Pricing Ebooks in Todays Market

The problem is nobody knows how to price an ebook. The publishers don't and neither do the authors because there is no floor and the market is in flux. Nobody knows where the threshold lies for a book without a physical presence. How do you price something that costs nothing to produce? And whats worse how do you price something that a lot of people are giving away for free?

That is the hell of todays publishing market. There is no way to set a market. In the print book arena there was always production costs so you had to cover that and make a little. This kept everyone from going too low too fast. But in the ebook market the race to the bottom is very quick. In fact some people start out at the bottom and go up from there. The inverse of a print book. The problem is you are trying to find where people will buy and the maximum price point.

It is this intersection that the rubics cube of ebooks can be solved. You cant set your price too high or you will kill the market. You cant set it too low or people will think your book is not worth anything and pass over it. You need to find the middle and this comes from experimenting. What will work with one book and one author will not necessarily work with another.

So really like the internet it is the Wild West. There will be a point where it settles down but don't look for that anytime soon. We are really just getting started.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Shelf Space or why Books Fail

Books fail for the same reason they always have. NO ONE SEES THEM. Lets assume your book is good. Lets assume you have the reviews. Your book still fails. Now why is that? Once upon a time there were only the bookstores. The bookstores had shelf space. Limited shelf space. Your book came out and chances are it did not find space on these shelves. Or if your book ended up in the bookstore it was spine out in the stacks and only for a little while.

Bookselling then was based on the concept that someone walking by would see your book and buy it. But most people never saw your book. The book was buried under the Bestsellers and the publishers who paid for shelf space. Your book from the midsized or even large press never had a chance because they only pay for so many books to be there. Even the Independent bookstores have to be careful about their space and pick only the books that hit their radar.

So now lets fast forward to the cyber world. Your book is now in cyber space and the same problems apply. Book shelf space. Except now it is cyber shelves. And your book has to be seen. But now you have a chance. Now you can get it in front of people. You just have to promote it though the many promotion channels. And your book may not be seen by everyone but by working hard you can make sure it is seen by some. And this is better.

The author now has a choice. Work hard and get cyber space or let your book disappear. The choice is really now up to the writer.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The Pitcher is #1...How Books Are Sold Now

            The Pitcher is currently #1 in these categories.

• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Urban
• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Sports
• #1 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Urban Life

 

The Pitcher is selling more right now than monster Bestsellers published by the largest publishers. Book selling has changed permanently. The fight between Amazon and traditional publishers is really the last Battle of the Bulge in a war that has been going on for some time. The fact is that books used to be sold very differently.

 

The stage was narrow because of the physicality of bookstores. Literally stores could only stock so many books and so the Big Authors or Bestsellers were put out where everyone could see them. These books were purchased first and behind them were some obscure midlist authors that were purchased occasionally. Finally was everyone else who never saw the light of day. There just wasn't room.

 

Now in the digital age authors are on equal footing. Of course the Bestsellers dominate the bookstores and always will but people are shopping with their computers and that is taking the lack of space out of the equation. Independent bookstores are still vital because they do bring forth the undiscovered but for the digital shopper the author can bring him or herself forth and have the same displaying power of even a giant like Grisham or a James Patterson.

 

Now a book must still be good for the digital world. No amount of behind the scenes pushing can make a bad book last.  It may sell but books especially in the digital world are sold by word of mouth and eventually the bad book falls. But if your book is good and you work hard then you at least have an equal chance as the big boys.

 

It is truly a different world out there.

 

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher

 

Why People Still Buy Books

I noticed that my sale of print books on The Pitcher keeps pushing past the Kindle copies. They usually sort of play it out like a major leaguer versus a minor league team with the kindle downloads leading the way. But lately the books have been fighting back and staying there. So in our ebook digital I don't know what to do with all these pulpy books and CDS age why are people still buying books? I have come up with a few ideas not based on any science at all.

