adminZach Aldwin Milkshake in the boardroom
While I love the sensation and smell of turning fresh paper over it is just faster and easier to download books from the internet.
That is why I love Kindle. If you have never heard of a Kindle, it is an electronic book reader that allows you to download “books” in electronic format to read from Amazon.com.
I get most of my books this way. You do not even need an actual Kindle; Amazon supplies a reading app for phones, tablets and PC, just check their website.
There are other e-readers available and other platforms to buy from, just shop around. One click gets me a book to read in my hand within five minutes. You have to love technology.
A friend of mine released a book electronically on Amazon this past week.
I had a chat with him about the process; he said the writing was the hard part, getting the guts to actually publish was even harder (you are putting your creation naked and unprotected on the market — it is a daunting prospect).
The actual act of publishing was made easy by the process built into the website. We made a few observations about the experience but before we delve into those allow me to give a brief history of the world of publishing.
Once the world had got past the idea of writing on walls (caves, inside of pyramids, carving into stone columns) and decided that paper was a much lighter and more portable means of putting ones thoughts down, books came into being.
Early ones were hand written, meticulously copied by those lucky enough to understand the art of writing.
A few thousand years later Gutenberg invented the printing press and made it more convenient to mass produce reading matter.
Presses were typeset; someone put little cut blocks of letters in the correct order on a “stamp” and it was used to run many copies of the same imprint.
This persisted well into recent times; we got better at making the typeset and the printing process but you still had to produce a large run of books off a printer to make it cost effective.
In order for those to sell you needed to be a pretty good author for someone to invest that much capital into your work.
Then digital printing arrived and the world of printing changed. No longer did a publisher have to print 100 000 copies of a book; they could do a run of a hundred for a new untested author.
Then the Kindle exploded onto the market and we did away with paper altogether. Bookshops collapsed overnight.
Not only that, everyone with a spare manuscript in their drawer dusted it out and put it online for the world to read.
I can sell one book and it is immediately profitable (in the sense that I have a few cents more that I had before I started).
As a result the universe of e-books is filled with a few of the amazingly good and thousands upon thousands of the really, really bad (once in a while some of the really bad make it big which is a horrible shame and speaks volumes for the reading level of society).
Publishing houses have modified the way they do business by taking on the really good, making them even better, and levering their marketing experience in their favour.
So my friend stuck out his book into a market where he is a tiny little dot lost in an ocean of word crazy piranhas.
He has little chance of being noticed. The first observation we made is that no matter how good you think you are, you should have a marketing plan somewhere.
It can start with Facebook and Twitter, or you can sign up to pay for a bunch of marketing newsletters, or try the old fashioned spam method.
You just better have a plan. Your book is not going to sell itself until you have a significant number of sales under your belt.
Our second observation is that you need to be able to take some heat. No matter what you write, or who you write for sooner or later someone will hate your work.
Then they will tell the world (and you) about it. Occasionally it may actually be constructive criticism, but for that I would suggest getting it from someone who knows what they are doing in your field (for books think English teachers, professional editors, other authors). Joe Blogs off the street can post a ghastly review about your book and have absolutely no credibility behind him.
If you take on every piece of ‘bad news’ then you will be very sad, very soon. Be selective about your source of input (that said if every single review is bad then perhaps you had better take a second look at your work).
Amazon provides a nice little ranking system for their books based on sales (you will find it under the product information tab).
It was very tempting for my friend to take a look at his ranking every 30 minutes. The novelty soon wore off.
When you are starting out, and selling very few books, a couple of sales can catapult you from rank 53 000 to 26 000 and then drop you back down as fast if you have a poor sale day.
It is a poor barometer of your ability as a writer (it is a better barometer of your ability to sell books).
Ignore it. It will simply cause more stress that it is worth. If you really want to use it as a measure of success then aim for something big like getting into the top thousand.
Do not quit your day job. If you are going to make a living as an author you better be ready to sell a lot of books.
Kindle currently offer a standard 35 percent royalty fee (there is a way to get 70 percent from some countries you sell to).
If you live out of America be prepared to sacrifice a chunk of that to withholding tax. If you sell a small, fiction, entry-level book for $2 then that is only 70c profit a book before the IRS cut (I should mention at this point that you will be taxed on earnings again by ZIMRA so be prepared for that one).
You have to sell thousands before it becomes worthwhile. Think that $2 for a book is too cheap; believe me people are not going to fork out a fortune for an untested author.
Many serial writers make their first offerings cheap and then market more expensive sequels to a fan base.
As you can see, sticking a book online is little different to creating any other product. It takes guts to start out, needs a plan, requires an investment in mental armour, and may earn you nothing at all. It could equally become a massive success; you just won’t know till you try.
E-mail:[email protected]
Online Reporter