After much delay, some confusion, an email snafu, and a small blog glitch, KdBlog is finally ready to introduce very special blog guest, Rob Walker. Rob, thanks for your patience and welcome to KdBlog.
![IM000700[1]robnew](http://kdblog.kdwrites.com/.a/6a0120a546aab5970b0133ed408356970b-800wi "IM000700[1]robnew") E-Books
and On Becoming an Indie Author/Publisher
–
Your Ticket to Success in Authorship
E-books and the
electronic readers like the kindle are suddenly legion at schools, at writers
conferences, even at ironically enough bookstores. I will never forget at a
book signing when a lady pushing a baby carriage by stopped long enough to
reach into the carriage to pull out her kindle to proudly flash before me to
ask my wife, Miranda and I, “Are your books on Kindle?” We were ready for her,
both of us replying, “Yes indeed.”
3 Million kindle
e-readers have been sold since December of this year, perhaps more; this is the
number I keep seeing in articles in The New Yorker and Newsweek. ,; the future
is upon us and traditional publishing has reason to be concerned even if they
don’t know it. More and more
authors are taking control of their content and making decisions that impact
the content—what they create.
Traditionally, the
working arrangement between publisher and writer has always been one of you
turn over your creation and the publisher “takes all the risks” as if you are
taking no risks in spending months if not years on a manuscript. However, since
you are taking “no risks” like those faced by the publisher—business risks—the
notion is you are now passive cargo and worth about 8 to 10 percent of each
“unit” sold. Now all decision making is out of your hands, and you are supposed
to go write another book in the event the first one sells well. Meanwhile, the
publisher’s team—all of whom have pensions and paychecks—make the important
decisions of pricing, placing, marketing, packaging, title, down to the font
and colors on the cover.
In other words, all
decisions made by committee, all of whom are making more money on books being
pushed than the author. Think totem pole and the author is at the bottom, and
wasn’t a camel a horse designed by committee? My point is when the book fails,
the guy at the bottom of the totem pole is the one blamed as his/her numbers of
unit sales is too low. So the business model for the author is pretty bleak,
and has been since Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press; ninety nine
percent of all novelists in the world cannot live on what they earn as writers.
Could you live on eight percent of what you sell without health benefits or
pension?
That said, let’s turn
now to the business model for the author who is now an Independent
Author/Publisher—and for starters, the Kindle contract is not an 8-10% cut but
a 70/30 split with the 70 going to the author! Aside from this, the author
makes all the decisions to package and price the book, no title fights, no
arguments over hardcover vs. trade vs. mass market as none of these
designations apply in e-books. The added attraction to doing e-books is control
and a sense of freedom.
Publishers are as interested
in change as glaciers, and for good reason—as they “take all the risks” and
they take the lion’s share of the profits. This is no more evident than now with the sudden growth of
e-readers and e-readership as the big houses like Random House and Penguin and
others are warring with Amazon.com over price-setting. They have always
controlled the prices, and now suddenly millions of avid readers, rabid readers
if you will (as kindle readers can go through forty books in a week) want their
books at less than ten dollars—as Bezos, the head of Amazon promised them—“You
buy a kindle, no kindle book on Amazon for more than 9.99.”
Fact is, Bezos wants
the world to have access to any book you or I want “at the moment” or as close
to NOW as Whispernet can make it happen. This is why Bezos named his device
“Kindle” to “kindle the passion in readers and non-readers alike.”
By using the A-B-C
directions at www.dtp.amazon.com, I now have some 43 novels for sale
online via Kindle Book Store on Amazon.com. The e-books for out of print titles
may require getting a company like www.blueleaf.com to convert an actual book to a scan to
doc, and once you have a doc file it must be converted to HTML—which can be the
most difficult part of the steps involved. If you already have a doc file of
the book in question, you won’t have to send off a book to be scanned. I used
Blue Leaf because their prices are three times cheaper than anyone else doing book
scanning.
The most trouble
involved in the process is converting the file to html and then in reviewing
it, correcting the errors that will inevitably come up in the process of
conversion—sometimes quite time consuming; however, once done and placed up on
your kindle dashboard, the rest is smooth sailing. The results in terms of
sales are astonishing. In the old
business model with traditional publishing wisdom has it that your price the
book at the top end—as high as the market will bear. However, in the e-book
model, the readers expect and demand low end pricing, very low end pricing.
They are savvy readers who know that putting a book onto Kindle is a snap
compared to printing on paper, paying for paper, warehousing paper, overhead
for paper, paying PR people, paying marketing director and his staff, etc. Since all of this “goes away” in e-book
world, the readers expect far cheaper books in the manner Bezos envisioned –
and why not?
It is for this reason
that I listed most of my forty plus books on Kindle as 1.99 and 2.99. These
books at this low end rate are selling like a river flowing, while my three
titles placed up by Harper Collins—priced at exactly the same price as the
paper books at 6.99—are sitting there like three stones (no sale) while my
novels like Children of Salem at 2.99 are my bestselling titles. I earned 400
dollars last month on books priced at the lowest end of the scale, while my
hardcover novel in the same month earned zip. In one year, I earned a mere 141 dollars on my traditionally
published hardcover DEAD ON, while in one month, I earned 400 dollars on my
lowly 1.99 and 2.99 specials. What
does this kind of economic comparison say about the old way of doing things and
the new way of doing things?
