SHORTLISTS AND PRIZES - AND A PRIZE FOR YOU...

Really, I do talk utter shite sometimes.

As you know, I have just moved house. (Have I said this?) And I do not, as yet, have broadband - until AOL get off their posteriors and activate the request I put in a long time ago. So, what with that and being up to my ears (almost literally literally) in paint, and having a blocked sink, failed heating system and a number of other tribulations, I do

Publishers + Ebooks = Epic Fail

The ebook world is changing fast.

A year ago, we had the Kindle and the Sony Reader as the two main platforms for ebooks. Now we've got Kindle, Sony, Nook, and iPad. Apple sold 300k iPads on its launch day. And this technology hasn't come close to reaching a saturation point with the general population.

New ereaders are going to continue to come out. They'll be better, less expensive, and more widely available. And people will adopt them.

Our society is moving toward a digital future, and the concept of ownership in regard to media is changing rapidly. We don't need to own a tangible object, because we recognize that the content, not the object, is all we care about.

We've actually known this for hundreds of years. The endurance of libraries proves a lot of people are happy to experience media without owning it.

Now we have Netflix and On Demand, and we can watch movies with the press of a button. We have iTunes, and can access the store directly using our mp3 players. We're no longer slaves to the television schedule. Indeed, TV schedules, and TV seasons for that matter, are things of the past. We Tivo, we Hula, we YouTube, we Roku.

And if we don't want to pay, we pirate. Millions of people share billions of files.

If we want it, we can get it instantly, without leaving the comfort of home.

Of course ebooks are going to continue to gobble up greater and greater shares of the publishing market. It's inevitable. Media has become fast food.

So why don't publishers act accordingly?

From July through December 2009, I sold 4840 Kindle ebooks of my Jack Daniels series, earning me $9130.

If I had the rights back from my publisher and priced them at $2.99 each, and they sold an average of 800 copies per month (which is what the average of my five top self-pubbed Kindle titles sell), then I would make $58,752 in a six month period.

By my count, I'm going to lose almost $100,000 per year. Probably more.

You may have noticed that ebook prices are going up. That's because publishers have switched to the agency model, allowing them to control the price. Though no publisher has come out and said it, the reason they're raising the prices of ebooks is twofold.

First, they want to stave off the inevitable dominance of ebooks, and make as much money as they can on print while print is still around.

Second, they believe they need high-priced ebooks to cover the cost of doing business, and that customers will adapt to higher prices.

They're wrong, on all counts.

I sold about 8000 paperbacks that same period. Which is not a lot. Keeping my ebook prices high didn't result in people buying more print books. And as bookstores stock fewer of my titles, those print numbers will go down.

Compare that to roughly 20,000 ebooks I sold by self-pubbing on Kindle during the same period.

On one end, we have a large NY publisher, with distribution muscle to get books into thousands of stores. They're a giant machine that employs a lot of professionals to acquire, edit, print, and sell books.

On the other end, we have a single guy uploading his self-pubbed ebooks to Amazon.

You'd think the NY publisher would cream the single guy in terms of sales. But they didn't. Not only did I double the sales of my publisher, but I made more money per book. Hell, I sold more ebooks than they sold print books and ebooks combined.

Don't you think there's something amiss in the universe when a midlist author can make more money on his own than he can with a big publisher?

Publishers talk about devaluing an ebook by pricing it low. I've said before that the value of a book is what it earns, not what the cover price is. Low-priced ebooks--which are what customers want--earn more than high priced ebooks. My own sales hammer this very simple point home.

People don't care about ownership. They care about price.

People want their media instantly. They don't want to go out and physically shop for it (or order it and wait for the mail to come.)

People want their media without restrictions.

In simpler terms, people want ebooks fast, easy, and cheap, and I can fulfill their needs better than a large company can.

I don't have overhead. I don't have meetings. I can make a decision without answering to my boss. I can turn on a dime. I can publish a book a few days after I write it.

In short, this market is perfect for a one-person operation.

I'd certainly entertain an offer from a large publisher, if they wanted to buy rights for one of my books. But I'm not going to go out looking for the opportunity. Especially since I'll make more money in the long run if I keep my rights.

I could even make more money in the short run.

According to my recent royalty statement, my horror novel AFRAID sold about 54,000 copies in all formats, earning me around $27k.

If I released a Jack Kilborn ebook on my own, and it sold like my current ebooks are selling, I'd make $20k in a year.

It's doubtful I'll make $17K next year on AFRAID, since it's no longer getting coop on bookstore shelves. But I'm sure I'd make $20k, or more, on a self-pubbed ebook.

So in two years I can make more money on my own on a self-pubbed ebook than a book released by a major publisher in hardcover, trade paper, paperback, and ebook formats, supported by a tour and advertising.

Unless it's a big offer, I can't imagine selling rights to my work ever again...

