:01:51] Melissa: So I just thought I’d go through a few of the, sort of the big highlights that have, come out over the past years. the biggest one was that self-published authors earn more than traditionally published authors. And that came out in 2023, was backed up by Authors Guild data, which also came out later that year.
And that was the first time they’d split their data. So you could see, that their data was proving exactly the same thing to within like a couple of hundred dollars. It was very neatly matched. and. On top of that. So they were, at the time, they were running at about \$12,000, I think, and growing.
and then in 2025, ALLi redid the data and it’s now \$13,500, and running at 6%. Increase, year on year, which is, sounds low-ish. that is a mean number. So it’s trying to get an average kind of picture of it. So not the crazy outliers that have, are, you know, like made their millions,
But you know that, that what is the sort of established area for the middle authors if you like. And that’s an interesting piece of data organizations, looking at traditionally published authors, they were
[00:03:06] Melissa: Other things that have come out in the last three years that are interesting. One is a lot more authors are selling direct. So the first time we looked at that data, it was about 12%. And you could say those were the real outliers. These were people who were really looking ahead and everybody else was kind of going, oh, not sure
And the last set of data we saw was that 30% were selling direct and another 30% were planning to in the next year. And that might be just. Just starting, just dipping their toe in the water. Or it might be just doing a lot of it, but that’s really grown in three years. It’s
there was a really interesting talk from, Ricardo Fayetet at last year’s, Self Publishing Show who talked about how AI is changing the way search engines are going to be working, and there was a really important thing that he said there, which I have been very mindful of myself personally, in
The AI fans out across the internet doing searches, and it looks for, am I finding the same data over and over again? So the more it finds your book in multiple places, the same book, the same title, the same cover, the same everything, the more, it kind of ranks it higher and more important. So it sees it as, oh, that is definitely a book that I should
And I thought that was a fascinating, piece of information.
[00:04:25] Melissa: we had some heartening news, which was that Gen Z are reading a lot, especially in paperback. They like the aesthetics of it. They like libraries to gather in and meet up and that kind of thing. That’s what was encouraging when you think the young people are going to be reading lots, so
[00:04:38] Matty: That was fun to see.
[00:04:39] Melissa: Yeah, definitely. But also that they really wanted to read more diverse stories, and by that they meant diversity of the characters, diversity of the situations. So they clearly were deliberately looking for a di, a wider. Range of stories and storytellers, so that’s interesting to know. And still sticking with
The younger authors are making self-publishing their first choice. It always used to be plan B. Self-publishing is plan B first. You try for trad, then you, oh, well all right then. And it’s really changing. And under 45, there were fewer than half the authors that would like to have
They were just going straight into the tradition, into the self-publishing arena. And I think that’s. Partly because of how I think younger creators view. Creating content. You know, they look at YouTube, which is to them is the same as tv. They don’t ra rank it higher than, you know, they don’t, they look at indie bands and they
and so then they look at books and they. They apply the same thinking. They go, I don’t see the difference. The book is the book. You know? so that’s an interesting thing. So it’s now kind of becoming plan A instead of plan B, which is good to know.
[00:05:55] Melissa: and then Data Guy / AuthorEarnings always fascinating their data.
they have shown that cell published authors. So this was in the, Kindle’s top 400 books, which shadow, we don’t have the date of all more recently, but in 2023, a self-published author has made up over 50% of that. So that was an interesting thing to see. and then, so that’s the kind of, the quantity if you like, but also Data Guy / AuthorEarnings looked at.
The quality. and they looked at 39% of Kindle royalties were going to indie authors, but also that their books were being rated by the readers. So looking at the reviews, they were being rated equally in quality. So the readers are not saying there’s a difference in quality
So that, that’s all interesting data I feel from the last three years, which has sort of sets a bit of a context, if you like.
[00:06:44] Melissa: And then the idea of a bookstore.
[00:06:47] Matty: Look at you. So excited.
