Pros and cons of publishing on Kindle?

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Annmarie09

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Hi everyone. So basically, I have a question. If you publish on the Kindle store, what rights can you still retain? I've tried getting published the old fashioned way, got a lot of rejection letters, and now I'm thinking of epublishing on kindle. However at the same time I'm worried that if I do this, I'll never be able to do anything else with my book and I'll have to give querying agents/publishers in a bid to get my book published in paperback.

So yeah. What are the pros and cons of selfpublishing on the amazon kindle store? Can you still try to get your book published the traditional way, or do you have to give all of your rights to amazon?
 

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Annmarie, you could try reading the Kindle contract. That should spell it out for you.
 

shaldna

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What old hack said, but, although you can 'unpublish' on kindle, you will still loose your first publication rights.
 

Library4Science

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You can do anything you want with your book. There is no exclusivity in the Kindle contract and most people who self-publish there also publish on B&N and through Smashwords (which gets you Kobo, Apple, etc). Most likely you won't be able to get an agent interested in selling ebook or US print rights on a self-published book. If the book is a big success you might get an agent for foreign and movie rights.
 

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. . . Can you still try to get your book published the traditional way,. . . ?
If you believe that your book is suitable for commercial publishing (that is, genre, quality, audience, author's platform, and so on), then IMHO you should first and foremost seek commercial (trade) [not "traditional," a meaningless term used by the vanity press PublishAmerica] publication. Seek agent/publisher in the usual way, and with persistence.

That said, sure, a book that has been initially self-published can be of interest to a commercial publisher. I know too many examples to believe otherwise. But if your goal is the wide distribution and the recognition of legitimate commercial publishing, start with that in mind and be professional and persistent.

See my booklet, linked in sig. block, for an overview of publishing opportunities, and for a list of sources of additional information.

--Ken
 

Carmy

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What Ken says is true -- several self-published authors are later picked up by traditional publishers.

If you're considering Kindle, also take a look at Smashwords. I find I sell more books there than on Kindle.
 

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What Ken says is true -- several self-published authors are later picked up by traditional publishers.

This isn't precisely correct as regards the original question. Quite a number of authors who've self-published later sign up with commercial publishers/agents for later books (again, NOT 'traditional'....a term made up by PublishAmerica to sucker people into thinking it's a commercial publisher).

I think what Carmy meant is that several self-published books are later picked up by commercial publishers. And this is true. Several out of hundreds of thousands. With the advent of self-e-publishing, we're seeing more than ever before, but it's still a tiny pinch (not even a small handful, really) of self-published books that are getting picked up. The reason you hear so much about those that do is because it's still so rare.

It used to happen to a few books every year; now it might be in the upper two-digits or even lower three-digits. But when you consider just how many self-published books/e-books are out there, you'll understand that it's still overwhelmingly unlikely to happen to any given writer.

Also, those self-published authors who do get the sales numbers to garner commercial interest are spending buckets of time being the publisher...doing the jobs that commercial publishers do that their authors don't have to. Here's a recent series of posts that will give you an idea of the return on investment of time for a first-time self-e-pubbed author.

So I took one of my books and took the leap, uploaded to Smashwords, Barnes and Noble and Amazon. My book has been out for almost two months now and my sales are going ok but I never could have imagined how much time I would have to spend on marketing and networking. I spend at least 2 or 3 hrs a day on promotion and that is after my regular job.

I know it's cheeky to ask about sale figures, so I won't. But would you be willing to tell us, based on your current SP earnings and, say, 2.5 hours per day spent on promotion, what that's coming out to as an hourly 'wage'? And it's okay if you don't want to share that info, either. :) But if you're willing, I do think that would be interesting to know for people who are thinking about getting started.
I am happy to share :) I have done it several times already, I think it helps to give one persons real world experience. This is the middle of the second month. I am still selling about a copy a day on one of the three sites I publish on. So at an average of .50 cents a book I am making like less than .25 cents an hour. LOL I have heard that it takes at least 6 months and multiple books to build up any kind of momentum at all so I am just trudging through and praying that is right. I have 11 reviews coming out over the next couple of months on book blogs so hopefully that will boost sales. I also have 2 more books scheduled to come out in the next month or two.

