Experimenting with Kindling

[jimhines]

Nifty First Book Friday news: Harry Connolly’s piece has been picked up and reprinted at Black Gate.  Congrats, Harry!

#

I’ve talked a bit about e-books and self-publishing.  There are folks like J. A. Konrath who claim to make it work.  When I posted about my electronic royalties, Konrath was one of the first to jump in and say flat-out that $6.99

Comments

[saetter]

Don't worry about becoming "that Guy." We'd tell you. :)

Thanks for sharing this type of information. I for one and very interested in the outcome.

No I won't be buying one, but only because I don't have an e-reader. Yet. :) Maybe once I get a job (hopefully soon).

[jimhines]

That's one of the things I'm curious about. For all of the claims regarding the success of e-publishing, it still cuts out a significant part of the potential audience.

People have pointed out that there are free applications you can get for your computer or phone to let you read Kindle books and other e-books, but I don't know how many people are using them. (I've been playing with my phone and iBooks, but haven't done more than a few minutes of actual reading on it.)

[sinboy]

I am not going to start going all-out on advertising and self-promotion. For one thing, I don’t have the time.

And this is one thing that publishers do for writers. Not "all out", but they do make at least some effort if they're worth their salt. Of course, with budget cuts to publishing, there's less of this going on.

[jimhines]

Yep. Even minimal publicity/promotion from a big publisher would require a lot of work (and possibly money) on my part to match.

That's one of the things I want to test. From reading some of these pro-Kindle or pro-selfpub authors, you get the sense that all you have to do is put it out there at the right price, and the sales will automatically start coming in.

Maybe they will. I certainly wouldn't mind :-) But I'm not holding my breath...

[angelabenedetti]

Fictionwise is another good place; I know a lot of people who shop there. Smashwords and Untreed Reads have gotten some buzz too; ugly web sites, but decent product.

Some place where people can get non-proprietary formats is important, though, wherever it is. There are still people (like me) won't buy e-books that only work on some particular device, or that require me to jump through technical hoops (even if it's only one large one set low to the ground) to convert them to my preferred format, which is PDF if it matters. If Amazon ever goes under, or decides that the Kindle isn't working for them (and that's happened with companies just as big and devices just as popular) there are going to be a lot of Kindle users with hundreds or thousands of proprietary format book files they paid a pile of money for, who are going to be very annoyed. I'm not going to be one of those people. I remember the PC platform wars of the eighties -- been there, done that, learned better

[jimhines]

I actually used to have this one on Fictionwise :-) The problems were:

1) They required exclusivity.
2) They set the price, which was higher than I wanted to experiment with.

I'll check the other sites you mentioned, thanks! And I'll update when and if other formats become available.

[angelabenedetti]

That's really strange. :/ My publisher has books on Fictionwise; they're nowhere near exclusive there, and the prices are the same as on my publisher's site. They also have a lot of free books (and not just Project Gutenberg type stuff) so it's weird that they'd get fussy about low prices.

I hope somewhere else works out, if FW went all whacked on you. [crossed fingers]

Angie

[jimhines]

I think publishers get a different contract than individual authors. I don't have the same kind of leverage that DAW and other publishers do.

(Though I think DAW's titles got pulled from Fictionwise a while back too. I never figured out exactly what happened there...)

[anonymous]

Thanks for being so upfront and transparent on the issue of an author putting their own books up in e-format. I will be watching your experiment with great interest!

[laurie_gail]

Dang, there I go again, leaving out my name. As I said in the just posted, anonymous comment, thanks for being so upfront and transparent on the e-publishing issue.

[jimhines]

You're welcome! I'm curious too. If I make a few bucks, great, but mostly I just want to see how it plays out.

Also, "I will be watching your experiment with great interest!" reminded me of Palpatine's line to Anakin Skywalker at the end of Phantom Menace...