[00:06:48] Melissa: I know it’s, well, it’s because, so it was about a couple of years ago now. but again, there isn’t somewhere, you know, if you go to Amazon or any of the big retailers and there is no button to press to say, can you just show me the indie authors only,
There isn’t that. So I would always, you know, get excited and enthused about self-publishing to people. And then they go, right and. Like, who, who should I read? And I would sort of start stumbling because I don’t have, for every genre that you might be interested in an instant, you know, list of self-published authors.
There’s a few for particular genres that I like and that I focus on. and so I, I’d always feel a bit of a loss at that point that I couldn’t, there wasn’t somewhere obvious for me to direct people to. and so then ALLi started thinking about wouldn’t it be cool if we had. a bookstore, essentially like a showcase online.
and it’s taken two years. That’s how long it takes. If you’re planning by the way, to set up stuff like that. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of tweaking, the little glitches and whatever along
[00:07:59] Melissa: However, we now have the indie author bookstore, which is very exciting. so there’s thousands of books on
At the moment, there’s 5,500 books, and it’s growing very quickly. So every week there’s hundreds more books coming on. And it’s great , because they’re all in one place. Lots of different genres and it allows you to direct people and go, well, if you want to go and have a look at thousands of indie authored books, which are going to be whatever genre you pick, there will be something that you like.
Go have a look through that and browse. So it’s a wonderful place for readers to have a look. it’s been very exciting, sort of bringing it into the world. so we started with a kind of soft launch where we were, and by the way, I always recommend soft launches to people for books and
You start with gentle and you work your way in and try and fix any little glitches along the way, but it’s looking really nice now. We’re very proud of it. so on there, what we have now is, so if you go into the homepage, there’s the new releases. So they get, a six month kind of opportunity to be showcased at the top because that’s always interesting to see what’s just new and what’s just coming out.
And then there’s kind of books of the day and they get randomly generated. Sadly, you can’t bribe me with chocolate. I was hoping that you could bribe me with chocolate, but you can’t.
[00:09:08] Matty: have to talk to the right techie people to make
[00:09:11] Melissa: that’s a point. I need to chat to them. So there’s, it’s a randomly generated, books of the day, so that changes
and then we have three sections that are,we sort of talk about our banners, but the like three sections where we showcase different themes each month. So, we do that by different things. So it might be genres, so like romance, or it could be a combination of genres. So we did a
Fiction and poetry and nonfiction, all just children’s things together, which was quite fun. formats. So we are doing an audiobook one. That was a nice one to be able to do, just to show if you wanted to look at audiobook, , because that’s rising a lot in the indie world as well.
[00:09:51] Melissa: and then also, it’s been interesting being
And it’s interesting to see what indies are really. Good at, if you like, that I don’t think get as much attention from traditional publishing. So right now on the indie page, one of the things we have is, memoirs. Now memoirs in traditional publishing, you only get chosen if you’re like a mega galactic celebrity, right?
That’s the only way you’re getting your memoir done. But these are stories about ordinary people who have led very interesting lives. I was looking through it today. You’ve got people who’ve worked for nasa, people who’ve been in hospices, people who’ve worked in the army,
There’s a woman there who’s a spy. I was like, whoa, this is fun. sorry. And so I think some of those, it’s really interesting to think, well, what’s been left outta traditional publishing? and I think some of these stories of. Ordinary people, they’re not very ordinary, but they would never get chosen because they’re not a big celeb.
