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.
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Angela Booth
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