So, when I see the name of a famous author “blurbing” a book, I ignore it. I much prefer independent sources such as Midwest Book Review, newspapers, etc.

I currently have mixed feelings about the Kindle, one reason is because of the price point of the books. I’ve read several comments that such pricing may make it tougher in the future for publishers and authors to profit. Maybe the lower margains can be made up in quantity because people will find them affordable, have to wait and see.

I also think the price structure is deceptive in a way. It sort of makes buyers think that the cost of paper, printing etc. is much higher than it really is. It doesn’t take much to get print costs down to only a few dollars, even though cover prices are in the 10-15 range. That being the case, the price really doesn’t need to be that different from the print version.

It would be nice if content could dictate price as it often does in the info marketing world for the regular publishing world too. It will be interesting to see where things go in the next few years.

Cheryl Pickett
http://www.publishinganswers.com

James, I’m glad you found my story encouraging. I’d say if you have current Word files of your books, the Kindle conversion isn’t a big deal. My problem was that I had made changes in the manuscript in InDesign, that weren’t in the Word version.

I don’t think owning or not owning a Kindle is the reason to put your books up there. The reason is, as April says, that people will buy them. In fact I’d heard from other authors who had Kindle editions that they were selling. And then i got intrigued with the whole ecological benefit thing. So that’s why I did it.

Like any new technology, there’s a certain amount of “threshold paranoia” as we call it around here. That is, nervousness about crossing a threshold into a new experience. If you aren’t sure what you are getting yourself into, you hesitate to take those first steps.

Your story is encouraging and helpful to anyone who is considering putting their books into Kindle format. It is nice to know that a real person who isn’t a computer science major (you aren’t, right?) can take this task on and hope to succeed.

Unfortunately, owning a Kindle is not in our near future, so it is hard to get excited about converting our eight self-published books to it. That’s no excuse, of course, but it definitely reduces our enthusiasm for the format. Our problem is that we live in the sticks where cell signals are hard to come by, so we wouldn’t be able to use the Kindle from our home. Nevermind that fact that the device is outrageously overpriced.

Anyway, thanks for your posting, and thank you to April too for your comments. I’m sure your words will encourage many indie authors to take those first steps over the Kindle threshold.

I broke into self-publishing, or as I call it, indie authorship, through the Kindle. It was a purposeful, strategic move on my part, and one I recommend to other indie authors. Here’s why…

First, Kindle owners are necessarily avid readers. Second, they are also necessarily early adopters: open-minded and willing to take a risk on something new. Third, they are a limited and fairly contained population, which makes it easier to target your promotional efforts. Fourth, while Kindle editions of popular, mainstream books are being added to Amazon’s catalog all the time, the overall number of Kindle titles is very, very small compared to Amazon’s catalog of books overall; this makes it much easier to climb into Kindle bestseller lists than it is to scale such heights among Amazon’s hard-copy book offerings. Fifth, because sales figures and reviews are displayed across all editions of a given book on Amazon, it’s possible to build up some momentum for a POD, hard-copy book release by racking up some respectable sales and positive reviews on a Kindle edition for weeks or months in advance. Finally, publishing a Kindle edition via Amazon’s DTP doesn’t require a great deal of technical skill, and it’s *free*.

I published both of my novels in Kindle editions first, and in both cases the strategy has really paid off. Each time one of them hit a top 10 list in the Kindle store I was able to fire off a press release, raising awareness of, and anticipation for, the novels among non-Kindle owners. Once each book had received enough reviews, I proceeded with trade paperback publication—announced via additional press releases, naturally!

It’s true that you don’t tend to make a lot of money on Kindle editions…I think I earn about $2 per copy sold. But that’s comparable to a mainstream author’s royalty on a typical trade paperback, and since my Kindle editions are first and foremost marketing tools for my trade paperbacks, I view any royalties earned on them as pure gravy anyway.

I wrote the Kindle how-to as a result of my own frustration in trying to find a clear, complete, step-by-step guide on the subject. Later, I experienced the same frustration in prepping my manuscripts for POD publication. Since I have many years’ experience as a technical writer, I decided to fill the void with a reference book of my own, The IndieAuthor Guide. The 300pp book includes the Kindle how-to (with more illustrations), and covers just about every other topic related to indie authorship: editing, formatting, choosing a publisher, designing your own book cover, creating your ‘brand’, promotion, etc. etc. Even though the book is now in print and available on Amazon, I’ve left some of its content on my web site in the form of free pdf Guides, like the Kindle how-to, and I’m in the process of serializing as much of the book as possible on my blog (aprillhamilton.blogspot.com) as well.

