Historical and Contemporary Romance Author
Before I launch into today’s post, a few quick words. I have been on vacation for almost two weeks. Although I got back early Monday, I’ve been playing catch-up in all aspects of my life (family, household, day job) and thus haven’t had much time for the writerly side. So, hi, here I am, and I’m glad to be back.…
I know some people are interested in seeing sales trends for self-published work, but if you aren’t interested, please feel free to click away, because this is going to be boring, boring, boring. Here’s the sales chart for The Reiver through June: If you’re looking at that line for Amazon sales and thinking “What the hell,” rest assured you’re not…
Since last week, the online publishing world has been ablaze with the news that Harlequin is changing the royalty rates it pays its authors from 6% of cover for category romances and 8% of cover for single title books to 15% of net and 25% of net. This change is retroactive and applies to authors who are “actively writing for…
As of this morning, I reached an interesting milestone on sales of my self-published short story. I’ve now earned $1,000 from it. That amount is a net, including the $250 advance I was originally paid by the editor of the anthology it first appeared in, less the cost of the cover art. The reason this is interesting is because the…
Over the past few days, I’ve noticed a lot of hand-wringing over the 99-cent book. Yesterday, both the Huffington Post and Nathan Bransford waxed eloquent on the problems with the 99 cent price point. Bransford was, in my opinon, considerably closer to the mark than the HuffPo’s writer when it comes to explicating the long-term implications of the 99-cent price…
Despite the fact that I’m published primarily in digital form (only one of my books has ever been released in print), I’ve always considered myself someone who preferred paper books to digital. I have a particular preference (or so I thought) for mass-market paperbacks, not so much because they are cheap (although that weighs into the equation), but because they…
With the advent of Amanda Hocking and other authors’ successes in selling oodles and oodles of digital books on Amazon at the low, low price of 99 cents, there’s come to be a sort of common wisdom that pricing your book at 99 cents is the most reliable road to (almost) instant success and bestsellerdom. Of course, there are plenty…
One of the perennial frustrations of being published by one of the traditional print publishers is that it takes forever to get any hard data on how your books are selling. The typical print publishers put out royalty statements twice a year–one in May covering the previous July to December’s sales and another in December covering January to June. True,…
Today, Avon (the division of HarperCollins, not the makeup distributor) announced the launch of its new digital imprint, Avon Impulse. In addition to digital books, at least some of their titles will be available as print-on-demand. This move comes as absolutely no surprise to me, as I suspect almost all of the traditional print presses are going to have digital-first…
I’ve been asked to be on a panel at the RT Booklovers Convention in LA in April of next year. The topic is money and digital publishing. I’m really excited about this because I have to qualms about talking openly and honestly about money and writing (and how much there is or isn’t). However, I think it’s about time we…