If what you want is a commercial deal, you should continue to pursue that without self-publishing the work. If you've exhausted all commercial outlets and still want to just get it out there, then you can look at self-publishing.
 

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. . . it's still overwhelmingly unlikely to happen to any given writer.. . . .
You could say as much about commercial publishing. Those with the ability, professionalism, persistence, and, yes, sometimes also luck, to battle their way through (let alone to make a living from it!) are a small minority of all writers who aspire to book publication.

--Ken
 

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. . .If what you want is a commercial deal, you should continue to pursue that without self-publishing the work.
Just so. If commercial publishing is your goal, seek your goal without detouring through self-publishing. Persistence, persistence, persistence. And professionalism.

--Ken
 

Saul Tanpepper

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Self-pubbing is always an option, but as the above posters have said, if you think you're book is suitable for a traditional publisher, you're better off going that route. Self-pubbing is a lot of work and most SPers don't do a good enough job of it to give their book a fair chance. Whatever you do, learn as much as you reasonably can about both sides of the pubbing industry, join crit groups, get beta rreaders for your MS and revise, revise, revise. Don't make the mistake of thinking the MS you just finished is good enough.
 
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Self-pubbing is always an option, but as the above posters have said, if you think you're book is suitable for a traditional publisher, you're better off going that route. Self-pubbing is a lot of work and most SPers don't do a good enough job of it to give their book a fair chance.

I'm thinking I sorta disagree on this one. I think self publishing is becoming, and will continue to become, more of a first-run choice for writers looking to break into writing as a professional career. Some will then go on to large publishers; others will continue to self publish only. And both routes are and will continue to be viable careers, I think.

Self publishing IS a lot of work. But then again, so is researching agents. So is learning enough about contracts to not get messed up by one (agents aren't perfect as this, and there's a lot of major publishers with base contract clauses that writers *should* pass on). So is learning to read royalty statements and track sales, so that you know you're getting the income you should be (most writers I know with long careers have been ripped off by at least one agent). So is all the marketing you still need to do for a corporate published book.

There's a lot of work in *either* path. But with corporate publishing contracting heavily right now, and expected to continue contracting for a while yet, the odds of getting published (and more importantly, published multiple times) that route are diminishing. That might change as digital sales grow (digital books financially favor producing *more* books faster, not less books slower), but we'll have to wait and see how things pan out.
 

ColoradoMom

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Self-pubbing is always an option, but as the above posters have said, if you think you're book is suitable for a traditional publisher, you're better off going that route.

Hmmmm...I don't think that's good advice at all. For one thing - her opinion of the book isn't what matters in TRADITIONAL (I like this word myself, and don't give a hoot who made it up for what reason...it works for me) publishing. It's the traditional publisher's opinion that counts.

AnnMarie - you said you've sent out queries and have gotten no response? Some feedback? What did they give you? If you get feedback that's a good indicator that you have something but it just isn't ready yet. Polish it up and send it out again.
 

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. . . It's the traditional publisher's opinion that counts.. . . .
I think you missed the point.

If the author believes that the book is suitable for commercial publishing, and if that is the author's goal, then that is what the author should pursue.

In contrast, if the author believes that the book is not "commercial" -- small audience, local/regional, not of a type commercial publishers are interested in (for example, does not fit into any standard genre) -- or if the author simply PREFERS self-publishing (entrepreurial orientation, and so on), then that is the way to go.

Obviously commercial/trade publishers will decide what meets their criteria, ranging from quality of writing to sufficiency of author's platform and anticipated continuing viability as an author, to suitability of the book for that publisher's catalog. That is a different question from the writers goal. If the writer's goal is commercial/trade publishing, then the writer should relentlessly pursue commercial/trade publishing. That, of course, might be a years-long process, including revising, and revising, and revising some more, and querying and querying and querying some more, and ultimately futile nonetheless.

(BTW, there is more tradition behind self-publishing and subsidy publishing, and even outright author-deluding vanity publishing, than there is behind today's half-dozen international book publishing conglomerates. You can call commercial/trade publishing rutabaga, if you like, but that does not make it rutabaga, or assure that anyone else will know what you mean. That said, "traditional" has metasticized as a term for commercial or trade publishing. Bummer. The hideous PublishAmerica wins that rhetorical battle.)