As a result of giving so much of it away for free, even though the Amazon reviews are stellar I’m not selling many copies of The IndieAuthor Guide—and because it’s heavily illustrated it’s not a good candidate for the Kindle, either. But at this point my priority with the book is raising awareness among would-be indie authors, convincing them they *can* do this, that it doesn’t have to take a lot of money nor even a great deal of technical skills, and showing them exactly how. Someday I hope my book will overtake Poynter’s as “The Bible” of self-publishing among indie authors, but a lot more people need to know it exists first.

As the indie author movement fares, so fare we all: writers and readers alike.
- A

But at some point in life, people have to grow up and live their own damn lives, instead of insisting on sucking on the mainstream acceptability teet.

I went through the traditional publisher battles for 4 years on the first book (a memoir, personal account not favored by traditionals) before going with GreatUnpublished, and when I finished my novel in 2005, BookSurge had taken over and I liked their agenda enough that I said screw the traditionals and published with them again. I have also revised the first book 3 times and very little expense–try doing that with a traditional and some of the other POD publishers.

There is another thing I like about BookSurge–they haven’t blown any smoke at me, promising me I’m going to be on the NYT Best Seller list in a week or so, or that my book is going to be made into a movie, or any of the other pie in the sky claims so prevalent in the self publishing industry at present. And when I have occasion to call them, I’m not talking to somebody in India or the Philippines.

When they merged or were acquired by Amazon, I automatically got the benifit of that exposure, sales have just about doubled and although I’m not yet ready to retire to a villa in the South of France (near the yacht) I’m happy as if I had good sense.

Chuck Lunsford
Author of “Departure Message” and “Boxcar Down: The Albanian Incident”

Excuse me, but if Franklin, Jefferson and Adams had believed that, you and I would be singing “God Save the Queen.”

Just so you know, that book you’ll get back from LSI won’t be the one the bookseller returned. They’ll trash that and print you a new copy. So, you won’t have to worry whether it will be fit for sale, it will. On the other hand, the original book has not only added yet more to the carbon footprint but the resources used to create it will have been wasted.

Are we really SO desperate to receive the grudging acceptance of booksellers that we aren’t willing to band together and say “not on your life?” It’s one thing to agree to accept returns on a small, individual order if it means the difference between an author being able to hold a signing or not, but I do not and will not contribute to the appalling waste that is returns.

And anyone who agrees with me is welcome to contact me at zumayabooks(at)gmail.com to discuss how we small publishers CAN start a movement.

As Franklin said back when the colonists were giving Parliament the kiss-off, “If we do not hang together, then we shall surely hang separately.” Returns are an abomination, both environmentally and with regard to the economic impact they have on inventory-free publishers whose COGS is higher than that of traditional, offset-using publishers.

Booksellers aren’t required to order ten copies of a book when two would do. They’ve just gotten so addicted to being able to do it and ship the excess back for credit they can then apply to their next order they’ve come to accept it as a reasonable way to finance stocking. I’m not prepared to subsidize their business at the expense of mine, and most particularly at the expense of the authors who trust me to see they are fairly compensated for their hard work.

The rules of the old guard are barked at us indie authors and publishers constantly, yet time and again I find mainstream books whose quality doesn’t come near to these supposedly high ’standards’. Still, traditionalists will dismiss an indie book as an instantly recognizable, sub-par effort merely because it doesn’t hew to industry standards for layout, fonts and other immaterial details—never mind how good or tightly-edited the content is, because they’ll never go so far as to read it.

In my how-to reference book on self-publishing, I tell it like it is: the only people who know or care what industry standards are with respect to layout and typesetting are people in the mainstream publishing industry. There are just a handful of acceptable fonts, for example, and they’re nearly all holdovers from the old days of moveable typesetting machines. Any graphic artist can tell you that fonts are, in and of themselves, design elements that can enhance the content they convey. I say, so long as your text is easy to read, why not use Euphemia for your sci-fi epic? Why not go with Garamond for your romance? I myself use Tahoma all the time. And why not set your gutters wider than industry ’standard’? I think the industry standard for gutters is too narrow (probably to reduce page count and save money on material costs), because I’ve ruined many a thick paperback’s binding when I had to forcibly flatten it so I could see the characters running right up to the gutter. I suppose a mainstream publishing insider would immediately diss and dismiss my books as ‘vanity’ dreck based on my font and layout choices alone, but who cares what publishing insiders think? My target audience is readers among the general public, and I’ve gotten very positive feedback from them about the superior readability of my books.

It’s at least a little maddening to read excerpts from Frey’s book, and knowing his history, see him once again a publisher’s darling, while we indies are out here slaving away, striving to exceed the quality of the mainstream, and still getting so much scorn. Oh well; you know what they say: you can always spot the pioneers, they’re the ones with arrows in their backs.
http://www.aprillhamilton.com

You’ve also mentioned the stigma attached to books published any way but traditionally, and this too is unfortunate fallout from the subsidy/fee based arena. I hope authors will continue to stand up for themselves so that we can finally get the same kind of respect that indie scriptwriters, musicians and artists have achieved without apology.

