I'd rather be read than rich!

When Amazon's top sellers are the cheapest e-books even the main-stream publishers are taking notes.

Consider that with Amazon if you sell an e-book through them at $2.99 you get $2.00

At $0.99 you get 35 cents.

If a top seller sells 75,000 copies a month at $2.99 and 3780,000 copies at $0.99 he makes a comparable income of over $128,000 a month (less tax) the key difference is that at $2.99 he makes that by only selling 75,000 copies, and at $0.99 he sells over 370,000

All writers will tell you they would rather have readers than income. Most of my published work never earns me a dime - but a recent check on BrokenSea's Doctor Who series download stats shows we have over 2000 downloads a week. Not bad for minimal promotion on our part.

My self-published books this year are going to be sold for $0.99 cents. That's a couple years worth of work for each of them and I value it at a lot more - but I have a job. I don't need to sell books to eat or pay rent.

I'd rather be read than rich!

Inside the cordon

I went into the Christchurch city cordon yesterday, right into the heart of the ruined city. My job was to retrieve personal items from our office building.

There is NOTHING as creepy as being in an empty office building that has been turned over by an earthquake and abandoned for 6 weeks. The smell is really bad (rotting food mostly). It is also quite dark as all the power is off.

I wore a hard-hat and had an LED headlight and the only other person in the building (we have to travel in pairs) was 4 levels below me. This building housed over 800 staff two months ago and they all left in a hurry.

Going up the stairs (in the pitch dark) and going through open plan offices it is eerily quiet. All I could keep thinking is, 'I now know what the zombie apocalypse will really be like.'

As a writer I have never been so inspired, as a resident of Christchurch I have never been so heartbroken to see the destruction.

Writing is good therapy, so I am writing a zombie short story using the earthquake as a vector for the outbreak and some other ideas.