My Self-Published History Homework Outsells Penguin Published Paul Stephenson As An E-book

When I was in school earning my bachelor's degree in history, I took a class on Roman history and two on Byzantine history (as well as many other classes, I just made sure I got in as much Roman history as I could.) My final class before completing my degree required us to write a 30-page paper on something from Byzantine history (the topics and our thesis had to be approved by the professor.) I chose to write on the idea that Constantine was an emperor tolerant of both paganism and Christianity and that he set a mold for subsequent emperors to follow. Whenever an emperor diverted from that path in favor of pagans or Christians, the empire saw a breakdown that sometimes led to civil war. The two notable exceptions to Constantine's empire of tolerance were Theodosius (in favor of Christians) and Julian (in favor of pagans.)

My professor recommended several primary and secondary sources for me to use in my paper. The most useful secondary source that aligned the best with my thesis was Paul Stephenson's Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor. Unlike historians of the past who found Constantine to be either the savior of Christianity or a secret pagan who spit on the cross, Stephenson found the truth to be somewhere in the middle. While Constantine trumpeted the cause of Christians, he also allowed pagan practices to continue, saw Christ more as his personal "summus deus," and was even buried like the pagan Roman emperors of old. Constantinople was also a fusion of both pagan and Christian ideas. After earning my degree, I self-published my article in 2012.

Stephenson's book changed the way academics view Constantine's rule. I'm sure he's in hundreds of university libraries in paperback (I know the BYU library had several copies.) In paperback, I'm pretty sure his sales numbers destroy mine. In the e-book format, however, I'm likely outselling him three or four to one most months. Just to give you a brief comparison of our e-books on Amazon:



-Stephenson is published by Overlook Press (under the Penguin umbrella.) My article, Constantine: The Emperor of Tolerance, is self-published.
-Stephenson's book has 14 reviews with an average of 4.5 / 5 stars. My article doesn't have any reviews yet on Amazon.
-Stephenson's book outsells my article in paperback. I'm sure by a crazy amount. Constantine: The Emperor of Tolerance has only been available in paperback since January of this year at $5.99 and I've sold 6 paperback copies.
-Stephenson's book is 377 pages based on the hardcover edition. My article is 46 pages in paperback.
-Here's the kicker: Stephenson's e-book is $18.99. My article is $2.99 for the e-book.

Do you see why I'm able to outsell him in the e-book format? I've been watching both of our rankings on Amazon carefully. I've sold four copies of Constantine: The Emperor of Tolerance this month as an e-book. Stephenson, based on his ranking movement, has sold one copy.

You might be thinking "well at $18.99, he probably made more money than you did from his single copy sold." You'd be wrong. Penguin, like any of the Big 5, pays 25% of net on e-books. So Stephenson's cut would be $18.99 x .7 (Amazon's royalty payment of 70%) x .25 (Penguin's royalty payment of 25% of net) = $3.23 (assuming there are no other delivery fees and that Amazon pays 70% on their $18.99 price because I know self-published authors only make 35% when a title is priced above $9.99.) So the e-book version of Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor has made Stephenson $3.23 this month while I made $2.07 (70% minus delivery fees) per copy sold on Constantine: The Emperor of Tolerance and I've sold four copies, giving me a royalty of $8.28.

So what's my point? My point is that the Big 5 are clearly trying to retard the growth of e-books by keeping their prices laughably high so they can keep selling hardcovers and paperbacks for as long as possible. They want the market to remain a place where authors HAVE to use them and they can continue to force authors into terrible contracts (like paying them 25% of net for e-book sales.) For paperback distribution and hardcover distribution, they clearly have more of the market share. In the e-book market, it's much more difficult for them to dominate, even if they tried to do so. At $18.99, Stephenson's e-book is just a few dollars short of the hardcover version. Some people will still buy it or will fork out the extra few dollars for the hardcover. Some people will discover my article instead and pay $2.99 for some light reading about Constantine instead of paying almost ten times as much for Stephenson's lengthy tome. While he will likely continue to outsell me in paperback, I will likely continue to outsell him in e-book. As long as Penguin remains stubborn with high e-book prices, I can sit at a reasonable price with my history articles and gain market share from casual history readers. (Note: I've been tracking my e-book against Stephenson's for months. I always outsell him in e-books. This was just the first month that I specifically wanted to figure out by how many copies I outsell him.)

