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Has self-publishing lost its way? The reason that I got interested in self-publishing was because of the traditional publishing industry’s obsession with marketing over the quality of books. It seems like the vibe around self-publishing these days is echoing trad publishing’s marketing obsession. I understand wanting to sell books. I’m desperate to sell books as well and I check my KDP account more than is healthy. But: book sales are not the only reason to write, and it’s also not the only reason to market a book.

JA Konrath has a post about how publicity doesn’t lead to book sales[…]

2011 was an essential year for self-publishing and it’s good to have all major events collected in one place.

I prepared a timeline, which works very well with a detailed report on top self-published Kindle ebooks of 2011 and will be a part of the infographic about self-publishing I’m going to post at Ebook Friendly by the end of January.

If you don’t want to miss the infographic and new posts on self-publishing, please get free updates by either RSS or email.

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January

Amazon extends the 70% royalty option from their self-publishing platform, KDP, to include […]

Andrew Sullivan posted an email from a reader – who we’ve reviewed and  interviewed in the past – about his leap from self-publishing to AmazonEncore (which I didn’t know had happened, so congrats Tim!).  He writes:

After finishing a first draft of the manuscript, I jumped through all the typical hoops: got an agent, wrote a fat book proposal, revised till my nose bled, this, that, the other. Ultimately, after several years of trying, my agent was unable to sell it because, even when editors were interested – and we did have a few big pubs on the line  -the

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 […]