Now there are a few players on the field, but the economics of e-book are similar and the Kindle still represents the bulk of the e-book market. Therefore, it’s a good model to use when comparing the numbers side of e-book publishing versus the dead tree model.

Let’s assume for a second that a big dead-tree publishing house is releasing your hardcover book at the usual price of (let’s say) twenty-four American dollars. Assuming a middling hardcover royalty rate of 12.5%, your share is an even three bucks for every copy sold. Your agent get his or her grubby mitts on 15% of your income, leaving you with a tidy sum of $2.55 for every copy sold.

Now, if you were to publish the same book yourself on the Kindle, you could pulled down the same three bucks (and more, without sharing a red cent with a grubby agent) selling the book for less than five dollars. Now, given that you and I are relative unknowns, I think we’ll both sell a hell of lot more copies at $5.00 than we would at $24.00.

“Yes,” you say, “but the publisher will promote my book, and I’ll sit next to Ellen Degeneres on TV.”

For the average author not named James Patterson, that moment typically happens shortly after pigs are seen soaring over the frozen landscape of hell. Most books aren’t promoted at all, or barely at all. As the author who slaved for hours in solitude, putting words after other words, you are also responsible for the heavy lifting for marketing your book, just as if you published it yourself.

And the sales and income from a book, published traditionally, wouldn’t start until close to a year after you signed a deal to publish your book, and that alone could take years to accomplish. Now you may never have a New York Times bestseller , but that’s true regardless of how your book is published.

So, to sum it all up:

• You can make as much or more money per copy selling your book on the Kindle as you could from a traditional publishing deal, while selling your book for far less than the paper edition.
• Even with a traditional publishing you will be the prime mover when it comes to publicity and marketing.
• While you’re waiting for some traditional “dead tree” publisher to decide that your books is worthy of their efforts, it’s certain that no one is reading your book, and equally certain that you’re no earning any income from your work. Even if you only sell a couple hundred copies, that about $600 (using my example above).
• It should be noted that self-publishing via the Kindle (and other mediums) does not preclude a traditional publishing deal later, and may help you establish a track record that will help you attract the attention of a publishing house. It certainly can’t hurt.

Of course, if you have any success as a self-publisher, you may not see a deal with a traditional publisher as a step forward. If you find yourself in that position, let me know, so I can spend some envying you.

In future posts, I will discuss the nuts and bolts of preparing your book for publication on the Kindle. I’ll also go into the economics of self-publishing the print edition with CreateSpace, as well as the various steps along the way.

As I make the necessary steps to promote Human X (and other books down the road), I will point out these steps and explain why I do the things I do.

Now it’s true that traditional publisher have this thing called a marketing department that helps to actually make other people aware that your book exists. The catch is that they won’t do that unless their employer has actually agreed to publish your novel. So while the traditional publisher has marketing muscle behind it to place your book into all the major bookstore chains and conduct advertising campaigns on your behalf, until you’re actually published, no one is doing anything to publicize your work, unless you take it on yourself.

And even if a big publisher takes you on, what are the odds that they are going to mount major ad campaign on your behalf? Not good. How many TV commercials have you seen for a book lately? Unless your name is Dan Brown, James Patterson, or J.K. Rowling, it’s probably not going to happen. The economics of the book industry don’t allow it. And even if you were so lucky, there’s still a lot of publicity work that falls upon your shoulders anyway. Your publisher and your agent can’t turn up at a bookstore and sign books for you, or do any of the drudgework that goes along with being an author. They can kick some doors open, but you actually have to walk through them.

So, to sum it all up, if you go down the route of traditional publishing:

• You will spend a lot of time waiting to hear you book “doesn’t meet our needs at this time.” Even if you’re brilliant, even when you have an agent the odds of being published do not generally run in your favor.
• While you’re waiting, neither you nor your book are being marketed to anyone, except one publisher at time.
• You’re book is not earning you any money at all while you wait. None. Not one red cent. Bupkis.

On the other hand, the self-published author:

• Is solely responsible for marketing himself or herself, instead of mostly responsible, like the traditionally published author. The difference between solely responsible and mostly responsible is not negligible, but it’s hardly insurmountable.
• Is not waiting for anyone but himself or publish to publish a book, which also means that the self-published author:
• Can be earning money from his or her book, even if it’s miniscule amounts at first, right from day one.

The image of the self-published writer used to be (or at least used to seem) that of the desperate artist who, rejected by every major and minor publishing house in the English-speaking world (or whatever world he or she inhabits), makes one last futile, Quixotic lunge for the brass ring. The reality is far different. Plenty of authors over the years have known right from the start that their work is not in the mass-market wheelhouse of the major publishers. They might also want more control over the finished product than is possible via the traditional route. It’s also possible that the self-published author simply has no patience for the bullshit of dealing with a major media conglomerate.

In the old days, a self-publishing author had little choice but to handle a lot of the dirty work all by his or her lonesome. They had to find an editor, printer, and a binder, and then order up as many copies of the book as he or she could afford or find room for.

Those days are over. Welcome to the world of “print-on-demand” (POD). These services keep nothing in inventory but a digital copy of your book. Then, when someone buys a copy, the service takes their cut to cover the printing costs, and send you the rest.

I’m not sure how many of these services exist (there are a least a couple of dozen) major ones, according to one website, but there are only two that have really made a major blip on my radar: Lulu and CreateSpace. There used to be a third, but as far as I can tell, Cafe Press has gotten out of the POD business. I considered these two mostly because many of the others charge a fee up front to publish your work, making them little better than POD variations of the old-fashioned vanity press. To the uninitiated, one author said that a vanity press is to publishing what a loan shark is to banking. This might be unduly harsh in this content, but a POD house that demands any money up front should raise at least a little red flag.

