Amazon's recently released statistics are no doubt causing gray hairs to sprout all over the heads of print publishers. Why? 

For one thing, 200,000 additional authors decided to sell their books exclusively on Amazon through their KDP Select program. Not all of these authors will reach the sales of the top 150, but even if each author sold a few hundred books in 2013, Amazon made quite a profit. 

Success, for Amazon, is not measured by how many best-selling authors they produce, but by how many authors decide to throw their hats into Amazon's ring.

Of course, another reason for CEOs to go gray is the exodus of well-known authors who have decided that they would rather get a greater chunk of the profits their books generate than whatever percentage their publishers mete out to them. In some cases, this amounts to millions of dollars in royalties that would otherwise have gone to publishing houses.

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Press Release: Amazon Media Room

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 26, 2013-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Amazon today announced a record-setting holiday season for Amazon Prime, the annual membership program offering unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on millions of items. More than one million customers around the world became new Prime members in the third week of December. On Amazon’s peak shipping day, more Prime items were shipped worldwide than ever before. The entire 2013 holiday season was the best ever for Amazon, with more than 36.8 million items ordered worldwide on Cyber Monday, which is a record-breaking 426 items per second, and millions of customers unwrapped Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets this holiday season.

Kindle and Amazon Digital Media Facts:

• Amazon’s digital media selection grew to more than 27 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, books, audiobooks, and popular apps and games in 2013.
• Selection in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library in 2013 grew from 250,000 books to more than 475,000 books.
• More than 200,000 exclusive books were added to the Kindle store in 2013.
• 150 Kindle Direct Publishing authors each sold more than 100,000 copies of their books in 2013. Top sellers this year include “Hopeless” by Colleen Hoover and “Wait for Me” by Elisabeth Naughton. (Read about Colleen Hoover HERE.)
• The best-selling Kindle Direct Publishing author during the holiday season was H.M. Ward.

Read the rest HERE.

For those of you who are not familiar with Guy Kawasaki, he is the entrepreneur's entrepreneur. His books on how to create a successful business - in your garage - combined with his no-holds-barred writing style have won him a place in the Bloggerdom equivalent to Mount Olympus.


Kawasaki's book, Author - Publisher - Entreprenuer (APE), is available for free until January 31st. So, get yourself a copy. Even if you missed out on starting Apple from your garage, his tips are well worth listening to.

Go here: http://apethebook.com/nanowrimo/

Nothing makes me happier than a bar graph. (Although pie charts also stir my soul.) Dana Beth Weinberg, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard University and is Professor of Sociology at Queens College, has made my day with - not just a bar graph - but an analysis!

You can either read her article and weep, or, like a sensible person, you can decide to cover all your bets. Keep your day job, self-publish, AND hound agents until one of them takes pity on you and sells your manuscript to Random/Penguin.

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The Self-Publishing Debate: A Social Scientist Separates Fact from Fiction (Part 3 of 3)

By Dana Beth Weinberg

Not surprisingly, most aspiring authors in the sample reported no annual income from their writing. About 19% of self-published authors in the sample also reported no annual income from their writing, compared to 6% of traditionally published authors and only 3% of hybrid authors. While most of the survey respondents clustered at the lower end of the income distribution, some authors did report earning $200,000 or more from their writing, the highest income choice on the survey:  less than one percent (0.6%) of self-published authors, 4.5% of traditionally published authors, and 6.7% of hybrid authors who reported on their income. (In the chart, I have collapsed the top categories to $100,000 or more for better visibility. These aggregated category represents 1.8% of self-published authors, 8.8% of traditionally published authors, and 13.2% of hybrid authors.)

Self-published authors in the sample earned a median income in the range of $1 to $4,999, while traditionally published authors had a median writing income of $5,000 to $9,999, and hybrid authors earned a median income of $15,000 to $19,999. Comparing authors with the same number of manuscripts (analysis not shown), there is a strong similarity in income between hybrid and traditional authors, but hybrid authors outperformed their self-published counterparts on earnings.

Read the full article HERE.  I insist.

This brief article appeared today in Publishers Weekly. Obviously, a lot was left out of this success story. For example, self-published authors usually don't get into the world's largest book fair.

So, how did Seskis get to Frankfurt?

