Ebooks

This post, by Alex Knapp, originally appeared on Forbes on 3/30/12.

We’re at the dawn of the tablet era now. Earlier this month, Apple sold 3 million of its new iPad during the opening weekend, with some analysts expecting over 60 million of the tablets to be sold worldwide. What’s more, e-book readers are selling even more briskly than tablets. People are using those e-readers, too. On Amazon.com, books for its Kindle outsell its paper books.

What’s more, the explosion of e-books is putting pressure on publishers between demands for price cuts on one hand, and competition from independent authors like Amanda Hocking, who earned over $2 million selling e-books on her own before signing with a major publisher.

It’s no surprise, then, that publishers are turning to the app as a possible product for books moving forward.  This has led to another movement towards enhanced books, particularly as apps for iPhone, Android, and other tablets. Are tablet apps the book of the future? In order to find out, I talked to authors, publishers, and app programmers, and read more than a few book apps.

The Varieties of E-Book App Experiences

Perhaps the most wildly divergent book app I’ve encountered so far is Chopsticks, which is another Penguin book, but one that’s vastly different than their amplified editions. It’s described as a novel, but it’s vastly different than a traditional novel. As you turn the pages, you aren’t confronted with a traditional narrative, but rather interact with different pieces of the lives of Glory, a teen piano player, and the boy who moves in next door. The story’s told through newspaper clippings, pictures, songs, and more.  It’s a rather fascinating way to tell a story.

Read the rest of the post on Forbes.

This post, by Deborah Reed, originally appeared on the New Wave Authors blog.

Ebook or Paper? How much longer will we need to debate this question? 

As a previously self-published author I have to say that the ebook is responsible for starting my career. Without it I’m not sure I’d be where I am today. In fact, Jeff Bezos just showed a taped interview with me at the Amazon press conference two weeks ago. Here is a link to an edited version of what was used. Keep in mind I’m Deborah Reed—Audrey Braun is the pen name I use for mystery/thriller writing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaXR6ew3vwg 

For the reader, there is no denying the convenience of an ereader. Being able to carry thousands of books with you wherever you go, not to mention purchase a new book no matter where you find yourself, is a gift to readers everywhere. I don’t know about the other ereaders (though I suspect they are the same) but Kindle owners are reading 4.6x more now than before they owned a kindle. This is great news for writers, too. 

There is also the price point to be considered. A significant gap in price exists between paper and electronic books. During difficult economic times the ebook is not only more convenient, it’s more affordable, even when you factor in the price of the ereader. From a writer’s perspective, a more affordable book is also great news. It is far easier and more profitable to sell 10,000 copies of a novel priced at $4.99 or less, than it is to sell 100 copies of a book priced between $9.99-$25.99. Lower price means the author has a better chance to build a larger readership and make a better income at the same time. 

One very important point I want to make is the fact that print books eventually go out of print, and long before that they are removed from bookstores due to limited space, sent to a warehouse, and if they’re not purchased by a certain time they are literally destroyed. An ebook will never go out of print. Readers will always be able to find older, more obscure books with a simple search, and begin reading them immediately. For authors this is a huge factor in sustaining a career. A book that came out years ago can suddenly be made relevant again, by something as simple as being featured in a discounted deal of the day or week or month.  

Read the rest of the post on the New Wave Authors blog.

This post, by J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 9/21/12. In it, Konrath shares his latest, cumulative book sales figures, both self-pub and "legacy" (mainstream-pubbed) titles, in both hard copy and ebook formats.

While this is useful information that definitely bolsters the argument in favor of going indie, it’s important to remember that Konrath’s numbers are exceptional, in part because he didn’t begin to self-publish until after he was well-established as a mainstream-published author. Konrath also has many, MANY titles in print. 

So I’m working with an incredible woman who is an MS Office tutor. She knows Excel like she wrote it herself.

Over the past few weeks she’s been compiling my sales data. ALL of my sales data.

For the very first time, I have total counts of all my sales from every platform. My legacy titles, Amazon published titles, and everything I have on KDP, Nook, Smashwords, Overdrive, Createspace, Kobo, Sony, and Apple.

And now I’m going to share those numbers with you.

