SFFMP 137: Launching Books That Aren’t “to Market,” Agency Pricing, and Are Ebook Sales Down?
Today, we had Nate Hoffelder from The Digital Reader blog on the show to talk about some of the news he’s been covering in the publishing world. The interview ended up being a little shorter than our usual shows, so Jo and Lindsay also talked about their recent book launches in the first segment, including some of the challenges of marketing when books aren’t written to market and don’t fit in with the tropes of the typical subgenres of science fiction and fantasy.
Here are some of the details of what we covered:
- The challenges of launching books that aren’t written to market and may be cross-genre or just a little out there.
- What agency pricing is and if it means anything for indie authors.
- Whether the ebook market has matured and leveled off in the U.S. or if there’s still room to grow.
- Whether we should be worried when publishers report that author earnings and overall ebook sales are down.
- Whether Kindle Unlimited earnings (payout for pages read), which has been down for the last couple of months, will continue to trend downward or level off and go back up.
- The fact that scams are still happening in the Kindle Unlimited world, and that Amazon hasn’t been able to stop them.
- Whether subscription services are a good idea or not for authors.
- Whether it’s worth the effort for indie authors to put out paperbacks and audiobooks and put effort into marketing them.
You can find Nate at The Digital Reader and learn more about the author services he offers on his site, where he does website development and critiques. You can also say hi to him on Twitter.
Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on iTunes.
Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on YouTube.
Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast via RSS.
Nice podcast, as usual, although I was amused at your comments about the consequences of taking a year long hiatus during a series. Most of us would be quite pleased if we could manage to write one book a year.
It’s reaaaally tough to gain any momentum and sell a lot at that pace, unfortunately. The perspective changes a bit when this becomes the full time job!