This post is an expansion (and partial reprint) of a comment I left on Alex J. Kane’s blog the other day in response to a very nice post he made about cover letters, e-publishing, and the career path of up-and-comers.  It might help to read Alex’s post first.  Or it might not.  Your call.

One of the big questions on the mind of every writer, publisher, editor, and agent is this: where are ebooks taking the market?  The Kindle is the primary culprit here, producing sales of electronically published work for pros and newbies alike.  Everyone that publishes through Kindle seems to be registering sales.  Not all spectacular numbers, mind you, but for some of us any positive number is…well, positive.

I’ve been following a friend’s study of ebook sales (an established pro without a big name but a name nonetheless) and it seems (in his studies) that the key to ebook sales is other ebook sales. The more times your book/story sells, the more it will show up on “people who bought this item also bought…” lists. This puts your story in the eye-line of people likely to buy it, and the cycle continues. It is a bit of a “turtles all the way down” strategy, though. To inspire those first sales to reach numbers that perpetuate the rest of the cycle, you need to grab an audience. Sales to big mags can help with that, as can appearing on a television show or buying up billboard space in every city in North America.  Selling a novel to a publishing house can also work, of course.  Somehow you need to get it started, but there is evidence to suggest the reaction will self-sustain for a while even through self-publishing.  The idea that you need a publisher behind your book ay be becoming a myth of the olden days.  A running start may well be all you need.

I’m awfully tempted to Kindle a collection of my own stuff. I could do it and I have a tiny bit of street cred (WotF and my eventual Escape Pod appearance) to propel things a little. It might prove more profitable to sell the stories in ones and twos rather than in a big omnibus since price seems a driving factor of Kindle sales. 20,000 words for a buck? People take a chance. They like it and they drop more dollars for more words.  And then turtles, turtles, turtles.

But I still feel like it’s too early. I don’t want to start the roller coaster too soon lest I get stuck in the loop. There’s a chance I won’t get stuck, but I don’t want to risk it. Perhaps I’ll end up waiting too long and find too much coaster traffic to ever reach the loop, let alone get through it. Market saturation may not be too far ahead.

Selling to a mag is a guaranteed amount of money…but hard to achieve. Going it alone on Kindle is a lot easier to get money…but no guaranteed amount. Two different gambles. Which is the better lottery ticket, PowerBall or MegaMillions?

As a traditional kind of guy, I’m still wandering traditional kinds of routes, finally getting a few select editors to recognize my name and pay my rejection letters some special attention. It’s a slow process, but I’m making progress. If I wasn’t, I’d likely take the other road. Either way, I suspect success in the future will require both roads to some extent. The all-or-nothing approach is the riskiest of all.

As a matter of fact, I’ve been engaged in some conversation with other WotF winners about where ebook rights will fit into future book contracts for those of us that do continue along the traditional route.  They’ll likely be the hot item that both sides want.  If I can sell a self-published ebook for a fraction of what a hard cover goes for and still make more money on it, I’d like to do that.  I dare say that a publisher that provides professional editing and such deserves the right to sell the electronic version that they influenced.  I also dare say the author deserves a bigger cut of those no-upfront-cost sales.  I confess that I don’t relish the idea of negotiating such things.  That’s what agents are for.  In fact, that’s always been what agents are for: negotiations, not talent searches.

Also presented in Alex’s post was a discussion as to whether small press and semi-pro sales belong in a submission cover letter.  My recent strategy is to only list the one or two biggest sales and provide a link to my full bibliography.  That way I am demonstrating competence and a track record without seeming desperate when I list zines and anthologies no one has ever heard of.  Semi-pro and lower-paying sales are for the benefit of the author, not really their career.  If you’ve not made any professional-rate sales (I hesitate to just call them “professional sales” lest I detract from the true value of the achievement of other sales), you’re not likely to impress a pro market with your backlist.  That doesn’t mean they won’t prefer a sale or two mentioned.  If someone gave you money for something you wrote, that suggests you are not totally incompetent.  So this is good.  However, a brief cover letter suggests confidence in the story itself.  It’s like the interviewee that won’t stop talking because he/she knows their resume isn’t up to snuff.  Here’s the story; I’ve sold to market XXX before; thanks for your consideration.  One low-end sale is as impressive as eight.  Mention your best and move on.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s hard to break into the market these days.  Writers of the Future has been a big help, but it was no magic key.  It merely showed me the door.  I still have to either convince someone on the other side to let me in or start trying to batter my way through.  There’s more than one “right way” to make it happen.  The only wrong way is to stop writing.