Cheryl Pickett

Mainstream publishing–the whole gammit–agents, editors, booksellers, etc. go for the dollar and path of least resistance. As an Economist, I understand to some extent, but I think quality and not just celebrity–the easy out–can generate profits.

Sadly, publishing has gone the way of most things–money first, quality/value last. Which is one reason this country is fast becoming a third world country.

I suspect many of the old school will fall away in the next two years. Face it, books are discretionary in a recession and library’s budgets will be cut with tax (real estate!) revenues. The shake-up of traditional agents, authors, and editors will be a positive for the industry. It will weed out the old school and make room for the new.

For me, I’m publishing my paper back of the first book with Dog Ear in a month, and my total cost per book will be $4.52 ($1.28 base + $0.02 per page). Selling price is $14.95 Retail, $8.99 through Amazon and several other distributors who I have worked out a special price agreement with.

At minimum, I’ll make $4.47 off each book as profit. Try that kind of “Royalty” with a traditional publisher! So I don’t understand why I would to give up my rights to my work, and loose money just so my book can be printed by some big excuse for a company that could care less about me, and care all about themselves.

So it may be true that most self-published authors don’t make as much money as one who publish through a traditional press, but its not because of the cost of the book or you getting cheated in royalties, its a matter of # of books sold.

It the same argument made in the film industry with Indie films vs. big budget studio films. Sure, most Hollywood film suck royalty, and quit a few indie films rock, but few will point out how nice it is to be an indie filmmaker!

Indie Filmmakers are shunned by hollywood, and most movie watchers carry some stigma toward them.

My view for the reason this is (in both industries) is that since Both Non-Traditional presses and Indie film have there very, very bad (but very few) apples they make the rest of us look bad to the general audience. Traditional Publishers and Hollywood studios carefully screen what they release, and most of the time if its bad, it either gets fixed or sent away, something that usually does not happy in the Non-Traditional and Indie Film community.

My argument on profits from books published with Non-Traditional publishers is this: While it is true that an offset printers cost’s much less to print, cost of the book is not the only reason people don’t make money in non-traditional publishers. What does make the difference? Advertising! The reason traditional books make more money and sell more copies is because Scholastic has millions of dollars to market a book, Self Publishers don’t. It had nothing to do with where it came from, its a matter that no one knows it exists to buy!

Look at it kind of like the Film industry, The little Indie guys makes a movie for $1 Million. Hell, this movie is the next Lord of the Rings! However, since he doesn’t have $132 million to market that film, it will never reach the potential of Lord of the Rings. Sometimes, however, word of mouth and good reviews is enough to skyrocket the films (or books) into better standing than most traditionally published books.

My view on getting your books into shops: IMHO (I don’t have any evidence to back it up) most people buy books online anyway. They are #1 Cheaper and #2 Easier to find and order. Let me tell you a true story here: 3 Days ago I wanted to buy the 5th books in the “Dripping Fang” series by Dan Greenburg. Available on Amazon for $9.99, but I couldn’t wait to get it. So I got out in my car, drove 25 minutes to Borders Bookstore. I walk in this giant store with hundreds of thousands of books and begin my search for Dripping Fang. I started with the info desk, where I asked the clerk if he could tell me where it was located. “Over in either the YA or Children’s section” was his reply. Okay, where at exactly? “I Don’t know for sure, its over there though!”. With that, I made my way to search through the thousands of books in the YA and Children’s section. Turns out, they don’t shelve there books by title or author, but by “Genre”, and then within the genre they are in no specific order. Weird thing is, they don’t even have the “genres” marked on the shelves! So I end up looking through all the books in YA, with no results. Then all the books in children’s with no results. By now I was 1 1/2 hours into my search, and very tired of it. I finally asked to talk to a manager who had no issue with typing several keys and bringing up on there computer that they did not even have it in stock, even thought there website said it was.

He did offer to place an order for me though, and it should arrive in 1-2 weeks!!! HAAA, right. So I went home, sucked it up, and placed an amazon order (which took me all of 8 minutes from the time i logged on to the final checkout page) and ordered my book. I’m expecting the book to arrive tomorrow, and I still saved money by ordering it online.

This is the reason that most people buy books (and most everything else) online. So to me, if my local Borders don’t want to carry my book, its no loss to me. Not like anyone could find it if they wanted it anyway!

Those are my views. I know some of them are strong, but it is my opinion on the matter. Does anyone else agree with me?

Thanks,
Landon Parks