Thanks guys, good to be back. I'm sure we could all do with a little less hop and a little more relaxation Oh, to be the idle rich. But, back to the topic at hand - how are sales going Scout? And how do people generally measure 'success' for ebook sales - in volume sold, or in money raised etc? The reviews on Amazon are all very positive, so that must be an indicator that you've done a great job with it.
A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. – The Teachings of Don Juan
Hey Jarrod. I don't know how sales are going yet. I went with an outfit called Book Baby who took my manuscript and converted it and distributed it. That happened a little over a month or so ago and I won't know until the first sales report comes in mid-July. I think it's selling a few copies a day or every other day. I sort of went into this half blind. There are other outfits like Vook (Publisher Weekly spin-off) that now offer day to day sales tracking as a feature which would be nice so I might looking into a place like that next time.
As far as measure how well you are doing that is calculated by total units sold, like in the music biz. Esp. in e-books where the prices are all over the place. I knowingly had it uploaded without a way to get it reviewed by some big places, or even Portland-centric places so I don't expect much yet. I need to start talking to publishing media gatekeepers, see if I get lucky. If not, I'm thinking of defacing a statue in a big Portland public park with red paint. I can't decide on Lewis or Clark. It can't be Sacajawea (I love that her name is in all the spell checkers....) because she is too cool. I mean, Sacajawea! But yeah, it's not anywhere close to breaking even. You could say it's pretty far underwater right now. I would need to sell a couple thousand copies at least to do that.
My brother Marcus The Novelist mentioned that more and more "mainstream" authors are turning to some self-publishing mechanism via Amazon and doing their own marketing. As bookstores buy fewer and fewer copies and eBooks continue to rise, it's a riskier but potentially more lucrative approach... and one in which the author has total control over his or her own message. This can be very useful.
Speaking as a person who runs a website and was dangerously obsessed with daily traffic figures until Jen, the Wisest Person In the World, talked some sense into me, I'd say a monthly report would be much less heartburn-inducing. If you can see movement every day, you'll look every day, and every day can be ruined that way. The main thing is you've got a beautiful, professionally-published novel that's exceptionally written and quite fun and gripping. I actually need to pop over to Amazon and do a review myself.
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
Marcus is right. In a way, self-publishing can really make money because you pocket most of the income yourself. Especially if you have a presence already in the market. If a writer is already "made", i.e. considered a no-brainer read, it must be really tempting to walk away from a publisher who pockets enormous amounts of profit. Still having a contract is good cause you at least have a production and marketing partner to some degree though maybe the cost might be too much in the end and lots of writers pretty much get cut loose once their book comes out anyway. E-books are great because that infamous "long tail" is infinite now. Bookstores will yank a low mid-list author off the shelves sometimes within weeks if they don't take right off. E-books are right there until the internet ends. Also lots of writers have many short stories lying around and can put those up for .99 a shot, not to mention the infamous backlist.
I hear you about the daily traffic fix. I would be addicted to it. Right now I even track my "best-selling" number on Amazon. They change it several times a day and you can see that there are sales by how small or large the number is. In this case, the smaller the number the better, with anything below a 100 being pretty sweet. There is some mysterious algorithm Amazon uses that factors you book against others so I'm not sure what any of it really means.
But yeah, at least I have the book out in the marketplace. Please, dude, review that bitch.
Now that google is coming out with a tablet priced to compete head on with the Amazon Fire, I'm keeping a close eye on that one to see how well it does with being used as an e-reader. I wouldn't mind owning one assuming it could do that well and also be compatible with a lot of the mobile games currently developed for the android mobile OS.
All very interesting! If you don't mind me asking, Scout, how microscopic with the planning did you go during pre-production? I've tried starting writing a couple of short-forms and long-forms, but lack the discipline to finish - it's really feat what you've done. And I downloaded my copy of Finding Miranda for my iPad/iPhone over the weekend. Now I just have to make some time to read it.
A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. – The Teachings of Don Juan
Thanks for the download, Jarrod. I hope you enjoy it.
I'm terrible at outlining novels. Usually I just start with a scene that sticks in my head, like a murder at a rest stop, or a remote hospital in the California mountains, or a lake in the middle of a dark forest. In Finding Miranda I had a scene of a boy skipping school and discovering an old abandoned house he didn't know existed and then finding the dead girl. From there I just sort of write what I see in my head. This approach makes for a lot of rewriting though. Also I never use the same character twice so that majorly slows me down. I have about 7 or 8 novel ms laying around, I guess, meaning none of them in print form. The writing part is just a matter of sitting down each day and going at it for a set number of hours. I really like to do it so it's nothing I have to make myself do.
Some writers do very detailed outlines. Others are like me and just sort jump into it and hope they figure it out. I know writers who if they don't have it in a couple of drafts just toss it and start another one until something clicks. I can't do that. Once I start a story I fuss until I get it close.
Jarrod said
Do you have any plans for your other 7 or 8 manuscripts?
Yes I have plans for some of them. I have a couple I really like a lot and I'll be getting them edited for grammar once I have the funds. They are fun action genre books I wrote at the end of the nineties, early 2000s, serial killer books with crazy split personality characters, art forgers in Paris, CIA in the 1960s, running 600 to 800 pages long with twisty plots and lots of locations. A few others, maybe under a pen name just to see what happens. There's at least one I'm probably just going to pretend doesn't exist. Or I could get all dramatic and burn it on the beach some drunken night. I've tried rewriting it but it just makes my head hurt, it's so dull.
EDIT: An old friend of mine wrote me recently, having read this book. She said reading it was like playing a video game, like watching the world from just behind the main character's head. I thought that was funny. She's recently retired from a career as a computer programmer and had gotten her start trying to get old DOS games to play, messing with the autoexec.bat files, config.sys and such and been fascinated by scripts and taught herself from there.
Colour me inspired, Scout - for too long I've wanted to write a novel-length manuscript, but succumbed to a lack of determination and discipline. No more - life is too short. I've had story ideas kicking around in my head for a while, and I'm going to use you as a shining example to get the writing done!
Thanks man
A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. – The Teachings of Don Juan
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