I'll link to both my e-book and Stephenson's on Amazon. They're both good reads and I'd recommend you check them out:

Constantine: The Emperor of Tolerance by Randall J. Morris
Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor by Paul Stephenson

A General Technology Rule: The Weakest Link

It's been a while since I posted some tech advice on my blog, so I decided to take a chapter from Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate Volume II and post it here. I'm hoping this changes the way people think about how they set things up because even the salesmen at your local electronics store constantly mess up systems by allowing one piece of the video, audio, or wireless chain to be weaker than the others, resulting in a downgrade of the entire system.

A GENERAL TECHNOLOGY RULE: THE WEAKEST LINK

In Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate, I covered different cable types and what that means in terms of resolution. As a brief refresher, resolution is the number of pixels (or little dots) on a screen. It’s length x width. These can be expressed as different resolutions (480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p.) In order to achieve the maximum resolution possible, however, everything in the system must support that resolution. Let’s think of you watching a movie as a chain of events. In order to watch a movie in 1080p (roughly 2.1 million pixels), you’ll need the following:

-A blu-ray disc

-A blu-ray player

-A TV that supports 1080p

-An HDMI cable connected from the blu-ray player to the TV.

If I change any of the items listed above, the movie will be displayed in the lowest resolution of the items I listed. Our chain currently looks like this:

Blu-ray disc (1080p) > Blu-ray player (1080p) > HDMI cable (1080p) > 1080p TV (1080p)

Let’s say I don’t have an HDMI cable so I just use the composite cables (red, white, and yellow cables) that came in the box with the blu-ray player. Our chain now looks like this:

Blu-ray disc (1080p) > Blu-ray player (1080p) > Composite cables (480i) > 1080p TV (1080p)

That chain will result in a picture on the TV that’s 480i. I used to set up TVs for people and sometimes they bought all new equipment and no one told them to get a cable to support the high definition experience they wanted. Sometimes I would meet people who had a blu-ray player and an HDMI cable but their TV was 720p. Keep in mind that whatever the lowest resolution in your chain is, that’s what your picture is going to be.

Here’s another good example dealing with wireless internet speeds and range. A wireless internet network can be broadcast by a box called a wireless router. As technology has progressed, wireless routers have evolved through different types of wireless networks, each one having a greater range (you can be father from the router and still connect to the internet) and better speed than the wireless networks that came before it. It progressed like this (from oldest to most current):
A > B > G > N > AC

An AC wireless network currently is the fastest and has the greatest range. The thing that the salesmen in the stores didn’t seem to initially understand is that an AC router is only part of the chain. Your device has a wireless card that connects it to the router. So let’s say your laptop computer has a wireless G network card built in and you’re having issues with speed and with connecting to the internet when you’re in your backyard. If you went into the store, I know a lot of salesmen who would recommend that you buy a wireless AC router and assure you that would fix all of your problems. What they don’t understand is that:

Your laptop (wireless G) + AC wireless router (wireless AC) = wireless G

The AC router is going to operate as if it were a wireless G router, meaning you’ll get the speed and range of a wireless G network. To fix the chain above so that your network performs with AC range and speed, you would need a wireless AC USB adapter. Once you plug in a wireless AC USB adapter into a USB port on your computer and turn off your computer’s built in wireless G network card, the chain would be like this:
Your laptop with USB adapter (wireless AC) + AC wireless router (wireless AC) = wireless AC

So to break this down into its simplest terms, make sure everything you connect together in a system is capable of doing the same speed, resolution, or whatever else as all of the other components. The weakest link in your system will determine how the system performs overall. I know this sounds like common sense, but you would be surprised how many times even people who are supposed to know what they’re doing forget about one of the parts of the chain we talked about here.

For more technology advice and explanations, you can check out the two volumes in the Explanations and Advice for the Tech Illiterate series on Amazon:
Volume I: Available in e-book, paperback, and audio book
Volume II: Available in e-book and paperback

Book Recommendations

My narrator uploaded the first half of the Jehovah and Hades audio book, so I'm about to start going through that to see if he needs to do any re-recording before making the master track. He said the full audio is ready to go, I just have to give the two plus hour long audio book a listen before we move on to mastering it. So that audio book isn't too far from going live.

