Now Is The Time, Content Makers

More and more I'm beginning to see some of the pioneering purveyors of ebooks on Amazon's selling machine begin to fade away. The first publishers were simply that: first on the scene. Then, once the scene was discovered by all, the writing abilities and ways with words became increasingly disparate, and the readers sorted the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Readers still do that on Amazon, voting with their wallets for the writers who will survive and allowing to fall by the wayside many of those who were simply early adopters.

Does this mean the gold rush is over?

Not by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I believe the public's appetite for content is only going to increase. As the real world becomes more troubled, it seems, the more it seems that people will reach out in equal parts for diversion. Hence the huge upswing in video games, movies, music and song, concerts, reality TV shows, and books and stories and nonfiction. If you are one of the blessed ones who can provide original, thoughtful content, if you are one of those blessed with a way with words, you're in luck. You just walked onto the modern day set of Albert in Wonderland and it is brimming with people and businesses just fighting to hand you money for your work.

Content is king.

Writers are the kingmakers.

There has never been a better time to get it down on paper and put it out there.

Write and publish. Repeat. Then do it again!

100,000 Books Sold - What Happened?

I published my first book in January of 2014. I just published my eleventh book in September 2015. Number 12 is underway with a Xmas publication date.

I write "legal thrillers." I don't know how "thrilling" my books are, but I don't make up the categories, either; Amazon does that.

Bookbub
My first month I think I sold maybe 40 or 50 books. My second month 400. My third month 1100. I was growing and selling more every month until about August of last year when I came on KBoards and found everyone talking about Bookbub. So I submitted and got accepted for a freebie on about my third try. Since then I've had eleven more Bookbubs (upcoming one is next Tuesday). Most have been freebie giveaways although a couple were promo sales. All in all Booktrakr tells me I've given away about 300,000 books, which I couldn't have done without Bookbub. And I've sold over 100,000.

So I guess BB is really the story of any success I've had. Why did they accept me so often? I think much of it has to do with my covers, which are made by Nathan Wampler. If you would like to ask him about covers he can be reached atnathanwamplerdesign@gmail.com. Please don't get him so busy he ignores my pleas for help. The guy's a genius, as far as I'm concerned and I can only say, based on BB's acceptance of my promos, they must like him too.

It's funny, but I practiced law 40 years and never earned as much as I do now by writing. I'm also an old guy so I wish (if wishes were horses...) I had started this years earlier. Whoops, actually I did. I had an agent back in the nineties when Grisham got so hot, and my agent peddled my books around NY and no one was interested. Even last January when I first self-pubbed I had just queried something like 45 agents and none of them wrote me back except for two canned, brief, brush-offs.

Hot New Releases
I like self-pub. I like writing and releasing on my own schedule. More than that, however, I've come to know that you need to play the Hot New Releases cycle and self-pub allows me to do that. For example, right now my latest book The Trial Lawyer is under thrillers > legal and it's about #4 under HNR. Also, my next book is on preorder and it's also on the first page of HNR and will remain there for the ninety days while it's being written. This is very important to me in how I move books.

KU
I'm in KU 100%. Many of my peers are wide. But I like page reads and get between 1.5 to 2.0 million per month. It would be hard to give that up for the "wide" adventure. Maybe at some point I will, but right now it works for me. Maybe not for you, but for how I'm building my backlist it works just fine. Everyone will have a different plan and use these tools to best suit their plan.

Mark and Nick
Yes, I've taken Mark Dawson's FB course and Nick Stephenson's mailing list course, with crossover between them. These guys, have taught me so much. Mark is brilliant at teaching Power Editor for FB and even a dummy like me now has it figured out. Nick was equally brilliant in teaching now to building that mailing list. My list right now has 5100 names and I can launch a book quite high in the rankings.

Can you learn from me?
This is an area where opinion seems to be all over the road. If we could replicate success from posts like this one, then why don't we all take James Patterson's course and become megasellers by following his path. But that's where it breaks down for me. I think generalities have been good for me to learn here on Kboards (write series, publish often, don't respond to the 1-stars, etc) but so far I haven't had the success others have had simply by following what someone else did. I've had to find my own way.

If I were starting out today, I would: find a small niche; write and publish no more than 90 days apart; tickle the Amazon algos by boosting sales through FB ads. When I first started out I advertised on FB in order to get sales so Amazon's algos would sit up and pay attention. My ads were money losers--but it wasn't profit I was after, it was movement. A gradual upswing in sales. I am NOT saying I acquired hundreds of sales by FB, maybe 4-6 sales per day to start. It doesn't take much. But as a long-time advertiser on Adwords I had come to know that I had to invest money up front to make money on the back end. Why wouldn't that same business tactic work with Amazon? I believe it does. And what Mark and Nick are doing is showing us how to not only get movement in our sales but, by their methods, even to turn a profit. What could be better than moving books on FB ads AND turning a profit? The one feeds the other. Just my opinion, of course. But again, I was all but broke when I started publishing and I know how hard it can be to spend money you don't have on advertising. Yikes. We all come to this differently.

Finally, those who know me know that I have asked probably the most butt-dumb questions on KBoards in a long time. I had to, because I knew absolutely zero about self-pub when I first came here. When I found KDP I was a phone call away from publishing with a company called XLibris and the guy had me talked into something like a $3,000 program guaranteed to line my garage with insulating boxes of books. Thank God for KDP. I went on their site and read it like ten times, each time looking for the part where it says how much I would have to pay to publish a book. Amazon removed the last obstacle for me: the gatekeepers. And all I have to do is keep writing, which is like a virus that wracks me and won't let go anyway. With or without Amazon, I'm writing anyway.

Never give up. I lost my first six books I wrote before my first self-pub in January 2014. Left on other people's computers or lost in printed formats. Gone. But maybe it's just as well, I don't know. But the point I want to make is that I had written continuously for thirty-some years since college until Amazon opened the door for me. Nobody bought anything from me. Nothing. But once the door opened, I had unlearned a lot of bad habits and was left with a style that more than anything aims for clarity of story. That's it, simple. Nothing matters to me but clarity of story. Sometimes I hit it, sometimes I miss it. But there's my goal.

Good luck everyone.

ETA:

I'm a strong believer in preorders because a preorder can stay on the "coming soon" pages for 90 days. Then when the book is released it gets another 30 days on the HNR page and then gets into the "New Releases/last ninety days" pages after. At this point my practice is to then establish another preorder book and climb back on the "coming soon" pages again while my latest release is HNR for thirty then "New Releases/last ninety days." This is the cycle, of course. Your mailing list will help you maintain a high level of visibility as you do this.

This model requires constant publishing, every ninety days. But in my experience, it is these lists that sell books on a regular daily basis, moving them ever higher as they go. It also requires a mailing list to keep your book churn up while the HNR algos kick in.

