Shane Jiraiya Cummings -The Grand Experiment

Ever since I discovered JA Konrath and signed up to his blog I have been hanging out for some Australian authors to emulate/replicate his self published success.  I know that we have great authors here in Australia who aren't receiving the same sort of acclaim as Konrath and some of the lesser known success stories that he promotes.


So it was almost serendipitous when I stumbled across Shane Jiraiya Cummings' plans to do just that.  He's titled it The Grand Experiment.  On his blog he writes:

At the end of this month, I’ll be self-publishing seven (7!) e-books directly ontoAmazon (via their Digital Text Platform, an excellent tool for self-publishing authors) and Smashwords. The titles will be available on all the major e-readers: Kindle, Kobo, Apple, PDF, etc. – although Amazon’s Kindle is my focus.

These new titles, along with my existing novella Phoenix and the Darkness of Wolves, mean that I have a decent sample of eight titles with which to build my reputation and sales.  I have another few titles in the works, but Mum’s the word on those for now. I’m saving them for later …

At the end of every month, I will post sales figures on this blog/website.

The goals of the Grand Experiment are:

• My primary goal (to determine whether the experiment is a success) is to sell 1,000 e-books in total (across all of these titles) by December 31, 2011
• My secondary goal is to sell 1,000 copies of each title (i.e. 7,000 copies) by December 31, 2011.
• I’m also hoping to demonstrate that word length is far less important when it comes to selling e-books. Novels are the dominant form in bookstores, but I propose that novellas are a better length for e-book readers and that short story collections, when marketed and published the right way, will sell just as well.

Here we have a Australian Speculative Fiction author, traditionally published, and who has the skill set to really take advantage of the self publishing phenomenon.  I will be following his progress over the coming months and blogging about it here.  I have also been invited to guest post on his blog next month. 


If you want to check out his work Shane has made The Smoke Dragon (an Aurealis Finalist) free at Smashwords.




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