April L. Hamilton

I'm currently working on The IndieAuthor Guide, a compendium of information and step-by-step instruction on topics ranging from editing, to self-publication, to promotion, and I've made key excerpts from it available for free as pdf downloads on my site. The excerpts are not empty teases, they're 18 - 55pp standalone Guides that I truly hope writers will find useful. If you want the Guides, go get 'em! If you want some more background first, read on.

I'm a novelist. After being well-agented for over a decade, getting positively glowing rejection letters from NY editors and repeatedly being told, "Of course I love it, but this isn't what the American book-buying public wants right now," I back-burnered my writing for years. Last fall, I entered one of my completed novels, Adelaide Einstein, in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest on a whim. It advanced no further than the semifinal round, and received a snarky and dismissive PW review, but it also received an average customer rating of 4.75 stars out of 5, over 36 reviews. I decided that NY editors don't really have any idea what the American book-buying public wants, and published both Adelaide and another of my novels, Snow Ball, independently.

As I went through the process of learning how to publish my manuscripts in Kindle format and trade paperback via CreateSpace, as well as how to promote them, I decided to document everything I'd learned and share it with my fellow authors in order to remove any perceived barriers to taking the indie path. You see, along the way I'd learned that the publishing industry has changed drastically for the worse thanks to industry consolidations, and it's now run on the same blockbuster mentality employed by movie studios. It doesn't matter how good your work is anymore, all that matters is whether or not the publisher thinks your book will sell >40k copies (the former cutoff point for midlist books, which are now largely extinct).

Now that we finally have quality and affordable tools at our disposal there's no reason why we writers shouldn't have an indie movement of our own, in solidarity with our filmmaker and musician peers. All that's needed now is enough quality work being independently published to put the lie to the assumption that indie books are inferior to mainstream-published books. As the movement fares, so fare all of us indies, and that's why I make my Guides available for free.

I've just posted the last individual Guide, The IndieAuthor Guide to Promotion. I will now proceed with combining all the Guides I've written so far, along with some supplemental material, into a book for publication and sale, but even after the book is out I'll keep the free, individual Guides on my site. You can read about my adventures in indie authorship on my IndieAuthor Blog, and also feel free to take a look at my CafePress IndieAuthor Shop, the proceeds of which help to subsidize the free Guides and the upkeep costs of my website. Enjoy!

Malone

Right on, sister! It's good to see writers break free of the corporate stranglehold on the industry.
I scanned your guides and some of them look very informative. Thanks for sharing. I'm going to spend more time going through them this evening.
Do you do much business through Kindle media? I imagine that's a pretty small niche.

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April L. Hamilton

Hi, Malone!
I published for the Kindle first, and it was a strategic move.

1) On Amazon, reviews and sales figures are reported across all editions of a given book. I built up some sales and reviews on the Kindle editions first, so that the trade paperbacks would have sales and reviews posted from the moment they went on sale.

2) The fact that the Kindle audience is limited actually works in the author's favor. Kindle readers are an easier group to target for promotion than readers in general precisely because there are so few of them, and they're very avid readers. Also, because the Kindle store carries only a fraction of the titles seen in the main Amazon book listings, it's much easier for a Kindle book to rise up into the top 10 or 20 in its category(ies) than it would be in the main bookstore.

3) Publishing for the Kindle is free, and the author royalty on each sold copy is 35% of the list price set by the author. Furthermore, you get 35% of the list price even on copies sold at a lower price due to Amazon discounts.

See the IndieAuthor Guide to Publishing For The Kindle for more info.

Malone

Hehe, I actually started reading the article after I asked the question. Still, do you get decent sales, outside of the strategic element involved, from the Kindle?

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April L. Hamilton

I published 2 novels for the Kindle in January, but didn't make any attempt to publicize my Kindle books' existence till the second week of February. Since then, I've sold a total of 71 copies combined. I've sold just under half that many in trade paperback editions, and my trade paperbacks were published the last week of February.

Bear in mind, I've been very busy writing IndieAuthor Guides, so promo for my books has gotten pretty short shrift for the past month or so. In discussions with other writers since beginning this whole IndieAuthor undertaking, I've found increasing numbers of writers are seriously considering the indie route but hold back due to fear of the unknown, and doubts about their ability to handle all the self-pub and promo tasks. That's why I decided to make The IndieAuthor Guide my top priority.