Chris is feeling under the weather today and asked that I put up an open thread for him. So, guys, the floor is yours. What do you want to discuss?
Amanda
Home / Meet the Mad Genius Club / Navigating from Writing to Publication
Home / Meet the Mad Genius Club / Navigating from Writing to Publication
Chris is feeling under the weather today and asked that I put up an open thread for him. So, guys, the floor is yours. What do you want to discuss?
Amanda
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “Open Thread”
On the ebusiness end of things, I rather tepidly googled around trying to find out how ebook sales are split between Kindle, Nook and Ipad and couldn’t find anything less than a year old. Anyone have any newer data?
I don’t think you’re going to find it, at least not anything that is really accurate, unless an author is willing to post their own figures. I can tell you that Amazon sales comprise at least 70% of NRP’s sales most months. Our webstore comes in second. If I clump all of the sales through smashwords together — ie, Diesel, iBooks, etc — smashwords would be in second place. BN comes in third.
Now, what trends I am seeing is that Amazon sales appear to be across the board, genre-wise. BN sales are more mystery, romance and name authors. I honestly don’t have enough data, even after a year, to call trends for the other outlets. This is because some of the reporting through smashwords can be as much as 2 quarters behind date of sale.
I guess what I’m saying is that Amazon is the gorilla in the market right now and is where authors have the most readers to connect with. If you take part in the kindle board discussions — remembering not to promote your stuff — as well as take part in the Meet Our Authors forum Amazon provides, that is a good start.
Now, the caveat to all of this is, as I’ve said before, the need to have a well-edited and well-formatted e-book. The participants in these fora can and do talk long and loudly about books that don’t meet their standards for professionalism, especially books that are considered “indie”. Conversely, they also talk up those that do. They are also adamant about hitting the “ignore” button if an author tics them off on the forum. So, it’s a minefield out there and authors have to be careful as they try to navigate it.
At this point, I suppose the balance between the outlets is shifting so rapidly it’s impossible to get up to date info analyzed and available before it’s no longer accurate. This Xmas, with the new Kindles out may be really interesting.
I’m running about, tearing my hair out and having fits of vapors, trying to get three books out before then, so as to hopefully benefit from the season.
Oh Pam, just wondering if the publisher for _Outcasts and Gods_ has a web-store. I haven’t purchased it yet but it looks interesting.
It’ll be live on Amazon within a couple of day, baring more “Oh %$#@! That used to work!” monents. Iron Ax Press, AKA me, isn’t selling, just advertizing, although I’ll probably try to figure out those Amazon links eventually.
Well, it looked like it was for sale when I first saw it. [Wink]
Now, it’s just up there. [Smile]
Oh well, it is now on my “to be purchased” list.
Pam, you really should consider the Kris and Dean workshop. Wish you were taking the one next weekend, as then we’d get to see you again!
Sarah, yeah, I wish I’d known about it earlier. Maybe next year.
Pam, it’s more that the data isn’t really being tracked yet like hard copy sales are.
Ping me off-list if you need help with the books.
Thanks Amanda. Part of my problem is that I’ve apparently got the wrong versions of Word and/or Windows for the emulators to work right, so I’m having to publicly flaunt my cluelessness to the world. Well, only once so far. But I haven’t a clue why the entire front matter went away. Cover, title page, copyright page, table of contents. Zip. Gone. You probably heard me scream, when I downloaded it . . .
And for anyone wondering, no, I’m not turning my back on Naked Reader. I’ve just got such a huge backlog of first drafts that no sensible publisher could devote that much time to, nor sensibly desire to put out so many books so fast by a new writer.
Pam, like I said, email me off-list and let me see if I can figure out what happened. Looking at the sample I downloaded, it looked like you didn’t embed your images. But I will be glad to talk to you about it.
I need to find ways to market my free ebook. Ways that obviously aren’t going to cost anything. I put the book up on http://www.getfreeebboks.com and the downloads went through the (admittedly low) roof. I had about 500 hits on my page from may to october. Then this month (when it went up) I have over 1000s hits already(and about 800 downloads). But once it gets pushed of the first couple of pages of getfreeebooks I imagine the numbers will drop significantly. They’ve been dropping daily as it is.
Reviews for self published books are hard to come by (I have two good ones so far) especially ones that will actually be read.
So I need something to keep the figures going…
Scott
http://www.scottjrobinson.com
Scott, actually there are a number of review sites that focus only on self-published e-books. I’m not on the computer right now where I have some of those sites bookmarked, but do a google search for them. I think you might be surprised.
Other than that, you have to look at where your book is available. If it isn’t on Smashwords, put it there. You can set the price at 0. If you meet the requirements for their expanded catalog, that will then get you into stores like Amazon, B&N, Diesel, etc. Some of those will then put the book up for free. Even if you don’t fo with the expanded bookstore, you might want to look at Smashwords, if you haven’t already.
Beyond that, you need to take part in different online communities and discussion boards where you can do at least limited promo of your book. Amazon’s “Meet Our Authors” board is a good place to be once you have something up there. There are others as well.
A word of caution now. There is a growing movement — or at least a movement that is growing more vocal — among e-book readers who are against indie books. They don’t care if they are free, 99 cents or what. These readers have been burned so many times by books that were poorly written, poorly edited, poorly formatted, etc., that they simply will not look at a book doesn’t come from a publisher or that isn’t valued enough by the author to price it at a minimum of $2.99. So, unless you have another title about to come out when you take your book free on the main e-book outlets (assuming you do), be ready for some negativity that has nothing to do with the book itself.