Ebooks

Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.

Konrath's Advice to Publishers

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 8/17/14.

Over four years ago I wrote a blog post about ebooks:

Joe sez in May 2010: I’d always assumed that print publishers would begin to lose market dominance once ebooks took off in a big way, and they’d have to either restructure or die.

But now I’m predicting another death for them.

What is going to happen when authors stop sending their books to publishers?

If I know I can make $100,000 on a self-published ebook in five years of sales, and I have the numbers to back up this claim, why would any informed writer–either pro or newbie–ever settle for less?

The dominance of ebooks is coming. I have no doubt. But I always thought it was the readers who would lead the charge, based on cost and convenience.

Now I’m starting to believe that the ones with the real power are the ones who should have had the power since the beginning of publishing. The ones who create the content in the first place.

The authors.

It’s a wonderful, dynamic, empowering time to be an author. For the first time, we can command our own ships.

We’re the ones who write the books. We can reach readers without any gatekeepers at all. And we can make money doing it.

The print publishing industry’s biggest fear shouldn’t be the eventual dominance of ebooks over print.

 

Click here to read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

Announcing Pre-order for KDP

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An email Amazon sent to KDP authors today:

We’re excited to announce that you can now make your new books available for pre-order in Kindle Stores worldwide. With a few quick and easy steps you can create a pre-order page up to 90 days in advance of your book’s release date–your pre-order product page will be created within 24 hours. When you make your book available for pre-order, customers can order the book anytime leading up to the release date you set. We will deliver it to them on that date.

One advantage of using pre-order is that you can start promoting your Kindle book pre-order page on Author Central, Goodreads, your personal website, and other places ahead of its release to help build excitement for your book. Also, pre-orders will contribute toward sales rank and other Kindle Store merchandising ahead of release, which can help more readers discover your book.

Visit your KDP Bookshelf to set up your new book for pre-order.

Best regards,
The Kindle Direct Publishing Team

Questions? Learn more about pre-order on our Help page.

 

The New Bestseller Lists

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This post by L.J. Sellers originally appeared on The Kill Zone on 8/11/14.

Elements of the publishing industry have never been more hotly debated! The most passionate discussion is the Amazon/Hachette dispute over distribution terms and pricing, but another issue has come up that may have a broader effect on authors. Or at least, a more personal influence.

Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited program was unveiled recently, and it’s already affecting the measure by which authors all live—the Kindle bestseller lists.  I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the background: Kindle Unlimited (KU) is a subscription service for ebooks. For $9.99 a month, readers can download all the digital books they want. So far, the books included in the service mostly come from the Select program of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and Amazon Publishing (AP) imprints.

[You can enroll in the KDP Select program by clicking on the box when you upload your book. When you click the Select box, you’re agreeing to make that ebook exclusive to Amazon and not sell it in ebook form anywhere else. In exchange, you get various promotional opportunities, plus you’re enrolled in KOLL (the lending library), so you get paid each time someone borrows your book. And now, with the new program, you’re also in Kindle Unlimited, for even more paid sales.]

 

Click here to read the full post on The Kill Zone.

 

What Does Amazon/Hachette Have to Do With Me?

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This post by Barry Eisler originally appeared on his blog on 8/9/14.

In connection with the $100,000 ad some reactionary authors bought to run in tomorrow’s New York Times, Amazon has sent a letter to its self-published authors. It’s a good read, with some interesting historical context, for anyone who values low-priced ebooks and fair royalties for writers. And if you want to share your opinion on those topics with the CEO of “Big Five” publisher Hachette, you can email him — just scroll down the Amazon letter. Here’s what I said:

Hi Michael, even if the Big Five (why would anyone imagine something called the Big Five could be a cartel?) still had the power to control the market — and you don’t — the best you could do through agency and windowing and the like is delay the inevitable mass market transition to digital. Is that really who you want to be? A reactionary, focused on shoring up the next quarter rather than expanding your opportunities for the long term?

I don’t want big publishing to die — I want it to get well. But to get well, you’re going to have to change the lifestyle that’s led to your ongoing decrepitude.

Please, think about the future. Think about your place not just in the Big Five, but in the world. Stop impeding what’s best for readers, writers, and reading. Don’t fight progress. Be progress.

Sincerely yours,
Barry Eisler
www.barryeisler.com

I’ve seen some interesting reactions to the Amazon missive. I responded to some of them over at The Passive Voice, which consistently has some of the best industry coverage I’ve seen (both for Passive Guy’s presence and the insights of the people who comment there). I’ll address those reactions here, as well:

1. Amazon and/or Hachette are trying to get me to do their bidding, drag me into their war, dragoon me, etc.

 

Click here to read the full post on Barry Eisler’s blog.

