BellaOnline Forums Computers Desktop Publishing Can you sell 100,000 books?

If you've written a book and are thinking about how to go about publishing it, you'll want to read this article about the pros and cons of self-publishing, and one young author who recently sold 100,000 of her self-published books on Amazon...in one month!

Should I Self-Publish My Book?

--Maria

Great article, Maria!

I'll be self-pubbing when (not if, darnit, Cricket) I finally finish my WIP. I think it's absolutely doable, but I think that self-pubbers have absolutely GOT to make their stuff LOOK as professionally done as possible.

Amanda Hocking, for example. I'm about to start the Trylle trilogy, but I've just devoured all four of her My Blood Approves series. Fabulous story, engaging characters, well done story all the way around. But the typos and the grammatical errors KILL me. Her stuff is way too appealing for those sorts of mistakes, and it pulls me from the work every time like nails down a chalkboard. It's mentioned in almost every review I've read of her stuff, so I can't imagine she doesn't know the problem exists. In an interview, she says that her work is proofed several times and that she's got a paid editor.

Now, I'm not picking on her, like I said, I love her stuff and I've bought 5 of her books thus far. But if authors are to break free of the stigma that self-publishing is only for those authors who just couldn't cut it in "regular" publishing, our works have got to be better (stronger, faster) on *every* level.

Darn straight, girl: when, when, when....never IF!


I totally agree. Now, even traditionally published books have occasional errors, and grammar & usage are sometimes a matter of opinion (I use a lot of "loose" terminology in my work like gotta, gimme, uh-huh, etc.), but there is a basic level of proofing that every book should have before you ask people to give you money for it, IMHO. Misspelled words especially bother me, because those can be caught by software. But even the more subtle errors that require a human eye can be found just by trading proofing with some other author friends. There's no excuse for not cleaning it up!

--Maria

Interesting update to this article! Just a couple days after I posted it, one of the authors I mentioned in the article, H.P. Mallory, was approached by Random House about publishing her books with them. She has not decided whether she will take their offer, as she is doing plenty well on her own, but it's certainly an interesting turn of events that the self-published authors are now being approached by the big publishers, instead of the other way around!

--Maria

I love the idea of posting a ton of ebooks on amazon. That honestly sounds like a lot of fun, and i love the idea of recurring income.

Talk about recurring income! One of the other authors I mentioned, the young Amanda Hocking, just signed a 4-book deal with a big name publisher for a reported two million dollars! Granted, both of these ladies (Hocking and Mallory above) may be exceptions to the rule, but there are dozens, even hundreds of previous nobodies now making a decent income by selling ebooks.

These are some interesting times we are living in.

--Maria