E-Book Reality Check
May 8, 2011
For all interested in e-book self-publishing, a little bit of a reality check. I also suggest you read Joe Konrath's recent blog post on the subject as well. I'm still working my way through the original Washington Post article - it's long - but here are the links.
Here's a quote from Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords:
For all interested in e-book self-publishing, a little bit of a reality check. I also suggest you read Joe Konrath's recent blog post on the subject as well. I'm still working my way through the original Washington Post article - it's long - but here are the links.
Here's a quote from Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords:
The overwhelming number of self-publishing e-authors are consigned to the same fate as their print counterparts: oblivion.
“We have less than 50 people who are making more than $50,000 per year. We have a lot who don’t sell a single book,” says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, a Web site that helped launch indie publishing.“When I load all our numbers on a spreadsheet, it’s the typical power curve,” he says. “On the left, there’s a skinny area of the chart where people are knocking it out of the park. And then we have a very, very long tail off to the right, where some titles sell very few at all.”
posted by Mark Terry at 11:11 AM
2 Comments:
Not everybody is going to have the sales numbers like John Grisham, or James Patterson, but Smashwords, and of course Kindle, give us great opportunty to sell our books. I find it very exciting after doing ebooks and self-publishing publishing for more than a decade. The reality is, we can have the freedom to do it ourselves, and I love it.
No matter what approach you take to trying to sell your writing you still need to to get noticed which is not easy. And that's supposing you can deliver a book that readers want to read once they notice it. Self publication makes it possible for you to put your writing our there without "permission" from agents and publishers. Whether that really increases your chances for success, or mostly increases your chances of cranking out inept garbage that nobody will ever want to buy, I can't say.
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