I’m thinking of publishing some of my stuff in ebook format. Working on it, actually. It’s starting to smell like money to me. Am I insane? I’ve already got a short story collection together.
Anybody with experience in this area, good or bad, as a reader or a publisher?
Check out my profile for a link to the short story collection if you wanna, but be forewarned there are semi-nekkid images beyond the plain text link.
I hang out often at the Writer’s Weekly Forums. There are lots of people on there who have been published in e-book format and who have gone onto get their books published in print, too. Angela Hoy, the site’s administrator, still publishes frequently in e-book format and runs Booklocker, an e-publisher that’ll put together an ISBN, plus cover art and formatting package for you. Although I’ve never published in e-book format, I’ve heard she’s very honest and very professional. The forums at Writers Weekly also offer a “Whispers and Warnings” section that’ll give you plenty of information on who to avoid when e-publishing.
P.S. Be sure to read lots of articles about self-promotion. Also, ask other authors what they do to promote their work. Although e-books have become more popular, they still don’t sell nearly as well as those in print, so make sure you put together a marketing plan to sell yourself and your book.
Well, I’m publishing my first book with an epublisher this spring, but that was after a year of research. I personally chose this specific publisher because of the genre–erotica romance, which is pretty popular now and just keeps growing.
But you should also be careful, because other than erotica romance epublishers, not many have been successful, and there’s still a stigma attached. It’s not insane to seek out an epublisher, but do your research, and do it well. it took me a year to submit to the one of my choice because I wanted to watch them, keep an eye out for problems, and talk to the people who were publishing and working with them.
Mind if I ask which publisher? I just had a friend of mine publish at Ellora’s Cave, then another published at Liquid Silver.
I feel that writers need publishers the way prostitutes need pimps – that is, not at all and they do better without them. To put my comments in perspective, I have made about $16,000 on my novels in stories by selling them in a membership format on my Jolly Roper website, but I want to make more, greedy bastid that I am, and have little interest in giving a publisher a cut of the money to do something I’ve already proven that I can do myself.
I mean, why would an ebook author need a publisher? I’ve visited quite a few sites on the topic already, and it seems to me that there’s very little a publisher can or would do that an author couldn’t or wouldn’t do better.
I read some ebooks, I’ve not yet gotten into the whole of the market, but many of the epublishing houses, and one or two of the mainstream publishing houses have some very attractive policies.
The problem I see with epublishing, so far, is similar to the problem with having been an Laserdisc fan. It’s a good format, but it’s not exactly catching on with the public at large.
On the other hand, it is growing.
Why not self-publish in print? With a printing service, it’d be about a $4,750 investment for 1500 books ($2.78/book), which you could then sell for ~$10 apiece (not including shipping), which would give you a profit margin of $7/book, for ~$10,000 profit. If you have $16,000 worth of subscribers already, you already have a built-in market for a paperback collection of short stories. You could add value with signed copies or bookplates, and tossing it up on Amazon would likely give you a small audience of new readers.
This is my big plan for my own stuff, so if I’m deluded, someone tell me now!
Because epublishing, if done right, and boy do I know how to do things right, requires an investment of $0 – it’s all sweat equity. Actually, I do plan to buy two more domains and an ISP host, but that won’t cost more than $30 tops. It CAN be done for free, but I am somewhat doubtful about the reliability of free hosting services, or the very cheap ones.
I think pdas are taking off, espeically among the young. I think I’m about five or ten years ahead of the curve, or right at the point where it really starts, which is where I wanna be. When things get really profitable, the big guys move in and use their economic muscle to drive out the smaller guys. I want to be solidly established before that happens.
I see what you’re saying, and you make a good point, though I think you’re underestimating the inertia of those same big guys.
I recently did a little research into ebooks for more common titles, and I found last year, that Bantam Spectra was still charging ~$18 for a one-time only download-read-once-only copy of David Brin’s Kiln People**, a book that had been out in paperback for ages at that time.
Aha! Fair enough. My operating model is designed for the lazy, like myself. 
If you’re looking for hosting, I’ve heard good things about BlueHost, and it will support multiple domains, high traffic, and e-commerce for dirt cheap.
Rysler, the problem with touting self-publishing as being for the lazy is that I can think of only one book that really took off as a self-published book: Joy of Cooking. In general those people who self-publish find themselves stuck with huge inventories of never-sold books, because you do have to still do all the self-promotion that Evil Captor is talking about for his e-books.
Self-publishing is a great deal for small clubs publishing small print runs for their membership. Or large families for a family history. For larger markets it’s not a very successful model. There have been some, but they are the exceptions, not the rule. Have you looked into the places that offer print-on-demand publishing? It’s more of an intermediary between the so-called vanity presses and epublishing.
On-demand and vanity publishing have always struck me as suspicious. I’d rather have more control over my rights, inventory, and marketing. Per inventory, Evil already has a following of people willing to buy books. He’s not publishing into the ether, he’s presumably going to offer his product to people who already have their wallets out.
And I was thinking small print runs to a niche market, not instant best-seller list. My expectations may be lower than Evil Captor’s.
Self-publishing is a perfectily viable option for several situations and genres. Vanity publishing is never a viable option for anybody. There is a difference between the two.
