Wall Street Journal
by Jeffrey Trachtenberg
31 Oct 11
….Vanity presses have been available for decades. But thanks to digital technology and particularly the emergence of e-books, the number of self-published titles exploded 160% to 133,036 in 2010 from 51,237 in 2006, estimates R. R. Bowker, which tracks the publishing business.
Amazon.com Inc. fueled the growth by offering self-published writers as much as 70% of revenue on digital books, depending on the retail price. By comparison, traditional publishers typically pay their authors 25% of net digital sales and even less on print books.
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Self-published women's fiction writer Darcie Chan has seen her new work, "The Mill River Recluse," hit No. 5 on The Wall Street Journal's list of digital fiction bestsellers for the week ended Oct. 23. Ms. Chan priced her novel about a secretive widow living in Vermont at 99 cents, and says she has sold "hundreds of thousands" of copies since it went on sale on Amazon in May. The book, also carried by Barnes & Noble Inc. and other e-retailers, was previously rejected by major publishing houses.
"My original intention was to gradually get my name out there as a writer, because when it was rejected one of the things I heard was that nobody knew me," says Ms. Chan. "I never expected this."
Ms. Chan says the book was featured on several Kindle-related sites that recommend e-books to readers. In August it broke into the top 10 on the Kindle store, where it ranked No. 6 Friday. She paid a site to review her book, which she thinks may have given her book a boost. And she also did some "inexpensive Web-based advertising" which also got the word moving among readers. Ms. Chan, a lawyer by training, said the novel is now being resubmitted to major publishers.
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"One of the big differences between e-books and print is the sales cycle," says Ms. Yohalem. "It's almost inverted. A chain store buyer makes a decision as much as six months before the book is published, and then it has no more than six months on the shelf. At that point your sales cycle is over. But with e-books, it's completely the opposite. It's often six to nine months before your book takes off, and you never take it down."
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To learn about self-publishing, Ms. Yohalem visited blogs such as Joe Konrath's "A Newbie's Guide to Publishing." She also spent time on KindleBoards.com, an independent community focused on topics related to Amazon's Kindle e-reader, including self-publishing…..
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