One. We are creatures of habit above all else. We see this with people who still have land lines and don't carry smart phones. I talked to a man who is a general contractor who never got a cell phone. Business is booming. How does he do it. He says people just get hold of him. And of course there are people who run around with legal tablets instead of IPADS. This is their preferred method. So it must be with books. There are people who like the feel of a book and do not like burning their eyes on screens.

Second would be physicality. Lets face it with a download you do not have a thing. You have some code that produces words on a screen. That's it. You have no evidence you just paid nine bucks for a book. And when you finish reading your code the book disappears versus that book that sits on your shelf or all time and calls out to you every time you pass it. You own something with a book.

Finally people like the experience of reading a printed page. There is a difference. Your eyes engage with the word differently. You have a tactile sensation. I have been reading WILSON the monster biography and I could never read that  in a kindle. Why? Because Woodrow Wilson was a man of the early twentieth century and I just couldn't see him dancing in the light on a screen as compared to me getting coffee and jelly all over him and even dropping him in the tub once.

Or maybe it is because we are not bits and bytes but flesh. We are real. So it is with books.

www.williamhazegrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

The State of the Book in 2014

You could argue it both ways. Go to the Kindle boards and you will see the new frontier of publishing. Writers taking their work and bypassing the publishing and putting it out there to sell on the kindle. The ebook certainly broke the dam of writers who would never see print. And there are writers who sell in the millions who have never signed a publishing contract and conversely they have become millionaires. They are the one percent of one percent.

For the rest of the self publishers it is a brutal slog and many sell few downloads of their book. But of course you could argue this beats obscurity. And for the traditionally published writers it is the year of reckoning. You have to compete on all fronts and with the advent of the ebook the free download has changed the field of play. People literally give way their book while traditional publishers sit on their prices like trolls at the gate. You cant blame them they actually have invested money in their books and they need to hold the line.

Profit has become a word only for the big sellers for these publishers. Print on Demand books have allowed them to compete with the price to sell market of ebooks but these also bring a stigma that keeps most POD books out of the bookstores so essential to selling now. It will be the year of the Independent this we know. Barnes and Noble is taking water so fast we might just see her slip beneath the waves in the first quarter. The Nook truly was the anchor thrown over the side with no real plan to compete with the Amazon behemoth.

And Amazon will rule its domain yet she was stymied when the independents didn't take her books. So we have gone full circle. Books are still stubbornly selling and independent bookstores are the future of book selling and are gaining strength while the ebook morphs into the interactive beast it is destined to be. Community will make or break the art of book selling for the independents. And what of the author in all of this?

Writers have greater opportunities to fail or thrive than ever before. If there is one consistent mantra it is this for the modern author; If you don't do it no one will. This is the unassailable truth of publishing. Never before have authors had to have thicker ankles than right now. It is a peasants work this selling of our wares but the truth is you have only one responsibility in the end and that is to your talent. And that has never changed and never will.

Full speed ahead.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Writers Making Money off of Writers

You see it all the time. The success story and then the pitch. I became a Kindle Bestseller and so can you. So you click. Why not you don't want to miss out. And it is a testimonial and basically breaks it all down to  a system. Becoming a bestseller has nothing to do with the merit of your book but the merit of the marketing. And here is how you do it. Post until you die. Shoot an email to these people. Contextual advertising. Facebook. Twitter. Skype. Radio. YouTube. Here is the secret and for a mere 9.95 or 19.95 or 99.95 you can have my secret.

And sometimes you pull the trigger. Why not?  It is the wild west out there and no one knows what really works and these writers selling these programs know that too. The hungry must be fed and so writers turn to making money off of writers. It is pathetic in a way. Writers have little money. Most writers. And now there is another predator out there. And maybe the system worked for the person. Maybe they lucked out and the marketing or Internet Gods turned in their favor. But probably the only thing that turned in their favor was the idea to con other writers.

