We’ve covered the saga of David Carnoy’s self-published novel Knife Music quite a bit over the last couple of years. One of the first controversial instances of “app store censorship”, the book was originally rejected from the app store due to a single instance of “the f-word” until Carnoy replaced the word and resubmitted it.
More recently, an iPhone appbook containing the first half of the book was released with the obscenity intact, as a sample for the professionally-published hardcover which is coming out soon.
Now Carnoy has an essay on Publishing Perspectives talking about his experiences with the book and his decision to self-publish. He writes that the controversy of Apple’s rejection, followed by the second controversy of the heat he took for his self-censorship, helped considerably.
[T]he app shot to #7 in the free book apps category, right after the Bible. It was doing 1,000 downloads a week. And what that did was create awareness for the book. Yes, I sold a decent amount of paperbacks (about 1,000 in four and half months) but I was doing better with the Kindle version, which I priced at $3.99. I think that’s a perfect price for newbie authors. I was selling close to 400 Kindle books a month and hit number #1 in the legal thriller category. Remember, this was in the early days of the device (early 2009), when not as many people had them and Grisham wasn’t available digitally.
Carnoy thinks that appbooks will slowly disappear now that iBooks has arrived, but thinks they still make sense for multimedia books such as children’s books or graphic novels. He did an app consisting of the first half of the book as a workaround because iBooks, Kindle, and Nook would not allow posting samples as lengthy as he wanted for his book.
