Posted on 08/05/2013 9:42:58 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It's been called a "cure for rejection-letter fatigue."
Amazon on Thursday released new details about the success of its program for authors who want to self-publish on its Kindle e-reader devices. The company, which unveiled a suite of new e-readers and tablets at a press conference in Southern California on Thursday, says 27 of the top 100 Kindle books were created using a system called Kindle Direct Publishing.
That system allows authors to bypass traditional publishers and instead deal directly with Amazon, which claims to be able to publish their books digitally "in hours."
The authors receive 70% of the royalties from the sale of these books. And some of them are doing quite well.
"Most of my months are six-figure months," said Hugh Howey, a 37-year-old Florida author whose "Wool" series of digital books was highlighted by Amazon. "It's more than I ever hoped to make in a year."
The company says some authors, including Theresa Ragen, who appeared in a promotional video during the Amazon event, have sold hundreds of thousands of books.
During the event Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos displayed a quote from Kathryn Stockett, author of best-selling novel "The Help," in which she lamented being rejected dozens of times before a publisher accepted her.
"What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60?" she was quoted as saying......
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Why not? Youtube exposure has done the same thing for independent musicians who are now making millions off their sales and touring.
Well, there is that ‘sex’ scene as the cougars mate, but the intent of the book is to have non-stop action and adventure without the sex and foul language... You know, like ordinary folks go through the day. :)
“How do unknown authors prevent an editor stealing their idea?”
They spend $35.00 on copyrighting their work.
Thanks for that link.
BTTT
I do not think people understand the convenience of that fully; that all the books you have purchased or gotten for free are all up there in your file at Amazon so if you get a new device you can put the whole library on your new device I have no idea how many times I have purchased books that I have read before with kindle it is easy when I click on the one click the popup tells me you already bought this. Now if someone could tell me how to move the books I have read to a read already archive that would help immensely because the recently active sort leaves the ones you just read on the front page.
The problem with self publishing is the amount of work to publish and marketing. My book has been picked up by a hybrid publisher which gives a good return.
I just don’t believe a lot of it.
bfl
Hurray for graphomania! (Because that’s what’s most of it is. But then, what do airport bookstores sell?)
I'm actually the speaker at next month's author's group here in town. I went to last month's meeting and for about two minutes told the audience about my long history in publishing, including being the person who selected manuscripts for publication. Told them that at the next meeting, I would be speaking about shaping and editing manuscripts. As I left the meeting, two women sort of bumped into me. "I have something else to do that day," said one. "So do I," said the other.
Not really surprising. I basically tell people to stay away from writers' groups, because you won't find any writers there. Even funnier, I was introduced to a woman in a small but wonderful town in CA. When she heard that I had just left my job as editorial director of a well-known publishing house, she pulled herself up, got really huffy and fumed, "Well, I'VE been to ten writers' conferences.
You get the picture.
Mark
I’m in a town where everybody’s a writer. Like L.A. where every taxi driver and waiter is a screenwriter. There is a writer group here that meets every Wednesday evening in a crowded cafe with bad acoustics where a dozen of the 20 or so attendees distribute copies of their scribbles (an expensive requirement), read them and then invite critique. I am a member of it, though I haven’s attended for a couple of years, but I get e-mail notifications thrice weekly. I never read there, attended two or three meetings, which was sufficient, and went to another group which had 3-4 attendees and met on Tuesdays at the same place. That one’s defunked, as its leader who used it to get help editing his New Age masterpiece, finally published it had a baby or two, and went on the speaker’s circuit.
Anyway, the larger group was/is led by a published Israeli-American writer, a moonbat to a high degree who wants to change the world with his writings, he says, a nice guy otherwise, and not a terribly good writer, but, as I said, published, not self-published. The attendees were mostly middle aged or older people, most of them writing mysteries, fashioned after famous mystery writers, and not altogether bad. One guy was writing a western, quite good, engaging, lots of detail, good characters (I think he was a retired journalist or something), and I thought what is he doing among these amateurs. All in all, it wasn’t as bad as you suggest, or as bad as my smaller Tuesday group of mostly random irregulars.
The problem with writing, as I see it, is that it’s so easy, anyone can do it, so many do it, the security guard at the company where I used to work, who ratted on me to the CEO after I was laid off, is a “writer” (self-published), I am a writer (published in magazines), my good friend for whom English is a third or fourth language, is a writer, a good one, but one who commits embarrassing grammar and spelling errors that he doesn’t ask me to correct, so I don’t. But I read top shelf literature, unlike many people who read junk, which convinces them, as it would anyone, that they can do better, while my top shelf stuff tells me I can’t do chit!