What is beautiful is that Amazon gives us these data filters (the lists) as tools we can (and should) use. I have been unable to find another sales portal that gives me this.

The All-Time Logical Fallacy (Or, How I Saved $99.99)

There is a logical fallacy among many writers (witness the blogs and their followers) that goes like this: You sell lots of books; if I study how you did it, I  will sell lots of books, too. This thinking doesn't, of course, take into account the factor of fortunate coincidence: in the first writer's case, certain events occurred that probably won't happen again in your case. But the second factor, and what this little blog exercise really is about, is what I call the logical fallacy of success. Here it is: Your ability to do something doesn't automatically mean I have the same ability.

Let's face it. Some people are smarter than other people. That is why they happen to succeed, because they thought their way into it. Or maybe they're more talented, so they wrote books that more people wanted to read. Just because author Jones can write unputdownable books doesn't mean author Smith can do the same. For author Smith to spend $99.99 to take author Jones' course on How to Sell Books is a foolish expenditure, if viewed in this light.

Now I'm going to tell you the secret of selling lots of books as it's come to me: write books people want to read. Can everyone do that? No. Can  you? If factor one (the fortunate coincidence of events) and factor two (the level of IQ or talent) are both present, the answer for you is "maybe." Why only maybe? Because you might throw up your hands and give up on book nine when book ten was the one that was really going to sell. Or maybe you're writing romance when it's really erotica that's your gift.

But here's the bottom line. Can you write and sell books and quit the day job? You won't know until you try. And try. And try.

That's what the rest of us did.

But save the $99.99. That's the price of admission for one day at Seaworld. (I know, Shamu is a victim of his own success. My wife is actively campaigning to set them all free, so got that covered. Which leaves me more time to write. But seriously, go to Seaworld rather than take someone's course for $99.99. If you don't yet understand how the oblique leads to the unique in your art, you might not be ready.)

Appointment World

I write on two Macbook Pro's. One is on my treadmill desk and one sits with me in my writing chair. The last time I was in Mexico my writing chair Macbook blew up (not literally). So I took it to Geeksquad when I returned to the U.S. They sent it off to Apple, who reported back the motherboard and this or that were burned out. Fried, they said. Fair enough. So I authorized the repair bill, which was about half the cost of a new machine ($700 repair). Lo and behold, I get a notice today from Geeksquad telling me to go on their calendar and make an appointment to come pick up my machine.

Apppointment?

What rock have I been living under? In Mexico I had my eyes examined by Dr. Cornel in Rosarito (great eye doctor, by the way). But first I called for an appointment. "Just come in tomorrow," he said, answering his own phone. "Yes, but what time?" I asked him. Silence on the line. "Just come in when you're ready," he said. "I'll see you then," he finished. So I did. He got me right in the next day when I turned up in his office. No forms to fill out, go right into the examining room. Exam took all of thirty minutes, following which he fitted me with the best pair of glasses I've ever owned. They have all the bells and whistles you can buy in the States, of course, but the point I'm trying to make is that an appointment wasn't necessary even for the office visit. But back in the U.S.? Apppointment for my computer pickup?

All right, so I'm old fashioned and, to be honest, an appointment does sound better than waiting forever in the customer service line at Geeksquad. Maybe it's time I learned to get with it, American style.

Still, I think back to my Mexico days. Come in when you're ready.

It works for me.

National Book Awards: No Indies

It's happened again: another award another troubling result: the National Book Awards fiction longlist contains no Indie books:

Jesse Ball, “A Cure for Suicide”
Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House

Bill Clegg, “Did You Ever Have a Family”
Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Karen E. Bender, “Refund”
Soft Skull/Counterpoint Press

Angela Flournoy, “The Turner House”
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Lauren Groff, “Fates and Furies”
Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House

Adam Johnson, “Fortune Smiles”
Random House/Penguin Random House

T. Geronimo Johnson, “Welcome to Braggsville”
William Morrow/HarperCollins

Edith Pearlman, “Honeydew”
Little, Brown/Hachette Book Group

Hanya Yanagihara, “A Little Life”
Doubleday/Penguin Random House

Nell Zink, “Mislaid”
The Ecco Press/HarperCollins

Surely some Indie writer somewhere penned a tome that should have found its way onto the list. But wait, there's a catch: Indie publishers are eligible IF they have published the works of other authors. The full eligibility text is here:

---

"WHO CAN SUBMIT BOOKS?

Each April, the Foundation sends the official National Book Awards guidelines and entry forms to the publishers in its master database. Those publishers who do not receive the materials automatically can call or email the Foundation to request a copy. Authors cannot submit their books themselves; they must have their publishers contact us directly. However, the guidelines are always available for informational purposes here:www.nationalbook.org/nbaentry.html.

In order to be eligible for the Award, a book must be written by an American citizen and published by an American publisher between December 1 of the previous year and November 30 of the current year. Self-published books are only eligible if the author/publisher publishes the work of other authors in addition to his own. Books published through services such as iUniverse are not eligible for the Award."

---

 

Did any Indie writers make it onto the long longlist? Or even the long long longlist?

Are there other Indies out there who, with me, would like to form a publishing co-op with an eye toward entering the NBA next year?

Just saying.

New Thaddeus Murfee Book: The Lawyer's Lawyer

I love writing about court cases where the target is moving. Where things are not what they seem. Because, in truth, that is the human condition: that things are never what they seem. We think we know our spouses or our children or our best friends, but do we really? The same thing is true with what happens in court. A guy gets arrested for something. Lawyer A, who has been paid $100,000 to defend the guy, pulls out all the stops. There is scientific evidence, there is a human factors expert, there is an economist, a treating physician, DNA testing and etc. Lawyer B, who has been paid $10,000 to defend the guy, shows up for court in a new suit and a recent haircut. There are no experts, no paid witnesses, no DNA testing experts and evidence, and no stops are pulled out. Lawyer C, the public defender, is paid $0 and immediately starts looking to plead the guy guilty to something. No offense meant; this is a budgetary matter. PD's are damn good lawyers, many, many of them even better than private lawyers, but, alas, they have no money to work with.

What's this all mean to me? That a lawsuit in my novel can have many different faces, depending on the motivation and expertise of the attorneys involved. So my main guy, Thaddeus Murfee, has money to burn. Why? Because that's how most all of us lawyers would like to handle our cases: ones where resources are unlimited. What a different world that would be.

In my latest Thaddeus adventure, due to be released in about 5-6 weeks, Thaddeus is defending a man with multiple motives to murder his wife, opportunity, and means. But there are other possible suspects as well. They also have motive[s], opportunity, and means. Are things as the client says they are? That's the rub: they never are. Which is the great thing about fiction: you can have two legitimate narrators in one book and they can both report the exact same scene differently--even vastly differently. So my client tells me one thing in the office, the police say something entirely different in court, and then the judge comes along and decides out of all of it what parts the jury gets to hear and what parts they won't access.

