Dean Wesley Smith has been writing a series of articles on the sacred cows of indie publishing – his latest is #7 – the idea that one has to sell a lot of books quickly to be considered a successful author. Smith argues that this way of thinking belongs to traditional publishers, and that modern [...]
Writing, Publishing, Promotion
Beth Davis had just published her book, A Glimmer of Hope, and thought about creative ways to market it. She drove to work about 30-miles in each direction along streets and freeways filled with cars, so Beth bought some magnetic signs to attach to her car. They can be purchased at office supply stores in [...]
James Patters recently commented on the Amazon – Hatchette battle over ebook prices. Now, Nick Gillespie comments on the whole mess: Can you believe those…those…those…sons of bitches at Amazon? After launching almost 20 years ago and making virtually every book—new, used, dead-tree, electronic, audio, and I’m guessing any day now, olfactory—available to everyone in America [...]
We hear stories about Hollywood studios stealing the stories of authors and not paying. Could it really happen? Best-selling author Tess Gerritsen thinks it happened to her, and has filed suit. Gerritsen is the author of the very popular Rizzoli and Iles books about a Boston police detective and the medical examiner. The books have [...]
Two traditional publishers, HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster have struck deals with eBook distributors Oyster and Scribd. These distributors charge customers a monthly fee and allow them to download books. It’s a business model very similar to Netflix, which charges a monthly fee for watching movies. The two publishers have licensed about 10,000 older titles [...]
One thing that seems to sell books is reviews. One way to get them is from book bloggers. Yes, there are bloggers who only review books. You can simply Google “book blogger” plus your genre and find some. Look over some of their previous posts – you want someone who lists positive attributes of books [...]
Mistakes that kill a book LinkedIn has a section on publishing, and recently members discussed what mistakes kill book sales. We’re going to assume that the book is good, typos eliminated, formatted correctly, etc. Here are some of the mentioned mistakes: 1. Failure to get a content editor who helps deliver the payload. 2. Putting [...]
As 2014 dawns, stories are circulating that the major publishers are reducing the prices on their ebooks. As you know, they previously had sold ebooks for almost as much as print books. That gave indies an advantage because we could profitably price our books lower. We had the below $5.99 market to ourselves. The Smashwords [...]
