Monday 10 August 2015

Is it luck or is it skill?

An article in the Telegraph by Arts Correspondent Hannah Furness, gives me hope.

Rachel Abbott has been named as the 14th bestselling author in the last five years on Kindle, after having her book rejected by ten agents.

She joins a list that includes  E L James’ Fifty Shades series, Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn and cult authors including George R R Martin, Suzanne Collins and Stieg Larson and has beaten Yann Martel, Jojo Moyes, and Jeffrey Archer, after releasing four novels on the Amazon e-reader.

 She retired in 2010 and decided to write a book for her own pleasure. Her first novel was priced at £1.99 – not cheap by Kindle standards – and began to get noticed after Abbott used her marketing experience – she ran an interactive media company, developing software for the education market - to get exposure through social media and forums.

She is one of hundreds of thousands of authors who have chosen to self-publish with Kindle, and is the number one bestselling independent author in its charts.

Kindle is now celebrating its fifth anniversary, after growing from 400,000 titles to more than four million. Analysis of its sales figures, released yesterday, showed Huntingdon, Cambridge, buys the most books per capita, while Yorkshire was crowned “the romance capital of the north”.

H'mmm. Memo to self - must find those sales figures, and must also promote myself though social media. and with reference to the title of this post, I think it is a mixture of both - plus something else - a knowledge of social media!

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