I blame my 4th grade teacher

I blame my grade 4 teacher for turning me into a writer. His name was Mr. Fitzgerald and he came to our small town of Tompkins right out of Education. He was only there a year, but in that year he did two things that changed my life forever. The first was he read The Hobbit to us. That book blew my mind! I was amazed by the dwarves and spiders and, of course, Bilbo himself. Wow, this book didn't have the Hardy Boys in it! It had swords! I remember staring at the cover for hours. The second thing he did was teach us how to play Dungeons and Dragons. The year would have been 1976. At that time no one had heard of the satanic, amazingly fun game. Only college geeks played it. I have no idea how he started teaching us, or why, but I do have memories of going on "adventures" during math class. I may not know my multiplication tables, but I can tell you the percentage chance of a 20 hit point strike with a +2 sword on a green dragon! The game, like The Hobbit, suddenly made my imagination explode. The game taught me that anything could be imagined. And I blame it (and my grade four teacher) for turning me into a writer.

SO thanks Mr. Fitzgerald!

>.99 cent books and the apocalypse

>.99 cent eBooks will destroy publishing!
.99 cent eBooks will save writers!
.99 cent eBooks are the 4th horsemen of the apocalypse!
.99 cent eBooks will save the Toronto Maple Leafs (or fill in your favourite sports team here _______)!

Okay, I don't know which (or if any) of these statements is true. The more I dig into the world of ePublishing the more arguments I hear for and against pricing eBooks as low as .99 cents (or free!). One argument is that this devalues books. Hey, that makes sense to me. eBooks should be worth something! I spent a year writing this book and I want money (preferably truckloads of money)! Another argument is that if you sell a book at 99 cents you make 35 cents. That's essentially a 35% royalty. Wow, I'd kill for a 35% royalty! Plus, the .99 cents opens up the purchaser to make an impulse buy. I love it when people follow their impulses...especially if their impulse is to buy my book.

Should I sell a book for .99 cents? I wondered. Will it devalue my book? Will it launch my books into the stratosphere? I meditated. I scattered the bones and read the pig livers (oink).

And the answer came back: yes.

I chose Dust because it is my most valuable book. It has won the most awards and has been the most successful and it would make the best impression on new readers. And that's who I am aiming the .99 cent price at. The eBook of Dust is only available in the U.S. and U.K. I am relatively unknown to the general public in these markets, so by lowering the price I am essentially saying, "hello, I'm over here. Pick me! Pick me!" Kind of like when I'd jump up and down hoping to be picked for the baseball team.

My hope is that the book will catch on and climb up to a steady sales rate. If I sell two copies that's almost the same amount that I make for selling a paperback version of the book. If I sell six copies then I am equalling the 2.01 that I was making when the ebook was priced at 2.99. If the book does gain traction I will have a choice to make, either to keep it at .99 cents or to put it back to $2.99 or $3.99 and hope the sales stay steady (I've seen both large publishers and small epubbers have success at this strategy).

The main reason I'm testing this is because if I didn't I'd always be curious. And it is a no risk situation for me. I make the vast majority of my income from my paper books (like 99.9%).

Art

P.S. for a great argument for keeping books above .99 read Write to Publishing. For a great argument for pricing at .99 cents read this John Locke interview. For another great blog post on .99 cent books read Nathan Bransford's blog post. For a laugh read this.
P.P.S. I believe that the .99 cent book is an oddity of our times. I think Amazon/iTunes/B&N are letting it exist because they are trying to sell more and more Kindles and iPads and Nooks and the more easily available the content for their devices the more they will sell. But the profit margin is too small for them to continue with the .99 cent price forever. It does cost money to upload and download books. Once they've saturated the market they'll likely raise the price of books. Of course, I base this theory on no stats or charts or anything tangible. The pig liver told me.
P.P.P.S. I realize at the beginning of this post some people might get the impression that the Toronto Maple Leafs are my favourite team... they aren't. I have a soft spot for them. But I'm an Oilers fan. So please don't start a flame war. Or a Flames war.
P.P.P.P.S For those who have never received a real letter, P.S. stands for post script. It was something you added to the end of a letter that you forgot to write in the main text. In the old days people used pens and so words were permanent. Unlike now. : )

>Using Project Wonderful ads to sell eBooks

>For those keeping track I recently posted about using Facebook for advertising here. In that "campaign" I spent 15 dollars and received 49 clicks and may have sold one book due to the ad.

An artist friend of mine, Christopher Steininger, has had tons of success with Project Wonderful, so I gave it a try. Project Wonderful is a site where you can create an account, create an ad and have your ad displayed on various websites. You are able to search for websites that might have potential customers then bid on the ad space (which comes in various sizes). It's a system that looks complicated in the beginning, but after about twenty minutes makes sense (plus they have a clever tutorial, though the best way to learn is from doing). So I came up with two ads.
and
Both are quite small, as you can see. I was hoping the cover of Draugr would intrigue
"clickers" and the Dust ad does let them know that it is an eBook. Then I deposited 15 dollars in my account using paypal and bid on several websites (some to do with comics, others to do with fiction).
Here are the results for Draugr

I have two ads because I changed the ad slightly. Overall you can see that I spent $5.24. The websites I advertised to over the 10 day stretch had 360,000 visits and received 98 clicks that took people to my website. So already this is much cheaper than Facebook per click.
Here are the results from Dust :

I spent $9.84 and the websites I advertised to had over a million hits and I received 73 clicks to my website.

