Synchronicity

Sometimes seemingly unrelated events come together in surprising ways, so that what happens next almost seems inevitable.  It's called synchronicity.  The first time I heard the word, I had just gotten the contract for my knitting mysteries.  A friend of a friend was going to go to a wool festival in Connecticut, where her friend was having a booth.  I'd never heard of such a thing, but a few weeks later I found myself in a damp, drafty barn somewhere in the country, in a heavy downpour.  From that experience came the setting for the second knitting book, Knit Fast, Die Young, as well as an idea for what would have been the third book.  Had I not met this friend of a friend at just the right time, none of those things would have happened.  Synchronicity, indeed.

When I stopped writing 3 years ago, I never intended to stay away from it forever.  I did, and still do, intend to stay away from traditional publishing.  I planned to publish ebooks someday.  Well, someday unexpectedly came last week.  A patron at the library showed me an article about people self-publishing their books.  That got me thinking.  Then a co-worker, who owns a Nook, told me a little bit more about ebooks, and, before you know it, I was researching the topic myself.  The upshot is that this past weekend I published an ebook.  It's a reissue of one of my old Regency short stories, "Gifts of the Heart."  I'm still surprised at how events came together, and how quickly they affected my life.  I'm publishing again.  Yay!

This is an interesting time in the publishing industry.  Ebooks have been around awhile.  In fact, one of my mysteries, Death on the Cliff Walk, has been available for quite a few years.  It took the development of such devices as the Kindle and the iPad to make them really popular, though.  At Amazon ebooks are outselling print books, and that trend is going to continue.  Someone's got to supply those books.  That's where the self-publishing revolution comes in.  While books by established authors are going for $12.00, self-published authors have the luxury of setting their own prices, often at $2.99 or less.  Those prices haven't been seen in the book world for many, many years.

At those prices, it wouldn't seem that authors could make much money, but a few have. due to high royalty rates - as high as 70% in some cases.  One young woman made over half a million last year with her books; another author, whose books are also in print, made about $50K in January alone.  I don't know if I'll ever hit those lofty heights, but if I sell enough books at .99, with a 30% royalty rate, I should do OK.  We'll see.  What do I have to lose?  "Gifts of the Heart" was published in an anthology almost 20 years ago.  I love having it in print again.  Best of all, I've already been paid for writing it.  Anything else is just icing on the cake.

Synchronicity.  It's led to a new adventure for me.  In the future I'm going to be reissuing the works over which I have control.  1 down, 20 to go!

Buy my book, please?  Gifts of the Heart is available for the Kindle at Amazon, under my penname of Mary Kingsley; at Smashwords.com, in all other formats, under Mary Kruger; and soon for other ereaders such as Apple's ibookshelf and Barnes and Noble's Nook.  It's only .99.  I guarantee you, it'll be the best .99 you've ever spent.