1846 and 1762

One thousand eight hundred and forty-six. That's how many self-pubbed books I'm selling daily.

This is an average of the 12 days and nine hours (March 13, 9am) my books have been for sale this month.

For those who are interested in numbers, here is how the 22848 books sold breaks down:

CreateSpace
603 books
$1457 earned

Nook
648 ebooks
$1047 earned

Kindle
14485 ebooks @ 99¢ (14 titles)
$5070 earned

7014 ebooks @ $2.99 (14 titles)
$14,238 earned

Which means that so far this month I've earned $21,812.

In other words, I'm making $1762 a day, or $73.44 an hour, or $1.22 a minute, or about 2¢ a second.

If this rate stays steady, in a 365 day period I'll earn $643,130.

Of course, I don't expect this rate to stay steady. I expect it to go up. Just like it has consistently for the last two years.

Ereaders will keep coming down in price. Many more will be sold. Plus I'm going to put ten new ebook titles up by Xmas.

Certainly I can't be the only one blown away by these numbers. Especially considering the route it took to get here.

In April 2009, I made $607 self-pubbing.

In April 2010, I made $4041 self-pubbing.

For April 2011, I'll likely make $52,860.

Now, let's see how I analyzed my data last year in June.

I guessed that if I could sell 5000 ebooks a month (which I thought was doable), I'd be able to earn $120,000 a year.

I also predicted there would be more indie writers in the Top 100 (at the time, I believe I was the only one), and some would wind up do better than I'm doing.

Turns out I underestimated both how many I'd sell, and how many other writers would sell. (And it really tickles me to see my reaction 12 months ago.)

Now there seems to be a lot of worry on the world wide web about ebook prices "racing to the bottom." I'm pretty sure my latest figures contradict that, and I think the worry is based on a skewed sample.

You can't study the Top 100 ebook bestsellers on Kindle and apply those ratios to the other 900,000 Kindle ebooks for sale on Amazon. Data always falls into a bell curve. The Top 100 won't apply to the rest of the ebooks that are for sale.

I've sold over 14k ebooks for 99 cents so far this month, and have made $5k. The majority of these sales (11781) are from The List, which is currently #17 on the Top 100.

But my $2.99 backlist, while not as high profile as the Top 100 books and not selling as well, has earned me almost three times as much money as my 99 cent ebooks.

I think that's a pretty good argument for $2.99 still being a viable price point overall. It just doesn't seem to be a viable price point for cracking the Top 100.

But even then, there are a few $2.99 indie ebooks in the Top 100. And soon I'm going to raise the price of The List back to $2.99, to see what happens.

Should be interesting...

Guest Post by Zoe Winters

Years ago, Zoe Winters used to comment on my blog, objecting whenever I mentioned that self-publishing was a bad idea.

I was correct. Back then, it was a bad idea. But Zoe firmly believed I was mistaken and she dove into self-pubbing full-force, evangelizing it with a zeal normally reserved for religious fanatics. It used to annoy me a bit, because Zoe was spouting off her opinions as facts when she'd had no experience in traditional publishing, no real success at self-publishing, and no data to back up her strong opinions.

And then a funny thing happened. The landscape began to rapidly shift. Self-publishing became a viable way to make money, and Zoe was perfectly positioned to capitalize upon this.

Which she did, selling thousands and thousands of ebooks, making a nice chunk of change, and then eventually self-pubbing print and audio editions.

She's got great covers, a great website, and a great blog. And I really dug her Zoe Who? video.

So here's Zoe...

What Next?
by Zoe Winters

Joe asked me if I’d like to blog at his place, but I wanted to talk about something a little different. What I want to talk about and what excites me now is... what next?

For a lot of indies “what next” is obviously an agent and a large traditional publishing deal. I’m sure if I ever did well enough, it’s theoretically possible someone could offer me a deal large enough to take. But even as I type that I’m a little doubtful. I “really” love self-publishing. The more I do it, the more I love it.

One of the major things I’ve learned is that we are all on our own publishing journey. And we all get where we’re going at different speeds and in different ways. It’s important that wherever you are, you learn to keep your eyes on your own paper and focus on where you are and what the next step is for where you want to go. And also take the time to smell the roses and appreciate the ability to produce your own work. Because that’s something that for most of the past century has not been a very popular concept. (But something that was long overdue to make a comeback.)

If you’re focused on what someone else is doing or maintaining some imaginary status, you will lose your freaking mind. Trust me on this one. It seems totally obvious, but when you get out there it is SO hard not to get sucked into all the drama and ego and blah blah blah and comparing yourself with what everyone else is doing for good or ill.

One of the best decisions I’ve made recently is to back off the indie rah rah train. My focus should be on building my platform for romance. When people think “Zoe Winters” I’d really rather them think: “Paranormal romance author, and I think she’s indie”, not “That loud-mouthed indie author, I don’t remember what she publishes. I think it’s some romance crap or something.” And I really want to avoid: “That crazy bitch”, as the first impression.

My primary focus in life right now needs to be: “How am I going to get these two characters into bed without being totally lame about it?” It’s great that I have these epic important goals, huh? That Zoe Winters is a girl with her priorities in the right place!

Beyond focusing more on the actual fiction than the peripheral publishing debates, I’ve started to expand what I’m doing a little bit in a couple of different areas. One of them is marketing and building a stronger connection with my platform of readers.

I used to hate book trailers to the degree that you would think they had personally offended me and my momma. I think it was because I didn’t “get” what they were for. Most people seem to agree that book trailers do not sell giant numbers of books to totally new people to your work. And they’d be right. Also, they cost either an arm and a leg or a ton of time. Or both. But I think they’re great for connecting with your current readership and can be a lot of fun.

Here is the book trailer for my recent release, Save My Soul, put together for me by the amazing Michelle Davidson Argyle:

Book Trailer: Save My Soul by: Zoe Winters from Zoe Winters on Vimeo.

Another project I’ve been working on, is getting audiobooks out the door. I don’t get a lot of time to read for pleasure, but with audio I’m able to “read” while cleaning, cooking, driving, exercising. It’s really a pretty awesome way to fit stories in. Listening to audiobooks, I started to think how cool it would be to have my own work packaged that way. Initially, I thought maybe I’d sell well enough someday that I could license those rights.

I ditched that idea pretty early because I’d have little or no say over who did the narration. Having listened to so many audio books, I am pretty particular about who reads to me. And having listened to James Marsters narrate the Dresden Files, and Jim Frangione narrate J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series, I’m pretty hung up on male voices reading to me for the most part.

