TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Best-selling E author Darrell Bain on agent hell and e-book success: 5,000 copies sold in E is proportionally 250,000 in P

By Darrell Bain

Moderator’s note: Darrell Bain, one of the best-selling authors of the e-book world and winner of two Eppies, is our newest contributor. See his bio at the end. His sci-fi novel Savage Survival is an e-book, trade paperback and hardback. Welcome, Darrell! - David Rothman

Ten years ago, in 1997, my budding hopes of becoming a successful author came crashing down in ruins as I learned that the so-called agent I had been dealing with for six years was an out and out crook.

Not only had all the manuscripts I submitted to the agent not been sent to publishers, I had been talked into paying a large amount for “reading fees,” “expenses” and “publishing contracts.” I paid some money up front for publication and supposedly was to recover it in sales. But the “publishers” were as fraudulent as the agent.

Broken dreams in the world of P—and jail time for the villains

I was naïve, along with thousands of other writers caught in the same web, and for a time I did nothing but brood over the dollars and years the scam had cost me. The agent and her husband and one of the “publishers” went to prison for mail fraud, but even this did little to assuage my feelings as I thought of all the lies I had believed in my eagerness to reach print.

Eventually, I picked up my broken dreams and went on with my life. I had felt the closeness of becoming published, even if it had been a fraud, and I couldn’t stop trying. But where to turn? At the time I still thought that all of my eight novels had been submitted to real publishers, so I didn’t try them “again.” Where should I next turn? Not any time soon would I trust another agent.

Breaking into E

What happened over the next five years surprised me beyond anything I might have reasonably expected. You see, I knew nothing about e-books at the time.

But then I ran across a site that allowed authors to post their manuscripts for free in the hope that a prospective publisher might see them. In my case, one publisher did—and liked the two books I had put up on the site. The only drawback was the term e-book. What the hell is an e-book? was my first thought. Nevertheless, someone apparently did really want me.

This time I did do a bit of checking and found that e-books were a new and promising development in publishing. I decided to go for it since I hadn’t had any luck with print publishers—even though the bad luck was all my own fault for being so naïve and trusting and not doing any research into the publishing industry.

My first royalty checks

Sure enough, my manuscripts were published, first on disk and then as downloads. I saw my first royalty checks, something like five or ten dollars, but that was a hell of a lot more than the print publishers had ever given me! I placed my other manuscripts with more e-book publishers and went back to writing.

I can summarize the next few years by saying that it wasn’t all gemstones and roses. Several of the e-book publishers went broke. Some didn’t know what the heck they were doing or were in it simply for what they thought was a fast buck. The editing was lacking in expertise, let us say, for lack of a more apt phrase. Still, something began to happen. For reasons I’m still not sure of, readers liked my work, especially science fiction and thriller fans. Over the next several years I became one of the most well known and successful authors in the e-book industry. I won multiple awards, including Fictionwise Author of the Year for 2004, and this was in competition with national best-selling print authors whose books were also released as e-books. It has been a marvelous experience seeing my name right up there with such well known ones as Stephen King and Louis McMaster Bujold, Michael Connelly and Anne McCaffrey.

5,000 in E meant 250,000 in P

To put it in perspective, though, success with e-books wasn’t the same as success in print would have been. The number of people who read e-books is only about 2% of the print readers. So where one of my e-book titles has sold 5,000 copies, the proportional number if I had equal success in print would have been 250,000 copies. Nevertheless, other than a few erotica writers, selling 5,000 copies of an e-book is almost unheard of, even now, and several of my other e-books have sold almost as many copies. Most of them have done very well indeed.

Now then, after most of my e-books have now been published in print as well, in the form of trade paperbacks, one might expect to see sales of my print copies soaring into the tens of thousands or more. Have they? No, alas it doesn’t work that way. While millions of people know who Stephen King or Anne McCaffrey are, only thousands of those same people have ever heard of me. So this is a fact: Success in print can easily be translated into success in e-books, but the reverse is not necessarily true for the reason just cited. However, I can say that success in e-books will give you a head start in the print industry. Had the foul-up with the crooked agent not set my progress as a writer back ten years or so, I might by now be a well know science fiction and thriller author in the print world.

$30K from e-books in six years—better than many print authors make from big publishers

On the other hand, I can’t complain. I have earned about thirty thousand dollars from e-books in six years, more than many print authors will make over the same period of time with the big publishers. And my name is gradually making its way into the print world.

Fiction writing is not an easy profession. The supply of authors far outnumbers demand and earning a place in e-books is almost as hard now as doing the same in print publishing. As a matter of fact, today most fiction works are put out in both print and as e-books. Eventually I don’t think there will be much distinction. They will simply be different methods of reading a book.

Lessons for prospective authors

This is my story and can’t be used as a standard. Success is almost never automatic. I wrote this mainly as a way of telling authors that success in e-books is generally not translated into success in print publishing, but a successful print author has a much better chance of becoming well known to e-book readers. And I also wrote it to tell all prospective authors that it doesn’t pay to give up. Success might be just around the corner but you’ll never know if you don’t keep on writing.

I can be contacted through the e-mail link at my Web site and try to always answer my mail, no matter how much time it takes.

I also publish a very successful monthly newsletter on my web site. If you would like to see a style that readers of newsletters seem to prefer, they are all archived. You can look at all of them dating back to August of 2005 when I began the current newsletter. This was my second attempt. My first newsletters weren’t too successful because I tried promoting myself too much. I found you have to give the readers a reason to keep reading and I seem to have found the key now. In fact, one of my publishers thinks my current newsletter is interesting enough that they are turning the newsletters into a yearly book, to be published in both e-book and print form.

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Darrell Bain has always been a voracious reader and always wanted to be a writer but didn’t get serious about it until he bought his first computer, a Tandy 1000 at age fifty, seventeen years ago. After struggling for years with crooked agents and publishers, he turned to e-books and became almost an overnight success. Subsequently, he has won every major award offered in the e-book publishing industry and now most of his books are in print as well. He buys a new computer every four or five years but didn’t begin to read on e-book devices himself until purchasing an eBookwise reader two years ago. He plans on asking Santa for a Kindle next Christmas. He writes mostly science fiction and suspense/thrillers but has also written a number of non-fiction humorous works dealing with life on the Christmas tree farm he and his wife Betty ran for years with the help of their dachshund, Biscuit.

Those wanting to know more about Darrell can read his complete autobiography under the title Darrell Bain’s World Of Books wherever e-books are sold. It will be in print in 2008.