Thanks to Seth Johnson for pointing me to this article, as well as the followup article. I usually focus on using e-books to attract a following, and thus leading you to every writers dream–the big contract. But even established authors are sitting up and taking notice.
As I’ve mentioned before, The Wylie Agency has put all of their e-book rights on hold. If an authors can get 70% by putting up a book on Amazon, why settle for 10% or 15% and go through a publisher?
Michael Stackpole, an author who has written in the Battletech and Star Wars universe, is taking it one step further. He’s offering one of his books, Talion Revenant, through Kindle, as well as selling it right from his site. Selling it on his site garner’s Stackpole about 86% of the cover price.
Michael has said if he sells 10,000 copies, about how many the print version sold, he’ll write the sequel to Talion. [Update, Tallion Revenant has sold over 40,000 copies in print, not 10,000. See Michael Stackpole’s comment below for more information.]
Unpublished authors are always looking for ways to get published, so it’s no surprise they would hop on the e-book wagon. But when you see published authors jumping ship and turning down offers from publishers to retain their digital rights, you know that e-books are changing the way we read and write books.
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