Instead of trying to license those rights to an audiobook publisher, I decided to go to an audiobook production company that works with indies, Perfect Voices. They will produce, edit, and distribute the audio, while I get a much larger cut of the proceeds than I’d get going traditionally.

I got 10 great auditions and chose Chet Williamson, who I absolutely adore. His comedic and dramatic timing is great. His pacing is great. Some of his interpretation of the text and characters is better than it played in my head, which makes me look like a more awesome writer than I am. And that’s always good. So I’m very excited about this new audio frontier.

This is the result:

http://zoewinters.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/blood-lust-audiobook-now-available/

And that was way more verbiage than you probably wanted about what I’m up to. I’d like to eventually do well enough that I could do limited edition signed and numbered hardcovers. I love the idea of putting together a hardcover that is so well-done that it goes back to “bookmaking as an art”. I think I need a much stronger and larger platform to make that viable, but it’s definitely on the list of stuff I’m hoping to do some day in the future.

And, of course, if you happen to read paranormal romance you can find the latest book, Save My Soul at Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords.

Thanks for reading!

Joe sez: One of the things I like about Zoe is that her product--books, website, blog, trailers--is indistinguishable from what the Big 6 are doing. She doesn't look like an indie author. Not one bit. The effort she's put into her writing career is impressive, and something all of us should strive for.

She's also making it her goal to write 365,000 words this year. That kind of commitment marks her as a pure professional. And in this current Gold Rush ebook climate, I'm betting it will pay off for her.

I'm actually doing a (gasp) book signing today in Peru, IL at the Waldenbooks in the mall, from 2pm-3pm with Henry Perez, so I won't be around. (I know, I said I wasn't doing any more signings, but this is a favor to my bookseller buddy Greg Swanson.)

But I've asked Zoe to stop by and answer any questions anyone might have. I'm sure she can hold down the fort in my absence.

Guest Post by Selena Blake

I asked Selena Blake to do a guest post back in January, and she did, but I haven't had a chance to post it until now. At the end of her post there's an update on her sales figures.

The Times They Are A-Changin'
By Selena Blake

Like so many authors, I’ve been reading Joe’s blog with a great deal of fascination. And dare I say, skepticism. For six months now I’ve wondered if Joe was for real or just pulling my leg. In my defense, you know what they say about something that sounds too good to be true.

At the same time, I was hopeful that his success wasn’t a solitary event and that his background in traditional publishing wasn’t solely responsible for his current success.

I've been in the publishing industry for over ten years now. A few years ago I decided it was time to try my hand at getting published. As a long time fan of ebooks, I worked out a marketing plan and career path that started with publishing digitally. I found a well recommended ebook publisher in my genre, submitted and had an offer four days later. They really liked the book and my series concept. Though that publisher bought five books from me and most of them sold well, my background is in marketing and I always thought I could reach a larger audience.

When my publisher gave me one reason after another as to why my books wouldn't/couldn’t be distributed through venues such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords, I was aghast.

Distribution is key, in my opinion.

I started my independent publishing journey with one novella that I really liked but wasn't quite right for the publishers I'd submitted it to. After playing the waiting game for over three years I published Surprising Darcy to Amazon and Smashwords in August of 2010. That was about the time I found Joe’s blog. And shortly after, Pubit came on the scene. I was making around $300 a month total, which to me was fabulous! That's a car payment. But I still thought I could do better.

I had to build my list of books on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. When my contracts were up with my publisher in the autumn of 2010, I took the books back.

I released the first book in my series, The Cajun’s Captive, on December 29, 2010. That same day I published another short story from my “early publishing days” and gave it a new title, Just a Little Taste.

In mid January I released my fourth self published ebook, Bitten in the Bayou, which is the second in my series.

At the time of writing this, I’ve sold just over 12,000 copies in less than a month.

12,000 copies. That number truly blows my mind. Actually, I almost fell out of my chair.

Now, instead of just paying the car payment, royalties from January’s sales will cover ALL my expenses. That’s an incredibly beautiful and humbling thought. And I’m terrified that I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will all have been a dream. I imagine a great many of the authors Joe has allowed to guest blog here lately feel that way, even though Joe keeps telling us, we’re not dreaming.

If you’re looking for an anomaly, of those 12,000 copies about 11,000 sold via Nook. Not Kindle. I sold a little over 1,000 copies on the Kindle in January. My numbers at Kindle get a little better each month and I like to think of that platform as my steady seller.

With numbers like this, I’m rethinking that original career plan. And the marketing plan too. And even the books I write. Where I once planned on digital publishing being my introduction to the industry and would later go after print contracts, I’m now much more focused on writing novels and letting them just be ebooks. Ebooks are real books.

Do I still want a publisher in addition to self publishing? Yes. Why? To further increase my audience and for the dedicated staff. These days I’m much more concerned about working with people who understand and embrace this new frontier, those who are keen on exploring and taking risks. I’m interested in working with publishers who understand that distribution and promotion are very important. I want to partner with companies that are aggressively pursuing all options and who understand that publishing is a business. An ever evolving business.

Do I have any interest in “traditional publishing?” Not really. Not the way traditional publishing has been defined for the last few decades. I think we are at a point where the rules are being rewritten, new lines are being drawn in the sand, and publishers as we used to know them are changing forever. What an exciting time to be an author.

If you’ve read Joe’s blog for any length of time, you’ll have noticed his comments on the downward spiral of these “traditional publishers.” I’ll let Joe speak for himself, but I believe that publishers need to “get with the program” if they’re going to survive.

Getting with the program, in my opinion, means embracing digital publishing, becoming more flexible and offering their backlist books in e-formats. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that digital needs to completely replace print publishing, I know that I haven’t bought fiction in print for quite a while. I still like a full color cookbook for my collection or perhaps a lovely coffee table book, but my purchasing habits have changed. As have the purchasing habits of millions of other consumers.

the times they are a-changin’. I remember the days when ebook authors were looked upon like second class citizens by friends, family, consumers, and writing organizations. I’ve watched this little corner of the market grow from a time where there were only a handful of digital publishers and we readers were still waiting to get our hands on an actual ereading device. Over time more epublishers cropped up and we ebook fans waited for ereaders to hit a lower price point, somewhere between $100 and $150. For years, experts agreed that if we could get a popular ereading device at a low enough price point, digital books could really take off.

Guess what? We’re there.

The question is where do we go from here? Continued education of the public. I met a lovely reader on Twitter the other day who did not know Kindle has an app for the PC. When I mentioned that to her, she downloaded it and I sent her a complimentary copy of The Cajun’s Captive. She loved it and has since spread the word about me and my books.

