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By David Rothman

Jim Musgrave, you’ll recall, is an unknown novelist charging $10 for a podcast of his thriller Wolves Russian Wolves, and I wondered who might have done something similar without being famous or using a service such as Audible.com.

From Alex Wilson at Tell Tale Weekly comes word that a professional writer named Bill Quick earned $4,500 via the Net by directly selling 900 copies of his e-book Inner Circles, at $5 each. And the audio angle? Well, a $9 audio deal moved 0 copies, perhaps because Quick used voice synthesis. Perhaps, too, people resisted the idea of paying for an audio when the Net is teeming with free podcasts. I hope Jim does better.

But back to Bill Quick’s missing paper version. Is there a lesson here? Well, yes. Quick noted that a typical novel bring $5,000 from a large publisher and an agent’s fee is 15 percent, so that he would have ended up with $4,250–a bit less than his Net earnings in his PayPal-powered experiment. Then again, he didn’t turn to the Web until he’d failed to bag a p-contract, and he’d rather have used a conventional approach. Besides, he promoted the book with an established blog, the Daily Pundit. A few more details:

In other words, the odds say that you aren’t simply going to be able to stick your book up there for download and grab four or five thousand bucks right out of the gate. On the other hand, this sort of outcome is a godsend for those of us professionals who think of ourselves as midlist, and who used to grind out two or three books a year in order to make thirty or forty grand before taxes. It offers us the possibility of bypassing the old apparatus entirely, and becoming self-publishers in a way that may eventually be able to match the financial rewards of traditional publishing.

Still, to be honest, my next book, a cop mystery thriller, will go to the mainstream houses. The sort of money I am making on Inner Circles is at the bottom of the range I could hope for in mainstream publishing. In effect, it is a nice surprise for a book that, ten years ago, would have made me no money whatsoever.

You can read a sample chapter from Quick’s conspiracy novel and buy it or the audio via this link.

(Spotted by Alex in Tobias S Buckell’s blog.)

 
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