October 19th is the release date for "Draculas," a horror novel that I wrote with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson. How four guys were able to collaborate on a single narrative is an interesting story, but not as interesting as the way "Draculas" is being released.
Though together we have over sixty years of experience in the print industry and have worked with dozens of publishers, we've decided to make "Draculas" a Kindle exclusive. Not only that, but we're publishing it ourselves.
The choice to circumvent Big New York Publishing was easy. We all have print deals, and probably could have sold this project to a major publishing house, but the reasons to go the indie route instead of the traditional one were numerous.
First was an issue of time. We wanted "Draculas" to launch before Halloween, but we'd only finished writing and editing the novel in September. There was no possible way a major publisher could go from first draft to live within three weeks. But we did.
With Amazon's assistance, we were able to put up a pre-order page and a free teaser last month, though we'd only written the first few chapters by that point. Like a traditionally published book, this allowed us to build buzz and accrue some advance sales.
Based on some of my experiments on Kindle, we're pricing "Draculas" at $2.99--something no Big Publisher has done for a new release (except for AmazonEncore, who is releasing my thriller novel "Shaken" next week at that price point.) We're also releasing it without DRM (digital rights management), which is another thing no publisher will allow (except for AmazonEncore.)
"Draculas" will be exclusive on Kindle for a year, as a favor to Amazon since they've been so helpful. But those with other brands of ereaders will be able to buy "Draculas" from Amazon and convert it to the format of their choice with free ebook software like Calibre or Stanza. We have instructions for doing this on our website, www.draculasthebook.com. We also plan on doing a print release later in the year, using Amazon's CreateSpace.
Since professionalism is essential, we hired a cover artist and an ebook formatter. A publisher providing these services takes 52.5% of an ebook's cover price, and the retailer gets 30% through the agency model. That leaves only 17.5% for the author. By absorbing these sunk costs ourselves, we're able to earn the full 70% royalties and not have to share them with anyone. Though we're splitting the profits four ways, we're each earning only slightly less per copy sold (51 cents each) than we would on one of our own paperback books (64 cents each), and still only charging the reader $2.99.
Of course, a publisher provides more services than cover art and formatting. For one thing, they edit. But among the four of us we've written over eighty novels, and we were able to edit each other and do our own copyediting with relative ease. What we missed, our beta readers caught.
Publishers also do promotion and marketing, though I haven't seen much of this for ebooks. Drawing on our fan bases, we sent out 260 advance reading copies of "Draculas." Come October 19, if only half of them come through for us, we'll launch our ebook with over a hundred reviews on Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, and dozens of blogs. We're also doing some niche advertising, and our combined newsletters reach over twenty thousand readers.
"Draculas" includes many bonus extras, which could only be done with a digital version. The more pages a paper book has, the more it costs to print and deliver. Ebooks have no such restrictions. So besides the 80,000 word novel, readers who buy "Draculas" will also get another 80,000 words of supplemental features, including interviews, deleted scenes, alternate endings, short stories, excerpts, and an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the writing of "Draculas" delivered through a collection of over seven hundred emails between the writers while we were brainstorming and writing the book.
Putting this project together was an exercise in speed and simplicity. We did the majority of the writing and the marketing within an eight week timeframe, while we were each working on other projects. By releasing it ourselves, we were able to maintain full control over the entire process, set our own price, eliminate DRM (which readers hate) and earn four times the royalty rate we would have through a publisher. By going ebook-only, we could add a bunch of fun supplements for no extra cost, while also releasing it super-fast.
Is this the future of publishing? Are publishers still needed in an ebook world when authors can do it on their own?
We'll see. We own all the rights to "Draculas," so any subsidiary rights are 100% ours to exploit. My agent has already sold audio rights to thirteen of my self-published books, and film rights to one of them, and the burgeoning foreign and translation markets for ebooks will no doubt become lucrative as the market expands worldwide.
Because we self-published "Draculas," we control the rights. Not just for now, but forever.
Forever is a very long time. Authors need to decide if they want to keep forever to themselves, or share forever with a publisher who takes over half the cover price.
