Books

You Can Become a Kindle Millionaire, Part 19

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MY GUN 3  This was another record month for my Kindle sales. Sales were up across the board — in March, I sold 1360 books, in April I sold 1798, and this month I sold 1919. I earned $1415 in April and this month I earned $1543.

THE WALK continues to be my bestselling title. I sold 629 copies in April and 720 this month. 

THE MAN WITH THE  IRON-ON BADGE is a distant second, with 234 copies sold, exactly the same number as last month. How bizarre is that? 

GUILTY, one of my re-branded VIGILANTE novels, moved up to #3 with 184 copies sold compared to 125 last month. 

There was one bit of troubling news…MY GUN HAS BULLETS went from selling 264 copies last month to 166 this month… I have no idea why sales plunged by 100 copies. That's a dramatic drop. I may need to try a new cover and see if that will stop the slide.

This will be the last month of Kindle sales under the old royalty system. Starting July 1, my royalties will go from 35% to 70% of each sale. I can't wait.

The Booksigning Song

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Here's my friend author Parnell Hall's classic, and painfully true, ode to booksignings, "Signing in the Waldenbooks," which is nearly as well known and beloved as his many books. He's been singing his very funny song at conferences and booksignings for years…so long, in fact, that he's still plugging away and Waldenbooks isn't (I think I first heard him sing it at a Left Coast Crime conference in Boulder Colorado in 1996).

Blue-Eyed Devil is Wide-Eyed Awful

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Blueeyeddevil  I'm a big fan of Robert B. Parker's  early Virgil & Everett westerns (APPALOOSA,RESOLUTION, etc.) but the latest, BLUE EYED DEVIL, is Parker at his worst. For starters, it's hardly a book at all, more like a long short story fattened up with large fonts, three-page chapters, and lots of white space. 

Professional gun hands Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch return to Appaloosa, the setting for the first (and best) book in the series and spend most of their time sitting on one porch or another sipping whiskey and talking about how smart, skilled, capable, and all around marvelous they are. Occasionally, they get up and shoot someone. The plotting is episodic, improvised, and often inept. For example, at one point, their old friend Pony Flores, a inscrutable and wise half-breed Indian, shows up on the run from the law with his silent brother but isn't worried about being caught because, like Virgil and Everett, he's so damn good.

"Anybody on your trail?" Virgil said.

Pony shook his head.

"Only man can track Pony Flores," he said, "is me."

"Good," Virgil said.

But a few pages later, the law shows up looking for him anyway. Virgil quizzes the trackers.

"What makes you think he's here?" Virgil said.

"Folks in Van Buren spotted them, couple weeks back, heading south. This is the next town."

Virgil nodded.

So Pony's brilliant, untrackable method for eluding pursuers is to go in a straight line from one town to the next, making sure that he's seen.  But Virgil and Everett continue to regard Pony as a master tracker and eluder anyway.

An editor might have caught that bit of insipidness and, perhaps, also the half-dozen repetitions of the phrase "when the balloon goes up" throughout the book, but it's been a while since anybody has bothered editing Parker…and that disinterest and laziness continues even after his death.

Parker relies on all of his tropes in this book, repeating banter that I swear I've read in all of his books and lifting situations whole from previous entries in the series (for instance, once again Everett finds a sweet, warm-hearted, still beautiful hooker willing to have sex with him for free because she gets so hot hearing him talk about how competent and marvelous he and Virgil are)

Parker has succeeded in killing this series with his own disinterest the same way he did with the Jesse Stone books. Both series started out great and then he seemingly gave up making any effort, letting them become thinly-written and loosely conceived parodies of themselves. It's a sad thing to see and even more painful to read. At least it's over fast. I doubt BLUE EYED DEVIL is even 30,000 words.

I truly hope that the two upcoming SPENSER novels that Parker finished before his death are a return to form and not, as I fear, a sad coda to a once-great writer's career.

SHAKEN Shakes Things Up

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Shaken_CoverArt  Joe Konrath is breaking new ground on the e-front yet again. Today Amazon announced that Amazon Encore is publishing SHAKEN, his latest Jack Daniels novel, first as a $2.99 ebook in October and then as a traditional trade paperback in February 2011. 

Up until now, Amazon Encore has only reprinted books that didn't make a big splash in their initial release and had fallen out of print. This is the first time they are publishing an original novel. 

Joe took the deal after Hyperion dropped the Jack Daniels series and no other publisher stepped up to publish the new book…and after his extraordinary success selling his other unpublished manuscripts as ebooks on Amazon. 

