A couple weeks ago, Smashwords posted an interview with one of their star authors, Brian S. Pratt. I didn’t write about it at the time, since I’d just posted about Joe Konrath making over $600 a day from his Kindle sales. How many success stories do y’all want to hear, anyway?
But I thought this might make for some inspirational Christmas reading, especially since Mr. Pratt has something of a rags to riches story. He wasn’t an established print author when he turned to ebooks, and he was living below the poverty level until recently. Now his fantasy ebooks are selling all over the place. (Since I’m a fantasy author myself, it’s nice to see my genre doing well out there!)
Here are a few quotations from the interview:
Last quarter, he earned over $18,000 from sales across the Smashwords retail distribution network. This quarter, with three weeks to go, he’s on track to break $25,000. He’s on track to earn over $100,000 in 2011 at Smashwords, and up to $200,000 total when he includes his projected Amazon sales.
His writing style is completely his own, and any New York editor would surely bristle at the rules Brian breaks. His most popular series, The Morcyth Saga, is written in the present tense (though he changed to past tense for subsequent series). It’s no wonder that after years trying to land an agent and a publisher, he faced unanimous rejection from publishing experts…Today, Pratt has 17 books at Smashwords, and we distribute the books to Barnes & Noble, Apple, Sony and Kobo, as well as to online mobile app catalogs of Stanza and Aldiko.
Make sure to check out the rest of the interview for information on how he advertised, how he used a free ebook to kickstart other sales, and his answer to the “What three secrets to success would you share, and why?” question.
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