And yet they have really interesting stories to tell. So I think that’s been a really interesting thing to come out of self-publishing. So that’s one. and then also looking at where have indie authors really just come in and. Done so well in particular genres. And of course we
They’ve done super well in, the thrillers and the crime kind of areas. So that’s been interesting as well to see, you know, how well they’ve
[00:11:18] Melissa: So with the bookstore now, that means that you’ve got all these in one place so that you can direct readers to it
So that’s something that, we’re doing now. ALLi is trying to. Bring it to the attention of not just the industry, but book influencers, readers, all of those kind of people, to bring them to that book site and start looking at it. And then we’ve sort of looked at what, how you can use it for marketing, how you can, how individual authors can use it
One is, at the end of the day, it’s a smaller platform. It is not Amazon. It is not. Kobo, you know, it is a smaller platform and that means you get a bit more visibility on there. Also, you’re not being swamped by, you know, millions and millions of AI titles, which are being dumped onto Amazon faster than you can, whatever.
so at the moment that means that you’ve got that slightly, you know, that smaller, group, but better visibility, I feel. So that’s a really nice thing to be able to have on there. That thing I talked about with Ricardo Fayet talking about AI discoverability, this is an additional platform. This is reinforcing when that AI search goes out and is looking, not just having your books in one place, but in multiple places means that it’s a, it is able to go out and pick up those books more
As higher ranked because they’re in multiple places. So that’s been a useful thing. it’s really nice for indie authors to be able to go on there and find collaborators because the indie author world has always been very collaborative. you know, things like where you do newsletter swaps, you know, mention people on your socials work together, those
It’s a really nice thing. , because there you can go on there and you know that everybody on there is an indie author and you could look within your own genre and go, well I want to reach out to so and so and say, you know, how about it? Should we do something together to promote?
Also, this is something I used to do on Amazon, but I mean, Amazon’s tricky because you don’t know which authors you’re looking at really. And this is a better match, is awards and opportunities. So We have award-winning books, that’s one of the tags that you can put on. so that means you can go in there and look, well, what have other people
And would it be suitable for me to enter? And you don’t have to worry. Do they take in these, do they not take in these, you know, they take in these , because that’s an indie author and they want it so. That’s been exciting to see and to think, oh, okay, so maybe that’s something you can use for your own development is to look at what awards have been won
Is that something that you could go for as well? So that’s been something that I’ve been, talking to people that they could consider
so it’s essentially a really big. Kind of visibility showcase of what indie authors are getting up to today, which is really exciting to have it all in one place, I feel.
[00:14:07] Matty: Well the, I think that the showcase aspect is important because, correct me if I’m wrong, but this is not a platform where you’re selling people, direct people to other. Platforms, which I think is great because, you know, I think that if people didn’t realize that, they might say, oh, like yet another platform where I have to
But actually once you load it, assuming your like book cover doesn’t change or your description doesn’t change, or that meta data doesn’t change, you’re not having to maintain it and pricing and things like that on an ongoing basis like you do if you have your book on Kobo or
[00:14:41] Melissa: yeah, exactly. So all the authors, essentially, it’s a, it’s like a, it’s a shop window, so you can look at it, you can browse through it, and at the moment where you go, you know, I really like the sound of that, I’m going to buy it. Every author provides their own purchase link to wherever they wish to purchase from.
Which can be the big retailers. It can also be the direct selling because we know that the direct selling is building up. So that can be something that they can work into. so yeah, it just means they just put the purchase link of their choice and that’s where the reader goes to make that actual, the actual buying point is dealt with by somebody
[00:15:17] Matty: And the other thing I believe, is that this is
[00:15:23] Melissa: members? Yes.
[00:15:25] Matty: And I like that idea of pairing activity in the, bookstore with, the ALLi Member Forum, self Pub Connect, because that’s where it’s very easy to go from looking at the bookstore and you see the person who has a book that you want to comment on, or you want to collaborate with them or something like that, then you just pop over to
[00:15:46] Melissa: Yeah. So you know that they’re in that community and that they’re around you and you know, that does mean you can go and find that person and say, who did you cover? Or, you know, loving the whatever it is you’ve done with it, and where did you get this person from, or where do you get that person from?
It’s a really nice way of collaborating more closely, I think, which is nice. and it is a, it is, you know, going back to that. Thing about the Gen Z, wanting more diverse stories. This is a place where they can go and poke around and find those diverse stories and storytellers, I think, which is really nice.
