Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Riding the Wave

This past week has been awesome! The "Dreams" giveaway helped "Doors" make #16 on the epic list twice. I sold seven months of books in that week. To strike while the iron is hot, I'm pushing to get "Sirius Academy" out as soon as possible. Hopefully, we can keep the momentum going.

Due to a Createspace-Amazon glitch, the paperback wasn't visible on the same page. So my big sellers had zero paper sales. I went to some local bookstores to tried to parlay this ranking into a few sales. I was told that small stores won't order from Ingrams because the margin is too small and the required order too large. The chain store I went to, the ladies behind the counter transformed into furies, just like in "the Lightning Thief." Amazon and everything associated is their sworn enemy. They'll never buy from that channel. The library has free copies but no budget to catalog them till June. Libraries won't buy a book unless it is well-rated in one of the three library journals. One of my relatives is a librarian and she won't read them. My local librarian doesn't want to waste time/money on reviews either. In short, the $40 a book I spent to open channels up was a colossal waste. All I did was make all my books cost $3 more to meet the required Amazon minimum.

As of today, my books are all priced between $9.99 and $12.99. Maybe I'll sell more than one a month now. My profit for each paper book is now the same as an e-book.

In preparation for the sequel to Jezebel, I'm removing the Icarus novella from Amazon and making it free on Smashwords. It was only getting 3 downloads a month--about a dollar. It's worth more as advertizing.

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