I’d volunteer.

Was mulling over the PW post the other day and pretty much thought of much the same thing as Eric. I also discovered this site the same was. Agree about the dedicated reviewers part, though if there was a pool of people and a pool of books to review (with certain exceptions where one could [...]

Interesting this should crop up when I just ended an experiment with Adwords of my own book. I got about 90 clicks from 350,000 displays, at a cost of $13. No effect on sales, though it did give my website all of it’s daily traffic. Adwords is more niche since it’s keyword and content based, [...]

Thanks for the resource! I’ve been considering making my books audio for a while (we have professional recording equipment at home), and other than the immense amount of time it takes, distribution was something I was concerned about. %75 commission does seem fine as well, once you discount the cuts the various extra final distributers [...]

About #2, there is a good marketing strategy for being hated. If there are people that vehemently hate something, there is usually an opposing group that overwhelmingly love it. See Apple, Microsoft, Google, and all the other big names. It’s really far and few between that anyone is universally hated. BP being a notable exception. [...]

I do think advances are pretty much the only way to make traditional publishing (as we currently know it) really work as a business. But conversely, to counter both the article writers point and to Eric’s question: How many traditionally published books earn back their advance? How many books make enough money by themselves, to [...]

Great. I’ve had a few male friends who’ve tried explaining the cultural depiction of dominant men before to other men and women, and being lambasted for it since they couldn’t understand the difference between dominant and abusive. Thanks to our culture, the dominant male has been distorted in media. It’s great to see the point [...]

I do want to mention, that all major publishers are corporations. After working in a corporation, filled with people who love their jobs and want to make other peoples lives better, I’ve understood what goes on. Traditional publishers are controlled by people whose aim is to make money. That’s it. Now, they do hire editors [...]

I’ve always thought it atrocious that the royalty was only %30, however when people were pricing their books at 0.99, that was the only way for Amazon to actually turn a profit on their works. It’s a cost of doing business, since all kindle owners get free 3G, and the cost of doing business. If [...]

I agree with everything here, and have to emphasize just how important this post is. Really great point about 1000 fans. Seth Godin also talks a lot about creating fans. Fans are loyal. They talk about you to others. And most of all, they are fans of you, not just of your books. Engaging with [...]

Kristen’s response is spot on, and hilarious. I didn’t think of it that way, and have been laughing ever since. I could have avoided my entire post and just written that! A S: I work in a field involved where data is received, checked, reviewed, and then quality controlled. We do the equivalent of 1000 [...]

First, congrats on getting into the top 50. I only made it past the pitch, the except is what excluded 4000 of us (per side), and that’s where I had to stop paying attention to the ABNA process. I don’t want this to sound like a rant at all, since I know I wouldn’t win [...]

I never wrote like that either. I think the people that will succeed at self-publishing are writers who, if given a proper opportunity (and exposure, and marketing, and distribution), would do extremely well if traditionally published. But they aren’t being published, or they want more control, or the publishers aren’t able to print every great [...]

Actually, it does appear to be a derivative, since it’s in a different format. It’s not an ebook anymore, it’s a physical product. Doesn’t even matter if the product inside is just a copy, it’s still been transformed and being sold. It’s complicated legalese, from what I can understand, but end-case it looks like they [...]

I used mininova.org for the initial plant – they used to be the largest P2P torrent site, but instead of being shut down they decided to go legal and host only user-created works. From there, all the other torrent sites scrape their content and redistribute it across other sites as well. Here’s the profile and [...]

Note about sales correlating to download figures: I’ve got a few chapters of my first book available for download (using P2P sites instead of book sites). 3 chapters, a total of 40,000 downloads / so about 13k each. Hasn’t influenced sales at all. Really, not a bit, yet. My second I’ve made free yesterday and [...]

Going to have to favorite this and recite it if anyone ever asks why I self-publish. Really, really good post. Being self-employed, doing a job you enjoy, outweighs the strain of being under others, whether that’s a publisher or an employer.

So many conflicted thoughts on this that I wouldn’t know where to begin and end. So I wont. Totally agree with the intro: “… which has implications for self-publishing and it also… doesn’t.” JA Konrath is an inspiration, but he still has a large set of books to support him. That is a “platform” – [...]