Send not to know for whom the bell tolls… — 19 Comments
Yep … the indy writers march on. Now, we’re finally getting a little grudging respect from agencies and traditional publishing houses, but honestly, after a certain point, the payoff is better in remaining indy.
BTW – I put out my first print book as in indy in 2005, my first novel, To Truckee’s Trail in 2007 – and I have written five HF novels since then: the Adelsverein Trilogy, and two that serve as a prelude to it. Right now, I am working out an arrangement with a German translator, to do a German-language version of the Trilogy and market it through Amazon to all those Karl May fans – he’ll do it on spec, for a percentage of future sales of the German edition.
Writing it is the first half of the job; getting a book, digital or print, in front of potential readers – now that’s the other half!
Yes, getting people to see it is the problem. Chan still wants to see hers “in print” and selling in a real store; having had paperbacks selling in real stores in the 1980’s, I can safely say I’m over that 🙂 Now I am just happy when people enjoy mine, whether digital or print. I’m starting to feel happily defiant about not having my latest ones in print. It’s an old model that has carried too much cachet for too long.
Forty-plus years ago, I read Jerzy Kozinski’s “The Painted Bird”, a page-turning downer. I gathered he had published a good many books, or at least copies of whatever he’d written.
Many years later, I discovered a frustrated writer had copied–at that time it meant typed–one of Kozinski’s books, put it under his name, and submitted it all over. Got nowhere.
The object, of course, was not plagiarism, but the random and quirky nature of the gatekeepers.
Years ago, I submitted a story built around the US as the on-call cop in the world, set about ten minutes ahead of whatever your time was. The agent, spooked by the CIA’s having paid some Guatemalan cop for information, decided that the US-as-good-guy market was dead.
I’m trying to think if that was just before or just as Tom Clancy hit the big time.
Afew years I was interested in a particular textbook. At $115 or so it was not on my must have list. It turns out an ecopy was available for $15.00.
Hopefully this will be the wave of the future in textbooks.
I was also interested in a good few original and obscure books, of interest to no one but researchers like myself. I could not afford the vintage print copies for sale here and there – but I found perfectly acceptable scans of them on Project Gutenburg.
There are a lot of interesting and almost totally forgotten books available on Kindle for free or for $.99. For example, I’ve been reading the novels of Isabel Paterson, who is best known as a libertarian-oriented writer of political philosophy (“The God of the Machines.”) She turns out to be a more than passable novelist as well; check out “The Shadow Riders,” her first book, written in 1914.
It sounds like writers are following in the footsteps of musicians. I don’t know much about the book publishing business, but I know that once upon a time, aspiring musicians needed to get signed to a record label. Only the record companies had the recording studios and the factories needed to manufacture vinyl records. And of course having records was necessary to get played on radio stations. Beginning in the 1980s, they promoted their music with videos on MTV.
Today, thanks to modern technology, musicians can record and burn CDs at home, and sell them directly to their fans at gigs and over the internet. They can even offer free downloads to get the word out (analogous to radio airplay), and put their promotional videos on YouTube.
True, they probably won’t get extremely rich doing this, but a decent musician can probably make a decent living this way. And they can retain complete control over their work, instead of running the risk of getting ripped off by unscrupulous managers, agents, and record companies.
I bought a Kindle about 18 months ago and I have sworn off paper books since then. I save a fortune in book purchases and I can shop from anywhere. All of my news is from e-news as well. The environmentalists should be happy and readers will save billions. Borders has gone bankrupt and the other old-fashioned book sellers and printers will follow. Please don’t tell me about the look and feel of a “real” book. I’m sure people said the same about stone tablets, but you can’t take stone tablets on a plane trip.
I just love the notion of getting rid of the mostly partisan aspect of the gatekeepers. With mainstream media, in magazine, television, newspapers, music, and now publishing being shoved down the steps *oops* I feel better about a potential return to sanity.
When all we read is propaganda that is all we will know. More so when it is one-sided propaganda. Off with the rose colored glasses!
What I love about this story is that it shows that the ultimate power in a market economy lies with the individual.
Individuals use their dollars to vote in the marketplace every day. And if this were an election between traditional books sold in a brick and mortar storefront and e-books sold electronically, the election would be a landslide in favor of e-books.
