I’m always intrigued by the people who endeavor to auction on eBay the rights to publish their manuscript. Or, sometimes, you’ll see someone seeking to sell the film rights. Often, they’re folks, like this industrious author, that may have self-published other books. The eBay entry mentions a couple of previous books printed through AuthorHouse and now seeking $130,000 for this new one.
Sometimes, the offers are a little odd, like this 20 page, $5,000 manuscript.
Rarely do I see an auction listing as elaborate as this opportunity to publish the fly-fishing bible. The seller claims they’ve had offers from NYC publishing companies for more than a hundred grand, but the bidding here starts for merely $50,000. I do have to give them credit for a bigtime eBay listing, though. This thing is huge and cool-looking. They’re certainly doing all they can to earn that cash.
130 grand for a “fictional novel?”
lol.
I love fictional novels.
That’s nothing. I auctioned off my future earnings as a writer to the highest bidder. It was a way to garner funding for grad. school. The remnants of this venture, covered last year by the AP and NPR, can be found on my website (link in my blog’s profile).
I recently started a publishing company, and discovered that you can self publish 1000 quite nice looking casebound books, with 4 color jackets, and 256 pages for about $6,000.00. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to sell them. Now I’m looking for a job. I’m not sure if this is a relevant post, come to think of it. But I had something to say, and I’ve had a lot of wine tonight. it must have been some sort of comment about aspiring authors… And Ebay… I wasn’t able to sell the damn book there either. Don’t worry though, I’m not talking about a Johnny Wraith writing. His stuff is not worth a penny. The book I am discussing was written by somebody else. Somebody that hired me because I know how to form companies. I just don’t know how to sell anything.