Lee Goldberg says...

Over at Lee Goldberg's most excellent blog, he speaks of the enormous money being made by some self-pubbed e-book writers. Mind you, I'm not one of the success stories just yet... Anywho, he quotes one agent. She "sums up the whole ebook marketplace very nicely: "This is a Wild West of a world."

This is something I'm a little afraid of. I think I write good books. I've gotten good reviews, and good feedback from fans (though I will share one quite angry email in the near future).

What I can't do is turn out four books a year. I probably could if I didn't have a full-time job. I have a couple of good novels not otherwise engaged. I just put one out a few days ago.



I think I'll be putting out another one next month. At the end of the summer, I expect to put out another one. That's three novels in one year and three more than I would have published even if I signed a contract today with one of the NYC publishers. It takes quite a while to bring a hardcover to market. And I do have couple of short story collections out now



and a couple more to come by June. These are mostly previously published stories that I was probably never going to see another dime from.

But I think that in order to start seeing real money*, you have to have a good number of novels out - say at least six or seven. I could be wrong. Maybe two or three novels will be enough to drive sales of the collections and so on, but I don't think so.

Not that I won't have six or seven or more novels out. The three for this year won't be my only three. I expect another two or three will be turned into kindling next year. It's just that in the Wild West, I'm not ever going to be "quick on the draw." I guess that means I'd better make my shots count.


* Define, if you will, real money... I have numbers in mind, but that's another post.