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I’m very happy about Konrath’s success.  It’s encouraging to everybody.  If I make 1/10 of what he’s making, I’ll be ecstatic.  But there’s sometimes a problem with writers like Konrath or Cory Doctorow touting their success when they’re each in a very unique position.  Doctorow advocates giving away books for free permanently because it’s worked for him.  What he doesn’t mention is that he also runs BoingBoing, which has hundreds of thousands of readers.  He’s the exception, not the rule.

Konrath is doing something similar.  He’s saying that his $100,000 month is because of Amazon, not name recognition:

I made

Yesterday, I was looking at my Kindle sales, which reliably sell the the same amount every day (which is not a huge amount, I’m no Konrath) and I was wondering why I couldn’t break through with more sales.  Am I getting the exact same traffic to my Amazon page every day?  How much of that traffic leads to a sale? In Google Analytics, the info for the week for this site looks like this:

It would be enormously important to see Bounce Rate: how many people are coming to the page and leaving without making a purchase. What about […]

Meghan Daum has a very interesting post in The Believer about what it’s like to be a columnist for the L.A. Times and the amount of invective that’s thrown her way:

These days, being attacked isn’t just the result of saying something badly, it’s the result of saying anything at all. I can testify to this, because for more than six years, I have been a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times. This is a great gig, and I have many loyal, smart, thoughtful readers. But I also live with the fact that practically everything I write is

I’m writing this to save my own life.  If my opening line doesn’t seize you by the wallet and pry the credit card from your increasingly skeptical hand, I could die.  Or worse, not sell you my book.

According to accepted wisdom (syndicated through the usual links, Likes and sponsored emails) your career will literally immolate itself in a sparking bonfire of molton e-readers and declining Amazon sales ranks unless the first bunch of words mashed together in your novel’s opening creates an immediate emotional investment through foreshadowing, suspense, pathos and wit.  And it shouldn’t be as long as that […]

A good post at the Huffington Post about the 99 cent price point.

Let’s look at the dollars and cents of the 99-cent price point for independent authors. If an author is self-published through Amazon KDP, he or she earns 34 cents per 99-cent book sold. Not only do authors put time and energy into their writing, there are other associated costs to publishing a quality book, including cover artists ($125-3000), editors ($800-5000), marketing, etc. If you add up the average cover cost of $350, average editing job of $1400, then divide by 34 cents, the author would have

Louis CK is my favorite writer – in any medium. Yeah, he’s a comic, but he’s got what I look for in a writer: total honesty. He’s willing to explore the darker parts of himself and lay it all bare. In my experience, there aren’t enough writers who do that. Check out his moving ode to George Carlin about his process. Really, there’s not much difference between stand-up comedy and fiction. It’s just writing performed.

So it was very interesting to see Louis CK go the self-publishing route with his latest special.  It’s pretty much exactly the same as […]