So you are an established author and have a healthy following, but feel lost in the midlist with reducing advances and hard battles to get published. You feel that you have something to say and more money to make. Can the new digital era offer you a way forward, or will you simply get lost in translation?J.A. Konrath’s blog claims a way forward and also shows that authors can make it by themselves with some digital application. He's not a new author and has built an established following as a writer of mystery, horror and sci-fi. He has a backlist and has taken the wise move of owning his digital rights. His digital sales aren’t huge but respectable and growing.
Amazon is about to make him richer as they will allow him to soon earn 70% royalty. He is pumped up as he is already making reasonable Amazon, but the agency model certainly works in his favour. He is now getting his ebooks up on other sites and expects much more and is full of the enthusiasm that only doing yourself can generate. He firmly believes he can sell more ebooks at lower prices than a publisher and earn more to boot. He prices his ebooks $1.99 and $2.99 and has even moved one up to $4.99. Under the 70/30 split things suddenly get a whole lot better!
He thinks the $2.99 could become the new bargain rate for authors such as himself and one that which will look very attractive against the ‘safe’ publisher pricing. We would recommend all authors to read Joe’s blog and maybe ewalk alone.
1 comment:
He's dead-on in his advice. My own sales since releasing my ebook 6 weeks ago have been really impressive. I'm an unknown author, doing this on my own, with a book that the big publishers thought "too risky". I've been following Joe's blog for a long time and he's helped me to prove that, without a doubt, there is a large market for my novel.
Go to his site, and read his blog. Then buy his books to say thanks. Every word he writes is worth far more than the few bucks you pay for his novels. The publishing world should be sitting up and paying close attention to what Joe has to say.
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