The eNovel experiment has been going for one week, so here's my first report.
1. Thanks to Corie Cornwell's Orphic Workshop, the store went up pretty much without a hitch, and we made our first sale within four minutes of going live. I calculated that if we kept up that rate, we would make about a million dollars a year for our charities.
2. As you may have guessed, sales trickled off to a more reasonable rate after the first four minutes. But if it keeps up at the current weekly rate, and if I keep putting up more novels, we should exceed $10,000 a year. And, unlike paper books, these books should keep selling year after year. That's my hope, anyway.
3. So far, 70% of my sales are to people I know personally, so I may be seriously overestimating future sales. And most writers shouldn't take me as a model anyway, because I already have a website that has attracted about 40,000 readers (or reads) a year for the past 10 years. Whether in a bookstore or on line, you have to have traffic to sell books.
4. One benefit I've already received is the feedback from readers with comments and typos to report. I am able to correct a book in minutes and put the corrected version in the eStore. Hopefully, the rate of typos will diminish quickly, making the books about as "perfect" as books can be.
5. One final learning to report for today. I discovered that receiving a report of a sale gives me a jolt of writing energy that surpasses anything Jolt Cola could produce. It's a reminder that someone out there intends to read my work. Like other writers who have reported to me, I sometimes bog down with the thought that nobody will read what I'm writing. I don't let it affect me much (certainly no so-called 'writers block'), but it takes some of the fun out of writing. Selling books every day puts that fun, and more, back in the process.
So, watch for future reports, and by all means, visit my eStore.
You might even want to buy a novel. They're only $4.99, a real bargain these days.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Just finished “First Stringers”. Great stuff. Fast-paced. Eagerly awaiting the sequel.
Errata: there was more than just “typos”. When I saw the first one I said “so what”. When I saw the second one I repressed the urge to start making notes, saying I bought the book to enjoy reading it, not to edit it. My impression is that there were fewer than a dozen in the whole book, and that’s probably worth a C+ on the errata scale. By now, I’m sure other readers have reported them all, so I need not inflict that particular kind of help.
This got me thinking about the book-creating process. It seemed to me in spots that you had made revisions after the last editing pass. This tells me I’ll need to find an editor for my books – even though I am a careful writer I sometimes notice errors after publishing a piece.
You may recall my urging you to try Word’s spell checker and your being pleasantly surprised with the result. Going by some of the errata, I now invite you to try the grammar checker as well. In addition to finding things like incomplete sentences and disagreements of tense or number, it also computes readability statistics. Up to this point, it reports a Flesch Reading Ease of 66.9 (fairly high) and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 7.2 (quite easy). It also flagged the four sentence fragments in my first paragraph. And it has limitations and is no mechanical substitute for skilled writing and editing – it didn’t like the word “your” in the first sentence of this paragraph, but Strunk and White continue to sleep undisturbed.
Very useful comments, Brian, not just for me and this book. No matter how many screening passes I make, there always seem to be more nits to resolve.
I don't use Word, so I can't try the grammar checker. Sometimes, I intentionally use incomplete sentences for effect. (Sometimes, just for effect.)
I always welcome reports of errors of any kind. One advantage of using this eBook format is the ability to correct errors at any time, so the ms. grows cleaner with time. If you find an error, it almost certainly means it hasn't been reported before, else I would have fixed it.
I’m a nut about grammar checking. I read fairly fast, and a broken sentence just brings everything to a jarring halt. I’m compelled to try to see what the author meant to say.
So I googled and got over 200,000 hits for “mac grammar checker”. There seem to be at least several programs available, I suppose under the usual “basic free/advanced priced” terms. It seems only sensible to use whatever tools you can to enable your editor to be as effective as possible. Then s/he can notice things like “blue car” on page 93 vs. “green car” on page 194.
I write commercial copy and highly value perfection as to language, since imperfection detracts from the effectiveness of the message. If Word’s grammar checker went away, I would immediately look for a replacement. I, too, use fragments for effect; I want to know when I’m breaking the rules.
Post a Comment