three quarters
I crunched some numbers this week, and I’m pleased to report that as of April 2017, I have sold 750,000 ebooks worldwide.
Thanks everyone! Dang, that’s a lot of ebooks. The town where I grew up had only 20,000 people in it.
Back in the previous decade, GHOST IN THE FLAMES got rejected by legacy publishers a few dozen times, so I like to think the 750,000th ebook was a copy of GHOST IN THE FLAMES. 🙂
-JM
I have loved Frostborn and look forward to checking out the rest of your books! Keep at it 🙂
Kind regards, Anna
Thanks! Glad you liked the FROSTBORN series.
WOW!!! Congratulations!
Many thanks!
First. Congrats!
I don’t know very much about publishing, but it seems to me that even given your success, the traditional publishers weren’t necessarily wrong to reject your books. Doesn’t their model require that they average 100,000+ copies of EACH book they sell? Your model seems to be more write lots and lots of books (80+) and sell maybe 10,000 or so of each book. Do you think that if a traditional publisher had picked up your series that they would’ve sold vastly more? Enough to make up for the much bigger bite they take out of the profits?
I’m wondering if it’s actually a win-win-win for them to have rejected your books. You’re better off (the publishers don’t gobble up all of the revenues), they’re better off (you don’t fit their model), and we readers are better off because you were freed to follow your instincts and able to write more books?
Thanks! And thanks for hanging around to read!
It didn’t used to be that way with publishing. Back before the 90s, 5,000 copies sold was average for a novel. Then the publishing industry in the US started to conglomerate, and so did the big box bookstores. (Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch have written good blog posts on this.) So by the time I started writing seriously in the early 2000s, we had a few big publishers in a cozy relationship with a few big box bookstores. The big box bookstores and the big publishers had totally dominated their ecosystem, which meant they had no defense when Amazon came along and started devouring it. I suppose it was like generals who had invested billions of dollars and decades of training preparing to fight the last war, and then some new tactic or technology comes along and stomps them.
But in hindsight, I lucked out big-time by not getting tradpubbed in the last decade and having all my books free and unencumbered when self-publishing came along. Last week I answered some emails from a tradpub SF/F writer who had questions about self-publishing. Fifteen or twenty years ago, getting published by Tor or Roc or whatever might have been impressive. Nowadays, to be totally blunt about it, I would view it as a huge financial drag and a step down from what I’m doing now. But I freely admit my dislike for traditional publishing might color my thinking on that.
How goes ghost in the ring
If all goes well, I hope I can finish tomorrow and start uploading on 6/2.
Already available on Amazon. Decisions, decisions. . . Start reading now or wait unti morning,. Flip coin. Imagine that. Came up start reading now.