 

These Romance Writers Ditched Their Publishers For Ebooks — And Made Millions

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This article by Mandi Woodruff originally appeared on Yahoo! Finance on 8/1/14.

In early 2010, things weren’t going very well for San Francisco-based romance novelist Bella Andre. Brick-and-mortar bookstores were shutting down in large numbers, and after seven years, eight books and two publishers, she learned she had been axed from her latest contract.

“I was hanging on by my fingernails,” says Andre, 41, who was trying to carve out a niche in contemporary romance. Peers advised her to try a different pen name, to change genres, to write anything but love stories. With a degree in economics from Stanford University and a background in music, she wasn’t short on career options.

Then a friend suggested she look into self-publishing. At the time, Amazon.com’s  (AMZN) direct publishing platform, which allows just about anyone to publish and sell their books online, was beginning to gain traction among professional writers. After years of bending her stories to the will and opinions of publishers, editors and literary agents, Andre found the prospect of having complete autonomy over her material very appealing.

“As an author, I was not high up on the publishing food chain and [my ideas] were rarely ever listened to,” she says. “I took my friend’s advice and I dove right into self-publishing.”

 

Click here to read the full story on Yahoo! Finance.

 

Amazon Speaks: We Want Lower eBook Prices from Hachette

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This post by Nate Hoffelder originally appeared on The Digital Reader on 7/21/14.

Amazon hasn’t said much concerning their ongoing contract dispute with the French media conglomerate Lagardère and its US publishing subsidiary Hachette, and today the retailer broke their silence with what is only their third official statement (not counting the leaked letter).

Like the first two statements, Amazon isn’t saying much. According to a message posted on Amazon’s forums (and copied below), one of the sticking points in the negotiations is the price of ebooks. We of course knew this from the WSJ interview in which Russ Grandinetti said little and avoided defending Amazon, but Amazon expands upon that earlier statement with a call for higher author royalties on ebooks.

The statement below lays out the math Amazon uses to justify their push for lower ebook prices, but it’s worth noting that the statement is somewhat misleading.

Amazon would like you to think that most ebooks can be priced at or below $10, even going so far as to point out that “there will be legitimate reasons for a small number of specialized titles” that will cost more, but what they hope you won’t realize is that they are glossing over whole swathes of nonfiction content, including textbooks, reference manuals, professional books, and works that are much longer and more expensive to create than your average novel.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Digital Reader.

 

Kindle Unlimited – Some Early Results

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This post by Nick Stephenson originally appeared on his blog on 7/23/14.

For anyone still living under a rock, or perhaps a particularly voracious shrub, you’ll probably already know that Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited program launched over the weekend, spurring a veritable explosion of opinion (both optimistic and doom-mongering) across the interwebs. Of course, much of what people are speculating is, well, just that – speculation.

So, in an attempt to add a little objectivity into the mix (God forbid) I figured I’d let you know how the new Kindle Unlimited service has affected me in the few days it’s been live.

But, before I get to that, I promised I’d put a comprehensive post together explaining how I’ve been building up my email list over the last few months. I’m seeing some steady growth – going from just a few hundred subscribers at the beginning of the year to over 4,000 readers as of today. For me, especially in light of potential game-changers like Kindle Unlimited, having my own ready-made list of followers is more important than ever. If you want to find out more about what I’ve been doing to build this up, head on over to indie legend David Gaughran’s Blog – David was kind enough to invite me over for a guest post about email tactics, and I’ve included a full breakdown.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. What exactly is Kindle Unlimited? It’s being touted as “Netflix for Books”, and is essentially a competitor to the already established offerings from Scribd and Oyster. The key points authors need to know are:

 

Click here to read the full post on Nick Stephenson’s blog.

 

Here Be Digital Dragons: Lucid Writing Requires Mental Maps

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This post by Douglas Carlson originally appeared on Brevity on 1/18/14.

That slight tremor on August 15, 2013—which passed without much notice in the rest of the world—was the earth shifting at The Georgia Review. On that day we began accepting electronic submissions. On August 18th an essay came in online that caught my eye. But after I read it a couple times, I found myself making a few lukewarm notes in preparation for moving it along to the next reader: “strong start, good closing, fuzzy in the middle—an ambitious essay that lost its focus.” For some reason that I don’t recall now, I decided to print the essay out and give it another try. You know where this is going: I immediately understood what the author was up to and loved the piece. It has been accepted for publication, and the whole incident has given me pause to realize that I don’t think that I read as well—that is, with the same level of perception—from a screen as I do from paper. Nothing against my iPad, which I dearly love, or even the big old Dell on my desk, but when I read at my job I’m evaluating the efforts of working writers, most of whom care and grind and hope. I owe them the courtesy of my complete attention and comprehension.

 

Click here to read the full post on Brevity.