And are you using metadata that the authors provide in order to create those groupings? like you had, described the sort of the, features of the month or features of a particular period. Yes. So we picked, a set of genres which go across, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. And then we chose, some additional tags, if you like, for particular themes that we thought might be relevant. That we might be able to draw attention to. And also obviously the formats, that kind of thing as well, and the
So certain, there’s certain pieces of data that we ask for that we knew might make good showcases that might be relevant to, to highlight to people. So yeah, so that’s been a nice thing. We don’t go as granular as some of the bigger retailers, just because it’s a smaller group of titles. So we keep the genres a little wider so we don’t go all the way down to, you know, mafia, billionaire romance kind of thing.
It’s. A little wider than that. but yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a fun thing to, to work on.
[00:17:14] Melissa: and then the other thing that’s, a new piece of data that’s come out. So, we run the indie author income survey, that got run last year. So we had a whole bunch of data come out from
But then we sort of do a second pass of it where we ask for further data
[00:17:29] Melissa: and one of the data pieces that came out of that, that I found really interesting was about, selective rights licensing, otherwise known as using, like a traditional publisher but
Individual sections of it that you might, be interested in. So something has really changed over the past. So I’ve been in this since 2015 ish. So it’s really interesting to me because at that time when I spoke to people about self-publishing, I basically used to have to say it’s kind
If you pick to self-publish the traditional authors, you know, the traditional, publishers rather. Are going to see that as that’s it. You, we’re never going to take you again , because you’ve chosen and you’ve gone that way. and that has changed. And I could see it changing
I could hear stories that made me doubt that was really the case anymore. And then in the last. Two months, I’ve suddenly seen a whole set of stories that are all in, you know, trade publishing. So Publishers Weekly, the bookseller, publishing perspectives, whole bunch of stories and interviews where I go, oh, that’s interesting.
[00:18:42] Melissa: So in a way, self-publishing is now being used as a kind of proof of concept. It’s being used as a proving ground. So you self-publish. We’ll see if it works. We’ll see if you work creatively, if you work commercially, if you can build up the readers and then we come in and ask the traditional publishers, come knocking on your door and go, hang on.
[00:19:06] Melissa: And the data that came out on that was interesting for us was, I think I stuck it in one of my data books so that I could refer back to it. But the interesting thing there was how much you could see the link between how much an author was making and the percentage amount, therefore likelihood that they were going to have
For something we don’t have the sort of granular, what is it exactly you are doing, but generally selective rights. so that was a real kind of clear points of interest. So under \$50,000 bracket of, in terms of your revenue as a self-published author, there’s around about 20% of the authors. Had a self pub, had a traditional publishing deal as well
as soon as they went over that \$50,000, it jumped up to 30% of the authors. So now we’ve got quite a chunk of people who have got those licensing deals. As soon as you go over a hundred k, the jump went to over 46%. And then when you get over 500 K, essentially it was 90%. And by that point it was quite clear to us, if you don’t have a licensing deal and you’re making that kind of revenue, it’s you, it’s been your
it’s, you have said no thank you. It’s not , because someone hasn’t
[00:20:23] Melissa: , because that means, you know, for example, I was talking about the bookstore to people and saying, oh, and then we’re going to reach out and tell publishers as well in the industry, and
what do they want to know about that for? Well, , because it’s a shop window. This is a shop window. If they’re coming looking for, oh, what might be interesting licensing rights to try and secure this becomes a shop window essentially, where they can look and see. These are the
they’ve got really interesting things to look at. It becomes something that’s also a potential marketing place. For those authors to showcase themselves. So that was really interesting to consider how much that has changed. and then, you know, you can argue all day long the ethics of, oh, I see.
