Why Giving Away Thousands Of Free Books Is A Good Thing

While on the surface the following may seem to be a KDP Select success story, it’s actually something a little more important than that: a testament to the power of determination, and proof that even the most niche of books can be a self-publishing success story, a book that every agent in the UK said there was no market for.

I first met Tony James Slater at a conference almost exactly two years ago. Given that it was quite a, cough, liquid affair, neither of us remember much about the encounter, other than we were both in a similar position: we had a finished book with which were desperately trying (and failing) to elicit interest.

And we were both getting knocked back for the same reason: the “experts” said there was no market for it. I was told that nobody wanted to read a historical novel set in South America, and Tony was universally informed that his foul-mouthed memoir of a time spent working in an Ecuadorean animal refuge could only have very limited appeal, especially considering he was an unknown quantity.

Okay, so Tony definitely wins the “niche” game. But Tony’s (eventual) success proves that even  the most narrowly defined niche is going to be well populated in a world with millions and millions of e-reader owners, most of whom can be reached through one retailer.

Print Editions, Mailing Lists, Special Offers, Donations & Ad Spots

A number of questions have been popping up by email and in the comments – topics I’ve alluded to here but haven’t gone into much detail. I’m going to run through them quickly today: print editions, mailing lists/newsletters, running a sale, PayPal donations, and ad spots on reader sites and book blogs.

Let’s Get Physical

As you might have guessed by the above pic, my first print edition has been foisted onto the world. If any of you are interested in purchasing A Storm Hits Valparaiso in paperback, North American readers can get it from Amazon (those in the US can also purchase from Barnes & Noble), and international readers are advised to buy from The Book Depository (who are excellent), where they can avail of free worldwide shipping.

Should you do print editions of your books? Dean Wesley Smith has a great post, explaining in some detail why you must. For the click-lazy, I’ll break it down. Eighty percent of readers haven’t switch to e-books yet, and it’s foolish to ignore that market when you can produce print editions very, very cheaply.

Amazon Is Creating Competition, Not Killing It

The big topic (again) seems to be whether Amazon is a monopoly, or is heading in that direction, and whether they should be “stopped” (although, I’m never quite sure what that entails exactly).

Barry Eisler dealt with this fear, rather conclusively, back in October in a guest post on Joe Konrath’s blog.

But lately, the hysteria has been ratcheted up a notch by Mike Shatzkin’s sensible prediction that Amazon will soon be responsible for 50% of most publisher’s sales (I can’t link to Mike’s original piece at the moment, there seems to be a problem with his site, but Passive Guy quotes the main points).

The Author’s Guild now has Amazon firmly in their sights. An article at the end of January entitled Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory was followed by another yesterday: Amazon, Innovation, and the Rewards of the Free Market. The anti-Amazon views contained therein are hardly surprising, given that the President of the Author’s Guild, Scott Turow, considers Amazon the “Darth Vader” of the publishing industry.

It appears that those labeling Amazon a monopoly (or on the road to becoming one) have failed to take account of the following:

Comprehensive Self-Publishing Survey – Please Participate!

The average self-publisher sells 100 books. Or is it 200? And is that in a year? Or is it over the lifetime of the book? The problem is, we have no idea at all, no way of measuring how we are doing.

Any “hard” numbers we have about self-publishing are either hopelessly out of date, or use (very) imperfect measures, such as the number of ISBNs registered in a given year, and then number of print editions bearing those ISBNs sold in outlets captured by Neilsen Bookscan.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. The most glaring is that a self-publisher could sell thousands and thousands of books without every getting an ISBN or creating a print edition (and many do just that).

Traditional publishers have all sorts of metrics. One that I like quoting here are the monthly AAP figures, which give us a rough idea of what percentage of the market that e-books have captured – an important number for all sorts of reasons.

A Straight Writer of Gay Romance? Interview With Swedish Author Niklas Leavy

I first met Niklas Leavy just over a year ago. At the time, I was still querying, and he was working on a book – hitting me for information on US agents and how to approach them.

Niklas had some success on the traditional path, but that was in Sweden (and writing in Swedish). This time he was writing in English, and that publication credit wasn’t going to open too many doors in Manhattan.

Fast forward one year, and Niklas has self-published his first book in English. As you will see from the interview below, his situation is quite unique.

I spoke with Niklas over a few days in Google Docs, and I think you will find this very interesting.

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Hi Niklas. I know you quite well, but why don’t you introduce yourself to the readers and tell them a little about yourself.

Writing At The Speed Of Light

I’m a slow writer. One of my primary goals this year is to increase my writing speed. Last year I released four titles – three shorts and two full-length books. About 170,000 words total.

That sounds pretty impressive until you factor in that two of those shorts were written in 2010, and I had been writing the historical novel over a period of many years – it only had to be rewritten last year. Subtracting both of those, and adding in new text added to the novel, leaves me with maybe 90,000 new words written and published last year.

It could be worse, I suppose, but there is a huge amount of room for improvement – especially when I break it down.

The bulk of those new words written and published were for my short story Transfection and my how-to Let’s Get Digital. I wrote the short in a few days and it only needed a small amount of revision before it was published. Let’s Get Digital took around three weeks. With revising time, back-and-forth with my editor etc., you could probably add another couple of weeks.

I know I can write fast when I put my mind to it. I’ve done 4,000 word days (on very rare occasions). But I lack discipline and focus. I’m a poor planner. I work on whatever I feel like working on. That’s fine, but the obvious corollary is that I will cast something aside when I don’t feel like working on it (as attested by the innumerable half-written shorts, novel outlines, and story ideas on my hard-drive).

Self-Editing: Back to Basics, Part II – Guest post from Karin Cox, Editor

We wrap up our series on self-editing today with part two of Karin Cox’s guest post on self-editing basics and the common mistakes writers make.

On Monday, we kicked off the series with a post from UK author and editor Harry Bingham (The Writers’ Workshop), who underlined the importance of editing, and how developing your own self-editing skills can greatly reduce the amount you need to spend on professional help (and lead to a better book). If you missed it, that’s here.

On Wednesday, my editor, Karin Cox, gave some practical tips on how to avoid some of the more common errors she sees in writers’ manuscripts, such as unnecessarily florid verbiage, wandering commas, and modifiers gone mad. That post is here.

If you have digested all that, Karin is back with more to wrap things up:

Self-editing: back to basics, part II

Following on from my last post on Wednesday, I thought I would elaborate on two more issues I regularly see in manuscripts submitted by novice authors.

Of course, there is a lot more to successful self-editing than picking up these errors, but they are at least a good start for new writers looking to finetune their work before they send it out to beta readers or (hopefully) to a professional editor.