Okay so Self Publishing rocks. I know it. Hopefully, you know it. But your brother-in-law might not. I got into a huge 'discussion' with my BIL this weekend over the merits of self pubbing. It was so weird bc it was almost like having a political argument. If I played back the audio and just inserted a few different words, the thing would still sound authentic.
We were looking at things from very different points of view and not really addressing each other's points very well. And both of us were a wee bit too emotional. The only reason I care so much (otherwise I would have exercised a little stfu on myself and let it go) is that he is a great writer. The man can whip out an article in like 30 minutes that would take other still-super-intelligent people a day or two at least. He could be making a full on killing with self pubbing with minimal effort.
His main beef? The 'reputation' of self publishing vs traditional publishing. He didn't want to be seen in any way as low rent or un-intellectual by virtue of how gets published. A sort of 'the message is in the medium' type bias. Of course-- I just showed my own bias by calling his opinion bias, but whatever.
I am going to prove him wrong. Or rather, gently change his opinion. Yeah, that's it. Gently guide him to a different way of seeing the world (my own). If he still chooses to believe the way he does after being presented with all of my kickass facts then that's his loss and I really do need to let it go.
All of these postings will be called 'Proving My Brother-in-Law Wrong' and here is the first tidbit.
After digging in Kindleboards I found this beautiful list of kickass (I just love that word today) self pubbed authors. Kickass being defined by sales numbers:
Amanda Hocking - 1.5 million ebooks sold in the past 20 months (as of Dec 2011) (source: The Guardian UK)
John Locke - sell more than 1,100,000 eBooks in five months
Barbara Freethy - "over one million units of her self-published titles in 2011" (source: prnewswire)
Gemma Halliday - over 1 million self-published ebooks as of March 2012
Michael Prescott - "is approaching 1 million sold"
Christopher Smith - 50,000 times 14 = 700,000
Heather Killough-Walden - "have achieved huge online success and record-breaking sales of over half a million copies" as of end of 2011
J.A. Konrath - He has sold over 500,000 ebooks (source: jakonrath bog)
Selena Kitt - "With half a million ebooks sold in 2011 alone"
Stephen Leather - "After selling close to half a million eBooks over the past twelve months"
CJ Lyons - "CJ now has nine books self e-published with sales of almost half a million books in 2011
Bob Mayer- over 400,000 ebooks by 2011's end
Darcie Chan - over 400,000 as of November 2012 (source: Wall Street Journal)
Bella Andre - over 400,000 as of Feb 2012
Tina Folsom - over 300,000 as of October 2011 (source: USAToday)
J Carson Black - over 300,000 as of November 2011
Kerry Wilkinson - "detective novels sell more than 250,000 copies on Kindle" source: the Guardian UK
T.R. Ragan - 239,592 as of March 2012
And as I said in the last post I will make an effort to include lots of links.
LINKY LINKS
Here is a link to the thread that lists authors that are kickass-lite (sold only over 50k) as defined by the above standards:
http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,103665.0.html
And on a different topic, here is a link to an NYT article that oh so begrudgingly mentions self pubbing. Of course, it manages to subtly belittle it as a 'learning experience' not unlike going to camp when you were a kid and to make it seem outrageously expensive at that (hint-- it's not--that post will be coming up soon).
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
Happy Monday, all.
Kate
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