Barry Eisler and Stephen Leather ride the indie charts in U.S./UK

Yet another self-published Kindle writer makes a killing

  In mid-March we had Barry Eisler turning down a $500,000 advance, which he explained in his long interview with J.A. Konrath.

  As the Daily Finance's Martin Cloake reported:

  ' At the heart of both authors' reasoning [Konrath and Eisler] is the publisher's advance. Traditionally authors received a lump sum advance against sales which they would use to write the book. But that money has to be earned back once the book is published, and at a royalty – between 10 and 15% – of the sale price.

Insurance policy
This can be seen as a loan, an insurance policy, even a bet. Konrath says: "Signing with a big publisher is like signing a life insurance policy, where the payments keep getting larger while the payoff gets smaller as time goes on."  Taking that loan, argues Eisler, only makes sense if "the loan is so big that you don't think you'd ever be able to make that much on your own". '


Stephen Leather - UK
A British thriller writer, Stephen Leather (U.S.)  (UK) sells his ebooks for as little as 71 p (US $1.50) and has enjoyed the #1 spot on Amazon UK's ebook bestseller lists for "90 percent of the last three months" and that's from selling "somewhere in the region" of 2,000 ebooks a day.

' Leather enjoys a successful parallel career writing "big international thrillers" for Hodder & Stoughton.

But last August, when Amazon.co.uk opened its Kindle store, he saw an opportunity: "I was lucky, in that I had three novellas Hodder had turned down because they were in a different genre from my other books and too short to work as conventional paperbacks.

"But I realised they might work for the Kindle." '

He realized the Kindle (UK: K3) was going to be very big on Christmas Day and that after people downloaded the ebooks they'd always wanted, most of them relatively (or absolutely) expensive, they'd start looking for cheaper books.

"I knew the wave was going to break on Christmas Day.  I got myself in position to take advantage, I got on and I've been riding it ever since."


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.