--Ken
 
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ColoradoMom

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I think you missed the point.

If the author believes that the book is suitable for commercial publishing, and if that is the author's goal, then that is what the author should pursue.


No, I got the point. That's why I advised her to take any feedback into account and press on with submissions.

Perhaps you missed my point? Which was, the author has very little control over how a house chooses books to publish, even if they think it is the best book in the world. She might try for years and get no where. She might polish it up and get signed the next time out. Either way - her opinion of the book isn't what matters - if it is what publishers want, they'll take it. If not, they won't.
 

kaitie

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I'm agreeing with Terie. She summed it up well. While this might be changing, traditionally it will actually be more difficult to get a self-published book picked up by a commercial publisher than it is to just go through the query-go-round and do it the old-fashioned way.

That's because there is a stigma attached to self-published books, many of them are at a disadvantage because they lack professional covers, editing, and marketing, and because if a book has already been published and had very low sales, then a publisher is going to see that as evidence that there isn't an audience for the book. If you managed to sell ten thousand copies on your own, you might have a chance, but selling that many is very difficult.

The hard truth is that if you're receiving a lot of rejections, it's probably for a reason. It's just a matter of figuring out what the reason is. Have you had your query letter critiqued in SYW? A bad letter can hurt because it means that they're not even going to bother with reading attached pages. If your query letter is awesome, is there a problem in your opening five? How about the opening three chapters?

Are you getting requests at all, or just straight rejections? This usually indicates a problem with the letter. If you're getting requests but those are rejected, what sort of responses are you getting? Has anyone pointed out what issues they might have seen?

The number one reason most stuff is rejected is because the writing just isn't ready yet, and the unfortunate thing is that if that's the case, you aren't going to find much success self-publishing, either. In which case, you might hurt yourself because a book can be edited and sent out to agents again in a year, but if you've self-published it and failed to sell, it'll be much harder to get a publisher for it.

Now, if you're doing everything right and you have a good query and kick ass opening chapters and you're getting good feedback and personalized rejections, that means you're really close and probably just need to keep at it. I sent hundreds of queries.

If you want to be commercially published and see your book in print, though, I'd suggest getting some crits and finding out if you can narrow down what the reasons for the rejections might be. Even if this book is rejected, you can always try again with the next book, and the next. For many of us, the first book we write that's actually good enough to succeed isn't the first (or second, or third lol). It's a long process, but if you have perseverance and dedication you can definitely get there.
 

kaitie

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No, I got the point. That's why I advised her to take any feedback into account and press on with submissions.

Perhaps you missed my point? Which was, the author has very little control over how a house chooses books to publish, even if they think it is the best book in the world. She might try for years and get no where. She might polish it up and get signed the next time out. Either way - her opinion of the book isn't what matters - if it is what publishers want, they'll take it. If not, they won't.

That's not really the point. The point is that she wants to be commercially published. If that's the case, then yes, self-publishing is probably not going to be the way to get there. It might, but if the goal is to see the book in print and get it commercially published, then that's the goal.

Yes, every author thinks his/her book is good enough, and you're right that it's whether or not a publisher picks it up that determines that most of the time, but if you write at a professional level and tell a good, interesting, original story with good characters and plotting, you'll get picked up. Sure, you might have a small chance of falling through the cracks, but if you've met those requirements, you have drastically improved your odds of success. And if this one doesn't make it, the next one will.

If someone isn't getting published because their writing isn't quite up to par yet, or because the story is basically the same as fifty other stories out there right now, or if aliens show up in the last fifty pages out of nowhere or whatever, then those are issues that can be addressed and improved, and the goal can still be met.
 

Angkor

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I just terminated my book contract with my big name agent so that I could free up my third and fourth novels for self-publishing. My first two novels are listed with Kindle, Nook, Smashwords and a couple of others. These two books have gone from 95 Kindle sales last December to almost 2,000/mo. now and they keep climbing. Both are on three Amazon bestseller lists. I lost count how many agent and publisher rejections all of my books have received over time. I've gone through three agents. What I've come to realize is that I don't need any of them. I'm making serious money now, which I expect to increase in multiples once novels #3 and #4 are released.