I had another reader email me asking what the Kindle is. Yes, there are still folks who don’t know what the Kindle is. As authors (and ebook fans,) it’s our duty to educate them, write good books, and spread the word.

If you think you’d like to give it a go, here are some of my observations. I’m by no means an expert so take them with a grain of salt.

1. Be Professional
To me, it means looking at your writing like a business. Making sound business decisions. That may mean hiring a professional cover artist and editor. Spending money (when you really need to!) to make money, as LJ Sellers did.

2. Publish Clean Copy
It’s not enough to write the book. You need to polish it. Luckily, most of my current releases had been previously published which means that I polished them a lot before I sent them to my editor where they went through three more rounds of editing. I got to keep those edited copies. As Joe says, have your betas and fellow authors proof your work. I’m lucky enough to have two editors as friends.

3. Use Professional Cover Art
The saying goes: never judge a book by its cover. But we all do it anyway. Why would you want to submit a small, fuzzy, hard to read cover to sell your book? You wouldn’t roll in the mud before going into a job interview would you?

4. Promote
I’ve done plenty of it. I’ve joined message boards, yahoo groups, Goodreads, Shelfari. I have a website and a blog and a newsletter. I offer free reads. I’ve joined sites within my niche where I’ve met readers, shared book recommendations and purchased advertising. I also write guest blog posts like this one. And in February I’m going on a blog tour. I have profiles on all the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Shelfari, Myspace, Bebo, Linkdin) and of course, Amazon. The key is interacting, I think. Subtle promo, not drive by promo.

5. Advertising
I’m a big fan of having someone else do my promotion for me while I’m sleeping. So I’ve had advertisements on half a dozen sites over the years and I’m looking to increase this in the future.

6. Distribution
I’ve always felt that distribution is important. When I look at the most successful companies, the ones who pay attention to getting their products into the hands of their customers as easily, efficiently, and cost affectively as possible are generally at the top of the list. With so many options available to us now, making your books available on as many platforms as you can makes sense to me.

7. Be willing to change
Along with the brand new cover art that graces all my current books, I changed the descriptions on many of them as well. I’ve even changed the blurbs more than once. The great thing about digital publishing, in my opinion, is the ability to craft a description that gets more attention. It’s being able to go back and adjust your key words, change your title or cover if you feel you can do better. Adjust your price points. Or even, updating your book.

8. Grow your readership
That sounds trite, doesn’t it? But what I mean, and what I’m trying to do, is meet new readers. Introduce myself to them. Become friends with them. Discover what THEY want to read. Publishers often think they know what readers want and authors often feel like readers should want something out of the ordinary. Independent publishing gives you the flexibility to try something new. To give readers what they say they want.

9. Have a plan
Just like businesses have a business plan and many professionals have a career plan, I recommend having a career plan and a marketing plan. Both of these will help keep you focused and they’ll provide guidance along the way. But don’t carve these into stone. As I mentioned, I had a career path and marketing plan developed way back when. Now I’m readjusting that to include self publishing. And perhaps even a POD anthology of my Stormy Weather series.

10. Writing Another Great Book
The key here I believe is to always be learning, always improving your craft. As Joe mentioned here, there are plenty of popular authors who weren’t the best writers in the beginning. But time and knowledge will allow you to write a better book. And when you write a better book, that should help you sell better.

There it is. My publishing journey thus far and my observations, for what they’re worth, on self publishing.

By the way, I no longer think Joe is pulling my leg.

What about you? Are you a self-publishing convert? A disbeliever? Or do you just feel more secure going the traditional publishing route? What do you think are key aspects of doing well as an independently published author?

Joe sez: To date, Blake has sold 23,000 ebooks. Which is impressive. I expect she'll begin to sell as well on Amazon as she is on Nook, and will eventually work her way up to a six figure annual income, selling 99 cent titles.

While I agree with much of what she has to say, I think advertising is pretty much a waste of money (any time I've done it I haven't noticed an uptick in sales, let alone one big enough to justify the cost of the ad.)

And while having a business plan is fine, it's important to differentiate between what you can accomplish on your own (writing and uploading an ebook, getting killer cover art) and what requires luck (selling 23,000 ebooks, making the Nook bestseller list.)

A goal is something you can attain through hard work. Dreams are things that require crossed fingers.

Luck is ALWAYS a factor in success, no matter how you publish.

That said, since January 1st I've profiled more than 15 authors who are doing extremely well self-pubbing, and I've turned down requests from many others who want to guest post.

Seems like a lot of writers are getting lucky with ebooks.

That doesn't mean everyone will hit the jackpot. But I'm convinced is better off going solo than trying to work through legacy publishing.

So if you're an author, what exactly are you waiting for?

Guest Post by Ann Voss Peterson

Three years ago, I had an idea for a spy novel. One that had a cold-as-ice female assassin, and more action in it than three other thrillers combined.

The problem was I didn't have time to write it. I was too busy with other projects, and couldn't devote the attention to the project that it needed.

Then last year I had an epiphany. Instead of writing it on my own, I could do a rough outline, find a collaborator, and we could both write the book.

I hunted around for the perfect partner for a while before approaching my friend, Ann Voss Peterson. Ann knew how much I was earning with ebooks (hell, everyone knows how much I'm earning with ebooks), and after plying her with liquor she agreed to co-write FLEE.

If all goes well, it will be released as an ebook and a print book at the end of March. Here's the Carl Graves cover (click on it to make it larger and read the back jacket copy.)

The cover image is taken from a pivotal scene in the novel. Set in Chicago, the hero is chased to the iconic Hancock Building and gets into a firefight in the Signature Room on the 95th floor. Windows are blown out, and she falls.

The tagline is, "If the adrenaline doesn't kill you, she will."

I'm extremely happy with how the book is going so far. It's like James Bond on steroids, loaded with firefights, sex, violence, double-crosses, narrow escapes, and faster pacing than any other book ever written. No bullshit.

Ann and I are doing a 50/50 split on all royalties, and if the book sells modestly there will be more to come.

While writing FLEE, I began to pester Ann to get a short story up on Kindle, and...

Well, I'll let her tell it.

Ann: Wild Night Is Calling started as a slightly strange thriller short story I wrote last year. I mentioned it to Joe, and he had the crazy idea of writing a companion piece to it and self-publishing them together. And since he’s Joe Konrath, he kept after me until I agreed. And I have to say, I love the result. Here's the ultra-brief synopsis:

Wisconsin.

Summer.

Late at night.