This is courtroom fiction at its best, this latest Thaddeus book. Be sure and preorder on Amazon. A good one-half of the book is taken up with the trial, my most ambitious yet.

Entertainment.

How I Wrote and Published 10 Books in 18 Months

Whew!

And I get asked about it lots. How the heck did you write so many books in a year and half, books with hundreds of reviews and high (low) rankings?

Truth be told, I wrote them over the past forty or fifty years. Not these published books specifically, but other books. Books that kept me writing nonstop over weekends with work weeks in between. Books that kept me up until three or four in the morning while my future readership was sleeping (or not yet conceived...), books that tortured me with misgivings because I couldn't make the damn book say what it was I was trying to say. And on and on. I wrote wrote wrote. And I submitted submitted submitted. All the major magazine's saw my short stories: Harper's, New Yorker, Atlantic--they all got a taste of my art.

And they all turned me down. "Not quite there," they might scrawl on their rejection slip, or "Please try us again--" -- very popular with the New Yorker way back when. Now I don't know what they write on their rejection slips by way of encouragement, if anything. I don't know because I no longer submit to them. Why would I, when, with the advent of self pub, I can put my voice out there for millions to hear simply by clicking through a few Amazon categories and sub-categories.

In January of 2014 when I published my first novel, it really wasn't. Wasn't really my first novel. I had written my Hemingway lookalike while in college. I had written my Updike lookalike a year after. I had written my Salinger shorts during that same era (all dialogue, all trying to sound East Coast cranky). I had written my Ken Follett novel, my LeCarre ambiguous spy thriller, my Thomas Harris minimalism and my John Grisham soundalike careless toss-away flashes of genius (the other John's: I'm not saying I've ever had any of my own.) So when I published in 2014 you were able to buy a writer who had sounded like everyone else out there and who now had found his own voice and you could hear that and decide whether it was your cup of tea or not.

I then washed, rinsed, repeated nine more times. Or is it ten more times? The count is beginning to escape me. And my writing speed is mine to click into because the structural-grammatical-dramatical pieces are long ago in place. Through practice practice practice.

Now you know. How I published 10 novels in 18 months, downloaded 450,000 of them, and earned well over $100,000. The next twelve months look to be 2.5 times better. Wow on me.

One other thing. I would be remiss not to mention this. Bookbub allowed me to grace its email ten times over the last twelve months (counting this coming Saturday's number 10). Sales upon sales upon sales.

There's a bit of luck involved with all this too.

Novel Writing Course for Lawyers

I've had enough lawyer wannabe novelists write to me about writing, reading their work and giving feedback, and publishing and marketing, that I thought maybe I should ask: would you, an attorney, be interested in enrolling in such a legal thriller course if I developed it? There would be a certain price threshold because the preparation of such a course would take me away from my writing bread and butter, but it would be a reasonable value, of course.

The course could cover the generalities of the legal thriller novel, such as they are, choice of story, expansion of choice into a novel-length treatment, and all the rest of the craft considerations the noobie novelist will need to review. We could maybe even do some hands-on feedback reading and writing where I would take a look at your chapter and publish it online, along with my comments. This might help us all learn.

Comments please. Is this something you might like to do?

Amazon and AntiTrust - the Real Truth

All the anti-Amazon bashing that’s underway again vis a vis Authors United simply goes too far. As a lawyer, the latest AU letter is presumptuous and just a little insulting.

As a “law,” U.S. antitrust is really a conglomeration of federal and some state laws that seek to address cartels, lessened competition and prohibit either (1) the creation of a monopoly or (2) abuse of monopoly power. It’s the latter which the AU is holding up in its grievance.

The fact is, U.S. antitrust laws do not outlaw cartels, business competition, or monopolies. That’s right, a business that operates as a monopoly is not per se illegal. It is illegal only when it takes action that abuses monopoly power.

But what I’ve seen so far is akin to the guy who runs into the fire station and cries out, “Fire! Red! Hot! Falling roofs! People fleeing!” and the fire department asking, give us an address. Because that’s the crux of all the adjectives being flung about by AU: symptoms, maybe, but address, none. In other words, tell the DOJ the address of the abuse of monopoly power. The DOJ will want an abuser, a fact of abuse, a date, a place, etc., all the stuff that enables it to fight the fire. But "fire, red, hot, falling roofs, people fleeing”—those are not enough. Not if you are seeking warranted action.

Again, it’s just a little bit insulting that some would try to inflame action with adjectives. The DOJ lawyers are much better trained than that.

Authors Guild Calls for DOJ Investigation of Amazon: a New One

Just when I thought the waters over at AG might be warming a degree, I receive this latest email from AG, calling for a huge Amazon bashing by the DOJ. It is republished below in its entirety:



 

The recent decision in United States v. Apple raises the spectre once again of Amazon’s excessive power in the publishing landscape. The federal appellate court in the case agreed with the lower court that Apple had indeed violated antitrust law by cooperating with publishers to establish agency pricing for e-books (which allows publishers to set their own prices and pay the retailer a commission). The irony of this decision is that Apple’s actions actually helped to open the e-book market and to reduce Amazon’s monopoly from a 90% market share in 2009 to around 67% today.

Without commenting on the outcome of the Apple case, or the facts that led the majority to its conclusion, we’d like to point out the long-term dangers of interpreting antitrust law solely to favor low book prices over a thriving, competitive and robust literary marketplace. The majority’s opinion takes a narrow view of antitrust law, assuming that low book prices to consumers trump all, even if the low prices are artificial loss leaders intended to lure buyers into a single company’s shopping platform. The much larger issue in our view is the dominance that Amazon—through its artificially depressed book prices—wields over the book ecosystem, and the potential repercussions on the free flow of information and free expression.

Despite the decision against Apple, Amazon’s tactics seemed troubling to the court. All three opinions, the majority, concurrence and a dissent, referred to the fact Amazon controlled 90% of the e-book market in 2009, and two of the three judges expressed clear concerns regarding Amazon’s anticompetitive behavior.

Judge Dennis Jacobs, in dissent, characterized Amazon’s behavior as so extreme that Apple had little alternative other than to enter the market on the terms that it did in order to create needed competition. Judge Raymond Lohier, concurring in the majority, found some “appeal to Apple’s argument that the e-book market, in light of Amazon’s virtually uncontested dominance, needed more competition.” Judge Lohier, however, felt that “more corporate bullying is not an appropriate antidote to corporate bullying.”

What, then, is the appropriate antidote?

We once again request the Department of Justice to investigate Amazon for its anti-competitive behavior, a far more dangerous variant that Apple’s.

