So I’m looking at this Amanda Hocking headline. Flecks of tea are moving down the screen of my laptop like the raw Matrix. The half-formed idea in my head—that I can make a book available and I don’t need to have a publisher—becomes about three-quarters formed. My audience is going to be limited to a few million Kindle customers, but that’s like saying my writing is limited by the alphabet; it’s enough, and nobody is going to tell me that only Random House can use the ‘Q’.
Amazon has the Kindle and they are selling them cheap. The Kindle store is very large. People who own a Kindle—like your humble correspondent—tend to be delighted with them, even though they’re a bit wonky. I can, in moments, download a Mark Twain, or buy the latest Jonathan Franzen. The Kindle store contains upwards of 700,000 books and the chances of finding an author you care about are good.
Then you have Apple. Their iBooks store has potential. The iPad isn’t wonky but the iBooks store is. The chances of finding a tell-all biography of Steve Jobs are slim. On the flip side, the chances of finding Winnie the Pooh are great.
You also have Barnes and Noble, and various other outlets and channels.
Right now, if you’re going to place your eggs in just one basket, Amazon looks like a good bet. They have relationships (strained, but there) with publishers and no other manufacturer can yet beat their Kindle for price. Steve Jobs said that 2011 will be the year of the iPad 2, but the jury is still eating bad hotel food over whether it’s possible to enjoy long-form fiction on the device. I’d say the iPad isn’t suited to the job.
The iBooks system is a tricky one. To get your book in there, you need a publisher. Lulu.com will do the job. These guys will add a small surcharge to your book and let you publish it for free—which is fine until you try to produce an ebook in iBooks’ ‘epub’ format. This format seems a mite less stable that Kindle’s ‘mobi’ and needs to pass through an automatic validation service to verify that it’s a well-formed epub file. Trouble is, I couldn’t get Apple Pages to export my novel in an epub format that would validate, and the ebook will never appear on iBooks until that happens. I’m still scratching my head about it. Right now, iBooks is the wild west.
The other advantage that Amazon has is a system called ‘Direct Kindle Publishing’. Cryptically, this is a system that allows you to publish—to the Kindle—but directly. It has some tolerably exciting aspects. First, it’s worldwide. Second, you can designate up to 70% of the cover price as a royalty. Compare this to the rate you’d receive through a traditional publisher. Alas, it’s not straightforward to publish a book for free using this service. (This had been my original plan following my retirement.) Third, it won’t matter that editors, agents, et al. say to you ‘It’s brilliant, moving, and wonderfully written but, gee, my lapdog didn’t do the shit dance when I acted out the first scene and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this game it’s that SCHNOOKINS IS NEVER WRONG.’
Too bitter?
Anyway, it won’t matter. Your ebook will just appear.
The Kindle publishing platform accepts multiple formats. My advice is to take this advice. If you’re not scared to get at the HTML of the book itself, it will pay dividends because you won’t end up with a trailing carriage return, WingDing, or otherwise bizarre formatting thingy that you can’t get rid of.
One more tip: Use the Kindle emulator available from Amazon. This was recommended to me by m’writerly colleague Michael Stephen Fuchs—another technothriller author—and it’s invaluable. You’ll be able to produce versions of your book and see what the reading experience of it will be for a reader.
Now, the cover.
This is what separates the Cubs from the Scouts—at least in my opinion. Anyone who thinks the jacket isn’t important can probably point to the phenomenal success of ebooks with appalling covers, and they’d be half-right. Today, however, I’d say the cover is still important.
How much should your ebook, or any ebook cost? For inspiration about this, I look to two things: (i) the Apple IOS ‘app store’, where prices are quite low compared to the traditional rate for software (anything over a tenner needs to be special); and (ii) my own feeling that £6.99 is all well and good for a physical paperback but far too expensive for an ebook. I’ve settled for £1.71, which is Amazon’s conversion of the US price of $2.99.
I published the book a couple of weeks back and I’ve sold five copies. A small number? That’s five people who, three weeks ago, hadn’t read my book and were never going to while it pootled around the publishing houses of the world waiting for Schnookins to do the shit dance. Am I bitter? No, not really. The only publishers I know well are very nice people, but that doesn’t help Bob in Idaho get hold of my book when the mood takes him.
The thing is this: There is no print run. In six months’ time, whether five or fifty or five thousand units have been sold, it will still be available to millions of Kindle users in an instant. It will probably be there the year after that; and maybe for several years. By 2020, I might even have figured out how to get the bloody thing onto iBooks.
At the end of this edition of Déjà Vu, I’ve written:
Saskia Brandt will return in: FLASHBACK
Given that Déjà Vu is now out and about, there is a very good chance that Flashback—which has been in a holding pattern for several years—will finally be published this summer. I’ll let Amanda Hocking keep the millions of readers; me, I’ll settle for a few dozen and the occasional email from Bob in Idaho.
Free Excerpt from the Sequel, Flashback
This was the place where Tolsdorf had come to die. North was the Bavarian Forest, a dark froth always visible, even on gloomy days. East: the rich plain of the Danube. To the south were the great stone feet of the Alps, and to the west the uplands of Franconia. He had grown to love this area during his work as a ranger for the forest authorities, and when government cuts made the position redundant, he had chosen to stay forever. The idea that he would die here, alone, no longer scared him, because as the twentieth century ended with the loss of his job, something had changed within Tolsdorf. He had reached an amicable divorce with himself. His eyes were steel grey now, not blue, and his hair was white, not blond. When he spat, perched on his rock overlooking the Danube, he looked down at the phlegm and noted the black flecks with indifference. Something was coming for him, alright, and it would find him here.
Tolsdorf kept a hut about half a kilometre away, down the eastern slope of a valley he called ‘the notch’. The roof and walls of the hut were prefabricated blocks camouflaged with wood drawn, as one might draw teeth, from the mouth of the forest. If a busybody came looking for the old ranger station, they would probably walk right past it. Nobody did come, though, apart from a charity volunteer from Regensburg called Frau Waellnitz who had heard the rumour of an old man in the woods. Tolsdorf tolerated her. He had even told her about the submerged concrete blocks that allowed a person to cross the river to the hut’s dooryard.