There's no doubt Amazon has noticed how well Joe's books are doing on the Kindle. From their POV, this deal had to be a no-brainer (though I suspect they would have liked to charge more than $2.99 but less than $9.99 for the ebook).  It certainly was a no-brainer from Joe's side. On top of that, Amazon will find no better cheerleader for the Kindle than Joe, which should lift up sales of all Kindle titles across the board as he works tirelessly to promote SHAKEN. In the Amazon press release, Joe says:

“My Kindle readers have been incredibly faithful fans and I’m excited to be able to release the Kindle edition of ‘Shaken’ several months before the physical version is available to purchase,” said Konrath. “Since it’s easier, faster and cheaper to create an e-book than it is a physical book, Kindle owners will get to read the seventh Jack Daniels before everyone else. The ability for authors to reach fans—instantly and inexpensively with a simple press of a button—is the greatest thing to happen to the written word since Gutenberg.”

He elaborated in on the deal, and why he took it, in more detail on his blog. He said, in part:

Traditional publishers had a chance to buy SHAKEN last year. They passed on it. Their loss. Their big loss. Their big, huge, monumental, epic fail.[…] I signed a print deal with a company that can email every single person who has every bought one of my books through their website, plus millions of potential new customers. I've never had that kind of marketing power behind one of my novels. I'd be an idiot not to do this.

I think it was only a matter for time before Amazon reached out to Joe to aggressively capitalize on his success instead of passively (they have been getting the lion's share of the money on his ebooks by doing nothing but hosting him). 

Joe is calling this deal a defining moment in publishing and so are his many fans. I'm not so sure that I'd go that far, but it was certainly inevitable. I think the only real difference between what Joe has been doing up with his ebooks and this Amazon Encore deal is that now he will have the full promotional might of Amazon behind him. As an e-venture, this will surely be a massive success, but as a print-publishing venture, I am not so sure. There's no doubt, though, that it's a win-win for Joe, who is bound to see the sales of his current slate of ebooks skyrocket as a result of the Amazon push for SHAKEN (including, ironically, the books still held by Hyperion).

UPDATE 5-18-2010: I woke up this morning to a bunch of emails asking me why this is a significant development in publishing. How is this any different, they ask, than what Joe is already doing self-publishing  his unpublished work on the Kindle?

In essence, Amazon Encore is a publisher that has picked up Joe's mid-list series from Hyperion. They are publishing the book first as an ebook then later as a trade paperback. The difference here is that the publisher is also the largest bookstore on earth and will put their considerable promotional and marketing might behind his book. But there's a bit more to it than that. Here's how Joe explained it in the comments section of his blog post:

"In this case Lee, it's a bit more complicated.

This bookseller is the number one online bookseller in the world, and they've created the number one dedicated ereading device.

Publishers need authors to write books, then booksellers to sell those books.

In this case, Amazon owns the bookstore, and the platform for the ebooks. And by cutting out distributors, publishers, and brick and mortar bookstores, they can offer a professional product faster and cheaper–and give the author better royalties–than a traditional publisher could.

In other words, Amazon is cutting out just about all the players in the traditional publishing industry, and directly connecting reader with author. 

If ebooks, and Amazon, continue to gain popularity, will there still be a need for the Big Six? Or would authors do better by either self-publishing, or dealing directly with the sellers of the new technology? I think this is pretty significant in the publishing world." 


UPDATE: Jason Pinter, author and former editor, shared his worries on The Huffington Post about what this deal means for the future. He said, among other things:

Amazon and other online retailers have made it incredibly easy to publish books on their servers. They give each author the ability to format books price them how the authors themselves see fit. There is certain freemarket sensibility here that is inspiring, and in a way each author becomes the proprietor of their own small business. However, I feel that the example of Konrath will inspire other, less successful and even less talented authors to publish their works online. They might see the Kindle as a bypass, a way to showcase their works that the Evil, Stupid Publishing Overlords in New York were too blind to realize are, in fact, literary masterpieces.

Now, publishing is not a perfect industry. And the examples of books that were rejected numerous times or even self-published that went on to become great successes are many. Because book publishing is a wholly subjective business–the only books that are published are the ones that editors truly love (let's ignore celebrity and cynical publishing). Many wonderful books are rejected because one or more editors simply didn't 'get' it. There are plenty of books I passed on as an editor that went on to be published to tremendous critical and/or commercial success. Every editor has their list of books that they kick themselves for having passed on. That is a flaw inherent in the system, only now it is easier than ever for authors to circumvent the system.