I have nothing but praise for Amazon and Kindle. They are easy to work with, very, very author-firendly; support is wonderful. I can't say the same for B&N or Google.

The key for self-publishing success is threefold: 1) great writing; 2) excellent cover art, and 3) energetic self-promotion. Amazon is the great equalizer of the playing field for authors. I cannot recommend them strongly enough.
 

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I can't emphasize the need for energetic self-promotion (and the need for the time it takes) enough. I'm just dipping my toes in the Kindle boom (Storm World series) and am consistently amazed how much promotional and social networking even the "average" authors with limited success do. If nothing else, I think Kindle underscores how essential evolving promotional and marketing strategies are in the age of ebooks.
 
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I'm agreeing with Terie. She summed it up well. While this might be changing, traditionally it will actually be more difficult to get a self-published book picked up by a commercial publisher than it is to just go through the query-go-round and do it the old-fashioned way.
I think you're assuming most self publishers want to be "picked up" by a corporate publisher. And I think you're wrong. Oh, some do, sure; but at least the better informed self publishers, the ones bothering to learn the industry, are already pretty clear that in many cases they're already making more money on their books than a corp is going to give them.

Even with the well-touted Amanda Hocking $2m advance, she publicly said she expects to *lose* money on the deal vs what she'd make on her own. She's doing it to get their advertising dollars to help her other books, and the 3-4 additional self published books she plans to write each year on top of the one she writes for SMP. No, not everyone is a Ms. Hocking, obviously; but the way the math breaks out, it's almost *impossible* for a self publisher who is selling well enough to "get picked up" to make more money on a corporate contract (outside of extra benefits, like the aforementioned marketing helping your self published books sell more). It's very unlikely to happen.

That's because there is a stigma attached to self-published books,
People keep saying that. But outside of the industry, it's simply not the case. Most readers *don't care*. Only writers, agents, publishers, and a few reviewers really give a flying fewmet who published a book. Oh, and the NYT, but we've all seen the huge problems that is causing them in terms of damage to their bestseller list credibility.

many of them are at a disadvantage because they lack professional covers, editing, and marketing,
Yes, and people don't buy those, and those books sink and vanish into the mass of other cruddy books. If you make a bad book, it won't sell. Doesn't matter if you are trying to sell it to an agent, or Joe Reader. Bad books don't sell. If you have a good book, it probably will sell. Either route.

and because if a book has already been published and had very low sales, then a publisher is going to see that as evidence that there isn't an audience for the book.
That would be true if publishers had any possible way to track ebook sales. But since they don't, it's pretty much false.

If you managed to sell ten thousand copies on your own, you might have a chance, but selling that many is very difficult.
I'm curious where the number came from. Most writers who've gotten contracts after self publishing sold a lot less than that. Of course, there are hundreds of people self publishing who got that many sales just in 2011 so far... Hundreds, out of tens of thousands of books that went up, yeah. Don't want to play the odds game - but really, isn't writing *always* a longshot gamble? Querying agents and then maybe getting one and then maybe getting a sale and then maybe getting good promotion and then possibly getting a contract for the next book, and the next, and building a career is a longshot, too.

There are a lot more professional writers than there are professional astronauts. But the ratio of pro writers :: people seriously trying is probably pretty similar to the ratio of pro astronauts :: people seriously trying. If you want an easy field, go study medicine, or get a law degree, or take up conceptual astrophysics. Don't be a writer. ;)

The hard truth is that if you're receiving a lot of rejections, it's probably for a reason. It's just a matter of figuring out what the reason is. Have you had your query letter critiqued in SYW? A bad letter can hurt because it means that they're not even going to bother with reading attached pages. If your query letter is awesome, is there a problem in your opening five? How about the opening three chapters?
Truth there. If you're not being accepted based on the quality of your writing, then perhaps it's better you spend more time working on, well, writing. Before trying to publish. A lot of people won't, and will fail. Many will quit. Lots of people send unfinished ms. to agents, fail, and quit. Not a lot of difference.

