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 ...
OMG! How is that possible in this day and age?
Well, to be honest, I don't have the endings written down yet… I just know how the story's supposed to end (for a few of them, anyway).
I'd like to do sci-fi, but I kinda suck at the intense sort of world-building that would take.
Think about the days of writing on a typewriter. Man, talk about an empty page being intimidating...
I’ve got a Vietnam vet buddy who still makes about $500 a month from Amazon sales of his book about the war. He published it about a year ago.
Our competitor’s topic was environmental in nature. They were from the Birkenstock and granola school of literature.
Cool, you should continue.
I download a program called Scrivener. Its pretty cool, it even allows me to save all the old versions when I make changes.
Since I am lying on the floor, my back, I almost really ROFL there
thanks
Oh, well then… here's a 250 word story I wrote some years ago:
Alright, there's nobody in front of me at the nearest checkout! That's good, 'cause all I wanted was this candy-bar. It's surprising how much the price of things have gone up. Five dollars is lot more than the eighty-nine cents I remember from my childhood. My memories are interrupted by the intoning of the computerized counter. Welcome to Albertsons.
It's amazing how much things have changed since my childhood. There weren't any of these self-checkout lanes when I was young.
Scan item now.
Obediently, I scan the item like the machine tells me. The five dollars appearing in the register. I hit the button to indicate that this is all I am going to be buying right now.
The machine calculates the taxes almost instantly showing that amount in addition to the purchase. Taxes, too, have increased. Over a dollar-fifty tax on this five dollar candy-bar, however, looking it over I'm somewhat amused at the total.
Scan hand now.
I scan my right hand and the machine interfaces with the credit chip implanted there. All physical money had been replaced years ago, the world government and credit-card companies agreeing that it would make financial transactions easier.
Transaction complete.
At this moment I could swear I hear a trumpet blasting forth. Now, as the receipt flutters out of my hand, which is causing me great pain right now, the total that was written on it, six dollars and sixty-six cents, doesn't seem so funny.
Gonna be a while? Grab a Snickers.
Yes, I am interested too, especially in the 3.0 version of publishing wonderfully explained in this article:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/20/how-to-self-publish-a-bestseller-publishing-3-0/
The best advice on writing I’ve ever read was in the late John Gardner’s books on the subject, still in print, I think. I disagreed with some of it, and over the years have found a lot of contradictory advice from others (write what you know, no, write what you don’t know, etc.) There ain’t no formula, baby!
People have been saying that to me for years now. The only reason I don't get started, is because I'm still immersed in running my small business and raising four kids in a terrible economy.
Sometimes I think the easiest thing would be to copy and paste my FR posts into some sort of log and present that as a book. I could call it, "Thoughts Of An Unreconstructed, Pissed Off, American Patriot".
As a reader I’m more likely to buy an ebook that’s priced under $4. A lot of self published authors are priced so. Its easier to take a risk on a bunch of new to me authors who are priced that way.
Media stuff has a fixed format, so there’s specialized software for it, but I found that I had to split the formatting part from the creating part. So I used to lock myself up in a motel room and just write for a few days using either pad and pen or whatever my current word processor was. Later I’d go home and plug it into the screenplay software. Everybody’s process is different, the best process is the one that works for you.
Scrivener looks pretty cool. I like that their focus is on getting you through the first draft.
Realistically, you can count on about $200/month from both B&N and Amazon combined, if you have a popular topic. Amazon will sell about twice as many as B&N.
That's a good point. There have been cloud providers who have disappeared. If you haven't downloaded the book... Course I can have a fire too, but I won't destroy a million folks' library.
Yeah, I agree. I also think one of the biggest traps is fear that you’ll never be able to do the story as well as it appears in your head. There’s no formula, and self-editing in the creative phase is death.
Unless, of course, that’s your formula...
It started with stuff we wrote here on FR and blossomed from there. I can tell you that it was very, very hard work to get it right. Silly things like formatting we had to learn along the way. Special requirements for Kindle that we still aren't quite through. How do you do hyperlinking for something as simple as the Table of Contents? How do you line up the chapter titles? This is the sort of stuff a commercial publishing house used to do for an author that a self-published author must learn on his or her own.
The working title will be Who Is John Galt? - A Navigational Guide To Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. We will be announcing soon.
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