EBook Sales for March 2011

I sold 3421 ebooks in March.

To say I’m thrilled would be an understatement. And if I thought February was great, well, March was even better. I saw a 46% jump in sales in March and it’s my goal now to realize that same sales increase with each succeeding month. Is it sustainable? I think it just might be. More people are flocking to ebooks and ereaders than ever before. And my numbers, as great as they are for me personally, are still a drop in a very, very big bucket. I still have hundreds of thousands of fans to introduce to Lawson. If I can be sure to introduce new Lawson adventures each month, retain readers from each book, and drive new readers to the series, I think it’s very, very possible to make good gains each month. We’ll see if I’m right.

The vast majority of my sales in March came from my Lawson vampire series. THE FIXER alone sold 953 copies on the US Amazon site. The other three novels all posted solid triple-digit sales and even the two novellas made it into triple digits. The Lawson short stories, while not as impressive sales-figures-wise, still managed to add several hundred dollars to my bottom line. And this next week will see the addition of a new Lawson novel, THE ENCHANTER (previously known as THE MADAGASCAR MATTER before it became a full-fledged novel) as well as a new novella titled THE SHEPHERD. I’m hoping that more and more people will find the series and really enjoy what I’m doing with it. Add to that the new redesign of THE FIXER website – which will be THE place for all things Lawson (including the TV series) and you have some very cool things happening right now.

For me, this new world of ebooks sales is extremely gratifying. I’m earning a very respectable wage on ebook sales (roughly $150 bucks each day) and I couldn’t be more pleased. I get a monthly check (net 60 days) which certainly makes things a lot easier to budget and plan for. I’d like to take a moment to say thanks to everyone who has purchased ebooks over the last few months. I write for you and I hope you really have fun with Lawson.

Oh, and by the way, PREY is coming soon. It needed a bit more revision work, but it will be out within the next month.

300 Ebooks in One Day?

So, we’re getting down to the end of the month and I’ve been very happy with my ebook sales. I’ve already surpassed last month, but I want to introduce even more people to my Lawson series. So, I’m posting a bit of a challenge – feel free to play along! I’m going to try to sell 300 copies of THE FIXER today, Friday, March 25th. Doesn’t matter if it’s for the Kindle or the Nook and there are links to each out here.

But I’d like your help in spreading the word about it. If you have a few friends who you think would enjoy the series, then please pass this on to them. In a few short weeks, the official website for THE FIXER TV series will debut along with new video footage, new books, and much more. This is the time to drive new fans to the series and get them hooked on the fun-filled world of Lawson.

Get THE FIXER for the Kindle | Get THE FIXER for the Nook

So please join me today and pick up a copy of THE FIXER. If you already have it, please make sure you’ve got the rest of the series, since we’ll be unveiling new adventures very soon.

Use the “share buttons” below to help spread the word – especially on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for your help!

Barry Eisler Snubs $500K Traditional Deal to Go Indie

Bestselling author Barry Eisler of the famed John Rain series of thrillers has just turned down a $500,000 traditional publishing deal with St. Martin’s Press in order to go the indie publishing route. He and Joe Konrath talk it out over a lengthy, but SO worth your time post over on Konrath’s Blog. The short of it is this: things are changing, traditional publishers are locking up right s and paying writers crap. So screw it and go indie. But check it out and then come on back. I’ll be here…

Good read, right? And I’m one of those traditional authors who has recently seen the light. For February, I made $3200 from ebook sales – the majority of it coming from my Lawson Vampire backlist and new adventures not available in print. For March, I’m on track to do even better. This isn’t flash-in-the-pan stuff. It’s not some marginal fringe movement (no matter how badly those whose livelihoods are tied to traditional publishing might wish you to believe).

This. Is. Real.

Ebooks aren’t going away. More ereaders are flooding the market at lower price points. And a reasonable price point on ebooks means they become “impulse buys” instead of drawn out financial decisions. Think about iTunes. 99 cents for a song? Easy buy. Click, click, click.