 

Kindle Book Pricing and How the Big Guys Don’t Get It.

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This post by Dennis Blanchard originally appeared on the K1YPP blog on 7/10/14.

I love to read. For some reason, as a young reader, I missed many of the classics. I’ve made up for lost time over the years by “catching up.” Books like The Catcher In The Rye, Of Mice And Men, White Fang and On The Road have been books that I’ve only read in the last twenty years or so. The same goes for movies, I’ve caught up on The African Queen, Casablanca, The Godfather and others in the last few years. How did I miss them? I don’t know, perhaps I just spent so much time outside when I was younger, I just missed them. That is a subject for another time.

Yesterday, I read a news piece on CNN about an author that was gored running with the bulls in Pamplona. Bill Hillmann, author of “Fiesta, How To Survive The Bulls Of  Pamplona.” How ironic. It occurred to me that I had not read anything much by Hemingway recently, so I decided to take a look online and see if I could find his book, “The Sun Also Rises.” I figured that, surely, by now, it must be on Kindle for an inexpensive price, or perhaps, even free. Surely.

 

Click here to read the full post on the K1YPP blog.

 

Self-Publishing as a Means to My Own Literary Revolution

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This post by Tejas Desai originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 6/26/14.

Much bluster has been made recently in the media regarding the Amazon-Hachette dispute, with multimillionaire authors, agents and self-published writers, among others, weighing in. Most have condemned Amazon for its bullying tactics in negotiations with publishers while self-published authors like Barry Eisler and J. A. Konrath have defended it for democratizing the field. Much of the rhetoric has involved terms like “sales figures” “copies sold” “promotional fees” and “marketing development.” Very little of the conversation has been about the more important issue of the current state of narrative and where literature is headed.

I published both my books, The Brotherhood (2012) and Good Americans (2013), through my own company The New Wei, after being frustrated with the traditional industry and the type of literature it was producing. I found most literary books I read to be bland in content and only passable in style. They often seemed to have some non-fiction market angle that hoped to sell the book and justified the authors getting teaching jobs and never publishing future books. Yet all of these books were acclaimed by major critics, newspapers, magazines, publications and writers, which caused me to question their impartiality, or at least their taste.

As someone who worked at a literary agency for years, I already knew how random publication tended to be and how difficult it was to sell a book. Most books never sold and those that did rarely earned out their advances. The contract terms were absurdly tilted toward the publishers and authors didn’t have much say in presentation or marketing. Most authors never got agents, and it had little to do with quality. Usually, it was just luck. Still I continued to have some faith in the industry even as I left it, became a professional librarian, received a MFA, wrote and rewrote my works. And while I received initial interest from several agents, I never got one. Even the independent publishers rejected it. All their stated reasons were different.

 

Click here to read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Amazon-Hachette: The Sounds of Silence

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This post by William Ockham originally appeared on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing on 7/13/14.

Everybody’s talking about Amazon’s latest move in the Amazon-Hachette kerfuffle and the reactions have been pretty predictable. Lots of confirmation bias going around. While the public broadsides, grand offers, and nasty anonymous leaks are full of sound and fury, I’m fond of looking for the truth in the silence. What the companies aren’t saying is as important to understanding the situation as what they are saying. I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but neither side has denied any of the specific factual claims the other has made. In fact, if we read between the lines, we can cut through the noise and see what’s really happening. I have learned* the best way to do that is to make a timeline. Our brains have a tendency to remember the order in which we learned a set of facts and it has a hard to reassembling the chronological order of how things actually happened. We should be continually re-evaluating our understanding of this situation based on new information.

Recent statements from both sides have provided a lot more information about how this dispute got to this point. To avoid turning Joe’s blog into an academic article, I’m not going to footnote all of these events. If you want the source for a particular claim, just ask in the comments. My primary sources are the most recent Amazon-Hachette exchange and Michael J. Sullivan’s account of his interactions with Amazon and Hachette this year. If I have left off any significant events and gotten any of this wrong, please let me know in the comments [section on the original post]. I’m far more interest[ed] in getting this right than being right.

 

Early Jan 2014

Amazon makes the first move, sending an offer to Hachette. Based on Hachette leaks, we know that Amazon is offering a return to wholesale pricing.

7 Feb 2014

Amazon stops discounting Hachette titles.

 

Click here to read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

Breaking Free – What Happened When I Left KDP Select

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This post by Nick Stephenson originally appeared on his site on 6/6/14.

