J.A. Konrath Kindle sales 30K ebooks in 11 months

Shhhh... J.A -- he's an author on here. He'll get a big head! Sweetheart that he is... My hubby loved his Whiskey Sour, other than he's just a nice chap.

Congrat's JA, and thanks for the link, Ben.

Wow, impressive.

If I remember from a former article, he really really did great PR work for his books too.

He's a phenom

We Love Joe!

Er... well, we do.

Honestly, Joe Konrath's bothered to comment on my Bare Bones - How To Write Horror thread, has bothered to write and extend his hand to fellow writers around the world with his blogs, gives away his Newbie's Guide, and is known to correspond with fellow writers, wannabe's, and fans frequently.

To co-opt a phrase from an old David Brin novel (and a fair-to-middlin' Kevin Costner movie) "He gives out advice (and hope) like candy from his pocket" (The Postman)

One of these days I hope to have the pleasure of meeting him in person and to get him to agree to take a look at one of my WIPs (which, I'm told, he also does in his (not) copious amounts of free time).

Joe's hit on a formula for writing success which I hope to emulate in the near future. He knows the market(s), knows the technology, and he somehow manages to stay on the leading edge of new waves like the Kindle and still write new stuff.

He's also showing other writers how to get onboard that same wagon if they're good enough.

I listen to practically every word Joe Konrath has to say in regard to writing (just as I religiously read everything Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, James D. MacDonald, et al had/have to say about it) and try to take it to heart.

I've been been following Konrath's blog for awhile. After seeing his success with Kindle, I decided to publish a Kindle edition of my own novel, Devil's Lair.

It debuted at #17 for historical fantasy.

I'm not pulling Konrath numbers (yet), but people are buying it.

nitaworm said:

Wow, impressive.

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Ditto

brnitschke said:

I thought this article was pertinent. I hope I'm not reposting it. Please delete if so!

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/03/ja-konrath-kindle-sales-30k-ebooks-in.html

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Thanks for the link!

And JA, if you read this, fantastic how-to article! It's now bookmarked...

David Wisehart said:

I've been been following Konrath's blog for awhile. After seeing his success with Kindle, I decided to publish a Kindle edition of my own novel, Devil's Lair.

It debuted at #17 for historical fantasy.

I'm not pulling Konrath numbers (yet), but people are buying it.

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Grrr. I feel like such a fledgeling. I've only recently started looking into this way of publishing. Not that I'm slow, but I got overtook by a disabled scooter the other day...

It's also worth noting that he maintains a strong online presence--not only offering useful and well-meaning advice here, but also on his blog. He does blog tours to talk about his books, and generally makes the most of the Internet as a promotion tool. It's worth emulating.

For some how-to advice in this vein, I think Jeff Vandermeer's "Booklife" is absolutely great. Here's the website with more info: http://booklife.org

I only came across this post after I had a discussion about ebooks with my friends and tried to guess at their profitability. The good news is, I'm the only one who knows what I missed...

I'm mindboggled. And considering ebooks in a new light. A much brighter one.

MumblingSage, While it's true that ebooks are not as immediately profitable as a sale to a Big House you should remember that the numbers are going to run a lot differently.

Consider Big House X. They pay $5k to a newbie (about average I'm told) for the advance and let's say 10% royalties on a print run of 50k copies priced at $7.99 each. Let's say, by some miracle, the book actually earns out the advance and sells all 50k copies (highly unlikely) of the first print run. That's $39,950.00 less the $5k advance or $35.950.00 for the author.

Now, let's say the author decides to go the ebook route. He or she chooses to use Smashwords for their generous 85% royalty rate. Let's say the author chooses to price their book at $1.99 (a bit lower than I like, but hey, you're trying to build a fan-base and to get the book into as many hands as possible so it seems that a lower price for a debut novel is a good idea). Let's say the author sells 30k copies. That's $50,745.00 in the author's pocket.

Now, that assumes that the book sells a phenomenal number of copies for an ebook. That doesn't happen very often. The average ebook sells less than 1k copies (mainly because most of them are complete crap and complete crap generates fewer sales, not more - a mouthful of crap or a Kindle load of crap is still crap and tastes like it). You have to have a Name (like JA Konrath) or be a brand (like JA Konrath) and aggressively market (like JA Konrath) or be just plain frakking lucky beyond all expectations of reality in order to gain those kinds of sales. It's far more likely your debut ebook is going to sell in the low hundreds or thousands, not the tens of thousands unless you've got a fan base or a Name.