Before I start listening to chapters of Jehovah and Hades, I figured I would post some book recommendations for self-published authors that I've read but you may not have heard of yet. In most of these cases, I've read at least one of their books. These books do have swearing and violence in them, so I'm adding that in as a disclaimer. Let's start:

1. A.G. Riddle
A.G. Riddle became successful on Amazon with his first self-published book, which is pretty rare. He's turned it into a series that now has three books. The first one, The Atlantis Gene, has over 7,000 reviews on Amazon and a rating of 4.2 / 5 stars. I've made it about 90% of the way through The Atlantis Gene and I have to say that it's been a good book so far, even though I think Riddle is a little too long-winded at times. This first book in the series clocks in at just under 500 pages. It's $2.99, so definitely a bargain. This action / adventure thriller deals with the origins of a specific disease and goes back to track down the mystery behind the evolutionary line of humans. Pretty interesting stuff. It's currently #64 in the Amazon Top 100 and it has been in the Top 100 for a long time now. You can pick up The Atlantis Gene as an e-book by clicking the cover image below:

2. Russell Blake
Russell Blake has been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and has sold over 600,000 books so far. He mainly writes fast-paced thrillers and is successful in that area (as evidenced by the strong sales in his Jet series.) Personally, I like Blake's PI / Detective books the best. There are currently four books in his Black series (about a PI named Artemus Black) and I've read all four. They're all great reads. Instead of linking to Jet, I'm going to link to the first book in Blake's Black series (which is currently at $3.99):

3. Nick Russell
Nick Russell made the New York Times Best Seller list with the first book in his Big Lake series, selling over 100,000 copies. Nick has featured my books on his blog several times which has brought in many additional sales for me. He's a traveling RVer who tours the country while speaking at various RV conventions and recently even started an informal workshop on self-publishing books. I read his latest stand-alone novel, Dog's Run, last year and it was in the top 5 for best books I read in all of 2013 (and I read a lot.) I'll link to Dog's Run below (which Amazon actually tried to make a deal with Nick to acquire.) It's definitely worth the current $3.99 price tag:

4. Hugh Howey
Hugh Howey hit it big with what I think was around the 10th book he wrote, a short story called Wool. It was so popular that fans demanded that he continue it into a series. I purchased the complete Wool collection a while back and I'm currently in book 4. It's a great series, but for the moment I've moved on to other reads. Howey is famous as an indie author for making a deal with Simon and Schuster for ONLY his paperback rights. Every other company in the Big 5 wanted to take his e-book rights as well and he stood firm and told them no. I'm currently reading Hugh Howey's latest novel, Sand, which is the book I will link to below (it's a different book outside of the Wool series, Hugh currently has it at $5.99 but I grabbed it when it was on sale for $1.99):

5. Brandon Hale
Brandon Hale is the author of the popular Day Soldiers series. He's also made my last two Facebook profile images, because he knows I love Assassin's Creed and thought it would be cool to photoshop me as an actual assassin. Brandon recently made the jump to full-time author and then found out shortly after that he has cancer. He's been fighting it and I know he's going to beat it, but it would definitely help him out if you grabbed a copy of Day Soldiers. I've read it; it's amazing. It features a world where vampires, werewolves, and other creatures come out of hiding and publicly declare that they exist, promising to extinguish humanity. The Day Soldiers are the humans that stand against them and fight back. Brandon has a great way of writing about the old school, original creatures of the night, not shiny, sparkling vampires. I read Bram Stoker's Dracula when I was a teenager and Hale does vampires more justice than Stephanie Meyer ever did. Day Soldiers is free, so if you enjoy it I would encourage you to leave a positive review and pick up more books in the series:

So there you go. Five new self-published indie authors to try out. Read any one of the five books I recommended and you can tell all of your friends that you're a hipster who reads indie authors. I know that's what you all secretly want, right? :-P If none of those books work for you, you can always check out my author page here. (Keep in mind that I'm a self-published indie author too.)