The Ark: A Kindle Success Story

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Cover_theark_large  On Joe Konrath's blog, author Boyd Morrison shares the amazing story of how he turned his Kindle ebooks into a four-book print deal, kicking off with the launch today of THE ARK. His story is unusual, and inspiring, but newbie writers should read it carefully before thinking they can easily replicate his success. 

One thing he didn't do was go to a print-on-demand vanity press, and for reasons beyond just the outrageous, and unreasonably, high cost and false promises:

I decided to put all three books on the Kindle store just to see what happened. Irene (Goodman, his agent) was fully supportive of the plan. I had nothing to lose.

What I didn’t do was self-publish in print because I would have something to lose. From the beginning, my goal was to get a traditional publishing deal (remember this was in early 2009, which seems not so long ago, but the ebook market was still in its infancy, and making a living from self-published ebooks seemed like a pipe dream). If I had published print books, not only would it be a hassle I didn’t want to deal with, but it would also mean my novels would need ISBNs.

ISBNs are international standard book numbers that can be tracked by publishers. If my sales were low, publishers would be able to see that and might not even want to look at my next book. But with ebooks on the Kindle, you don’t need an ISBN. If my sales were bad, no one would ever have to know. And if they were good, I could use that data as evidence that readers were interested in my books.

[…]Would I recommend self-publishing ebooks? It depends what your goals are. If you want to see your book in print, as I did, I wouldn’t choose that path as your first option. I was in a unique limbo because I had an agent and blurbs from bestselling authors, but I couldn’t get a publisher. Once my sales jumped, my agent was able to act on it immediately. If I had to start the agent search from scratch at that point, it would have been much more difficult.

Good luck doing that if you, unlike Boyd, don't already have power-house representation. But the e-book market has changed. It's actually possible to make good money on an ebook. So why go thhe print route at all? Here's Boyd's take:

My goal was always to be traditionally published. I wanted to get my books in front of as many readers as possible, and while ebooks are the fastest growing part of the market, they still represent only 3-5% of all books sold. If I wanted to reach a broad market, I’d have to be in print, and the only way to get into most bookstores is through a traditional publisher. Plus, foreign rights, which represent a surprisingly large segment of the market, would have been virtually impossible to sell without a deal with a traditional publisher. And as much as I love ebooks, there’s still no substitute for holding a print book in your hands to make you feel like a real author.

I agree and am not ready myself to forsake print for the digital publication. 

But the publishing world is changing very fast. If you'd told me a year ago that I could actually make $18,000-a-year off my out-of-print work on the Kindle (or potentially $55,000 with the new royalty rate), I would never have believed it. 

So some of my attitudes are changing as a result. I am beginning to rethink the advice that I've always given aspiring writers not to self-publish their novels. I still believe that going the vanity press route is a huge mistake…but posting on the Kindle cuts the print-on-demand scammers entirely out of the equation and all the risk of getting swindled (you DON'T need Lulu or Authorhouse or any other vanity press to get your book on the Kindle or iPad, no matter what they those self-publishers may tell you). So why not do it?

On the plus side, Kindle/ebook publishing can be cost-free and, if your book is really good, and you are very lucky, you could make some real money…and, perhaps, attract the attention of a major publisher. 

But if your book is awful, and truly "not ready for prime time," you can embarrass yourself, create negative word-of-mouth, and potentially seriously harm the reputation you are seeking to build. 

I am still thinking it all through. That said, there's no question that these are very interesting, potentially game-changing times in the publishing business. I am very interested to see how Joe's two new horror novels, published for the first time on the Kindle, sell and whether the royalties match what he could  have earned with a print contract.

You Can Become a Kindle Millionaire, Part 18

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Royalties0430.1110
 On April 17, I predicted in a post on this blog that I'd earn $1400 in Kindle royalties this month. I was right. I earned $1416. It was, by far, my best Kindle month since I began this experiment eleven months ago. Last month, I sold 1360 books…this month I sold 1798, an increase of 438 books and $400 in royalties. (Click on my royalty statement for a larger view).

BADGE 3  I credit the surge this month to three things:

1.   my bet with Joe Konrath, which resulted in new covers and titles for my Vigilante novels. It was a bet I was thrilled to lose.

2.  raising the price of THREE WAYS TO DIE from .99 cents to 1.99. 

3. adding a Kindle edition of my out-0f-print book THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE to my available titles. 

