ebook reading clubs

Despite all the obvious signs, the popularity of ebooks has caught a lot of people by surprise.  USA Today recently had three ebooks listed among their best sellers.  Last week, fellow thriller author Michael Prescott had a 99-cent self-published e-book in the paper’s top 150.  Sadly you can’t sit in a bookstore and sign your ebooks, but then again there are fewer and fewer bookstores to sit in anyway.  So how does the enterprising writer reach out to his audience in a personal way?

News in Publisher’s Weekly seems to indicate that book clubs may be the answer.  According to a survey done by Reading Group Choices, more and more reading groups are picking e-books over the dead tree publications.  Twenty-five 25% of the book club members surveyed said they are using e-books.  In fact 21% of those surveyed said they are reading most or all of their books on e-readers.  Nearly 60 percent of those books were read on a Kindle, but the Barnes & Noble Nook held a strong second place at 26%.  There was also a certain amount of overlap in platform choice.  For example, tablet computers as e-readers were used by nearly 20% of reading group members who read e-books.

I can imagine several advantages of visiting a book club if they are ebook readers.  There would be no reason to carry books with you.  If you impress a room full of Kindle users they can download your other titles on the spot.  And because ebook prices are lower, many people who order one of your titles will get them all. 

Also, readers who are comfortable with ebooks may be more open to virtual visits.  You could join the reading group via Skype or some other remote computer interface.  That would certainly widen your reach, allowing you to meet with readers across the country.

So if you enjoy personal contact with your readers, book clubs may become your targets of choice, especially if you are a romance writer.  Most reading groups are largely female, and 60% of all titles purchased in e-book format are romance fiction.

Are e-book Royalties Fair?

I hold my own e-book rights and a couple weeks ago dropped the Kindle price on my novels to 99 cents.  I expected a bump in sales but not the explosion that ensued.  I then noticed that the major publishers often charge as much for e-books as they do for paperbacks, and wondered if writers were being fairly compensated for those sales.  It didn’t take me long to find an authoritative opinion.
In a recent interview, Brian DeFiore, President of DeFiore and Company, a New York literary agency was asked if it was fair that large publishers pay the standard 25% of the net to authors on e-book sales.  DeFiore was once a Senior Vice President and Publisher of the Villard Books division of Random House and the founding Editor-in-Chief of Hyperion, so you might expect his opinion to favor the publisher point of view.  Instead, he said that authors are getting shorted by the big publishers.

Of course there are a lot of advantages to getting a book placed with a major publisher.  Just the publisher’s name adds a lot and there is value in the marketing and distribution they can offer.  They also handle expenses that man authors might overlook or undervalue, such as the legal efforts to stop piracy.

But despite all the hidden costs publishers may have to cover, DeFiore said that that are saving huge sums on e-books just because printing and shipping books is enormously expensive.  So all along the process, from the production department to the warehouse, publishers are reaping big savings and authors are just not being credited for those savings.  The price of e-books is almost always below the price of a hardcover, but the publisher’s contribution on every sale of an e-book is about the same as a hardcover.  However, the author’s share has dropped by about 1/3.  It’s hard to see that as fair.

Here’s how it shakes out.  Suppose my e-books were put out by Random House.  They’d retain at near what the paperbacks cost, around $13.  After Amazon’s cut, the publisher gets $9.10.  If I self published at that price the $9.10 would be mine but if the book was with Random House at that price I’d get a 25% royalty, so about $2.27.  The rest is gravy for the publisher.

I’m not saying any author should or shouldn’t take an e-book deal with a big publisher.  I’m just saying they should look closely at the math. 

From Noir to Horror

I took a hiatus from blogging over the summer but now I'm back and you can count on hearing from me a couple of times a week.  For today:  Washington DC crime writer Quintin Peterson has taken a step out of his usual comfort zone to write something even darker than noir.  I asked him to explain the how and why.  Here’s what he said:

I am a contributor to a recently released anthology of tales of horror and the paranormal; FromShadows & Nightmares, edited by Amber L. Campbell, which is available at amazon.com, BN.com, et al. My contribution is the genre-blending ‘Round Midnight, a cop/ghost story. Hard-boiled chills and thrills.

In my youth, I read a lot of horror and speculative fiction and watched quite a few such movies and my writing back then reflected that. While I was a high school student, I received the University of Wisconsin’s Science Fiction Writing Award, the National Council of Teachers of English Writing Award, and the Wisconsin Junior Academy’s Writing Achievement Award.