Here is a letter to the Department of Justice, written by Douglas Preston and Barry Lynn in cooperation with the Authors Guild. Preston is a Council Member of the Authors Guild, which from the beginning has been a partner in this initiative. Last summer he spearheaded a grassroots protest against Amazon’s punishment of authors during its dispute with the publisher Hachette. Under the rubric “Authors United,” he gathered over 900 authors’ signatures and took out a two-page advertisement in The New York Times, in a public challenge to Amazon’s actions.

This letter addresses the larger issue of Amazon’s control of the book market and requests an investigation of the company by the Department Of Justice. The Authors Guild supports Preston’s actions and endorses his request, as do the American Booksellers Association and the Association of Authors’ Representatives.

Roxana Robinson
President
The Authors Guild

Half of Net Proceeds New Standard for Trad Pub EBook Royalties

From Authors' Guild 7/9/15:

We announced our Fair Contract Initiative earlier this summer. Now our first detailed analysis tackles today’s inadequate e-book royalties. At the heart of our concern with the unfair industry-standard e-book royalty rate is its failure to treat authors as full partners in the publishing enterprise. This will be a resounding theme in our initiative; it’s what’s wrong with many of the one-sided “standard” clauses we’ll be examining in future installments.

Traditionally, the author-publisher partnership was an equal one. Authors earned around 50% of their books’ profits. That equal split is reflected in the traditional hardcover royalty of 15% of list (cover price, that is, not the much lower wholesale price), and in the 50-50 split of publishers’ earnings from selling paperback, book club, or reprint rights. Authors generally received an even larger share than the publisher for non-print rights (such as stage and screen rights) and foreign rights.

But today’s standard contracts give authors just 25% of the publisher’s “net receipts” (more or less what the publisher collects from a book sale) for e-book royalties. That doesn’t look like a partnership to us.

We maintain that a 50-50 split in e-book profits is fair because the traditional author-publisher relationship is essentially a joint venture. The author writes the book, and by any fair measure the author’s efforts represent most of the labor invested and most of the resulting value. The publisher, like a venture capitalist, invests in the author’s work by paying an advance so the author can make ends meet while the book gets finished. Generally, the publisher also provides editing, marketing, packaging, and distribution services. In return for fronting the financial risk and providing these services, the publisher gets to share in the book’s profits. Not a bad deal. This worked well enough throughout much of the twentieth century: publishers prospered and authors had a decent shot at earning a living.

How the e-book rate evolved

From the mid-1990s, when e-book provisions regularly began appearing in contracts, until around 2004, e-royalties varied wildly. Many of the e-rates at major publishing houses were shockingly low—less than 10% of net receipts—and some were at 50%. Some standard contracts left them open to negotiation. As the years passed, and especially between 2000 and 2004, many publishers paid authors 50% of their net receipts from e-book sales, in keeping with the idea that authors and publishers were equal partners in the book business.

In 2004, we saw a hint of things to come. Random House, which had previously paid 50% of its revenues for e-book sales, anticipated the coming boom in e-book sales and cut its e-rates significantly. Other publishers followed, and gradually e-royalties began to coalesce around 25%. By 2010 it was clear that publishers had successfully tipped the scales on the longstanding partnership between author and publisher to achieve a 75-25 balance in their favor.

The lowball e-royalty was inequitable, but initially it didn’t have much effect on authors’ bottom lines. As late as 2009, e-books accounted for a paltry 3–5% of book sales. Authors and agents ought to have pushed back, but with e-book sales so low it didn’t make much sense to risk the chance of any individual book deal falling apart over e-royalties. We called the 25% rate a “low-water mark.” We said, “Once the digital market gets large enough, authors with strong sales records won’t put up with this: they’ll go where they’ll once again be paid as full partners in the exploitation of their creative work.”

E-books now represent 25–30% of all adult trade book sales, but for the vast majority of authors the rate remains unchanged. If anything, publishers have dug in their heels. Why? There’s a contractual roadblock, for one: major book publishers have agreed to include “most favored nation” clauses in thousands of existing contracts. These clauses require automatic adjustment or renegotiation of e-book royalties if the publisher changes its standard royalty rate, giving publishers a strong incentive to maintain the status quo. And the increasing consolidation of the book industry has drastically reduced competition among publishers, allowing them more than ever to hand authors “take it or leave it” deals in the expectation that the author won’t find a better offer.

The elephant in the room

And then there’s the elephant in the room: Amazon, which has used its e-book dominance to demand steep discounts from publishers and drive down the price of frontlist e-books, even selling them at a loss. As a result, there’s simply not as much e-book revenue to split as there was in 2011when we reported on the e-book royalty math. At that time, publishers made a killing on frontlist e-book sales as compared to frontlist hardcover sales—at the author’s expense—because, as compared to today, the price of e-books was relatively high.

When we analyzed e-royalties for three books in the 2011 post, “E-Book Royalty Math: The House Always Wins,” we found that every time an e-book was sold in place of a hardcover, the author’s take decreased substantially, while the publisher’s take increased.

Since 2011, we have found that publishers’ e-gains have diminished. But the author’s share has fallen even farther. Amazon has squeezed the publishers, to be sure. The publishers have helped recoup their losses by passing them on to their authors.

These were our calculations for several books in 2011. The trend was obvious. Compared with hardcovers, each e-book sold brought big gains to the publisher and sizable losses to the author when the author’s royalties are compared to the publisher’s gross profit (income per copy minus expenses per copy), calculated using industry-standard contract terms:

Author’s Royalty vs. Publisher’s Profit, 2011

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

Author’s Standard Royalty: $3.75 hardcover; $2.28 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss = -39%

Publisher’s Margin: $4.75 hardcover; $6.32 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain = +33%

Hell’s Corner, by David Baldacci

Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.20 hardcover; $2.63 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss = -37%

Publisher’s Margin: $5.80 hardcover; $7.37 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain = +27%

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand

Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.05 hardcover; $3.38 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss = -17%

Publisher’s Margin: $5.45 hardcover; $9.62 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain = +77%

What’s happening now? We ran the numbers again using the following recent bestsellers. Because of lower e-book prices, the publishers don’t do as well as they used to, though they still come out ahead when consumers choose e-books over hardcovers. But authors fare worse than ever:

Author’s Royalty vs. Publisher’s Profit, 2015

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doer

Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.04 hardcover; $2.09 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss= -48%

Publisher’s Margin: $5.44 hardcover; $5.80 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain: +7%

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande

Author’s Standard Royalty: $3.90 hardcover; $1.92 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss= -51%

Publisher’s Margin: $5.10 hardcover; $5.27 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain: +3.5%

A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler

Author’s Standard Royalty: $3.89; $1.92 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss: -51%

Publisher’s Margin: $5.09 hardcover; $5.27 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain: +3.5%[1]

Exceptions to the rule

It’s time for a change. If the publishers won’t correct this imbalance on their own, it will take a critical mass of authors and agents willing to fight for a fair 50% e-book royalty. We hope that established authors and, particularly, bestselling authors will start to push back and stand up to publishers on the royalty rate—on behalf of all authors, as well as themselves.

