Thank you, Jane.
Jane’s posting again.
by CJ | Aug 10, 2009 | Journal | 9 comments
9 Comments
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Like a total noob: WHERE?
ah! http://www.janefancher.com/TheCaptainAndLime/
Thank you! Voyeur c’est moi!
I read a very interesting article about e-books on Amazon which may have some relevance for you.
Apparently some authors have been having great success from offering the first book in a series free to Kindle readers.
Quote: “Shannon said Del Rey has had especially good luck with Naomi Novik’s ‘Temeraire’ fantasy series after offering the first book for free. He said sales for the other Temeraire novels increased by more than 1,000 percent. ‘It’s been stunning,’ he said.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jej_XcJmRU4sAin7BvTVgnXZXgiwD99U2GIO0
I think that you would be in a particularly good position to use this strategy because of the many different series of books you have.
I don’t know what the copyright and e-publishing rights situation may be with most of your books. But suppose, just for the sake of argument, you were to offer Downbelow Station to Kindle readers for $0.00, as some other authors are doing with the first book of major series.
A landmark novel and Hugo award winner completely free. You’d get many, many readers downloading it who would otherwise not know about it or think of purchasing it.
And once they are hooked, those readers might be quite willing to purchase several other titles of the Alliance-Union books, especially if it were made clear in the free book that a number of other titles in the same universe exist, even with some overlap of characters.
And the same for your other series – Foreigner, Fortress, etc.
Just something to think about.
It is a thought: I’ll pass it on to my publisher. I control what has passed out of print, but none of the DAW books are under my control.
Baen’s been doing that for years, with the Free Library. http://baen.com/library/ And they say it works. Of course, they don’t have quite the “market penetration” of Amazon.
But there are some of us who don’t have a Kindle, and won’t touch such a DRM-friendly (read, customer UNfriendly), distributor-linked device with a ten foot pole. There are now getting to be a number of readers out there from independent companies. I REALLY like the color choice from Coolreaders.com. But the format wars — SIGH. So far it’s far worse than Beta vs VHS.
I can tell you Baen’s generated sales from this amounted last year to 250 dollars.
I’ve used Baen, but have found that a lot of what they have up is either older or not to my taste. There are a few authors that I can find there and not on Amazon.
While Baen doesn’t have the sales, they are into the ebook thing rather heavily. Plus … they don’t include any DRM on their books.
It’s been a huge thing for T, trying to get her agent to retain ebook rights, so that we can make sure that whatever gets put out there 1) gives her a decent profit, and 2) doesn’t have any DRM included. The agent just says, No, you’re not big enough to push for that, blah blah blah.
Sigh.
Baen sells lots in Scotland: they’re all about the military, here, unsurprisingly.