Have you considered building a web site and marketing your books yourself?
Not as a substitute for your listing at Amazon, but as a way to promote/sell your books.
I am not saying that the web site by itself would solve the problem of finding potential buyers of your books, but it would give you a fighting chance.

 

Good question. A few years ago, when I finished the books, I gave it the college try. I set up Facebook/ Twitter/ Goodreads/ Apple/ Amazon accounts. I reserved a web domain for marketing. Then I pitched the books to 80 agents. Out of pocket cost around $2,000.

The effort succeeded in the sense that I got more than just form letter rejections. A few agents corresponded, and one even called me at home. The verdict: the books are too long for bound/print publishing. Marketing risk. None of them would list the books, but all of them urged me to (1) e-publish them, just to get them out there, and (2) write shorter books that they would be able to represent.

I did e-pub the books, and over-the-transom sales have just about covered the early production costs. But as far as marketing them, I heeded the advice of the experts and decided not to waste time and money trying to promote them. So the web domain and social media accounts are all sitting idle.

As for starting again with shorter books, maybe. The big agencies want a novel length of 160,000 words or less. When I am in a groove, I can produce 40,000 words per week. So I think I could make a good living on pulp fiction. These days I am busy professionally, but I am always on the lookout for a big idea. Not for a series. The "endless saga" has been done to death. What I want is a big theme, a framework for a large number of short books that begin and end.

 

The censorship is the result of some governments absolutely not tolerating some forms of porn. For instance here in the US the FBI are putting child pervs in prison, no matter who they are. I'm sure they are sending a message.

 

This has been said many times, and yes there are legal crackdowns on visual media.

But as far as fiction, it does not hold water.

The biggest free-speech erotica site on the Internet (and a few smaller ones as well) are hosted in the United States and have been for years.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The Marquis de Sade's novels contain explicit sex with, murder of, and cannibalism of children and toddlers, and here in the United States you can legally purchase hardcover editions in any big city bookstore.

This place faces a challenge not because there is underaged fiction, but because it also hosts pictures and video.

 

With the unprecedented crack down on kiddie porn, don't be surprised if fiction underage porn stories become illegal. They just may be in other countries. I really don't know. However if someone who is in the porn business is restricting underage porn I'm positive there is a fear of legal action. Otherwise it would not make sense for him to limit his audience. That only costs him money.

 

Was the web site singularly designed to attract an agent or did you have a mechanism on the web site that allowed you to directly sell your e-book from the web site to readers?

 

I reserved the domain name, but I never did get to the point of putting a website on it.

I pitched the agents the old fashioned way: Crane 50lb cotton stationery, and lots of it. Each packet had a cover letter, an eight page synopsis, and fifty pages of vignettes. I researched to get real people, called ahead whenever possible, and sent the packets via certified mail. I sent approximately 60 packets to agencies, and approximately 20 to some small boutique publishers that still consider unsolicited manuscripts as long as they're professionally presented.

A standard practice with the cover letter is to put the word count at the top right corner. A third of the recipients never made it past that point.

Another third sent impersonal form rejections. (Standard practice.)

The remaining third sent personalized rejections with regrets, and a small number of those offered to read and represent shorter work.

Long books don't sell. (Unless the author name has cachet.) No one reads, anymore.

(sigh)

 

So, we'll start burning books in the U.S. and the First Amendment be damned? Hmm. Maybe, maybe not. But you're kind of steering us off the topic. Most of the writers who have left this place-- myself included-- neither read nor write kiddie porn.

Let me be clear (again), because we always go to extremes with this topic:

Under the old system XNXX was a free speech site, but the admin of the time (LemarkXXX) gave the moderators wide latitude to use their own judgment to keep the place free of extreme child porn. If someone posted sex with babies, no one made it stink about it. The story was quietly pulled with no muss and bother. The rest of us were pretty much free to write what we wanted to write, and we didn't have to pull our plotlines through a wringer until they became utterly ridiculous.