There have been cracks in some publishers’ façades. Some bestselling authors have managed to obtain a 50% e-book split, though they’re asked to sign non-disclosure agreements to keep these terms secret. We’ve also heard of authors with strong sales histories negotiating 50-50 royalty splits in exchange for foregoing an advance or getting a lower advance; or where the 50% rate kicks in only after a certain threshold level of sales. For instance, a major romance publishing house has offered 50% royalties, but only after the first 10,000 electronic copies—a high bar to clear in the current digital climate. But overall, publishers’ apparent inflexibility on their standard e-book royalty demonstrates their unwillingness to change it.

We know and respect the fact that publishers—especially in this era of media consolidation—need to meet their bottom lines. But if professional authors are going to continue to produce the sort of work publishing houses are willing to stake their reputations on, those authors need a fair share of the profits from their art and labor. In a time when electronic books provide an increasing share of revenues at significantly lower production and distribution costs, publishers’ e-book royalty practices need to change.

[1] In calculating these numbers and percentages for hardcover editions, we made the following assumptions: (1) the publisher sells at an average 50% discount to the wholesaler or retailer, (2) the royalty rate is 15% of list price (as it is for most hardcover books, after 10,000 units are sold), (3) the average marginal cost to manufacture the book and get it to the store is $3, and (4) the return rate is 25% (a handy number—if one of four books produced is returned, then the $3 marginal cost of producing the book is spread over three other books, giving us a return cost of $1 per book). We also rounded up retail list price a few pennies to give us easy figures to work with.

Likewise, in calculating these numbers and percentages for the 2015 set of e-books, we are assuming that under the agency model—which is reportedly the new standard in the Big Five’s agreements with Amazon—the online bookseller pays 70% of the retail list price of the e-book to the publisher. The bookseller, acting as the publisher’s agent, sells the e-book at the price established by the publisher. The unit costs to the publisher are simply the author’s royalty and the encryption and transmission fees, for which we deduct a generous 50 cents per unit.

I Like Sci-Fi, I Like Dystopia, I Like the Idea of Law in the Future

Vortice is the name of a novel I'm writing in fits and starts. The book is set in 2055 and takes a hard look at where law will be when machines can access the quantum information inside a person's microtubules where consciousness is--it is thought by some--stored.

It is the story of a young woman whose mental images have been read and who is found to be guilty of a murder.

Except...she didn't commit it.

Her grandfather, Thaddeus Murfee, has a role.

What do you think?

Whew, Christine II is Finished!

Today is July 4 and I spent the day finishing the first draft of Hellfire: I, Lawyer, a Sisters In Law series novel. It's a terrific book with a fuse burning down at the end and my fingers were flying as I wrote it, excited to see what came next. Hopefully lots of people will read it and like it and word will spread about what a fun six or seven hours of reading Hellfire is.

Should be published by mid-July.

Thaddeus Murfee Book 9 is Underway!

Thaddeus Murfee update: The new Thaddeus Murfee thriller us being plotted and character development begun. Working title is "A Small Death in Orbit" and takes Thaddeus back to Orbit, where it all began five years ago. He is called upon to defend an old friend and much more, including his agreement to run for public office. Will he actually run? Get elected? We'll find out in the next couple of months.

This Thaddeus Murfee book will get back to basics: crime > court > outcome. Thaddeus has personally asked me for that kind of approach and I have wholeheartedly agreed.

Welcome back, Thaddeus.

Now to watch.

New Path Maybe Taken

I have written nine novels in 14 or 15 months that now keep the bills paid. So far, so good. But for many years I have wanted to write a series of about four novels, financial/family in nature, that each would take about two years to research and write. At the end of that time I would probably give up writing and take up kite surfing (I would be 81). I would be very proud of these four novels, much prouder than I am of the ones written so far. Maybe "pleased with" is a better way of putting it. They would please me more than the ones to date have pleased me. I love my novels written thus far, but I know I can do much better, tell much wider stories with more power than what I've done. Now if I can just figure out how to stop publishing for two years while I write the first one. Will my little publishing shop go under while I don't feed the Amazon algos for two years? Or is there enough to keep things going? I really don't know. But I'm leaning toward trying.

Mexico: Gracias Por Su Bienvenida!

Yes, thank you for the welcome you've given one more gringo who has come down south to enjoy your sand, sea, and sunshine. Thank you for the incredible food and willing help when my host's car broke down and you appeared along the roadside to stop and lend us assistance, giving us a ride into town when the Norteamericanos sped past us without a second look.

The lobster here is indescribably delicious. I was able to take five of us out for lobster dinners in a quaint little fishing village south of Tijuana for a mere $85.00 dlls. Freshly caught, freshly cooked, with chips and salsa and side dishes and dessert. I can't eat like this every day, but it's a good start to a long stay.

I found a home on the ocean. It looks like something out of the movies, furnished, with surf and breakers just outside the front door. It's huge, so my dogs have plenty of room to roam and so I can find a quiet place or two where I can sit down and type out my stories for an hour or two each day. Downstairs is a separate apartment where my sister will live and do her thing with her own kitchen, patio, and room for her life and animals. Coming upstairs is a huge living room to your left, furnished with three couches and fireplace, and straight back is the kitchen that is one of four walls surrounding an interior atrium where all manner of plants and flowers and succulents are growing--enough to keep Deb happy with her green thumb notions. Then there's a room where Deb can set up her sewing machine and create her art quilts. So she's got her space. Off to the right is an upstairs patio with a huge table beneath a thatched roof and that looks straight down at the ocean. Here's hoping the dogs don't try out the three foot high balustrade and go sailing off into the waters of the Pacific.

Two car garage, room for beach stuff for the kids, enough bedrooms that family and friends can come and stay for a few days or even weeks if they want.

All of it made possible by you, the readers I love and to whom I owe everything.

Thank you one and all.

Ten Things I've Been Doing...

