Jane’s going to be putting an offering up on Amazon. We need more traffic on Closed Circle—just to stay in the game—and we’re going to be doing a few new things, which she’s trying first, to see how it flies. There will be a time when you can do us an immense favor, which is to get up on Amazon, once she has the stuff up, and give Jane some reviews that will help her. I will post when she actually gets it up: it is a bit of a bear of a process, and it is taking some time: this weekend we are trying to get the accounting done, so we can nail that down and get necessary mailings off.
We are giving a try to the Amazon process to try to give CC a boost. Our books, sold from OUR site will still be DRM-free, will still have free updates should anything change in the technology, and personal intervention if you have any trouble with a download, and there will not be anything on Amazon you can’t get from us—in other words, CC will be what CC has always been. Bear that in mind. We are going to Amazon to try to get some new readers to come here.
I’ll be interested to see whether the new central DRM-free ebook listing at calibre drives any traffic your way. I hope it does – it’s a wonderful idea.
Thanks for the note; I went up to Calibre and put in a plug for Closed Circle. We weren’t listed with them, but it’s on the urgent end of the 10,000 things I urgently need to do—aggh, so little time, so many things to tend to!
As of a few minutes ago, all three CC authors are now listed. The url to the Calibre DRM-free listing is http://drmfree.calibre-ebook.com/
I’ll be sure to check on things. We fans also have a vested interest in helping make sure authors we like succeed in the ebook and web worlds.
As sci-fi writers and fans, we’re all seeing the very sci-fi development of the new ebook medium and the web, as they happen. New formats, new capabilities, new ways (and old ways remade) of doing things…we’re all seeing them as they happen. The details will be very messy. Things will take strange twists and turns. Eventually, though, it’ll shake out into as rich a format as printed matter, with extra new features.
Meanwhile, self-teaching, learning how to DIY, is going to be a bear. I’m currently learning how to do HTML5 + CSS3, but I need to learn PHP and Flash, and I need to upgrade my skills from competing products to new Illustrator and FontLab, and dang, I can’t yet afford the newest DreamWeaver, but by the time I can afford it, CS6 will likely be out.
Yay. calibre has been very kind to us—very helpful and outgoing. I like them!
Jane spent all yesterday struggling with amazon files.
Wednesday I both get a keyboard that does things EvERytime I hit the shift button…and we get a working printer.
A friend pointed this article out to me, which I feel may be relevant:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/03/09/0618234/Crime-Writer-Makes-a-Killing-With-99-Cent-E-Books
“Joe Konrath has an interesting interview with independent writer John
Locke who currently holds the coveted #1 spot in the Amazon Top 100 and
has sold just over 350,000 downloads on Kindle of his 99 cent books
since January 1st of this year, which, with a royalty rate of 35%, is an
annual income well over $500k. Locke says that 99 cents is the magic
number and adds that when he lowered the price of his book The List from
$2.99 to 99 cents, he started selling 20 times as many copies — about
800 a day, turning his loss lead into his biggest earner. ‘These days
the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It’s not an
automatic sale,’ says Locke. ‘And the reason it’s not is because the
buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be.
And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause—this golden,
sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage,
because we offer incredible value.’ Kevin Kelly predicts that within 5
years all digital books will cost 99 cents. ‘I don’t think publishers
are ready for how low book prices will go,’ writes Kelly. ‘It seems
insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable.'”
It would be so lovely to get just enough to live on from e-books, let alone that kind of figure.
I really do want to have all the books I own ALSO on my Kindle, but it is very hard to justify spending the price of a new book all over again when I already own one. That said, when/if a book is ONLY available as an eBook – that ought to be worth more to readers than an electronic copy of something they already own (or may not be sure they want, by the way).
I also want them all NOW, so that’s also a problem in the initial outlay… balancing available funds against how-many-books.
Actually it seems to be up NOW !