Shooting is too easy. Kids today, no imagination!
It’s still available, but it’s being crowded out by zombies and urban fantasy in the book stores. Shopping online you can find a lot of it, but it takes a while. There are websites that recommend new books, like GoodReads, but I find it harder and harder to make the time to sift through all the authors and then when you do, their e-books are still priced at like $8-10, which I think is way high for an e-book unless it’s by someone who’s basically a sure thing.
That’s why a lot of people are ready to read self-published stuff at 99 cents a shot.
I, like most people, hate fitting a stereotype but this sounds a lot like me. : ) I’ve tried a ton of new, cheap fiction thanks to the Kindle and this lead me to “The Martian” and some other books. The Kobani series I’m reading is almost exactly what you describe.
One thing to note, part of the success in self-publishing seems to be turn around - I’ve seen seven books in a series released within a couple of years.
I started talking about self-publishing about 15 years ago, when people were already saying that Any Day Now it would destroy the mainstream publishers. I was pointing out even then that the successes, outside of the rare lightning strike, were an already identifiable type: people who were tremendously prolific, not genre writers in general. For one thing, it allowed them to give away product for free to entice readers. The other advantage was the ability of online sources to make all the titles available at once, rather than than the short shelf life of genre in bookstores.
Happened just as I called it. And perhaps more so. Back then series were becoming common; today they are almost mandatory in genre. In the print days, a series book appeared normally no more often than once a year. Today that has been driven up to 2, 3, 4, or more. Pump them out. Don’t worry about burnout. (Or quality, but that can only be said in a whisper.)
Hm. I’m interested in opinions on this topic, as an author with self-publishing plans in the offing.
I’m nearly finished with the first book in a planned 3-4 book series – classic epic fantasy stuff. I’m sending it to be copy-edited later this week. Though I have the whole series mapped out, I’ve only just started writing Book 2, and at best am likely to release about a book each year. Will it be problematic, to have so much time pass between books being available? Even assuming I gain an audience, will I lose them all before Book 2 is ready?
This has been a fascinating and educational thread – thanks to all who have contributed, especially you who have been through the process!
As a reader of such works, no. Most of the authors tend to be up front about their progress on the series, which is nice, but as long as you’re not GoTing it things are fine.
If you publish on Amazon, readers can “follow” you on your author page–as I think has been mentioned in this thread. Once they follow you, they are notified every time you release a new title. So that’s one way to remind your fan base that you exist.
A second way is to maintain your own mailing list. There are pay services you can do this with, or just have a form on your website and maintain the list privately. Then send out a message every time you publish or plan to make a public appearance. Many authors-of-series swear up and down that this is the secret of their success.
15 years ago, there were not tablet computers worth using, nor were the other e-readers very good. You’d have to be sitting in front of a kludgey desktop computer or squinting at the crummy screen on a heavy, hot laptop to read a book. The ipad wasn’t released until 2010, and it was around $600. (and still is, and the competitor tablets with similar quality screens are about the same price)
The very first kindle was released in 2007. And, the display has problems - yes, it’s daylight readable, but you can’t turn the pages very fast, the resolution is poor, there’s no color until very recently, the devices were very slow, the resolution is not the same as print (only the retina model ipads are competitive with print in resolution).
In short, even 15 years later, if you want a device with similar quality to a good printed book with glossy imagery, you need an ipad, an HD kindle, or the various high end samsung and google tablets. All cost north of $500. I think it’s reasonable to think that eventually they will be so cheap ($100 or so each) that we’ll have tablet PCs lying around like magazines on a coffee table, and you’ll keep one sitting on the toilet tank, but that point hasn’t been reached yet.
I personally do read science fiction self published on Amazon, but I’ve found that most of it is garbage. OTOH, The Martian was the best sci-fi novel I’ve read in several years.
Those are some pretty demanding specs for a device to download and read text files, and much more than most people need. I was reading stuff from Project Guttenberg on VGA displays almost 20 years before the first e-reader. And even a color KindleHD is under $200.
Habeed, I’m not sure what your point is. You may not like e-readers but tens, maybe hundreds, of millions have been purchased, and the first ones went on sale in 1998. In any case, what ebooks are read on doesn’t seem to have made any difference to the industry. The same types of books and the same patterns of buying or not buying have been consistent from the start.