You just wait for somebody else to put all their time and money and effort behind something before you swoop in and pick it up. That’s, you know, but then it’s up to the authors to think about, okay, and how do I make the best of that opportunity? Rather than just wholesale handing over all the rights right at the beginning without knowing how you’re
All you build up and at the point where somebody approaches you, you can think about, right, and is that going to. Do better for me than I’m doing myself. Is it, which elements might I benefit from? So, for example, bookshops have always been a little harder for self-published authors because the logistics and the communications of those have
That’s just how it’s set up. So yes, you can go individually, bookstore by bookstore and try and get your way in there, but it’s difficult because it’s just not set up that way. It’s not set up for you. So. You know, that’s a moment where if somebody approached you, you could think about would it be useful to put out certain, you know, choose those rights to license out, that might take care of certain areas that I find more difficult while holding onto the areas that I’m
You know, eBooks always going to be one of those. so that’s just, it’s just interesting to see how the data. Keeps developing what the opportunities are and how it changes the narrative over time. that’s been quite, you know, surprising to go from, oh, we’re just hearing stories here and there to going, no, no.
This is now a clear, obvious thing to everybody in the industry. and
[00:22:46] Matty: Yeah, I do like that idea of working Across RAD and Indie as partnerships rather than, like, poaching, you know,
[00:22:54] Melissa: Yes.
[00:22:55] Matty: and I like the idea of, you know, on the surface having an indie author bookstore feels like. for good reasons you’re
But I love that idea that it’s also providing this path for, people. I’ve even gotten away from saying traditional publishers and saying third party publishers because ba you know, in many cases the difference is just, it’s somebody else making the decisions and giving them a place to go because they think one of the challenges and I, the more I sort of muck around in the publishing world, the more I appreciate the
Traditional platforms have legitimate concerns about vetting. Like I know when, I was working for ALLi, there was this conversation about how do we get awards to open up to indies? And on the one hand, it’s not a quality issue. You know, there are plenty of indies writing award-winning worthy works, but it’s a vetting issue.
And if I were running An award and I had relationships with the Big Five and I knew that each Big Five publisher, I’m making up how this works, but each Big five publisher was going to nominate five of their books or something like that. That’s much more manageable than 10,000 indie publishers are going to, you know, nominate
[00:24:07] Melissa: because someone’s done the work for you.
[00:24:08] Matty: Yes, yes, exactly.
[00:24:10] Melissa: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. and I think that, like you say that concept of third party publishers almost becoming a publishing service. In the same way that you would reach out and find yourself a good editor and a good cover designer and a good marketing person, you might reach out and find yourself a publishing person that
And I think that’s, that becomes a sort of new aspect of it.
[00:24:45] Melissa: And certainly in the articles that I’m seeing, there’s also mention of two things. One is the contracts needing to change. , because contracts used to be very boilerplate. they were. Cookie cuts are just identical things. And now they’re having to
Because if you are going to work with someone who’s already got a thriving business, they’re not going to just accept your cookie cutter template. They’re going to go, nope. yes and nope, and change that. And, you know, and they’re not going to accept the first thing that they see. So that
And the other one was, looking at, there’s a. A new publisher was launching who were deliberately focused on what they called established authors, and they mentioned both traditionally and self-published. So they’re wanting people who are already up and running and know what they’re doing, and they were providing them with what they called their
Now, that’s not something that any traditional publisher has ever shown their authors. That’s been a lack of transparency in their industry, and it’s having to change because if you’re talking to someone who’s looked at their daily sales every day for the past 10 years, they’re not going to accept you just drawing a veil over it and going, I’m sorry,
That’s. That’s not going to work. And so it really interesting to see the traditional publishing world having to alter how it works as well to be able to work with self-published author and being willing to do so. So that’s been, you know, a real change, I think is shifting there, real
[00:26:13] Matty: So because you have been working with, you now have this pool of thousands of, indie published books that are coming in and being put on the showcase. are there any lessons you’re learning, like messages you would like to send to people who are now enthusiastic about joining ALLi and putting their books up about things that the indie authors can be working on in order to make their books more compelling to the people who are, browsing the window?
[00:26:36] Melissa: Yeah, so one is get yourself up there and I think, you know, that goes for all, you know, obviously would love it on the bookstore, but equally it’s with all those opportunities. Set aside that little bit of time and get them up there. So I get people who are sort of, oh yeah, yeah, I’ll do it in a bit.
