Saturday, March 19, 2011

Norman Spinrad

Seems Norman Spinrad is dipping his toes in the ebook market. I smell revolution in the air.

I’ve made backlist novel titles and even a couple of original collections available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as ebooks, and so am familiar with the deal and its numbers. You can set your own prices, but they can’t be lower than $2.99. That’s not a high price for a novelette, about the cost of two lousy beers or one good one in the store. And the writer gets 70%. Try to get a royalty rate like that with a traditional paperbound publisher!

4 comments:

Disco Stu said...

This looks like a very attractive deal for many authors.

You do all seem to think about beer a lot though?

vaudeviewgalor raandisisraisins said...

THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE, and THE IRON DREAM are brutal and hilarious messy death triptychs. hopefully those will go out as ebooks at some pt if they havent already.

his possibly contraversial MEXICA he couldnt get published anywhere except England (i think) so that was the reason he is now getting bugged on this route. good for him.

also interesting:
http://goo.gl/QXQNA

osh said...

The problem with ebooks is for the new author - how to get noticed?

An established author like neal has fans who will follow (look at the parasite - its the first ebook I've bought)

If I was to just bung one of my bits of writing up on amazon;
1) I doubt anyone would even look at it
2) its not had any proofing or editing which a dead wood book has.
3) ok, maybe my mum and dad would download it!

70% of nothing is not a lot.

Once there is something in place that ensures new authors work is of sufficient quality and does not get too lost - then ebooks will really step up.

Neal Asher said...

I'm going to have a hard think about this, Osh, and write about it later. However, it strikes me that in the future the stuff that will sell will be the stuff that is good and talked about over the Internet. No advertising will be able to over-hype it when a guy sitting at a pc can advertise as much as a big company. The present publishing model is being swept away and, I reckon, the likes of Amazon will have to be very careful too.

More on this later.