Individuals voted with their dollars and forced book retailer Borders completely out of business. In a market economy based on voluntary transactions, the individual consumer decides which products, businesses and industries succeed and which fail. They decide whether to buy traditional books or e-books. They decide whose e-books get bought and whose don’t. The greedy individual consumer pursuing his own self interest forced Borders out of business because he perceived better value with e-books. The biggest, most powerful “greedy” corporation in the world can’t force individuals to buy traditional books if the consumers refuse to buy them. That’s why all the Occupiers, as well as our President, who talk about corporate greed are idiots. The individual consumers are the ones who wield the power.
This is the perfect example of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called, “the gales of creative destruction”.
In the small town where I used to live, the holidays were greeted by the “Candlewalk” with many of the retailers offering open houses, hay rides, and various musical acts. Some were HS kids playing baroque Christmas stuff. Some were local choirs. There would be professionals, as well, playing requests on harp or acoustic guitar. One was a music therapist at a big hospital who played the celtic harp. Another was from the Detroit Symphony.
The celtic harpist had fronted about $2k for studio time, burned a bunch of CDs and sold them for, iirc, $12 at various functions where she played for free. We have a couple, along with one from the DSO artist. Good music, no labels, great price and, in some way, personal, since we were able to converse with the artist between pieces.
Sort of like having an artist four steps below the national figures in marketing savvy, but about one half step below the national figures in talent come to your house to play.
Rickl, exactly – indy book authors are able to do now what indy musicians began doing a decade or so ago; produce and market their material having disintermediated the big producers/publishers. I do talks about my books, or the German settlements, or Civil War in the Hill Country to clubs and associations, and then sell copies of my books in the back of the room afterwards. It’s not spectacular – but I have a growing local fan base because of it.
I love how the previous gatekeepers of what we read, what we must think, and how we are going to be entertained are getting hurt by this new, surprisingly powerful technology called the Internet.
I self published a software program for doing charting and technical analysis and made a decent living from it for more than 10 years. I also self published an investment newsletter and a printed book on technical analysis that sold quite a few copies. It’s no longer in print and apparently has sort of a cult following for those interested in technical analysis of the markets. I recently saw a copy advertised for $155.00.
My son is an awarded and exhibited photographer (sorry…shameless promotion for him makes me point you to http://www.billmccullugh.com to check out his work) who does almost all of his marketing over the Internet. Several public museums have purchased some of his pieces for their private collections. None of this would have been possible without the Internet.
His wife who is an arty, liberal type says she no longer wants to be bothered with holding a book and turning pages when she reads. She’d rather read from a nice, compact Kindle or Nook. It’s also nice that she can carry a library of thousands of books on the plane in her travels.
I’ll have to hold an e-reader for a while before I could be convinced. Having another fragile, battery-dependent high-value object to keep track of is not attractive. And I really do not like the idea of amazon.com (or any authority) having the power to remove ideas from my library at their discretion.
If the analogy to music holds, we will still have some bookstores, just like we have niche vinyl record shops. Art books, gift books, coffeetable books and probably some technical manuals and home-study materials are better as physical objects.
I just bought the print-on-demand paper version of OpenOffice.org’s manual even though I could read and use the same info for free on a laptop beside my main computer.
Despite my earlier comment, I haven’t yet made the switch to Kindle. I still like hard copy books. For years I bought paperbacks whenever possible to save money, but since I discovered Brodart, I’ve been going out of my way to buy hardcovers so I can Brodart the dust jackets.
I do most of my book shopping online nowadays, either through Amazon or through AbeBooks and Alibris for used and out-of-print books. I’ve yet to be disappointed. The descriptions of the book’s condition tend to be pretty accurate. I’ve bought some used books that are barely distinguishable from new.
If the major publishers are dying it is from self-inflicted wounds.
I don’t read that much fiction. But I’ve downloaded a few of the 99 cent novels on my Kindles. All of them have been good. Some of them have been in the “can’t put it down” class. And I’m glad to support a writer who has provided me a ton of good reading for 99 cents.
I love how the previous gatekeepers of what we read, what we must think, and how we are going to be entertained are getting hurt by this new, surprisingly powerful technology called the Internet.
Texexec, you and Sgt. Mom nailed it: disintermediation is a bitch. Particularly for those who so richly deserve to be … uh … disintermediated. Perhaps we should coin a pseudo-leftist neologism: “cultural democracy.”
Kaba, I don’t know if I will be able to mark down many of my Kindle version books to .99 as a Christmas sale special (I’m on the 70% royalty payment plan, so there is a minimum that I have to ask for) but all of my Kindle versions but one are priced less than the cost of a Starbucks cuppa. If you are feeling adventurous about indy authors, check out mine. Or any others – I can make a list of extremely good indy authors for y’all.
