Quote:
Originally Posted by caleb72
You're chock full of Hugh these days.  |
Just contributing what I find that appears to be interesting enough to share, like the below.
Quoted from
forbes.com
Quote:
If E.L. James represents publishing’s most promising new formula, another writer named Hugh Howey represents an existential threat. A 38-year-old college dropout passing time behind the register of a North Carolina bookstore, Howey has become publishing’s entrepreneurial superstar after readers turned his postapocalyptic short stories into online bestsellers starting in 2011, all without the help of the mainstream publishing industry.
Watching how a regional publishing house handled the rollout of his first novel in 2009, he realized that he could access the same tools they did to put the book on Amazon, for instance, or send it off to a printer. When he wrote his first Wool novella, set in a future where humans live underground, scraping by for survival, he decided to bypass the book industry’s traditional route and publish it himself on Amazon.com.
That decision made him a multi-millionaire. Within months he’d sold more than 14,000 copies of his work, including self-published print editions, and readers were clamoring for more. So he wrote new Wool books. By the time publishers and agents caught on, their deals made little financial sense to him. In May 2012 he was already earning more than $125,000 a month. Six- and then seven-figure offers didn’t stack up. Though he eventually found an agent to help him sell foreign rights (a single-volume edition of the Wool novellas has been published in 30 countries), land a big movie deal (with Twentieth Century Fox and producer Ridley Scott) and cut a six-figure agreement with Simon & Schuster for limited U.S. print rights, he’s kept all the core facets of the publishing business, from marketing to distribution, in his own hands.
He sets prices, determines the cover art and makes 70% on e-books and $5 to $6 per paperback he sells through Amazon’s CreateSpace division, versus about a buck a book or less through Simon & Schuster. To attract new readers he gives the first book in his series away for free. He says he could “live comfortably” on what he earns on his self-published audiobooks alone.
The number of self-published books produced annually in the U.S. more than tripled to 250,000 between 2006 and 2012, according to publishing industry analyst Bowker. A handful of outfits, like CreateSpace, e-book publisher Smashwords, Penguin Books’ Author Solutions and Lulu Enterprises, dominate the DIY industry, charging just a few dollars to hand writers and small houses the keys to a complete publishing system.
“I think this is rating up there with the invention of the printing press,” says Howey. “I think Gutenberg and e-books have the same kind of democratizing effect on publishing.”
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