So far, 1 person has bought the paperback version.
I got my brother a copy for his birthday.
Still, it's more than zero.
It’s half a book more than I’ve finished and it’s one book more than I’ve sold! Kudos. Best of luck.
Next book's almost ready ^^ Hoping this one does a little better. But two months between releases is pushing me into daily panic, because the sales in the week or two before a release has a huge impact on how much effort Amazon will put into directing people away from it. I've convinced one friend who didn't have the last book yet to buy a copy; just hoping that's enough.
Question. Do you think a publishing a book on Barnes and Noble or something like that would work? Amazon has millions of customers a minute, but also millions of sellers a minute. It might be easier to sell books with an official publisher.
For ebooks? I've put some of mine out through nook/kobo/ibook/google/etc. It's just as easy to do them all at once, but they have a much smaller market. So in my experience, it's not worth losing Amazon's exclusivity bonus.
For print books through traditional bookshops; they already are. Some of them, anyway. If you go into a bookshop, you can probably order my books. Getting them on the shelves means the manager of a bookstore has to order them. For that to happen the bookstore manager has to know about them, which means spending money up front in advertising.
On top of that, if you can't afford to buy a block of ISBN's up front, you're pretty much stuck with print-on-demand publishers. Which means that the store doesn't get the usual wholesale discount, and the price has to be higher to cover their cut. Also, bookstores usually get books from the publisher on sale-or-return. Createspace doesn't allow this; Ingram does, but if a store orders a thousand books and then immediately cancels, I get a bill for printing, shipping, and warehousing those books until someone actually buys them. (User forums suggest that this happens often)
Traditional publishing is the 'easy' way because they put up the money. Except that these days, the big five ignore their slush piles.
To get picked up by a traditional publisher, you have to either
I can send my work out to agents, and hope someone likes it enough to pass it on to a publisher, and then they like it. But that's a lot of time which doesn't count towards the number of work hours the taxman requires me to do; and basically doesn't count for the purposes of my "doing self-employed work" requirement for disability benefits.
Sorry, I know I seem really cynical today. But basically, tax bureaucracy has forced me into this dead end where I have to keep writing, I have to do publication myself, I have to treat it as a full time job, and I have to keep every month doing better than the last. If I want to step off the treadmill, I need to be sure I have money to cover at 3-6 months rent and bills. Which I don't.
On the plus side, A Bored God is now out on Kindle. Fingers crossed this one ends up selling copies.
Hmm... Really interesting information.
I'm wanting to be become a writer myself. Maybe I've talked about it before. The first is just a trans dad with adopted daughters. The second is just a coming of age story about a boy in high school.
You make great games for the Quest forums, from what I can tell! I have not read any of your books though. I'm sure someone will buy it though. There's an audience for everything!
Follow us on Facebook
Follow @TextAdv on Twitter