October experiment

I decided to do an experiment with my short story sales during the month of October.  I posted them on Smashwords over the last couple of months at a price of .99cents and made 4 sales over that course of time.  

On October 1, I reset all the titles to "Pick your own price" and sold three times as many within a couple days as I had within the last two months.  Of course, pick your own price also includes free as a price tag - but if people find a writer they like, they tend to continue to read other stuff by that same author.  I figured this was the best way I could get these stories into the hands of readers, to get folks to take a chance on me.

I'm not sure if it will translate into real sales when this is all said and done, but my hope is that it will raise awareness and open more doors for my work. 

There has been a great debate on what the golden price is for an e-book and I've seen $2.99 thrown out there a fair amount  of times.  Is that the magic number?  I don't know, but from a consumer standpoint, I'd more readily take a chance on an unknown author if the price was $2.99 as opposed to $6.99 or higher.  I'd also be more likely to impulse buy at the lower amount too. 

Perhaps this theory has creedence.  What would happen if a publisher set the price of a new release as $2.99 for a full length novel - even if it only lasted for the first month along with an advertisement of new releases on sale.   

After all, it is amazing what the label "sale" does to the purchasing mentality.

Until next time . . .
JET

http://www.jetaylor75.com/

Viva la revolution baby…

Okay, so when I first heard of ‘self publishing’ the old quote of “She/he who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client” came to mind. Why? Well it’s all about knowledge and knowing how to apply it in order to succeed. If you have no knowledge you have the amazing ability to bugger stuff up. This is why most writers latch on to a publishing house in order to get their epic saga to print. The idea of having no clue and being unaided in getting a book out there is daunting. But then there’s the flipside. This writing gig can be a minefield. How so? Dodgy publishing houses, suspect royalties and in-house fighting between writers/editors/publishers. Yeesh. Go with that or take a crack at self-pubbing?

Essentially writers are quite mad. No really. Who else is going to sit on their arse for hours talking to themselves as they bang out a stream of vaguely coherent words into a computer? Yet as mad as we are we retain stuff to be used later on…like in stories…or in business. We watch, we gossip, we listen. We look around and think ‘well crap, they suck as a publisher. I can do what they’re doing.’ Let’s face it – most of the e-book publishing companies out there were started by people who took a chance and had a go. So why couldn’t anyone do that? You don’t have to be a genius – just a risk taker.

So – thinking about self-pubbing? Go for it. As for revolutions? I love a good stousch. Put my name down for the next one…

Amarinda Jones
Penn Halligan
www.amarindajones.com
www.amarindajones.blogspot.com
Be daring...read an Amarinda book