Readers are right. Everyone else is WRONG. In this blog post,, I said:

* Sometimes editors are wrong

* Sometimes literary agents are wrong

* Often ALL buyers of your writing are WRONG. (By which I meant buyer of your writing services, rather than readers.)

Anyone who stands between you and your readers can be wrong, and can steer you in the wrong direction. Only your readers are right.

Readers are what writing is all about, and when you have direct contact with readers, your writing will take off.

As proof, we have this blog post, How I Became a Best-Selling Author – Yahoo! Finance, about Darcie Chan’s rejected novel which gained 400,000 readers very quickly:

“This past May, Ms. Chan decided to digitally publish it herself, hoping to gain a few readers and some feedback. She bought some ads on Web sites targeting e-book readers, paid for a review from Kirkus Reviews, and strategically priced her book at 99 cents to encourage readers to try it. She’s now attracting bids from foreign imprints, movie studios and audio-book publishers, without selling a single copy in print.”

You’ll notice that Darcie Chan’s novel has only been selling online since May, 2011. That’s 400K copies in seven months.

Since there’s no shelf life for digital books, the novel will snowball. Judging by the publicity Ms Chan’s getting, I predict she’ll hit a million copies sold sometime next year. If I were a betting person (I’m not) I’d bet on the second quarter of 2012.

You’re writing ebooks, but you have an agenda. You don’t just want to sell copies, you also want to build your platform. Your hope is that a major publisher will see your sales, and will take you on board.

The major publishers, the “Big Six”, are all about the numbers and whether they can make money publishing you. This makes the price of the ebooks you’re selling all-important.

Therefore, you may want to forget offering your ebooks for free, or charging 99 cants. You’re going to have to charge more.

If you’ve been keeping your eye on ebook prices at the Kindle store, for example, you’ll see that Big Six ebooks are often between $8 and $10, sometimes much more. Publishers are experimenting with prices, and I’ve seen backlist titles set at an eye-watering $17 and over.

You have to wonder what these people are smoking. I won’t say who the publisher was, but one test ran the $17 price point for at least a four weeks that I’m aware of, before the price of the ebooks (we’re talking books first published in the 1980s), dropped to $7.50 on average.

To reiterate, big publishing is all about the numbers, so a 99 price, even if you’re selling lots of copies, is too low.

This article, How Low is Too Low? | AARdvark, reports:

“Anecdotally, I’ve heard that $3.99 is the breaking point; that if a book can sell a solid number of copies or become a bestseller while priced at $3.99 or higher, mainstream publishers become interested.  Below that point, they don’t care too much. ”

So there’s your challenge, if you want big-publisher attention, your price point needs to be tasty enough to interest them, and of course, you need to have the numbers.

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I’m not a fan of Stieg Larsson books, but many people are.

This article, ‘Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ Sells More Than 1 Million Digital Copies – NYTimes.com, reports:

“In what is believed to be a first for an e-book, ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,’ by the Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson, has sold more than a million copies in its digital format, Knopf said on Thursday. “

The article also reports that: “The “Millennium” trilogy has sold nearly 17 million copies in the United States.”

Publishers are always complaining that digital editions will cannibalize their print sales, and this could well be evidence that they’re wrong.

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Want to make great money writing? Discover the secrets of high-selling, highly paid writers.

Join the thousands of other writers who are using the information to change their lives. You’ll learn how to write, and how to sell. Angela’s been writing for 30 years, and shares her knowledge with you.

This article, Why Book Trailers Are Now Essential to the Publishing Industry, suggests:

“Book trailers are relatively recent additions to the literary world. Most of the authors I know detest the very idea of them.”

You may well hate the idea of having to create a book trailer once you’ve written your novel.

However, if you’re in the planning stages of writing, consider writing a script for your planned novel. Much like a blurb, your trainer will get you thinking about your voice and tone, situations, scenes, narrative… in fact, everything you need to be thinking about, in visual form.

In other words, scripting a trailer can kick-start your imagination.

I’m planning novel which will have more than a touch of humor. Thinking visually has helped me to understand what I think is funny, and what scenes would be fun to include.

I suggested the “script a trailer for your book” to one of my students who’s stuck in the “dreaded middle” of her novel. It gave her some excellent ideas for scenes, and a new climax, all within 20 minutes.

She said: “When I thought about the trailer, it helped me to see a couple of my characters in a completely new and fresh way. I suddenly knew what they’d do next. They feel like real people to me now.”

Angela Booth’s writing guides have been created to help you to make money from your writing every day. Join the thousands of writers who are making great money with their writing skills.

Amanda Hocking has just signed a four-book $2 million deal with St.Martin’s, for the world English language rights.

This article, Amanda Hocking Sells Book Series to St. Martin’s Press – NYTimes.com, reports:

“‘I’ve done as much with self-publishing as any person can do,’ Ms. Hocking said in an interview on Thursday. ‘People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don’t have to keep using them. But I do think they have something to offer.’”

Let’s see… she earned $2 million from her ebooks, and then St. Martin’s paid $2 million for the rights… that’s $4 million in around a year. And her books are still earning, AND she’s being launched by a major publisher…

Very nice.

There are many lessons you can take from this, the primary one being that the gatekeepers are gone, and that you can publish what you like, when you like.

Huge congratulations to Amanda, who’s still very young. I can’t wait to see where she goes from here; she has an amazing future.