Is print dying? No. But people aren’t buying books like they used to. I’ve often said that my job is to deliver entertainment. I personally don’t really care how that entertainment gets delivered, just so long as it does. And with the plans I have in motion now (“In 3 weeks, everything changes…” <--mysterious side comment not associated with this post) that will be realized. More books, more control, less time to bring books to market, better ability to adapt to changing market conditions, and a consistent and expanding audience. Sounds like a winning combination to me.

Read an E-Book Week

Sunday marked the start of Read an E-Book Week, a new initiative to introduce more readers to ebooks and their lasting place within the world of content. Obviously, given my success with ebooks last month, I’m very interested in introducing more readers to my work, so a week long push to drive more people to ebooks sounds like a great idea to me. If you’ve got a Kindle, you can check out a complete list of my work by clicking here. And if you’ve got a Nook or other e-reader that handles the epub format, please click here to see what’s available.

Sunday, I also passed something of a milestone. On the 6th day of March, I sold my 1000th ebook of the month. That’s pretty damned cool. My ebook experiences are definitely opening up a whole new world of possibilities and I’m thrilled to meet so many new fans. if you’ve read one or all of my ebook offerings, I hope you’ll recommend them to several friends so my audience continues to grow through

Later this week, the next issue of Boston Nocturne goes out, so make sure you’re subscribed to it since the next installment of the free Lawson adventure MISSION: MALTA will be in the newsletter. Also, later this week or early next, my debut column over at Inveterate Media Junkies goes live. I’ll post details on that when I have them. It will make for interesting reading, though…

The End of Fabruary

Bunch of stuff to talk about today…

Last week was spent suffering through a nasty bout of the flu. I was down for most of the week (the worst was actually over in about two days, but the lingering effects sucked) and spent all my awake time finishing off my final Rogue Angel novel. I’ve had an absolute blast writing on that series, but after eleven novels, I’m pretty burned out. The folks at Gold Eagle are fantastic to work with and I really enjoyed my time with them.

But I’m excited about things ahead for one big reason: the preceding month has been renamed to “Fabruary.”

Let me explain…

I’ve always viewed the coming ebook revolution with something of a jaded eye. After a decade or more in this business, I’m always wary of supposedly “new” things. But I’ve also been playing around with ebooks for a few years now. I had some early success with it with regards to Parallax and then, after putting out a host of novels, short stories, and a few other things, my sales flatlined at about $100 earnings each month for the last year. That means I was making about a hundred bucks on sales of everything I had out on the Amazon Kindle platform. Not impressive, by any means – especially when I’d read blogs by other folks like Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking (she just bought a house for cash with her ebook earnings), and even some closer friends and colleagues – all of them were enjoying some serious success.

And I wasn’t.

So, I decided to try to remedy that. At the end of January, I put my entire Lawson backlist – four novels, a novella, and four short stories – out on both the Kindle and the Nook platforms. In February, I also debuted a new novella, SLAVE TO LOVE, and then in late February, I reworked the cover of Parallax, dropped its price to 99 cents, and put an excerpt from THE FIXER in the back of it. The goal was to use Parallax as something of a gateway drug to my Lawson series.

The results have been amazing.

Thanks to a series of incredible covers, the Lawson backlist is selling very well, indeed. As of this moment, THE FIXER alone has sold 450 copies on the US Kindle store alone. Priced at $2.99, the novel has earned me $900 and change this month. That’s 100% gorgeous passive income – and it’s 9 times what I made in total for the previous 9 months.

Ah, but I’ve got more than one Lawson novel. I’ve got four. The other three are all selling triple digits. The novellas are closing in on 3 digits and the short stories are selling very well.

So, by itself, the Lawson backlist was generating very strong sales during the shortest month of the year.

Then I dropped the price on Parallax. Until I reworked the cover, I’d sold 4 copies all month. After I dropped the price to 99 cents, I sold many more copies. As of last Friday, I’d sold just over 150 on the Kindle and perhaps 50 on the Nook.

