After I wrote my first novel, Tokyo Zero, I bounced it off a few literary agents: like you do. I got the pat on the head of being told it was well written but they didn’t think they could sell it. I didn’t have the will to rewrite or remarket it – I wrote it in one solid ‘take’, like recording live with a band, and I didn’t want to mess with that. However, a while later I came across what Cory Doctorow was doing with his novels: putting a Creative Commons version and letting it out in the wild. So I put together a PDF in InDesign and put it on my hokey old earthlink homepage and then dropped Cory a line. He was cool enough to mention it on BoingBoing and then this got me about 10,000 downloads. I did my best to stop this by changing the title shortly after the BoingBoing post went up…
That was 2005. Over the next two years I got 3000-ish, then 1000-ish downloads from the earthlink homepage. I was pleased that at least a few people must be reading it since I was getting nice emails and rude bulletin board postings about me.
During this time manybooks.net picked up the book. They were my main source of downloads from 2006 – 2008. It was fun to see myself occasionally right behind Ulysses on the top 20 list.
2008 was a dark year for Tokyo Zero. I had moved to Paris in 2007, was starting to write again and not really thinking much about my old book. I did get numerous requests for a paper version, so I set that up via amazon and sold less than 100. Other than that, Manybooks had trickled down to just a couple of downloads a day. When I did look at how TZ was doing, I thought that I had just kind of reached the end of the long tail of the book.
Then in 2009 something happened which was the iPhone/Kindle driven ebook mini-boom. Suddenly a lot of copies of Tokyo Zero were being downloaded by services like Feedbooks where fans of the book had uploaded it. Also, it was featured book of the week on manybooks, and a favorable review of the book appeared on Teleread. This spike of interest made me think that I should start blogging a little, since I was hoping to launch book number 2 in 2009 and thought it would make sense to get a bit of buzz about me as opposed to just my first novel. I haven’t put a huge amount of work yet into making myself into a ‘brand’ but once Novel Number 2 [working title 'This Unhappy Planet'] appears this winter I will be shilling fervently.
So this year has seen the renaissance of Tokyo Zero. If I keep at my current pace I’ll hit 30,000 lifetime downloads of Tokyo Zero next week [that I know of], and nearly a third of that will have come in this, the 5th year of its availability. I met a successful French literary author who told me that selling 6,000 copies is a success in his circles. Of course who knows how many people have actually read their download and of course I have made basically peanuts off the book, but for a novel that I have thought was dead twice, I am quite pleased.