Two teenage girls are picked up by two boys, who invite them back to their place to party. But an innocent mistake turns the party into a nightmare, where nothing is what it seems...

Wild Night is a 5000 word short available for 99 cents on Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, and coming soon to other ereaders.

The ebook also contains the first few pages of FLEE, which is going to be released in March or April, depending on how fast Joe can write.

Joe: I can write pretty fast, but I'm taking my time with FLEE. It's special. I haven't felt this way about a story since I wrote Whiskey Sour back in 2002. I really dig the main character, the set-up, and the ridiculous amount of energy this book has.

Ann: FLEE is very high-octane. It’s the kind of story that should be made into a star vehicle for Angelina Jolie, if her star vehicles were this good. Seriously, the story is non-stop action and conflict layered upon conflict.

Joe sprang this idea on me as we were carpooling to Bouchercon. Neither of us had time to work on it until recently, but it’s been a blast to write. I’ve always had a bit of a tendency to write dark and action-heavy romantic suspense, something I’ve tried to control in my Harlequins. In FLEE, I’ve been able to let loose.

Joe: We should talk about your writing background. And by "we" I mean "you."

Ann: I got my start writing and publishing books at the age of six. They had very marketable construction paper covers and featured hooky premises like saving my best friend from being eaten by goblins. But even with that background, I turned my back on genre fiction in college and became a literary snob, like any good English major. I read the classics and wrote short stories about characters with deep, absorbing problems that they couldn’t quite identify. I earned A's, and although I didn’t yet understand how to weave a compelling story, I did learn a lot about word craft and how to use criticism to improve my work.

After earning my Bachelor’s degree, I turned down graduate school in favor of living life. I tended bar, traveled around the country as a horse show groom and started my own window washing business. It wasn’t until my husband the DJ began a feature on his morning radio show called “Romance Novel Theater,” that I considered reading a romance (I didn’t realize Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters wrote romance). And when I discovered there were romance novels that featured suspense storylines, I knew I’d found what I wanted to write.

I soon discovered that writing romance wasn’t easy, especially without having read much of it. So I read like crazy and wrote three complete romantic suspense manuscripts before I felt I had anything good enough to submit. I sold the third manuscript to Harlequin’s Intrigue line, and it was published in 2000. My 25th book for Harlequin will be released in November. Many have won awards, including the Daphne du Maurier award for series romantic suspense, and I have around 3 million books in print all over the world. My most recent release hit number one on the Borders Bestsellers List for series romance.

Joe: JA's First Rule of Collaboration is: Try to team up with someone who sells more books than you do. 3 million certainly qualifies.

I'll confess that I'm pretty geeked about FLEE, and I have a feeling readers will like it. I pride myself on writing fast-paced books, but this one makes much of my earlier stuff look tame. FLEE starts pretty quick, then keeps picking up speed for 300 pages.

Until FLEE comes out, I encourage romance readers to check out Ann's books, and thriller readers to check out Wild Night Is Calling. If you were ever a fan of the old TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, you'll see immediately what Ann and I were trying to do with Wild Night.

Anyone who buys a copy of Wild Night is Calling will get a free copy of FLEE for free, in the ereader format of their choice. Just email me at joekonrath(at)comcast(dot)net with the header FREE FLEE. To prove you bought Wild Night, write the last line of the story in your email.

If you can follow those easy instructions, I'll send you a free copy of FLEE a week before it goes on sale. You'll be the envy of all your friends, and get to brag that you're super-special buddies with two bestselling authors.

And if anyone has questions about what it's like to work for a giant publisher like Harlequin, or why Ann is beginning to self-publish ebooks, please post them for her in the comments section.

Some questions might include:

Is writing series romance lucrative?

What's it like working with Konrath?

Do you think ebooks are the future?

Are you selling any of those construction paper books on your website?

Come to think of it, I'd like to know the answers to these myself...

Guest Post by John Locke

If you're paying any attention to the Amazon Top 100, you'll know that my ebook, The List, is currently ranked #35.

You'll also know that out of the Top 100, twenty-six of those spots belong to indie authors. Seven of those are occupied by wunderkind Amanda Hocking.

But six of them, including the coveted #1 spot, are from a writer named John Locke.

So who is John Locke?

I caught up with John while we were both in the Swiss Alps, at a secret bestselling author chalet where we heat our jacuzzis by burning stacks of hundred dollar bills.

Naturally, I had questions. In between throwing greenbacks on the fire, he graciously answered.

Joe: You seem to have come out of nowhere. What's the story?

John: My background is niche marketing, where I built a successful business selling specialty insurance, and then another one, investing in specialty real estate. So the first time I saw the business model for selling eBooks on Kindle, my eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas. Why? Because Kindle doesn’t just level the playing field for self-published authors, it actually slants it in our favor.

Specifically, I saw that a self-published book could be offered on Kindle for 99 cents, and still turn a 35 cent profit. I was stunned! I walked around in a daze for, well, days, trying to explain to people what that meant. No one seemed impressed. To me it was like receiving the keys to the kingdom, and I immediately set a goal to become the world’s greatest 99-cent author.

Joe: Which, at this moment, you are. This fascinates me, because when Amazon began offering 70% to ebooks priced $2.99 and up, a lot of people considered staying at 99 cents to be slumming.

Which was naive. Coming from a legacy publishing background, I knew that 35% royalties were much better than anything the Big 6 offered. Even so, when I first got into this, I thought that cheap ebooks would be a loss lead, that would get people to read my more expensive books.

And yet, when I lowered the price of The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, I started selling 20x as many copies--about 800 a day. My loss lead became my biggest earner.

I guess there's something about 99 cents...

John: In February, 1963, I was twelve years old, living in Shreveport, Louisiana. One Saturday I walked a couple of blocks, caught a bus and took it downtown, walked another block to 728 Texas Street, and entered Stan’s Record Shop to buy a recording of “Walk Like A Man,” by the Four Seasons. It was two minutes and seventeen seconds long, cost a dollar, and I still had to catch a bus ride home.

Now, 48 years later, you can buy one of my books for only 99 cents! You don’t have to walk a step, catch a bus, drive a car, fight the traffic, find a parking space, wait in line, or cut down a single tree. You press a button, and within a couple of effortless seconds, you get four or five hours of entertainment.

Joe: For years, I've been trying to tell other authors that ebooks are a game changer. Some are listening...

John: For the first time in history, there's an advantage to being an independent author!

It wasn’t so long ago that an aspiring author would complete his or her manuscript, only to don a pair of knee pads and assume a supplicating posture in order to beg agents to beg publishers to read their work. And from way on high, the publishers would bestow favor upon this one or that, and those who failed to get the nod were out of the game.