And it all assumes that the central idea of writing a good book is secondary. That telling a really good story might be the only way to sell lots of books. This is buried under the pyramid scheme idea that there is some secret nestled deep down in the ground that has more to do with computer algorithms than the merit of your book.

The sad truth is the only thing deep down in the ground is a treasure chest filled with the fools gold of people who think talent can be bought for 19.95. 

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

The Second LIfe of a Book

Thirty one thousand downloads later and Tobacco Sticks has a second life. This was not possible for a book unless another publisher bought the rights and resuscitated some out of print title. Because books don't have a long shelf life and if they don't sell then they tend to disappear. Enter the net where suddenly books that have been dead have life breathed into them by readers looking for a title they can get a deal on.

I had managed to keep the ebook rights to Tobacco Sticks and had not done much with them until I saw other authors putting out their backlist at a discount. A highly reviewed book may or may not reach it's market. And when that window of opportunity closes down then the book disappears. A lot of time it is market forces and  a book doesn't have a chance. Who knows what really sells a book.

But now an author can take a second shot and readers can have a second glance. It beats the alternative. A book damned to the darkness after a very short life.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher
 

Should You Publish Directly To Kindle?

I would have said no before but now I have to qualify it. The world is moving away from books and of course that means they are downloading crazily. I am thinking about publishing a mystery called Jackpine directly to Kindle. Why? Well. The people already reading Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways which are Southern mysteries set in time will pick up on another one in the same genre. And I am backed up with traditional releases through Fall 2014.

And I really want to get this book out there. I had spent years writing it and then put it aside for other books but the Kindle environment is perfect for a book like this. It is a genre driven title and once people start to find you then you can feed them one book after another. What about reviews? Well every one of my books has been heavily reviewed and by now people know what they can expect. What about a physical copy?  I am not that concerned with that right now.

The change in publishing is ongoing. And the author has to morph along with it. There is good and bad and little we can do to change that. But the opportunity is there. I will say this. If your book is not ready to be published don't do it. The ebook audience massacres books that are poorly written. You have to know your craft or you will pay for it with poor sales and a massive blow to your ego. So. I would say try traditional first and then if you are ready.

Go Kindle.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

Reading Huckleberry Finn on a Kindle

It doesn't work. Sorry. I tried. But there are some books that have to be read in paper. I read to half and put it down. Of course I have read the book many times but I wanted to dip back in and I had it on the Kindle and nah. Didn't work. And why didn't it work. It is lighter. It is more convenient. Hell I can even read it in the bathtub with the cat swimming around. Of course one false move and so much for the kindle and the cat. But the biggest reason I could not read Twain's classic in a mini computer format was because the story did not fit the form.

And here is where Jeff Bezos meets the road. Literature is an art all rankings aside. There are other considerations than how many units can be moved and all the digital BS in the world will not change the fact that the immutability of art trumps commerce. It always has. Why do billionaires buy paintings and pay millions for them. Not because of the investment...it is because they want to own art. Something that can not be bought. It is the eternal that makes money seem small and art if it is any good is all about the eternal.

And so it is with Huckleberry Finn. You cannot read about Huck and Jim floating down the river on a flickering screen. Twain did not intend it that way nor did history. Those old crackly pulped pages must turn again for you to hear the splash of that raft and Jim musings on the cosmos and Hucks hard headed deliverance. So I turn back against form and go for content.

Style over substance loses out and the pulp litters the water while the cat swims.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher




 

The King of Crap

There is a new paradigm in publishing now. Who will be the King of Crap.  Crap being what games the algorithms on Amazon. The publishing world is changing so fast it takes your breath away and then makes you want to hold it for the stench it is producing. I am talking about the crap that is moving into the cyber vacuum and it is crap. It is whatever is put behind an ecover and flung into the blogosphere. The King of Crap doesn't care. Because the computers kick up the title for a  nice bump and a list appears.