“KDP Select is evil”. “Free promotions are pointless”. “Nick, you’re an idiot”. These are things I hear on a daily basis, the latter usually being something I say to myself when I’m looking in the mirror. As for the first two, I talk to a lot of authors who have a strong opinion on the relative merits of signing up for 90 days of exclusivity with Amazon, and the words “shackled” and “dungeon” come up a lot. It’s the same for free days – half of authors think they’re a God-send, the other half would rather cut off their own limbs with a rusty spatula than offer their work gratis. And that’s cool, I don’t have anything against people having wildly different opinions – and there are plenty of authors making a decent income without touching free promotions, and there are plenty who swear by them. But I like to look at the cold, hard numbers before coming to a conclusion, as everybody’s mileage seems to vary.

The two main strategies for free books I see most often are:

1. A variety of titles signed up to KDP Select, with rotating free promotions on each book. This is pretty easy to do with the 5 free days you get to play with under the KDP Select contract.

2.Titles NOT in KDP select, and up on other vendors, with the first book in the series permanently free. This is also pretty easy to do.

There are pros and cons for both approaches, but last month was the first time I’d tried option number (2). I’ve had a bunch of emails and comments asking for me to report back on the results, so here’s the skinny:

Income Report: All Books in KDP Select

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes sales graphs and detailed analysis, on Nick Stephenson’s site.

 

Amazon Speaks!

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This post by Alex Shephard originally appeared on the Melville House blog on 7/3/14.

Amazon does not like to talk. And Amazon especially does not like to talk to the press—when the company felt it had to address its dispute with Hachette in late-May it avoided the media completely, and instead released an odd, condescending statement on its Kindle forum. In every report about its ongoing negotiations with Hachette you could expect to find one, beautiful sentence: “An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.”

That changed late Tuesday, when an Amazon representative—Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of Kindle content—did comment, to the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg. The timing was, perhaps, deliberate—Trachtenberg’s piece went up shortly before “Amazon: Business as Usual?” a panel discussion hosted by The New York Public Library began. That panel discussion featured a number of outspoken Amazon critics, including James Patterson, Bob Kohn, and Tim Wu. Amazon was clearly paying attention: it paid to fly self-publishing blogger and pro-Amazon zealot David Vandagriff to New York City to participate. (That Amazon finds Vandagriff, who does little to hide his disgust with “traditional publishing” on his blog, to be an appropriate spokesperson for the company’s aims is interesting, though it’s possible that they merely wanted to counter-balance the other panelists’ anti-Amazon views. Fight fire with fire: the Amazon way.) Once again, Amazon found the media narrative slipping away, and it decided to fight back.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Melville House blog.

 

2014 Smashwords Survey Reveals New Opportunities for Indie Authors

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 7/6/14.

Welcome to the 2014 Smashwords Survey, our third annual survey that reveals new opportunities for indie ebook authors to sell more books.

As in prior surveys (view the 2013 Smashwords Survey here and 2012 Smashwords Survey here), we examined aggregated retail and library sales data of Smashwords books and then crunched the numbers based on various quantifiable characteristics of the book.

For this year’s survey, we examined over $25 million in customer purchases  aggregated across Smashwords retailers including Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, the Smashwords.com store, Sony (now closed), Diesel (closed), Oyster, Scribd, Kobo, public libraries and others.

This year, we break new ground with more data, including survey questions that explore preorders and series, two categories of inquiry that weren’t possible in prior years.  These latter two categories were enabled by Smashwords’ introduction of ebook preorder distribution in July, 2013 and our new Smashwords Series Manager feature which allows us to capture, analyze and share the performance of series books.

The goal of the survey is to identify Viral Catalysts.  I first introduced the concept of Viral Catalyst in 2012 with the publication of my free ebook best practices book, The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success.  A Viral Catalyst is anything that makes a book more discoverable and more enjoyable to readers.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Smashwords blog.

 

Authors Behaving Badly and Authors Who Aren't

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing blog on 7/3/14.

So a bunch of legacy authors–many of them smart and who should know better–just signed a letter accusing Amazon of things that simply make no sense.

Some of the usual suspects are at the forefront. James Patterson, who continues to show he has no clue about how his own industry works. Scott Turow, whose tenure as president of the Authors Guild amounted to being a shill for Big Publishing. Douglas Preston, who once supported windowing ebook titles and keeping prices high.

Preston recently said:

“If I were Jeff Bezos, the one thing I would fear most is if authors organized themselves and took broad, concerted, sustained, and dignified public action.”

Konrath replies:

“If I were Jeff Bezos, I would know that legacy authors have no power, because they signed away their rights to their publishers. Patterson, Turow, and Preston couldn’t remove their books from Amazon even if they wanted to. But, strangely, I don’t hear any of them demanding it, or even mentioning it.”

Naturally, I’m going to fisk this letter. Then I’m going to link to a different sort of letter for authors to sign. Hugh Howey and I, along with Barry Eisler and others, have been fiddling with this letter for the last 24 hours, and it explains to readers what’s really happening with the Amazon/Hachette dispute.

 

Click here to read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.