No more.

These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It’s not an automatic sale. And the reason it’s not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause—this golden, sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage, because we offer incredible value.

Joe: You're getting great reviews, so people are obviously enjoying your work. Plus, you're outselling every other book on Amazon, including some name brand authors.

John: I’m new to the writing game. But if I’d started self-publishing even three years ago, I would have spent all my time trying to prove to the public I’m just as good as the top authors in America. These days, the burden of proof is on them. Now the best authors in America have to prove they’re ten times better than me. And in a game like that, I like my chances.

Joe: Do you have any traditional publishing experience? An agent?

John: I've never had an agent or publisher, and have never sent a manuscript or query letter to anyone. I always intended to self-publish my work, without representation, and figured my time would be better spent writing books than query letters.

Joe: So, you're the first indie writer to hit #1 on the Amazon Top 100. You also currently hold the #4 spot, and #10 spot. Three in the Top 10. How does it feel?

John: I've thought all day how to express the way it feels to have all 6 books in the top 40, including #1 and #2, but I couldn't come up with the proper adjectives! Today I was contacted about selling the movie rights to my Donovan Creed novels. I was also contacted by a literary agent for representation. On the other hand, I feel weird because I'm the same guy no one paid any attention to last year. The books they want to represent were written a year ago, and when I sent out press releases, no one cared. Now that these same books are selling, I'm what, suddenly good? Doesn't make sense. But yeah, it feels great, of course.

Joe: Congrats on your success. And you really should consider an agent. Even though I'm keeping my print and erights, my agent has been great in selling audio, foreign, and film rights.

Who does your cover art? How much does it cost to self-publish?

John: Claudia Jackson, of Telemachus Press, does all my cover design. She charges $995 to publish an eBook, including cover creation, and distribution to multiple ebook formats. Any art work she purchases for the projects are extra, but reasonable. It's nice to be able to write the book, send it to her, and not have to fool with the process. And Telemachus puts the Ebook accounts in the author's name, so I get all the profits. To me, it's a no-brainer.

Joe: Readers of my blog love numbers, so here's the big question. How many books have you sold so far?

John: As I answer this question, it is March 8th. I have sold just over 350,000 downloads on Kindle since January 1st of this year.

Joe: That's incredible.

John: Kindle is great because you get the sales numbers in real time. I don't have current sales figures for the other eBook formats.

Joe: What advice can you give your fellow authors?

John: I always give authors the same advice: don't take yourself too seriously. Write the types of books you like to read. I offer my readers a fun, breezy read. If I can give them some chuckles and hold their interest for a few hours, I feel I've earned my 99 cents. I know I'm on the right track if I laugh out loud when I'm writing a scene. And if I don't laugh out loud several times while writing a book, I don't publish it.

----------------------------

Joe sez: One thing that strikes me, and strikes me hard, is how outside-the-box Locke's approach has been. He didn't even bother with the query-go-round. He marched boldly into self-publishing, recognizing it for the potential goldmine it could be, and wound up hitting it big.

I'm thrilled for his success, and I invited John to hang out on my blog for a bit to answer any questions that my readers might have.

Ebooks Ain't A Bubble

Elsewhere on the internets, I've heard the current ebook boom being described as a bubble. One that will eventually burst.

That's incorrect.

A bubble is when people invest more money in something than it is actually worth. Real estate, technology, dot com companies, housing, the stock market, etc. all are investments that might not pay off, and have been called bubbles.

Ebooks aren't an investment. We're not dumping money into them, hoping we can sell them at a profit later on.

Rather, ebooks are more like a commodity. But not quite, because they don't conform to the rules of supply and demand, as there is an endless supply. But I believe there is also an endless demand. I come to this conclusion by looking at other digital media, and seeing the never-ending, constantly regenerating market.

An ebook is forever. Forever is a long time to find readers. I'm selling over 1000 ebooks a day, but it would take me forty-one years to completely saturate the current Kindle-owner market (assuming there are currently 15 million Kindle owners.)

However, people read ebooks on more than just their Kindles. There are Kindle apps, Nooks, Kobos, smart phones, computers, tablets, and so on. I could sell 10,000 ebooks a day, and it would still take the rest of my life to saturate the current market.

But the market won't stay current. Ebooks will become the dominant format for reading fiction. They'll proliferate the US and Canada, the UK and Australia, and eventually the world.

There's no ebook bubble. There is only unlimited potential sales. I referred to it in an earlier post as a Gold Rush. But, unlike a Gold Rush, where there is limited gold available, I don't see this gold vein ever running out. The gold is readers, and there are billions of them. It doesn't matter how many miners are trying to get rich. There is enough for everybody, assuming writers work hard and stick with it until they get lucky.

Now, while I consider the ebook forecast for the next few years to be bright, with a high chance of riches for me (I'm currently earning $1300 a day), there is a tech precedent that might show otherwise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983

That article is worth reading, because it shows what could happen in the ebook world once there are no longer any gatekeepers. If the market gets flooded with crap, consumers could stop buying ebooks and instead do something else with their time and money, just as they did with videogames.

But there are some key differences.

First, there is now unlimited retail space, and consumers and etailers have made it easy to find the worthy books.

Second, while there are competing ereading devices, authors can make their work easily available on all of them without an extra time or money investment.

Third, there is no boom/bust bubble, because we don't have to dump money into development, advertising, or speculative stock trading. We don't have to spend money to make money.

Also, even though the 1983 video game crash ruined many companies and temporarily soured the public on videogames, by 1985 videogames were back, and they've been growing ever since. Videogames now make more money than Hollywood.

I've also seen some authors who are doing both self-publishing and legacy publishing, calling it diversification.

That isn't diversification. It's buying a ticket on the Titanic.

I could make a logical, persuasive case for chain bookstores disappearing (as chain record stores and video stores have), and then draw the obvious conclusion that ebooks will replace print as the dominant format, but I've done that often enough to bother repeating it all here. Go back to April 2009 and read my blog from then until now if you want a blow-by-blow report of how the publishing industry is collapsing and ebooks are taking over.

Instead, I want all authors reading this to ask themselves two questions.

1. Will ebooks eventually outsell print books? (hint: they already are in many cases)

2. Do you want to give up 70% royalties and instead accept 14.9% royalties by signing with a legacy publisher? (assume you'll be locked into the contract forever, because you will)

How you answer those questions is how you should approach the next legacy publishing deal you're offered.

For years, I've talked about the importance of luck. You can't succeed without it.