During my career as a DC police officer, I turned to noir fiction and became “the cop who writes crime fiction” and now I am known as “the retired cop who writes crime fiction.” I considered it an interesting challenge to generate a ghost story rooted in the crime fiction genre. So, I combined a cop story with a ghost story and came up with ‘Round Midnight, the story of a DC cop’s on and off-duty ghostly encounters with a childhood friend who died in his youth. It begins:

“Police work had taken everything from me and over time had left me virtually hollow. Seeing humanity at its worst on a daily basis had taken its toll and left me jaded and faithless. And yet the biggest case of my career, a murder involving a childhood friend who died decades earlier, changed my outlook and renewed my faith.”

I’m sure fans of both genres will enjoy it.

From Shadows & Nightmares: Travel through the darkest shadows and twisted thoughts of a group of talented authors. From the traditional werewolf to an ancient curse to brain eating zombies, the authors' imagination will make you squirm in your seat. Your stomach will clench as you read one, and then you will question just how depraved our fellow human beings can be as you read another. The talent gathered in this latest addition to the Nightfall Publication anthologies present to you spine-tingling, blanket clutching stories, all brought to life from their own Shadows and Nightmares. James Dorr, Jeffrey Wooten, and Michele Wyan are among the 22 authors featured in this anthology, which has something for everyone who enjoys creepy stories.


This fledgling independent book publisher is still going through growing pains. This is only its third anthology. Currently, the publisher has released only ­­one novel and three thematically different anthologies, but more books are in the works. I support what Nightfall Publications and other indie book publishers are trying to achieve.  Check the book out here: http://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Nightmares-James-Dorr/dp/098372041X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313059419&sr=1-1

Day to Day Marketing

Sometimes I think the best thing I can do in my blog is point writers to other blogs they should be reading.  I’ve been focused on marketing more than craft here recently and was thinking about how overwhelming that job can seem.  There are so many things a writer CAN do to promote their work that it could easily become a full time job.  I thought I’d write something about that but my research proved that someone else has already done a good job there.
 

Every published author should be following the blog “Marketing Tips for Authors.”  It recently featured an entry entitled “7 Weekly Book Marketing Goals You Can Adopt Today” that lays out a way that a writer can market his or her book on a consistent basis.  The issue, I think, is not so much knowing what to do as knowing how to do it.  The trick is to have a plan for breaking the various jobs into smaller pieces.  The book marketing plan might start as monthly or weekly objectives, but the easiest path to success is to follow weekly and daily goals, and make them part of your routine.

The seven objectives laid out in the article are simple, and if done consistently they will help you increase your book’s visibility, grow your platform, and extend your network.  Their first suggestion is to either be a guest blogger or get another writer to be a guest on your blog.  Posting on someone else’s blog is a great way to get your name and your writing in front of a new audience.  If you have guest bloggers, they will usually bring some of their readers to your blog.  If they like it, your blog may become a regular stop for them.  So they suggest that every week you look for a way to expand your readership through guest blogging.  And by the way, I am ALWAYS looking for guest bloggers here.  Anything related to living the life of a writer is welcome, four hundred words is a good length, and I always post book covers and web site links.

Their second great recommendation is that you comment on ten blog posts every week.  Not hard if you commit to posting two comments every day.  If those blogs are related to your writing, or the blogs of similar authors, this will get your name in front of new readers too.  It will also help you build relationships with those other bloggers. 

The blog on Marketing Tips for Authors includes five more great ideas.  These seven weekly book marketing goals laid out in the blog really are pretty simple and really will help new readers find your work.  Plus, the daily activity will help you to get better at book marketing.  Of course, their list is by no means everything you should be doing, but they can be a heck of a good start.  Find out at http://blog.marketingtipsforauthors.com/2011/05/7-weekly-book-marketing-goals-you-can.html

Get the Most Out of a Conference

I wish I was at Book Expo America right now, but I had to make a financial choice and I’ll get more out of Thrillerfest.  Whichever writer’s conferences you decide to attend, you should not just go for the fun if you’re an author.  So have clear goals when you plan to attend one of these events.  I focus on networking a lot, but you may want to accomplish other things and that’s fine, just know what they are in advance.