I’ll, yeah, something, you know, I’ve got other things to do, whatever. But you know, the days go by and you don’t know which people are coming onto the platform, and that might have found you interesting. And this goes for all such opportunities. And equally, a friend of mine recently, she texted me and she went, oh cool, the bookstore great.
And she’s an ALLi member. So she was like, how do I get the books up there? And I was like, oh, I’ll send you the, I’ll send you the information tomorrow. But it did come out in an email. She was like, okay, great. And then like 20 minutes later, she goes, yeah, all done. And I was like, oh, that was fast. but the thing is.
She sat down and gave it that time. So that’s, you know, that’s something when you see those opportunities crack on with them is one thing. They’re usually less fiercesome than they seem, you know, just
[00:27:43] Melissa: So that’s one thing really interesting for me because I have basically opened up that bookstore and looked at it every single day since November now, and, you know, check people’s covers,
Had a look at what happens when you know, what happens if you do this search or that search or the other search. Really interesting. Who has different kinds of covers? I will give tip of the hat to thrillers, crime, sci-fi and fantasy, who really have their act together as a group. You know, when I’m looking at them as a whole, really, genre is
you can spot their stuff a mile away and you go, oh, that is absolutely a thriller or crime or sci-fi fantasy. Very sharp, very Of a group, you know, which is kind of important. so they’re very on their genre, nice work too. Nice covers quality looking stuff. the sci-fi and fantasy people, partly because of their, of what they’re writing about, have some really quirky, interesting stuff going on with, you know, the dragons and the, you know, all the crazy things that might be going on in their
But they really lean into that. They really go for some nice, interesting artwork. So. I am liking those. sadly for my own historical fiction category, we, you’re not fairing as well. it’s a little bit up and down. There’s some that are really, really beautiful covers, you know, really, on genre.
Holding it, you know, getting a consistent look and then somewhere it kind of dips in and out a bit. And you feel like this as a whole genre are not as tightly woven as those other ones I’ve just mentioned. So they’re interesting poetry I really feel are missing a trick a little bit. I feel that people who enjoy poetry and the beauty of words and really thinking about things would really appreciate covers.
That are beautiful. You know that, that real sense of beauty going for, and they’re a little bit mixed as well. There is not that, that, leaning into that. It’s a bit, some people have gone for this style and some people have gone for that style. And as a whole, you kind of lack coherency because when I run a search for poetry, I’m expecting to see.
Possibly very different images, but a consistency of we’re trying to put something really beautiful in front of you. That’s what I would be expecting to see, and that’s lacking a little bit. So I’d talk to those two genres I think need a little bit to, to really focus.
[00:30:00] Melissa: And then in terms of your metadata, this has been fascinating, but in terms of your metadata, people’s desire to
Every possible tag genre genres they don’t really belong to, but they’re sort of teetering on the edge of, and I just, I have to keep repeating to people, it is better to have one genre, you know, we allow three on ours, but it is better to have one that is absolutely 100% your correct genre than to cram in, you know, five, six.
I’ve made nine 10 of them that have nothing to do with you because. When I, the reader, then run a search and I’m looking for this particular thing. When your book pops up, I don’t go, oh, well look at that, something completely different. I’ll go and look at that. I just go. Well, I don’t know what that’s doing there.
it’s almost, an unpleasant reaction it provokes because that’s not what you are looking for. And equally that means you might then have missed a genre that is truly yours and that you truly belong to and that you should be part of. and that’s where you should make sure that your
This, I belong here, I belong to this group. So that’s, and of course your cover then looks completely wrong as well. It’s not just the search was wrong. Your cover doesn’t match at all if you’ve put it
[00:31:25] Matty: the even worse scenario than someone scanning the list and says, oh, that’s not for me, is they think it is for them because it’s in this genre. So it must be for them. They buy it, they read it, and they live you a one star review because
[00:31:37] Melissa: No.