 

Is that really true considering the financial success of the 50 Shades series?

 

Yes. It is really true.


Fifty Shades started as a fan fiction spin-off of the Twilight Series, and it was first posted (and built its cult following) at a sex stories site that is also famous for Harry Potter buggery and Emma Watson rape stories. I can't name the site, for obvious reasons, but "fan" and "fiction" are in its name.

 

Ok, so that is how it was initially marketed. But the paperback copies are still selling. A couple weekends ago I watched a woman by all four books from a large display at a Barnes and Noble.

My point is that long books are being read and have found a cult following. It's all in the marketing. (It certainly wasn't in the writing quality.)

 

Of course, of course. The exceptions prove the rule! That's what I mean by "author cachet." Fifty Shades is now a major motion picture (in the U.S.), so it sells itself, length be damned. Think about the ridiculously popular Game of Thrones series, which has exploded into thousands upon thousands of mediocre pages with no end in sight. Tens of millions are reading those.

But I'm nobody. My books are okay, I suppose. (Some people say I'm the next Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and others say I suck maggots, so I'm splitting it down the middle and saying I'm okay.) But no brick and mortar publisher is going to take a chance on a seven hundred page novel written by an unknown. They won't even read it. They can't secure shelf space for such books in retail. The titles do not sell the books; the authors' names sell the books. And they won't put a seven hundred page book on a shelf when they could put three novellas there instead.

And in all fairness, look at how Kurt Vonnegut got his start. Short pulp fiction novels. Cat's Cradle. GREAT book! And what is it? 140,000 words, if that?

Ugh.

Sorry to everyone who's reading this and doesn't care. We're way off topic now, and there's a story forum for this. Sorry.

 

seems to me you should float down the steam instead of swimming up it.....

write short to see if you can sell it
then when the name comes you already have a trilogy that is 700 page..

 

+1

Exactly. That's the fallback plan. For the day I decide to start writing again.

I spent a lot of money trying to do it backward, and I figure the only way to get value from that money is to listen to the feedback and learn from the mistakes.

 

How many pages is War and Peace...?

 

I go by words. War and Peace, if memory serves, is around 640,000 words, give or take.

The second book in my series of three is longer than that.

But it is not such a rare thing. "Epic" stories are often longer. (And I mean "epic" in terms of plot sprawl, not greatness.)

They're not long because I wanted to write "the next great book." They're long because I wrote them for me, and I personally like big long books. If that makes any sense. Then people started liking them, so I kept writing them. At various times they've been out there for free at various websites. I would estimate that around 90,000 people have read the free versions. That sounds like a lot, but it is peanuts when you put them in a place like Amazon. There every new author is immediately lost. A raindrop on a pond.

 

now it seems to me if 90,000 had read it.....should be valid for a amazon book.....they are publishing now, correct?
no shelf space....just gigabits.....

ought to have maybe a few hundred comments from the readers also.....

boy have we derailed this thread...hehe

 

It doesn't work that way.

There are hundreds of comments, but most of them are on lost threads on sites and forums where the books used to be free and no longer exist.

The books have good reviews at Amazon, typically 4.5 to 5.0 stars out of 5.0. But small numbers. The books are cheap-- $2.99, $3.99, thereabouts, but it doesn't matter. People say they will buy them and don't get around to it. Or they're more than happy to love the work for free, yet have no intention of buying it. Nothing against the readers. It's just life.

Blockbusters happen when people want to be seen with it. That's why, even now, in this day and age, a book is not really a book unless it is paper that one can hold in one's hands.

And yes. This thread is derailed. I've already apologized.

 

Ever read Worm, a story by a dude named Wildblow? Just google Parahumans Worm into google and he has a massive story online for free. Hell, I'd buy it.

PM me a link to wherever you sell your ebook, I'll check it out.

 

I always say, "I have a small target market. Me! If anyone else enjoys it, it's icing on the cake."