If networking IS your focus at a writer’s conference, get started before the event.  Dig thru the conference website and pick out the people you want to meet.  If you can find an email address (usually easy if it’s an agent, publisher or writer who is networking too) send them a note letting them know you’re looking forward to meeting them, or taking their class or hearing their presentation.  Also friend them on Facebook, like them on their fan page, and follow them on Twitter.  See, you’re already connected.  And if you want more than five minutes with an individual, go ahead and set up an appointment during the conference.

Also, please don’t make the disastrous mistake I made at my first conference.  Take plenty of business cards.

One cool idea for staying organized is to take a few small envelopes with you.  If you’re collecting other people’s cards you can stick all you get at one award presentation or dinner in one envelope so you remember where you met those folks.  When you get each card jot a note on the back about the meeting (“said he’d give me a blurb” or “was willing to look at my manuscript” are my favorites.)  Then you won’t forget to follow up, and when you do you can mention that award presentation you both sat thru.

There are always meals at these events so make sure you never eat alone.  In fact, try to eat with different people each time to maximize your networking. 

Finally, make sure you follow up with everyone you told you’d contact.  Otherwise, it was a wasted contact.  And try to stay in touch with those folks AFTER the event – you DID friend them on Facebook, right?  Maybe you’ll see them at a future conference and they’ll introduce you to even more people worth knowing.

You think YOUR life is weird?

I don’t usually borrow from other blogs, but considering my theme you’ll understand why I was fascinated by an article entitled “15 Writers With Lives More Interesting Than Fiction”  My guest writers and I focus on the writing life here.  The author of that article, Erin Lenderts, points out that throughout history, writers have led interesting lives, with lifestyles well worth exploring.  Truly creative minds have long been driven to drugs,  alcohol abuse, tumultuous relationships, and often mental instability.  

Among the 15 lives explored in the article is Ernest Hemingway, a members of the "Lost Generation," who was an ambulance driver during World War I.  Hemingway was also a bull runner, a lifelong heavy drinker and an American expatriate in Paris. He married four times, and was almost killed in two different plane crashes while on safari in Africa. He is believed to have had a genetic disease that causes mental and physical deterioration over time. When alcohol, accidents and continuous risk taking failed to kill him, he took his own life by shooting himself with his favorite shotgun,

Even more interesting was the life of Sylvia Plath.  It seemed she was obsessed with death and deterioration, which may not be so surprising, considering that her father died when she was eight years old.  His death inspired her first suicide attempt – rather a young age to try to overdose on sleeping pills.  She finally did manage to kill herself when she was 30 years old.  A gas oven proved more effective than pills.

The lives, and deaths, of Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare, and eleven more authors of note get a close and fun examination in the article, which I recommend you check out on your own.  Then, maybe you will feel better about your own life.  I do.

Read “15 Writers With Lives More Interesting Than Fiction” at

http://www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com/blog/2011/15-writers-with-lives-more-interesting-than-fiction /

The Kindle Book Un-Signing

With ebooks beginning to outsell dead tree books, one of the forecasts I’ve heard is that we’ll see the end of the book signing.  No more readings, no more face-to-face time with authors and no more of the interaction that helps an author understand his or her audience.  Well luckily, those forecasters were wrong.  The fact that you can’t put a pen on the fly leaf of an ebook hasn’t stopped anything.

The Soundry, in Vienna, VA, has been holding a series of Kindle parties for those readers who are always looking for a good download for their ereader.  Each Kindle Party features several novelists reading from their digitally published books.  The audience sits poised with their Kindles in hand.  When someone likes what they hear and wants more, they just download that book on the spot.

At the Soundry, they really do make each event a party.   At 7pm there is a half hour of social time so authors and readers can mingle and talk.  The writers discuss their books and answer questions from both the live audience and internet listeners via a live chat.  Then each author gets ten minutes for a reading, and a chance to answer more questions.  The evening ends with a panel discussion where the authors share their experiences with epublishing and social networking.

I see great potential for this approach to book events to be expanded and enhanced.  Authors could set up friendly competitions to see who can move the most books in a specific period of time.  Venues could arrange prizes for the reader who downloads the most books in an evening.  Or authors could offer discount coupons – codes that would allow readers to download another of their books for free or at reduced cost.

All in all, this Kindle Party idea strikes me as a marvelous way for readers to discover new writers, and for authors to build their fan base.  It’s a nice mix of grassroots selling and potentially viral marketing.