I wrote a post-modern story yesterday. A story, you might say, about itself.
Cheers.
I’m in a town where everybody’s a writer. Like L.A. where every taxi driver and waiter is a screenwriter. There is a writer group here that meets every Wednesday evening in a crowded cafe with bad acoustics where a dozen of the 20 or so attendees distribute copies of their scribbles (an expensive requirement), read them and then invite critique. I am a member of it, though I haven’s attended for a couple of years, but I get e-mail notifications thrice weekly. I never read there, attended two or three meetings, which was sufficient, and went to another group which had 3-4 attendees and met on Tuesdays at the same place. That one’s defunked, as its leader who used it to get help editing his New Age masterpiece, finally published it had a baby or two, and went on the speaker’s circuit.
Anyway, the larger group was/is led by a published Israeli-American writer, a moonbat to a high degree who wants to change the world with his writings, he says, a nice guy otherwise, and not a terribly good writer, but, as I said, published, not self-published. The attendees were mostly middle aged or older people, most of them writing mysteries, fashioned after famous mystery writers, and not altogether bad. One guy was writing a western, quite good, engaging, lots of detail, good characters (I think he was a retired journalist or something), and I thought what is he doing among these amateurs. All in all, it wasn’t as bad as you suggest, or as bad as my smaller Tuesday group of mostly random irregulars.
The problem with writing, as I see it, is that it’s so easy, anyone can do it, so many do it, the security guard at the company where I used to work, who ratted on me to the CEO after I was laid off, is a “writer” (self-published), I am a writer (published in magazines), my good friend for whom English is a third or fourth language, is a writer, a good one, but one who commits embarrassing grammar and spelling errors that he doesn’t ask me to correct, so I don’t. But I read top shelf literature, unlike many people who read junk, which convinces them, as it would anyone, that they can do better, while my top shelf stuff tells me I can’t do chit!
I wrote a post-modern story yesterday. A story, you might say, about itself.
Cheers.
Agree, groups are potentially fun and interesting and a really good group might inspire you to do your best. But those groups are hard to find, and amateur writers can tear into other writers’ work unmercifully. Not good.
Anyone can write just as anyone can sing. But well enough to get paid for it?
Here’s a wild concept you might drop into the mix, if people really hope to get published: Whoever told you to write for yourself was wrong. The only important person in the room when you’re writing is the READER.
I’ve asked writers to visualize their target audience, cut out pictures of similar people from magazines and tape them to their computer screens. Consult with them throughout the day.
I had a wonderful woman friend when I first started out...she was not a writer but a very smart woman with a very clear mind. I’d just sort of write TO her. Does this sentence/chapter communicate to Helen? If not, revise. Or delete.
In fact, most self-pub books would benefit from having about 1/3 of the pages deleted and the writing tightened up. I’m not going to say that at the authors’ meeting, as they’ve already made those mistakes. Yes, they are, for the most part, retired people. Some quite interesting. One fellow has written and sold 25 audiobooks, just one in print. He knows what he’s doing in his particular market, which is mostly made up of long-distance drivers. Truck drivers love his work. He (a retired professor) writes FOR them. The books roll out, the checks roll in. Nice.
Best luck to you :)
BFL
It’s called “snapshots”. You can move between them easily and cut-n-paste is easy as with anything else. There really are a lot more features than I am ever going to use probably.
In the “Research” area you can place documents, files, pics, video and stuff related to your story, things like background and character information. So its not in a different file(s).
Each project has a trash can but nothing is ever really thrown away.
I download the Linux version because its a free beta and apparently it should work until sometime in 2014. heh.
Well, I have learned that "in the works" is a LONG way from "in the can". Also, I've looked at all the survival-related books sold on Amazon and have not found one that goes to anything near the degree of detail I'm providing.
Yesterday I bought my ISBN number ... so it won't be long. If I don't sell a copy I'll just be happy to be through burning the midnight oil every night.
My favorite author and sometime conservative commentator Mark Helprin once talked about the battles he carried with his editor over commas. Another favorite author, name withdrawn, over two dozen literary mysteries published, used in one of them the word “peddle” for “pedal”, three times, a common error on these pages, where I saw it for the first time, by the way. I contacted him on Fakebook, and, admitting his mistake, he wrote that the proof reader goofed. I didn’t have the nerve to ask a follow-up question, but did he have an editor? Do editors catch and correct such errors?
good luck
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