These are based on my 8 legacy titles (the Jack Daniels books, Afraid, Timecaster) and my 40+ self-pubbed titles (which include 6 solo novels, 3 collaborative novels–Flee, Draculas, and Serial Killers Uncut, and the rest shorts and compilations and collaborations).

So what are these numbers? (For fun, compare them to my numbers from 2009.)

EBOOKS

Since 2004, I’ve sold 126,366 legacy ebooks, earning me $130,916 (prior to 15% to my agent.)

Since 2009, I’ve sold 632,501 self-pubbed ebooks, earning me $912,138. Some of that is shared with my collaborators, but not the lion’s share by a longshot.

The majority of the money I’ve made on ebooks are on six of my novels, The List, Origin, Disturb, Shot of Tequila, Endurance, and Trapped. These six novels–all rejected by legacy publishers, have sold 362,783 copies, earning me $600,501.

I’m not at liberty to discuss the sales of my Amazon published books, Shaken and Stirred, because Amazon prefers I don’t. But I’ll say that I’ve sold more ebook copies of Shaken and Stirred in less than three years than my eight legacy titles of sold in ebooks in eight years.

PAPER

My eight legacy titles have sold 60,993 hardcovers, 190,213 paperbacks, and 9828 trade paper since 2004, earning me a total of $264,527.

I’ve used Createspace to make my self-pubbed books available in print. Since 2010 I’ve sold 12,711 self-pubbed paper books and made $37,519.

Again, can’t talk about Shaken and Stirred. Shaken, released first, did pretty well in print, as this was when Borders and B&N carried copies. Now Borders is gone, and no brick and mortar bookstore will touch Amazon pubbed paper books, so Stirred didn’t do as well.

TOTALS

Since 2004, I’ve sold a combined ebook/paper total of 387,400 legacy books, earning $395,443, or $336,126 after my agent’s commission. This includes all advances. That’s $42,015 per year. Not bad, but anyone who is a longtime reader of this blog knows how much I busted my ass to sell that many, and how much I spent on promotion and travel. If I took home $30k any given year, I’d be very surprised. It was usually less than that.

Since 2009, I’ve sold a combined ebook.paper total of 645,212 self-pubbed legacy books, earning $949,657. That’s $730,282 on my own, and another $109,687 for my share of my collaborations, for a total of  $839,969. That’s $210,000 a year, average.

Stirred has made a little more money than Shaken, due to Blake Crouch’s brand, but I had to split that money with him. Again, I’m not disclosing how much I’ve made, but I’ve made more on Shaken than I have on any one of my legacy titles. This is the reason I continue to sign with Amazon publishing, and why at the end of this year I’ll release three books with them, co-written with Ann Voss Peterson, Flee, Spree, and Three.

However…

Some of my self-pubbed novels have made more money than Shaken.

Now my calculations don’t take certain things into account, including: 

Read the rest of the post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

dreams swirl

in a snow globe on the desk…

for a while

I am a child again

and you are shoveling the drive

meditation…

the tea picker’s song

in my cup

country graveyard

a hummingbird

she would’ve loved

were all the cranes

to forsake the temple,

would the shadow

of something you said

still dwell in me?

                                Darrell Lindsey’s haiku and tanka have won awards in the United States, Japan, Croatia, Bulgaria, Canada, and Romania. He is a Pushcart-Prize nominated poet and the author of Edge Of The Pond ( Popcorn Press, 2012). The book is available at Amazon.com ( including Kindle), BN.com ( Nook Book), and from the publisher at www.popcornpress.com

This post, by Rick Meyer, originally appeared on nieman storyboard, a project of the nieman foundation for journalism at Harvard, on 6/1/05.

This essay is adapted from Rick Meyer’s notes for a talk at the 2005 Nieman Narrative Editors’ Seminar. Rick’s presentation was paired with Laurie Hertzel’s talk on scenes.

We probably ought to declare something right away, so no one can accuse us of cheating. In nonfiction, when we talk about building characters, we’re not talking about creating them. That happens in fiction. In our world, God creates the characters. That’s his or her job. It’s our job to write about those characters.

