Joe Konrath has posted again about his successes with self-publishing through Amazon. (We’ve covered a number of such posts from him already.) This time he couches it in the form of a “bedtime story,” which is a bit cutesy but it gets the point across.
Soon, Joe was making over $1000 a month on Kindle.
Joe was shocked by this. He thought the only way to make a living as a writer was with the Gatekeeper. The Gatekeeper offered advances. The Gatekeeper did the editing and the cover art. And most importantly, the Gatekeeper controlled distribution. There was no way to reach readers without the Gatekeeper.
But ebooks didn’t need to be distributed in the same way print books were. So the Gatekeeper wasn’t needed.
It’s great that Konrath is having so much success with his Amazon self-publishing. My only problem with these blog posts is that they’re all starting to say the same things over and over again, as if he just has to keep repeating himself in different phrasing to refresh the story for the search engines every so often.
But then, I suppose this sort of self-publicity is what earned him $22,000 in December, so it’s not as if I can blame him for continuing to spread it on.
I think the repeating of the story is just as much for people as for search engines.
You never know which post is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Also, earning $22K in December is a LOT more than what he was earning earlier in the year – so a new post is warranted. At some level, everyone needs to understand (authors and everyone else in the business) that you have to come up with some angle to get yourself out there, and often it’ll upset/annoy 25% of people. Or it’ll seem like overpromoting yourself. Except the people who are being very polite are usually invisible.