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Yep … the indy writers march on. Now, we’re finally getting a little grudging respect from agencies and traditional publishing houses, but honestly, after a certain point, the payoff is better in remaining indy.
BTW – I put out my first print book as in indy in 2005, my first novel, To Truckee’s Trail in 2007 – and I have written five HF novels since then: the Adelsverein Trilogy, and two that serve as a prelude to it. Right now, I am working out an arrangement with a German translator, to do a German-language version of the Trilogy and market it through Amazon to all those Karl May fans – he’ll do it on spec, for a percentage of future sales of the German edition.
Writing it is the first half of the job; getting a book, digital or print, in front of potential readers – now that’s the other half!
Yes, getting people to see it is the problem. Chan still wants to see hers “in print” and selling in a real store; having had paperbacks selling in real stores in the 1980’s, I can safely say I’m over that 🙂 Now I am just happy when people enjoy mine, whether digital or print. I’m starting to feel happily defiant about not having my latest ones in print. It’s an old model that has carried too much cachet for too long.
Forty-plus years ago, I read Jerzy Kozinski’s “The Painted Bird”, a page-turning downer. I gathered he had published a good many books, or at least copies of whatever he’d written.
Many years later, I discovered a frustrated writer had copied–at that time it meant typed–one of Kozinski’s books, put it under his name, and submitted it all over. Got nowhere.
The object, of course, was not plagiarism, but the random and quirky nature of the gatekeepers.
Years ago, I submitted a story built around the US as the on-call cop in the world, set about ten minutes ahead of whatever your time was. The agent, spooked by the CIA’s having paid some Guatemalan cop for information, decided that the US-as-good-guy market was dead.
I’m trying to think if that was just before or just as Tom Clancy hit the big time.
Afew years I was interested in a particular textbook. At $115 or so it was not on my must have list. It turns out an ecopy was available for $15.00.
Hopefully this will be the wave of the future in textbooks.
I was also interested in a good few original and obscure books, of interest to no one but researchers like myself. I could not afford the vintage print copies for sale here and there – but I found perfectly acceptable scans of them on Project Gutenburg.
There are a lot of interesting and almost totally forgotten books available on Kindle for free or for $.99. For example, I’ve been reading the novels of Isabel Paterson, who is best known as a libertarian-oriented writer of political philosophy (“The God of the Machines.”) She turns out to be a more than passable novelist as well; check out “The Shadow Riders,” her first book, written in 1914.
It sounds like writers are following in the footsteps of musicians. I don’t know much about the book publishing business, but I know that once upon a time, aspiring musicians needed to get signed to a record label. Only the record companies had the recording studios and the factories needed to manufacture vinyl records. And of course having records was necessary to get played on radio stations. Beginning in the 1980s, they promoted their music with videos on MTV.
Today, thanks to modern technology, musicians can record and burn CDs at home, and sell them directly to their fans at gigs and over the internet. They can even offer free downloads to get the word out (analogous to radio airplay), and put their promotional videos on YouTube.
True, they probably won’t get extremely rich doing this, but a decent musician can probably make a decent living this way. And they can retain complete control over their work, instead of running the risk of getting ripped off by unscrupulous managers, agents, and record companies.
I bought a Kindle about 18 months ago and I have sworn off paper books since then. I save a fortune in book purchases and I can shop from anywhere. All of my news is from e-news as well. The environmentalists should be happy and readers will save billions. Borders has gone bankrupt and the other old-fashioned book sellers and printers will follow. Please don’t tell me about the look and feel of a “real” book. I’m sure people said the same about stone tablets, but you can’t take stone tablets on a plane trip.
I just love the notion of getting rid of the mostly partisan aspect of the gatekeepers. With mainstream media, in magazine, television, newspapers, music, and now publishing being shoved down the steps *oops* I feel better about a potential return to sanity.
When all we read is propaganda that is all we will know. More so when it is one-sided propaganda. Off with the rose colored glasses!
What I love about this story is that it shows that the ultimate power in a market economy lies with the individual.
Individuals use their dollars to vote in the marketplace every day. And if this were an election between traditional books sold in a brick and mortar storefront and e-books sold electronically, the election would be a landslide in favor of e-books.
Individuals voted with their dollars and forced book retailer Borders completely out of business. In a market economy based on voluntary transactions, the individual consumer decides which products, businesses and industries succeed and which fail. They decide whether to buy traditional books or e-books. They decide whose e-books get bought and whose don’t. The greedy individual consumer pursuing his own self interest forced Borders out of business because he perceived better value with e-books. The biggest, most powerful “greedy” corporation in the world can’t force individuals to buy traditional books if the consumers refuse to buy them. That’s why all the Occupiers, as well as our President, who talk about corporate greed are idiots. The individual consumers are the ones who wield the power.
