Amazon has made it easy to give away ebooks (with the condition of exclusivity, of course) but the idea isn't really new. Cory Doctorow and others have been advocates of free ebooks for more than a decade, with the science fiction community being early adopters of the idea.
People ask me why I give away so many ebooks (probably 300,000 copies since Christmas), and I say, "There are probably 20 million Kindles in America and I want to be on every one of them." I don't worry about lost sales because not that many people know who I am, despite multiple titles over the years. And it also fits my philosophy of idea gardens, where we all trade ideas and grow together.
Cory Doctorow lays out some of his notions in this free ebook , although some of the positions are decidedly dated--such as using the free ebooks to sell paper books. Doctorow also talks a little too gleefully about getting rich for my tastes, but that's his trip. The ideas in his ebook are free and worth it.
The challenge still remains: how do I get people to read these books? How do I reach the people who don;t even know I have books, or those who don't even know my ebooks are free? Where are the unexplored territories? Is it possible to build a productive communal model for big ebook giveaways?
I am currently developing a platform for huge ebook events, with sponsor-supported events. Free ebooks and lending libraries will soon make a joke of the $9.99 ebook. As Doctorow also notes, nobody knows how writers will make a living in a free world, but the first worry is to not be lost in obscurity. I still have 19.7 million Kindles to go, and seven billion readers worldwide!
Free through 2/18- Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0077U2IMO
###
Showing posts with label Da Vinci Code Dan Brown commercial writing bestsellers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Da Vinci Code Dan Brown commercial writing bestsellers. Show all posts
Friday, February 17, 2012
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Blogtalk Tonight: ParaYourNormal
I'll be on ParaYourNormal blogtalk radio tonight at 10:10 pm EST (6:30 PST) http://www.blogtalkradio.com/parayournormal/2011/05/11/our-interview-with-scott-nicholson
Please drop in or call in a question! Also an interview with three book giveaways on the ParaYourNormal Blog.
Please enter and good luck! Busy working on Chronic Fear, aiming for a late June release.
Please drop in or call in a question! Also an interview with three book giveaways on the ParaYourNormal Blog.
Please enter and good luck! Busy working on Chronic Fear, aiming for a late June release.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Mystery Dance by Scott Nicholson
And, yes, a nod to Elvis Costello...
Jim McLeod gives treat as host of Ginger Nuts of Horror
Leisha is gracious enough to feature me as her first-ever interview at A Tale of Many Reviews. Thanks, Leisha!
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Thursday, January 27, 2011
The Widget World
After some research, I've finally cracked the arcane secrets to having my very own Amazon Kindle widget, which you can see here to the right. I look forward to exploring more ways to use these and I'm also getting my Barnes & Noble affiliate account.
If you want your own Scott Nicholson Amazon Kindle, I'd be happy to send you the code, and if you're an Amazon affiliate, you can easily set it up to earn 4 to 6 percent commission on sales of my books. Money earned while sitting at home in dirty sweat pants, just like me. Who says I don't love you?
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If you want your own Scott Nicholson Amazon Kindle, I'd be happy to send you the code, and if you're an Amazon affiliate, you can easily set it up to earn 4 to 6 percent commission on sales of my books. Money earned while sitting at home in dirty sweat pants, just like me. Who says I don't love you?
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Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Book Piracy. Five reasons not to worry.
There's a little debate going around in which writers are calculating the millions of dollars they've lost, as well as that wonderful, lofty perch on the bestseller list, because of all those meany pirates out there dumping their book files into torrents. I tweeted last week that 10,000 illegal downloads doesn't mean 10,000 lost sales, it means maybe five lost sales. And I'll bet it was because the book was overpriced to begin with. (Which almost universally means either someone else is setting your price who has their own agenda instead of the writer's best performance and income in mind, or else you have not paid one bit of attention to the digital market in the past two years. Or, in the case of New York publishing, both).
My books have been stolen for years. Ironically, it's only my corporate books that are illegally shared; my DRM-free ebooks don't show up there, yet they could easily be shared, swapped, ripped, and even rewritten. I only even notice the piracy when I do Google alerts of my name and see them in the rapidshare and torrent streams. I don't even know what those streams do, or how they work, and I don't care. It would be like sticking my thumb in a river to try to plug a dam six miles downstream. It would be a full-time job and all I would get is a wet finger. And the pirates would never even notice.