[00:31:38] Matty: like, I found this in cozy mystery, but like somebody got, you know, killed with baseball bats in the first page.
[00:31:45] Melissa: Exactly. So it’s a real mistake. And I keep, you know, because people, because I’m on the admin side, people will, if they get stuck or they’re not quite sure, they’ll send me an email, which I is great , because that’s what I’m there for. They’ll send me something and they’ll go, well, I can’t find one in this bit that
So, so what do I do about that? And you know, a few of them, I’m like, well, that is a fair point. Perhaps, you know, we should adjust something. But most of them I go, but you don’t need to have all of those. It’s fine. You don’t have to find something here so long as you
You know, it’s fine. And so it’s a good thing that I have my own books , because I’m able to go back to ’em and go, well, you know, some of my books have extra tags on and some of them don’t. They just, they don’t
[00:32:29] Melissa: but my favorite is,and I’m really going to tell
So everybody has taken to using literary fiction. I think that in their minds equals. Good quality, or I did a lot of research, or, you know, I put a lot of time and effort into it or something that’s what they think it means. I’m like, no, it’s its own genre. It has its own style and rules and whatever, and you just ticking that because you think
That’s not what it means at all. so you have to be a little bit careful with that. And equally, you know, I mean, that’s my favorite one because everybody tries to do it, but things like romance. You know, I try to point this out to people. Lots of my books have a bit of a romantic streaking , because I’m a romantic at heart that does not make
You know, romance people, they have particular rules they’re expecting you to follow. And if you know, end up with a tragic loft story that goes horribly wrong at the end, the fact that there was romance in there, they’re going to be horrified by that. So, again, you know, be,
And your cover on point then to, to try and cram yourself into whoever it doesn’t, doesn’t really work for you, works against you, if
it’s no good labeling your stuff as that if it isn’t. It just, it’s not going to work at all. and it’s just confusing. It makes it confusing for people if you are going to go down that route. It’s better to talk about what themes it has, because people who are attracted to literary fiction often want to know the theme something has rather than the plot
You know, they’re more focused on that aspect of it, perhaps. but yeah, it’s been fascinating to be. Both a reader and an author, but you know, normally I’m reader and author. And then to look behind what happens on what is essentially a bookstore, you know, is really interesting to see, oh, what goes into that?
What goes into trying to list it correctly, trying to showcase it correctly, how, you know, which bits could go well together. You know,
[00:34:34] Matty: Yeah, that is a great perspective to, uh, to be
[00:34:39] Matty: So, Melissa, thank you so much for coming on to talk about both the Author Income Survey and the new bookstore. so please let everyone know where they can go to find out about all those
[00:34:50] Melissa: Absolutely. So it’s bookstore dot AllianceIndependentAuthors.org. So fairly straightforward and, AllianceIndependentAuthors.org if you wish to join as a member. But there’s information about that on the bookstore itself, so you can pick that up easily There. I. My own website is MelissaAddey.com.
but yeah, go and have a look at the bookstore. Go and have a little browse whether you are a reader or an author. I’m getting into it more as a reader now , because I was very kind of admin on it at the beginning. I was very kinda, what is it doing? What is the thing? What is the something? And now that it’s, you know, working well, I can look at it and go, Ooh, ooh, I fancy that.
[00:35:24] Matty: Yes. I remember many, many years ago working in a bookstore and, one of the perks was, I can’t believe this was a perk, but you could borrow hardcover books as long as you returned them, like
[00:35:35] Melissa: condition.
[00:35:36] Matty: I did more reading in those that like half a year, however long I was working in the bookstore.
[00:35:41] Melissa: You couldn’t break the spine there. You couldn’t get a good crack open,
[00:35:44] Matty: No, no. You had to be very, very careful with
[00:35:47] Melissa: old plum. It’s a pleasure. Thank you very
[00:35:51] Matty: Oh, my pleasure.