I didn’t get much work done today, because this morning my mind exploded with possibilities.

Tobias Buckell’s blog is in my morning RSS diet (even though I don’t like his books very much), so I read his latest entry, about an attack piece from Publisher’s Weekly on JA Konrath. Who’s that? Some writer. Never heard of him. But he’s the kind of guy you should know about, because he’s making almost $500 a day selling self-published e-books online.

I spent the morning reading through his supremely encouraging blog and got his story: he spent forever breaking into traditional publishing, amassing over 500 rejections, writing and rewriting many many novels before he finally got published. His initial sales were okay, and then worse than okay, until, as happens to too many writers, publishers started passing. Not wanting his books to go to waste, he stuck ‘em online, sold ‘em on Amazon for the Kindle at low, low prices. And now he’s rolling in dough.

He’s often described as an outlier by other novelists and publishers, something that not everyone can do, and, yeah, that’s true. Your book needs to  be good. It needs to have an eye-catching cover, and you need to work to promote it. He also prices his books incredibly cheaply. Many ebooks produced by major companies sell, incredibly, in the $6-12 range. JA Konrath prices his at $2-3 and makes up for it with volume - volume and the amazing 70% royalties Amazon pays.

Think about that. 70%. Most traditional publishers pay the author a criminal 15% - granted, 15% of $20 or so. But $2 is the “Well, why not?” range. More people are likely to try your stuff, and advertise through word of mouth. If it’s good, of course.

Another criticism against Konrath is that he already had a fanbase before he tried e-publishing, so he didn’t have to get noticed amongst the sea of dreck. Maybe. Certainly that wouldn’t hurt. But here on his blog he talks to Karen McQuestion (great name); she began with no prior publications, no website, nothing, and in nine months sold 30,000 ebooks. Damn.

It’s no secret to anyone who’s spent any time looking at the procedure of getting published traditionally that the traditional system is decrepit, obsolete, slow, and maddeningly unfair. My novel has been stuck in slush for sixteen months now. It passed the first round, quite quickly, and went on to round two, where it would take “quite a while” to make a decision. Sixteen months and counting. No one has this kind of time, but publishers think nothing of sticking someone’s work in a stack and ignoring it for a couple of years. Oh, and don’t you dare submit anywhere else at the same time - that wouldn’t be fair to the publisher. Jesus.

And then, if I were lucky enough to get accepted, I could wait another year or two for editing, layout, printing, and finally distribution, when it fits into their schedule. And then I’d be on my way to 15% royalties. Great. In my recent trip to Barnes & Noble, I noted how few of my favorite authors had books on the shelves - which are physically limited, after all - and how much dreck was on the shelves with them, and how was good stuff supposed to stand out?

Currently e-books only represent 6% of all book sales. But, as Konrath points out, the e-reader market is nowhere near saturation. Lots of people are buying ipads, iphones, etc. etc. Many markets, many illimitable electronic bookshelves to fill.

Konrath actually gives away his books for free on his webpage. He encourages piracy (good publicity). No DRM on his stuff. Spread the word, spread your books.

It’s powerful, it’s democratic, it’s good news for authors. It may be the actualization of POD. Print-on-demand, of course, is rarely ever profitable because you still have to put the books on paper. Yes, it’s democratic, anyone can do it, but the cost of physically printing the books put them into a prohibitive range for many people - who wants to pay $25 for a poorly printed paperback? $2 for a digital, though - well, why not?

Workers control the means of production!

More:

Some writers view this as a means to an end. Boyd Morrison’s books did so well on Kindle that Simon & Schuster offered him a deal, and now he’s a “real” author. John Scalzi gave away “Old Man’s War” for free on his website for years, until it got enough buzz for Tor to pick up; now all his books are published traditionally. He says he wouldn’t advise the giving-away-for-free method as a way to break in. He also came out against self-publishing in an amusing and long blog post that I can’t be bothered to look up right now - basically, you self-pub, you hire your own editor and artist, spend a lot of time on marketing and junk that your agent is supposed to do for you, so much time that you can’t write on your own. Nice. Great. Yes, that’s true, if you’re a freaking professional author already. For those of for whom writing, sadly, is a side gig, for those of us whom the agents reject (if they even bother to answer letters), we’ve already got stacks of books doing nothing, being read by no one at any price. Why not? Well, why not?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.