by krj | Sep 3, 2012 | Self-publishing
So if you missed the news the other day, I clicked the big gold button and published Reborn. (Shh, the big gold button is supposed to be a secret.) If I had thought that I learned everything I could learn after publishing Omni, then I was seriously wrong. Luckily, I knew I still had a lot to learn, and even now, know that is still the case. Despite that, the entire process of developing Reborn—writing, revising, editing, and ultimately, publishing—turned out to be more instructive than I would have guessed. While I certainly learned much in my first go-round, here’s a few things I picked up from this most recent experience. 1. Every bookstore publishes at a different rate This may seem obvious, but despite thinking that I understood what to expect from each bookstore, I’ve been astounded to discover that not only did I guess wrong on when the book would be available, I really didn’t learn anything from my first experience. For example, when I published Omni, Barnes & Noble took roughly three days to make the book available. As of the time I’m writing this, Reborn is now finally available on Barnes & Noble after spending… approximately three days in their system getting processed. So much for learning the first time around. Additionally, I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly Apple made the book available in iTunes. With Omni, it took weeks because I had to wait for my account to be approved, but now that I’m in? I’m not sure, but Apple may have even beaten Amazon to making Reborn available to the public the...
by krj | Dec 9, 2011 | Self-publishing
Forgive me if you’re not a writer because this will only be partially interesting to you (if at all). If you haven’t heard, it’s all the rage in the last couple of days. Amazon, well-known and loved (I suppose) for its ease of allowing folks to publish, is endeavoring to make it easier for books to reach a broader market. How? By allowing authors to enroll their works in the KDP Select program that allows Kindle owners to “borrow” books from Amazon’s library. (We’re going to ignore the inanity of attaching physical world ideas to a digital world.) There’s a few problems with this, but for those who don’t know or for people who would wonder what Amazon is offering authors to entice them, here it is: money. $500k to start, with a $6m allocated for next year. Yes, that “m” means million, as in, $6000000. That’s a lot of money, right? Here’s the catch: you only get a percentage of the pie. Well of course you didn’t think Amazon would give all of it to one person, right? But to earn anything beyond a few pennies (admittedly, the numbers remain to be seen), you have to have your book “borrowed” more than pretty much everyone else. Here’s where we begin to discover why I won’t be participating in this, and why you will still have to buy my books (Kindle loaning and piracy aside): I’m never going to have more books borrowed than Stephen King. Or Dean Koontz. Or Stephanie Meyer. Or James Patterson. Or… and so it goes. I’m fine with that, but if that’s the case,...
by krj | Jul 19, 2011 | Self-publishing
While Joe Konrath was busy poking the beehive with his post today, Be Deliberate, quite the discussion took place in the comments. One of the more interesting things to come of it was the suggestion that books priced higher have a higher average rating, to a limit, of course. Commenter S Alini said: There might be another reason people gave one star reviews to Serial, Joe. That is that people often assign value to something based on how much they’re asked to pay for it. So if you give it to them for free, some are likely to think it has zero value. I think there’s some merit to the idea, and so does Joe who later replied: Serial is free and has an average star rating of 3 stars. Serial Uncut (Serial plus some extra stuff) is $2.99 and has a 4 star average. Obviously it’s not an entirely fair comparison because the free version of his book, Serial, doesn’t have the same content as the paid version. However, Scott Nicholson, a little further into the conversation, agrees with the observation: My $2.99 books always have better star ratings than my 99 cent books. That tells me they are more likely to get to the people who want them, as opposed to people who just want a bargain. This is all empirical evidence and not based upon any sort of study, but it makes for an interesting dialogue, especially if you’re considering pricing your book at $.99. Pricing it higher isn’t going to guarantee you higher ratings come review time, but I think there’s a certain validity to...
by krj | Jul 17, 2011 | Self-publishing
I originally typed out a fairly long blog post before I decided it was overly preachy and should be trashed. Instead, I’m going to limit this to something I learned. If you don’t want the background, then skip ahead a few paragraphs. I’ve been writing for years, well over fifteen, and though I’ve seen limited success in terms of publication, I have had a couple of things put onto paper. It’s been a gratifying experience, and one that has served as reinforcement that I’m doing what I should be doing. However, aside from those couple of lucky breaks, I’ve done a lot of procrastinating as I’ve watched the publishing industry slowly eat itself. I’m sure I’m not alone in having been part of a large group of spectators who were unsure if they wanted to dip a toe into those waters because they weren’t sure they’d get it back. Publishing has changed a lot in the last decade, and even more so in the last couple of years (or months). This isn’t news to anyone. The ramifications of the most recent changes means that self-publishing is now a viable option and, potentially, a viable career path. Whereas it used to take a lot of money, and an almost insurmountable amount of work, to self-publish and then market the crap out of something, one can do so relatively easily now, and with far less investment. Ebooks have changed everything, and at least right now, it looks to be for the better. So as someone who wanted the validation of the hardcover book (and still does, to be completely honest), I’m...
by krj | Jun 6, 2011 | Self-publishing
For those of us who are geeks, especially those are Apple fanboys, and perhaps yet more for those are developers, Apple today kicked off World Wide Developers Conference 2011 — WWDC. For those who don’t know what this is, it’s essentially a week-long event hosted by Apple for the benefit of people who make software and hardware for their products. So if this is an event for developers, why am I writing about it on a publishing/writing/editing/etc. blog? Well, it’s all in the title: iBooks and iCloud. At WWDC today, Apple announced a boatload of new things, and one of those was a syncing feature for iBooks using their new service, iCloud. This isn’t active just yet (except for those doing testing), and I may be wrong about this, but I see this new feature as a Good Thing for writers. In a nutshell, iBooks syncing through iCloud will make it super simple for users to take anything they’ve purchased in the iBooks store and quickly and easily send it to their other iOS devices for consumption. Beyond that, it appears as though it’ll work like Amazon’s WhisperNet which automatically syncs your Kindle (and Kindle apps) with bookmarks, highlights, notes, last page read, etc, only this’ll be for iBooks. A big problem with iOS right now, and to a somewhat lesser degree other mobile platforms, is syncing. This is going to be a big step in the right direction for Apple once this goes live, and if there’s something that can be said of making things easier for consumers, it’s usually that it benefits everyone. Take the Kindle for...
by krj | Jun 3, 2011 | Self-publishing
If you follow the podcasting world then you’ve likely heard the term “New Media” once or twice by now. New Media is a term that describes, essentially, internet video and audio. Television and radio are Old Media now, titans of a day gone by. That’s not to say that, like the Titans of old, they’ll be cut down by their children and be replaced and essentially forgotten (besides, that doesn’t work in this case because Old and New Media aren’t related in such a way). Much like Old Media, for now, is here to stay, New Media isn’t going away any time soon. So what do Old and New Media have to do with publishing? It’s the exact same thing that’s happening now with legacy publishing and self-publishing that you’re seeing on the Kindle, nook, iOS devices, and a variety of other, smaller, dedicated ereaders and similar devices. It used to be that self-publishing was something that was almost entirely reserved for those who fell into a few categories: Those who didn’t have the chops to make it in the traditional print publishing world; or Those who were met with endless rejections and wouldn’t take no for an answer; or Those who wanted to see their name on a book (often times quality be damned), or some combination thereof. There are other reasons, of course, that may not fall into that very narrow list, but the majority used to fall nicely into one of those categories. For those who opted for the self-publishing route (vanity press aside), it was almost a guaranteed loss. There are very few people who have...