But writers need to fight Stockholm Syndrome and escape the siren song of legacy publishing. For decades they were the only game in town, and trying to get accepted by the gatekeepers has become imprinted on our brains. Getting lucky meant finding a publisher.

These days, signing with a publisher, who will give you an advance in return for the majority of all your royalties, forever, isn't lucky at all. It's like signing a balloon loan, where the payments get bigger every year. Or a life insurance policy, where you keep paying more annually for fewer benefits.

A much better route to take is self-pubbing. At least there, if you get lucky, you get to keep most of your money.

The List Experiment Update

Eighteen days ago, I dropped the price of my ebook, The List, from $2.99 to 99 cents on Amazon. I was selling 40 copies a day prior to that.

Currently, The List is #37 in the Top 100 Bestsellers on the Kindle. It's selling 620 copies a day on Amazon.

Monetizing Your Intellectual Property

So you've got this story you want to e-publish. It's about 5000 words long. You've seen the success Barry Eisler has had with The Lost Coast, selling a short story on Kindle for $2.99, but you don't have Barry Eisler's fanbase. So you decide to price it modestly at 99 cents.

After it goes live, you mention it a few times on your blog, on Twitter, on Kindleboards.com. Then you move on to your next project, content that you'll forever earn money on this short story.

But are you truly maximizing this story's potential?

No. You're not even close.

Let's look at five of my short stories. The Screaming, a vampire story that originally appeared in an anthology six years ago. Symbios, a sci-fi/horror take that originally appeared in Apex Digest. Shapeshifters Anonymous, which was originally in the Wolfsbane & Mistletoe anthology. Serial, which I wrote with Blake Crouch expressly for Kindle as a freebie. And Truck Stop, a Jack Daniels/Jack Kilborn crossover I wrote for Kindle.

The Screaming appeared in trade paperback, mass market paperback, and then in a reprint anthology. I recently released it as a standalone ebook for 99 cents on Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords. But I didn't stop there.

The Screaming is in my $2.99 collection Horror Stories (which is also available as a self-published trade paperback.) Horror Stories is part of a larger, omnibus collection called 65 Proof (also available as a trade paper.)

I did the same thing with Symbios and Shapeshifter's Anonymous. They're both available as singles, in Horror Stories, and in 65 Proof.

Three stories. Fifteen ways to buy them.

Serial, which Blake and I wrote a few years ago, is still available for free (and still in the Kindle Free Top 100.) We also released it for 99 cents, and, incredibly, people are buying it. Since authors can't release ebooks for free on Kindle, Nook, Sony, or the others, we went through my legacy publisher to do so. But realizing that Serial might be missed by those who don't shop for freebies, we put it out at 99 cents for those surfing Amazon,'s other areas, and we sell a few hundred copies a month.

We also sold Serial to Cemetery Dance for the anthology Shivers VI, where it appears between the covers with Stephen King and Peter Straub. Serial is also in 65 Proof, and Blake's collection Six in the Cylinder. And Six in the Cylinder is in his omnibus Fully Loaded, which is also available in print.

But we weren't done monetizing Serial.

Banking on Serial's popularity, we released a longer version called Serial Uncut, on all ebook platforms. It's also available as a trade paperback, which includes my story Truck Stop, and Blake's story Bad Girl, along with more original content. Naturally, Truck Stop and Bad Girl are also available as 99 cent stand-alones.

Serial Uncut has proven to be very lucrative, earning us tens of thousands of dollars. We just wrote a sequel, Killers, which is now available.

Can you guess where we're going next? Killers Uncut will be out soon, in ebook and self-published trade paper. Then it's a no-brainer to bundle both versions (which will be a whopping 90,000 word novel) into Serial Killers Uncut, which will be a $5.99 ebook and a $15 paperback.

Horror Stories and Serial Uncut were also sold as audiobooks to Brilliance Audio. And Serial had its film rights optioned. My agent is working on foreign deals for these properties.

You're getting the idea, right?

A single intellectual property can be exploited in multiple ways. It can be sold as a single, as a part of multiple collections, as an expanded version, as a bundle. It can be sold to anthologies and magazines, to audio and foreign markets, and can be self-published in print.

The more ways you package it, the more chances you'll have to reach new eyes.

In the past, a brick and mortar bookshelf had limited space. If authors wanted to be discovered, they improved their chances by taking up as much of that bookshelf as possible.

These days, the bookshelf is the internet, and it is infinite. The more IPs you have for sale, in various packages and formats, the more potential fans you'll find.

You don't need to have fifty unique IPs to have fifty products for sale.

Different people are looking in different places for different things. But if you properly package your story, you can vastly improve your reach. Just as in the print world, the more places you appear, and the more shelf space you occupy, the more you'll sell.

And for those keeping track of such things, I'm selling about 1500 ebooks a day.

Guest Post by Jon F. Merz

I love success stories.

I especially love success stories when the recipient of success struggled to attain it. The reason we all relate to the movie Rocky is because it personifies the American Dream. To wit: "You can do anything if you work your ass off."

Jon F. Merz is, by any account, a good writer. He's sold a lot of fiction to legacy publishers, has a lot of words under his belt, and began self-pubbing on Kindle around the same time I did.

Initially, he had some success. Then the success began to recede.

Merz didn't understand why.

Anyone who reads this blog knows the value I place on luck. You have to have the right book in the right place at the right time.

But you can give luck a little help by also having the right price, the right description, the right cover. You can also improve luck by doing this as many times as possible. The more books, the better.

I'm fond of saying that ebooks are forever (and you should begin forever today, not tomorrow.) I also believe that with infinite shelf space, a writer should take up as much of it as they can.

So last month, on my blog, Merz openly disagreed with me. (You can find our exchange in the comments of Lee Goldberg's guest post.)

I invited Jon to give me a call, then got busy and blew him off. But I did ask him to write a guest post, which he did on January 24th. Again, because I've had a lot of guest posts lately, I haven't had a chance to post it.

Well, now I have a chance to, along with a follow up post by Merz a month later.

It's very interesting reading...

Tales of an Ebook Nothing...
by Jon F. Merz

So, last week I called Joe out. Here on his blog. Maybe you saw my comments. I've ventured into indie publishing on the Kindle and my sales have been pretty awful. Joe's constant preaching of his and others success has, frankly, grated on my nerves for no other reason than I'm jealous as hell that I'm not selling thousands of dollars worth of ebooks on a monthly basis. I wanted answers as to what I'm doing wrong and I asked Joe to put his money where his mouth was.

