Matthew Yglesias wrote an interesting column yesterday in Slate entitled, Leave Penguin Alone: Who cares if book publishers are colluding with Apple to raise e-book prices?. It takes a look at the recent Department of Justice announcement that they will be pursuing legal action against Apple and the “Big Six” of publishing for price-fixing.
A few years ago I attended the renowned Boucheron convention, a fan-based convention for mystery and crime fiction. UK comedian-turned-crime fiction-novelist Mark Billingham was one of the many panelists that I listened to that day, but he said something that stuck with me when the words of many other bright lights at the conference faded away. Something I’d never heard a mystery or crime fiction author talk about before.
Friends –
I’m excited to be the guest blogger on David Gaughran’s fantastic blog, Let’s Get Digital, today, where I’m talking about how digital publishing has–or will soon–change not just publishing, but the art of writing itself by eliminating one important dimension: length.
If you have the time, please swing by Dave’s blog and add to the discussion!
For many indie authors (and Kindle aficionados), this post will fall into the “water is wet” category of late-breaking news, but I’ve found it’s foolish to make assumptions about what others know and don’t, especially when it comes to the rapidly-changing face of digital publishing and the internet.
The Best Resource Out There
Kindleboards (www.kindleboards.com) is a site that has to be at the top of every digital self-publisher’s bookmarks list. It is a supremely helpful site that, in digital publishing terms, has been around since the Stone Age (about 3 years) providing a forum space for budding digital authors, Kindle book lovers, and geek and gadget people in general.
The forum section boasts around 55,000 registered users and several thousand are online at any one time. A subset of those are writers (detailed below), but many more thousands are readers interested in one thing: digital books.
If I had any doubts about the power of promotion, they were laid to rest this past weekend.
My crime fiction short story collection Three Shorts has been free since about the first week of February. In a month, it had been downloaded a respectable–if unspectacular–500 times. I had heard of other indie authors garnering thousands of downloads, but I’m a relatively unknown new-comer and I was more than happy to see hundreds of downloads fueled by little more than a change in price…I didn’t do any specific promotion beyond Twitter, Facebook, and a blog post.