Interestingly enough, Seskis' book, One Step Too Far, was published, not by Amazon or Smashwords - like most self-published ebooks - but by Kirk Parolles, an imprint that proclaims: "Gone are the days when agents, publishers and bookstores decide which books reach the reader. As publishers we may not always like it, but the truth is the books that sell may not be the ones we would have chosen – they’re the ones that people connect with, will talk about, will stay up until 3 in the morning to find out what happened.Those are the books we seek out at Kirk Parolles, and those are the ones we’re committed to publish."

What is truly fascinating about this publisher is that it has only two books on its roster, One Step Too Far, and Seskis' next novel, A Serpentine Affair. What's more KP is closed to submissions. Obviously, Kirk Parolles' publishing commitment has exceptionally narrow limits. Did Seskis set up a publishing house in order to get her book to Frankfurt?

You betcha. Authors who set up "publishing houses" to legitimize their work are rife in the industry. In fact, if you want to waste a few hours tracking down the owners of small publishing houses, you'll find their names often appear on the titles in their inventory.

Very clever, Tina.

(I am thinking of naming my new publishing house Random Penguin. What do you think?)
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Frankfurt Book Fair 2013: HC Wins Self-Published Novel In Major Buy

Source: Publishers Weekly, By Rachel Deahl Oct 10, 2013

Self-publishing was one of the big topics at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, and at least one self-published book caught the eye, and wallet, of a major publisher. In what is rumored to be a deal worth $500,000, Jennifer Brehl at HarperCollins’s William Morrow imprint bought North American rights to Tina Seskis’s novel, One Step Too Far.

The debut, which was originally published in April as a Kindle e-book, went on to hit #1 on Amazon. Seskis, who grew up in New Hampshire and now lives in London, followed the e-book publication with a paperback release, and that print edition went on to hit the bestseller list of the British bookstore chain, W.H. Smith.

One Step Too Far follows a lawyer named Emily Coleman who inexplicably abandons her life. Despite what appears to be an idyllic existence—a beautiful two-year-old son, a lovely home, an adoring husband—Emily wakes up one summer morning, grabs her passport, and hops on a train bound from London to Manchester. Determined to leave her old life behind, Emily meets a croupier named Angel who becomes her only new friend, and who also leads her into a dangerous new existence.

Brehl told PW that Seskis likes to refer to the book as a “whydunit,” because it leaves a host of questions about its heroine’s actions unanswered. The novel, which works up to a final secret-reveal, was something Brehl said she picked up one night and “didn’t put down until I finished it the next morning.”

John Elek, with the British firm United Agents, represents Seskis.

This fascinating little industry tidbit (below) appeared in Publisher's Weekly a couple of weeks ago. Wattpad, for those of you who are not familiar with the site, features free chapters of self-published books. It boasts a readership in the millions. (Its Alexa ranking in the US is 2,553, which is very good.) This makes Wattpad an excellent platform for new writers, who generally care more about getting noticed than raking in the cash. (That comes later.)

Given Random/Penguin's recent launching of its various e-imprints, Loveswept among them, I was wondering how it was going to compete with the lure of Amazon's KDP Select, a program that has dominated the self-publishing scene for more than a decade. KDP Select allows writers to give away their books during 5 out of every 90 days in exchange for exclusive distributing rights. As a promotional tool. nothing beats giving something away for free, so Amazon, which has an immense reach, drew writers to it in droves.

Random/Penguin's strategy, apparently, is to give books away for free before they are released. Chapters will be published on the Wattpad site in serial form, another tried-and-true method for hooking readers.

The progress of Knox's novel, Truly, is something the industry will no doubt keep a close eye on. If Random/Penguin's strategy works, it will solve the pesky problem of how to build an online readership while undercutting Amazon's most successful marketing scheme.


Random House's Loveswept Partners With Wattpad

Publisher's Weekly, Aug 19, 2013

Thanks to a deal between Random House's digital-only romance imprint, Loveswept, and Wattpad, author Ruthie Knox will have her new series appear in serialized form on the online writing (and reading) community. Through the deal, Knox's novel Truly, which is the first title in a planned series, will debut on Wattpad as a free story in the fall, before being released as an e-book by Loveswept in August 2014.

Chapters from Truly will begin appearing on Wattpad on September 3, and continue to appear until the conclusion to the story is posted on November 4. Throughout the process, RH will invite Wattpad readers to take part in choosing the cover for the e-book. The effort, RH said, will also allow a high level of author access to Knox as readers will be able to use Wattpad's platform, which has mobile engagement, to contact her

Allison Dobson, v-p of business development and digital publishing at RH, said that Wattpad offers an "innovative approach to content creation and distribution," noting that the site already draws "millions of voracious readers" from all over the world.