But before we get to the goodness that follows (namely, Joe taking one of my books apart bit-by-bit) a little backstory is in order.

My first novel, The Fixer, came out in May 2002 from Kensington Publications Corp. Scott Nicholson and I were both there at the same time. But while Scott enjoyed a few more years, my own experience with Kensington was short-lived. Long story, short, my first agent only wanted me writing vampire novels, so I fired her. Unfortunately, she and my editor were best pals. That didn't bode well for my fledgling career. Suddenly, planned publicity evaporated and they brought out four novels within a really short space of time. Subsequently, by the time my third novel in the Lawson Vampire series came out, the first one was already out-of-print.

My plans to convince the publisher that they needed to reprint the first book involved a pretty big fan letter campaign that produced thousands of letters of support aimed at Kensington...and one very pissed off letter back from the president of Kensington to me, telling me in no uncertain terms that the series was dead to them and to please tell my fans to stop flooding them with letters.

So my first publisher dropped me. Not a nice feeling. Especially since I'd come up dreaming (like most everyone else) about big advances, publicity and bestseller lists. Now I was orphaned.

I moved to a second agent, who looked good on paper, but in reality sucked mightily. Any deals done during my time with him were ones I worked my ass off to bring to the table myself. I was busy looking for a new home for Lawson, simply because I knew the series had incredible potential and just needed the right editor/house behind it. I started doing work-for-hire novels for the bestselling Rogue Angel series from Gold Eagle. I was the first writer they brought in after the original team that had created it. Over the course of the intervening years, I've written eleven of those novels. (And, according to some Amazon reviews, have single-handedly destroyed the series because I don't let the heroine hack her way out of every troublesome spot.)

Around this time, I was working on a project that I felt sure would be my break-out bestseller. Parallax was a spy thriller about two professional assassins - one a Mafia hitman and one a retired German terrorist - who kill at the exact same moment in time and develop a psychic bond. The resulting cat-and-mouse game intertwined with a nefarious plot, was certain to catapult me onto the lists. I felt sure of it.

I worked my ass off on that novel. More rewrites than I'd ever done before. And this was while I was co-authoring two non-fiction books, working on Rogue Angel, etc. etc. But Parallax was good. It was damned good.

My second agent submitted it around New York. And the reactions from editors were more than encouraging. They loved it. We had one go so far as to tell us, "the world needs Jon F. Merz's voice." Seriously. Hey, it's publishing, you know you can't make this stuff up!

But as nice as all that praise was, the worst was yet to come. Because along with the great things they said about the book, they also delivered this buzz kill: "We can't buy it."

WTF? That was some sort of joke, right? Nuh uh. Turns out, editors have almost zero power. And the sales people they had to pitch the book to, decided that since Parallax wasn't a straight spy thriller, nor was it straight SF, but some sort of weird amalgamation of the two, it would be too difficult to even attempt to sell to their accounts.

Never mind that it was a great read. All that mattered to the sales people was they couldn't easily label it and it would therefore take too much trouble to try and convince key accounts that it would sell.

I was pissed off beyond belief. The reasoning was ludicrous. But it was also indicative of the changing face of publishing. And it was a hard lesson to learn.

I'd always resisted the idea of self-publishing. All right, that's not *exactly* true. I'd given it some thought. But I hadn't made much money with my writing so far and trying to think about doing it myself was a pretty awesome undertaking given everything else I was involved in. I was also, frankly, still one of those who saw self-publishing as the refuge for those who didn't want to do their time in the trenches and earn their way to a legitimate deal. (And yeah, that was my sentiment. Honestly. I'd read a lot of self-published stuff and everything I'd read was crap. Throw stones if you want, but that was my experience at that time.)

But Parallax getting turned down because it couldn't be easily shelved into some narrow category really annoyed me. So I heard about Amazon's new Kindle publishing program. This was back in 2009 and I put Parallax out.

It sold great. Better, the reader reviews were almost universally positive. I felt vindicated. And the sales really helped on the home front. I played around with price points quite a bit, trying to maximize revenue and strike that balance between too little or too much. This was about the same time Joe was doing his first title out there as well. Interesting times, to be sure.

And then I screwed up. I took my eye off the ball. Instead of capitalizing on the initial momentum that Parallax had gained, I got wrapped up in other projects. I was content to let Parallax sit out there and generate the passive income I'd always dreamed about. I did about $10,000 in sales during those first four-to-six months. I put out another trunk novel of mine - Vicarious, a supernatural thriller. It did okay, but nothing like Parallax had. I was starting to see problems.

Then all momentum died. I started putting other parts of my backlist out, but my sales simply didn't take off. And for the past year or so, I've sold consistently but completely unimpressively. I make a few hundred bucks each month with a combination of novels, short stories, and novella pieces. I've experimented with covers, and studied a lot of the market trying to understand, although I certainly haven't had as much time to devote to it as I wish I had. Contrary to what some believe, I'm not out here looking for an easy solution. If anything, the fact that I've experimented as much as I have rather than simply come over here and kiss ass is proof that I have tried to find the solution on my own.

But after reading post after post of others enjoying the level of success I want for my own ebooks, I've grown frustrated and tired of my own failed experimentations. As I've said elsewhere, I'm all for cutting out the middlemen and getting my stuff right to the people who matter: the readers. I just need some help finding the path.

So here I am: on Joe's blog looking for a way to kick the afterburners into gear and really get my sales up. My latest novel is The Kensei, out last week from St. Martin's Press. It's the 5th book in my Lawson Vampire series, but I want to get my first four Lawson vampire installments out onto the Kindle - a lot of people are asking about them.

But I want to do it right.

And with that, I turn it over to Joe, with the expectation that as harsh as his critique may be, it will hopefully provide some of the answers I've been seeking. And if they do, I'll be the first to shout it from the rooftops.

Thanks.

Joe sez: This was the part where I was supposed to get all preachy and lay down the tough love about tweaking his covers and descriptions, lowering his prices, and keeping at it. I was then going to point out specific examples of what to fix, and end with the rallying cry of, "Just keep on keeping on, and hopefully lightning will strike soon."

In a nutshell, for those who haven't heard me spout it before, here are my plans for ebook success:

1. Write a damn good book.

2. Make sure it has professional cover art.

3. Keep the price under $4.

4. Make sure the formatting is flawless.

5. Write a good product description.

6. Upload to Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords.

7. Repeat. Over and over, until the world can no longer ignore your work.

In Jon's case, I would have concentrated on #2 (I think his covers are too dark, so they don't look clear as thumbnails or in grayscale), #5 (I believe his descriptions can be beefed-up), and #7 (more is better.)