Why do I not care? It's stealing, and stealing is wrong. Anybody who says it's not stealing is wrong. I don't even make cassettes or copies of my own CDs, not even for personal use. But I am not casting stones, because I've conducted other illegal or immoral acts. None of us are without sin.
But I'm a writer, not the world's morality cop. And I have plenty of my own shortcomings. Anyway, the author has many antidotes to piracy:
1. Quit freaking out--stealing or not, this is how people communicate in the modern age. They share. They mutually create content and their shared experiences. They aren't as hung up on "ownership."
2. Take control of your content (from a corporation) and make it cheap. If your book is a buck or two, all but the most ardent thieves (who are spending their time stealing instead of reading anyway) would rather just buy the book and save the hassle. And you'll make the same amount of money, anyway. Actually, far more.
3. Find your own translators. Even if you gave up control of your English rights to a corporation, you can still seek translators on your own. If somebody cracks your book, translates it, and puts it out, that's an incredible homage--many hours of their life. This way, you can make a little money and pay them a royalty.
4. Use it as a positive. In five years, you'll be "selling" your download stats to sponsors and advertisers. And getting ripped off big-time then becomes an asset. Think of them as your future shares in the new market.
5. Why do we write in the first place? If you had told someone 100 years ago you could widely spread your ideas to millions of people at no cost, they would have said you've gone to writer heaven. Or you've gone insane. Which, when you look at it, is basically the same thing.
###
My books have been stolen for years. Ironically, it's only my corporate books that are illegally shared; my DRM-free ebooks don't show up there, yet they could easily be shared, swapped, ripped, and even rewritten. I only even notice the piracy when I do Google alerts of my name and see them in the rapidshare and torrent streams. I don't even know what those streams do, or how they work, and I don't care. It would be like sticking my thumb in a river to try to plug a dam six miles downstream. It would be a full-time job and all I would get is a wet finger. And the pirates would never even notice.
Why do I not care? It's stealing, and stealing is wrong. Anybody who says it's not stealing is wrong. I don't even make cassettes or copies of my own CDs, not even for personal use. But I am not casting stones, because I've conducted other illegal or immoral acts. None of us are without sin.
But I'm a writer, not the world's morality cop. And I have plenty of my own shortcomings. Anyway, the author has many antidotes to piracy:
1. Quit freaking out--stealing or not, this is how people communicate in the modern age. They share. They mutually create content and their shared experiences. They aren't as hung up on "ownership."
2. Take control of your content (from a corporation) and make it cheap. If your book is a buck or two, all but the most ardent thieves (who are spending their time stealing instead of reading anyway) would rather just buy the book and save the hassle. And you'll make the same amount of money, anyway. Actually, far more.
3. Find your own translators. Even if you gave up control of your English rights to a corporation, you can still seek translators on your own. If somebody cracks your book, translates it, and puts it out, that's an incredible homage--many hours of their life. This way, you can make a little money and pay them a royalty.
4. Use it as a positive. In five years, you'll be "selling" your download stats to sponsors and advertisers. And getting ripped off big-time then becomes an asset. Think of them as your future shares in the new market.
5. Why do we write in the first place? If you had told someone 100 years ago you could widely spread your ideas to millions of people at no cost, they would have said you've gone to writer heaven. Or you've gone insane. Which, when you look at it, is basically the same thing.
###
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Why NYT list and BookScan data are worthless
NYT to report e-book sales! You can pay to get your own BookScan data! Hooray! Indie authors and e-books are now legit! We won!
Dude, put down the coffee cup and slowly back away. In prehistoric times, pterodactyls ruled the sky and I'd get on the phone to Ingram's warehouse and see how many copies of my books had shipped. It sort of seemed important, although I never knew what to do with the data. And what agent, editor, or author wouldn't want to say, "I'm a bestseller" and "moving tons of units"?
But if you are an indie author hoping to get some attention, or an underground success planning to go blinking to the surface world, you might want to temper expectations. Or better yet, not waste a second of your time or energy.
Firstly, the NYT bestseller list will only report major publisher data--many indies and small presses will not be reported. You need different ISBNs for each format, and you need it all to be aggregated by some central processing unit. Who will control that? The Times? The publishing industry? BookScan? And who is going to be volunteering the numbers? Amazon, which probably has 80 percent if not 90 percent of the e-book market? Yeah, right.