The really
disheartening thing that drop’s an author’s hopes and heart like a stone are a
thing called “Returns” – and a writer does not earn out his advance and
royalties until “returns” are “returned” from the booksellers. This is an old
and out of date business element in book publishing and bookselling. It is the only business wherein the
product can be returned for full or close to full price if the buyer cannot
sell the product. Until all “returns” are in, the author is kept in the dark
about sales numbers, and even if he or she can get the sales numbers, there is
always the warning that this is “before” returns. After returns then you can
“believe” your royalty statement. That and AFTER everyone else—like the
distributor of said units—gets their cut. Then the agent takes his or her cut.
Pretty soon what trickles down as leftover change makes its way to the author.
In e-books, a
disappointed reader returns a book, not the bookseller; Amazon.com will never
“return” a book to you, the author/publisher. Essentially, there are no returns—perhaps
eleven in a year, maybe twelve, but it is all done electronically as in credit
to the account. Now then, once the traditional publisher is
DONE with a book or a series and declares they will buy no more titles in a
series or they will discontinue selling a title, what happens to the book or
series? They go out of print; they become Ops which can only be found in used
book stores or via Amazon cooperative used book stores. Out of prints pretty
much means the book is dead and it was believed, up till now, dead
forever—except in used book stores or on “remainder” tables.
In the world of
e-books, guess what. There is no out of prints until which time the author
decides to deep six or kill a book (once again the author decides). No author I
know wants a beloved title to be out of print. No one wants his or her book to
be “Remaindered” either. This is when a book is overstocked in a warehouse when
THEY decide to sell it off at ten or five cents on the dollar to rid it from
the warehouse, so it winds up at Costco or Wal-Mart with a big discount slapped
on it while Costco pays ten cents a book and charges the reader five or seven
bucks, and the author gets zero on such sales. In e-book world, there is no
such animal as a “Remainder” e-book. Next to no returns, no “stripped” covers,
and no remainders, and no warehousing, and no need of a lot of the flotsam of
traditional “dead tree” publishing.
We need a Beetles
song for e-book publishing; something along the lines of Imagine…Imagine a
world without rancor between author and publisher as he is the same person! The
sense of control and freedom comes with “If the book fails, I have only myself
to blame.” Whereas in traditional publishing, “If the book fails, we have no
one to blame but the author (as we put up the advance funds, the costs of
printing, costs of salaries to committees, cost of distribution, cost of
mailings, costs of returns, and eating the remainders—so it must be that the
reading public just does not like this author, so in the end it must be his
fault we did not sell enough units, and 50,000 units is not enough!).
So how can you get
started in becoming an Indie Author/Publisher? Take a close look at www.smashwords.com and give it a shot; put up an article
like my RN wife, Miranda Phillips Walker did on Kicking the Migraine Monkey off
Your Back. She placed it up on Smashwords and then onto Kindle. The process for
each is similar, and working with a short document is a good way to get a feel
for the protocol of becoming your own publisher. It may at first be
frustrating, but go at it a second time, and try to do it when you are not
tired. Go to www.dtp.amazon.com
as this is where the real action is and most readers! Finally, if you are
having too many problems and the confusions and frustrations are too many, go
to your son, daughter, nephew, niece or neighborhood computer geek for a spot
of help. There are also folks online popping up daily who will help you for a price.
As for cover art,
this too can become a problem if you are not proficient with images and placing
lettering over images. I am not, so I get my son onto this project, and he is a
genius with creating cover art (see any one of my titles for example: Killer Instinct,
Disembodied, Children of Salem). Stephen’s found at www.srwalkerdesigns.com but there are many others online who
do this for a price as well. In
the event you want a POD paper book option as well as an e-book, you might want
to work with www.wordclay.com
for a print on demand paperback version, and there I found creating a cover
using their template relatively easy once I got the hang of it. If you approach
all of it as “practice run” with the expectation it may take you at least two
runs at this, you will not become so overly upset with yourself as to quit on
it before you are successful.
Oh my…I just earned
$100 more in the last twenty-four hours from my ebooks! Well enough of that!
This about covers it. If you have any questions, please leave a comment!
Robert W. Walker
Award-winning author and graduate of Northwestern University ROBERT W. WALKER created his highly acclaimed INSTINCT and EDGE SERIES between 1982 and 2005. Rob has since written his award-winning historical series featuring Inspector Alastair Ransom with CITY FOR RANSOM (2006), SHADOWS IN THE WHITE CITY (2007), and CITY OF THE ABSENT (2008). This history-mystery hybrid straddles the Chicago World’s Fair circa 1893, and has had enthusiastic reviews from Chicago historians and the Chicago Tribune, which likened “the witticism to Mark Twain, the social consciousness to Dickens, and the ghoulish atmosphere to Poe!” Rob’s most recent book is DEAD ON, a PI’s tale of revenge as a reason to live—set in modern day Atlanta. An unsold but completed novel entitled CUBA BLUE features a female detective in Havana who investigates a multiple murder of three doctors from America and Canada (co-authored with Lyn Pokabla). The current work in progress is CURSE of the TITANIC, another theory of why Captain Edward Smith sank the Titanic as I put a plague-spreading monster on board (two concurrent stories of present day and historical suspense and horror). Rob’s completed, next historical suspense is CHILDREN of SALEM, while an historical romance and suspense novel, it pulls no punches in exposing the evil and the many sad truths of any theocracy— this one surrounding the court and people who allowed neighbor to hang neighbor in the Salem Witchcraft episode in grim 1692 New England, which one professional editor remarked on: Only Robert Walker could make this work—romance amid the infamous witch trials. For more on Rob and his published works, see www.robertwalkerbooks.com , www.HarperCollins.com , www.acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com , www.makeminemystery.blogspot.com , www.dirtydeeds-advice.blogspot.com . |
