Michael Prescott – Four Bestselling Ebooks on Amazon Kindle At Once
Most authors would be over the moon if they had one bestselling book on Amazon Kindle Bestseller List. Michael Prescott has had four. Here is a sample of recent rankings:
Shiver - #23 in Paid Kindle, #16 in Literature & Fiction, #3 in Suspense
Mortal Pursuit - #29 in Paid Kindle, #2 in Action & Adventure, #2 in Police Procedurals
Stealing Faces - #38 in Paid Kindle, #27 in Literature & Fiction, #6 in Suspense
Riptide - #95 in Paid Kindle, #3 in Psychological Thrillers, #4 in Police Procedurals
This is obviously pretty amazing. In this interview, Michael speaks to us about his writing and the best ways other writers can market themselves to get their books into the bestseller lists too.
Darrell - Can you describe a typical day of writing?
Michael - In my thirty or so years as a professional writer I've tried various approaches. When I was writing horror novels in the 1980s, I forced myself to do four double-spaced pages a day. Usually I wrote at a specific time and treated it like a job. I had to work fast because I wasn't being paid much! Later I became more relaxed in my approach and gave up on the idea of a daily schedule or a targeted number of pages. However, I always had a sense of the deadline and how many pages I needed to complete each month.
Everything changed a few years ago when the mass-market paperback end of the business started falling apart. Like many midlist writers, I was shown the door. I thought I could find a new home at another publishing house, but with the industry in transition there were no takers. At that point I switched my focus and started making money in ways unrelated to publishing. However, I still wanted to self-publish a thriller called Riptide, which I'd shopped around unsuccessfully to print publishers. It was basically a vanity project. I was mainly interested in bringing it out as a print-on-demand edition, using CreateSpace. Doing it as an ebook was an afterthought. I figured as long as I had the book proofread and formatted, I might as well put it out as a Kindle edition too.
As it turned out, the print on-demand version has sold relatively few copies, while the Kindle edition is doing much better. Eventually I decided to do ebook versions of some of my out-of-print titles, since the rights had reverted to me. When the ebooks starting to sell, I realized -- somewhat to my surprise -- that this was actually a viable market.
Now I'm doing some original writing for the first time in a while. But it's different from my earlier stuff. What I'm working on is a short comedy novel specifically for the ebook market. There's no deadline, so I write when the spirit moves me.
I guess the short answer is, there's no typical day of writing for me. Sometimes I get inspired and write a whole lot of pages, and other days I focus on other things. And this was true even for much of the time when writing was my only job.
Darrell - You started out writing a number of scripts for movies, but switched to novels. Do you think of yourself as a 'visual' writer?
Michael - To be honest, I probably wasn't visual enough to be a good screenwriter! Only one of my scripts actually got made into a movie, and it was awful.
The main difference between screenwriting and novel-writing is that in a screenplay everything has to be condensed. Plot developments and character motivations have to be reduced to a few lines of dialogue or a little bit of action or a single meaningful image. In a novel, on the other hand, you can explain things at length. You can get inside the character's head and show exactly what he's thinking and feeling. For me, it's much easier and comes much more naturally.
I don't think my style of writing is particularly visual. I think it's more oriented toward dialogue and interior monologue. In fact, sometimes the first draft of one of my scenes consists only of dialogue. I fill in the action and descriptive details later.
Darrell - You mentioned on your website that you had problems getting your book "Final Sins" published. How did this come about?
Michael - It was actually Riptide, not Final Sins. Final Sins was the last book I did for a print publisher, and it concluded a loose trilogy that began with Dangerous Games and Mortal Faults. All three books featured a pair of heroines, Abby Sinclair and Tess McCallum, who had an interesting dynamic. But because mass-market paperbacks were on the decline, sales for each book were lower than for the previous one. After I finished Final Sins, I couldn't find anyone to publish either Riptide or another book I wrote on spec, which I'll bring out as an ebook eventually. Nobody was buying fiction unless they thought it was going to be another Da Vinci Code.
Frankly, I think The Da Vinci Code ended up doing more harm than good to the book industry. It's an entertaining book, but its success was, to some extent, a fluke. It's not the kind of thing you can repeat at will. Even Dan Brown couldn't repeat it. And yet publishers became obsessed with finding the "next" Da Vinci Code. In the process, they lost sight of the less splashy books that had been making money for years. They weren't interested in "small" stories anymore. Everything had to be high-concept, over-the-top, international in scope. But not every writer can do that kind of thing, and not every reader wants to read it. So they ended up losing a lot of perfectly good writers and alienating a lot of formerly dependable readers, all in the quest for another mega-hit.
Darrell - You currently have four books in the Kindle top 100 "paid" bestsellers. How did you achieve this amazing feat?
Michael - I'm not entirely sure! But the basic strategy is one I learned from a good friend of mine, J. Carson Black, who used it to get several of her books into the top 100. And I think both of us are indebted to Joe Konrath, whose blog about ebooks has provided a lot of inspiration and solid, practical advice.
For me the strategy has two key points: First, price your book at $.99. There's a whole subculture of ebook readers who look for these bargain books. Second, promote your book using Amazon's discussion boards, which can be accessed toward the bottom of any Kindle book's sales page. Include a link to your sales page in any comment you post. Visit, say, five boards at a time and post your sales pitch. Do this only on boards that specifically request sales pitches and book recommendations. Don't do more than about five at a time, because some people subscribe to multiple threads and get irritated reading the same ad over and over. Wait a few days or a week, then visit five new boards and repeat the procedure. Keep track of which boards you visited so you don't place duplicate ads on the same thread. It doesn't take much self-promotion to start getting some sales. As the book moves up in the rankings, sales may snowball.
I've also made my books available in Nook editions, but those aren't selling well. Barnes & Noble does not have the same resources available for indie authors to make themselves known.
Darrell - What do you think is the best way for writers to market themselves?
Michael - The best way is to use the Amazon discussion boards, as mentioned above. But it's also good to have your own Facebook page -- not just a personal page, but an author page devoted exclusively to publicizing your books. You should also have your own website with links to your sales pages. If you have a mailing list of readers, send them a note when you put out a new title. Many people use Twitter, but I don't. I'm too damn old to tweet.
Darrell - How do you feel about self publishing for writers? Do you think this is where the future lies?
Michael - I think the days of the big publishing houses, which take 90% of the book's earnings and allow the author a royalty of 10% or less, are coming to an end. I'm not saying they will all go out of business, but I think they'll be less important in the future. As it becomes increasingly clear that authors can find a large audience through ebooks and keep 35% or 70% of the income, while writing only the books they want to write, it will be tough for the big houses to stay competitive. Even now, they're pricing their ebooks too high and taking too long to bring out digital editions. They don't seem able to adapt nimbly to changing conditions, and I think this is going to be a fatal flaw for some of them.
I'm sure big bestselling authors will continue to have nationally distributed print editions of their books, and there will also be a market for children's books, graphic novels, art books, and other books that are given as gifts or intended for collection or display. It's not the end of print, but it is the end of print's monopoly, and that's a good thing.
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