Category: Money

Brainstorming future projects, Fall 2012 – Spring 2013

I have Facebook Pages set up for myself and for Modern Evil Press, but I don’t really make good use of them. I also have subscriptions turned on, on my personal Facebook account, so fans can just subscribe to my updates there and … well, that’s probably the best option, if you actually want to see all my updates, and know what I’m doing, what I’m working on, et cetera. I do have a couple apps pulling the feeds from this blog, my podcast, and any updates to modernevil.com and wretchedcreature.com onto the official Facebook page for me (though not the Modern Evil Press page), so if you Like me there, you’ll know most of what I’m doing, but I rarely make direct updates/posts. Sometimes I try.

A little while ago I began trying to write an update for my page, from my iPhone, and … it got a bit out of hand. Here’s what I wrote (with a few tiny adjustments):

Trying to decide what to attempt this year for NaNoWriMo, and how to publish it (in print) in time for PHXCC’13 without going broke in the process. Possible ideas:

1) Rush to be ready to re-write Dragons’ Truth by November 1st
2) Write a ‘tentacle novel’ for NaNoWriMo (specifically to sell at PHXCC, partially via a tentacle-themed-crafts collective I’m tentatively a part of).

These two ideas each lead to spin-off ideas:

3) The Dragons’ Truth re-write is supposed to include designing it to allow for a sequel – actually I’m planning a trilogy. Due to timeline issues, I’d like to have all 3 written before the first goes to press. (At least for the paper version; eBooks are easy to change/correct/update.)
4) Should I write one long-ish tentacle novel (say, 75k+ words) or two or three short ones (under 40k words each), which can sell for pocket money (target: <$7.99)? Doesn’t “The Tentacle Trilogy” sound good? “Introducing: The Mystery of the Missing Manacles, Book 1 of The Tentacle Trilogy“

5) Printing trilogies is expensive. Triple the setup costs, trouble moving inventory for later books in the series… And while I really like the idea of doing the individual books (for either trilogy) as cheap paperbacks and adding a combined hardcover limited edition that would sell for a premium price, that makes for a very expensive spring, next year.
6) If I really put my mind to it (and didn’t spend the whole of the next 3.5 months on the tabletop game I’m also developing) I could theoretically write all six books (How did I go from one or two books in the next few months to six? Six!?) in time to have some or all of them at PHXCC.

How those books are presented/sold becomes the conundrum: Do I only release the first book (of each series), and give specific release dates for the others? Do I make the first books available as paperbacks, both series available in combined LE hardbacks, and conditionally print the other paperbacks if/when the cost of doing so would be covered? Do I break the bank & print up 6 new paperback and 2 new LE hardbacks, all at once, and hope enough of them sell?

It would be difficult to set deadlines appropriately without knowing my publishing plans, or to begin building marketing hype for those unknown future releases.

Then there’s always the thought of kickstarting: I could write the books, edit them, prepare them for publication, and release the first book as an eBook (or just link to the free interactive version I’m planning, for Dragons’ Truth), then kickstart to try to raise funds for printing paper versions, with stretch goals for the various mixes/release-schedules postulated above, and the main reward being the “best version” printed.

This is getting longer than I’d planned. Maybe I should go do a blog post.

So… here I am. Doing a blog post. Continue reading Brainstorming future projects, Fall 2012 – Spring 2013

Short rant on the “value of eBooks”, another rant on the value of MY books

The following is something I wrote as a comment on a TeleRead blog post, which was apparently a reblog, but I didn’t copy my comment to the original post. Instead I’m posting it here. Basically, it’s another article discussing how $2.99 is the “magical price point” for eBooks, and forecasting that all eBooks will eventually have to lower to that price, because … well, because that’s just how much the author is willing to pay, is why. Some eBooks are cheap, sometimes, therefore he’s never going to pay more than $2.99 for an eBook!