Sales of the VIGILANTE books (now known, thanks to Joe, as The Jury Series) shot up enormously. For example, the previously titled .357 VIGILANTE #4: KILLSTORM sold  14 copies last month. This month, by rebranding the book GUILTY, I sold 125 copies.  I now have someone re-reading the manuscripts of all four books, correcting the conversion errors that have bedeviled me since I posted them a few months ago.

Last month, THREE WAYS TO DIE sold 201 priced at 99 cents and earned $70. This month, I sold 169 and earned $103. Fewer sales, but higher royalties. I can live with that.
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THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE, priced at $2.99, quickly became my second best-selling title, if not in volume (234 copies sold) certainly in profits ($245). Those sales reassure me that my bestselling title, THE WALK, will do fine when, in late June, I raise the price from $1.99 to $2.99 to take advantage of Amazon's new royalty formula, which will give me a 70% royalty instead of the 35% I get now.
By the way, this month THE WALK  sold  629 copies, earning me $440 (last month I sold 575 copies). A new high.
Beyond project4  

Changing the cover and title of BEYOND THE BEYOND boosted sales a bit. Last month, under the BEYOND title, I sold 73 copies. This month, rebranded as DEAD SPACE, I sold 92.

I can't wait to see how things shake out in July once my royalty doubles. Will my earning, if not my volume of sales, go up? Or will it level off? Or will the bubble burst and sales slowly begin to deteriorate? I don't know, but no matter what happens, I am already a winner. As I keep saying, this is all found money on out-of-print books that were packed away in my garage or in a dark corner of my hard-drive.

Cover Comparison

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Which cover do you like better for my Mom's Kindle ebook Active Senior Living. Do you prefer the current one:

Moms Cover New

Or this new one?

Activeseniorliving3
Or should we start from scratch?

UPDATE 5/1/10:  We listened. We scrapped the new one and stuck with the old one. So what do you think of this one? Does it capture the humor and the heart?

Momactive
  

Walking the Walk, Talking the Talk

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159414110X  My brother Tod had the following conversation at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books:

A couple walked up to me after a panel on Sunday and looked very excited.

Man: We always come to the panels you're on!

Me: Oh, thanks, I appreciate it.

Man: We just loved The Walk! [a book my brother Lee wrote]

Me: Oh, uh, yeah, it's a good book.

Woman: Will you ever write another book like The Walk?

Me: Probably not.

Man: Is it even still in print?

Me: Yes. It's sold over 2 million copies. So I would think so.

Man: Really?

Me: Really.

Woman: It's so different from your other books.

Me: You think so?

Woman: It's nothing like Living Dead Girl.

Me: Well, I wrote The Walk when I was in recovery.

Man:

Woman:

Me: So, I was a different person with that book. 

Me at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

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As usual, I had a fantastic time at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I got to talk with so many writers, including Hannah Dennison, Brett Battles, Denise Hamilton, Gregg Hurwitz, John Wirth, Jane Smiley, Doug Lyle, Paul Levine, Cara Black, Joseph Wambaugh, Gary Phillips, Megan Abbott, Alex Espinoza, Cecil Castellucci, Tim Maleeny, Robert Gregory Browne, and Robert Dugoni, to name just a few. I also talked to tons of readers and bought a bunch of signed books, including "Model Home" by Eric Puchner, "Up in the Air" by Walter Kirn, and "A Bad Day for Sorry" by Sophie Littlefield. Here I am with my brother Tod and William Rabkin at the Mystery Bookstore booth.

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And here's Christopher Rice, me, and Joseph Wambaugh.

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And here I am with Todd Reynolds, who is going to be one of the stars of the short film I am shooting in Owensboro KY this fall.

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I moderated a panel with Gayle Lynds, Christopher Rice and David Corbett and it went great. It was a nice mix of laughter, good advice, and knowledgeable observations about the craft and business of writing. I think we had as much fun as the audience. I hope I get to moderate another panel next year.

The Clock is Ticking and the Hands Are Dripping Blood

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Vigilante 3  Marty McKee talks about my book .357 VIGILANTE #3: WHITE WASH (now available in a Kindle edition under the title PAYBACK) He didn't like it as much as the earlier books in the series, but still found some things to enjoy. He says, in part: 

The book's highlights are its action sequences, which work very well, even though some of the villains' motivations seem weak. When Macklin is introduced in the first chapter while tinkering with his new gadget-equipped 1959 Cadillac, I turned the pages in great anticipation waiting for him to use that sucker (which he does in a bloody scene that could have come right out of an Executioner novel).