Monthly Archives: February 2011

Here are the current top ten ebook fiction best-sellers as shown online today:

What do we see in this week’s cook-off?

• Three out of four lists agree that Alone by Lisa Gardner is the best-selling ebook, so we can conclude that there is no Numero Uno Stew on the stove at the moment.
• The New York Times shows Dreams of a Dark Warrior as #7 when neither Amazon nor BN show this book in their top ten or twenty or thirty.  It’s ranked #93 in the Kindle store and #83 at Nookbooks.  Let’s see, during its earnings call this week, BN claimed that it’s selling 25% of all ebooks in the US and Amazon regularly claims 70-80% ebook market share.  Has the NYT discovered a tsunami of sales of Dreams of a Dark Warrior from Borders for the Kobo reader?  Is Dreams of a Dark Warrior the key to a secret Borders bankruptcy strategy?  I don’t know about you, but I smell something in the oven.
• A similar aroma surrounds Her Last Letter, which is #9 at NYT while ranking #22 on Amazon and #129 on Nook.
• The taste-makers at The New York Times continue to studiously avoid acknowledging that indie writers could possibly be bestsellers.  Perhaps the NYT list should be captioned, “Best Selling Ebooks Published by People Who Buy Advertisements in The New York Times (with a special thank you to Simon & Schuster for Dreams of a Dark Warrior)”.
• Indies hold three places in the top ten Kindle books, with John Locke leading Amanda Hocking 2-1.
• USA Today recognizes Amanda Hocking, indie queen, as a best-seller for Switched, but USA Today lists the price of Switched as $2.99 when the book is 99 cents on the Kindle and the Nook.

Snark Finem

A note about the USA Today bestseller list.  USA Today includes top-selling books, including fiction and non-fiction, hardcopy and ebooks, in a single list. USA Today combines sales from each format to determine rank. In the list, they note which format recorded the most sales that week. For my list above, I’ve included fiction titles that sold more in ebook format than any other. The numbers in parentheses show the overall USA Today ranking. Mine isn’t a perfect solution because, for example, Tick Tock is #2 in the overall USA Today ranking but shows its top-selling format to be hardcover. It is possible that Tick Tock sold more ebooks than some of the lower-ranked books selling the most in ebook format.

New York Times Ebook Fiction Best Sellers

Amazon Fiction Ebook Bestsellers

Nookbooks Bestsellers

USA Today Top 150

According to Barnes & Noble, Nook has 25% of the ebook market.

Why would they lie?

Excerpt:

“We intend for Barnes & Noble to be a leader in the exploding market for digital content,” said William Lynch, Barnes & Noble’s CEO. “We now represent 25 percent of the e-book market in the U.S., larger than our share in physical books. We sell twice as many e-books as all formats of physical books combined on BN.com.”

Link to the rest at cnet News

Lantz Powell, an agent, blogs about an indie author’s marketing campaign on Facebook.

Excerpts:

There was a time in a major NY publisher, you would walk past rows of desks filled with copy editors and marketing interns.  Not so today.  Desks are empty and their former occupants email resumes with their novel submissions.

Recently an ad popped up for Alice & Henry by Anne Eldridge. It was better than the average ad on Facebook so I clicked and took a quick look then moved on.

The problem was it returned again and again. After a few more impressions I clicked to dig deeper into their marketing. It was better than most ads I see from NY publishers. There seemed to be a live person behind it which is too expensive for a NY publisher. Was it some sophisticated marketing gimmick with a guru behind it?

. . . .

I mean that we have reached a tipping point. Big Time. What the industry has seen so far is only the rain for the last few years. The dad-gum dam is about to break!

I still have not read her book – I just don’t think it is for me. But I am convinced that she is doing a lot of things right and will be a success.

1] She wrote one book and spent several years in CompuServe’s lit forum. [That is one of the best free classrooms to learn the craft around].

2] She listens to suggestions and works daily to build her fan base.

3] She has a background in sales. Every writer must have marketing savvy today.

All the desks in her office are filled. And the head of her marketing department personally drives the author to a book signing, and the author constantly rewrites everything the editor tells her to and all three of them fight for use of the phone. She may not get rich writing. But I bet she will make more profit this year than most publishers. And she is having a ball learning what it is all about.

Link to the rest at The Gatekeepers Post

Is 99 cents a better price than $2.99 for a Kindle ebook?  Joe Konrath runs the numbers.

Excerpts:

So we’ve seen a dramatic increase in sales.

But is it enough of an increase?

At $2.99, I was earning $2.03 per download. And I was selling an average of 43 ebooks a day.

At 99 cents, I only earn 35 cents per download. I’m now averaging 205 sales a day.

At $2.99, I made $87 a day.

At 99 cents, I’m making $71 a day.

. . . .

But there are obvious certain benefits to the 99 cent price point. Because it is now higher on the bestseller lists, it is seen more often. And 99 cents is more of an impulse purchase.

Link to the rest at A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing

I just discovered a blog entitled, “Scrivener’s Error,” written by an attorney, C.E. Petit, who focuses on copyright and author’s issues.

He has some detailed observations about the effect of Borders’ bankruptcy on royalty payments.  To be clear, an author whose books are sold by Borders is not a creditor in the bankruptcy (unless he/she self-publishes), but a publisher is.  This post relates to how publishers may try to share the pain of not being paid by Borders with authors.

