Also, Kindle books are completely returnable so it doesn’t hurt Amazon to let anyone sell anything. And we’re talking about negligible server space taken up by each listing. Amazon’s interest seems to be to dominate publishing. One of the ways to decentralize the power of the major publishers is to put power in the hands of authors. I don’t believe Amazon does this because they are magnanimous, I believe they do this because it serves their own purposes for power.

I also agree with you that a lot of the changes are on the horizon in the next 5-10 years. That’s why IMO NOW is the time for an indie to start building audience and platform and selling books. Those who wait until it hits big will have a much harder time than those who jump on now.

And you mentioning ebook rights not even being in the contract in 2001, that really lets us know how much things can change in 10 years.

As for the Apple ibookstore, I imagine at some point they’ll let indies in there too. A job post they made looking for someone to be a liason for that sort of thing seems to indicate as much. After all they let people publish their own music and podcasts in the itunes store, so it makes so sense for them to shut indies out of the iPad.

But it’s not just iPad vs. Kindle, there is the Nook which despite having some faults also has some cool assets Kindle doesn’t have, and it’s not Amazon for those who hate Amazon and think of it as the Walmart of books ruining everything else.

And there is also the Sony ebook reader and the Sony store. There is also the Scrib’d store. So there are a LOT of outlets and readers out there that I believe will keep any one company from totally monopolizing everything for a good time to come.

I am also acting on assumptions that are basically assumptions–that Amazon will continue to allow indies to sell there, that Apple won’t take the majority of ebook sales and make exclusive deals with major publishers, or that storytelling will become a more complex, interactive system more like videogames than novels. In other words, what looks great right now may not be the landscape of my retirement years. Ebooks may become seen as free and worthless, and writers will have to find new ways to make money. In other words, I am not counting on things staying the same as they are now.

While I do expect ebooks to grow rapidly, I also don’t know about the other factors out there–even if you control your content, you can never control the shape of technology or the trends of consumers or the direction of society.

From the point I’m at RIGHT NOW, my odds for success would be about equal whether I continued to pursue indie or pursued trad. Too many people talk about this from their position of attained success. (One of the reasons I’m such a loud mouth even now. Because if I ever DO attain success, then I can’t be accused of only speaking from my high horse, I’ve talked about this stuff from day one. And been mocked plenty of times for it.)

Given all of that though… which option… indie or trad, do I have the MOST personal control over the outcome? IMO that’s indie. Indie may be perceived as “harder to succeed at” but it’s not really. That’s because people talk about succeeding as a trad pubbed author ASSUMING a contract, not assuming starting at the place of an unpubbed author. They speak from a position of ASSUMING more than one book contract, and a whole other boatload of assumptions. When you strip away all the assumptions the odds change for any indie who “could have” succeeded in trad publishing given the opportunity.

90% of what happens on the trad path you can’t control.

Whereas as an indie there are VERY few variables outside your control. Even buying behavior you can control to some degree if you learn to write sales pages that convert a higher percentage of people. Then it’s a numbers game of exposure which builds over time.

So it’s all about tweaking, experimenting, learning, growing and learning from your mistakes. It gives the power of action to the author instead of making them helpless and dependent on the whims of a publisher.

We don’t have a fiction indie author success story where the indie STAYED indie because as soon as they got big enough, a publisher snapped them up and that seems to support this idea that NY is the “only way you can make money.” But of course this is total BS.

Like you say, you can do math. It’s not that hard to see the potential of 10 books out. And even if an indie author wanted a trad publisher for print, it’s not that wise to give them your e-rights considering how ebook retarded they tend to be.

However, most publishers WANT your e-rights and I don’t personally see an indie author being able to hold onto those rights and still make a deal. Not unless the only print rights they were selling was a subsidiary right like mass market.

Indies have so many outlets they can get into for ebooks, and ebooks are about to explode. I know people have heard this so much that they don’t believe it anymore, but nevertheless, just because some people have jumped the gun forecasting it… it seems to be almost here.

People are already making great money with ebooks. It’s still a niche market right now but that won’t always be the case.

I figure I’m on a ten year plan here, and if with my nonfiction and fiction under diff pen names, I can’t make a living within 10 years I’ll be very much surprised. In fact, the only way I won’t be making good money is if I’m not writing good enough books, or I’m not marketing them right, because I write in two genres that are very popular and do well in digital.

But one thing I do is run my blog which is intended to help indie authors understand how much work it takes, but also gives them tips on putting out a quality product without breaking the bank…and without having to buy YET ANOTHER book on self-publishing that doesn’t provide half the detail that you really need. That’s my little contribution to the problem. And when authors ask me my opinion, and many have, I give it to them straight with no chaser. “You need a new cover…” or “You need another good edit…” Offering that kind of support can only work in the favor of all indie authors.

And also Joe writes gory serial killer stuff. If he can write and handle THAT he can handle kinky sex that isn’t even that graphically written or that appalling on ANY level. I continue to be shocked by people who freak out over anything beyond standard sexual fare but think torture porn like Hostel is A-okay. That’s just creative expression, but openness about sex is evil. Um, yeah, okay.

The other thing was… it takes several pages before you even get to anything that’s going to upset most people as far as even the level of graphic I went to. By that point, even if the reader has to check out cause they can’t handle the subject-matter, it’s enough to form an opinion about whether I have the ability to write fiction or not. Which was what it was about to begin with. Not: Is this your thing? Do you like the story itself?

