I already wrote a long post about my long book titles, but I thought I’d give you a quick update about the decision I came to after another 5+ weeks of thought. As you can see by visiting my page on Amazon or on Goodreads or on Smashwords, I decided to go with the following format for the eBook titles of the books in the Untrue Tales… series, putting the 3 book names first and the 2 series names & the book number in parentheses afterward:
An Introduction to Dodgeball or Conception and Induction or How to Begin an Apocalypse (Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past, Book One)
The Twofold Invasion or Penetration and Destruction or How to Make Love With Twins (Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past, Book Two)
Escape from Exile or Confusion and Contraction or How to Get Out of Hell (Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past, Book Three)
Explorations of Ridiculous Realities or Corporation and Collusion or How to Subvert Corporatocracy (Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction Recollections of an Alternate Past – Book Four)
This complies with Smashwords’ (inconsistent) interpretation of Apple’s apparent policy of requiring a pseudo-exact match between the title in the cover image and the title in the ‘title’ metadata field. I also left the old style of writing the titles in the books’ descriptions. We’ll see how this goes…
Though actually, in the last week and over the next week I’m rolling out a few other changes regarding eBooks for which the idea “We’ll see how this goes…” more readily applies. For example: I’ve uploaded ePubs of all my eBooks to Goodreads so you can buy & read them there (or preview them there, EX: Last Christmas – hit the ‘read ebook’ button!) in addition to the Amazon / Apple / Google / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / Sony / Diesel / Smashwords eBooks stores where you could already get them. I also uploaded the same ePub versions of my books to Google for their eBookstore; they only had PDF versions before… and after a week they’re all still PDF, so I assume someone at Google is manually … approving?… the ePubs I uploaded? Isn’t that a job a computer can do? Anyway, they’re all available as “scanned pages” right now (which actually means the PDFs I sent to my printer to print; no scanning has taken place to produce the version available now) and will be available as “flowable text” at Google … as soon as they get around to it. And everywhere else, now.
So in the next week (or so, and I’ll do another post on 1/1/2011 with more details) I’ll be uploading fresh free versions of the ten (maybe eleven) of my books you can get as free eBooks, re-writing all the eBooks pages at modernevil.com, adding links to the GoodReads (and maybe Google) eBooks versions to all the ‘pay what you can’ bars across modernevil.com, and removing the Smashwords coupon codes (which expire 12/31/2010, anyway) from all the eBooks pages. I’m also considering/reconsidering my eBooks pricing scheme, though I’m leaning toward keeping everything where it is (half the paperback cover price for eBooks)… except maybe for Untrue Tales… Book One, which I’ll likely semi-permanently drop to $0.99 and/or free, depending on what’s allowed (ie: kindle doesn’t allow indie publishers to price eBooks at $0.00) and where. Other thoughts include: rounding everything to whole dollars (ie: $5.99 becomes $6.00), rounding everything to $n.99 (ie: $6.50 becomes $6.99), adjusting full-book prices downward (so that my most expensive single eBook is $4.99), adjusting all prices upward (since people who can’t afford $9.99 probably can’t afford $4.99 and either can’t afford an eReader or will just go get the free copies anyway), and giving one or more books away at all times (perhaps rotating which title is free on the pay sites by quarter). Any thoughts you have on these (or related) ideas are welcome.
Oh, and I must have missed something somewhere when I was going through the numbers, because I just did a quick run-through of the hrblock.com tax interview with my business data for 2010 & it said Modern Evil Press made $33 taxable income in 2010. I was expecting to have an “official” loss again, by about that amount. I’ll be buying TurboTax in January or February and very carefully and thoroughly going through everything, but that’s pretty good news, if it’s right. It also matches with my experiences and projections for the year, of being just-barely-profitable. So that’s good.
Oh, and maybe I’ll write a more personal blog post at some point… ?
