Michael Allen - A Writer's Guide To Everything Important - The Omnibus Edition Of Seven Essential Guides For Fiction Writers

Bear in mind: none of these firms providing ‘services for self-publishers’ are doing anything that you can’t do for yourself, at virtually zero cost, if you just take the trouble to learn how. But if you are too green and gullible for your own good, you may end up paying out tens of thousands of dollars.

3.1.2 The arrival of the ebook

Less than ten years after the introduction of POD machines, the digital age dreamed up another piece of technology which would have massive effects on publishing. In particular, it would set writers free from the necessity of dealing with traditional publishers at all, if they didn’t want to.

Once, as you will doubtless remember because I keep on hammering the point (and with good reason), writers who wanted to get a book published and into the hands of readers had no choice – none – but to go knocking on the doors of publishers.

Now they do.

What transformed the world of books and publishing was the advent of the electronic book, or ebook. Since you’re reading one now, you have at least some grasp of how ebooks and ereaders work.

For all practical purposes, the ebook revolution can be said to have begun on 19 November 2007, when Amazon first offered the Kindle for sale.

Amazon isn’t the only company which sells ereaders and ebooks, but it will serve to illustrate the enormous scale of the business being done here. Amazon doesn’t issue any sales figures itself, but Morgan Stanley estimates that Amazon sold $3.57 billion worth of Kindle ereaders and tablets in 2012, and $4.5 billion worth of Kindle devices in 2013. Best guess for 2014 is $5 billion.

And how many books do you think the average Kindle owner buys, and at what average price? Take a look at your own device. Even allowing for those freebies that you’ve got on there, it’s still going to be quite a lot of money.

By the summer of 2010, Amazon was telling us that, in the previous three-month period, it had sold 143 Kindle ebooks for every 100 hardcover books.

What all this means is that we are now in the early morning (dawn has gone by) of a new age of limitless digital opportunity for writers. And unless you have lived through several decades of doing things the old way, and have experienced the pain and heartache which normally accompany such efforts, you just can’t imagine how lucky you are.

Today it is no longer necessary for writers to slave away for years, knocking on countless doors of agents and publishers, only to face continual rejection. Today – right now – writers no longer need to bother about agents and publishers. They can do it all themselves. They can write a book and publish it in ebook or paperback form without having to persuade a single soul to help them, or spend a penny piece on the process. What is more they can sometimes go from frequently rejected unknown to big-selling superstar in just a few months – using exactly the same book!

Here is an example.

The Mill River Recluse is a novel by Darcie Chan. And when you look this lady up you find that hers is an absolutely classic story of the digital age.

It took her three years to complete the book, after which she tested it on her family and friends, polished it up, and sent it out to traditional publishers. Got absolutely nowhere. Scores of rejections. Sent it out to dozens of agents, with the same result. Then one top-class agent took her on (Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord). Laurie sent it to all her best contacts, over a further two-year period. But still no sale.

By that time Darcie had become aware of this new-fangled digital self-publishing business. So she gave it a try. She edited the book herself, did her own formatting, designed her own cover, and handled her own publicity.

The book was published as a Kindle ebook in May 2011. In June, she was thrilled when 100 copies had been sold. After that, aided by some hard work on marketing, and a little bit of advertising, things began to snowball, until in the latter part of the year the book was selling several thousand copies a day.

At the end of 2011, when the figures were added up, The Mill River Recluse turned out to be the fourth biggest-selling book on the whole of Amazon in 2011. These figures were achieved with no paper edition at all. It was ‘just’ an ebook. And one that had been repeatedly rejected by the gatekeepers of traditional publishing.

What distinguished this book from ten thousand others? Ah, if only we knew. All we can say, with any confidence, is that sometimes a book will find its readers and really take off. But mostly it won’t.

If you really aren’t familiar with any other big-time self-published successes, google the names Anne Hocking, John Locke, Hugh Howey, and Joe Konrath. There are plenty of others.

3.2 Free at last, free at last!

At the end of this book, in the Appendix, I am going to give you a list of blogs and web sites which, if you’re at all interested in writing fiction, you really ought to read on a regular basis. What is more, you can go back through the archives of these blogs and see how things have developed over the last few years.

After a year or two of reading about digital developments, and their impact on publishing, you will, I hope, have grasped the enormous importance of the choices which are now available to you.

Yes, if you want to, you can still follow the traditional route to readers. And the traditional route, to remind you, is finished manuscript to agent, agent to publisher, publisher to bookshops, bookshops to readers. And good luck to you.

But there’s a new way. Finished manuscript uploaded to Kindle, Kindle to readers. End of.

You don’t have to wait twelve months or more to see your finished book. You don’t have to wait six months for an incomprehensible royalty statement and maybe a payment if you’re lucky. Instead, with Amazon you get paid monthly, direct into your bank account. And you can publish anything you please, from a short story to a 250,000-word monster. It doesn’t have to be 55,000 words exactly, and you don’t have to rewrite chapter 13 just because your editor’s mother didn’t like it.

3.3 The secret of success

Unfortunately, while you may enjoy an unprecedented degree of freedom, as described above, freedom does not guarantee success – no matter how you define that word. It is possible to publish an ebook and struggle to sell a single copy. So why is it that some books sell in vast quantities and some hardly at all?

In my book The Truth about Writing , first published in 2003, I took a whole chapter to discuss the secret of success. And here’s a shorter version of my theory.

You will doubtless be familiar with the use of the equals sign, as in 2 + 2 = 4. But you may not, perhaps, be familiar with another mathematical symbol, written in the form of two colons, as in X :: Y. When used like that, the :: sign means ‘varies as to’. The :: symbol was introduced by William Oughtred in a book published in 1631.

How might we use this symbol in relation to writing and publishing? Well, we might say that the thickness of a book varies as to the number of pages; which means that the more pages there are, the thicker the book is. We could also express this statement as T :: N, where T stands for thickness and N is the number of pages.

Now let us turn our attention to success inasmuch as it concerns writers, and try to determine the factors which create success. In other words, we need to find the missing part of the expression S :: ?

We might begin by making a list of all possible factors which govern success, and these might include the following: talent; hard work; connections (i.e. knowing influential people); perseverance; good reviews; a powerful agent; a major publisher; and so on.