Tag Archives: JA Konrath

Truckstop By JA Konrath And Jack Kilborne

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Two freeway serial killers meet at a truckstop in rural Wisconsin. One has a fetish for eating his victims’ toes. The other likes to feed their own faces to them. When these two realize who the other is, it’s a wary fanboy moment. And it just so happens one of them has a victim already trussed up and ready to kill in his sleeper cab.

Then along comes Lt. Jacquelyn “Jack” Daniels, Chicago Homicide and on vacation. Seems Jack made a wrong turn on her way to boyfriend Lathan’s cabin in the woods and is now three hours way on the wrong highway. She pulls into the truckstop where our two intrepid fiends are getting ready to do their deed. They recognize Jack. She’s the one who’s killed off several serial killers. To eat the toes of the legendary Jack Daniels and feed her own face to her would be a coup for these two. Trouble for them is that Jack’s dealt with their type before, and she is not in the mood.

Truckstop has all the usual gory goodness one expects from JA Konrath, who is also his own co-author, Jack Kilborne. However, there are only so many dismembering, ritualistic killers you can go after before even horrific death gets to be routine. Jack sounds tired in this one, and that’s a shame. Konrath’s earlier books were fun romps, a darker, more violent version of Stephanie Plum (only with a protag with a much higher IQ.)

On the upside, this book is short. I bring this up not because it’s mercifully short. (If anything, I wanted it to be a little longer.) I bring this up because Konrath, the original Kindle apologist, has hit on one of modern ebooks’ strengths. Truckstop is a novella. Without the need to produce a minimum of 60,000 words for a print novel, he can sell this without having to find a magazine to serialize it. For crime fiction, a novella outlet has been long overdue since long before I got into writing.

Something For You To Ponder This Weekend

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Every Tuesday, I’ve been blatherating about ebooks, mainly on what I’ve seen and, more importantly, what I as a consumer want.

But JA Konrath has taken the experiment beyond the experimental phase.  After only a short time, Joe’s finding ebooks to be a profitable revenue stream.  And as we all know, all but the most pretentious jackass writers love profitable revenue streams.  (Hint:  Craft is why you want to make a living this way.  You still need to make a living.  No one respects a starving artist who is perfectly capable of holding a job.)

Today, over at Joe’s Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, he sums up his experiences and the pros and cons of ebookery.  I’ve said it here before; Joe hit the sweet spot.  He’s got brand and he caught the technology at the dawn of its ascendancy.  Oh, sure.  Pads have actually been with us for 10 years, as have PDA’s, which have morphed into phones.  Ebooks have been with us almost from the beginning of the Internet.  Hell, you could read books on Gopher.  (You know how I learned about Gopher?  On this newfangled thangie called the “World Wide Web.”)  But the Kindle and its clones matured pad computing to a useful stage, which gave Apple the go ahead to bless it with all the sterile chicness that is the iPad, and coupled it with mobile computing technology.  That ebook you just read on your device is really just a .mobi or .epub file.  These have been with us for some time now.  They were even the impetus for taking this live.  But Kindle and .mobi/.epub are the result of what happens when two technologies morph into something that grows its own cool factor.

Some of Joe’s salient points, lifted and plagiarized directly from Joe himself.  (Sorry, Joe.  I thought it worth repeating.)

  • “Kindle and ebooks are no more a guaranteed success than any other type of publishing. If you want to be widely read, and have the potential for earning the a lot of money, find an agent. If your agent can’t sell your book, or if you have out of print books, I highly recommend self-pubbing on Kindle and Smashwords.”
  • “I post at www.kindleboards.com whenever I have a new release. That’s pretty much all the promo I do. But I’m lucky to have a popular blog, and lots of folks who talk about me on the net. I also have a print backlist.”
  • “Q: Are ebooks going to take over traditional publishing?

    A: Eventually. But print will be around for a while.”

Mind you, I’ve argued some with Joe on this point, but he’s right.  The New York/London model is dying, and it’s not pretty to watch.  Print, I firmly believe, will be around for a long, long time.  But it will be more niche oriented.  The blockbuster mentality that now dominates New York, London, and Paris will not work in the future, at least not in its current form.  Eventually, ebooks will be the dominant format.  Cheap distribution, and if authors are smart about their rights, highly profitable for those creating the work.

Joe goes on to say…

If I maintain my current rate of sales, I’ll earn $170,000 a year on ebook sales. That’s just on the Kindle, and ebooks currently account for less than 6% of all book sales. What happens when ebooks account for 10%? Or 30%? What about platforms other than Kindle?

Eventually, there will be tens of millions of ereading devices out there, and I’m going to keep publishing new ebooks–many of them per year. I can envision a time in the future where I’m selling 500 or 1000 ebooks per day. If we predict that 40 million people will have ereaders in the year 2015, and I sold 1000 ebooks per day, it would take me over a hundred years to completely saturate that market. I’m not in any danger of maxing out my potential fanbase anytime soon.

It’s a brave new world, kids.  And right now, the rules aren’t even being written.  They’re being scribbled on the back of cocktail napkins for use in the rough draft.