Making a million on Kindle
John Locke just passed a million copies of his Kindle books. There’s a good story in the Telegraph (h/t to Glenn for pointing it out) that shows some of what I’ve been seeing as the future of publishing.
John Locke, 60, who publishes and promotes his own work, enjoys sales figures close to such literary luminaries as Stieg Larsson, James Patterson and Michael Connelly.
But unlike these heavyweights of the writing world, he has achieved it without the help of an agent or publicist – and with virtually no marketing budget.
Instead the DIY novelist has relied on word of mouth and a growing army of fans of his crime and western novellas that he has built up online thanks to a website and twitter account.
His remarkable achievement is being hailed as a milestone of the internet age and the beginning of a revolution in the way that books are sold.
Locke, from Louisville, Kentucky, USA, whose only other artistic endeavour was as a singer with a rock band in his youth, admits that the writing it [sic] not even his day job.
See, Locke isn’t working through a publisher. He publishes and promotes his books himself. With no intermediate, that means he can publish for 99 cents; he takes home something like 70 35 cents per copy.
Which means in this case that he’s made something like $700,000 $350,000 gross in a year.
When John Locke (1621-1690) sells that well, then we can figure America has hope…REAL HOPE.
this was my initial impression as well re: john locke
Yeah. I almost put it as “John Locke” in scare quotes, figuring that can’t be his real name. But his web site and everything doesn’t mention it being a pen name….
With crime and western novels, his imprint should be called “Locke and Load.”
feat. Locke-Jaw
And he seems to have stopped spamming the Kindle boards with daily threads complaining that other people price their books higher.
Kinda like Nathan Lowell, whom we were discussing on that other thread, hmmm, Charlie?
If nothing else, the Kindle has opened the doors to previously unpublished authors to get their books into the hands of readers. In some cases–perhaps many–there’s a good reason that they never got past publishers… honestly, some of the self-published stuff out there is dreck. However, there are also diamonds in the rough, like Mr. Lowell.
Overall, I’ll wade through the dreck–with the help of Amazon customer reviews–in order to find the diamonds that previously couldn’t make it past the self-anointed gatekeepers of the publishing world.
“…honestly, some of the self-published stuff out there is dreck.”
Most of the professionally published stuff, too, if what I see at the books stores and the “New” stack at our library, is any indication.
This is far from an argument that all writers should do the same, and can expect comparable results. I, too, am an independent writer. From marketing efforts quite similar to Locke’s, and twelve volumes of various kinds available for no more than $0.99 each, in three years I’ve reaped well under a thousand dollars.
Succeeding in this business has the same requirements as does any other business: you need to offer people a product they want, can afford, and can trust to be what it appears to be. Apparently John Locke has done that. The rest of us, while we admire Locke’s success and wish for the same for ourselves, remain with our noses pressed to the glass.