Stephanie McAfee’s
Diary of a Mad Fat Girl
(NAL, $15) offers a fascinating tale, but not between its covers. The girl-buddy cape, starring a sassy, overweight Mississippi teacher, brims with local color but is burdened by too much plot and too little nuance. With an endearingly flawed narrator in a conflicted relationship, this is chick-lit territory that many talented writers — Jennifer Weiner and Rebecca Wells among them — have explored far more deftly.
What makes “Diary of a Mad Fat Girl” so fascinating is how it became a book in the first place. McAfee is a former teacher from Mississippi who, after being rejected by numerous literary agents, decided to self-publish her e-book in December 2010. “When I discovered Smashwords (and later Amazon KDP and Barnes & Noble PubIt!), I thought, ‘Hey, why not give this a try?’ ” she says in the book’s publicity materials. “Kindle ads were on the back of literally every magazine we subscribed to at the time. . . . And what does everyone want after Christmas? A bargain. Enter my 0.99 cent ebook.”
(New American Library) - “Diary of a Mad Fat Girl” by Stephanie McAfee was originally a 99-cent e-book.
At the time, McAfee did not own an e-reader. But she spread the word about her first novel to her 400 or so Facebook friends and watched as her book became an underground hit.
The e-book sold 145,325 copies from January to August 2011, McAfee says, and spent 12 weeks on the extended New York Times e-book fiction bestseller list and two weeks on the combined e-book and print-fiction list. Agents started calling, and NAL offered McAfee a three-book deal for an undisclosed amount. Sales from the e-book, she said, were “a bit more” than her annual teaching salary; she’s now writing full time. “I know how it feels to hit the jackpot,” she says.
E-book software and social networking have helped make self-publishing and self-promotion simple and inexpensive, and e-book bestseller lists have given the form cachet. John Locke, author of the best-selling novel “Saving Rachel,” boasts that sales of his e-books rank among those of Stieg Larsson and James Patterson. Last year, he became the first self-published writer to sell 1 million books on Kindle; he has since signed a sales and distribution deal with Simon & Schuster. Young-adult fantasy-lit sensation Amanda Hocking sold more than 1 million copies of her self-published e-book series and last year made a $2 million deal with St. Martin’s.
A book placed with a traditional publisher is edited, made into a physical product, marketed and shipped — expenses that are built into the retail price. Self-published e-books, though, often sell for less than $3. McAfee’s 99-cent e-book, substantially expanded by the author, and edited and marketed by NAL, will cost $15 in paperback. Hocking’s “Switched” was 99 cents as an e-book but is an $8.99 paperback. Locke says he plans to raise the prices of the existing novels from his popular Donovan Creed series “to prevent self-competition with the paperbacks.” (For $9.99, you can buy the paperback edition of his book “How I Sold 1 Million ebooks in 5 Months.”)
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