May sales report and June price increases

May brought 21 sales, with 20 coming through Amazon, and 1 coming through Gumroad. As I expected, putting out new releases from March to May has increased sales, though not necessarily for the new books. What happens is that all those ads catch peoples’ attention, and maybe the book I’m selling isn’t what they wanted. But they look through my back catalog and find something that does interest them and buy that instead. This also tells me I can only go a few months at a time without new releases because even if I continue to promote the same titles, ad fatigue sets in and makes me invisible again. So I really do need to keep up the regular releases if I want my sales to remain consistent.

I’d taken some advice from someone to reduce prices on my Tobe White books during the opening month of Adventures in Trolling, but despite heavy promotions, there weren’t any new readers coming to the series. I think the biggest problem is, a 99 cent price point is now about as useful as a free book. When only a few folks were doing it, readers would download just about anything offered to them. Now they’ve got a few hundred free books when in reality they only read an average of maybe 25-50 books a year. Some might average lower numbers, and others higher, but my point is, they’ve taken in far more books than they could conceivably read, and free by itself is no longer the blinking neon sign that it was a few years back. The quality of these books is irrelevant because people are not going to read what they downloaded either way. Most of the books they picked up will be deleted unread. So free, or even steeply discounted books might pick up some people in a promotional push, but there’s no guarantee that those folks will ever read them. It’s pretty much the same situation as shotgun blasting ARCs out to reviewers. You’re free book is entry 500 out of 700 books in the pile, which means your odds of being read and reviewed are now depressingly slim.

And this brings me to my announcement about price increases for all my books across all three vendors. I could tell you I’m doing it because with my lowering sales, I’m trying to improve my royalties. But while that is a positive side effect of the increase, my real reason for doing this has a lot to do with reader feedback. On Twitter and in reviewer blogs, I’m seeing a lot of people saying they won’t buy a book in the 99 cent to $2.99 range because they feel that price point equals lower quality. They think the books must be selling badly, so the authors are desperate to move units. This isn’t a book judged by the cover or the blurb. It’s all about the perception of price.

As a reader I can’t say I agree with this, and I’ll buy an ebook at any price between 0.99 and 13.99 so long as the blurb gets my attention. But I know I tend to be a bit weird in my reading habits and review policies, and I can’t ignore what so many readers are saying about their buying habits. So I’m going with the flow and bringing book prices up to avoid looking cheap and desperate. All the shorter works under 50K are now $3.99, and all my novels are $4.99. My omnibus collections are priced between $5.99 and $9.99 depending on the lengths of the books and how many books are in the collection.

These prices will be in place until at least January 2015, at which point I will evaluate my performance and decide if another increase needs to be made to get back on peoples’ radars. It’s a bit weird to me to be contemplating price increases to attract readers, but that’s the wacky world of ebooks for you. Go too cheap and you fall off the map. =^/

Now that I’ve got my pricing policies sorted out, my next goal this month will be uploading and formatting my books for NookPress. They work a little different from my other vendors, so when I upload an epub file to them, they format the page breaks into a table of contents with the links named HTML1, HTML2, HTML3, etc. This wouldn’t be so bad if those chapters weren’t numbered in reverse order. So HTML1 is actually the last chapter, not the first. NookPress does allow me to edit the Table of Contents titles from within their site, but that still means I have to format all of my books as well as fill out the various forms for pricing and marketing categories and such. Oh, and Nook has a different cover requirement from Amazon, so all my covers have to be resized to meet their standards. Of course. So it’s going to be a week-long project, at the very least.

After I’ve got the back catalog up on NookPress, my next project will be releasing Nobody Special. I’ve debated about what to market it as, and I decided to call it YA and accept that it’s going to offend some adult readers because the main character isn’t a perfect guy. But after reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and making an attempt to read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I think Scott is a good fit for YA even if he is a lousy role model.

In conclusion, I want to thank everyone who bought my books in May, and to the fine readers who reviewed them as well. Every time I get a new sale, I’m reminded of the fact that you have hundreds of thousands of talented writers to choose from in this crowded market, and that you still choose to buy my stuff. That by itself is amazing, but some of you even like my stories enough to post a review or a rating, and I cherish every one of you for spending your time with me. You all make this writing gig so much more satisfying, and you make it easier to plant my butt in my chair and keep cranking out new stories.

Thank you again, and I’ll try to have a new review out in the next few days, assuming I can find some free time to finish reading Kealan Patrick Burke’s The Hides.