But, as fate would have it, Jon didn't wait for me to give him his critique and pep talk. He went ahead on his own, and...

Well, I'll just let him tell his own story.


The End of Fabruary
by Jon F. Merz

I’m excited about things ahead for one big reason: the preceding month has been renamed to “Fabruary.”

Let me explain…

I’ve always viewed the coming ebook revolution with something of a jaded eye. After a decade or more in this business, I’m always wary of supposedly “new” things. But I’ve also been playing around with ebooks for a few years now. I had some early success with it with regards to Parallax and then, after putting out a host of novels, short stories, and a few other things, my sales flatlined at about $100 earnings each month for the last year. That means I was making about a hundred bucks on sales of everything I had out on the Amazon Kindle platform. Not impressive, by any means – especially when I’d read blogs by other folks like Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking (she just bought a house for cash with her ebook earnings), and even some closer friends and colleagues – all of them were enjoying some serious success.

And I wasn’t.

So, I decided to try to remedy that. At the end of January, I put my entire Lawson backlist – four novels, a novella, and four short stories – out on both the Kindle and the Nook platforms. In February, I also debuted a new novella, SLAVE TO LOVE, and then in late February, I reworked the cover of Parallax, dropped its price to 99 cents, and put an excerpt from THE FIXER in the back of it. The goal was to use Parallax as something of a gateway drug to my Lawson series.

The results have been amazing.

Thanks to a series of incredible covers, the Lawson backlist is selling very well, indeed. As of this moment, THE FIXER alone has sold 450 copies on the US Kindle store alone. Priced at $2.99, the novel has earned me $900 and change this month. That’s 100% gorgeous passive income – and it’s 9 times what I made in total for the previous 9 months.

Ah, but I’ve got more than one Lawson novel. I’ve got four. The other three are all selling triple digits. The novellas are closing in on 3 digits and the short stories are selling very well.

So, by itself, the Lawson backlist was generating very strong sales during the shortest month of the year.

Then I dropped the price on Parallax. Until I reworked the cover, I’d sold 4 copies all month. After I dropped the price to 99 cents, I sold many more copies. As of last Friday, I’d sold just over 150 on the Kindle and perhaps 50 on the Nook.

But on Saturday morning, something incredible happened: Barnes & Noble featured Parallax in an email promo to its customers. Nothing elaborate; just a simple shot of some book covers. Parallax was featured in its “thrifty reads & great stories” section. I had no idea this had happened until very late Saturday night. Saturday morning, I saw that Parallax had suddenly sold 55 copies and I thought, “huh, interesting.” I continued to watch the numbers climb all day and into Saturday night. By midnight, it had done 347 copies for the day.

Incredible. My sales rank in the Nook store was beating the likes of JD Robb/Nora Roberts and I was on par with ebook success Amanda Hocking. I had no way of knowing if the trend would last, but yesterday, I sold 233 copies.

Staggering.

I have no idea if the Parallax burst will last, but I’m thrilled to have gotten such an amazing push. I’ve sold 25 copies this morning. You can still get it for the Nook HERE and on the Kindle HERE for just 99 cents. It’s a great book, one of my best.

So, with all that said, I’m very excited. The ebook revolution means that I have the freedom to write whatever I want and get it out there as soon as it’s ready for mass consumption. No longer do I have to slave over a proposal and hope that an editor in New York understands the scope of the project, gets excited, can then pitch it to a room full of supposed experts, gets the green light to acquire it, makes a decent offer (lol), and then tells me the book will be out in about a year. Now, if I have an idea I think is cool, I can just write the thing and put it out. If it flops, no biggie. If it’s a hit – all the better. But the amount of time and number of hoops to jump through for me to reach my readers has now been drastically winnowed.

After all, it’s always been about the readers. Or rather, it should have always been about the readers. That hasn’t always been the case with the traditional publishing model.

But now, it can be.

Am I through with traditional publishing? Probably not. But I will say this: my attitude has been changed tremendously given the success I’ve had in the shortest month of the year. I have big plans to get a lot more material out for ereaders – more Lawson, new series, fun stuff – a veritable ton of things that have only been ideas and “failed” proposals until now. (I say “failed” only because they didn’t sell in the traditional publishing world.)

The landscape is changing. Dramatically.

Borders has gone bankrupt. Is B&N going that way, too? Probably not since they adopted an ebook strategy. But the thing about ebooks is this: they’re not going to stop. And more people will get an e-reader. I love the feel of traditional books, but even I have been reading some things on my iPhone lately. We’re either at a tipping point or beyond it now. Millions are reading ebooks and millions more will soon join them.

Traditional publishers need to seriously revamp their contracts. Right now, the industry standard is 25% net on ebook sales.

That’s crap.

And as much as they may insist that costs are high for producing an ebook, it’s a bogus argument. I can put an ebook out on the Kindle and it takes me perhaps thirty minutes to do. Same for the Nook. I can hire someone to design a great cover.

So why would I give a publisher more than 50% of the proceeds from ebook sales?

For me personally, there’s a lot to think about in the coming months. Where do I want my career to go? With THE FIXER TV series moving ahead, do I want my books tied up by a traditional publisher that doesn’t pay me a fair rate?

Before the ebook revolution, the folks in New York (by and large) determined the destinies of writers.

Since the ebook revolution, that power has shifted. On a seismic scale. Writers now control their destinies. We can write what we want and sell it to our readers. Fewer middlemen means a lot of very good things, indeed.

I’m excited.

For the month of Fabruary, I just broke $3,000 in earnings for my ebooks. 30 times what I’d earned each month for the previous year. (and frankly, there are many writers making a LOT more than that right now, so my potential for sales isn’t going to go down, it’s going to go up as I a) produce more material, b) the number of folks reading ebooks climbs, and c) the number of e-readers sold climbs…)

That kind of success can make a person stop and think.

And it should.

Joe sez: Remember the end of Rocky? He lost the fight. But he still refused to give up, and then went on to eventually win in numerous sequels.

That's life. And that's the writing biz. There will be ups and downs, but you can't take it personally either way. Selling a lot doesn't mean you're the best writer on the planet and you deserve all the cash you're making. Selling a little doesn't mean you're a loser who will never amount to anything.

You just need to keep at it until you get lucky.

Merz kept uploading new material, kept experimenting, kept rethinking his approach, until luck struck.

Best of all, his luck saved me from having to keep my promise to help. Jon found success, and I didn't have to do a long blog post, lecturing him.

Which is why I'm thrilled to have him guest post. Let this be his lecture to you.