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faerie blood

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

Faerie Blood print edition update!

After learning that fixing the typo in Chapter 20 would cost me an extra $75–on the grounds that this would mean making a new master file for Third Place’s printing system, and that new master file would mean another round of plugging it into the system, which means another setup fee–Dara and I have elected to NOT fix the typo yet. We will fix it when there’s enough more to do to the print editions to justify changing the master files. Just taking out one character, not really so much of a justification, I fear. When we get closer to releasing Bone Walker, maybe I’ll stick a preview chapter in there or something–enough new content to justify the new setup fee, anyway!

For now, though, I WILL fix the typo in the digital versions, since that’s easy and free, and I will distribute the fixed copies to all the sales channels. Anybody who already has a copy can get a corrected version on request, too!

AND, I have requested a new print run of 25 copies from Third Place. So I should have new copies of the book back in stock soon! If anybody out there wants one, the time to express your interest is NOW!

August 17, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Question for the publishing industry geeks out there

Okay so yeah, second printing for Faerie Blood! Dara and I want to make this happen!

But as I’ve posted before, before this run goes out, I want to fix the typo in Chapter 20 reported to me by eagle-eyed Kickstarter backer Scott. Here’s the part that stymies Dara and me, though: does fixing a typo, a fix that is literally just removing a single character from a word, justify updating the printing information listed at the beginning of the book, on the copyright page?

Right now that information looks like this:

Second edition 2012
First printing, this edition, 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Third Place Press
Lake Forest Park, Seattle

And what we don’t know is whether making a change so small would justify changing this to read “Second printing, this edition, 2012”, and/or changing the line of numbers. Sure, this is self-pub and we could do it either way–and it seems weird to me to go to the trouble for removing a single character from the story–but Dara and I are cognizant that there is PROTOCOL HERE DAMMIT and we’re genuinely curious about what the protocol actually is. We’re treating this book like it was professionally produced, we want to damn well follow appropriate protocols!

Can anybody fill us in?

August 15, 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

A quick self-pub status report

I may be in Canada right now on vacation, but this HAS turned into a bit of a working vacation as I have extensive edits I need to do (for reasons which will hopefully be made clear soon in an upcoming post!). So I’ve brought my iPad along with me to Canada, as well as a Bluetooth keyboard to type on. Which has proven surprisingly effective as a way for getting editing work done!

But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to give y’all a quick status check on how the self-pub situation is going!

I just checked my numbers on the various places Faerie Blood is deployed for sale, and saw that since coming up to Canada the day before yesterday, I’ve had another couple of sales on the iTunes store and another one for the Kindle. This brings my total ebook sales for the month to 21, to wit: AWESOME. If I make it to 30 by the end of the month, I’ll double June’s numbers, and June’s numbers were only for a week and change!

The big interesting thing I’ve noticed so far is that the iTunes store is in fact my big seller so far this month–12 sales there, as opposed to only 7 so far for the Kindle. What’s particularly interesting to me is that several of my sales for the iTunes store are in fact on the iTunes Australia store! So HI AUSTRALIANS! Thank you for buying my book, whoever you are!

I note as well that mostly, the places I’m seeing the most sales are the places where I have actual reviews posted–the iTunes Australia store, and Amazon US. (I’m still getting sales on iTunes US even though I DON’T have reviews up there.) The takeaway from this, anyway, is that Reviews are Good Things. So many thanks to those of you who have taken the time to review the book on your chosen markets! It helps!

(The rest of you who’ve read Faerie Blood, please consider posting your own reviews! And do make them honest. I try not to read reviews in depth–I only pay close enough attention to see how many there are, and to get a sense of average overall rating. So don’t feel like you have to review me well to please me, because you don’t! As long as the review is an honest one and discusses what you liked and didn’t like about the book, that’s what I’m after.

Though that said, positive reviews certainly will be happily accepted!)

Barnes and Noble is clocking in so far at two sales this month, and the only reviews I have there in fact appear to be left over from Faerie Blood’s previous incarnation on the B&N store–the datestamps on them are concurrent with the Drollerie edition. Which suggests to me that B&N didn’t clean up its database when that version was yanked, but whatevs! If any Nook owners out there who’ve bought the book want to put up current reviews, I encourage you to do that too!

No sign yet of sales at all on either the Smashwords or Kobo sites. Kobo’s neat because it actually hooks into Goodreads and shows the nine reviews I’ve received there–so if you’re a Goodreads user, reviews on that site can also help me. I’m sure hoping somebody will eventually buy me on that site, though. I like Kobo!

Anyway, long story short, 21 sales so far this month of ebook editions, and 19 print copies, for a total of 40. I’ve already gotten the money for the print copies; hopefully the money for the ebooks will show up in September or October. Tiny, tiny numbers in the grand scheme of things. But they are my tiny numbers, and I love them so.

Thank you, each and every one of you, for buying and supporting my book!

July 25, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

And now, the winners of the Faerie Blood giveaway!

As promised, ladies and gentlemen, I give unto you the winners of the Faerie Blood giveaway! If you see your name on this list, please contact me ASAP to claim your prize! If you win an ebook copy, I will need a valid email address to send you a link to download the ebook! If you win a print copy, I will need you to send me your snailmail address so that I can mail you your book before I leave for my Canada vacation!

Print copy winners–if I don’t hear from you by 8pm Pacific time TOMORROW NIGHT (that’s Friday, July 20th), I will have to draw a new winner! I want to send out the winner copies by mail before I leave for Canada, and my only chance to do that will be on Saturday! So do please claim your prize promptly!

Now without further ado, courtesy of your friend and mine the Random Number Generator, here we go!

Ebook #1 goes to David Stayduhar! (Who I primarily communicate with on Facebook, so David, please ping me there!)

Ebook #2 goes to Misty, who I primarily communicate with either on the MurkMUSH or on Google+! Misty, you know what to do!

Print copy #1 goes to Catherine Lundoff who I communicate with in several places, so Catherine, take your pick!

Print copy #2 goes to userinfome_fein on Livejournal!

Congratulations, winners, I hope you’ll enjoy my book! And many thanks to all who spread the word of the contest!

July 19, 2012 by