1. Writing iLawyer, starring Christine Susmann. Probably 10% done.
2. Taking dogs (Max and Skittles) for haircuts. Big mess, barking and trying to get loose in the parking lot.
3. Juicing. Doing the Joe Cross 5-Day reboot. Could sure use a Big Mac about now.
4. Watching the NCAA Final Four. Great games, we'll see lots of these guys in the NBA.
5. Getting Deb ready to go to Africa to work with monkeys. Will she come back to me or throw me over for a tree dweller? Only time will tell.
6. Recovering from second back surgery. This one isn't fun. Don't have any jokes for it. But hey, it could always be worse, right?
7. Thinking how grateful I am for my readers. You have given me my dreams, my new life.
8. Wondering if my new agent is going to be able to sell the new Christine series to some publisher who will put in airports and drug stores. This one is something I look forward to try.
9. Looking for hang glider lessons. While Deb's in Europe, I'm imagining all the things I could be doing--including taking a week long hangliding course. I had my own airplane at one time and so this looks like a natural for me.
10. Playing my guitar in my studio. I'm determined to learn the solos for Hotel California and Sultans of Swing. Now if my fingers would just cooperate.

New Series Starring Christine Susmann

My agent, Jane Dystel, is going to sell my new series for me. The series will star our old friend, Christine Susmann. As you remember, she is Thaddeus' paralegal who is an Iraq War veteran, a weightlifter and firearms expert, beautiful and brilliant. When Thaddeus was defending Ermeline in The Defendants the case wouldn't have been won without Christine's tough help.

Now the book is being written. The title is iLawyer. There will be many of these books. She is a lawyer now, concentrating in public policy law, and her first case involves the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which presently is threatened by commercial logging (thanks to the U.S. Forest Service) and ordinary people are being injured in person and property due to the clearcutting. Christine flies her plane to Alaska and signs up her first client.

The book is titled iLawyer because her cases come over the Internet, Hence "i".

iLawyer will publish hopefully this year. It will be slower to come to you than the Thaddeus books because it will be published by one of the Big Five publishing houses or by one of Amazon's imprints and that takes a while longer. But not to worry: the Thaddeus Murfee series will continue and bring you more great reading all during this next year.

Thanks for reading my stuff.

Thaddeus Book 8 Will Publish This Week

The New York Times Bestseller novel with will publish this week. It is with its three editors right now and then proofing will be left to do, add front and back matter, and voila, we're published. The editors are raving about this book, and these people are hard-hitting wordsmiths who ordinarily don't rave about anything. They've seen it all, but they tell me this is an excellent book.

Why you might really like the NYT Bestseller: There's lots of Thaddeus in the book and lots of Christine. Plus Katy returns and is dealing with trying to get pregnant. Thaddeus' childhood is gone into, plus his earlier, college years and what happened then. Christine is taken prisoner in Moscow and abused beyond belief as the Russians try to extract a confession from her.

Great ending, all comes out well. You're going to enjoy this one, good escape reading, fast-paced, no-nonsense with long descriptions and all the stuff too many writers use as filler. My readers want it fast and want to keep turning pages. This book definitely has that.

Buy it now, please, pre-order available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SZDHI72.

The book so far has 1,000 pre-orders, so it's going to be huge.

Music Studio

All right, I better come clean. Deep down inside me is a frustrated musician. I have played guitar since high school and have been in bands on and off since then. In the past couple of years my hero has been Naudo Rodrigues and I have hoped to learn some of his style and play out, hopefully as noon music at a sandwich shop or a hotel lobby, something like that. Also, I write music and want to get my music online, here at my website, so people (you) can come here and listen to what I'm up to.

EQUIPMENT LIST

Macbook Pro
Garageband
Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 2 In/2 Out USB Audio Interface
Alhambra Guitar
Godin Multiac Guitar with MIDI & XLR outs
12 String Guitar
Yamaha Synth
Tascam Studio Monitors
2488 NEO Tascam Board (Used recording bands live)

Pretty basic stuff, all in all.

I have about four songs that I've written over the years and want to start with those.

Keep checking back. Music will magically appear here and we'll have something else in common!

I'm An Amazon (Kindle) All-Star!

Based on my sale of books (thanks to you all!), I have been selected  Kindle all-star and awarded a cash prize of $1000.  Here is the email I received from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) where all ebooks get published:

Congratulations! You have qualified for a KDP Select All-Star bonus for the month of February.

To further reward the books that are most popular with our customers, we recently introduced KDP Select All-Star bonuses, based on what KDP Select (KDPS) titles and authors are being read the most.

The following author qualified for a bonus:

John Ellsworth |  $1,000

We determine ‘most-read’ rankings by combining books sold plus qualified borrows from Kindle Unlimited (KU) and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) during the month on Amazon.com. Calculations include only titles that are enrolled in KDP Select during the period.

The payment schedule and payment method is the same as your other sales from KDP. You will receive your bonus approximately sixty (60) days following the end of the calendar month during which applicable sales occur.

For more information on KDP Select All-Star bonuses, please go here:  https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A2X66QXB12WV2

Best regards,

The Kindle Direct Publishing Team

Thanks to all you readers. I love each and every one of you and am so grateful to you for reading my books. I will keep working hard at it in order to please you and provide you with the kind of stories you like. (all the gang says hello too: Thaddeus, Katy, Turquoise, Henry, Christine, Sarai, and all the rest).

Look Out World: Here Comes Christine Susmann!

Christine Susmann, the brainy, ex-army paralegal, is getting her own series! That's right, I am writing the first book now, starring Christine as a new law school grad interested in public policy law. Her cases will be exciting and they will deal with matters of public importance.

This is the series my agent, Jane Dystel, will sell for me when I have the first book ready. So...say a little prayer for yours truly and wish me well.

Hello, Christine, my name is John. Let's talk....

Learning to Write - What I Did, Example 1

When I was just out of college I was very taken with two writers: J.D. Salinger and John Updike. I read Salinger's stuff and I saw that it "was mostly dialogue," as I saw it way back when. I looked at Updike's work and I felt like I was in the presence of an angel describing the world in ways I had never seen it before. My first inclination, as maybe it is with all young writers, was to imitate what I was seeing.

So...I opened [i]Nine Stories[/i] to page one and began...typing Salinger's story on my typewriter. I wanted to see how it felt to write those sentences. I wanted to see how the meter and rhythm of the sentences changed so the reader wouldn't become bored.

And moved on. Many new writers back then, when I was learning, were Hemingway imitators. Everything was a simple sentence. Until it wasn't. Gerund phrases, said Hemingway's critics--you must learn to use gerund phrases if you are ever going to describe action that's happening right before the reader's eyes. So...I was teaching English to high school students then...I learned what the heck a gerund phrase was. Then I went looking for the animal of that name in Hemingway's writing. I tried it out. I wrote a hunting story and it ran on for about a half page in one place, building gerund phrase upon gerund phrase until the protagonist must have been winded and exhausted by all the movement.

Moving forward. I wrote out John Irving's first chapter to Garp. This was after I studied under John at Goddard College in 1976 in Vermont. He was teaching that summer session in their low-residency MFA program and I showed up ready to earn an MFA, but instead was told that writing couldn't be taught, it had to be learned. Oh well.

Writing out other writer's words.