But it is true, nonetheless, that writers build characters. First, when they report them, they take them apart and put pieces of them into their notebooks: Pale, amber eyes. Red hair. Freckles across the bridge of her nose. Talks softly and slowly. Perfume like lilacs. Then when they write these characters, they put the pieces back together, back into whole beings. If they have done it well, these people come alive. They inhabit our imaginations just as vividly as fictional characters do.

Maybe more so, because when we read about them we know they’re real.

What happens to the main characters in the stories we edit is called the plot or the story line or the arc of the narrative. We ought to develop plots, or story lines, through scenes as much as possible. I’ll try here to suggest some ways to develop the characters in those scenes into full, three-dimensional figures. In other words, I’ll try to suggest how to make the characters come alive, how to make them come up off the written page.

None of these suggestions is original with me. I’ve picked up these notions along the way from editors, reporters and writers, teachers and folks who write about writing. They include Jon Franklin, John Gardner, Jim Frey, Tom Wolfe, Mark Kramer, Gay Talese, Sol Stein, Walt Harrington, John McPhee, Jacqui Banaszynski, Elmore Leonard, Barry Siegel, Jack Hart, Kit Rachlis and Norman Mailer. If there’s anything unique here, it’s only because Willie Nelson might be right when he says, “If you steal from enough people, somehow you end up doing your own thing.”

My suggestions number a baker’s dozen plus one. To illustrate them, I’ll use a piece you might be familiar with. It’s an old story by now, published in 2002. But it has some pretty good examples of what I’m going to talk about. It’s Sonia Nazario’s piece about a 17-year-old kid named Enrique, whose mother leaves him behind in Central America and comes to the United States to find work. He is so torn and lonely for her that he sets out on his own, by foot, riding on the tops of freight trains, hitchhiking on trucks, all the way across Honduras and Guatemala, up the length of Mexico, then by coyote across the Rio Grande and illegally into Texas, then finally to North Carolina to hunt for her. Forty-eight thousand kids do this every year. Some are only 7 years old. It’s a new and extremely dangerous migration. Sonia’s story won a Pulitzer.

Many of the things I’m going to talk about Sonia did on her own. A few I suggested. Some are suggestions I wish I had offered but didn’t have the good sense to at the time. A number might make you yawn, because you know some of these things as well as or better than I do. But maybe there’s a notion or two here that could be helpful. It sort of goes without saying that Sonia and I talked about things such as these all along the way — as she reported, while she drew up her story architecture and during her writing. If you wait to consider them until the line editing gets under way, you’re way too late.

Here are the suggestions:

Build characters by showing their actions. Sometimes you’ll be tempted to develop characters by saying who they are. Show them instead.

Shaq was tall. That’s telling it. Shaq ducked to get through the door. That’s showing it.

My father was easygoing about religion. That’s telling.

Every spring, my father let me skip catechism class so I could play baseball. That’s showing.

From “Enrique’s Journey,” here’s an example that tells first and then shows:

Uncle Marco and his girlfriend treat him well. … Uncle Marco gives Enrique a daily allowance, buys him clothes and sends him to a private school.

I could make a pretty good case that you shouldn’t do both. It’s redundant. In retrospect, I’d suggest to Sonia that we take out the first of those two sentences.

Get character-building information by asking for examples, anecdotes and vignettes.

Read the rest of the post on nieman storyboard.

This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files on 9/4/12.

At lunch a few months ago, Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, expressed dissatisfaction with the term “legacy” to describe the publishers who had been successful since before the digital revolution began. For one thing, he felt that sounded too much like “the past”. “We need to come up with a different term,” was his assessment and he suggested that perhaps “full-service” was more apt.

I find I keep coming back to “full service” as an accurate description of the publisher’s relationship to an author. That’s what the long-established publishers have evolved to be.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that publishing organizations were deliberately created as service organizations for authors. They weren’t. In fact, as we shall see, the service component of a publisher’s DNA was developed in service to other publishers.

My Dad, Leonard Shatzkin, pointed out to me 40 years ago that all trade book publishing companies were started with an “editorial inspiration”: an idea of what they would publish. Sometimes that was a highly personal selection dictated by an individual’s taste, such as by so many of the great company and imprint names: Scribners, Knopf, Farrar and Straus and Giroux, for examples. Random House was begun on the idea of the Modern Library series; Simon & Schuster was started to do crossword puzzle books.