It’s all about value, he declares, and this idea is based on the premise that if an eBook will ever in its future be discounted, the full/original/list price was never an appropriate value. Which is ridiculous. Here is my response:

The whole discussion of eBook pricing is skewed by a very vocal minority who do not comprehend the foundations of the publishing industry’s economic model. First: One must realize, when trying to make sense of publishers’ attempts to price eBooks, that historically the majority of the profit comes from the sale of the hardcover release. There are plenty of people who have quite happily paid full price ($25-$35) for new books, and they are the ones who have turned publishing into an industry of note. Not you, oh vocal minority, oh ye who would (imagining that there may be a future sale) wait patiently for a lower price on the same book, wait to buy it until it reaches your “magic price point”. The most vocal of the “Cheap eBooks now! Cheap eBooks forever!” crowd seem to correspond to the same readers who would not only wait for the paperback, but the mass-market paperback, and often for the used paperback; for the biggest publishers, readers in these last two categories aren’t even their customers – mmpb is farmed out to companies which do just that (and know how to operate on the tiny margins), and used books, well, that’s another matter – something all large media companies are trying to wipe out in the shift to digital. Windowing has everything to do with selling full-value books to people willing to pay for quality ($30), then selling discounted books to people who value books less and are willing to wait ($15), then selling the scraps to the mmpb-producers ($7), who then sell the books to the people who value new books just a little more than the used-book buyers (who can be said to barely value books at all; $3). Thus: The fact that books are available at different price points at different times, that they go on sale, and that some customers are willing to wait until they’re paying what amounts to a nominal price (i.e.: paying in name only), is not a new (or eBooks-related) phenomenon. Likewise, the fact that publishers would like to continue to sell their books at something close to their full value to the readers willing to pay full price should not come as a shock or as an affront to those who have always stood as the least-valuable customers; when a publisher prices an eBook at $15, it isn’t about YOU – it’s about the people who have been gladly paying $15-$35 for books all along! They’re also buying $12-$15 eBooks quite happily, despite all the moaning from the other end of the price/value spectrum.

Is $2.99 the magic price for eBooks? Well, for a certain class of reader, the ones for whom mmpb and used were the first times they’d consider buying a book (magically quite near the same $3 price point), maybe. But not for everyone. Not for publishers on the first day of a book’s hardcover release. You $3 book buyers are not the market at that time; you’ll be the market later. Feel free to wait, as you always have. The publishers are not in business to serve you; they’re primarily in business to serve those willing to pay 10x more for the same story, and are willing to let you eat those customers’ scraps.

###

In addition, since this is my blog, I want to add, about my books:

I write, publish, and sell books. Paper books, audio books, and eBooks. I’ve tried a lot of price points over the years, for each medium. I’m in the midst of another pricing experiment, right now (as you may know), where I lower the prices of my books the more money they make, until they reach the minimum price I can sell them at and still make a couple bucks a copy; this scheme is based on the rantings of the vocal minority derided above! This pricing scheme is founded on the oft-repeated claim about the marginal-costs of producing eBooks being close-to-zero, so why aren’t eBooks close-to-free? The whole “there’s no paper, so what am I paying you for?” argument – the one which insists that the writing itself, the story or information contained therein has negligible (not even nominal) value. So several of my books (the ones which have “earned out” and paid for their initial costs of production) are priced at this floor – $2.99 for an eBook, $5-7 for paperbacks; that’s as low as I can go. (Especially considering I give all my books away, too.)

With my most recent two books, Sophia and Emily, I started the eBooks at $9.99 apiece (largely because of Amazon rules/rates), and I priced the hardcover release at $35. Within the first month, I sold more than enough hardcovers to cover all the upfront/fixed costs of production, and I dropped the price of the eBooks all the way to $2.99. Theoretically, if the “Cheap eBooks now!” crowd is correct, dropping the price should have increased my sales volume. Of course, as I expected (based on my experiences with this price experiment and several others over the years), they did not go up – they stopped. I’d say they stopped altogether, but since dropping the prices to $2.99, a single copy of one of the eBooks has sold.

$2.99 is not a “magic price” for eBooks.

I consistently get more sales of my higher priced books, and see a massive drop in sales whenever I drop the price, even temporarily. I announce all around the books will be $0.99, or $1.99, or $2.99, but only for a day, or a week, or a month, and that day/week/month will have fewer sales than those before and after it. People want something of value, and they’re willing to pay for it. When I put my books out there with a $2.99 price tag, it says “This book is cheap! This book can’t compete! This book isn’t worth your money, or your time!” and they go buy one of the $8.99-$14.99 eBooks which, at those prices, must be a better book.