It is worth noting here that you talk about *query letter* quality, which is pretty silly if you think for a minute. Do you grade your electrician on his ability to do your plumbing? Do you quiz your doctor on her ability to fix your car? Why would you rate a fiction writer on the ability to write a completely different sort of material as the *primary* thing you want to see? Smart agents would basically ignore the query letter, and read the first doggone chapter. The fiction - the storytelling - is what matters, not the ability to write a catchy letter. If you're being rejected on the basis of your fiction, think twice about why before self publishing. If you're being rejected on the basis of your query? Well, readers won't be reading that anyway, will they?

In which case, you might hurt yourself because a book can be edited and sent out to agents again in a year, but if you've self-published it and failed to sell, it'll be much harder to get a publisher for it.
My considered opinion on this is that you're much better off writing a new book in that year. Or two or three, if you're up to that level of effort. If you've self published a book, let it be. If it's good, it'll make you some nice money. If not, it won't. Write another book and send that one to agents, if you still want to.

If you want to be commercially published
That's the real crux, I think.

The main reason for going with a corporate publisher is no longer financial. From my observations, good books, produced well, will tend to earn well either way.

The main reason for going with a corporate publisher is, in most cases, because you want to be corporate published. If that's your goal, your life-dream sort of thing, then definitely go for it. And the advice given in the post I quoted is quite good then - keep at it, stay dedicated, write more (hopefully better) books, keep trying. But keep in mind that it is a decision. Self publishers are not settling for second best by not signing with a corporate publisher. They're doing the *other* best.
 
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Terie

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The main reason for going with a corporate publisher is no longer financial. Good books will tend to earn well either way.

You can't possibly have read every self-published book, so you can't possibly state with any degree of accuracy that all good self-published books tend to earn well, or even that most do. From the writer blogs I follow, plenty of good self-pubbed e-books aren't selling very well at all.

You might want to review the guidelines for this forum, particularly what they say about making unsubstantiated claims:

  1. This part of AW is for discussing self publishing, but is not limited to self publishers only. Everyone is welcome to participate regardless of how they're published, so long as we all remember AW's central rule: Respect Your Fellow Writer.
  2. Please check your facts before posting here. That means, don't believe everything you read on the internet; don't try to disguise your opinions as fact; and don't make claims which you cannot verify. For example: if one more person states here that John Grisham self published, my head will explode. There's a useful thread here about successful writers who are said to have self published.
  3. It's not "traditional" or "legacy" publishing: it's "trade" publishing, or sometimes "mainstream" or "commercial" publishing. If you're not sure which, then "trade publishing" is usually the one to use. Unless of course you mean academic publishing, which is another thing entirely.
  4. Similarly, if you self-publish your own work you are a self-publisher, not an "indie" publisher or writer. An independent publisher is a completely different thing.
  5. E-publishing is not the same as self publishing and anyone who suggests otherwise will be Hello Kittied without mercy. At the very least.
  6. People who point out the difficulties involved with self publishing aren't necessarily being rude about self publishing, and might just have a valid point to make: but everyone is encouraged to debate this with them, so long as everyone follows our One Rule.
  7. If you're going to post statistics, make sure they prove what you think they do,and that they're reliable, used in context, and verifiable. Otherwise you will make yourself look like a banana.
  8. Finally, if you think that anyone has overstepped the line, please use the "report post" button. If we mods don't know you're upset, we can't do anything to help.
 
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You can't possibly have read every self-published book, so you can't possibly state with any degree of accuracy that all good self-published books tend to earn well, or even that most do. From the writer blogs I follow, plenty of good self-pubbed e-books aren't selling very well at all.

You might want to review the guidelines for this forum, particularly what they say about making unsubstantiated claims:

Edited for clarity. Note however that I *never* said "all". I said "tend to". Please don't put words (or unsubstantiable claims) into my mouth.

From what I have seen, most books that are well written and well packaged ARE selling well. And my strong feeling is that most of the books that don't sell well are either badly written, badly packaged, or both. Then again, I think what "well" is, is hard to define, but I wasn't trying to be picky. How Barry Eisler defines a self published book doing "well" is going to be very different from a first time writer with reasonable expectations.
 

Terie

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Edited for clarity. Note however that I *never* said "all". I said "tend to". Please don't put words (or unsubstantiable claims) into my mouth.