This fascinating story was a guest post on BookRx. It's one of the better success stories out there, because Madeline Sheehan didn't "rocket" to success, she started off with only 6 sales - and she was thrilled! How did she get to #17 on Amazon’s Kindle Best Seller list (and get an agent)? Read all about it HERE. 

Self-Publishing, Blah, Blah, Blah…

By Madeline Sheehan

When I say “blah,” I mean it in the very best way. Because self-publishing, in a nutshell, is a three-ring circus.

But let me start at the very beginning, before I was introduced to the big, bad, kill-or-be-killed, survival-of-the-fittest world of independent authors. Back when I was just a lowly Public Relations Coordinator/Editor at a nonprofit organization with a writing hobby that I indulged in during my downtime, dreaming the dream of most writers to someday see their book on a bookstore shelf.

I’d been writing nearly my entire life but hadn’t completed a full-length novel until 2010 (The Soul Mate, a dystopian paranormal romance centered around modern-day gypsies), spending my evenings working tirelessly on the story line and character development. When I was finished, I didn’t have a clue what to do with it, but I did know right away I wasn’t going to be submitting it to any traditional publishing houses only to get my cherished manuscript tossed into their slush pile. So I opted instead to send it to a few family members for their opinions and amazingly enough, both my father and little sister, who are both avid readers, loved the book.

So then I thought, now what? You see, I didn’t know anything about self-publishing other than I loved Amanda Hocking’s Trylle trilogy and My Blood Approves series. I literally knew nothing about Amazon, Smashwords, or CreateSpace’s self-publishing platforms until one day my husband came home from work with a tip from a friend of his who’d self-published a book of poetry on Smashwords. Of course I looked into it, created a profile, and submitted my manuscript, and within a few weeks my e-book was available through Barnes and Noble, Apple, Sony, Kobo, etc.

And…nothing.

I sold a grand total of six books in six months. Don’t get me wrong; I was thrilled. Someone other than a family member had read my work. Had actually paid the $0.99 I was asking for it and READ it.

It was then that I decided to self-publish on Amazon as well, which, lo and behold, provided me with a lot more sales. A total of thirty in another six-month time frame.

Energized, I continued writing. While I was writing the sequel, My Soul To Take, I set up a Facebook author page to begin promoting my books to, well, my friends and family members. I had a total of a hundred likes, all of which were from people I’d known most of my life and weren’t interested in reading any of my books.

Halfway through writing My Soul To Take, I hit a mental brick wall. In the midst of trying to work through it, I pulled up a fresh Word document and began writing my third book, Undeniable. It was as far removed from the paranormal romance genre I’d been writing in as one could get. Undeniable is a motorcycle club dark romance set in a criminal underground world. It doesn’t hold back, it’s taboo, it’s gritty and ugly, it’s raw, and I make no apologies for it. I poured my heart and soul into that book; I used both real and fictional experiences, real and fictional character traits, and about a month after publishing My Soul To Take, I published Undeniable.

Fast-forward three weeks and the Internet BLEW UP...

Read the rest of this illuminating story HERE.

With no UK publishing deal for her debut novel, Tracy Bloom decided to go it alone. A few weeks later, her book was sitting at the top of the Amazon Kindle chart.

Tracy Bloom: I learned a huge amount from self-publishing

Source: The Guardian, Tuesday 9 July 2013 09.03 EDT

Why did you decide to self-publish your book?

I wrote my novel, No-one Ever Has Sex on a Tuesday, while living in Connecticut, US having moved there temporarily with my husband's job. I left behind a dream career developing rides for theme parks and found myself in a foreign country with a new baby and a desire to make the most of my dramatic change in circumstances. I joined an evening class in creative writing and about a year later I had completed my first romantic comedy, written mostly during my son's afternoon naps. To my utter shock an agent and foreign-rights deals came quickly afterwards, but although I had some very positive comments no UK publisher stepped forward. Having watched the self-publishing industry evolve to become a valid gateway to reach an audience I decided that the time was right to go it alone.

Read the rest of the article here.

If you are weighing the economic pros and cons of epublishing, it always helps to have a report from the trenches, so to speak. Lindsay Buroker has done us all a huge favor by not only telling us how much her books are earning, but how she managed to support herself on ebook sales. The secret to success? Keep writing! 

Are More Authors Than You Think Making a Living Self-Publishing?

