I have to confess in this strange early summer holiday season to a coming out. Not my wife will be pleased to learn in the sense that you might have initially imagined!
No I have written a book, a work of fiction which was published over the Easter holidays. In case anybody at my employer reads this, it has been written in my spare time and not during working hours! It is probably not a great or even a good book, but the purpose of this blog is not really about the book but its manner of publication.
Like all budding authors I had submitted my manuscript to a number of literary agents (who can act as a route to a publisher) – and been repeatedly rejected with varying degrees of politeness and sometimes even encouragement. This is a thankless and soul destroying task especially in these economically straitened times. Most litererary agents are looking for rare jewels particularly amongst first time authors. Even J K Rowling was allegedly rejected by quite a large number of publishers. Must have been some gnashing of teeth there at the missed opportunity.
However there is I have discovered a viable alternative to this challenging process. Electronic book publishing.
If like me you have literary aspirations of any kind you can publish your work online as an e-book. I used Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. The process is fairly straightforward and there are excellent idiot proof online guides to constructing your e-book. You create your manuscript in Word, convert it into a “Web Page Filtered (HTML)” document and then load it onto the Kindle site. You can also upload a cover (prepared for me by youngest son who is claiming royalty rights!) and a summary of your work. You decide what category your e-book falls into (mine is loosely a work of historic fiction) and include key words as meta data to help readers find the work. Kindle then publish the e-book and it is available to anyone with a Kindle reader.
And it is a genuine business proposition. You set a royalty rate which for the USA and UK can be 70% and apply an electronic rights management system. You can review regular reports on any royalties that you may earn. The publisher even provides support for the marketing of your book.
For me this process is another great example of how information technology is changing the way we do things, altering the very fabric of our social and business structure. This is disintermediation in practice. I am sure that the advice, guidance and support of a literary agent who in turn finds a suitable publisher would be invaluable and give you a head’s start to success as an author. But if you are not fortunate enough to attract such interest then it seems to me that e-pubishing is a realistic alternative.
If you imagine a future where everybody has electronic readers of some kind then it is not difficult to see this as the new way most books could eventually be published and purchased.
And it is not just dedicated Kindle like readers that work. My youngest son discovered that his (ubiquitous for his generation) iPhone had the relevant app and, funded unwittingly by my wife, dowloaded the book over the weekend. It only costs £2.46 so that’s probably OK and I can now say I have at least sold one copy!
Incidentally I asked said son if he was at all worried that Apple appear to know where he is at any time of the day or night due to the automatic geographical location that comes built in with his device. He was however not at all fussed and shrugged his shoulders. I think he and his peers would just see this as coming with the territory.
And in case you think I am making this all up my book is called “The First Riders” and is available as I say for the modest price of £2.46 from http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004XMOR5K
Clive
