If you know where to look, you can find ebook sales numbers for any number of indie ebook authors, and you’ll find they run the gamut from almost nothing to six figures a year. J.A. Konrath details his figures on his blog, others post them on KindleBoards.com. I’ve read samples of books from many of the authors, both large sellers and small, and I’ve come to some conclusions.

 

First, if your sample sucks, people won’t buy your book.

 

Eh? What? You mean I need to write well? Yes. Write a good book. Get all the errors out. Don’t screw up your POV. Start with something interesting to read. Readers read the samples before buying the book. You do, don’t you? I sure do. I may have some disposable income, but I’m not about to dispose of it on something I don’t want, and I certainly don’t want books where I can’t stand the writing.

 

Second, one book isn’t enough.

 

You may get lucky and that book you wrote may be the only book you ever need to write. You may also get lucky and have a thousand one carat diamonds just fall into your lap. Nearly every author selling large numbers of books (hundreds per month) has more than one book available. Each book sells itself, but they are advertisements for your other books, as well. Each new book is a new page on Amazon. Each page helps to sell all your books because of the link to your Author Name. They also help because of links to similar titles and people who bought this also bought this other thing.

 

Third, this is going to take forfuckingever.

 

I’ve seen that when you’re just starting out, one book a day is a pretty decent number for the first month. If you can get some additional books available, you can be selling a few hundred books a month after about six months. Even if I could write and release four books a year, and their average numbers are Konrath numbers, it will take several years to replace my current income with writing income. Big numbers come from multiple complementary books, and I haven’t even finished the first one yet.

 

I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m writing only for money. I’m not. I’m writing because I want to write. I’d like to be able to spend my entire day working on things I want to work on, be it my games, my music, or my writing. The only way I can do that is if one of those things, or a combination of them, generates enough money that I can jettison the day job.

 

If you really want to help me out, tell all your friends to buy multiple copies of StoryBox. I like working on that, too.

 

 

If you look at the “In Progress” bar to the right, you might see something interesting. That 100%? Yeah. I finished the initial draft of WiW last night. It didn’t quite make it to 100,000 words, but that doesn’t matter. I wasn’t trying to hit that number spot on. It was a number I didn’t want to exceed (but I would have if the story called for it). There’s probably a couple months of work left on it, between having some people close to me check it out and editing.

 

Finishing it was sort of anti-climactic. I always hear stories of how great authors feel after they’ve written that last word, but I just felt numb. I sat in front of my computer and stared at it for a couple minutes, dutifully copied out the word count into a spreadsheet I keep to track each day’s output (there’s a feature I need in StoryBox), updated the progress widget on the blog, and then stared some more.

 

Maybe it’s just that I know there’s still work ahead, with editing, querying, and publishing. Maybe I had just pushed so hard to get through the last chapter. I just don’t know.

 

But, this morning, I’m excited. It’s done. I think it might be pretty good. I won’t know until I’ve read it a couple weeks from now.

 

I’m going to give myself through the weekend to decide on the next project.

 

One of my concerns in making that choice is timing. In November, I’m going to David Farland’s Writers Death Camp, and he recommends being well into the project you’re going to be working on before getting there. But the timing is such, if I start a new project in three days and it follows the pattern of WiW (90k words), I could be done with it only days before going to the workshop. Or worse, I’ll finish it on Monday or Tuesday and have nothing to write for the rest of that week.

 

Since I’ve had my iPad, I’ve read a lot more often because it’s just so much fun. I’ve bought books from Amazon, Kobobooks.com, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. At first, I bought mostly traditionally published books, too.

 

Then, once I really started thinking about writing again, I stumbled onto J.A. Konrath’s  ”A Newbies Guide To Publishing“, I think via Dean Wesley Smith’s blog (hard to remember). The world of Indie publishing opened up to me.

 

If you don’t know J.A Konrath, he’s an author that published several books the traditional way, but in the last year or so, due to an experiment with putting some of his older published material on Amazon for his fans to read, has decided he likely won’t publish through a traditional publisher any more because he can make more money self-publishing electronically on the Kindle.

 

So, where’s this going, you ask?

 

I got interested in finding out the quality of the typical Indie book, so I started with a couple of the people who commented on his blog. Zoe Winters, JA Konrath himself, and a couple others. I read Disturb, from JAK, and it was pretty good. I thought there were places where it could have been better, but it wasn’t awful. Zoe Winters Kept was good, too. I’m normally not a paranormal romance reader, but Kept kept me reading til it was done. My wife liked it, too, and made me buy the other two novellas in the series.

 

Then, I decided to be adventurous, and I downloaded half a dozen random samples from Smashwords. They were uniformly awful. Poor sentence structure, uninteresting characters, big blocks of scenery description with nothing happening.

 

From that, I deduced that the bad outweighs the good, but then, that’s pretty much always the case. After all, Sturgeon’s Law says “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

 

And then, I came across David Dalglish’s Half-Orcs books. I read the first one, and really, in the first chapter, I almost put it down. There was almost too much going on, and it wasn’t clear to me at all points what was happening or why I should care, and the writing itself, I thought, was average at best. But it wasn’t awful, and I wanted to see if it got better.

 

It did get better. The confusion cleared up, and after about the third chapter, I couldn’t put it down. I had to finish it. These two brother half-orcs do some horrid things in this book, but David manages to make you care about the better brother (as I see him), and you begin to root for him to come to his senses and give his brother the boot.

 

And then I read the second book, and I couldn’t put it down. And you know what this indie author managed to do? He managed to make me care so much about his characters in this book, despite the sometimes less than professional editing job, that near the end of the book, when the bad brother does something so despicable to his brother that it’s hard to imagine someone actually doing it, that I had to set it down for a moment to collect myself. I felt so angry at him, and so sad for his brother that I had to get up and walk around for a bit to calm down. No book since Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, which I read years ago (and reread often) has made me feel that way.  Congratulations David. Hurry up and finish the last two.

I was too tired last night to write a post after finishing my daily 2k, but I thought yesterday was a pretty cool milestone for me. I finally won NaNo – sort of. I hit the 50k mark, and if I were to place the 18 days of writing I did in August immediately after the 12 days of writing I did back in November, I won!

 

Of course, I can’t really do that, so I didn’t win, but that 50k does mean something else important to me. I’m half way done with the first draft of WiW. 37.5k words in 18 days. At this rate, I’ll be done right around the 10th or 11th of September.

 

What have I learned the past 18 days? I’ve learned that I can sit my butt in the chair and write my 2000 words, even if I don’t know exactly what I’m going to write that day. And if I can do it while working an 8 hour a day job plus updating StoryBox once a week and getting hours in with my kids and WoW, as well as some reading every day – why can’t you?