By Lindsay Buroker 

About this time last year, I wrote up a blog post detailing how I was doing, financially speaking, on my new e-publishing endeavor (I got my start in December of 2010). When it came to ebook earnings, my grand total for March of 2011 was $724. At the time, I had two novels out, a couple of 99-cent short story collections, and the first Flash Gold novella (it, and my first Emperor’s Edge novel, are free in case you haven’t checked out my work yet and are dying to do so).

I didn’t think that $700 was too shabby considering I hadn’t been at the e-publishing thing for long. But when you look at how much time I was spending on promotion and writing, it wasn’t exactly a huge income either.

A year later, though, things have continued to pick up steam. I have two more novels out, two more novellas, and a new stand-alone short story. In March of 2012, I sold more than 4,000 ebooks, not including downloads of the freebies, and will earn over $5,000 (my ebooks range from 99 cents to $4.95).

Read the rest of Lindsay's illuminating article HERE.

It is received wisdom that in order to get a book published you should start by placing short stories in literary magazines. Like most received wisdom, this is hogwash. It is easier to get a book published than it is to get a short story placed in any kind of reputable literary magazine. (That being said, there are literary magazines of ill repute, and your stories may wind up sliding down the slippery slope into a few of them.) Not only is it hard to break into the literary magazine scene, it takes forever. Literary magazines are often staffed by underpaid, overworked grad students, who will take a minimum of three months to respond to your submission – if at all. Moreover, their readerships are generally small (1000 subscribers is a lot), their editorial staff quirky, and their requirements absurd. (No simultaneous submissions? Snail mail? Seriously!)

So, why bother? For one thing, some people are really good at writing short stories – much better than they are at writing novels. Short stories are not easy to write. Unlike novels, which allow writers to natter on for hundreds of pages before getting to the point, short stories are an art form that requires fast efficient character development, a plot that moves at the speed of light, and an ending that sticks in your mind like that song you can’t get out of your head. If you can write a good short story, I envy you. Get it published!

Here are the most extensive, and most useful, resources for finding the perfect home for your short story.

1) Poets and Writers
Poets & Writers is always my first stop when I am looking for a short story market. Their list is not comprehensive, but P&W includes a great deal of useful information, such as circulation, length of time for a response, genres, representative authors, reading period, whether they accept electronic submissions, or charge a reading fee. (Don’t submit to magazines that charge a fee. They will take your money and run.) Listings are alphabetical, but you can also do a search by genre and subgenre.

2) Every Writer’s Resource
These people were not overstating their mission when they called their site Every Writer’s Resource.  Not only do they feature articles, blogs, publishers, but oh! The lists! The big list has 2000 literary magazines on it, which is enough to make anyone’s hair fall out. To keep you from going bald, they also narrow the field down to a list of the top 50 literary magazines, university magazines, print magazines that take online submissions (bravo!), and genre-specific magazines (horror, fantasy and sci-fi).

3) Random House list
Random House doesn’t do anything half way, and their list proves it. It’s very long.  If you are blitzing your way through submissions – and, as an aside, blitzing is a good technique if you don’t have years to waste waiting for replies – this list will enable you to submit to a hundred magazines in a day. There is very little in the way of detailed information, but for sheer convenience, nothing beats the RH list.

4) New Pages 
New Pages keeps a well-organized list with new and featured magazines at the top. Best of all they include icons of the magazine covers. Magazine covers are just as important as book covers (by which we make ill-informed, yet somehow completely accurate judgments). You don’t want your short story appearing in a magazine that has cover art drawn by the editor’s six-year-old grandson. The short summaries alongside the cover icons provide the essentials that will enable you to make a fast choice.

5) Duotrope (payment required)
When Duotrope was free I used the site daily. Not only does Duotrope include every literary magazine, you can search magazines by genre, whether they take electronic submissions, response time, and acceptance rate. These last two details are extremely important, and because Duotrope’s figures are based on what writers report, they are fairly accurate. The subscription is $5 a month (7-day free trial). (You can access Duotrope’s basic stats for individual magazines by doing a Google search on “duotrope” and the name of the magazine.)

6) The Grinder (free version of Duotrope)
Like the fourth (and fifth) books of the Douglas Adams trilogy, I am adding a 6th source to my top five. (Many thanks to Wm. Luke Everest for suggesting this wonderful site.) Here you can find a virtual replica of the old Duotrope site - and it's FREE. We tempest-tossed writers yearning to publish free really do appreciate their generosity. So go to The Grinder, and check it out! I'm going there right now...