Liquid Silver. I tried Ellora’s Cave first, but apparently, it wasn’t smutty enough for them. Heh, whatever. Liquid Silver bought it under 2 months after I submitted it.
I do recognize that there is a difference between the two - though I will argue that vanity publishing can an option for some people who don’t intend it to be a money-making venture.
Having said that, many of the presses that will do for self-publishing, are also serving the vanity publishing market, too. The respectable ones don’t advertise like the scum-sucking vanity presses do, but they will do the work. And, I’m just lazy enough to find that vanity press as a generic term is easier to type and a self-publishing press.
e-publishing and self-publishing can work if you have a good target market, or if your book is on a topic not of general interest to a wide audience but of high interest to a narrow audience.
But there are problems. This is from someone in my writers critique group who self published a memoir. He was excellent at self-promotion. He did readings at bookstores all around where he lived, went back to his hometown and did readings, got on the radio and in the papers. But his book was still a flop, since it wasn’t all that good. Plus, large bookstores don’t accept self-published books by policy, which limits your market.
What publishers do for you is to certify that of all books submitted, yours was so much better than the rest that it got selected. (Important for new authors - not so much if you or your lover has killed someone. 
) But, if you are looking for a book to read, would you choose something that likely got rejected by professional editors over something that got accepted? If you are looking for a book in an area that is so small that there is nothing professionally published, that’s a different story.
I’d say in most cases editors improve the quality of a book. The guy I’m referring to regretted getting his book out when he did, because he say its flaws. This didn’t stop him from doing the same thing with a second volume. He needed to see his stuff between covers, and was willing to pay for the privilege. A guy came to our local B&N on a panel, and proudly distributed his self-published mystery. There were so many grammatical errors and instances of bad writing on the first ten pages I gave up. He thought he was a great writer, but he didn’t have a clue.
Real publishers also have better distribution.
Barnes and Noble was somehow involved in e-publishing at one point - there was a push to generate books for i-publish - but the thrust went away. I guess it is growing, but I’m not sure it is big yet.
I hope that anyone planning to self-publish has at least joined a critique group to get some good feedback on his writing. It’s painful, but it is worth it.
Well, publishers have a lock on the distribution channels in the print world, which is why most authors need them. In cyberspace, there’s Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but still plenty of room for the little guys to make money. I have found a lot of sites that will let you place a book on their site, and all they’re looking for is a cut of your profits. This is EXTREMELY attractive to me, as they also don’t require exclusivity.
Compare this to trad publishers who demand (or used to, it’s been a long time since I kept track) that you send out query letters to only one publisher at a time, instead of doing the logical thing and sending your queries out to everyone who might be interested in your work.
It does take much more effort and energy to market your book yourself, but I kinda enjoy it. It’s rewarding when the money comes in, for one thing. For another, it makes you feel like a capable person who can deal with business problems rather than a delicate flower of a writer who can’t be bothered to take care of his/her own work.
I’d love to have a big pay me huge sums of money and invest huge sums of money in marketing and promoting my work, but I would feel stupid waiting for it to happen, expecially in the area of bondage erotica. It worked for Pauline Reage and that chick who wrote 9 1/2 Weeks, and practically no one else.
I know the community relations manager at our local B&N quite well, and really they are the ones responsible for blocking the channel. They can’t afford to deal with lots of independent authors who don’t support their books the way the majors do, and who either don’t take returns or require effort for each and every author. So it isn’t the publishers preventing independents from getting distribution, it is the publishers offering a service independent authors can’t offer.
I don’t know about your old publishers, but the majors don’t have this requirement. When my wife had an agent for her book, the agent sent it to several publishers at once. I know you can send query letters to several agents at once, and I need to look up my notes on sending mss’s to several at once. It is based on not asking an agent to waste time reading your ms when you’ve decided to place it with someone else.
Oh come on. In software those who are good developers may not be good marketers. Good writing and good marketing are not linked. A writer should go out in support of a book, but it seems silly to ask someone who is a great writer but a mediocre marketer to take time from his strength to focus on his weakness. It’s just division of labor.
Ah, a niche market, and I wish I could find an appropriate pun correlating niche and bondage! Is there a lot of book market left for this kind of thing, or have videos sapped it.
Inspirational books, bondage books - probably look the same market size-wise.
Just what I was thinking. Everything changes when you’ve already got that built-iin audience who has proven they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is.
I lean against e-Books, however, because they’re so easy to copy and share. (Unless you set some sort of security into the eBook, which may or may not be worth the hassle.) If you are not concerned about people buying your eBook and then emailing all their buddies a copy (or sharing it on P2P), then eBooks could be okay. But a regular print book sounds better to me. I much prefer to read an actual paperback, rather than scroll through a PDF eBook on my computer screen.
Barnes and Noble does self-publishing through iUniverse. I have been led to believe that iUniverse uses the POD (Print on Demand) publisher LightningSource. POD appeals to me because you won’t pay too much up-front, and you won’t have stacks of books collecting dust in your garage. A copy is printed out only as a book is ordered. If you buy yourself some ISBN numbers, you can set yourself up as your own publisher and have your books printed through Lightning Source (or other POD of your choice—I have no idea of Lightning Source is the best one) and sell through Amazon.com and B&N.