Excerpt:

The first thing that you’re going to see happen is an increase in the reserve against returns on your next royalty statement. Borders allegedly has about 15% of the market… but its share of returns is much higher, running over 20%. What is most likely is that your reserve against returns will be jacked up by a fifth on the next royalty statement; what might be justifiable is jacking it up by a tenth, but justification for reserves against returns is more than somewhat lacking.

The second thing that you’re going to see happen is that some publishers — in particular smaller publishers and those that imposed net-receipts royalty streams — are going to refuse to credit you with all of the sales, claiming (rightly or wrongly) that the sales don’t count until they’ve been paid… and that they’re going to have to “adjust” actual sales based on how much they get paid for outstanding invoices. This is a key point for authors near escalator points and at risk from “deep discount” royalty slashes.

Link to the rest at Scrivener’s Error

From Joel Friedlander, a professional book designer who works with self-publishers.

Excerpt:

There are very few “rules” about book sizes, but there are a number of conventions that are good to know about. (All sizes quoted in this article are width x height.)

• The only real rule is that mass market books have to be 4-1/4″ x 7″. These books are often sold through racks at point of purchase sites in supermarkets, airports, drugstores and the like and their size is an essential part of the way they are distributed. These are not usually self-published books, so you probably won’t have to worry about considering this size.
• Trade paperbacks, a pretty loose category of books, are often in the 5-1/2″ x 8-1/2″ to 6″ x 9″ range. This page proportion—for instance in the 6″ x 9″ size—of 2:3 has long been considered an ideal for a book page, and you can create good looking books at different sizes but in the same page proportions. Most self-published books are trade paperbacks.

Link to the rest at The Book Designer

A self-published Amazon author has been posting pirated copies of entire ebooks for sale.  Amazon finally shut this one down, but when will it happen again?

Link to Teleread

Professional editor Theresa (sorry, couldn’t find a last name) at edittorent dissects the way one writer sets a scene.

Excerpts:

Once out of the park, Clotilde stood still, the sounds and sights of the city surrounding her. Brightly dressed people bustled past on the pavement and the street was full of large car and double-decker buses. Everywhere she looked, something was moving. Her fingers clenched the plastic bag with the advertisement. She resisted the urge to run back to the river and hide. She needed to find someone to give her directions – not the Yank, obviously, but someone who lived here and knew London.

. . . .

I think the sense of motion in the world around her is also clear, but I want it to be more concrete. Phrases like “sights and sounds of the city” are too abstract to register a sensory impression. What exactly does she hear? Cars. Footsteps. Horns. What else? What exactly does she see? Cars. People. Pavement. Coffee shop. These words are more concrete than “sights and sounds.”

Link to the rest at edittorrent

I’ve paired two good discussions on self-publishing, one Pro and one Con.

First, the Pro from Joanna Penn.  The Con from Larry Brooks follows right after this post.

Excerpts:

I’d love to see my books in bookstores all over the world. That’s still a dream of mine, as it is probably yours. It’s also the dream of many mid-list authors who have a publishing contract but the reality hasn’t quite led them to bestseller success. Despite this dream, I have just independently published my first thriller novel, Pentecost on Amazon.com as a print and Kindle book.

. . . .

But what if you still want a book deal?

You need to decide for yourself whether you’re patient enough to wait for the traditional publishing cycle. I’m impatient and a DIY type of person. I love to take action and see a result. I like being in control. I’ve tried the submission-rejection process and the negative energy made me crazy. There are other roads to a publishing deal, including making huge sales on the Kindle and being noticed for sales success. Check out Karen McQuestion or Boyd Morrison. There are other authors who achieve this level of success and then turn down publishing deals as they make more money on their own. Check out Amanda Hocking or the recent Amazon #1 The Machine of Death.

There are some aspects you need to consider if you choose these independent publishing paths as it definitely suits a certain type of personality. You need to treat it as a business where you invest some money for professional editing, book cover design and formatting in order to create a quality product. You then receive income from sales like any other business. It’s a different model to advances and royalties but it’s definitely easier to understand! You also need to do your own marketing so you need an author platform (although there are stories of people who are making money just by loading books on the Kindle with no marketing). Mainstream publishers expect an author platform these days as well so that is needed whatever the route you take.

Link to the rest at Storyfix.com

I’ve paired two good discussions on self-publishing, one Pro and one Con.

The preceding post from Joanna Penn took the Pro side.  Now Larry Brooks responds to Joanna and takes the Con side.

Excerpts:

Every movement of mass hysteria has a voice of reason and moderation, and this is it.

This is about getting real with your dream of being published.  Because – newsflash – it isn’t the same dream that you started with.  And the new one doesn’t come with the same perks.

. . . .

It wasn’t that long ago that self-publishing was a haven of last resort.  Traditional publishing rejected you (I know they sure did reject me), so you spent your money and got the thing printed yourself.  Or – for even more money – you signed on with a third party to help make that happen, hoping they might get you into the bookstores that you can’t.

They didn’t.  Nor did they give you your money back.  There was no market for independently published fiction, the only market was for the folks offering to get you into one.

But now there’s a new self-publishing sheriff in town (that’s Sheriff Kindle, to you), and he’s swinging open the publishing doors to anyone and everyone who knows how to download a digital file.  And because the bookstore of today is just a few keystrokes away, everyone has access to the marketplace.

Or so the theory goes.

What used to be a concert by John Denver is now allowing anybody with a ticket up onto the stage.

Link to the rest at Storyfix.com