Novel rejected? There’s an e-book gold rush!

She met authors she’d read for years and was astonished at how lucrative writing could be. “I had just been to Nashville, where even No. 1 songwriters were struggling to pay the rent . . . but there were a good 10 to 20 women in that room who were making phenomenal livings,” she says.

A writer at the conference mentioned a digital publisher of erotica, called Ellora’s Cave. Though she was “absolutely shocked” at how explicit the genre was, she went home and, encouraged by her husband, sat down to see whether she could write the stuff.

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“And I wrote three chapters!” she says. “They just like flew from my fingertips! The ideas just came to me!”

She wrote “Authors in Ecstasy,” now just named “Ecstasy,” all 40,000 words (that would be about a 130-page book) in a week. Its digital-only edition got the highest possible rating from Romantic Times, the genre’s trade magazine.

She started writing at a finger-numbing 20 to 30 pages a day. She discovered that she wrote well about action, emotions and sex. She wrote four books for Ellora’s Cave, and then got a series of contracts with big-time print publishers, including Simon & Schuster. She wrote steamy novels about alpha heroes and the women who loved them. “Take Me.” “Candy Store.” “Wild Heat.”

She was having “super ridiculous” amounts of fun, but sales were flat, and flat is not good (except, perhaps, for taxes).

So, last winter, when she proposed a three-book series set in the Adirondacks with a softer, small-town theme, her publishers rejected it.

She tried not to be depressed. Then, that day in March, she roused herself to make the first book she wrote, “Ecstasy,” available on the Kindle.

Dynamics of book-buying

E-readers have been around in early formats for nearly two decades, but they have been drastically dropping in price and improving in quality during the past 36 months.

One of the first groups to embrace them were readers of romance fiction. These books were part of larger genre-based markets, such as thrillers and horror, that were populated by avid readers who chain-read books. They were avid fans, communicating with one another in any number of ways, including blogs and book clubs. Romance was tailor-made for the webs of social media.

“Romance novels are leading the way in e-publishing because romance readers are incredibly prolific,” says Malle Vallik, Harlequin’s director of digital publishing. “They understood [e-readers] immediately: ‘Oh, my God, in my purse, I can have 50 books.’ You like one writer, you can get their complete backlist immediately.”

New marketing patterns of lower online prices and impulse buying created a perfect dynamic for authors like Belleville: Genre authors who were prolific but who had not been too successful. This peculiar level of accomplishment meant they had written books for print publishers, seen sales vanish and had the rights revert back to them, and even had completed manuscripts that publishers had rejected.

This left with the writers with just the right recipe: a small but devout core audience; a readily available backlist for new readers to discover; a knack for writing fast; and an inherent appeal to a fan base that read voraciously.

Meanwhile, online booksellers were changing the dynamics of book-buying.

Algorithms that track customers viewing and buying habits (“Customers who bought this book also bought . . .”), the explosion of bestseller lists in specific categories (history, biography, thrillers, sports) , online reader reviews, the catologues that enable readers to see an author’s other books — all began giving readers more options and information than they ever had before.

And many indie authors started doing something publishers would never do: Giving books away for free in an effort to lure readers to check them out. “They know once they get readers hooked, they’ll pay for the rest of their books or the rest of a series,” says Coker at Smashwords.

That pricing has been crucial to the explosion in sales, indie authors say.

Readers may balk at shelling out $23.95 for a hardcover or even $12.95 for a trade paperback. But, it has turned out, mid-list authors who don’t have success at those prices may be runaway bestsellers at, say, $2.99.

Because royalties paid for e-books range from 35 to 70 percent (compared to 15 percent or so on paperback and hardcover titles), and because self-published writers don’t have to pay an agent (typically another 15 percent bite out of their profits), these little-known but self-published writers can take home about $2 on that $2.99 title — nearly double what they would earn on that $12.95 paperback.

Think price and format don’t matter?