And no that’s not related to KEPT. That was something for an erotic fiction contest (I won second place, and $300.) Typically I have to write erotica under a diff name cause I’ll censor myself otherwise worrying about alienating people who like my paranormal romance but can’t handle the rest.

The paranormal romance is very sexually tame which oddly makes some think I’m some kind of sex-writing prude, no, I just don’t find overly explicit sex, sexy. And when it’s romance, not erotica, it’s about the relationship dynamic, not how many sex scenes you can cram into the book. If it doesn’t push the plot forward it doesn’t need to be shown. I mean do you walk us through every meal a character eats? Or all their bathroom trips? We have such weird views about sex, that when we get to romance some people have to have it on every page.

And KEPT is the paranormal romance. It features shapeshifters, vampires, demons, etc and is less serious and more campy/fun. Though I guess there is always the power balance subtext in the paranormal romance. Some readers pick up on it, some don’t. I guess it depends on how their brains are wired.

I’ve had some people want me to expand A Safer Life, but I don’t think present tense will work well for a longer piece, and because of how stupid people are about sex, I really need the space to be able to write that without people going “OMG did you see what Zoe Winters wrote?” If A Safer Life is enough for them to judge me, then I don’t care, cause that wasn’t even that graphic to begin with.

Revolutionary Road was a GREAT film. And COOL to all the other stuff you said! Yeah I just don’t have much respect for much of how publishing is run. I can’t see myself begging at the gates to be let into an industry where the standards of business are so low and weird.

True revolutionaries are people like Mark Coker, Henry Baum, Amy Edelman, April Hamilton, Michael Stackpole. These people are shaking things up and doing things that are DIFFERENT and aren’t playing it safe by any stretch of the publishing imagination.

I know of the first and the last you mentioned. I’ll have to look up the others. Good to know!

Yeah, I noticed no one commented on your writing. I don’t know if that’s a knee-jerk reaction to romance with explicit sex in it or what. (I could say a thing or two about the discrepancies between the glorification of violence in art and the vilification of sex in same and how we need to stop taking our cues from our colonialist, Puritan roots here in the U.S., but that’s another rant for another time. ;D)

In any case, I read it and loved it! Are those characters in KEPT or any of your upcoming books? It was so haunting. I like dark fiction and power imbalances. Ha!

They need to decide whether they’re in it for money or art, because at this point in time mainstream publishing in general is succeeding on neither score.

Blasphemy! Don’t you know you’ll never achieve anything in this world without recognizing your betters?

I used to buy into all of the stereotypes about romance. Then I realized that all of the complaints about formulaic writing could easily be applied to any literary genre. I mean, think about it: there are literary tropes all over the mystery and thriller genres. They’re more “respected,” I suspect — and this is all relative, because genre fiction on the whole is disrespected compared to literary fiction — because anything that is perceived to be flowery, feminine or emotional in the mass consciousness is considered for women only and thus is regarded as inferior.

It’s my eternal frustration with the entertainment industry as a whole. Look at film. There are so many crappy films out there, and half of mainstream movies seem hackneyed, dull, and pointless to me. On the other hand, it’s the 20 percent of movies like Scary Movie [#] and Saw [#] that pay for the production of films like Revolutionary Road and Finding Neverland. Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, where the films with good acting, direction, writing, etc. are about subjects that I find boring or distasteful, like every single film about boxing in the past decade or so: Ali, Million Dollar Baby, The Hurricane, Rocky Balboa, and Cinderella Man. People in Hollywood apparently like boxing. A lot. (Thanks, Stallone.) I hate it; the only instances where I thought it was well-done on film were as parts of larger plot arcs, like in Far and Away. I want a happy medium here, the equivalent of Neil Gaiman stuff for film, where something can be educational or beautiful AND entertaining. I love historical fiction, but we don’t need any more twentieth-century historical fiction unless it’s about the cultural revolution of the Sixties or the Roaring Twenties, and even so, those areas have some coverage. Similarly, I don’t mind social justice in my entertainment, but there needs to be a hopeful ending. I want to escape from the real world, not be even more depressed. It’s the difference between A Time to Kill and Dangerous Minds. The latter is not appealing. That’s just me.

Back to romance. The publishing industry does itself a big disservice when it discounts a third of its total sales. There’s shooting yourself in the foot, and then there’s the publishing industry. -.-

I mean, honestly, I wish people would make up their minds. Either you’re in it for the art and you need to listen to and respect readers and cultivate patronage to survive, or you’re in it for the money and you throw your weight behind enterprises that resemble Harlequin. They want to have it both ways, but they don’t want to change the system to accommodate both ways. Why not take the readership-loyalty practices of Harlequin, the business savvy of Baen, and the open-minded ebook/print practices of Samhain? I’m not saying any one company is perfect, but there is risk inherent in any sea change. The worst thing to do is bury one’s head in the sand and pretend that nothing is happening.

The Expresso is really cool. I actually found out about a trad. published author who is now selling some of his titles exclusively through POD/Expresso with the Harvard Bookstore. His name is Steve Almond, and he is FANTASTIC. He pulls no punches when it comes to lambasting the short-sightedness of the industry, and I actually went to the store and bought his book, THIS WON’T TAKE BUT A MINUTE, HONEY (stories and essays on writing) because of his opinions on the future of publishing.