Authors Electric

My first ebook Around 2007 I began to take interest in ebooks and started reading the reports of booming ebook sales. Seeing sales were increasing month on month I decided to join this revolution. So in 2011 I published my first collection of short stories as an ebook. Based on my sales I followed this ebook with others. Then came the print on demand (POD) revolution, where authors like myself and the Author Electric team could publish a physical book without holding stock. So in 2014 I decided to combine my two Anansi ebooks and release as a POD book. At first sales were slow, then they started to match those of my ebooks. Now they outsell my ebooks. This made me wonder if it was just my ebooks or if ebook sales were down generally. So I did a little research. I discovered sales of ebooks have been falling for the last couple of years. Some of the large publishers have given figures in the region of a 12% fall from 2015 - 2016. I found several reasons being suggested for this...

Solid books, Krakow style Like most authors of e-books, I also publish in print. Well to be precise, in the case of A Kettle of Fish , I had a publisher for the e-book but published the paperback copy myself using a POD (Print on Demand) publisher Feedaread . My AE colleagues will know all about the different options for going into print so this is just a rough guide for anyone else who is interested in how we get our books - the solid kind - out to our readers.  POD costs more per copy (around £5.70 for me) than asking a local printer to do a print run,  but the advantage is the author needn't fork out the money up front. If you can cope with the fairly basic mechanics of uploading a Word file and cover image to the POD website, the only start-up costs are cover design, usually £200- £300 although there are cheaper options. (And if you have e-published, that part might already be in hand with just some tweaking required for print quality images). Feedaread asks the auth...

A collection of 16 short stories If you’ve read some of my previous blog posts you’ll know some time ago I decided to turn my two Anansi the Trickster Spider eBooks into a POD (print on demand) book. At last Anansi the Trickster Spider (volumes one and two) is available via Amazon plus a few other outlets. Now we (my other-half was drafted in to help) decided to create the book using Creatspace. Although it was easy to use we were totally unprepared. We naively set up an account and went in thinking we’d upload a file, choose the font style and size and off we’d go. Then came the surprise (yes I know, you don’t need to tell me, we should have realised it's not that simple) we had to answer quite a few questions. Questions such as:   Do you require page numbers? Would you like the numbering to start with the introduction or with the first story?     Have you considered an index? How about something in the page header e.g. the books title or story titl...

In February, it will be two years since I took the plunge into self-publishing, by releasing a collection of previously-print-published short stories onto kindle. It was an experiment – with the concept of epublishing, Amazon’s KDP process and getting to grips with the technical side of formatting and uploading.  Once I’d successfully managed that, I went on and epubbed a thriller and a young adult fantasy novel. Sales have been good – more than I ever expected – and while I do think the kindle bubble has deflated somewhat, there are still opportunities for writers to take control of their careers. Having said that, there hasn’t been a rush of big publishers beating a path to my door and offering me several million for print rights. Not that I expected it – I’ve been on the fringes of the industry for long enough to know how it works. I’ve had big agents and big-6 (or is is 5 now?) editors in the past and I know I can write, but I’m never going to generate sufficient sales f...