What methods or techniques have you used to improve your craft?

The New York Times Bestseller: a Novel

Know what I like? I like writing. I especially like writing when I'm 68,000 words into an 80,000 word novel. Which is where I am with the NYT Bestseller. At this stage, a novel either takes on a life of its own and becomes more than the writer knew it could be, or it becomes stale. I'm lucky, because this book has suddenly begun to run away with itself. Sub-plots that I never imagined, going in, are rising to the surface and torquing the story. It's going to be a fun read, worth every penny of $2.99.

If you'd like to sample the first two chapters of this cool book, free, go here: http://johnellsworthbooks.com/free-chapter/

Excuse me now while I get back to it. The book should hit the shelves "Kindle Market" in about thirty days--edits and all that once I've done my part.

Signed With Literary Agent Today!

When I first published 13 months ago I was very upset with New York. I had just queried 37 agents one snowy afternoon about my new novel, The Defendants. Not one of them responded. So I looked around and stumbled across KDP. At last, I thought, no one could stand in my way of getting published. But I was still angry at NY. Not really, but I didn't understand the numbers then: how many unsolicited mss they get and must deal with. I was one fish out of many that day, I'm sure. Still, hard not to take personally.

Over the next year I wrote and published six more books in the series. They've all gotten good reviews and they've all gotten some not-so-good reviews. In that year I sold over 41,000 books and gave away 177,000, thanks to Bookbub.

But I wanted more: I wanted to see how far I could actually go with my books. I’m one of these people who likes to try stuff, stir things up, see what happens.

So I queried again. But this time, to only one agent, Dystel and Goderich. Jane Dystel of Dystel and Goderich asked for a chapter, read it, and said she'd be glad to represent me.

Done deal, I signed. (Keeping in mind I'm a lawyer and I knew a little bit about contracts, which the agent was only too happy to change around until I was cool with it. Which was a relief.)

The agency rep is for a new series, none of which is written except for that first chapter of the first book, the one I sent Jane. It does not cover my existing or hereafter Thaddeus Murfee series, the books that pay the rent.

Which is kind of cool, because someone has actually accepted me on the basis of yet-unwritten work. I like that vote of confidence.

We'll see where this goes. But the cool thing is, I'm in again. I'm writing with renewed interest and energy. As soon as I put down 35K more words on Thaddeus 8, I can start the new series. It's a spinoff, one of the characters from the Thaddeus books that many readers have said they'd like to see more. A woman. An Iraq war veteran and a paralegal. Tough as nails, ready to take on a new assignment. I know this woman already. But now I'm going to get to know her a lot better.

How I Decide What Language and Scenarios Are OK for My Books

In my own experience as a fairly newly published novelist, readers have written to me objecting to this or that. Some left reviews in which they objected to this or that. Rather than being offended or feeling put-upon, I have usually found myself looking deeper into my use of certain language and found that, in my writing, I had actually violated some of my own personal beliefs or values for the sake of my “art,” that sensibility that anything goes, wordwise and expression-wise, as long as it’s true to the character.

Um, no. I have learned other ways of expressing those same things so that certain group of readers–and I–would no longer be offended by those conventional expressions.

Then there was the reader who wrote and said if my MC killed one more person she was going to quit reading me. So, the next time I came to one of those inevitable killing moments, her words came back to me, I paused on that path, and found myself thinking, “How else could I, the writer, approach this storyline and avoid killing?” After all, to kill again was predictable and maybe okay, given the nastiness of the target. But, horror of horrors, it was trite and it was predictable. So what actually happened was a wholly different twist to the storyline suddenly presented itself and I headed in that new, and, it turns out, really cool direction. (Later MC does kill again in a totally different scenario and book, but hey, sometimes…). So that’s been my experience with reader feedback, in the main. If you look through my novels you’ll find that, since I’ve honored my own sensibilities, there are no longer F-bombs or expressions of a higher power’s name “in vain,” as it were. Not because I felt threatened by the objecting reader but because my own deep-down sensibility was thus honored and my automatic writing reviewed and changed.

OTOH, would I change an expression I found okay, or a scenario I found okay, just because some group or other was offended? Never. The predicate being, “I found okay.”

What I’m relating here is in no way meant to be didactic; rather, it’s a simple recounting of some of my own experiences as a writer, FWIW.

First Chapter of New Book - Read Free Here!

The New York Times Bestseller

is one-fourth finished and the first chapter, second draft, may be read here. This is an exciting book, all about a skyjacking. When it happens, Thaddeus is sitting on the plane with Christine Susmann on one side and Angelina Sosa on the other. Angelina is a brand new journalism grad looking to make her mark. She decides that the skyjacking is her chance to write a Pulitzer Prize winning story for her paper, the Chicago Tribune, and maybe even writer a New York Times bestseller book. The plane is diverted and lands in Moscow. Christine is taken off the plane by Russian intelligence officers, who believe she is actually a spy. Thaddeus follows her and Angelina darts off with them in pursuit of her story.

That's about all I'm going to reveal right now. Please read the first chapter and enjoy!

Ralph Rowland Posts First Review of Unspeakable Prayers!

Unspeakable Prayers is the seventh book in the Thaddeus Murfee series by this author. I have read and reported on all the previous books.
This book, whether as a standalone, or as continuing in the series warrants a five star rating. Unspeakable Prayers is a serious study, in my view, of the interaction between two men, one a Jew, the other an SS Officer in Hitler’s Third Reich. The backdrop of their interaction is the Holocaust, specifically the Treblinka extermination camp.
Lodzi Ashstein, a Polish Jew, was sentenced to Treblinka in 1942. He was 19. While there he encountered Janich Heiss, a member of Hitler’s elite SS, a commandant level officer, authorized by dint of his grade to kill Jews at will. Again, Treblinka, not to be confused, for example with Auschwitz, was an extermination camp which was the reason why Jews were sent there. Auschwitz was a concentration camp peopled by Jews used to labor in the service of the Reich during WWII. As a side note, Tuesday, January 27, 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russians.
I don’t re-tell story lines in my reviews. Suffice it to say, this book is not an apologetic for what occurred at Treblinka. It is, both a serious study of Hitler’s intention to carry out the ultimate solution and, in part, a serious study of the horrors, at times grisly, while never gratuitous, of the treatment that those sent there from among the overall 6 million Jews exterminated during WWII suffered and died at the hands of the German High Command.
While dark, the book is truly a masterful accounting and thought provoking study of how these two individuals behaved in the manner in which they found themselves, either to survive, or eradicate. Both protagonists bring strong character development to the plot which is laid out such that causes one to gasp at times enough to want to put the book down and take a breath, yet doing so raises the risk of losing the moment and thus the momentum of the story.
Make no mistake, Unspeakable Prayers is gripping. It pulls no punches in providing a thorough going analysis of the Holocaust, whose victims suffered inhuman treatment at the hands of the Nazis. Yet, at the same time, Unspeakable Prayers offers up a beacon to the will of the human spirit to survive. To say any more would detract from the point of this review.
Simply put, John Ellsworth has presented a work that is timeless in its importance, which cannot be denied or simply sloughed over. Unspeakable Prayers, is both Man’s unspeakable moment, yet is it also his Prayer in its message for the human spirit.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

JANUARY 27, 2015
The UN General Assembly designated January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the victims of the Nazi era and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.

