Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.
This is a season of giving, so I have reduced the price on the Kindle versions of all my books for the next few days.
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Richard-T.-Burke/author/B018F53OZ4
US: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Richard-T.-Burke/author/B018F53OZ4
It’s certainly not true that all authors earn huge amounts of money and lead a life of leisure. Whisper it quietly, but I don’t make enough as a writer to live in the manner to which I have become accustomed. That means I have a day job, which pays the vast majority (in fact all) of the bills. I try to keep the world of work—in which I am a Software and Systems Manager—separate from my life as an author.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when the two worlds collided, and I received a message to my work email address referencing one of my books in a lot of detail. With the sender’s permission, I have quoted the exchange below:
A few weeks ago I did a five day free give away of The Rage on Kindle. During that period there were about 2000 downloads and a steady trickle of sales thereafter. Amazon provide statistics on the Kindle Direct Publishing page including a button to download a report. I hadn’t looked at one of these reports before so I decided to check it out.
The report gives a daily breakdown of the sales by book and by region. I have only the one book at the moment so all rows were for The Rage. As I studied the report, my first reaction was I haven’t sold that many. Upon further inspection I noticed a column called “Units Refunded”. In the week after the free give-away this accounted for about 30% of total sales. So what’s going on?
I did a search on Google and discovered several articles from people who had discovered the same thing. There seemed to be three main schools of thought:
So basically I have no real plausible explanation. It’s not enough sales to get excited about but if anybody can shed light on this I would be interested to hear from you.
Many years ago (12 to be exact), my wife came across a book whilst shopping in Devizes. The book was called Frozen and the author shared my name. She wrote a message inside the cover and gave it to me for my birthday. Well yesterday I discovered the other Richard Burke’s website (www.richardburkeward.co.uk/) and decided to send him a message.
Two authors, one name
My wife’s message
Richard responded almost immediately and offered some very interesting insights into the life of a published author. After the success of the first book, published by Orion, he struggled writing the second but eventually published Redemption through the same publisher. Interestingly his third book, Payback, was self published and Richard says that he would go down this route again for any future books. In his words, “far easier and potentially far more lucrative”.
You can find Richard’s books on Amazon here.
In a show of solidarity he also bought a copy of The Rage and offered to act as a sounding board if I wanted to bounce any ideas off him – a generous offer for which I am very grateful.
These days Richard earns a living working mostly on factual film scripting (details on his web page).
When I read Frozen all those years ago (I recall that it was very good), I never thought that I would ever write my own book and exchange emails with my namesake.
Hopefully we will now stay in touch. After all, us Richard Burkes must stick together!
Note that the “Ow!” is intended in the style of Michael Jackson rather than an indication of pain.
So what is a MOOC you may well ask. Well, a MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course. The reason I mention it on this blog is that a new course called Start Writing Fiction commences on 12th October. This free course is run by the Open University and lasts for eight weeks. Various authors have been conscripted to provide guidance and advice including Alex Garland, author of The Beach.
Even though I have completed my first book, I still have a huge amount to learn about writing so free advice is always welcome. If some of the input from the successful authors involved in the course rubs off, it will be well worth while. The details page suggests that course work will take up approximately three hours a week so it doesn’t require a huge investment in time.
I took part in a MOOC on a programming language last year (I work for a high technology start-up company during the day) and to be honest it was a bit of a mixed bag. The course started well but then lost pace after the first few weeks. I am hoping that this course will maintain my interest until the end. I intend to go into it with an open mind. If nothing else, it will make good material for a future blog!
Another good source of advice about writing is Marg McAlister’s Writing4Success site. There are literally hundreds of articles about all aspects of writing, many of them thought provoking.
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