At Phoenix Comicon, I was certainly trying to push the hardcover books, the paperback books, the things I could easily sell, in person for ready money – rather than the things that people would maybe get later. Rather than the things people could go get for free. Yet, there are a lot of young people at Comicon – people without a lot of financial means (yet), who were interested in my stories, but maybe didn’t have the cash to buy the limited-edition hardcover (or even a paperback). So I gave them my card and told them that if they really couldn’t afford to buy, they could go to my website and get the eBooks for free. Or go listen to my podcast, and hear the books for free. All unabridged, of course. At least two young people, people who knew they could just go get the same exact book, the same story, for free on my website, came back later in the weekend having scrounged together the cash, and bought the full-price hardcovers. People are willing to pay more for what they value. Yes, they can go get it for free, but the book is worth something to them, and they’d rather pay what it’s worth than simply get the best deal.

Probably I’ll cancel this pricing experiment, soon, and raise all my eBook prices, again. Having low prices doesn’t really seem to get me more sales. Price, as they say, is the last tool in the salesman’s bag of tricks. What gets me more sales is writing great stories, connecting with readers, and building relationships with their imaginations. People who love my books are happy to pay for them. To pay full price for them. Even to pay more than full price for them, and support them in other ways. All those people for whom $2.99 is a “magic price” are probably happier getting it for free, anyway.

Never Let the Right One Go – One Month Out [Updated]

It’s been just over a month since the official release/publication date of my new book/series, Never Let the Right One Go, so I thought I’d do a post to go over its progress so far, in terms of reviews, sales (both paper and digital), and free downloads. All numbers in this post are based on the best data I have available, covering the period from when the books became available (on the podcast as early as May 4th, the eBooks between midnight on 5/12 and several days later, and the hardcovers since 5/14) and midnight at the end of 6/13.

First I’d like to address free eBook downloads: As I’ve stated before, I’ve only made ePub and mobi versions of the eBooks available for free, so far. Since for 2012 nearly 75% of all my free eBook downloads are of a PDF version (over half a version which is only screen-readable, not printable, and none of which have reflowable text), this puts both Sophia and Emily at a disadvantage regarding eBook download volumes. In their first month of availability, the free Sophia eBook has been downloaded 62 times and the free Emily eBook has been downloaded 55 times. The ePub version is 30% more popular than the mobi version, for both titles. Considering that Unspecified, a poetry book, is still getting around 400 free downloads a month, every month, nine months after release, these are disheartening numbers. Of course, over 87% of Unspecified‘s downloads are of PDF versions, so I suppose that tells me what I need to do if I want to increase the number of people reading Never Let the Right One Go for free; based on these numbers, I could expect each title to see 400-1,000 downloads a month, if PDFs (et cetera) were available.

Then there were the versions of the eBook available for purchase. As I stated in my Phoenix Comicon wrap-up post, I sold two copies (of each of the two books) of the eBooks at Comicon, via Indie Aisle redemption cards, at roughly $8.99 per eBook. In addition to those, I sold 5 copies of Sophia (and no copies of Emily) – two each on Amazon and the iBookstore, and one copy via Barnes & Noble. (It’s possible some copies sold via Smashwords Premium Distribution that I won’t hear about for months; I don’t count those as sold until my balance due is updated.) After Comicon, because of great sales there, and because of my current pricing scheme, I adjusted the prices of the eBooks down to $2.99 (effective on most stores around 6/1) – only one of the 5 copies of the Sophia eBook were at the reduced price; the four other buyers (plus the two at Comicon) thought $8.99 or $9.99 was a reasonable price for an eBook. I’ll write another post after a while, on this subject: I think the eBook buyers clamoring for lower prices are a tiny (vocal) minority, and that most eBook buyers see low price as an indicator of dubious quality.

In addition, at Comicon I sold 33 copies of the Never Let the Right One Go limited edition hardcover, and I’ve sold another 5 copies online, for a total of 38 copies sold of the hardcover book containing both complete novels. (Four copies were exchanged with the photographers/models as compensation, so there are only 8 copies left, though one of those is also spoken for; I have a buyer who has asked me to hold one copy, to be delivered by hand (and paid for) next month.) Plus, I made up two copies of the audiobooks on MP3 CDs, and sold one of them at Comicon, for another copy of each book in a reader’s hands.

