Has it been a success though, I ask. I don't know, ... I don't have another first novel that wasn't pushed electronically to compare it to. But the book itself is doing very well. Looking at other publishers, a good example is Baen Books , who do a lot of multi volume series of books. From experience, they know how much volume 13 should sell based on the sales of boook 12. So when volume 13 comes out, they bundled a CD-Rom with eBook versions of the first 12 books. They also hosted these eBooks online for free. When this happens, the sales of volume 13 were beyond expectation, and volumes 1 through 12 see a bump in sales as well.
Quotes about ebooks (3 Quotes)
If I am going to be a writer, earning a living in the era of digital text, I need to understand where the opportunities are. They won't disappear, they'll just be different, and need to be recognised. In the last days of Vaudeville Theatre, they sued Marconi because radio was killing Vaudeville, where you had to pay to go into a relatively small room to listen to music and voice. But it didn't kill music, the outcome was a thousand times more music, making a thousand times more money, reaching a thousand times more people. But in the short term, there was panic. If digital text will result in hundreds more authors, with hundreds more novels, I need to be in the middle of eBooks. I need to be heavily engaged. All those people downloading my text is good news.
There are people already sharing eBooks out there, ... and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me.