Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Ed Ditto has put up the two parts of an interview (questions from me) centered around questions for authors from a reader/blogger perspective -

1. Part 1: How does a book get from the Author’s imagination to a bookstore? 
2. Part 2: The Business of being an Author.

You can buy Ed Ditto’s ‘Swine King’ book at Amazon for $1.99 (should go to $0.99 soon).

Thoughts on Ed’s Answers

Part 1: Author’s Imagination to BookStore

1. Like the idea of finding a story that millions of people can identify with.
2. The notion of selling a book based on the idea and market, and writing it after getting a contract, is really good too.  
3. The really long time scale of book creation has a lot of opportunities to be shortened – at least in seems that way.

Part 2: Business of being an Author. 

1. Very good point on a publisher helping you leapfrog authors who are going it alone.  
2. Interesting that the biggest sales bumps were magazines, personal appearances, and talk radio and tv.
3. Good point on visiting trade shows, local and online gatherings related to the niche you write about.
4. Think that not tracking sales closely, consistently isn’t optimal. Of course, it isn’t very easy.
5. The fact that there is no co-op of independent authors is a huge opportunity. It’s logical for indie authors to be pooling their traffic and advertising each other’s books, etc.
6. This couldn’t really be true could it -
   

   that same NYT-bestselling author I mentioned earlier once told me that there are only around a hundred full-time novelists in the United States making enough money to support a family

   Neal Stephenson said Snow Crash was earning him enough to maintain a “middle class-ish” existence. And we all know that “Snow Crash” was a monumental hit. So let that give you a sense of scale.

Closing Thoughts

This interview only adds to my belief that authors are as important of a market as readers.

1. Have to love what SmashWords is doing i.e. helping indie authors for a 15% cut.
2. Evan Williams’ work with Blogger is probably the most important development in writing and publishing in my lifetime. The fact that he’s now helped create Twitter adds to his status as the Gutenberg of our era (with Jeff Bezos, and perhaps soon Steve Jobs, also in the argument).

The emergence of ePub as the alternative to the Kindle, the entry of so many eReader companies, and the gradual change in mindsets certainly points to a time when a lot more than a few hundred, or even a few thousand, authors can make a good living from writing.

Filed under: publishing Tagged: | book publishing, independent author