Speaking of the audiobook, I began podcasting both books on the Modern Evil Podcast at the beginning of May. Each is currently only up to about chapter 6 (with 21 chapters to go of each novel, over the next 21 weeks), so I can’t really count how many people have listened to the novels, quite yet – but I can see how many have downloaded at least the first chapter of either novel; 172 have downloaded the first chapter of the Sophia audiobook, and 129 have downloaded the first chapter of the Emily audiobook. (45-55 each have downloaded the latest chapter in the feed, so that’s probably how many are very-actively listening; around 50.) All told, here is the breakdown of distributed copies for the first month (or so) of availability:

  • Amazon: Sophia x2 ($13.22)
  • BN: Sophia x1 ($5.84)
  • iTunes: Sophia x2 ($8.39)
  • Indie Aisle: Sophia x2, Emily x2 (~$36)
  • Hardcover: x38 ($1320)
  • Audiobooks: x1 (~$18)
  • Free eBooks: Sophia x62, Emily x55 ($0)
  • Totals (full book): Sophia x108, Emily x96 (~$1402)
  • MEPod (started): Sophia x172, Emily x129 ($0)
  • Total started: Sophia x280, Emily x225 (~$1402)

When given the option to acquire the novels individually, about 30% more people get Sophia than Emily, though when paying readers are given the same option, 100% of them only get Sophia (so far). But what do they think of the books once they read them?

Well, so far 100% of the reviews the two books have received on sites like Goodreads and Amazon have been from people whose copies were not included in the stats above; they were people who were involved as First Readers or Beta Readers of the books. (The latest reviews are from someone who didn’t have time to make it through the written texts, but was easily able to listen to the audiobooks once I had them completed; she is still one of my First Readers, though.) I mention this not because I believe their reviews are biased toward me (give me a moment, I’ll show they’re all over the board – rather than the oft-derided all-five-star reviews of “the author’s friends and family”), but because … I really don’t yet know what random people coming across the books think about them. I don’t yet know what any of the people who paid nearly $40 (w/tax) at Comicon think of them (and likely never will). Several of my First Readers and Beta Readers for Never Let the Right One Go had never read a book by me before, so they weren’t (yet) fans, and others had less-than-favorable reactions to some of my other recent work – and yet so far, most of their reactions have been, while reasonable and honest, not what I would have expected from each of them. Here is what my books look like on Amazon, right now:

Amazon Ratings for Never Let the Right One Go, as of 6/14/2012Four-star average is fine by me, and none of the reviews are the sort of 1-star or one-sentence reviews I’ve been frustrated by in the past. Instead, there is no consensus (so far) about whether the books are good (or mediocre), or as to which one is better than the other (with Sophia taking a very slight lead), and after a month, I’m not really sure either book will (possibly ever again) receive additional reviews or ratings on Amazon. Most of my titles don’t have any reviews, and those that do seem to get them within a very short period after release and then never again – despite new people reading them, sometimes thousands of new people reading them. Interestingly, the numbers on Goodreads look a little different (though the reviewers are about 75% the same; their reviews copied and pasted between the two sites), with Sophia looking like a significantly better book than Emily. Here’s what the books look like on Goodreads right now:

Ratings for Never Let the Right One Go, on Goodreads, as of 6/14/2012

Here, Sophia comes in almost a full star-rating better, though if you look at the details at the bottom of Emily, you can see the chart is out-of-date (there should be two 3-star ratings, not one) because the latest review of Emily was posted just a couple of hours ago. Sophia has the look of a good book, with all those 5-star ratings, something which isn’t showing up on Amazon.

Amazon Ratings for Harry Potter 7 and Twilight 4Now, I realize you may not look at a lot of book reviews, so I’ve grabbed screenshots of a couple of other titles to give you an idea of commonly-seen ratings distributions for generally-popular books. Either most people really like them (top right, 90% 4-star or better), or they are polarizing, (bottom right, 61% 4-star or better, plus almost 21% 1-star), but there isn’t an even spread across all five star-ratings. Usually there are disproportionate numbers of 5-star (and sometimes 1-star) reviews, but that (I believe) has a lot to do with the nature of amateur reviewing; people tend only to speak up about things they feel strongly about. We see the first pattern beginning to form for Sophia at Goodreads, but not for Emily, and for neither at Amazon, which is where sales are likely to result (or not) from those star-ratings. When writing these books I’d been dreaming of a pattern like the second and hoping for a pattern like the first (and really just hoping to get enough ratings/reviews that any pattern at all appeared, so at least in that I’m making some headway!), so it’s a bit disappointing to see such an even spread of opinions about both books, so far. They are neither loved nor divisive. I’m not sure they’re provoking any conversation, either:

If there’s one thing I’m learning in the wake of the recent Prometheus release, it’s that creating something which leaves people with things to wonder about, to talk about, to complain about, and to leave the theatre/book/whatever scratching their heads about, it’s probably better than … well, apparently better than what it is I’m doing, where I do my best to explain everything, tie up all loose ends, fill all plot holes, et cetera. Where the characters’ motivations and actions and resolutions are clear and make sense (at least internally, even if you wouldn’t have done that in their position), and the world is well-thought-out and thoroughly-explained… Luckily, I suppose, the next book I’m writing, in the DNGR Saga, starts in the middle, goes all sorts of crazy places along the way, and ends up with plenty of unanswered questions. Unfortunately, I fear that’ll put it in with so many of my other books as being unreviewable – people just won’t know what to say (or think) about them. Killing word-of-mouth sales/interest. Nullifying the possibility of building a reputation.

Bah.

Now I’m rambling.

Enough: Good night.

Update: After getting some sleep (well, mostly what I’m about to write was things I continued thinking, while lying awake in bed, trying to sleep as the sun came up beyond my curtains), I wanted to clarify/summarize a few key points: Within one month of availability, Never Let the Right One Go has been more profitable and sold more copies than any of my other books (excepting Cheating, Death) across their entire lifetime (some approaching a decade since first printing), and in terms of gross revenue it is far and away the most successful book (or series) I have ever published. In terms of revenue from book sales (not including cover art) the only other thing in my history which comes close is by comparing the entire Untrue Tales… series to the idea that Never Let the Right One Go is (technically) a series of two books; and even then Never Let the Right One Go already has 50% more revenue than all editions and releases of everything in the Untrue Tales… series combined. Depending on how the Sophia (and Emily) eBooks do in the coming months, and how quickly the 7 remaining copies of the hardback sell, Never Let the Right One Go should surpass Cheating, Death in both profitability and copies sold before the end of the year. Without the benefit of the revenue from selling the original cover art, Cheating, Death is already beaten on that front. Also, I believe each of the two books have received more Amazon reviews than any of my other titles. Despite my frustration with the star-distribution, more reviews is better, and something I’ve been striving toward lately, and Emily and Sophia have succeeded there, as well.

All in all, this is my most successful book to date, by many measures. I feel it very successfully accomplished what I set out to do when writing the books, which is my paramount goal. In addition, it has sold more copies, faster, for more money, than anything else I’ve ever published. In part this is because of all the marketing efforts I built into it from the start (cover design, hooking first sentences and first chapters, et cetera), and in part as a result of the gradual building of my reputation/brand/audience/fanbase, so that each book I write does a little better than the one before it. Now I just have to figure out what the right first sentence/paragraph/chapter for my new book will be, and what the heck to put on the cover, right?

Post-PXHCC’12 post (numbers, new prices, et cetera)

Phoenix Comicon 2012 was this weekend, and it seems to have been wildly successful, all around. They haven’t released a final number yet, but current estimates of attendance seem to be falling around 30,000 people. Every exhibitor I spoke to said they had a great year, and I did, too. Suddenly the pressure is on to have new books available to sell at next year’s Comicon (I’ve already paid to get a Small Press Table there, and unless they wildly re-arrange the space, pre-paying so early should have secured the same location I had this year) because the hot seller I had this year (Never Let the Right One Go) will certainly be sold out by then.