RESOURCES FOR WRITERS

Since I'm not really here - in new flat and probably without internet connection and up to my ears in paint pots - I thought I'd bring you a fabulous website of resources for writers. (By the way, I wish that was me on the left. In my dreams. Not that blonde women appear regularly in my dreams but you know what I mean.)

Iain Broome, the ever helpful man at Write for Your Life, set up this

LIFE, KITCHEN SINKS AND NEW BOOKS

Life is not easy right now. I am in my new flat, but "new" is relative. It's old, and it shows. The heating doesn't work, the sink is blocked and there's no sodding broadband. I am covered in paint and I will never ever install a roller blind on a wonky wall ever again. Ever. Even for chocolate.

However, I mustn't moan. I will, but I mustn't.

Nevertheless, I am unerring in my generosity because

Guest Post by Mark Terry

I've known Mark for years, and he frequently stops by this blog and offers his insights.

His new thriller, THE FALLEN, just came out. I encourage you all to buy it. His Derek Stillwater novels remind me a lot of Lee Child crossed with Tom Clancy.

If you have a Kindle, I also encourage you to buy DANCING IN THE DARK. Hopefully someone will after reading this blog post...


E-BOOKS AND ME by Mark Terry

Everyone here pretty much reads Joe’s successes with e-books with their mouths dropped open in astonishment. I mean that. He’s so far ahead of the curve on this that he’s out of sight.

Which also means he’s not typical.

Last summer, inspired by Joe’s adventures, I looked through my various projects, found one that I thought was good enough to be published, wasn’t being marketed by my agent, or wasn’t tied up contractually, and published DANCING IN THE DARK as an e-book. To say my sales are different than Joe’s is to compare a AAA battery to a lightning bolt. Here’s my sales to-date:

Invoice Date Amount Paid:

30-SEP-2009 3.12
16-OCT-2009 1.56
11-NOV-2009 1.56
21-DEC-2009 2.08
19-JAN-2010 1.56
23-FEB-2010 1.04

Yeah, man, I’m rocking. Let’s not spend that $10.92 all in one place.

But first, let’s discuss the possible reasons why my sales here are a bit sluggish (to say the least), particularly in comparison to Joe’s.

1. Joe’s better known than I am. Although my novels have been well-received critically, I’m typically published by independent presses with limited distribution. Sales have been modest. And in fact, although THE FALLEN, the third in the Derek Stillwater series, is officially released this week in hardcover, the two previous Derek Stillwater novels, THE DEVIL’S PITCHFORK and THE SERPENT’S KISS, are essentially out of print (except they will soon be available on Kindle, more about that later).

2. Although I think the cover of DANCING IN THE DARK is pretty good, my cover person laid it out in a 3-D fashion that I initially liked, but am now not so wild about, primarily because it’s different from everything else you see on Amazon. Needs to be changed.

3. I was in between books. As mentioned before, my first two Derek Stillwater novels are out of print. There was a lag of several years before I found another publisher and in that period, although I was very busy making a good living as a freelance writer, I wasn’t spending much time promoting books that were out of print. Now that I’m promoting THE FALLEN, I’m hearing an overall interest in my e-books, simply because readers are once again being made aware of me.

4. Someone recently pointed out to me that my Amazon page was a mess and not all my books were linked. I took care of that, but the fact is, there’s a lot of housekeeping involved in making sure that if someone hears your name, it’s then very easy for them to find your books—all of them (and publishers do not always make this easy, being far more interested in selling their books, rather than the author’s backlist from other publishers).

So what’s going on? Well, a couple things. As anyone who’s following the e-books and publishing, e-rights have becoming a big bouncing ball. Publishers want to hold onto all e-rights and give the author a very small percentage, anywhere from 10% to 25% for those rights. Authors, naturally, want to hold on to them or get significantly better percentages of e-rights. Publishers are dragging their heels, pushing for 25% or less, but agents are pushing for 50% to be standard. Meanwhile, Amazon, currently the biggest purveyor of e-books via the Kindle, is offering a 70% royalty if you publish them yourself. A “standard” agreement on this hasn’t really been worked out yet in the way that a “standard” agreement has been more or less worked out for mass market paperback, trade paperback, and hardcover royalty rates.

Here’s where my own experiences start getting rather across-the-board. First, in addition to the novels, I’m a freelance writer. I’m collaborating on a nonfiction book with a pair of doctors and due to a weird set of circumstances, I ended up negotiating the contract rather than our agent (very long story). One of the sticking points, for me anyway, was e-rights. I really felt that either the publisher needed to tell me what their plan was for an e-book version of the book and then negotiate a decent royalty (50%), or let us keep the e-rights. After much haggling we got a 25% royalty, but the rights will revert to us within 18 months of paper publication if the publisher doesn’t actually get around to doing an e-book version. (Book contracts are all about compromise. Was I happy about this? Well, it was a compromise. I could live with it).

