Christmas 2010 was on the horizon and bestselling author Stephen Leather had a plan.
The scuttlebutt around the internet said that the Amazon Kindle was about to break huge. Like iPod huge. With a steep drop on its price tag, the e-reader stood to be one of the most-gifted items in the history of the holiday—a rehash of the Tickle-Me-Elmo surge of 1996, or the explosion of the Nintendo Wii, now four full Christmases in the past.
Leather, a bushwhacker by reputation, has always done his best to stay ahead of the technological curve. In the early half of the last decade, he’d adhered to an online distribution method many in the publishing industry viewed as reckless. Sitting on three short novels that his publisher had rejected on the basis that strayed too far from the typical thrillers they usually published for him, Leather uploaded the stories to his website for free user download—chief amongst them a vampire tale aptly titled, Once Bitten.
At the time this seemed rather revolutionary. The prevailing theory—also championed by the likes of authors Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow—was that a person who had read one of your books, regardless of how it came into their possession, would be much more likely to buy another one in the future. And for the most part, the gamble paid off for Leather. The give-away process provided the sort of authoritative marketing that money couldn’t buy. The uninitiated became familiar with his work. At no cost, he’d expanded his readership and fortified his brand.
But this Kindle business? As the holiday approached, he believed the device had all of the elements of a game changer. Readers had only tolerated reading PDFs on their laptops. The good intentions of free distribution had ultimately given way to the lackluster execution of having to scroll awkwardly down a PDF, to say nothing of the strain that the process put on a reader’s eyes as he or she gazed for hours into a shiny, seemingly malicious computer screen.
To Leather it appeared that the Kindle and its competitors would finally offer a swath of middle ground. So as the holiday season rapidly approached, the writer went to work formulating a new strategy in order to deal with what promised to be a new world order.
This is what he knew.
For writers, bestseller lists are Mecca. A place where the rich get richer and the savvy can open up permanent shop alongside the book market’s most heavily trafficked online interstate. So three weeks before the holiday, he decided to post Once Bitten to the UK Kindle store. In a calculated stroke, the author priced the castaway story and two others just like it, for the UK equivalent of 99 cents, the lowest price Amazon would allow. The low cost helped Leather’s books quickly ascend the bestseller list, putting him in an enviably visible position as the soothsaying literary pundits prognosticated a December to remember.
As the holiday deadline grew nearer, Leather’s belief in the internet predictions grew stronger. He was convinced that after three years the public’s hesitancy towards e-readers would finally fall by the wayside in the same way the diffidence towards digital music was eventually eradicated during the rapid ascent of the iPod. All over the world people would be reaching beneath the Christmas tree and unwrapping their very first e-reader.
And he was right.
Leather sold 7,000 e-books on Christmas day alone. By the end of January he’d sold 90,000. In a matter of months the very same manuscripts he’d previously given away through his website—stories his publisher had once thought undesirable—had transformed into veritable cash cows.
While he still presently makes the majority of his money from traditional publishers, it became clear to Leather over the holidays that the game of self-publishing had opened up lucrative new options. If he desired continued success, he would have to continue to adapt to a new set of ever-shifting rules.
All told, Amazon reportedly sold 1.6 million Kindles in December 2010.
Barnes and Noble kept their hardware sales under tighter wraps, but according to a January press release, when lumped together their three e-reader devices (Nook Color, Nook 3G, Nook Wi-Fi) proved “the company’s biggest seller in its nearly 40-year history”. Add in the estimated 5 million iPads sold during the holiday, and over the last four months devices with e-book reading capabilities are suddenly everywhere—a common sight on beaches and subway cars, even in the classroom.
All of this considered, it should come as no great surprise that for Leather and the other authors that were brave enough to dive headfirst into mostly unproven waters, the situation only continued to get better in the months following the holiday. In the past five months their potential audience on the Kindle alone has nearly doubled. As of late May, Amazon announced that for the first time in company history they were selling more electronic books than print, claiming to sell 105 e-books for every 100 of their traditional counterparts. Initial sales data indicates that Amazon has sold three times as many e-books in the first quarter of 2011 than they did in 2010.
As an example of what this has meant to self-published authors, Scott Nicholson—a horror/thriller author and no stranger to the Kindle bestseller list—notes the marked upsurge in his sales since the end of the previous year’s holiday season. At the beginning of 2010, he submitted an out-of-print novel, The Red Church, to Amazon. He added more titles as the months went on and by the end of the year he’d sold 30,000 e-books.
In 2011? “I topped [that number] in the first three months,” he says. According to Nicholson—who traditionally published eight books before making his leap to the digital age—this upsurge is no fluke. The various e-readers have gifted self-published authors with the literary equivalent of the candy bar station parked in front of a grocery store’s checkout lane. E-books can be purchased directly from the devices themselves, often in a single click. By self-publishing previously unsold works and marking them down to the sort of bargain prices that would cause major publishers to shudder, authors are suddenly reaping the benefits of every retail capitalist’s favorite economic fixture: the impulse-buy.
“The short shelf life of a mass-market book is comparable to that of cottage cheese. Once you’re hard to find, it’s difficult to build a sustained career,” Nicholson says. “E-books are on the shelf 24 hours-a-day, every day, all around the world.”
Moreover, Nicholson believes that the typical e-reader owner represents the ideal consumer. They are proud of their reading habits. They are insatiable, obsessed.
“These readers tend to consume the most and, given the impulse shopping and the internet algorithms that make it easier to find your favorite books, it’s stimulated a growth in reading,” he says. “Now you can carry 1,500 books in your hip pocket.”
Working in tandem, low prices and eager consumers have opened up a series of new avenues for published and non-published authors alike.