Nina Lassam: Bestselling Authors and the Move to Self-Publishing
Borders, BookBrewer Launch E-Publishing Platform
I really don't care that some people believe ebooks or whatever aren't good enough for them. All books have some limitations on their audience. If you won't buy a Kindle, you can download FREE software to read on your computer. If reading on devices gives you headaches, I can't help you. Some readers- including me- get headaches reading paper books. And if you can't read English, you can't read my books. I have no foreign language editions.
I didn't go POD or other paper edition when I re-issued my backlist because they're not affordable. But I've sold enough copies to provide a nice supplement to my income, better than I ever got with a traditional publisher. And that's all the justification I need.
That's all the justification any author needs. We're reaching more people every day. We don't need to sell to people who would never like our books just because of the format. Derision has become meaningless.
For instance, I will never buy a Kindle because of Amazon's ability to summarily erase everything that is downloaded to it. And I will never pay for a Kindle book to download to my Android because their Kindle app presumably allows them to do the same thing.
And even if I were to do something like buy an iPad or other tablet computer, I'm part of an audience that is unlikely to use it much for books anyway, because reading books from a computer screen invariably gives me a headache. I don't have to deal with that when reading a hardcover or paperback. But POD books are generally pretty shoddy construction, so I'm not very willing to spend money on them either. And neither is my local library.
Also, a surprising number of kindles are found and returned to their owner. Amazon can make a lost kindle no longer able to download books from Amazon, so it is less valuable to a thief.
But in any case, if you still don't want a kindle, fine. Konrath says they will eventually put it out in paper (an interesting twist - up until recently, the ebook version was often delayed, now the paper version is delayed...)
www.youtube.com/robchristopherwriter
They haven't paid me to say this, so this isn't an advertisement. But it is certainly an endorsement of the job they're doing to help authors reach more readers and make more money than they could through the traditional route.
The Kindle is a terrific device. I own many terrific devices that I endorse. An iPhone. An Asus Eee PC. An Xbox 360. But none of those have helped me earn over $100,000 by the year's end like Kindle has.
This column should serve as an eye-opener to writers, and to readers, about the future of this industry. If I wasn't making money, and didn't love the device, I wouldn't publish on it.
That's not advertising. It's capitalism, common sense, and am eagerness to share what I've managed to figure out.
This should be an eye-opener.
My apprehension comes from the devices used for e-books (Kindles, iPads, etc). They're made by essentially slave labor. Workers live inside the factories where they work 12 hour shifts, 6 days a week. Several workers for Foxconn, the manufacturer, have committed suicide over the past few months.
How can the literary world simply ignore that? How can a reader upoload "The Jungle" on his or her Kindle and not see the horrific irony?
Authors should hold themselves to higher standards.
http://nyti.ms/d0gM3l
"Today, companies on Taiwan produce 80 percent of computer motherboards, 72 percent of notebook computers and 68 percent of L.C.D. monitors. And most of the assembly takes place in China."
I think that self publishing with freelance editors just might be a match made in heaven (nothing is more distracting to me as a reader than mistakes in a finished product).
http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
I would love nothing more than to be a full-time writer. I still suspect that the traditional publishing route is the strongest way to do this. But I'm willing to give new methods the benefit of the doubt.
E-books could be your savior.
I have no interest in reading the turgid gushings of wannabee un-edited writers in print or on the web. Odds have always been low for getting published by a major house - as it should be. It's the difference between High school football and the NFL. The better talent gets the jersey, the support, and the money.
If you just want folks to read your work, then cool, ebooks are the way to go. If you want to become a writer, then get an editor at least and work with a small house first.
I encounter a lot of people in this field who fear the self-published model will leave talented writers struggling to gain an audience in a sea of mediocre slop from every knucklehead who thinks he's Stephen King. But I think it's just the opposite. The community evaluation model of iTunes, Amazon, and the like, allows the best reviewed, most helpful products to rise to the top. It's the community as gatekeeper rather than the publisher. Authors who connect with their audience, consult editors for feedback, treat writing as craft, build a following, and work hard at self-promotion will find this to be an exciting proposition. As an editor, I feel like my career and my purpose may be changing, but it's not going away.
www.youtube.com/robchristopherwriter
I don't have a Kindle and have no desire for one, but I'm tempted to buy the book and see if I can convert it for use on my Palm T/X, which serves as my reader.