Konrath, the guy knocking down $78,000 in six weeks, wrote a techno-thriller in 1999 called “The List.” No publisher wanted it. He self published it in 2009, in print and digital editions.

At 2:45 p.m. March 24, the e-book was at No. 50 on the Kindle paid bestseller list, selling at $2.99, with 28 days on the list. His Kindle account shows he sold 3,771 copies that week at that price.

On the same day, the same book was offered in paperback at $13.95 on Amazon’s books page. It was ranked 102,526.

Eisler, the thriller writer who turned down the $500,000 contract, is another convert to digital indie publishing.

The dynamic of book purchasing is proving to be vastly different for e-readers than it is in the bricks-and-mortar world of bookstores, he says.

Eisler’s theory, which is widely shared in the field, holds that a typical bookstore browser might pick out six or seven books they want, but the sheer weight and the price of such purchases causes them to winnow their selections to one or two. There’s also the mental block of having stacks of unread books at home.

But digital sales are convincing him that online purchasing behavior is different — people can buy six books for, say, $20, and have nothing to weigh them down while shopping in the mall or getting on a plane.

“The price is so low, the gratification is so instant, and there no ‘to be read’ pile about to tip over on your night table,” he says. “The limiting factor isn’t time or cost. It’s interest. In a paper world, shelves can only hold so much, towns can only support so many bookstores.”

“Low-priced digital,” he says, “is just a completely different animal.”

Godin has been in publishing and marketing for two decades. He’s sold on the idea that digital is the new frontier. But, he says, the success stories — Hocking, Konrath, Belleville — have spent years writing, blogging, communicating with readers online and building their audiences one painstaking member at a time. “You have to earn [an audience],” he says. “You can’t buy it. It’s not for sale.”

Belleville, for example, had saved every piece of fan mail from readers who liked her most popular book, “Take Me.” When she wrote the digital-only sequel, “Love Me,” last summer, she wrote the news to every person who had written her about the original. Then there was the blogging, the newsletter on her Web sites, her Facebook pages, her Twitter accounts and so on.

In between, she writes as much as 6,000 words per day for her novels. That’s nearly 20 pages in standard hardcover format.

“I am working,” she says, “harder than I ever have in my life.”

A good story is key

The day after putting together her latest book cover, Belleville gets up just after dawn to drive an hour and a half to Berkeley to speak to the local chapter of the Romance Writers of America.

Despite her wild success in the past year, she doesn’t think that print publishers are going anywhere, and she doesn’t want them to. Last spring, while her digital books were beginning to take off, she got word from her agent that her Adirondacks trilogy under the name “Bella Riley” had sold to a new print publishing house — for a modest $7,500 per book. She was geeked out about that, too.

Meanwhile, the grand dame of her pseudonyms, Bella Andre, has been dramatically rescued from an untimely demise, even without an alpha male in sight. She’s selling terrifically online, and Belleville has mapped out an eight-book Andre series.

The Romance Writers meeting is a loud, spirited talk shop of about 25 women in an upstairs room of the Pyramid Breweries Alehouse. Writers announce their latest adventures in publishing, and Belleville and two friends give a short workshop on creating alpha male heroes.

There’s the swashbuckling alpha, the wounded alpha, the bad-boy alpha, the extreme alpha, the chief alpha, the gentle alpha and, of course, the warrior alpha. Your alpha can be a dominant guy, they say, but his love interest has to be a strong woman, too, or else he’d just be overbearing. The heroine, in fact, is almost always the one chink in his armor.

“One thing alphas do not say,” Belleville says, “is ‘I don’t know what to do.’ ” To connote her heroes’ take-charge manner, she’ll cut the first word or two out of his dialogue; “Are you going to town?” becomes “Going to town?”

It’s an odd little moment in the breakout days of one of the hottest digital writers in America: During her presentation, there was almost no talk about digital publishing. The discussion was just about stories and why readers like some characters and don’t like others, the dynamics between men and women, and what they find moving and worthwhile in literature.

It was almost like 1995.