With six published novels under his belt, you might think J.A. Konrath has it made. But, if you know much about the current publishing market, you could certainly question that. Made or not, JA made a very interesting discovery recently when he sat down and compared his Hyperion ebook royalty statements with the proceeds he’s brought in by putting up four novels on Amazon’s Kindle store all by himself.
What did he learn? That self-publishing ebooks can be a lucrative and very real option for known authors! You’ve got to read the whole post here to get a full sense of the figures involved and why this has been working for him.
While we’re at it, if you want more writers disclosing their royalty statements in blogs, have a look at what Lynn Viehl has to say about the proceeds from her NY Times Bestselling books at Genreality.com. Thanks to April Hamilton at Publetariat for bringing this to my eye.
You can find out more about Seth’s work (including his latest book Jack Wakes Up) at SethHarwood.com.
woohoo! i get to say ‘i called that one!’ — in this very blog, about 3 months ago:
http://www.openculture.com/2009/08/top_ten_reasons_why_the_kindle_wont_be_an_ipod_for_books.html
(it’s in my 2nd mammoth wall of text)
as mr. korath says in his blog, this really won’t affect the top tier authors of the world that much, but it amounts to a fundamental shift as to how the bottom-tier and mid-list authors could do business. i’m actually quite interested in how said authors can/will grow their readerbase. i think we’ll see a lot more avenues emerge (other than say, the tred and true book tour.)
i think the next major step/hurdle will be when a nominally top-tier author decides to just self-publish and promote, rather than sign a long-term book contract.
Ha!!
Nicely done, Kurt! Nicely done!
Very excellent.
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