This blog was always intended to be a journey of discovery through the world of self-publishing, discussing what works and what doesn’t work (for me, at least). I’ve been a bit remiss on that front recently, so will try to address that over the coming weeks.
It’s now 3 months since The Long Second was published on Amazon’s Kindle platform. So far, it hasn’t set the world alight despite almost universal praise from everybody who reads it. I’ll admit that many of these readers are personally known to me and so carry little weight in the grand scheme of things, but many of these people I was completely unaware that they were reading it until they finished it and told me how much they enjoyed it (and were now reading the sequel – Broken). Had they not enjoyed it, they would probably never have mentioned it to me, so I take it as positive that they did.
In June and July sales were steady. In August, they nose-dived dramatically. This seemingly coincided with my decision to raise the price of the books to £2.99/$2.99 – following the theory of some that the 99p/99c price level devalues books, makes them seem almost worthless. I’m not saying they are wrong (in fact, I’m inclined to agree) but it does appear that casual browsers are more willing to take a chance on a 99p book than a £2.99 book. Does that buyer actually read the book? I’ve no idea…
As of today, I have reset the price of The Long Second to 99p/99c and have (following the advice of another successful self-publisher) changed the Amazon description. I’ve also changed the genre category. That does, of course, complicate matters because having changed three things it will be impossible to know which has had the most impact.
I intend to change the description on Broken and Adam’s Game, but I won’t be changing the price on these just yet.
I still hope that “word of mouth” will eventually lead to some good sales figures, and I keep being told that it’s a slow process. I’m still very reticent to promote heavily on Twitter and Facebook following the earlier issues with offensive tags being added to the book, but I may revisit this in a different, hopefully less intrusive manner.
Time, as they say, will tell.
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