Lansing author and journalist James Sanford, 48, (who is also A&E editor at Lansing City Pulse) had an exciting taste of success recently, when his newly released e-book The Sum of My Parts sold 1,000 downloads in the first six days of being on sale. REVUE talked with Sanford about his memoir of surviving testicular cancer (he's been cancer free since 2002).
Q: How did you manage to do sell so many e-books in less than a week?
A: I think my friends did their job to support me, but also the Kindle Singles people are terrific in terms of really pushing what they publish. The Kindle Singles agent contacted me and said, "Oh, this is such a terrific book; it's going to be a big seller." I said, "That's really kind of you to say, but I don't really think there's a big market for a book like this." Maybe it will sell to people who are going through it or who have family members going through it, and that's primarily why I wrote it. I thought maybe hearing my story would make someone else feel better or give them some kind of support, but I did not believe for a minute that it was going to be broadly appealing.
Q: What is Kindle Singles?
It's an arm of Amazon that's dedicated to pieces ... that people can read in the course of a few hours. I had no idea what to do with it because it was much too long to be a magazine piece and I didn't feel like padding it out and turning it into a book. So I was kind of down-hearted for a while, but I received an email from author Susan Orlean (author of the Orchid Thief) and she told me about an essay she had published by Kindle Singles. I said, "I've never even heard of Kindle Singles before." I sent a query letter over on a Sunday night and literally Monday morning I got an answer back saying "I'm going to send you a link so you can upload the manuscript and we can take a look at it."
Q: Do you have to have a Kindle to read it?
A: The good thing about Kindle is that you do not actually have to have a Kindle unit to read it, because you can download the Kindle application for PC or for Mac and you can put it on your smart phone.
