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how to buy my books

Faerie Blood

Lowering the price on Faerie Blood ebook for a bit

My sales numbers for August were pretty thin on the ground, so as of last night I lowered the ebook price for Faerie Blood on the various sites where it’s being sold. This is partly out of experimental interest to see if this improves my numbers any, and partly just because I’ve been hand-selling the ebook editions for five bucks each–and bringing the base price down to $4.99 USD is more in line with that.

The new price is now in effect on Amazon, B&N, iTunes, Smashwords (and should be rolling out to the places Smashwords deploys to soon), and Kobo.

I’ll keep this price in effect for a while just to see what happens with it!

September 2, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Self-pub status update

I have received notification from Amazon’s KDP system that my first drop of royalties, for sales in June of this year, will be delivered to me on the 31st. The amount is puny–$39.45–but it is by gods my royalties, and I’ll be very grateful to get them.

Similarly, Apple has a notification up on my iTunes Connect account saying that my first payment from them should be delivered on September 6th. They owe me over $75 at this point for total sales, but I expect to get a subset of that; I don’t know the exact amount yet.

The long and short of it is, though, I’m about to get money for my self-pub sales and that is awesome. Especially since the sales so far in the month of August have been minimal–especially on B&N and Smashwords and Kobo. So those of you who aren’t in favor of either Amazon or Apple, if you want a copy of Faerie Blood and you don’t have it yet, those sites have it too!

Especially worthy of note is that Kobo just sent its Writing Life authors a notice saying that to celebrate the site being up, they’ll be bumping up the royalty rate to 80 percent. Which is super, super shiny, so any of you Kobo owners out there, if you’d like to consider buying my book, now’s the time! And remember, y’all, I’ll also be happy to just hand-sell you a copy of the ebook if you want it, just drop me a line and we’ll make arrangements! The same will apply once I get the next drop of print copies from Third Place; the request for the next set of those is in, and I’ll post when I have more copies available.

Amazon has also, by the way, also informed us KDP users that self-pub sales will now be available in India! So readers in India should be able to grab my book off of Amazon.com now. If anybody out there actually succeeds at doing that, I’d love to hear about it!

And oh yes, speaking of iTunes–I’ve gone ahead and deployed Faerie Blood to all the remaining iTunes stores I have access to, for a total of 32 stores! Mostly this means a bunch more countries in the Eurozone, and a couple of Scandinavian countries as well. If you’re in Europe and you’re an iTunes user, chances are high you can get Faerie Blood that way now.

I have cleared 80 copies sold so far this summer, counting print and digital. It’d be awesome if I could clear 100 by the end of the year.

August 24, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Time for Faerie Blood print run #2

Hey Internets! So I’m back from my vacation and it’s time to get back to writerly business. One of the items at the top of my agenda is to do a second print run of Faerie Blood!

A few of you out there wanted copies that didn’t get accounted for in print run #1. Some of you have also just expressed general interest before. So here’s your chance, people–anybody out there want to claim a copy out of the new print run? Please check in with me and let me know, so that I can get a decent count of how many copies I should ask Third Place to run off for me!

As before, my asking price is $15 per copy if you’re local or I can otherwise hand-deliver the book to you. If I need to mail it, it’ll be $20. Thanks all!

August 7, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood now on more iTunes stores + print copy status!

I got asked to deploy Faerie Blood to the Norwegian iTunes store today, so I have gone ahead and done that! And because I could, I also deployed to the Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Ireland iTunes stores. I will keep adding new iTunes stores by request if people want ’em, so if I don’t have your country covered yet, by all means, folks, talk to me! I have updated the Faerie Blood page with the new direct iTunes links.

Meanwhile, a new confirmed Paypal sale means I have 14 copies left for general sale out of the first print run. I have a total of ten open requests for copies, for which I have not yet received actual payment–but I will continue to give priority to paying customers. So if you want a copy, please do pay me sooner rather than later, to guarantee you’ll get one out of this first batch! If you don’t make this batch and you still want one anyway, also let me know about that so that I can start getting an estimate of how many I’ll need for a second print run.

And don’t forget, you guys–I also have two print copies (as well as two ebook copies) up for grabs in the still-open Faerie Blood giveaway! I have a nice little number of entries in that now, but do please keep spreading the word, and do keep those entries coming! The entry pool’s still pretty small, though, so if you jump in, your chances ARE good right now!