So the total for both campaigns was 171 clicks. A higher number than I received from Facebook (which was 49 clicks).

Number of sales from these clicks = 1 or 2. That's about all I can attribute to the campaigns. So I didn't earn my money back. What's up with that? I thought advertising was the answer to everything! : )

I do feel that there is more potential at Project Wonderful. If I were to do another campaign I would use larger banner ads with better designs. I also understand the bidding system a bit better now and you can literally spend pennies a day (even nothing--that's right your ads run for free) and get a good return if you're willing to do a bit more "poking" around at various websites. In the future I would rather do a long-term campaign (for pennies a day) to get attention and "branding." Most people don't just click and buy. They click then go away. But if they keep seeing your ad for two or three months then they are more likely to click again and go "Oh what the heck" and buy.

Meanwhile I'm going to go back to writing!

Art

>Shades--an eBook of short stories

>I'm continuing on with my eBook adventures. For those curious I posted about the creation of both
and as eBooks here.
So as my next project I decided to gather all of my short stories together under one name and release them (very few anthologies get published in the print world, so it was a chance to bring these stories back to life). First, I hunted through all my files and came up with 17 short stories that I thought were presentable. Many had been published previously or broadcast on radio and a few were orphans whom I believed deserved their moment on stage. It's a really eclectic collection--fantasy, horror, literary fiction, humorous, irreverent, violent and, well, weird. They do span the length of my career. I rarely write shorts stories (only 17 so far that are publishable) whereas I've written 16 published novels (and 6 unpublished novels). The curious thing is that they almost all ended up for an older YA/adult audience.

I gave the collection the title Shades in an attempt to describe the eclectic styles (there are all different shades of stories) and I bought an image at http://www.istockphoto.com and made my own cover. I'm pleased with the cover, though I feel it's utilitarian, but it shows some of the mystery of the stories. I may give it a new cover further down the road.

Here's a short description of a few of them and a guesstimate of when they were written.

Stubb This is my most recent short story. All about a boy who may be a werewolf. (2007)
Snow White and the Seven Elves a snarky retelling of the fairytale. (1997)
Garbage Day A young boy has a tough home life. He wants revenge. Exactly what does he put in the garbage? (1992)
Fairytale I seem to be channeling Ray Bradbury in this story. I could draw a direct line from it to Dust. (1993)
The Jesus Trilogy Three short looks at Jesus. Two have to do with the resurrection and one with Pontius Pilate and a rodeo. They are written in a bluesy style. (1997)
Virtual Dragon A cyberpunk kung fu story. Because...well...the world needs more cyberpunk.(1995)

And that's just a few of them.

They're available at Amazon (kindle) and Smashwords (most every eReader). Just visit the links here. It's fun to have the stories out there again. They usually have such brief lives.

Art

>Read an eBook week

>It's read an eBook week! Both my titles:
and (short stories)
are available this week at Smashwords for 50% off. Err, which makes them only $1.99.

Of course, every week is "read a book in general" week, right?

Art

>Does Social Networking Work?

>I've recently released two ebooks unto the world.
and
As part of my awareness campaign I did several things. I blogged about both books. My blog appears on Livejournal, Blogspot and Myspace (aka deadspace) and it is "fed" to Facebook, Goodreads, Amazon, and Jacketflap. So my rough estimate is that around 5000 people have friended or follow me on these various networks. So that's a potential audience of 5000 (or 10,000 eyeballs if you're counting).
Arthur Slade's Profile

I also tweeted and "Facebooked" about the books, exposing them to about 4800 people (many of them the same people as the first group). These tweets were also re-tweeted by several others for even more exposure.

Total sales in the last two weeks: 25

That may seem like a small amount but I'm actually extremely pleased by it (hey, there was even one sale in the UK). If I examine just my Facebook friends alone I have around 3200. But only a small part of them would be actual fans -- the rest are other writers, people who collect Facebook friends, other writers, teachers, other writers, etc. Only a certain portion of them would own eReaders and only a small portion of those owners would be interested in Draugr and Dust. Not everyone wants to read YA. And not everyone wants to read horror. Add to that all the other "noise" out there (how many tweets can you read in a day?).

Actually if the sales pattern continues of 12 copies a week by the end of a year I'll have sold 624 copies and made $1248. Hey, that's not too bad. Add to that the fact that I intend to release two more books in the Northern Frights series, a book of short stories and maybe even a novelette--all of that can only help sales.

So does networking work? It depends on what you hope it will achieve. I see it as a way to both join the community of other writers and readers out there (and the heavy metal/starwars/startrek/geek community) and a way to be able to communicate directly to people who enjoy my work. "Friends" won't just purchase something the moment you tweet about it. They have lives of their own (apparently!). I rarely like seeing a direct sales message (unless it's something I'm dying to get) so I don't expect others to want to see too many of my own. In fact, I think you're far more likely to sell books if you're a good online citizen and nice to people (hey, maybe that could be a t-shirt--be nice to people...it sells books!)

So the social networking works for me.

And it's a great way to procrastinate from writing...

Art