That is: people had the idea that they knew what books would sell and built a company around finding them, developing them, and bringing them to market.

And the development and delivery to the market required building up a repertoire of capabilities that comprised a full-service offering.

The publisher would find a manuscript or the idea for one and then provide everything that was necessary — albeit largely by engaging and coordinating the activities of other contractors or companies — to make the manuscript or idea commercially productive for the author and themselves.

The list of these services describes the publishing value chain. It includes:

• select the project (and assume a financial risk, sometimes relieving the author of any);
   
• guide its editorial development (although the work is mostly done by the contracted author or packager);
   
• execute the delivery of the content into transactable and consumable forms (which used to mean “printed books” but now also means as ebooks, apps, or web-viewable content);
   
• put it into the world in a way that it will be found and bought (which used to mean “put it in a catalog widely distributed to opinion-makers or buyers” but now largely means “manage metadata”);
   
• publicize and market it;
   
• build awareness and demand among the people at libraries and bookstores and other distribution channels who can buy it;
   
• process the orders;
   
• manufacture and warehouse the actual books or files or other packaged product;
   
• deliver;
   
• collect;
   
• and, along the way, sell rights to exploit the intellectual property in other forms and markets, including other languages.

It has long been customary for publishers to unbundle the components of their service offering. The most common form of unbundling is through “distribution deals” by which one publisher takes on some of the most scaleable activities on behalf of other smaller ones. It has reached the point where almost every publisher is either a distributor or a distributee. Many are depending on a third party, quite often a competing publisher, for warehousing, shipping, and billing and perhaps sales or even manufacturing. All the big ones and many others, along with a few companies dedicated to distribution, are providing that batch of services. It is not unheard of for one publisher to do both: offering distribution services to a smaller competitor while they are in turn actually being distributed by somebody larger than they.

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

This post, by Henry Baum, originally appeared on The Self-Publishing Review on 9/13/12.

It’s odd that the recent firestorm about paid reviews and unscrupulous self-publishers has actually rekindled my love of self-publishing. Ever since Amanda Hocking, the vibe around self-publishing has been money, money, money. On the one hand, I was grateful for this because it put self-publishing on the map: money talks. On the other hand: this is the worst determination of value and pretty much what’s wrong with the world, and publishing in general. The reason that I fled traditional publishing (after having a series of agents and traditional contracts) was because of the overemphasis on marketing and past sales. Publishing was all about a numbers game.

My support for self-publishing has been about self-expression – every writer should have a chance to express themselves in print or ebook, no matter how flawed those books may sometimes be. The slippery slope of the traditional publishing industry suggests that many, many interesting and/or adventurous books are not getting published. That’s a loss to the culture at large. This is self-publishing’s value – intellectual freedom, not the freedom to be independently wealthy. Of course, it’d be great to have the latter, but the former is more important.

And so it’s somewhat vindicating to see the greed impulse in self-publishing sort of fall apart. It’s also eye-opening about all the successes that have happened. Frankly, it’s always been kind of mysterious why one book totally takes off and another one does not. This has been chalked up to the ephemeral “word of mouth,” but in some cases that word of mouth was fake. On many books with 100+ reviews, you’ll inevitably see, “This book is terrible. All those 5-star reviews must be family…” I always chalked it up to bitter reviewers, but it turns out some of them were right. I’d look at a book with a terrible cover, terrible synopsis and think, This is what people want to read? It was pretty depressing.  It turns out readers really didn’t want to read those books.

I’ve had my differences with JA Konrath for a long time. In the past, he crapped all over self-publishers because they didn’t have the approval of a publishing “professional.” Then he became a self-publishing convert, because evidently $ speaks louder than a publisher’s approval. It irked me that he would continually trump up his income. This can be useful to see how self-publishing is progressing and “legacy” publishing is archaic, but his impulse was to highlight all the money-makers to prove his point, rather than people who are writing good books, but might not be selling a lot. Those people don’t fit into JA Konrath’s narrative, even though they’re the writers who might need the attention more.

Read the rest of the post on The Self-Publishing Review.