Any questions, give me a shout!

July 9, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

First print drop of Faerie Blood!

Check it out, you guys, I have the first drop of Faerie Blood! Here’s a big box of half-Sidhe fiddle player, ready to rock, and the redoubtable printing machine handing me one of the books too!

The operative word for this being AWESOME.

This is drop #1 of the print run–the rest of them will be finished early next week, I am informed. But this’ll keep me plenty occupied as I begin to mail out copies to Kickstarter backers!

The total run is 70 copies. Of these, 40 are going to backers. Of the 30 remaining, four are compensation copies for userinfosolarbird and for Kiri Moth! Two are reserved for my contest in progress. That leaves me a total of 24 copies available to sell!

So if anybody out there has a hankering to claim one of the books out of this print run for your very own, NOW is the time to let me know! As I call out on the official Faerie Blood page, I ask $15 per copy if I can hand-deliver it to you. If I need to mail it to you, I ask $20 to cover shipping costs and postage. I will be giving priority to anybody who can pay me via Paypal, or who will be attending Westercon and can pay either Dara or myself in person. So if you’d like a copy out of this run, talk to me ASAP! PM/DM me on the usual social networks, email me, whatever works for you, just get in touch and let me know that you want to make arrangements!

Special note to anybody in Toronto, Montreal, Moncton, or St. John’s: if you’re not already getting a copy from me via the Kickstarter and you want one of this print run, I am quite willing to bring you a book directly when Dara and I go on vacation! But you do need to let me know ASAP if you want me to reserve you one, and a Paypal payment will guarantee a copy will be saved for you!

ETA: If you want to fling me moneys and you can’t do Paypal, I will also accept $15 (if I’m personally delivering) or $20 (if I’m mailing the book) in credit anywhere I can buy books or ebooks. Talk to me if you want to pursue that option too. 🙂

July 5, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood live on Smashwords, and what that was like

To follow up on my last post about comparing the experiences of putting the book up on Amazon, B&N, and Apple, here’s the news that Faerie Blood is now live and for sale on Smashwords!

I was relieved that reformatting my manuscript for Smashword’s automatic conversion wasn’t nearly as much of a chore as I expected. It helped considerably that I always write in manuscript format anyway, and what styling I use is very simple indeed. I had to do only a few minimal changes that are easy to do for anyone familiar with Word. The Smashwords Style Guide was quite helpful with this, spelling out in extensive detail what the best practices are for manuscript formatting on their site.

Here’s the thing, though–if you want to deploy to Smashwords, be prepared for the output to be bare-bones, minimally styled, in order to maximize compatibility across all the formats and readers that Smashwords supports. Which means in turn that the EPUB, PDF, and MOBI versions you can download from Smashwords aren’t nearly as prettily styled as the ones I’ve deployed to my Kickstarter backers, or for that matter, that I’ve uploaded directly to the other sites for sale there. Now, I probably could have gotten a little fancier, and tried to make the Smashwords edition of the book closer to the versions on the other sites. But the Style Guide hammers home, over and over and over, how you don’t want to get too crazytalk with the styling or else their automated system will reject your book. So I wanted to keep things as simple as possible.

Overall I’d say that even if it means I have multiple sites to keep track off, I’m glad I did my own formatting for the Amazon, B&N, and Apple releases. And I suspect that once Kobo’s self-pub system goes live, I’ll take that site off the list on Smashwords–but we’ll see. Meanwhile, Smashwords should also be deploying me to Sony, Diesel, Baker & Taylor, and Page Foundry. The latter three of whom I had to look up, since I’d only vaguely heard of Diesel, and hadn’t heard of Baker & Taylor or Page Foundry at all. But I have to clear their review to get onto the other sites. So for now, I’m just on Smashwords itself.

More bulletins as events warrant!

July 2, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood now live on iBooks sites!

Faerie Blood has now gone live on four iBooks stores: the US, Canada, UK, and Australian stores! So if you’re an iDevice owner in any of those markets and you don’t have the book already, there’s another way for you to get it! If you’re an iDevice owner in other markets and you’d like to see me deploy to your home iBooks store, let me know! I’m certainly going to look at the iBooks stores for countries in the Eurozone at minimum–but feedback on this would be great nonetheless. 🙂

Direct links off to the US, Canada, UK, and Australian iBooks pages are now added to the official Faerie Blood page. Clickie!

June 29, 2012 by