My fall “Talking Indies” column, “Three Money Lessons for Starry Eyed Authors,” comes out today at TW. It summarizes three important lessons I’ve learned since I dove full-time into the publishing and writing world in 2012. The column is intended to be slightly provocative and amusing as well as heuristic with respect to self-publishing. It deals, essentially, with key economic/business elements that all writers need to understand — supply and demand in the writing world is not something to gloss over if you’re an indie author.
These three lessons are not unique to self-publishing. They are true for all the arts, and not just for indie artists, but for everyone in the world of creativity.
1. There’s a shitload of other work out there, i.e., you have more competition than you can possibly imagine (supply)
2. Unless you’re The Beatles or Picasso — or Derek Jeter — no one cares what you just put onto the market (demand)
3. The digital world makes product availability infinitely perpetual (leap frogging the supply and demand problem)
All three points are obvious and essential to understand for success in the modern world where half of what we do, think, Continue reading
At the end of the summer, Amazon offered to let all of us authors and publishers in on their new Kindle MatchBook program. MatchBook is an interesting deal. It’s set up to allow readers to get the e-book edition of a book at a very low cost when they buy the paperbound version — kind of a 2-for-1 thing.