Here are my total sales (all paperback, except where noted, and all including sales tax), with the last two years’ comparable sales (in italics, in parentheses):

  • Lost and Not Found: 1 / $11  (2011: 1 / $14, 2010: 0 / $0)
  • Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 2 / $16 (2011: 0 / $0, 2010: 1 / $10)
  • Dragons’ Truth: 3 / $47 (2011: 2 / $26, 2010: 4 / $49)
  • Cheating, Death: 9 / $45 (2011: 7 / $70, 2010: 6 (plus 2 given away) / $55)
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again: 2 / $14 (2011: 3 / $42)
  • The First Untrue Trilogy: 3 / $33 (2011: 6 / $144)
  • The Second Untrue Trilogy: 3 / $55 (2011: 3 / $70)
  • Worth 1k — Volume 2: 2 / $20
  • Unspecified: 1 / $5
  • Never Let the Right One Go (hardcover): 33 / $1250
  • Never Let the Right One Go (MP3 CDs): 1 / $20
  • Never Let the Right One Go (eBooks): 2 / $40
  • Total Comicon book sales: 62 / $1556 (2011: 27 / $411, 2010: 27 / $411)
  • Total minus NLtROG hc: 29 / $306

I haven’t included every title I have, or everything I had available, or everything that ever sold at any Comicon, just the things which sold at this year’s Comicon. (Books I had with me but sold zero copies include: Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, Worth 1k — Volume 2, and the MP3 CDs for Dragons’ Truth and Time, emiT, and Time Again.) Book sales were up by almost every measure: I even sold more paperbacks than previous years (even without counting the limited edition hardcover I was featuring this year), though the revenue on that was lower because of my new pricing system. Including Never Let the Right One Go, sales were more than double the last two years at Comicon, by volume, and more than triple by revenue.

Each day’s sales were better than the last, and they started with a bang: Thursday (Preview night, which in previous years has been just that – people coming around to see what’s there, and spending little) I had about $238 in sales (2011: $60, 2010: $0), which almost covered the cost of the Small Press Table ($229+tax) before things really got started. Friday I made $299, Saturday $442, and Sunday $578, including a sale after con was over: I was packed up and on my way to my car – someone spotted me rolling my boxes of books out & flagged me down to buy one.

Most of this was because of my new book, Never Let the Right One Go, and how I was marketing it. Designing great covers (thanks to getting permission to use those great photographs) was a big part, and just having the book on display brought a lot of people to my table – people would stare, mesmerized, by Emily and Sophia’s direct gazes, then find themselves drawn in. Also, creating a unique product, the flipbook, and standing there for most of the four days of Comicon, manually flipping the book over and over as though I were one of those people who stand on street corners trying to catch drivers eyes by flipping and spinning their signs/ads around, but really just to show off that it was two books in one binding, created a fair amount of interest; a surprising number of people had never seen a flipbook of any kind, before. Far and away the most important parts of my marketing efforts were in how I described the books (which I really believe worked only because of how I wrote the books), and the promotional chapbooks I gave away the first three days: I put together the first two chapters of each book, along with the synopses and the information on the limited edition and my table number, and handed them out to anyone who was interested after hearing about the books, but not ready to buy – like an eBook preview for the physical books; getting the readers hooked on the story, the characters, the world-building, and wanting more. Quite a lot of sales were to people who walked up to me with determination after having read the preview, with no doubts about needing to buy the books, and no hesitation about the price.

That was something else I was pretty sure of before Comicon, but am really glad to have seen proved out: People are willing to pay more for a good book. I didn’t put the price of the book on the book itself, or on the signs I made up, or in the promotional chapbook; I only put it on the price list I keep on my table during Comicon, which shows all the books’ prices, each relatively small, and usually unnoticed. I talked about the books and their stories and structure and characters first, and about the price last, and only when asked. For most of the people I gave the chapbooks to, especially those who came back eagerly ready to buy after having read it, they didn’t even ask the price until they walked up with cash in hand, and then didn’t blink when I asked $38 ($35+tax, rounded down to whole dollars) for a book. For most of the people who heard the price and didn’t buy, it wasn’t because they thought it was too expensive, but because they didn’t have enough cash left after their other Comicon purchases; their disappointed looks were quite crushing. (I pointed those customers to my website, where the eBooks are a lot cheaper than a limited edition hardcover – free, even.) The lesson is: If the story is good enough, the price doesn’t have to be low.

