Konrath signs directly with Kindle:

[I. J. Parker]

The announcement comes from Publisher's Marketplace and contains the following interview comments:

 

Q: You signed a print deal? I thought you weren't signing any more print deals.
A: I signed a print deal with a company that can email every single person who has every bought one of my books through their website, plus millions of potential new customers. I've never had that kind of marketing power behind one of my novels. I'd be an idiot not to do this.

Q: Aren't you going to piss off traditional publishers?
A: Traditional publishers had a chance to buy Shaken last year. They passed on it. Their loss. Their big loss. Their big, huge, monumental, epic fail.
Blog

 

 

My feeling:  This ought to be very, very interesting.  The new title in his series goes for 2.99.  And as someone who lost a couple of publishers:  I hope he's right.

[EDWARD C MORGAN]

It's just another transition in the publishing industry. I think that, like news, publishers will sooner or later begin to release titles in varied formats as soon as they are available to be released, and without production time/costs, it stands to reason that e-books will be first. And then hardback, audio, paperback, etc., available for those who prefer those formats.

Right now, the biggest impediment to e-book growth, I think, is the cost of the devices, but obviously more and more people are willing to make that investment...and the prices will come down.

Konrath has made a nice chunk of change off traditional publishing and now is selling e-books at quite a clip. We have to remember two things about Konrath, though:
*He already has a following.
*He is a masterful, tireless and relentless marketer.

With self-publishing, marketing remains a basic problem. Will authors, who feel that marketing is the job of their publisher, do any better at marketing their self-published work than they did the traditionally published work? I do not know, but if they don't, why would they expect better sales? Also, how much more difficult will it become when what I think will happen comes to pass - a massive increase in books being published (plenty garbage), thanks to e-publishing? How will your book stand out with five times, 10 times, or 20 times the competition than you currently have?

Konrath certainly has the drive, the ability and the desire to market himself, and he has a hard-earned and I believe well-deserved reputation for delivering a great, entertaining read, among readers to capitalize on. And I think it is very interesting to watch as he explores a new business model that mixes e-books, bound copies and audio with traditional and self publishing.

I also think there is this simple fact. You could have 100,000 writers just like me - a handful of published short stories but no name recognition - rise up and self-publish. While this statement may be brutal, I believe their impact on the industry would be roughly equal to a fart in a tornado.

But imagine if Robert Crais or Harlan Coben said "I'm going to self-publish my next book as an e-book." Now that would be the tornado!

While e-publishing has substantially reduced the cost of self-publishing, and this is great in that it gives an author greater control, I foresee it creating a whole slew of new and equally daunting challenges for authors to overcome. And I just wonder if in five or ten years, people will be complaining that the sellers of e-books need to start up some "weeding out" process.

Of course, maybe I'm just in a cynical mood today.

[I. J. Parker]

Well, the amount of promotion an author can do is very limited. At some point, he who promotes heavily will be forced to turn out hack work. Many midlist authors already do this in order to make a living. They write 3 or 4 series under different names and produce 2 books each per year. The system promotes mediocrity.

The Kindle promotion uses Amazon's expertise and is very good for writers. I have said from the start that Amazon's handling of my books has been just about the only promotion I received: they list all my major reviews; they list all my books; they list what other of my books customers have bought, and they offer my books on the sites of other authors. If you go to one of my Amazon listings, you see that each book page has a long list of other books by me that my customers have also bought. That is a testimonial to the fact that they liked the first book well enough to buy the others. Where else would I get this much support?

[Dana King]

Clay,
"people will be complaining that the sellers of e-books need to start up some "weeding out" process."

That may have already begun. Sites like tis and many blogs and review web sites that cater to readers as well as writers provide recommendations. I rarely--actually, never--read mainstream media reviews or care much about ads. All of my reading recommendations come from what I refer to as electronic word of mouth.

Amazon/Google-style automated, personalized marketing is the next step, along with a NetFlix-style rating system, as someone noted above. (John McFetridge, maybe?) They'll see what you bought and/or read, and how much you liked it, then make recommendations accordingly. Under the Amazon/NetFlix model, there would be no reason to take money to gin the recommendations, as they're figuring you'll buy it from them, anyway.

[Camille LaGuire]

One of the interesting things about the new model is the power it gives what Seth Godin calls "sneezers" - that is enthusiastic fans who spread the word about something.

In the traditional world, the reviewers with the most influence and power were the ones that influenced distributors and libraries. In the Kindle world, there are people like Red Adept, and the Kindleobsessed blog. For individual genres there are fan blogs and such. A number of these people are not professionals at all, just enthusiasts who love their Kindle or other ereader, or just love to read.

Anybody interested in marketing in this new paradigm should subscribe to Godin's blog.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/

As for the hack writers... You know, I have a lot of respect for hack writers. A lot of my favorite writers (people like Donald Westlake and Harlan Ellison) honed their skills at half penny a word. If you look at it in terms of a rebirth of the pulps, I'm all for it.

[Kemosabe]

I do too. I hate the bastards.