You Might Be Curious

December 16, 2011
So, my publisher, Oceanview, offered last year's Derek Stillwater novel, THE FALLEN, for FREE on the Amazon Kindle. It moved its way up to #1 for a while on the Amazon bestseller lists (for free) although it's dropped down to about #51 overall, although as of today it's still #3 in the Action/Thriller list. Great advertising that.

In that I get no money from this (nor does my publisher, presumably), the question becomes: Did it do anything for your other books? I have no answer to that in terms of the paper versions of THE FALLEN or any of the versions of THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS.

I do, however, have some data on how it affected e-book sales of my other titles on Amazon. So, keeping in mind that today is the 16th and due to Amazon's silliness they didn't actually get the price down to $0.00 until about the 5th or 6th, here's what happened to my other titles to-date.

#	Title	ASIN	Units Sold	Units Refunded	Net Units Sold	Units Borrowed
1	DEADLY BY THE DOZEN	B004OA6KFQ	3	0	3	0
2	Edge	B002CJLSV2	13	0	13	0
3	Freelance Writing For A Living	B004XNKWSA	1	0	1	0
4	Hot Money	B0045U9R3C	10	0	10	0
5	Monster Seeker	B003QHZ6VC	3	0	3	0
6	The Battle For Atlantis	B003QHZ7V6	10	0	10	0
7	The Devil's Pitchfork	B003LSTW3E	231	3	228	0
8	The Fortress of Diamonds	B005HVZ96M	3	0	3	0
9	The Serpent's Kiss	B003NUQRA6	204	2	202	0

Clearly we can see that the incentive increased interest in THE DEVIL'S PITCHFORK and THE SERPENT'S KISS. How much? Well, sales were increasing in November anyway for no completely identifiable reason, although I suspect the blog-publishing of DIRE STRAITS had something to do with it.

It's having some effect on HOT MONEY, which is gratifying, and on EDGE. THE BATTLE FOR ATLANTIS sells about that many copies each month anyway. The other titles, well, they haven't budged much. Typical sales of PITCHFORK and SERPENT prior to November were something like 20 to 30 copies each. So clearly something has happened, and just getting onto the Kindle lists probably has a lot to do with it. I've always argued that the best advertising in the world is actually getting onto certain bestseller lists, and this seems to confirm that.

So, I'm happy about it. I'm not confident in the sales' sustainability, but I'll get a nice deposit into my checking account at the end of the month that will help me somewhat offset my Christmas spending. I would generally have preferred THE FALLEN show up in the Top 10 of the list on December 25th so a million or so people who found Kindles under their Christmas trees would download it, but, as they say, timing is everything. Hopefully it'll still have some legs in a week.

As for how this compares to my Nook sales and sales via Smashwords, well. Last I checked (yesterday), I had sold 2 copies of Pitchfork and 2 copies of Serpent this month, and nothing else. On Smashwords, hell, I haven't sold anything on Smashwords in months.

After a dry blogging period, I'm hoping to do some semi-regular posts from now until the end of the year that will address publishing and e-book sales and writing in general and what I'm thinking about 2011 and 2012.

Cheers,
Mark Terry

Zoe Winters On E-Book Pricing

July 26, 2011
Zoe Winters has a good post on pricing your e-books at 99 cents. Now, some of my e-books ARE priced at 99 cents, but most are priced at $2.99 and even $2.99 is awfully cheap (and frankly, I need to mess with pricing more because I'm having a hard time seeing why it makes much of a difference either way except, er, I make less money with the lower price. I don't, necessarily, sell more books. Christ, would it be likely to sell less?)

Anyway, check it out.

Squeezing The Midlist Authors

July 13, 2007

There's been a little more talk than usual recently about how publishers are squeezing out the midlist author, focusing on bestsellers, blah, blah, blah.

It ain't new. From what I've been able to tell, there's been talk about midlist authors being cut, squeezed or marginalized pretty much since the word "midlist" was coined.

I just read a blog the other day where the writer seemed to be referring to midlist authors as anyone who is not a bestseller. That's a whole lot of books, folks.

One of the definitions I came across was "all books that aren't frontlist." Of course, bestsellers are frontlist, but there are sometimes "frontlist" books that aren't bestsellers.

Another definition is "books that are not bestsellers, but which make enough profit to justify publication."

I was checking out another blog and it had many postings on this subject, but here's part of one:

MARJORIE BRAMAN VP & Executive Editor, HarperCollins

There are, as I see it, two different definitions of midlist. There are books that, by their very nature, represent the dreaded kind of midlist--and quite honestly, as an editor, it's this variety that I try to avoid. These are the books--and we all know them--that are often very readable, but in the end, just don't seem necessary. And I don't know any editor who wants to spend the kind of energy and time a novel demands on a book that's not necessary. Doesn't mean we don't like it--just that we can live without it.

So I guess a midlist book is one I can live without. Which is sort of interesting and just about as ephemeral as a rainbow. I mean, I read maybe 50 books a year, yet there are apparently 200,000 published in the U.S. alone, give or take, so it's clear that if I were the arbiter of all things "midlist" then approximately 199,950 writers are going to be looking for work elsewhere. (Look out McDonalds, here they come. Hope you have lots of applications handy.) And with all due respect to Ms. Braman, by that definition her company would pretty much cease to exist given that more readers DON'T read her books than do, ergo, they can live without them.

I like the definition only if I were God and not a terribly benevolent one at that. Can I apply this definition to all arts and entertainment? And while we're at it, I can think of some politicians and, well, countries, that I could live without.

Madonna? Bye-bye. Anne Coulter. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Rush Limbaugh, sayonara, buddy. The entire Bush Administration (and take your ugly little dog, Dick Cheney, with you, too), so long. 99.9% of the films that come out of the Sundance Film Festival--ciao. 87.2% of the films that come out of Hollywood--hasta la vista, baby! Books? I'm making a list, checking it twice, but the publishing industry as we know it soon going to cease to exist.

Well, you get the idea. That's probably not a good definition either.

And I find it hard to figure how people can claim to even begin to predict the demise of something they can't even clearly define.

One of the more useful (sort of) definitions of midlist that has come over the years was:

Genre novels sold between, say, 5000 and 15,000 copies.

Anything below 5000 could safely be dubbed "literary" or "mainstream." I find this wildly amusing because, by this definition, all literary novels sell below 5000 copies. I'm sorry, but Phillip Roth, John Updike and Maya Angelou don't qualify as literary. Sorry, folks, but I think you're just bestsellers. Screw your pretensions to "literary" greatness. Sell fewer books or give up the title.

Bestsellers, as anyone who's studied the actual sales numbers knows, vary wildly, but a book that sells about 150,000 in hardcover or 1,000,000 in mass market paperback can be safely called a bestseller.

So midlist, by this definition, is a hardcover novel that sells between 15,000 and 150,000 copies, or if it's mass market paperback, perhaps midlist is between 15,000 and oh, a million is too high, let's make it 300,000 just to be totally arbitrary. Since no one else has come up with a useful definition, I'll make that mine and you're free to either argue with me or make your own definition. Hell, we're right back to that God thing again, aren't we?

What's your definition?

Cheers,

Mark Terry