If you want to go to all that trouble just to appear on someone else's lists, be my guest. Disintegration doesn't have an ISBN at either Amazon or B&N. It was a bestseller, hitting #30 in the Kindle store, which definitely put it in the top 50 of e-books worldwide. For only a time, but still...as my daughter says, "Once you are a bestselling author, you are a bestseller forever." Hardly anyone will know it was a bestseller, even the people who bought it. It doesn't even have an ISBN. Amazon and I are the ONLY ones who know how many it sold. And neither of us are telling.
And the people reading the NYT are not the indie author's audience--they are reading a newspaper, for Jiminy Cricket's sake. They might as well etch it into a clay tablet and send it out via a fleet of carrier pigeons for all the good it will do. Look, the people who were most excited about that announcement, as evidenced by TweetStream, that cool-a-meter of our times, were the entrenched industry types at every level who have so much invested in the continuation of their careers. It's understandable, but it doesn't mean you as an indie author should fight against the currents of time to join them.
The NYT list has been bought and sold for decades--that data is based on advance store orders, which means major publisher push and co-op money paid to big booksellers. Haven't you ever wondered why books show up as bestsellers before they are even released?
This is all a shell game, high-stakes ego moves, a valuable tool or a cudgel depending on your needs as a publisher or bookseller. Sure, some people wander into bookstores and blindly grab the first book they see, and booksellers stack bestsellers in the front of the store, and everybody goes through the motions. I'm surprised there isn't a Patterson store yet, wall to wall offerings by The James Gang.
Bestsellers are made, not born, often even years in advance of their publication. Janet Evanovich doesn't sign a multi-million-dollar, multi-book contract to gather dust, spine out, on the E shelf in "Mystery." How many "surprise bestsellers" have you read about? How did Stephen King just happen to get a copy of Justin Cronin's "The Passage" months before publication? Why did the publisher decide to print 10,000 advance review copies of The da Vinci Code?
Besides, what does the term "bestselling author" mean anymore? I've seen indie authors on the Internet shouting, with multiple exclamation points, "I just hit #19 in the category of Greek History: Ancient Pottery Shards!!!!" There's even a guidebook out there on how to trick up your keywords to rank high in obscure categories so you can be a "bestseller."
BookScan? Measuring point of purchase hard-copy sales at a limited number of outlets? What is that good for these days? Where's Walmart, the airports, Christian bookstores, specialty shops, hand sellers, the drug store that sells local books? Yes, there is a "geographic tracking," but what do you care? Say you're selling lousy in Buffalo. Are you going to hop in your car and drive up there and do a book signing? Can't your e-book squeeze through the frozen ethernet of the Great North?
The bestseller list already exists--there are only two. Kindle and B&N. The Kindle bestseller list IS the e-book bestseller list. No one in NY will admit it and you won't read it in PW. That's not sexy, and major publishing is at an uneasy detente with Amazon at the moment. Amazon has never revealed their data on anything significant, only in the loosest of terms that makes it look good (i.e. "We sold out millions in seconds....")
As an indie author, it is against your best interest to even use ISBNs. They are not required by either Amazon or B&N. The only outlets that require them right now are Sony and Apple iBookstore, and those markets are hardly worth investing the $10 an ISBN will cost you at Smashwords. Oh, yeah, everyone wants their own ISBN for each format and their store, and it has to be different from the ISBN of the print version(s). Seventeen flaming hoops, lots of cost and inconvenience, and all you gain is the ability of corporations to easily track you? Yeah, I'm jumping on that one.
The NYT list is just one last attempt to make NY valid in the new era, and it might have been interesting a couple of years ago, and maybe there's a long shot of a Hollywood sale--but I suspect more movie producers own Kindles than read the NYT. It gets attention because of "tradition," but what is tradition worth right now? More importantly, what is tradition worth to YOU? The most successful indie authors I've seen don't even know what tradition is, nor do they care.
This is data for the publishing industry. I've said repeatedly, if you are an indie author, you are not in the publishing industry. You are in the YOU industry. You don't need to view the publishing industry as competition, not yet, but you might want to consider whether you invest resources in their industry or in your industry.
Just typing all this up kept me from working on my current project, but maybe you will buy my books, or learn something, or tweet me, but in a way, this was energy wasted on tradition. Picking up the hammer to knock down a wall is tedious when you can simply walk away from it, go around it...or fly over it.
