This article, by J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 10/16/10.
October 19th is the release date for "Draculas," a horror novel that I wrote with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson. How four guys were able to collaborate on a single narrative is an interesting story, but not as interesting as the way "Draculas" is being released.
Though together we have over sixty years of experience in the print industry and have worked with dozens of publishers, we’ve decided to make "Draculas" a Kindle exclusive. Not only that, but we’re publishing it ourselves.
The choice to circumvent Big New York Publishing was easy. We all have print deals, and probably could have sold this project to a major publishing house, but the reasons to go the indie route instead of the traditional one were numerous.
First was an issue of time. We wanted "Draculas" to launch before Halloween, but we’d only finished writing and editing the novel in September. There was no possible way a major publisher could go from first draft to live within three weeks. But we did.
With Amazon’s assistance, we were able to put up a pre-order page and a free teaser last month, though we’d only written the first few chapters by that point. Like a traditionally published book, this allowed us to build buzz and accrue some advance sales.
Based on some of my experiments on Kindle, we’re pricing "Draculas" at $2.99–something no Big Publisher has done for a new release (except for AmazonEncore, who is releasing my thriller novel "Shaken" next week at that price point.) We’re also releasing it without DRM (digital rights management), which is another thing no publisher will allow (except for AmazonEncore.)
Read the rest of the article on The Huffington Post.