However, this is one way that newbies build a fan base. Everyone starts out as a newb. Building that fan base is mainly by word of mouth and the web is the greatest word of mouth advertising tool ever built or conceived of. You can reach tens of millions of people more than any Big House's marketing director ever dreamed of if you market your book correctly.

It doesn't look to me like Konrath is doing all that well compared to other established writer.

If a newbie really wants to build a fan base, he must write a novel worthy of being talked about. That's "all."

You throwing a lot of numbers out that really don't mean much, or that are 100% speculation based on nothing solid that I can see.

Real world experience doesn't bear you out in any way. You're especially wrong when you say You can reach tens of millions of people more than any Big House's marketing director ever dreamed of if you market your book correctly.

You're forgetting that every Big House out there knows all about the internet, more about marketing and word of wouth than you do, and uses every tool and approach you're thinking about, plus a lot of others.

The Big Houses, in other words, are already reaching those tens of millions on the web, plus millions more that you can't access at all.

you may want to look at his latest post.

a wee bit o'backtracking, to my view.

in other words, don't rush off to Amazon to toss your first draft out into the wide world and hope you'll strike gold.

Jamesaritchie wrote, You throwing a lot of numbers out that really don't mean much, or that are 100% speculation based on nothing solid that I can see.

Real world experience doesn't bear you out in any way. You're especially wrong when you say You can reach tens of millions of people more than any Big House's marketing director ever dreamed of if you market your book correctly.

You're forgetting that every Big House out there knows all about the internet, more about marketing and word of wouth than you do, and uses every tool and approach you're thinking about, plus a lot of others.

The Big Houses, in other words, are already reaching those tens of millions on the web, plus millions more that you can't access at all.

Let's just say that I disagree with you and leave it at that, huh? I doubt that I'm 100% wrong in any case as you state, but it's beside the point. If Konrath's numbers are right and Smashwords lives up to its 85% royalty rates on ebooks then the math is correct.

The Big Houses do know all about the web, but you can still reach tens of millions of people through it and using it. That's not a lie. You have to market yourself aggressively and there many, many ways to do that and to reach a lot more people in a lot more ways than simply having your book sitting on a shelf in a store somewhere.

'Nuff said. I didn't post to start an argument.

FOTSGreg said:

Now, let's say the author decides to go the ebook route. He or she chooses to use Smashwords for their generous 85% royalty rate. Let's say the author chooses to price their book at $1.99 (a bit lower than I like, but hey, you're trying to build a fan-base and to get the book into as many hands as possible so it seems that a lower price for a debut novel is a good idea). Let's say the author sells 30k copies. That's $50,745.00 in the author's pocket.

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Lol. Let's not forget that my book, which had sold 33 copies at the time, was on the smashwords bestseller list at #15 for months.

When you're saying the average self-published ebook sells less than 1k, it's probably WAAAY less than 1k.

Let's also not forget that whatever title this was, was NOT Konrath's first book. I shared a panel with him back in '03, I think it was, and he already knew everything about marketing then...

I wish him well and tons of sales, but please don't think he stepped straight into the market and saw this volume on a first book. Didn't happen that way.

Of course he didn't step straight into the market and suddenly get these kinds of sales. It's possible for a newbie to get these kinds of sales, but the odds are about the same as your being bounced on the head by a Dinosaur Killer asteroid and walking off wondering what happened.

Odds are strong, I'm sorry, odds are ASTRONOMICAL, that a first timer with a new ebook will sell next to no copies of their work, and by that I mean a few hundred copies at most (there are ways to influence this and boost it upwards significantly, but I digress).

Konrath has spent years building his fan-base and building his brand. People surf his website looking for freebies because he gives them away and if they happen to stumble over an ebook and think "Hey, I'll give this a try for a buck-ninety- nine" they;re out less than $2 if they decide it sucks.

But Konrath made a sale nevertheless. That adds to his bottom line. He's already built his fan-base by aggressively marketing his brand.

Then he turns around and hands out he advice he does to new writers - make yourself a brand, aggressively market your books, look for each and every way you can put them in the hands of a reader.

Yeah, I'm a fan. Sue me. But I'm a fan who is going to aggressively take to heart a lot (not everything) of the advice Joe offers. I'll be honest and admit that I don't worship the ground his books walk on, but gods-bless-me, he markets the daylights out of himself and his work.

A lot of us could take lessons from his example.

Congrats to him. He obviously works very hard at promotion, networking, and staying out there.