If all you ever wanted was to call up Mom and your sixth-grade English teacher and say "See, I told you I'd make the list," then I say go for it. For everyone else, you are better off writing that next book and getting on the list of your reader. That's the list that matters.
###
Dude, put down the coffee cup and slowly back away. In prehistoric times, pterodactyls ruled the sky and I'd get on the phone to Ingram's warehouse and see how many copies of my books had shipped. It sort of seemed important, although I never knew what to do with the data. And what agent, editor, or author wouldn't want to say, "I'm a bestseller" and "moving tons of units"?
But if you are an indie author hoping to get some attention, or an underground success planning to go blinking to the surface world, you might want to temper expectations. Or better yet, not waste a second of your time or energy.
Firstly, the NYT bestseller list will only report major publisher data--many indies and small presses will not be reported. You need different ISBNs for each format, and you need it all to be aggregated by some central processing unit. Who will control that? The Times? The publishing industry? BookScan? And who is going to be volunteering the numbers? Amazon, which probably has 80 percent if not 90 percent of the e-book market? Yeah, right.
If you want to go to all that trouble just to appear on someone else's lists, be my guest. Disintegration doesn't have an ISBN at either Amazon or B&N. It was a bestseller, hitting #30 in the Kindle store, which definitely put it in the top 50 of e-books worldwide. For only a time, but still...as my daughter says, "Once you are a bestselling author, you are a bestseller forever." Hardly anyone will know it was a bestseller, even the people who bought it. It doesn't even have an ISBN. Amazon and I are the ONLY ones who know how many it sold. And neither of us are telling.
And the people reading the NYT are not the indie author's audience--they are reading a newspaper, for Jiminy Cricket's sake. They might as well etch it into a clay tablet and send it out via a fleet of carrier pigeons for all the good it will do. Look, the people who were most excited about that announcement, as evidenced by TweetStream, that cool-a-meter of our times, were the entrenched industry types at every level who have so much invested in the continuation of their careers. It's understandable, but it doesn't mean you as an indie author should fight against the currents of time to join them.
The NYT list has been bought and sold for decades--that data is based on advance store orders, which means major publisher push and co-op money paid to big booksellers. Haven't you ever wondered why books show up as bestsellers before they are even released?
This is all a shell game, high-stakes ego moves, a valuable tool or a cudgel depending on your needs as a publisher or bookseller. Sure, some people wander into bookstores and blindly grab the first book they see, and booksellers stack bestsellers in the front of the store, and everybody goes through the motions. I'm surprised there isn't a Patterson store yet, wall to wall offerings by The James Gang.
Bestsellers are made, not born, often even years in advance of their publication. Janet Evanovich doesn't sign a multi-million-dollar, multi-book contract to gather dust, spine out, on the E shelf in "Mystery." How many "surprise bestsellers" have you read about? How did Stephen King just happen to get a copy of Justin Cronin's "The Passage" months before publication? Why did the publisher decide to print 10,000 advance review copies of The da Vinci Code?
Besides, what does the term "bestselling author" mean anymore? I've seen indie authors on the Internet shouting, with multiple exclamation points, "I just hit #19 in the category of Greek History: Ancient Pottery Shards!!!!" There's even a guidebook out there on how to trick up your keywords to rank high in obscure categories so you can be a "bestseller."
BookScan? Measuring point of purchase hard-copy sales at a limited number of outlets? What is that good for these days? Where's Walmart, the airports, Christian bookstores, specialty shops, hand sellers, the drug store that sells local books? Yes, there is a "geographic tracking," but what do you care? Say you're selling lousy in Buffalo. Are you going to hop in your car and drive up there and do a book signing? Can't your e-book squeeze through the frozen ethernet of the Great North?
The bestseller list already exists--there are only two. Kindle and B&N. The Kindle bestseller list IS the e-book bestseller list. No one in NY will admit it and you won't read it in PW. That's not sexy, and major publishing is at an uneasy detente with Amazon at the moment. Amazon has never revealed their data on anything significant, only in the loosest of terms that makes it look good (i.e. "We sold out millions in seconds....")
As an indie author, it is against your best interest to even use ISBNs. They are not required by either Amazon or B&N. The only outlets that require them right now are Sony and Apple iBookstore, and those markets are hardly worth investing the $10 an ISBN will cost you at Smashwords. Oh, yeah, everyone wants their own ISBN for each format and their store, and it has to be different from the ISBN of the print version(s). Seventeen flaming hoops, lots of cost and inconvenience, and all you gain is the ability of corporations to easily track you? Yeah, I'm jumping on that one.