#45 on Ants/literature/walnuts/books about toilet paper. And this then is taken as gospel. Bestsellerdom. Throw some free giveaways into the mix and you have The King of Crap crowing from the rooftops #1 on Toilet paper books about wiping! This then is the new modality. The new fame of the self published author who is not about literary quality. In fact the KOC makes no bones. "Whats the point of being good at something if you cant sell?" An actual quote. Commodification at it's lowest point.

And so KOC publishes. And publishes mightily. One hundred titles a year is a stated goal. You heard right and take it from me producing one hundred titles of self published Crap is not hard. You just sit and write one and three days later upload with your cover. And the computer will treat you as a darling. This is what aspirants to the crown know. Algorithms dictate sales. New books get pushed up front. So you repeat and repeat and repeat until the crown is yours.

The newly crowned and admired King of Crap. Welcome to the publishing world of the early twenty first century. We can only go down from here.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The POD Shimmy

Got the POD shimmy yesterday at a chain bookstore. You know the look. I am sorry we are not carrying your book...it is a POD book. Usually some low level manager who stares at all authors as if they just self published after reading the book yesterday. My book is not POD. It is traditional as bread. POD is an order driven system where books are produced by demand. Traditional is you print the books before hand. To make it more confusing many publishers back up their print runs with POD tech. So back to my man at the store.

Well my book is not POD could you check again. The man with the name tag stared at his computer. No. This is a POD book. By now he wants to be done with the pesky author. Look. My books were with Random House. This book is with a different press. Surely you can see that there are books in the warehouse. Noooo. I am sorry sir. But there is nothing I can do. And so we continued our POD shimmy. He behind a desk. Me in that sea of books.

Now look. I know you can do this. I am local. I have an interview coming up. I want to do a signing. And we shimmied on. Because the deal is POD books have no chance in bookstores. This is something most publishers wont tell their authors but the brutal truth is most books die because they never see the light of day. They never get seen by the consumer. Unless those books are sitting in a warehouse and a buyer makes the call and stocks them...then the author has no chance.

No. I am sorry sir. This is definitely a POD book. I could see our dance was at a standstill. We shook hands in mutual hate and I left the floor. I called up another store of the same chain in Chicago from the car. Of course we have your book! Would you like us to hold it for you? I thanked the girl and hung up. Sometimes you just want to know you still have it.

The Pitcher....sometimes a dream is all you have



 

The New Publishing World: Quanity over Quality

You must know that publishing has changed. Well it has. It is driven by algorithms...specifically algorithms coded by Amazon. And in this world more is better. Amazon recognizes content and it doesn't matter what kind of content. As long as it is new. Authors know this, especially kindle authors and so the new mantra is quantity over quality. Gone are the authors who spend years on books and then publish. There are now authors who publish every week. Some every few days. It is a very different world out there.

And these authors have sales to prove it. Some. Not all of course. But Amazon ranks the authors with a lot of books higher than the ones who have just a few. Now this is not official but it is known among the successful book marketers. And so people publish just about anything. A short story. A novella. A novel. A one page story. It doesn't really matter in this bits and bytes world. As long as you have the next book ready to go.

Series rule. They are the gold standard now. You must have a series. This accomplishes several things. One a book followed by another gets the same reader. Two it keeps the publishing rocking so Amazon can recognize this is an author who deserves to be pushed. So we have this quantity over quality modality that is now putting immense pressure on authors. Everyone feels it who buys into the whole "its a brave new world out there and I must adapt" mantra. Even I have stared eyeing old manuscripts...maybe...

But there is also this. One good book can outsell a hundred bad books. It is all how you want to build your spaceship. My books usually take years. But who knows. Maybe I can shorten that up. At least by a year or so.

