Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Success!!

With just hours remaining on my promotion here are the latest stats. Sales in the U.S are DROP OUT – 751 and INSECTLAND – 281. In the UK my sales are DROP OUT – 251 and INSECTLAND – 67. In Germany my sales are DROP OUT – 7 and INSECTLAND – 1. DROP OUT is close to breaking into the top 100 in sales and might in the next few hours. I’ve done a last minute promo blitz of the free books so maybe there may be a final surge. Not bad. If I can get ten or fifteen reviews out of this it will have been well worth it.  It seems a little strange to me that DROP OUT was so overwhelmingly popular compared to INSECTLAND. I feel the cover of INSECTLAND is much more attention getting. I’m starting to think that maybe the majority of Kindle readers are still adults right now and that the kids are just starting to catch up and get interested in the device. If that’s the case, I may be pushing the wrong books and should spend more time promoting my adult thrillers and fiction. We’ll see what happens in the next three months with all my promotions coming to fruition. I had planned on converting all my books by next year anyway and deleting my relationship with iuniverse and paperbacks. Iuniverse charges way too much for a download and they keep like 90% of the royalties. That said, I’ve been in contact with my cover artist, Judy, and have sent her the description for my newest sci-fi, SILENT INVASION. It is a re-write of TIM MADISON GALACTIC WARRIOR that’s been updated and refined. The new story is much edgier and more grown-up than the original. The original is only selling a few copies a year anyway so I figured I’d give it new life. I have also decided not to market my books to literary agents anymore. I think that era of having representation may be finished for me and it would be a waste of my time and energy to pursue that route. However, I did write a query letter for SILENT INVASION which I’ll share in my next post. It’s an updated version of the query letter that got me my NY agent five years ago.

3 comments:

  1. Great post! I linked to it in my blog today: http://authorjess.blogspot.com/2012/01/whats-up-wednesday-giveaways-book.html

    How did you manage to get such a great response? I'm giving away my ebooks right now, but I'm not really getting much!

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  2. Neil,
    Congratulations. I just saw you in the one of the free best selling lists not far from my husband's book, Time to Time, Ashton Ford Series. I was reluctant to do this exclusive with Amazon but this is the third book I've done since Christmas, 2 days at a time, and I am amazed how effective it is. The rankings have pretty much continued on the 2 books now back at regular price. And the borrowing is going on, too.

    Just today, I canceled my PODs with iUniverse after 10 years and am putting them all up at Creatspace soon as I have already done with a number of our books (along with ebooks). Judy has done my covers for more than a decade now. She's doing a great job with your covers, too.

    It takes some work doing our own publishing, but I feel it is well worth it to have freedom--pricing, covers, etc. I love it.

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  3. Who does your book covers, if you don't mind tellng me, and at what price?

    Dick

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