The NYT list is just one last attempt to make NY valid in the new era, and it might have been interesting a couple of years ago, and maybe there's a long shot of a Hollywood sale--but I suspect more movie producers own Kindles than read the NYT. It gets attention because of "tradition," but what is tradition worth right now? More importantly, what is tradition worth to YOU? The most successful indie authors I've seen don't even know what tradition is, nor do they care.
This is data for the publishing industry. I've said repeatedly, if you are an indie author, you are not in the publishing industry. You are in the YOU industry. You don't need to view the publishing industry as competition, not yet, but you might want to consider whether you invest resources in their industry or in your industry.
Just typing all this up kept me from working on my current project, but maybe you will buy my books, or learn something, or tweet me, but in a way, this was energy wasted on tradition. Picking up the hammer to knock down a wall is tedious when you can simply walk away from it, go around it...or fly over it.
If all you ever wanted was to call up Mom and your sixth-grade English teacher and say "See, I told you I'd make the list," then I say go for it. For everyone else, you are better off writing that next book and getting on the list of your reader. That's the list that matters.
###
Monday, September 20, 2010
September Zombie event
Velvet at VVB is running a zombie event for the end of September--http://vvb32reads.blogspot.com/2010/08/september-zombies-schedule-2010.html I'll be giving away a Murdermouth copy and doing some other things. Looks like some cool bloggers involved so give them some love.
Also the Pandora's Box is over 100 e-books now, sow make sure you follow me on Twitter to be eligible!
Working on a four-way novella with Steve Lockley, Steven Savile, and William Meikle, it is definitely interesting and a little different, especially since they are all Brits! They'll have ot fix my slang.
###
Also the Pandora's Box is over 100 e-books now, sow make sure you follow me on Twitter to be eligible!
Working on a four-way novella with Steve Lockley, Steven Savile, and William Meikle, it is definitely interesting and a little different, especially since they are all Brits! They'll have ot fix my slang.
###
Monday, January 18, 2010
Da Vinci Code, symbology, and Scottology
Being the kind who is usually 10 years behind the cultural trends, I'm just now getting around to "The Da Vinci Code," listening to an audiotape from the library. I can see why this is so popular. It's accessible, fast-paced, reasonably well-written, and provides a lot of information. I've known some writers who sneered at the book, considering it hack work. Of course, that comes from the position of assuming that 10 million people have to be "wrong" in a subjective matter. I have to admit, I picked up one bestseller and when I got to the line "I did a shrug," I thought, "Well, maybe I'm not in this book's audience."
But in thinking about my own work, I can't afford to take any kind of elitist position. I thought after 10 years I'd know how to write. The truth is, after 12 years, I am finally ready to LEARN to write. A big distinction. A little unsettling, a little intimidating, but also strangely freeing and transformative. In the last post, I was musing on my past. I can't disown it. Yet I also don't have to be "just my books."
By looking at the kind of books people like, instead of what I think they should read, I am more like the student I say every writer should be. I used to shudder when I heard about writers who calculated their plots and characters on whatever was popular at the time, deliberately copying big beats like First Kill, First Punch, First Kiss. But there's wisdom in it because it is the rhythm of our popular storytelling, and it didn't emerge in a vacuum. The reader completes the journey that the writer embarks upon alone. Everything is not Shakespeare. Sometimes you need some Patterson or Brown or Evanovich or Meyer.
But in thinking about my own work, I can't afford to take any kind of elitist position. I thought after 10 years I'd know how to write. The truth is, after 12 years, I am finally ready to LEARN to write. A big distinction. A little unsettling, a little intimidating, but also strangely freeing and transformative. In the last post, I was musing on my past. I can't disown it. Yet I also don't have to be "just my books."
By looking at the kind of books people like, instead of what I think they should read, I am more like the student I say every writer should be. I used to shudder when I heard about writers who calculated their plots and characters on whatever was popular at the time, deliberately copying big beats like First Kill, First Punch, First Kiss. But there's wisdom in it because it is the rhythm of our popular storytelling, and it didn't emerge in a vacuum. The reader completes the journey that the writer embarks upon alone. Everything is not Shakespeare. Sometimes you need some Patterson or Brown or Evanovich or Meyer.
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