Why Self-Published Authors Know Best
I ran across this quote today, from a post that historical romance novelist Courtney Milan wrote this week as an open letter to agents. The traditional information storehouse has been inverted. Right now, the people who know the most about self-publishing are authors, and trust me, the vast majority of authors are aware of that. For the first time, authors are having questions about their careers, and their agents are not their go-to people. While not having an agent, in fact having decided in the fall of 2009 not to look for an agent for my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I can’t really speak to this group’s effectiveness in this new publishing climate. Neither to I want to go into whether or not I think that the decision on the part of some agents to begin to publish their Read more…
Ebook Publishing and the Great Price Debate: My numbers tell an interesting story
Before Christmas and the great Amanda Hocking success story hit the blogosphere, the general wisdom among ebook self-publishers tended to be that $2.99 was the sweet spot for selling and profiting from sales. Particularly after Amazon instituted its new 70% royalty offering (which didn’t apply for books priced at under $2.99), anything lower than that was seen as reserved for short stories or novella’s or at the most a brief promotional launch. However, the success of Amanda Hocking and a growing number of self-published authors selling their books at 99 cents changed the debate. They proved that you could sell so many books at that rate that it would more than make up for the loss of the 70% revenue. An additional upside to the 99 cent approach was that the sheer volume of sales at 99 cents would put Read more…
What is a fair but competitive price for audible books?
Recently I’ve been pretty quiet on this blog, mostly because I am furiously writing away on my sequel to Maids of Misfortune. The title of the sequel is Uneasy Spirits, and I have over 90,000 words written. My goal is to finish the first draft by the time of the Historical Novel Society Convention, which is meeting mid June in San Diego. (If you are going to be there let me know, I would love a chance to meet you.) But, today I read about a new service Amazon is providing with its subsidiary Audible called Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) where it is going to make it easier for self-published authors to produce audio books. For the year and a half that Maids of Misfortune has been out, I’ve kept saying to myself that I should produce an audio book. Read more…
Seven Tips on how to sell books on Kindle
This post was originally a guest post over on Patty Henderson’s blog, The Henderson Files, entitled 7 Tips on how to sell books on Kindle. I am reprinting it here. First of all, why should you listen to me, an unknown author, tell you how to sell your book on Kindle? A little more than a year ago, I was a semi-retired professor of U.S. Women’s history who, besides a few academic articles, had never published a thing. What I did have was a manuscript of an historical mystery I had written 20 years earlier, based on my doctoral research on working women in the late nineteenth century. In the 20 years after writing the first draft, while I pursued my teaching career, I found an agent, collected rejections, lost an agent, published briefly with a small Print on Demand (POD) Read more…
Marketing or Selling: What’s the difference and why do I like to do one and not the other?
To sell: “to influence or induce to make a purchase” Merriam-webster.com To market: “to expose for sale in a market.” Merriam-webster.com People commenting on the new trends in publishing frequently say that for self-published authors to be successful they need to be entrepreneurs. In fact they often say any author who wants to be successful needs to participate fully in the selling of their own books. I heard stories for years from my traditionally published friends about going to conventions to network with book sellers, arranging book tours, book signings, and speaking engagements at local libraries, and how much they dreaded this aspect of being a published author. Author Forums and groups like Murder Must Advertise are still dominated by similar discussions of the ins and outs of selling books, including these traditional methods. As I prepared my historical mystery, Read more…
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