Impressive

I read with great relish an article today by Alexandra Alter called How I Became a Best-Selling Author (here). It is all about how Darcie Chan sold over 400,000 copies of her book and still can't find anyone to publish it. I did not learn much more than I already knew before, charge 0.99 not 2.99 despite the difference in royalties, how to pay for reviews and get traction on your novel, but what I gleaned from the article was that publishers still don't trust ebook sales.

It was a great article to tell new authors how they might find readership, how to publish their books as ebooks, etc. and I would heartily recommend it to any writer who wants to be an author. But the passage that stuck in my craw the most was this one:

Sales kept climbing. In July, it sold more than 14,000 copies. That month, it was featured on two of the biggest sites for e-book readers, generating a surge of new sales. In August, it sold more than 77,000 copies and hit the New York Times and USA Today e-book best-seller lists; it later landed on the Wall Street Journal list. In September, it sold more than 159,000 copies. To date, she has sold around 413,000 copies.

Ms. Chan and her agent decided to resubmit the novel to all the major imprints, citing robust sales figures and rave online reviews. Some publishers have responded warily. A representative of one publishing house feared the book had "run its course," Ms. Liss recalls. Others worried about the novel's bargain basement price, arguing that an e-book that sells for 99 cents likely won't command a typical hardcover price of around $26.

Now, I guess that they know there business better than I, but by the same token it seems to me that they're looking at a possible best seller and saying, "I'll pass."

Good for Miss Chan nevertheless.