Top Suspense, eBooks + news

METODIKA in Lithuania will be publishing Outsourced. Foreign rights for Outsourced so far: UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, and now Lithuania.

Top Suspense Group & eBooks

Early this summer Ed Gorman, Harry Shannon and I were talking about how authors can survive this fastly arriving & changing eBook world. With print books, authors have a chance of building a readership over time by being reviewed in newspapers and magazines, winning awards, booksellers handselling your books, and eventually word of mouth. Once Amazon opened up their Kindle store to self-published books these dynamics changed. The reality is that this move is adding 10s of thousands of poorly written eBooks to the Kindle store, and in effect making the Kindle store similar to the slush piles that publishers used to have. There are going to be some very good self-published books in the mix, probably more than ever given how publishers are increasingly moving towards a celebrity/bestseller only mentality, but these are going to be buried under 1000s of poorly written ones. And the sad fact is that the self-published authors writing these good books aren't necessarily going to have the skills or temperament to social network effectively. The way I see this heading is that readers are going to get burned by a lot of bad self-published books, and going to move towards the safety of only the most recognizable names--and that the Amazon kindle store will very soon (if not already) look a lot like the book section at Walmart--the most commercial books will be pushed hard while all other books will be buried. Ed & Harry saw things the same way, and the solution we came up with was to form a collaborative with a mix of talented authors where we'd help promote each others eBooks, and more than that, brand our Top Suspense Group as a trusted place for readers to find high quality genre (mystery, crime, thriller, horror, westerns) ebooks. Outside of the website, we'll be doing other things as part of this collaborative + branding. We'll be introducing a blog soon, and one of the first things we'll be posting on it will be a crime story where we'll each be taking turns writing sections (and with no planning or coordination). Advertising will also be an important part to help create this brand. And over the next few months we'll be expanding the group--we kept the group at a more manageable size of six to start because getting any group of authors to agree on anything is a bit like herding cats. I think over the next year many more collaborative author groups like Top Suspense Group will be formed since this is what's going to be needed in this new eBook world, and these collaborative groups will be made up of both pro writers and talented new self-published writers who find each other.