Recent content by Kevin O. McLaughlin

Paying for reviews IS an ethical grey area. Understand: it's industry standard for major US publishers. Almost every imprint from almost every major US publishing company buys reviews. It's business as normal. Beyond things like Kirkus, they also pay PR companies to get them a whole bunch of...

Or on a phone, or on a tablet! Seriously, WAY worth it for this deal. Awesome books. :)

Hey guys! Thought I'd jump in here and let folks know about my newest project. I’ve officially launched my first Kickstarter on April 27th. It will run for 30 days, and if it’s funded, it’ll kick off a fiction writing adventure for me and every reader who’s signed on with the project...

You'll have to make your own judgement on whether or not to enter based on the scientology bit... But the contest is well known, well run, and reputable. Winning, or even being a finalist, is noteworthy and stands out as a good bit for the resume for any spec fic novice. It's one of the only...

What I think some of the posters above have missed is that your bio is now part of your sales pitch. You are selling YOURSELF - as a storyteller - to your readers. Which means that if you're writing literary fiction, mentioning that Columbia U MFA in Writing might help. If you're writing pretty...

Anyone with the tech savvy to program this spider PROBABLY has the skills to use a proxy to mask an IP. ;) That said, Amazon gets crawled all the time. By Google, by other retailers... And Amazon crawls other retailers back. It's normal.

Excellent points, Stephen. No disagreement there. Interesting, though - the publisher is trying to pay for HER marketing expertise, and she's seeing marketing as really the only advantage the publisher can still offer her. But of course, they can't.

The sad thing is, even at the highest end, publishers really don't as a rule have much of an idea how to get those first 3500 readers. They're very good at selling books to bookstores. They're mediocre at best at selling books to readers. *shrug* Think about it - it's not their fault, really...

Wow, great list up there! Yes, Passive Voice, Konrath, DWS, Kris Rusch - basically this is your "who's who" of major spots for indies. I'd add in Hugh, now. And Lindsay, while perhaps not as well known, is an AWESOME source as well. Gaughran does not post as often, but is great. Consider...

I like the DBW report too. I found it fascinating, because it said something that Hugh's report really only hinted at. According to the DBW charts, it is VERY clear that the median and mean author will make significantly more money as an indie than as a trad pub writer. Found that interesting...

Speaking from personal experience in both indie and trad... 1) To roughly match a publisher for quality of editing and cover, you're looking at spending $1000-2000. Yes, some publishers spend more than this, especially on "big" books. But that's the figure level to roughly match their effort as...

Funny thing is, even as staunch an advocate of indie publishing as I am...? If a publisher offered me "game changing" money for a book, I'd be likely to take it, provided I could get the non-compete defanged. By game changing, I mean enough to say cut back my day job from full to half time for a...

There are always some folks who do better than usual on any platform. I make almost half my sales between Kobo and B&N - that's HIGHLY unusual. I know a writer who makes 3/4 of her sales on Apple - which has a single digit market share. Some writers are reporting Smashwords is where they make...

This isn't just a survey of people; it's a survey of data. It's a grab of the actual data from the actual retail website. VERY different from past surveys. But yes, you have to keep in mind the data source when analyzing it. :) Except the data took that into account, and showed that indies...

Hmmm. Most of the data is pretty obvious, to me. But I've been immersed in it for a while now - so I recognize that what might be "common knowledge" to one person might be new and radical to another. For example, go read any fifty contracts from a major publisher issued in the last year, and...