Piracy or Free Publicity

I attended a panel on writing and one thing stuck in my mind. When asked about the issue of piracy and the ease of copying on the internet, someone replied that as an author, he wasn't concerned with piracy as much as obscurity. Especially for those who haven't 'made' it yet, the small amount of money that is made is peanuts compared with the 'free' publicity.

The idea is to build a fan base first. Once people find they love your work, they will be much more inclined to buy your other books. Readers as a group, tend to be loyal to the authors they love. They will shell out the money in order to read more from that author.

Trailer for The Empire

Action! Adventure! Sci-Fi! Thriller! Romance! 

The Book Trailer for The Empire 

by Elizabeth Lang

Trailer for The Empire

Status Updates

Just a bit of a status update as we near the end of the year.

The Rebels is going like a passenger train on turbo. Now that Adrian has decided to make his opinions public, I can't seem to shut him up.

Remember that Name

What names are these?

I'm glad you asked...

John Locke, Amanda Hocking...I'm sure you've heard of them, the self-publishing phenoms.

Now we have also have J.A. Konrath, a mystery writer who has sold 400,000 digital copies of his self-published books, and our newest success story, Darcy Chan, whose manuscript, after being rejected by 100 publishers and agents as too risky, braved the self-publishing maze and published it herself on Amazon. After a $1000 marketing and PR campaign, including a hefty $575 review from Kirkus, and strategically pricing her book at 99 cents, hoping to build an audience, she has now sold over 400,000 ebooks and is attracting interest from movie producers and audio-book publishers.

The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing. People pursue it like a holy grail; that magical, mercurial, fairy-dust creature that will bestow success on desperate pilgrims. We seek to ride the whirlwind, to hang onto its coattails and hope it can propel us to success. But like the internet, that vast living spiderweb of human connectedness, no one can truly tame it, control it, or predict its behavior, until after the dust settles. Then, like the wise sages we are, we scratch our wizardly-white beards and claim, we knew it all along. Like hell we did. It's like saying that we can stir the pot and know the exact molecule that will end up in our mouths. We don't. We spit in the wind and hope none of the spittle comes back to smack us in the face.

But it is fun speculating.