When my former publisher and I parted ways, they returned all print rights to us for THE DEVIL’S PITCHFORK and THE SERPENT’S KISS, as well as ALL rights to THE FALLEN and the 4th Derek Stillwater novel, THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS (scheduled for September 2011 now). However, for Pitchfork and Serpent, the publisher hung on to all the foreign rights because they were still marketing them, AND, digital rights. Recently we got most of the foreign rights back and went after the e-rights. But the publisher wouldn’t release them because they have plans to publish an e-book version and had, in fact, already submitted the manuscripts to Amazon and B&N and others (without telling us). They aren’t, as far as I can tell, available yet, but should be soon.

My publisher for THE FALLEN did not have a negotiated right to the e-books … but apparently planned on publishing a Kindle version simultaneously with the hardcover version. Something I found out only recently. Again, you can hear the ball bouncing, so my agent and I are in discussions about exactly what our royalty rate is going to be for this.

And so it goes.

Will I be self-publishing more books? Oh, most definitely. The more I have around, the more synergy I’ll create, the more sales I’ll get. Besides, more and more people are buying e-readers—my iPad arrived Saturday!—so the market’s only going to grow. I plan to put forth a Kindle version of DIRTY DEEDS just as soon as I figure out where the original files are, see if I can find a floppy disk drive to attach to my computer, get cover art … oh, and find the original contract and see who actually has the e-rights. And I wrote a follow-up that never got picked up, and there are some other projects that I still like that won’t embarrass me to see them in print and available to readers.

The entire e-book world is exploding (while traditional publishing seems to be slowly imploding). No one really knows where it’s going to land in five or ten years, and so far most prognosticators have been totally full of crap. If everything goes to e-books and paper books become dinosaurs, I’m concerned about the millions of books currently sold at non-bookstore venues that are bought by millions of people who buy a book or two a year to take on vacation or for their business plane trip. Are they going to buy an e-reader when they don’t regularly read? Will they buy multi-media devices like the iPad, and if they do, will they buy books or just surf the web or watch a movie instead? Will they start selling e-reader individual books, a cheap, almost disposable one-shot, like you occasionally see (or saw, I haven’t seen one lately) for audiobooks? I don’t know. But writers should probably pay attention and get involved in it.

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Joe's response.

Here's a case of a professional writer with a good book, good cover, good product description, and terrible sales. He's got a good website, www.markterrybooks.com, and has several previous books in print. He's selling DANCING IN THE DARK for a very reasonable $1.49.

So what do I think is going on? I have a few theories.

1. Mark hasn't mentioned that he's done any sort of marketing for this book. At the very least, he should visit www.kindleboards.com and post about his book, join the community, and maybe politely ask Red Adept to read a copy to review. There are other Kindle forums, including on on Yahoo, that could also use an announcement.

2. Mark's been out of commission for a while, so who is going to go looking for this ebook? He didn't mention sending a newsletter to fans, though he has a mailing list. He has blogged about ebooks, but I'm not sure what kind of blog traffic he gets. One thing I'd do if I were Mark is trade links with more blogs, and offer to guest post on blogs (which he's doing here.)

3. Mark could consider cross-promoting with some of his author friends who have Kindle titles, trading chapter excerpts for inclusion in the back matter.

4. DANCING is buried on his website, and isn't listed in the sidebar on his blog. Compare that to my website and blog.

5. Does Mark have an Amazon plog? Is he using his social networks to the fullest (Twitter, Facebook, Crimespace, Goodreads, etc.)?

6. Weird as it sounds, $1.49 seems to be an awkward price. I don't see any other books priced like that. I'd either raise it to $1.99 or drop it to 99 cents.

7. The problem with the 3D book cover is its size. When it is viewed as a thumbnail, its too small to make out any real details.

8. I hope he went the Smashwords route and got this up on the iBooks for the iPad launch, and that it's also available on the Nook and Sony Reader.

Mark also seems to know that this is the very beginning of the ebook revolution, and there's a very long tail here. Okay, so the first six months were terrible. But the more he gets his name out there, the more he and others link to his books, the more Kindle books he posts, the easier he'll be to find.

With a little work, his sales will go up. Hell, they can't go down... :)

HOPE AGAINST HOPE IS PUBLISHED

I bring you happy news, though it won't be news to some of you. Tomorrow is the long-awaited first publication day of Hope Against Hope, the debut novel of one of my most lovely and intelligent blog-readers, Sally Zigmond. I wanted to interview Sally because she has so much to teach us about perseverance, focus on craft, and the roller-coaster ride from idea to publication. This is a story of

CRIMINAL INTENT

(NB: this is an April Fool-Free zone, I promise. I'm not in the mood today, and you may guess why later on in the post, if you don't already know. And crikey, I've talked about it enough...)

So, crime fiction post, here we go.

Crime fiction is a hugely popular genre and includes many different sub-genres. It's changed a lot over the years, too, so what used to work and what you remember working