Ack! I’ve been neglecting the litfarm lately–things are crazy at my day job–and I apologize for that. I’ve got over a dozen posts in the queue, but they all need some attention first. In the meantime, to hold you over, The Guardian has an article about the boom in the self-publishing industry.

While definitive figures on sales generated by self-published books are hard to come by, there are estimates that they could be well into the billions of dollars. A report, Under the Radar by the Book Industry Study Group estimated that non-calculated sales by smaller publishers and self-publish companies could be as high as $14.2bn (£7.3bn) in 2005, the last year statistics were available.

A quick look at Lulu’s list of best-selling fiction has an author who turned his self-published novel into a book deal with St Martin’s. Admittedly, he writes somewhat Christian fiction, which is a market that’s been under served by traditional publishing houses, but even so it’s encouraging.

Another interesting site mentioned in the article is Wowio.com, an online store that sells nothing but ebooks.

So go read that. When you’re done, there ought to be some more posts here.

A lot has been written about the long tail, and how internets is workin’ for businesses like Amazon, who make a good deal of their money off niche sales that are possible because of the large number of customers they can reach with internets. Good old internets.

But you’re probably wondering, What Can Internets Do for Me? Kevin Kelly’s recent blog post 1,000 True Fans aims to find out. The short version:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

His argument is compelling. He says that the True Fan is someone who will read everything you write, go to all your concerts, buy the t-shirt, everything. If you figure that a True Fan is going to spend $100 per year doing this, that’s $100,000 of income for you, the artist. This works especially well for musicians, who have concerts, t-shirts, mp3s and related swag, but check out the angle for an author. Say your novel is selling for $15. Whether you’re providing a print-on-demand title or have a publisher, if you can get the word out to your 1,000, that’s $15,000 in sales at the cost of keeping a blog, an email list or a forum. That’s enough to make a first-time author significantly more attractive to a potential publisher.

And one thousand is a relatively small number. If you managed to get a few hundred a year, you’d have your thousand in under five years. As I mentioned in an earlier post, word of mouth is still the number one way publishers sell books. That’s 1,000 words. Of mouths. Or just mouths.

It’s a lot, is what I’m saying.

The article also talks about Street Performer Protocol (a term I was familiar with as “ransomware”) and other alternate methods of funding creative projects, including Fundable, a site built to handle the tricky business.

Way back at the end of 2007, the Vancouver Sun published some predictions on talented unknowns set to blow up in Aught Eight. (Notice how I imply that Aught Eight is some kind of trendy new way of referring to 2008, therefore firming up my hipster-cred. It could be, for all I know.) Anyway, on the list of people we need to keep an eye on, is my fellow alumna (TWS ‘06) Gurjinder Basran:

A regional manager with Bell Mobility and a mother of two, north Delta’s Gurjinder Basran squeezed a creative writing program at Simon Fraser University into her life. There she wrote a novel about a young Indo-Canadian woman trying to assert her independence in a strict Punjabi Sikh community. She’s calling it Everything Was Goodbye.

Apart from Ranj Dhaliwal’s Daaku, not many novels have been written about the Indo-Canadian experience. Few books speak to “the first generation that grew up here,” says 35-year-old Basran, who is seeking an agent and a publisher. “I’m hoping it will resonate with all kinds of people.”

Not only that, but the novel is a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, one of 100 entries out of 5,000 chosen by Penguin editors for the final read-through to narrow the field to ten books, which will then be chosen by Amazon readers… and presumably will be published by Penguin, although there’s no information about that on the Amazon site that I could find. Check out the excerpt of Everything Was Good-bye for as a free download from Amazon.

So says Paulo Coehlo, who when his publisher was none too keen about distributing digital versions of his work, set up a blog, Pirate Coelho, to help fans find P2P downloads. What was the effect? Sales. In a speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of The Alchemist made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more. Here’s a link to a blog post with video of the speech on torrentfreak.com.

Why does it work? From the Guardian book blog:

… giving away free digital copies of books makes a lot more sense that giving away free digital copies of music. Downloading a couple of chapters allows you to see how much you might like an author unknown to you. The point being that most of us who like what we read are then likely to go on and purchase the physical copy of the book, because so few of us have the stamina to read an entire book from a screen.

Coelho is one of the biggest names I’ve heard of adopting the strategy espoused by Cory Doctorow, et al. My guess is that we’ll see free sample chapters as a mainstream marketing strategy in a year or two, if not complete works. Good news for writers just starting out: setting up a torrent of your novel could emerge as a viable (and cheap) way of bootstrapping yourself into a publishing contract.

To celebrate the seventh anniversary of his blog, Neil Gaiman and HarperCollins have decided to release one of his books as a free download. Which one is up to you. Gaiman is conducting a vote on his blog. The winning book will be posted online for free by the publisher, who will also track sales following the download. If the experiment sparks sales, presumably HC will do the same with other titles.

Exciting!

If you’re like me a few minutes ago, you’re wondering who Steven Poole is. He’s a blogger and the author of Trigger Happy, a non-fiction book on the aesthetics of video games. Anyway. He blogged about the Kindle and after the subsequent fooferaw, has decided to experiment with ebooks by giving his book away as a free PDF for a while.

I haven’t read the book, but here on the litfarm we’re intrigued by authors giving away free, electronic versions of their books, in the hopes it’ll translate into dead-tree sales. Or at least a little bit more glory.

So check it out. If you like it, why not pick up a copy? Or not. That’s ebooks for you.