Category Archives: Success Stories

Success Stories – To Self-Publish or Not To Self-Publish…

USA Today Bestselling author, Kelli Maine writes about the pros and cons of self publishing:

Sometimes you have to take the plunge, but which direction do you go? Not too long ago, this question wasn’t considered valid by “the industry”. If you self-published, it was because you couldn’t get an agent or you couldn’t get an editor to buy your book. But today, the game has turned on its head. You don’t need an agent or an editor to get books in reader’s hands and be considered a legitimate author.

While some very successful self-published authors still seek the validity of having their names on a book in Barnes and Noble, know that getting stocked in a bookstore is NOT a guarantee from even the big six publishers. Take it from someone who has a YA published by a big six publisher and zero books in bookstores. They can’t necessarily sell your book to book buyers any better than you could.

With fewer and fewer brick and mortar stores and the ones that are still around carrying an equal number of t-shirts, toys and One Direction dolls as books, there’s an ever shrinking amount of shelf space and if you can suck in your gut and hold your breath, you might be able to squeeze in between Cassie Clare and Veronica Roth.

You can read the whole article HERE.

 

NaNoWriMo: It’s a matter of trust for some writers

Not really a trust issue for me; I have a whole lot of keys on this keyboard and I’m not afraid to use any of them.  But there’s a different perspective from Lynn Viehl:

Tomorrow it will be one week since writers around the world began working on their National Novel Writing Month book. I always love the first week of writing a new novel, but I always hate it, too. There’s the excitement of beginning a new story, which clashes with the dread that I’ve chosen the wrong idea to write. I’ve probably had the characters in my head for quite some time, and yet I’ve never heard them before on the page (a bit of synethesia there; I hear my characters via the dialogue I write.) Unless I’m working on a series book I’m generally in a new place with a lot of unfamiliar folks doing things unknown to me, and this can be both exhilarating and exhausting.

For some of you this first week has been instructive; it’s given you a chance to engage in a work routine, figure out how much you can comfortably write per day, etc. You’ve discovered self-discipline, internal or external motivation, and how you may best do this thing. For some of you it’s been the exact opposite; you’re fighting with the words and the characters and the concept; the story is getting away from you (or hasn’t appeared at all as you imagined it), and you may even be thinking this was a very bad idea, and/or you’re considering tossing in the towel now before you end up looking/feeling/writing like a fool. Most of you will waffle between these two states or land somewhere in the middle of them for the next twenty-five days.

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Kindle Direct Publishing Announces Kindle MatchBook

Amazon is officially launching Kindle MatchBook in October.  The announcement on their website can be seen HERE.

According to the announcement, “For thousands of qualifying books, your past, present, and future print-edition purchases will soon allow you to buy the Kindle edition for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free.”

The program is making ebook versions of print books purchased new from Amazon, going all the way back to 1995 when Amazon first opened its online bookstore.  This is great news for customers … and it can be great news for indie publishers as well.

Amazon’s official notice to us authors and publishers:

Kindle MatchBook is an innovative new program which enables you to offer your Kindle book at a discount when readers purchase your print book, so you can sell more books.

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Is Self-Publishing here to stay?

This question was recently asked, and some mighty strange answers were provided:

“…Is self publishing here to stay? Hogwash. Self publishing will be here to stay when self published authors start showing up on Good Morning America or The View or the front page of the Huffington Post or Salon or the New York Times Book Review, and I don’t mean well known marketable authors who’ve jettisoned the mainstream publishers without which they’d still be a bunch of nobodies tweeting their asses off about their latest novel. Sure, once in a blue moon an “indie” author will break through into one of those venues, but the major publishers are still dictating what America reads. Go ahead, shoot the messenger…”

And:

“…Excuse me, I forgot this is an ebook group, so let’s add the ebook phenomenon to the print on demand phenomenon! You can publish an ebook for nothing too. Of course, with both ebooks and POD, you could pay a couple of hundred dollars for a professionally designed cover, and a few hundred dollars on up to an editor, and then you could pay I don’t know how much to a blog tour broker, and you could pay to have your book displayed on a web site promoting great reads to people looking for something to read…”

And:

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Wait, WHAT? A self-published author turns down a publisher?

Author Aubrey Rose recently wrote a blog post explaining why she decided to turn down an offer from Amazon Publishing’s Montlake Romance imprint.

Why would a self-published author turn down an overture from a publisher?  An offer that included royalties, even?

From her post:

“…Naturally, I was thrilled. A real publisher wanted my work! I chatted with her briefly on the phone and asked her a ton of questions: What kind of cover would they create for me? What promotions would they do? What control would I have over everything? Although I was excited to work with Amazon, I wanted to know that they would treat my book right. She told me my novel was a great read and very clean writing, and that she would love to “partner” with me in relaunching my book through Amazon’s imprint.

However, she couldn’t guarantee anything – from cover image to pricing to marketing…”

Ah, ha!  Well, that’s par for the publisher course.  But wait, there’s more:

“…The advance they offered was less than I had made in my first month of sales. As I looked through the Montlake catalogue, I saw a mix of breakout hits and complete flops, with some recent books that just had the worst covers imaginable for romance. And I would have to pull my book from every publisher except Amazon…”

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