ePublishing: Does it really “count”?

I used to think digital publishing was sort of a cheat, a way to get around the obstacles of traditional publishing for those who get sick of the multiplying rejection letters. It wasn’t “real” publishing, in my mind. After all, my dream was to see my book, with some big publishing house’s insignia on the spine, on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. If it was available only online, that was somehow way less of an accomplishment. Any ol’ person can publish online. Where’s the glory? And, besides, you can’t actually make money by publishing online.

Except you can.

Recently, my friend (and writer) Stephanie Walker sent me this link, which tells the story of Amanda Hocking, a 26-year-old writer who has nine self-published books, selling 100,000+ copies per month online. At $3 per book (70% per sale for the Kindle store), she’s making what my wanna-be-ghetto friend would call “a grip.”

Writer Joe Konrath (whose blog profile quote is, “There’s a word for a writer who never gives up: Published”) explains the benefits of ePublishing like this:

If you’re an indie writer, you get to sell books at a price way, way lower than what a Traditional Publisher can sell at. And yet you make more money, because your only costs are to an ebook and cover art designer (whereas the traditional publisher has to support a legacy system, plus the traditionally published author gets a 30% cut, while you get 70%).

In the meantime, readers are more inclined to buy your stories, even if you’re an unknown author, simply because your book prices are cheaper. So you get high sales, low ebook prices, but high revenue once you’ve hit sufficient scale. And the best thing is that it’s infinitely scalable: your ebooks are out there, getting sales every single day. No shelf-space, no print runs to worry about.

Granted, Konrath was a traditionally-published author before he found success online, but many others (like Amanda Hocking) were not. If you look at this list of bestsellers from the Kindle store, only a handful have had previous deals with print publishers. The rest are selling thousands of books (per month!), at a few bucks per book, with Amazon taking only 30%. Do the math.

This all goes to say that perhaps I should reconsider what “valid” publishing is. If thousands of people are reading a work, and the author is fulfilled by that (along with the paycheck), that seems pretty damn valid to me.

>>Find out how you can self-publish books for sale in the Kindle store.
(I am going to wander over to this link now myself)