Plan B Forum

As American John Locke becomes the first self-published writer to sell a million Kindle electronic books on Amazon, the first "indie authors" to top the UK e-books chart explain their success.

Fed up that your latest masterpiece has failed to make it out of the literary agents' "slush piles" of unread manuscripts?

Self-publishing - paying a printer to run off a few hundred copies - has long been available as a last resort to frustrated amateur authors.

But it does not come cheap, and the chances of having a hit are virtually non-existent - it's with good reason that the practice is known as "vanity publishing".

Help appears to be at hand in the form of websites on which writers can publish their novels and sell them as e-books for electronic readers such as the Kindle.

On the face of it, the rise of such technology has the potential to democratise the publishing process.

British authors Louise Voss and Mark Edwards gave up on their dream of writing a bestseller years ago when their two finished thrillers failed to attract the attention of publishers.

But when Edwards, who is the marketing director of a student finance website, bought an e-book reader last autumn and heard about Amazon's free direct publication system, he sensed a second chance.

Their second co-written novel, Catch Your Death - the tale of "a killer virus" and "a race to save the world" - is currently number one in the Amazon e-books bestsellers chart ahead of works by Stieg Larsson, John Grisham and Michael McIntyre.

It follows the success in the chart of their first novel, Killing Cupid, also still in the top 10.

"Its extraordinary and really unexpected," says Voss, a concert organiser at Kingston University.

"We did a lot of work and we worked hard to promote them but I don't think either of us thought in our wildest dreams that we'd be number one for two weeks and have two books in the top 10."


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13853728