To publish the print edition of Human X, I’m going with CreateSpace, which is a division of Amazon. The economics, compared to Lulu, makes this a no-brainer. My retail price for this book can be about four bucks cheaper at CreateSpace than at Lulu and still make the same amount of money per copy if sell through someone like Barnes & Noble.

For electronic publishing on the Kindle and selling via Amazon, you’re pretty much stuck with Kindle Direct via Amazon themselves. This kind of bites because the process for getting your book uploaded and Kindle-ready isn’t what I would call “hands-off,” but it’s manageable.

To publish on the other two major e-book platforms, NOOK and iBook, I’m still thinking. The choice is between Lulu and SmashWords. SmashWords is more independently oriented, but has a lot to offer in terms of publishing on more formats. They do demand more from the author/publisher when it comes to getting the material ready for publication.

Next time: The economics of independent Kindle publishing versus the traditional route.

Of course, back when they were books “on tape,” you were lucky get more than a semi-famous TV actor reading the Reader’s Digest abridgement of a few best sellers. If you wanted to listen to the unabridged version of Stephen King’s The Stand, even if it had existed, someone would need to back a Peterbilt truck up to your door and leave two shipping pallets full of cassettes on your door step.

In this age of the iPod, of course, I can carry the Library of Congress in my hip pocket, so I get my earful of reading via a service called Audible, which sells audio books via the old interweb, effectively replacing that eighteen-wheeler with my headphones.

It’s a remarkably relaxing way to deal with a commute that now runs between 30 to 40 minutes (okay, not so bad, but longer than I’ve had to deal with for the previous seventeen years), as well as make good use of some normally useless time by cranking through some pretty substantial books. Some of the books I’ve “read” this way include William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the first volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative. I also listened to Frank Herbert’s Dune, three novels by Neal Stephenson, and all three volumes of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

The recordings of these various works vary from straight-ahead readings of the text to out-and-out performances, featuring a large cast of actors, music, and sound effects, as was done with Dune. On the other hand, the two historical books were pretty much straight forward. Third Reich and The Civil War were both read by the same actor, Grover Gardner, but while recording of the first was clean all the way through, the second varied widely in quality, with some parts sounding like they were recorded in a van driving through the Holland Tunnel.

The quality of the performance can affect one’s enjoyment of the book being read. I took a break from Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday because the reader had a way of making the book’s heroine, a super-competent secret agent, sound like a spoiled Valley Girl. I’m currently finishing up John Perkin’s Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and I can’t decide if the author is a self-important windbag or the reader just makes him sound that way.

So, between the Kindle and Audible, I managed to feed my mind with the written word without killing a single tree.

But he was, above all, a brutally honest man. Agree with him or hate him, he never told you anything but what he really felt. That’s a rare quality. He will be and should be missed. The world is poorer tonight.

So what was the problem? What did I stop like that? I can’t answer that question with any authority but I realized that I stopped doing something else.

Reading.

That’s a horrible confession for a writer to make, but I barely cracked a book during the first decade of the millennium. I can’t tell you why, but I can’t say there’s no connection between my lack of input to my lack of output.

What I can tell is what I did this summer. I finally broke down and brought myself an Amazon Kindle™. To give you an idea of what this did to my reading habits, I had been slogging my way through Stephen King’s mammoth doorstop, Under the Dome, for almost a year, using the Kindle app on my iPhone, and was only about halfway through the book. After I had the actual e-reader in my hands, I powered through the remainder of the book in three days.

Let no one tell you that you don’t want the actual reader because you can get the app on your phone for free. It’s not the same. The non-backlit, glare-free screen on the reader is so much closer to actual experience of reading a book that it’s not even close. Lest anyone think this is a commercial for the Kindle, the same thing applies to the NOOK from Barnes & Noble, the Sony, and others. The actual black-and-white e-reader is in all ways superior to reading on a computer, tablet, or phone.

In a good week I can power through two or three books, although a book a week is more realistic now that I’m working, but suddenly, with my reading habits back in gear, my writing muscles emerged from hibernation, and Human X, the book you will hopefully read in early 2012, was the first result.

Okay, in that time I found steady work as a technical writer, so my skills with the mother tongue were not going entirely to waste. That was not, however, the most stimulating use of my talents, so a return to more creative writing was long overdue.

The best thing to happen to me on that front came at the beginning of October, when I lost my job. Normally, that isn’t a cause for celebration, but freeing me from the need to spend eight hours a day in an office allowed me time to break out a concept for a novel that I had been nurturing since sometime during the mid-nineties. Between my last day of work and when I starting my new job in late November, I banged out the healthy 70,000+ words that comprise Human X, a techno-thriller about “gray market” human genetic engineering.

My current plan is to self-publish this thing in early in 2012, both in print and on the Kindle and NOOK. “Why,” you might ask, “don’t I send it into a legitimate publisher?”

What? And waste two years of my life waiting for some corporate slob to grant me permission to share my work with the rest of the world? In all seriousness, I’ll go into the why and the how in a later post.

For the moment, I’m sitting on the manuscript for a few weeks, so I can return to it fresh for one last round of rewriting (“writing is rewriting,” they always say). In the meantime, I’ve started working on another project. Now that I’m working again, I probably won’t be knocking this one out in a little more than a month, but I’ll do my best.
Until next time, then…