But on Saturday morning, something incredible happened: Barnes & Noble featured Parallax in an email promo to its customers. Nothing elaborate; just a simple shot of some book covers. Parallax was featured in its “thrifty reads & great stories” section. I had no idea this had happened until very late Saturday night. Saturday morning, I saw that Parallax had suddenly sold 55 copies and I thought, “huh, interesting.” I continued to watch the numbers climb all day and into Saturday night. By midnight, it had done 347 copies for the day.

Incredible. My sales rank in the Nook store was beating the likes of JD Robb/Nora Roberts and I was on par with ebook success Amanda Hocking. I had no way of knowing if the trend would last, but yesterday, I sold 233 copies.

Staggering.

I have no idea if the Parallax burst will last, but I’m thrilled to have gotten such an amazing push. I’ve sold 25 copies this morning. You can still get it for the Nook HERE and on the Kindle HERE for just 99 cents. It’s a great book, one of my best.

So, with all that said, I’m very excited. The ebook revolution means that I have the freedom to write whatever I want and get it out there as soon as it’s ready for mass consumption. No longer do I have to slave over a proposal and hope that an editor in New York understands the scope of the project, gets excited, can then pitch it to a room full of supposed experts, gets the green light to acquire it, makes a decent offer (lol), and then tells me the book will be out in about a year. Now, if I have an idea I think is cool, I can just write the thing and put it out. If it flops, no biggie. If it’s a hit – all the better. But the amount of time and number of hoops to jump through for me to reach my readers has now been drastically winnowed.

After all, it’s always been about the readers. Or rather, it should have always been about the readers. That hasn’t always been the case with the traditional publishing model.

But now, it can be.

Am I through with traditional publishing? Probably not. But I will say this: my attitude has been changed tremendously given the success I’ve had in the shortest month of the year. I have big plans to get a lot more material out for ereaders – more Lawson, new series, fun stuff – a veritable ton of things that have only been ideas and “failed” proposals until now. (I say “failed” only because they didn’t sell in the traditional publishing world.)

The landscape is changing. Dramatically.

Borders has gone bankrupt. Is B&N going that way, too? Probably not since they adopted an ebook strategy. But the thing about ebooks is this: they’re not going to stop. And more people will get an e-reader. I love the feel of traditional books, but even I have been reading some things on my iPhone lately. We’re either at a tipping point or beyond it now. Millions are reading ebooks and millions more will soon join them.

Traditional publishers need to seriously revamp their contracts. Right now, the industry standard is 25% net on ebook sales.

That’s crap.

And as much as they may insist that costs are high for producing an ebook, it’s a bogus argument. I can put an ebook out on the Kindle and it takes me perhaps thirty minutes to do. Same for the Nook. I can hire someone to design a great cover.

So why would I give a publisher more than 50% of the proceeds from ebook sales?

For me personally, there’s a lot to think about in the coming months. Where do I want my career to go? With THE FIXER TV series moving ahead, do I want my books tied up by a traditional publisher that doesn’t pay me a fair rate?

Before the ebook revolution, the folks in New York (by and large) determined the destinies of writers.

Since the ebook revolution, that power has shifted. On a seismic scale. Writers now control their destinies. We can write what we want and sell it to our readers. Fewer middlemen means a lot of very good things, indeed.

I’m excited.

For the month of Fabruary, I just broke $3,000 in earnings for my ebooks. 30 times what I’d earned each month for the previous year. (and frankly, there are many writers making a LOT more than that right now, so my potential for sales isn’t going to go down, it’s going to go up as I a) produce more material, b) the number of folks reading ebooks climbs, and c) the number of e-readers sold climbs…)

That kind of success can make a person stop and think.

And it should.

So, while I do that, here’s a new review of THE KENSEI and a fun little Q&A with Talya. Enjoy!