Yesterday, fellow writer Joe Konrath announced that the next book in his Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels mystery series, Shaken, would be published through the Amazon Encore program.
What makes this interesting, for those of you who might not be familiar with Joe’s career, is that the last six books in the Jack Daniels series had been published in hardcover to a fair degree of success by Hyperion. Joe is also an author who has taken advantage of the ability to make his backlist available to readers via the Amazon Kindle and has been having great financial success with that strategy, earning royalties of more than $4000 per month as a result.
Having already had success taking matters into his own hands with regard to his backlist, Joe apparently decided to pursue the same course when New York passed on the eight book in his popular series. As he says on his blog, “Traditional publishers had a chance to buy Shaken last year. They passed on it. Their loss. Their big loss. Their big, huge, monumental, epic fail.”
As far as I know, this is the first time that the Amazon Encore program has been used to publish original fiction, Previously, it has republished works that had been previously self published by the authors themselves.
Joe has been vocal in his stance that publishers need to change in order to keep up with the changing face of publishing, given the rise of ebooks, ereaders, and the many ways authors now have to bring their works to the readers who enjoy them. While he won’t discuss the specifics of the deal itself, Joe does say “that my terrific agents have been involved from the very beginning of negotiations, and have been essential in getting me a very favorable contract. I couldn’t be happier.” Given what he publicly admits to making with his self-published Kindle books, I imagine Amazon must have cut a nice deal with him for him to say he “couldn’t be happier.”
I admit I’m intrigued by this development. I’d certainly love it if my Kindle books would sell as well as Joe’s are selling currently and I suspect that this move will really boost his sales, both for his current titles and for Shaken itself. Being on the front end of a big new wave is always a good thing. Is it sustainable? I don’t know. Will Joe do this for the rest of his books? I don’t know.
I do know it will be interesting to watch and see.
Tell me, what kind of implications do you see resulting from something like this?