This is the perfect example of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called, “the gales of creative destruction”.
In the small town where I used to live, the holidays were greeted by the “Candlewalk” with many of the retailers offering open houses, hay rides, and various musical acts. Some were HS kids playing baroque Christmas stuff. Some were local choirs. There would be professionals, as well, playing requests on harp or acoustic guitar. One was a music therapist at a big hospital who played the celtic harp. Another was from the Detroit Symphony.
The celtic harpist had fronted about $2k for studio time, burned a bunch of CDs and sold them for, iirc, $12 at various functions where she played for free. We have a couple, along with one from the DSO artist. Good music, no labels, great price and, in some way, personal, since we were able to converse with the artist between pieces.
Sort of like having an artist four steps below the national figures in marketing savvy, but about one half step below the national figures in talent come to your house to play.
Rickl, exactly – indy book authors are able to do now what indy musicians began doing a decade or so ago; produce and market their material having disintermediated the big producers/publishers. I do talks about my books, or the German settlements, or Civil War in the Hill Country to clubs and associations, and then sell copies of my books in the back of the room afterwards. It’s not spectacular – but I have a growing local fan base because of it.
I love how the previous gatekeepers of what we read, what we must think, and how we are going to be entertained are getting hurt by this new, surprisingly powerful technology called the Internet.
I self published a software program for doing charting and technical analysis and made a decent living from it for more than 10 years. I also self published an investment newsletter and a printed book on technical analysis that sold quite a few copies. It’s no longer in print and apparently has sort of a cult following for those interested in technical analysis of the markets. I recently saw a copy advertised for $155.00.
My son is an awarded and exhibited photographer (sorry…shameless promotion for him makes me point you to http://www.billmccullugh.com to check out his work) who does almost all of his marketing over the Internet. Several public museums have purchased some of his pieces for their private collections. None of this would have been possible without the Internet.
His wife who is an arty, liberal type says she no longer wants to be bothered with holding a book and turning pages when she reads. She’d rather read from a nice, compact Kindle or Nook. It’s also nice that she can carry a library of thousands of books on the plane in her travels.
Oops…make that link http://www.billmccullough.com .
I’ll have to hold an e-reader for a while before I could be convinced. Having another fragile, battery-dependent high-value object to keep track of is not attractive. And I really do not like the idea of amazon.com (or any authority) having the power to remove ideas from my library at their discretion.
If the analogy to music holds, we will still have some bookstores, just like we have niche vinyl record shops. Art books, gift books, coffeetable books and probably some technical manuals and home-study materials are better as physical objects.
I just bought the print-on-demand paper version of OpenOffice.org’s manual even though I could read and use the same info for free on a laptop beside my main computer.
Despite my earlier comment, I haven’t yet made the switch to Kindle. I still like hard copy books. For years I bought paperbacks whenever possible to save money, but since I discovered Brodart, I’ve been going out of my way to buy hardcovers so I can Brodart the dust jackets.
I do most of my book shopping online nowadays, either through Amazon or through AbeBooks and Alibris for used and out-of-print books. I’ve yet to be disappointed. The descriptions of the book’s condition tend to be pretty accurate. I’ve bought some used books that are barely distinguishable from new.
If the major publishers are dying it is from self-inflicted wounds.
I don’t read that much fiction. But I’ve downloaded a few of the 99 cent novels on my Kindles. All of them have been good. Some of them have been in the “can’t put it down” class. And I’m glad to support a writer who has provided me a ton of good reading for 99 cents.
I love how the previous gatekeepers of what we read, what we must think, and how we are going to be entertained are getting hurt by this new, surprisingly powerful technology called the Internet.
Texexec, you and Sgt. Mom nailed it: disintermediation is a bitch. Particularly for those who so richly deserve to be … uh … disintermediated. Perhaps we should coin a pseudo-leftist neologism: “cultural democracy.”
Kaba, I don’t know if I will be able to mark down many of my Kindle version books to .99 as a Christmas sale special (I’m on the 70% royalty payment plan, so there is a minimum that I have to ask for) but all of my Kindle versions but one are priced less than the cost of a Starbucks cuppa. If you are feeling adventurous about indy authors, check out mine. Or any others – I can make a list of extremely good indy authors for y’all.