The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have

On Marketing Books: The Powers That Be Part II: By the Boards

The biggest shock comes when you get your first real media hit. You have been a one man band doing everything you can and then finally something breaks. You long ago gave up any idea of a publicist, they are expensive and they aren't that good a lot of times. The really good ones are extremely expensive. So you take it all on. You do the calling and the sending and the searching and you do it every day. And now you aren't even writing anymore. You have become this monk of a marketer who busts ass every day and you make nothing,

But a break. For me it was People Magazine. My book had come out with a press so small it only had one book. But there it was in People. Game over. I remember walking down a beach thinking it had not been such a hard climb after all. Just ten years of blood sweat and tears. But not so fast. That blip of demand is enough to push you onto the Bestseller List for a week. But then just as quickly you fall back down and the demand goes back to a trickle.

So you go back to it. And things are changing again. The bookstores that never even carried your books are dying. The internet is taking over. The ebooks are pushing up. You hear of people who sell a million books without a single review. A girl in Peoria uploads her fantasy novel and wham. A bestseller. She gets a check for a million dollars and buys her parents a home. This makes it almost worse. Could it be that everything you have been doing for publicity and reviews doesn't matter anymore?

Has the brave new world of Eat What You Kill just bypassed traditional publishing in a way that turns selling books into a lottery upload? Should you just be pumping out books the way someone pumps dimes into a slot machine?

Next On Marketing Books: Eat What You Kill Publishing

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher --Sometimes a Dream is all you have

What you can do with your Book over a Kindle

Books are dinasorial but they have a function. For one thing you can read a book in the sun. You  cannot read your kindle in the sun. Alright. Maybe the old kindles but not the kindle fire. It is is just a black piece of marble. And you can read your book in the tub. You cannot read your kindle in the tub. I did. I dropped it. No more kindle. My book just got soggy.

You cannot throw your kindle on the floor or in in your backpack or on your shelf. Not if you want to lose a couple hundred bucks. Throw that book anywhere and you can still read it. You cannot read your kindle with toast and jelly and coffee. Your fingers are sticky and gum up the screen. You cannot dribble egg yolk on your kindle. Many of my books have yellow stains. You cannot spill coffee on your kindle. You cant get too far from a plug with your kindle especially the later ones. They just turn black. You never have to plug your book in. Ever!

You cannot turn down the page of your kindle and the bookmark function doesn't work a lot of times so you have to find your page again. Your book. Turn down the page. Rip it. Piss on it. Do what you have to do but you can find your place. You cant leave your kindle out in the rain. You can leave your book in the rain. It just gets fat.

Here's a big one. You forget what you read with your kindle. Your book lays around and you say oh yeah...that was a good book. Or...I better read that book I bought. With your kindle your book is hidden and forgettable. You also cant look ahead in your kindle...im sorry it is not the same. And you can't look back to see how much you have read.

 And finally you cant turn the last page of your kindle and hold it and go wow that was a good book!
You just turn it off. Bummer.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Kamikaze writing the Big Book

My mother in law asked me what I was working on. Usually I just say something vague, but I told her I was working on a big book and that I was six hundred and sixty pages into it. She paused, then looked at me and said "who the hell wants to read a book that big?" Fair enough. It gets worse because I will probably break a thousand. But when writing the big book you are a bit like a kamikaze where you are not sure you are coming back from this one.

First of all no one wants a really big book anymore. They are expensive to publish. And there is that old thing that peoples attention span is getting shorter not longer. Look at Kindle singles. Look at what is selling. Look at twitter! And there you go, writing an opus along the lines of Gone With the Wind or War and Peace. Talk about insane. Your agent doesn't want you to do it and yet you persist. Why?

Maybe because you can. Maybe because you wont ever do it again. Maybe you just want to see if you can write the big book and take a swipe at the "whats it all about sweepstakes." Why not? You have written everything else. Why not throw in everything but the kitchen sink and go for it. You only live once right? And so you strap yourself in, start the motor, and fly toward your final destination. A human torpedo headed for total destruction or total nirvana.

