A look inside Arthur's brain...
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Well, Steve Jobs is pleased to announce that Draugr is available on iBooks. That's right -- 40,000 words of YA fright is waiting to spring into creepy life on your iPad (or iPod Touch or iPhone or iBrain). Just click the corresponding link.
iAustralia! iCanada! iUS of A! iUK! iFrance!
Yep, I'm a Macgeek. Sorry.
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G'day Australia! Howdy US of A! Bloody top of the morning UK! Bonjour France!
Dust is officially up for sale on iBooks in the above countries. I am enough of a Mac geek that I find this thrilling (alas, again I must mention it is not for sale in the Canadian store because of "negotiations" etc--I can't even download my own book!).
It has been ten years since the book was released. When I talk to students they often ask me which of my 15 books is my favourite and I always answer Dust. It is the one that I feel "worked" the best out of all my novels.
>Well, yesterday I launched (or resurrected) my first novel, Draugr, as an ebook.
A few weeks before that I released Dust as an ebook (available only in the US and UK because I don't have the Canadian rights).
Total sales so far: 6
I'm actually very pleased with that. I don't see this as a massive sales rush, but more a long term project that (I hope) will pay off over time. If I only make $1000.00 a year from the experiment...then that's ten grand after ten years (because the books will not be taken off the shelves unless something major happens to the internet or people start downloading them into their brains).
Why bother? Well, two main reasons. One is that these books were out of print in various countries, so I could at least be making an income from them. The second is that right now in the publishing world there is great, numbing fear about the changes coming to the industry via ebooks (umm...update the changes are here) and, frankly, the e-rights being offered by major publishers are not very generous (to make it simple if I sell an ebook through a publisher I make $25% of net which on a $10.00 book would be $1.75. If I upload that same book to amazon myself I make $7.00). Obviously there are a multitude of factors on why a traditional contract is still very much in the cards for a new book ("paper" books are the vast majority of my sales and, at this moment, the sales of the Children's market, publishers have promotion budgets, editors, sales staff, etc.) For my out-of-print books it was an easy decision to go it alone.
I am a bit of a techie and I like to have control over my own work. I was inspired by blogs by people such as JA Konrath
and Robin Sullivan of Ridan Publishing.
Read those blogs. They are very inspiring and eye-opening about the ebook world (Konrath has a long list of authors who have been successful on the epublishing front--some heady stuff, to be sure, though of course I can't find a corresponding blog about failures of e-pubbing--then again you can't win if you don't play).
So armed by inspiration, I researched how to make an eBook. And you know what, it's relatively easy. First I signed up at Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)(Amazon's ebook publishing program). Then I converted my book into html following this guide by Derek Canyon:
Then I asked an artist friend to do the cover for a fee (in the case of Dust it was Christopher Steininger and Draugr was done by Derek Mah--hire them, they're great). Then I uploaded my file to KDP and within 24 hours it was for sale worldwide (C'mon brits...buy a book...I dare you!).
Of course, Amazon isn't the only game in the ebook market. There are many others including B&N, Apple, Sony etc. I am in the process of getting my books on iTunes myself, but for the rest of the distributors I used Smashwords. What Smashwords does is take a word file (prepared exactly to their specifications) and put it through their "meatgrinder" which spits out your book in various formats (epub/pdf/html) and then distributes it on their website and to all the major ebook sellers (Amazon/B&N etc.,). For a fee, of course (15% of net). This is likely the easiest way to go--I chose to put up my book on iTunes and Amazon on my own because it was easy enough to do and I kept that 15%.
Anyway, that's been the journey so far...
Hmm in the time it's taken to write this blog another sale appeared on Smashwords. That's 7 total. I'm gonna open the bubbly when it hits double digits. Err, maybe I'll wait until after 11 AM.
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Good news! Books can come back from the dead! Today is the official re-release of my first novel Draugr. All three books in the Northern Frights series have been out of print for several years now, so I'm glad to see the first book rise out of the grave and roar to undead life. It has a lovely new "chilling" cover by Derek Mah. It's being released in ebook format only and I am the publisher (I started a company called Dava Enterprises named after my grandmother, because well...everyone should have a company named after their grandmother). At a future date I'll post about all the reasons why I decided to put the book out on my own (like, err, I get a 70% of cover price royalty instead of a 25% of net royalty) and explain some of the process (if you're interested in that sort of thing).
Draugr came out in 1997. It was my first book to be published after writing six unpublished books. So it does hold a dear, frightful place in my heart. But, as part of the publishing process, I had to read the book again. It is an odd experience to read your own writing fourteen years (and fifteen books) later. I decided to keep the text as original as possible and only fixed a few grammatical mistakes and misspelling of Icelandic names (don't get the Vikings mad, that's a general rule of mine). I'm glad that the book still holds up--at gut level it's a very scary book. And that was the point, of course. I must say I'm still proud of the opening line: "Grandpa was going to murder us. Not with an ax. Not with a shovel. But with words." Just click on this link if you want to see the web page I've put up about the book.
I've priced Draugr at $2.99. That may seem amazingly cheap (or expensive depending on your view), but the reality is I make $2.01 on every copy sold. Which is more (per book) than I've made from the sale of any of my hardcover, trade paperback, or paperback books.
Anyway, if you have one of those fancy Kindles, or iPads, or iPod touches or eReaders of any sort I'll now provide links for you (I'm the publisher, I have to sell the book, right...err and get that author to write another one). The rest of the series will be coming out over the next few months.
Kindle link (US & Canada)
Kindle link (UK)
All other eReaders.
Thanks for joining the party!
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Today, La Cité Bleue d'Icaria d' Arthur Slade is out in France (and Quebec, home of the Montreal Canadiens). Yes, it's the French version of The Dark Deeps, 2nd book of The Hunchback Assignments. Of course, they called the series The Brotherhood of the Clock and changed the title of the second book to "The Blue City of Icaria." But that's the great thing about the French...they have a different word for everything. Viva la France!
