The Millennial Sword: Last Day Free
It’s the last day of my free launch promotion for The Millennial Sword. As of right now 933 copies of the book have been downloaded; I’m very confident that it’ll cross a thousand downloads before the end of the day. It’s also currently listed at #14 on Amazon’s list of Top 100 Free Books in the “Contemporary Fantasy” genre. This is the kind of thing that authors get excited about even though it doesn’t particularly mean much. The real test of whether or not the launch promotion was a success will be if I start seeing reviews crop up on Amazon, Goodreads, and other sites.
I have some details that I can share about the paperback version. It will probably be available next week, and it will be priced at $12.99. This is on the expensive side because I’m doing print-on-demand; I don’t benefit from the economies of scale that are involved in a large print run. To be honest, I don’t expect to sell many paperbacks. What I have heard is that having a paperback version available tends to boost e-book sales: that $2.99 digital price looks even better when it’s next to a $12.99 paperback. Plus, I can get copies for my family members and give them away at Christmas.
Over the next few weeks, what I really need to do is stop obsessively refreshing my Amazon sales stats and my book’s Goodreads page, and get back to working on my second novel. As I think I mentioned before, e-book authors almost never make huge sales on a single title—instead, they earn income by building a solid backlist of titles that each sell in modest but steady numbers. I would like to have a second novel to publish by the end of next year. But doing that will require closing down my web browser, and putting in some actual work!
October 5th, 2012 at 5:28 pm
Congrats! Those are great numbers. I’m on chapter 2.
October 5th, 2012 at 5:48 pm
Hope you like it!
October 7th, 2012 at 2:16 pm
Yay, fun numbers!
Now go away and don’t look at them. I know you know that–I know you just wrote that–but it never hurts for somebody else to reiterate that book numbers are strange and ultimately rather meaningless things.
I suspect you could push that $2.99 price point up by a couple bucks, especially next to a print price that’s not bad for POD, but that’s based on a general sense of prices and What People Are Currently Saying that is really just voodoo. (The boring, loa-free sort of voodoo.) You could also consider reprinting some short fiction, as a quick way to build a backlist (and also provide a variety of price points and opportunities for more promotions and such). But see voodoo comment above.
October 7th, 2012 at 3:26 pm
“I know you know that–I know you just wrote that–but it never hurts for somebody else to reiterate that book numbers are strange and ultimately rather meaningless things.”
No, you’re right–and thanks for the advice about the short stories. I should definitely comb through my hard drive and see if there’s anything salvageable in there.