AUSCHWITZ
The Auschwitz concentration camp complex was the largest of its kind established by the Nazi regime. It included three main camps, all of which deployed incarcerated prisoners at forced labor. One of them also functioned for an extended period as a killing center. The camps were located approximately 37 miles west of Krakow, near the prewar German-Polish border in Upper Silesia, an area that Nazi Germany annexed in 1939 after invading and conquering Poland. The SS authorities established three main camps near the Polish city of Oswiecim: Auschwitz I in May 1940; Auschwitz II (also called Auschwitz-Birkenau) in early 1942; and Auschwitz III (also called Auschwitz-Monowitz) in October 1942.

UNSPEAKABLE PRAYERS
A novel about Lodzi Ashstein, a 19-year-old Jewish boy forced from Warsaw by the Nazis in 1942 to board the cattle train to Treblinka. A novel of evil, survival, overcoming, and hope. A look at one man's life from Treblinka to Chicago and a trial based on the Hate Crimes Act in reverse, for this time a Nazi captain from Treblinka has been murdered. An inquiry into the prevalence of hate toward a people chosen as God's own. The why remains a mystery at the end of the book--you will be asked to draw your own conclusions. Truth be told, there are probably as many conclusions to be drawn as there are readers of this incredible novel.

If you're looking for a novel fitting for Remembrance Day, this novel, released on that day, is suggested.

You will never forget Lodzi Ashstein, I promise you. -- John Ellsworth, January 2015.

Bookbub Number 5 - In Six Months!

That's right, I just got word yesterday that Bookbub has accepted my discount promo for February 21, 2015. The book is The Defendants, my book number 1. The Kindle Countdown Deal with actually begin February 19 and run for five days, with BB on the third day, the 21st.

What does this mean? For one thing, in my first four Bookbub freebie promos (starting in August 2015 with BB number 1), I have given away free over 170,000 of my books. This has resulted in daily sales in excess of 100/day. Now Bookbub has given me a paid promo, meaning I will get to sell The Defendants at a discount price of .99c and I will receive royalties instead of giving my book away free. Finally, because I have been trying for a paid promo all this time! I am very gratified and thankful this has happened.

Book seven, Unspeakable Prayers, will be released on January 27. If you would like a pre-release copy of this book, please just let me know. I will be happy to send you a free copy. In exchange, if you would leave an Amazon book review next week I would be enormously grateful.

Thanks for reading!

Unspeakable Prayers

When even the angels had to turn aside their faces and wish they had not seen. When even the angels could not tell what they had heard. Unspeakable prayers, the seventh of the Thaddeus Murfee books, is coming in the next week. Right now the book is out for edits and beta reads, and will be published once all that good stuff is completed.

This weekend my wife is reading the book. She's usually a pretty good indicator for me. This book is going to be one I've waited and wanted all my life to write: it is, as Hollywood is wont to say, sprawling. Covering WWII and after, the history is broad histoscape that takes in so much of Poland, Germany, and America, where the virulent disease of Nazi Germany can still rear its head and ask to be heard. Witness even the latest round of rallies going on in Germany this past week. The world has changed so much since 1942, but has man really changed?

Which is what this book is all about. It deals with the kind of hatred most of us never know: that hatred of a people or a race that isn't subject to any kind of empathy or forgiveness (for what, God only knows) of the people who are members of that hated race or group. In writing this book, I have studied the historians, read the first-person accounts, considered the economic, religious, and political realities of pre- and post- and still cannot conceive how one group, the Nazis, could so loath another, the Jews, that it would try to eradicate them from the earth.

Pick up this book and read it, please. It is my best work and it's the book that will always make me feel like my life was worth living, after all.

After all the pain and loss and all the rest of it, Unspeakable Prayers can exist as my prayer.

First Year, Seventh Book

Well, it's almost over--my first year as a published author. During that year I wrote and published six books and wrote a seventh, now undergoing final reads and edits. Here is what has happened to me this first year out.

I have sold 30,000 books and given away 170,000 books. That's right, I discovered Bookbub about halfway into my first year and made submissions. Of my book, The Defendants. It was offered for free and it had right at 50,000 downloads in two days. Three more freebie Bookbubs followed. All told, 170,000 books downloaded. Results: 30,000 sales, probably directly attributable to the giveaways.

At least I think. To be very honest, I don't know how it happened. Here's some history.

I have been writing for publication since 1967 when I wrote my first novel. I published in 2014. That's quite a dry spell, you might say. Some might be inclined to quit. But after serial rejections in the hundreds, I kept writing. Because writing is like my therapy. It's the one place where I can be my best self. My books say who I am. My collection of short stories say who I am. They tell anyone who wishes to know, how I think, how I speak, how my mind works--all of that. But most important, my books tell stories. That's right. I see myself wholly as an entertainer. If this writing of mine is art then I missed that part of the definition when I took humanities in college. We were taught that art is found mostly in France, Italy, and Greece, and we were taught that art might very well take up years of lying on your back and painting ceilings. Doesn't even come close to my experience with my seven books.

See, I first published in 2014 when I was 72 years old. That's right. During that same year I had cataract surgery on both eyes and had back surgery (spinal ablation) when the osteoarthritis got so bad I couldn't stand upright without spasms. So I did the next best thing: I sat. I retired from my law practice and I sat. I got bored, so I bought a Macbook. The heavens parted: I love that computer. So one night I wrote my first sentence of my first novel. And then my life came gushing out in these 500,000 words. More and more, as if it was feeding on itself, the stories refused to stop coming out.

So, I did what a blind invalid should do: I wrote them down. And put them on Amazon. And people bought them.

Today I sell around 150 books a day. That's after one year. Now I can see again 20/20, and I can stand up again. But I'm still sitting with the little laptop propped on my lap in my dilapidated chair that my wife explains is the root cause of both back and vision problems. Somehow...they're connected, the health problems and the chair, as only a spouse can make those connections for you. Anyway, that's a whole other book, one I doubt I'll write.

My main character is a young lawyer named Thaddeus Murfee. Much of what happens to him actually happened to me while I was practicing law. Equally true, much of what happens to him did not happen to me, thank heavens. Thaddeus has several more careers coming at him down the road. Stay tuned.

Year two looks like it will be lively.