This post is really about marketing experiments. If you’re not interested in marketing and haven’t bought All Is Silence and would like it on ebook, go here. In paperback or hardcover go here. Now back to the topic: marketing! In Three Parts.
1. So. Do sales help? I’ve marked All Is Silence down temporarily in part to support other writers and on the off chance that I might sell a few copies. It’s currently $3.99 here. It will stay on sale until the 20th. The weird thing? And this happened the last time I marked it down as well… I had no sales. Not a one. No bump. Like I said… Weird. Yet. At the regular price of $6.99? It sells a few each week. At $4.99 it sells a few each week. I’ll continue to explore.
2. Does exposure help? Last Sunday after literally [not figuratively] six months of self-debate, I uploaded the first section of the first chapter of All Is Silence onto WattPad. What convinced me? More like who. Amanda J. Hagarty, Mark Leslie and Margaret Atwood. Amanda has been gently proselytizing WattPad for months. Mark Leslie got me on the site to read Evasion. And Margaret? Her novel Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam Trilogy, #1) is up on WattPad as well as available for sale everywhere else. So, I’m planning on putting up sections of chapters a few times a week with one chapter per week. It will finish about the time Deserted Lands book two: Straight Into Darkness comes out next March or April. It’s got a few more fixes than the final print version and it will remain free and readable through WattPad’s interface. Will it have an effect on sales? Mailing List? Fans? Who knows. Maybe I should put a how did you hear about question on the newsletter sign-up.
2. Does Kindle Select Help? Over the last year, I have sold half a dozen copies of my debut Fiction/Poetry collection Outward Bound. I probably purchased at least two of those copies myself. It cost me far more to create and upload it only figuring cover art, formatting, fees [BookBaby special $29! The same services they do for FREE now!} and not including writing time. Most of the stories and poems are a decade or more old and most have been sold and appeared in print. The goal was to create an ebook and get it up on all the platforms and perhaps get some exposure in the process. It was mostly a warm-up for All Is Silence. In that, it was successful. I made errors doing it so I could make new errors the next time.
A few weeks ago I decided to pull Outward Bound from all markets and try Kindle Select and see if I could use this collection as a marketing tool. I reordered the ebook so that the forward became an afterward thereby letting folks read a complete story, a poem, and part of a third piece, the title story. I also added more ‘bonus’ materials: a teaser for the Deserted Lands novella: Toils and Snares that I plan to release in the fall. So, if you are currently on Kindle Unlimited you can read it for free. I’ll also do some sales, I think, especially as I get close to other releases. And we’ll see. Does it get some traction with marketing? Does it lead people to buying the novella, signing up for the newsletter? We’ll see.
Now, back to writing the next books.
Perceived value is such a funny thing. I once heard about a store that had these beautiful scarves for such a good price…and they couldn’t sell a single one. When everyone else started saying, “Well, mark them down.” someone else insisted, “No. mark them up.” They did and the scarves sold like hotcakes. It’s speculation, but it seems customers were suspicious of the good value, assuming the scarves couldn’t be that good of quality if they sold for such an inexpensive price. Whereas, once the scarves were expensive the customers assumed they must be especially nice scarves to sell for so much.
Thanks, Rachel. I’ve got a friend who is a huge e-book reader. He suggested I price it like all the Trad published books for that very reason. I’ve put it back up to regular price. Of course, if someone read in the comment here that they could get a better price by e-mailing the author… ;-).