From what I have seen, most books that are well written and well packaged ARE selling well. And my strong feeling is that most of the books that don't sell well are either badly written, badly packaged, or both. Then again, I think what "well" is, is hard to define, but I wasn't trying to be picky. How Barry Eisler defines a self published book doing "well" is going to be very different from a first time writer with reasonable expectations.

Your original statement ('Good books will tend to earn well either way') implied 'most'; I wasn't putting words in your mouth. If you'd meant 'hardly any' or 'only a few' or 'around half', you would've said that. You're a writer; own your words.

And again, I've read numerous posts from professional writers (many of whom are posting their rights-reverted backlists) whose books aren't doing 'well' -- just a few sales a day, at most.

As you say, 'well' is impossible to define and will be different for every person, but I think there's a point at which we can all agree. For example, let's take the person I quoted earlier who (at the time of her OP) was selling one book a day. To some people, that might be considered selling well; I'll frankly admit that none of my commercially published books sell even one per day, and if they started to do so, I'd be happy at this point.

But nown let's look at how much time that person was spending self-promoting to get those one-per-day sales: two to three hours. After her full-time job. She made $.50 per sale, and was spending two to three hours per day to earn that. As she herself said, that comes out to less that $.25 per hour.

To put it another way, let's say someone is earning $15 per hour at their day job. In my view, their work time is, therefore, worth $15 per hour. If that same person is spending two hours per day self-promoting their work, they'd need to be selling $30 (profit) to make that work break even. At $.50 per book, that's 60 books. In those circumstances, I would personally judge that selling 60 books per day was NOT selling 'well' due to the amount of time being spent to generate those sales. If they'd never self-published the book and were not spending two hours per day self-promoting it, they'd be getting exactly the same thing. If a commercially published author, who didn't have to do anything publishing related other than work on their next book, was selling 60 books per day, they'd be doing it without having to spend those two hours per day.

Okay, this is a theoretical difference, I realise that. But I was raised to believe that time is money. If you're not getting sufficient recompense for your time spent doing something, it's not worth doing it. This isn't to say that money is the only recompense. For someone who enjoys doing all the self-promotion, their enjoyment could be sufficient recompense, as is reading, eating, gardening, and all the other things we do in our leisure time that we enjoy. But for someone who can't stand self-promotion, it's pure work, and why should they do it if they're not making the sales to recompense them adequately?

In the case of the example I quoted above, the hope is that sales will improve to make that expenditure of time worthwhile. Furthermore, how many future sales will have to be made to recompense all those hours spent at first? And there's no guarantee that sales will rise; the book could, sadly, peak at two or three per day, then fade away. (I certainly hope not, but it's a very realistic possibility.)

At the same time, a commercially published author got an advance and is already starting out in the plus column.

All this to say: 'selling well' ought to be defined as selling reasonably more than the effort effort required to get those sales. If I'm spending two hours a day doing it, I'd damn well better be either earning back a lot more than my current hourly wage (which is substantially more than $15 per hour) or else having an awfully good time doing the work.
 
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badducky

No Time For Chitchat, Kemosabe.
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Hearing all the hype, and having a novelette gathering dust on my hard drive without a market I'd like to publish it in wanting it, I went ahead and threw it up on the Kindle for a dollar, just to see what all the fuss was about. I did this last week.

I've sold one copy. From where I'm standing that looks like about all I'm going to sell unless I go onto some sort of insane marketing campaign flogging my wares everywhere in the internet.

I'd much rather be writing more books for people that handle the lion's share of the marketing campaign: legitimate publishers.

My research indicates being published with a publisher is a much better way to publish a book if what you want is an audience and the time to write more books.
 
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I'd much rather be writing more books for people that handle the lion's share of the marketing campaign: legitimate publishers.

Again... Most corporate published books don't get a lot of marketing money. Mine didn't. Most writers I know don't. Please don't count on a corporate publisher for marketing, or you'll likely be disappointed - most writers have to market their own books, regardless how they publish.

Also, please think before launching pejorative attacks like calling corp pubs "legitimate publishers" in a self publishing forum. ;) Legitimacy is acquired by production of a quality final product, not by corporate size or structure, thanks.
 
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