Independent publishing and e-books
USA Today last month published a story about Amanda Hocking, an author who has never had a “traditional” publishing deal but nonetheless sold 450,000 copies of her nine young-adult paranormal e-books in January. She charges 99 cents to $2.99 for each of her e-books, and through her deal with Kindle, she gets 30 percent of each 99-cent book sold and 70 percent of each $2.99 book sold, netting her significantly more than she would have made through a deal with any publisher.
I had been wondering for a while when a story like this would break. “Publishing” an e-book costs almost next to nothing, and websites like BookBaby that allow writers to publish their books direct to the Apple Store, Kindle Store, and other e-reader sites mean that there is nothing preventing anyone who has written a book from making it available to the public around the world. And the ability to bypass publishers, who have to consider how much profit they will make on each book, means that authors can write books targeted at small but loyal niche markets without having to consider if they can sell enough physical copies to balance the cost of actually printing the book.
My next question is: who is going to be the first big, established author to figure out how much more money they would make if they self-published their own e-books instead of letting their publishers handle it? In the music world, Radiohead was the first big band to break away from the label system to focus on releasing music online (their most recent albums, In Rainbows and King of Limbs, have both seen physical releases but only months after they were available digitally). The next big milestone for e-publishing will be when a Stephen King or Michael Chabon follows their lead.
I’m intrigued by this from a zine perspective. Are there currently any e-book zines? I don’t even mean in a traditional sense (I’m no zine aficionado but I can certainly conceive of this idea getting a negative reaction) but more in a “publishing of collaborative literary magazines/journals or similar entirely in an e-book format.”
Yep! Fucking Trans Women is one.
