Writing is Hard: Self-Publishing Ebooks and Feeding Your Family Too

Writer JA Konrath has been championing the advantages of self-publishing your own ebooks for a while now, having raked in a ton of money himself that way. Because I'm interested in the publishing industry and where it's headed, I've been following his posts with a lot of curiosity. I just haven't linked to them because I don't have a novel I'm trying to get published or any other dog in this particular hunt. Not yet anyway.

But I'd like to one day and I figure that I'm going to want to remember his detailed advice on How to Make Money on Ebooks.

Writing is Hard: Digital Advice

Couple of quick writing links:

What's the story?

Robot 6 has a new contributor, Brigid Alverson, who's writing a webcomics column called Unbound. Her first article is up and it's really good. She talks about how a webcomic needs to catch its audience in no more than eight pages. It's a similar rule to editor Ray Rhamey's about prose novels needing to captivate readers in the first 16 lines of text.

I'm the choir listening to Brigid's sermon, but it's still indespinsable advice for anyone hoping to make webcomics. I'd add that it's also good advice for anyone hoping to make any kind of comic, but I don't think that's true. I'm guessing that you have even less room than that to catch an audience in a printed book you're asking someone to pay for. Webcomic audiences can afford to be more forgiving because they're getting the product for free.

Along with the excellent advice, Brigid makes an even better webcomic recommendation. It's not the kind of thing I usually talk about on the blog, but I'm already about half caught up on Dovecote Crest, a romantic comedy about Civil War re-enactment. It's excellent if you've got any kind of soft spot for good romantic comedy at all. I'm already a little smitten with the heroine myself.



That mad ebook money

JA Konrath talks about how he's been able to do very well selling ebook copies of unprinted stuff he's already been giving away for free online. I don't know what to do with that yet, but it's interesting to me.