From Rags to riches on the Kindle: SleuthFest 2011 and February sales.
By Mike Jastrzebski
I spent the weekend at the SleuthFest writer's conference which is put on every year by the Florida chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. I think this is my seventh year attending the conference and as always it's great to visit with old friends and pick up a tip or two from the panels.
The biggest difference I noticed this year was the attitude of writers, editors and agents toward e-books. Last year, the general theme among these attendees was that e-books were such a small percentage of books sold that they weren't very important. This year everyone admits that they are.
Last year I started talking about releasing my historical novel, The Storm Killer
, as an e-book and the general consensus was that I was wasting my time. When I referenced what I'd been reading on Joe Konrath's blog I was told, "You can't believe everything Joe says. Nobody can be making that kind of money on e-books. Boy has their attitude changed.
As I talked with fellow writers this year and told them what my sales have been, (I sold 319 copies of The Storm Killer and 493 copies of Key Lime Blues (A Wes Darling Mystery)
for a total of 812 sales in February) even some of the big name publishers wanted more information. I'm holding back the names of these writers because I know they would prefer that their publishes didn't know about their interest, but believe me, it's there.
As for the publishers, well they claim not to be worried about e-book sales. Their attitude is they'll just adjust for the decrease in paper book sales and increase in e-book sales. They believe that at best e-books will only account for 50% of book sales in five years. I suppose they could be right, but I'm willing to bet that fiction e-books will make up a far greater percentage than 50%.
As for the agents, they're a bit more realistic about matters. They're afraid they may lose some of their mid-list writers to self publishing on the Kindle, and all of the agents I spoke with had a rough idea of how many books a self published e-book writer would have to be selling before they would be interested in talking to a writer.
The number varied. One agent said a thousand books a month, another set the bar a fifteen hundred a month and a third agent told me that they would rather see a long term track record. The figure mentioned by that agent was 10,000 books sold over a year.
So I ask the readers of this blog, if you were selling 10,000 e-books a year, how big of an advance would you want to be offered before you would consider pulling your books off of Amazon and signing with a traditional publisher? I don't have a figure that I would accept, but I know that a $50,000 advance would not be enough to tempt me.
By the way, if you are wondering, I'm not worried about having that offer at this time. My total sales for both books since July of 2010 when my first book went on sale are only a little over 4000 books. Want to test my resolve? Buy my books, push my numbers higher, and I promise that if an offer ever comes in I'll write about it on this blog.
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