That's the big book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Publishing Worm in Apple

Yeah. I get why the big publishers went to Apple and said you know what; lets fix a price we can all live with here. Amazon is a leaking ship on the good seas of Ebook commerce and the economics are devastating. Ebooks drop pricing to the floor and Amazon was intent on doing just that. I set my own prices on my ebooks (I happen to own the rights) and one thing I found out was that ebooks are priced low low low compared to regular books. You can see the IPOD nightmare of publishing over the next hill with .99 cent downloads.

But you still can't stack the deck. And whose to say what really happened at this point, but it sounds like the publishers tried to turn back the clock and stop the hemorrhage. And it is a hemorrhage. You are talking about a twenty five dollar hardcover versus a ten dollar ebook or worse. And once file sharing really kicks on ebooks that will be getting nothing for that old hardcover. So now what? Well...people still like to read books. And they like a quality ebook.

So instead of fixing the price with Apple for books on their IPADs, really the publishers should come up with their own hardware or high end ebooks. Look. There are a lot of people who do not like the Kindle but there isn't a lot of competition out there.  The Nook. The Sony Reader. They all still feel like a computer. Yeah. I have a Kindle but I still prefer a book. What I'm saying is we are not there yet and there is a lot of room for someone to get it right.

Old Steve Jobs knew that. The IPAD. The IPHONE. The IPOD. Even though he went along with the price fix, he knew it is really all in the delivery.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Publishing Old Manuscripts

Everybody has them. All those books that misfired and never took off or just blew up on the launch pad. They represent years and years of toil and you would like for something to come of them because they represent your heart and soul. So in the new environment of EBooks, you think, well maybe there is something there that escaped the publishers eyes and these books should have been published except for a short sighted editor who couldn't see the diamond in the rough. And so you start tracking them down on your computers.

Usually they are a couple of computers back that you dig out of a closet and there they are; floating around your desktop like space junk. They have weird file names you started giving them after the twenty third rewrite and you have to piece them together like cars in a junkyard. Lets see, I'll use this beginning with this middle and where is the end...ah here it is. There it's a book. So you start to read your old prose. Dammit. This was good! This should have been published! And so you continue, getting excited. Yes. Yes. Readers will finally be able to discover this great story that has been stopped because of some nimrod of a publisher.

And then...somewhere along page thirty two, the thing goes off the rails. Maybe it is the tired prose, the lackluster plot. Maybe it's just sort of hackneyed and old. But there is something missing. Some bit of modernity that gives the book spark. The prose just dries up on the page and is dated and dead and the book turns back into that old manuscript in a moldy box in a basement. And you want it to be good. You really do. You want it to be the book that it could have been, but it's just not.

So you try and resucitate some others, but they fall from the sky like satellites gliding out of orbit. There were problems. There was a reason these books never saw the light of day. And even the ubiquity of e-publishing won't save them. So you pull the plug, let the dust motes settle, and throw the computer back in the corner where it belongs.

And that book stays in darkness....where it belongs.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Even writers have to throw a punch

Ebooks are all the rage but ubiquity should not be a cover for getting free downloads. The Internet enjoys free reign because it is new and this has allowed it to keep one step ahead of the great fist of restraint. But authors and everyone else with a book knows that what happened to the music business is happening to publishing. Just because you can get a book on the Internet does not mean we should just go oh well anybody can download anything they want now. They can't.

The IPOD motif of books has not arrived. The Kindle while  very good is a poor substitute for the book. It just isnt the same. Sorry. But reading from a screen is reading from a screen. Now as an author who wants exposure I don't particularly mind the free downloads. The writers first goal after getting published is to get read and availability is a big deal. But right behind that you wouldn't mind getting paid either. This is hard stuff for writers who are used to existing on nothing. Average income for writers...nine grand. Och.

So you have these creatures who are used to getting screwed over  and making very little. Now they are going to have to stand up and say don't download my book for free! Thank God for the Authors Guild. They do most of the heavy lifting but individual writers have to decide if they want their books disseminated for free or not. Again you are torn between getting read and getting paid. The big hitters not so much.

