Straddling The Fence
Today’s guest blogger is author Shiloh Walker. Welcome, Shiloh!
I’m currently straddling a fence. I write for four different publishers-two are print and two are epublishers.
I started out in ebooks-my first published book was from Ellora’s Cave, a book I’d written with the plan to submit to Silhouette. It was rejected about the same time I found Ellora’s Cave. I had been hunting for more books by a couple of authors I found in the SECRETS books by Red Sage, found some books by Angela Knight there, gobbled them down, bought more by other authors, gobbled them.
I had my rejection letter in hand and decided, I’m going to do some rewriting on this book and send it to them. If I recall correctly, that was in late summer 2002. I sent it in that fall and sometime later, a couple of weeks, I think, I get a response back-they wanted it. I was happy-thrilled beyond belief. But I had no idea just how much the decision to revamp that story was going to change my life. I had no idea how much money I was going to make. I had no idea what in the world I was getting into.
Epublishing has a lot of appealing options.
Epubs take a variety of story lengths-from 10k up to over 100k and everywhere in between. You won’t find that huge variety in traditional print publishing.
Epubs, because their costs are much lower, can afford to take some risks that print publishers can’t. If a book flops at an epub, there’s no advance the publisher has to eat and there’s no print costs the publisher has to eat, and there’s no fat pile of books to deal with, either.
Since there are fewer costs with epubs, authors get higher royalties. In my experience, it ranges from between 35%-45% of the cover price.
If you tell stories that go a little outside of normal-say, like me, you’ve got a habit of killing husbands (fictionally-not literally), then epublishing can be a great place.
However, it’s not going to work for everybody. Those it does work for, it doesn’t work in the same way for each of us.
Initially, I was writing and working full-time. In 2004, I quit work and just wrote. At that point, I was only writing for my epublishers and I had a release out about every 4-6 weeks. You sell the most copies the month of release and keeping up a steady stream of releases those first few years is how I was able to make writing my full-time job. It worked for me because I write fast.
It works for me now because I have a fairly substantial backlist in a short amount of time, and for epubbed authors, having a good backlist is crucial. If you only have one or two stories out a year, it’s going to be hard to get to the point to where you can write for a living.
It works for me because I have a lot of ideas that aren’t long enough for the 90K I need for my traditional pubs. It works for me because sometimes I write in genres that don’t sell all that great-like fantasy romance.
In the past six years, I’ve written more than fifty ebook titles. Some are shorter stories, some are almost as long as my New York titles. I hit EC right as they were on the cusp of becoming huge, and I hit it right when erotic romance was really starting to take off. I started a vampire series just when the current paranormal trend was really getting big. For me, things just fell into place all at the right time.
Epublishing can be a great outlet for a writer. But it’s not for every writer.
If you don’t write fast, it will take a lot longer to build that backlist, and without that backlist, it will be a long time before you can even think about writing to support yourself and your family.
If you’re looking at epubs as a ‘springboard’ to print publishing, make sure you understand-that it can be a gamble. It has worked that way for some, but it doesn’t work for everybody and it’s probably getting to the point where it’s going to be harder to use epublishing as a way to launch yourself to New York.
There’s also the ‘erotic’ aspect. The ebooks that sell the best are erotic romance. I believe I’d heard that inspirational romances in ebook are starting to get bigger, but the bottom line, if you’re looking at things from a financial perspective, the money lies in erotic romance. So if you don’t write erotic, epubs might not be your best route.
Right now, epubs serve a different purpose for me than they did a few years ago. Since I’m writing for Berkley and Ballantine, I focus my longer books for them. Anything over 90K, I keep for that venue. But a lot of the stuff I write is shorter-I couldn’t make it 90k without padding and over-inflating and basically ruining the book. So those shorter works, I write with the goal of putting them with my epubs. That keeps my name ‘current’ for the readers, continues to build my backlist, and sometimes, those ebooks are a refreshing change of pace. The intensity and pressure from deadlines aren’t as present, for me, with epublishing.
Writing for both works-for me. It works for others. Maybe it can work for you. Or maybe you just want to wade into the ebook waters first. Whichever it is, if you’re interested in pursuing epublishing, make sure you go into with your eyes wide open. Do your research, figure out what your writing goals and decide if you can maintain the pace needed to build up a backlist and establish a reader base.
It can be one hell of a ride. But it can also be a rough one at times, especially if you have unrealistic expectations. If you research and prepare, it can smooth out some of those bumps.
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