That said, while I’m tempted to keep the price of the Sophia and Emily eBooks where it is ($8.99/each), knowing that the stories are good enough to deserve that valuation (or, obviously, more – people were happily paying almost double that for the hardcover), I still want to stand by the pricing model I introduced this year, which adjusts the prices down as books “earn out”. So, with sales from Phoenix Comicon 2012 now accounted for, here are the updated prices for my books: paper / ebook:

It’ll take a few days for me to get the prices updated everywhere, which is probably a good thing considering I sold some copies of the Never Let the Right One Go eBooks at their $8.99 prices at Comicon – I don’t particularly want people who paid that price to see it so much lower when they get online to go redeem their codes; that sort of thing tends to create a feeling of buyer’s remorse. I’ve also got to go update all the pages on modernevil.com with accurate inventory levels, including things like: There are only 8 copies of the Never Let the Right One Go limited edition hardcover left, and I only have 5 more copies of Cheating, Death – and I haven’t decided whether I want to re-order any more copies of Cheating, Death. Probably I will; it’s sold more copies than any of my other books (77 copies, including paperbacks, eBooks, and Podiobooks.com donations) and is currently at a very attractive price point for hand sales… though I’m not expecting to do another event where direct sales will happen until Phoenix Comicon 2013, so maybe I’ll wait to order more until it’s time for that.

All in all, Phoenix Comicon has been a real blessing and a great opportunity for me. Meeting readers and being able to engage with them directly, often repeatedly (both day-by-day over the course of the con and year-after-year), about my works and my ideas, and often about their lives, their work, and their ideas, is awesome and rewarding on its own. As I kept telling people (usually right after handing a teenager my card and telling them they can get the eBooks for free), I’d rather have more readers than more money. Making a lot of sales, more sales each year than the year before, is certainly nice, too, and parallels what I’ve been seeing with my business overall – the beginnings of the fruition of my long-term plans; keep writing great books, keep making great art, keep connecting with readers and fans, and appropriate rewards will follow.

Now I’ve just got the next six to nine months to figure out exactly what new thing(s) I’ll be showing off at Phoenix Comicon 2013. If hundreds, or thousands, of copies of the Sophia and Emily eBooks sell, maybe that’ll include individual paperback editions of those books. If I can get the research, planning, writing, editing, and design done quickly enough, hopefully that’ll include the re-written Dragons’ Truth – and better yet, the entire new Dragons’ Truth trilogy I’ve been planning. If the book about writing and publishing does well as an eBook, and if I can figure out how to put it together as a paper book, maybe that, too – there are always aspiring authors asking me questions at Phoenix Comicon, so I know at least a few copies would sell there. Maybe a couple other, entirely different, things. Lots of time to figure it out, but even more ambition than time, so … time to get back to work, I suppose.

OnlyIndie’s variable pricing

(This was originally a G+ post, but then it got long, so I thought I ought to copy it to my blog.)

The Indie eBook site, OnlyIndie, uses a variable pricing model which starts at free. After 15 “sales” the price goes to $0.01, and increments up by $0.01 per reader (up to a maximum of $7.98). Unless the book goes 24 hours without a sale, and then the price starts dropping again. (They don’t say how much or how quickly. For the following calculations, I’ve decided it’s probably “quick enough” since it’s rare for any of my eBooks to sell two days in a row (or, really, two months in a row).) Most of my eBooks sell between 0 and 6 times per year, across all available platforms – though Untrue Tales… Book One sold 9 copies last year, and Cheating, Death sold 14 last year.

Based on a quick look at my spreadsheets, and pretending that 1) getting 15 people to take a book for free is easy, 2) once a title hits a price of $0.01 it doesn’t actually drop to free again, and 3) demand for my eBooks would have been the same at $0.01 as it was at all the different prices they’ve been at in the last 3.5 years (Okay, this one is actually based on some data, where I’ve lowered and raised and adjusted prices between $0.99 and $9.99 for months at a time, and seen that interest in my books drops when they’re below $2.99 but doesn’t really change much between $4.99 and $9.99.), I would have made roughly $3.25 $1.62 if 100% of my eBook sales in the last 3.5 years had been made through OnlyIndie. (They take 50% of all sales under $2/each. Not even my most popular $0.99 short story has sold 200 copies, ever.)

Since Amazon price-matches, Apple won’t allow books below $0.99 and won’t allow you to undercut them on other sites, et cetera, et cetera, saying 100% of sales had to be through OnlyIndie isn’t even relevant: The earnings would be the same. Maybe this tool/site/scheme would work as a way to “build a platform”, but it seems like it would need a lot of attention, just to keep prices from falling to useless levels.