But when you come down to it, getting paid legitimizes the work. You have to give value to your work first and hopefully the public will follow. These are changing times, but writers are used to that. The difference now is that people who are used to working alone will have to stand up for themselves and their work and get involved  or risk being pushed around yet again.

Even writers have to learn to throw a punch.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Downloads Top Album Sales For the First Time

Something we all know has arrived. The download is now preeminent in the music world and those CD players we have are now in the junk heap of history. Sure Sure. People will still buy a physical medium to claim ownership, but that accessibility will trump ownership eventually and the digital medium is proving it more every day. A million kindles sold every week by Amazon. A million. If the writing gets any bigger on the wall there will be no more wall.

Not that books are songs. They are not. Readers are a persnickety group and a lot of people will prefer the book, but when my eighty nine year old father in-law and my eighty year old mother in-law are sitting in their La-Z boys hunched over their Kindle screens then something is definitely up. The speed of this transition is taking away our collective breath and is already leaving authors and publishers scrambling to keep up. The proof is in the download.

The Kindle is not the IPOD. Not yet anyway. You still want a break from the Kindle with a book. I know I do and have read the last three novels in the old paper format. Music has no such physical drawbacks. In fact having all your music in your pocket is fantastic compared to carrying around a bulky CD player or worse a boom box. But, portability is a big factor in the Kindle reader also. You don't lug books, but the tech revolution of the IPOD just doesn't seem as much of a Watershed as the Kindle. It is still a better tactile experience to read a book if not visually as well.

But the Kindle is still evolving. Paper screens may not be far off along with brighter screens that are easier on the eye. Who knows, maybe they will even get that pulpy old book smell puffing out as you read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...a hilarious well written novel about one mans search for the new American Dream James Frey

The Millionaire Troll Author

By now you have heard of the girl in Minnesota who couldn't get published or considered by agents and so she shot her troll based novels out on Kindle and made a cool million dollars then got a big contract with a publisher and made even more and now her books are being made into movies and life is good for the twenty something (barely) who took a chance on herself and hit the lottery of new technology and sidestepped publishing and essentially hit the lottery of mass entertainment. So what does all that mean to authors and publishers?

Well nothing new under the sun. We have heard of these stories of the unrecognized author who is dug out of the slush pile or self publishes and the world is introduced to a book that would have suffered the fate of most rejected manuscripts: the moldy box in the basement. But what backs this story into something new is the ease in which this author broke the back of main stream publishing. She simply uploaded her books and people started to read them and  more people started to read them and then more people started to read them. The digital bestseller is a bit like an atom bomb. Fission is possible.

But of course for most of us this does not occurs. The atoms do not bang up against each other in the proper sequence and the uploaded book takes it lonely place in cyberspace, unreviewed, unread, a little catalog of bits and bytes. But here it worked fabulously. Expect troll books up the ying yang. YA will be seen as even more of a gold mine than it already is. Expect more ebook success stories. Expect publishers not to change. Expect authors to remain frustrated.

Publishers cannot recognize the gold in front of them because they don't know what it is anymore. Especially now. Large conglomerates push down hard on editors and the bottom line long ago pushed over literary merit. The divining rod has clearly bent to commerce if it ever bent away in the first place. Weird things happen. People get struck by lighting, win the lottery, publish books about trolls that make millions of dollars. Does this matter to the writer? Yeah and no. It is good to know it is possible, but you view it the same way you hear about someone who gets the catastrophic disease or writes a hit song. How does that happen? What must it be like to be that person.

Ultimately though, you pick up the pen and start again. Hmm...lets see.  Ok. I got it. A boy wizard who turns into a troll! What?  It might work....I was seriously thinking of a troll book even before Mrs. Minnesota. No, really. You don't think I would follow a trend for money. Please.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
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