Deadly Proof–anatomy of a book launch
I am proud to announce that Deadly Proof, the fourth book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series, is now available for sale (see links below). As with the other three novels in this series, Deadly Proof finds Annie Fuller and her beau, Nate Dawson, investigating a crime that will lead them (and the reader) into an exploration of the lives of working women in the late 19th century—in this case women who held jobs in the printing industry. If you read my last two posts on my marketing strategy for 2015, you will know that I decided to take all my full-length books out of KDP Select and upload them everywhere and make the first book perma-free. My hope was that this strategy would provide a fertile field for this newly published book. So far, my hopes have been Read more…
Ebook Publishing and the Great Price Debate: My numbers tell an interesting story
Before Christmas and the great Amanda Hocking success story hit the blogosphere, the general wisdom among ebook self-publishers tended to be that $2.99 was the sweet spot for selling and profiting from sales. Particularly after Amazon instituted its new 70% royalty offering (which didn’t apply for books priced at under $2.99), anything lower than that was seen as reserved for short stories or novella’s or at the most a brief promotional launch. However, the success of Amanda Hocking and a growing number of self-published authors selling their books at 99 cents changed the debate. They proved that you could sell so many books at that rate that it would more than make up for the loss of the 70% revenue. An additional upside to the 99 cent approach was that the sheer volume of sales at 99 cents would put Read more…
Analysis of first quarterly Sales or Can I call myself a real published author yet????
Last year as I was making the decision whether or not to self-publish my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I read blog after blog post that tried to parse the differences among traditional publishers, small presses, subsidy and/or vanity publishers, and independent or self-published authors. While I found little absolute agreement, I was left with the impression that if you self-published a book that ended up being bought primarily by immediate family and friends, you were probably involved in vanity publishing, no matter what method you used. This idea was reinforced when I read such statements as those by Jane Smith in her blog How Publishing Really Works that self-published books sold on average “between forty and two hundred copies…”(http://bit.ly/6gvvj2) and that “Despite some highly publicized successes, the average book from a POD service sells fewer than 200 copies–mostly to the authors Read more…
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