UK: 1,547 sales
US: 45 sales
Germany: 5 sales
France: 1 sale

So that’s 1,598 sales in a week. Last month’s total sales were 875.

Incidentally, I’m messing around with print-on-demand at Lulu.com for an article I’m writing. It’s not cheap – at pocket paperback size Coffin Dodgers works out at around 320 pages, which means the cheapest you can sell it at (with zero profit margin) is £6.98 plus shipping, but once you figure out how it all works the results are pretty impressive.

I’m quite pleased about that.

If you’re wondering why I did it, it’s a one-word answer: marketing. I don’t have any money to spend on advertising and I’m terrible at self-promotion, so the hope is that of the 3,500-odd people who got the book, a few of them will read it, enjoy it and tell other people about it. If they do, I might sell more books, or they might buy the sequel, which I’ve actually started writing now. Honest.

Worst case scenario? More people read my book.

* I have to admit that I’m surprised by the number of people who downloaded it in such a short time. I thought a few hundred people might go for it, a thousand tops. Isn’t the internet fascinating?

If you get it and like it, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a review on Amazon. You don’t have to, but if you don’t, then when I die I’m going to come back and haunt you.Икони на светци

The deal’s simple enough: buy one of LC Evans’ books, choose your freebie and email the order receipt (take your credit card details out if they’re listed; you never know what cash-strapped authors are capable of) to the appropriate author. And, er, that’s it.

The list of free books is here, and while it’s still being updated you’ll see there’s already a really wide selection.

Here’s what Simon has to say:

To celebrate and honor our friend, indie author, L.C. Evans, and her contribution to the Indie eBook revolution, we’re giving away a whole bunch of free books. Linda lost her fight with cancer earlier this month. We lost a friend and a compatriot. We’d like you to buy her books, read her books, and make her words live.

…If chick lit or romantic comedy is not your thing, authors who have been interviewed on the IndieView will give you one of their books for every one of Linda’s books that you buy. For every receipt you send through, you will also get a lucky draw entry. The winners of the lucky draw will get a bundle of ALL the books – free.

There are two kinds of copying. There’s good copying, and there’s bad copying.

(This is a long post, so I’ve split it so it doesn’t overpower the entire home page)

Good copying doesn’t harm, and might just help. Good copying is when somebody enjoyed the book and passed it on to someone else, or when someone enjoyed it on Kindle and wants to convert it to a different format for a different device, or wants to print it out, or whatever. None of these things harm me, and they might just help: someone who enjoys Coffin Dodgers now, for free, might recommend me to someone who buys it, or they might buy the sequel.

My take on it is that I wrote Coffin Dodgers because I wanted it to be read. Of course I’d like to make some money out of it, but that isn’t my main concern (although unlike many other writers, I can afford to say that because I already have a job).

As Michael Marshall says in the post I linked to earlier on:

of course a little bit of this is not the end of the world and of course a degree of laxity with regard to sharing materials is part of how the net works and what makes it the extraordinary resource that it is

As I say, I don’t have a problem with it – anyone who’s spent any time at all hanging around this blog or reading my columns will know that I’m against draconian internet regulation, and that I think the claims of damage due to piracy are usually massively overblown.

The problem, though, is that there are bastards out there. Hello, bad copying.

Bad copying has a financial component: it’s when copies are provided for money, and the creator doesn’t get anything. The sites I’ve found offering Coffin Dodgers – or at least, claiming to; I’m buggered if I’m going to join up to find out if they have the book or not – run ads and charge for membership. It’s not much, but you can see why the copyright industries go crazy when they see sites linking almost exclusively to illegal content pulling in hundreds of thousands of pounds in ad revenues. I covered a case recently where, in just three years, the owner of one website made a claimed £147,000 from selling ad space around links to copyrighted content.

Piracy isn’t generally speaking an ethical decision, but a financial one: people pirate because free is cheaper than any price tag, and because they’ll get away with it. Personally I’m a fan of downloading leaked albums I’ve pre-ordered in CD format or on iTunes, or TV programmes I forgot to set the Sky+ for. I don’t think I’m being evil by doing this – I’ve paid for my pre-order, my TV licence and my Sky subscription – but I do think it would be hypocritical of me to whinge if somebody’s sharing Coffin Dodgers on a file sharing network or by email or IM. However, I don’t think I should applaud if somebody on the other side of the planet is making money at my expense.

In my case it’s the principle that’s annoying – I’ve sold two and a half thousand ebooks legally, which is nothing; never mind being on the radar, I’m not even in the same airspace as proper writers, so if even one person has actually downloaded Coffin Dodgers from a dodgy site I’ll be amazed – but I can see where the WE MUST SHUT THE ENTIRE INTERNET demands come from and why writers with proper profiles and serious numbers of readers get so pissed off.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do worry that the copyright debate has become too polarised. It’s become about absolutes, total internet freedom versus total lockdown, and there’s much, much more to the copyright debate than that.

The purpose of copyright isn’t, as many people assume, to stop people copying things. It’s bigger than that. It’s about encouraging the creation of new and valuable things by giving creators, for a limited period of time, protection so that they can benefit from their efforts.

It’s been corrupted by never-ending copyright extensions, by rights-grabbing contracts and by the belief that if Mickey Mouse ever falls into the public domain, the skies will open and the four horsemen of the apocalypse will ride out, but that doesn’t mean that copyright itself is a bad idea.

Ian Betteridge put it very well a few years back:

We should always remember that copyright is an artificial monopoly granted because it has a beneficial effect for society as a whole, not privilege that’s designed simply to benefit a particular class or profession

I think the corporations have perverted that, and I think the internet has made it exceptionally difficult to enforce, but I’m not convinced that the answer is to just forget about copyright law altogether. We just need to differentiate good copying and bad copying, and to protect the former while trying to prevent the latter.

Easier said than done, I know, but it’d be nice if we tried.

Amazon could probably afford to lose $20 million/year in their publishing arm just to put the other publishers out of business. I think that’s what they’re trying to do–throw money around in an industry that doesn’t have any, until Amazon becomes not only the only place where you buy books, but the only place that publishes books, too.

As of right now, Coffin Dodgers is number one in Amazon UK’s technothrillers chart. That’s quite good, isn’t it?

Sales are currently sitting at 2,323. That’s quite good too.

This is making up for a spectacularly crappy day.

Kate Pool of the Society of Authors confirmed that new writers could expect an average advance of £10,000 around 20 years ago: “Now they’re lucky to get between £1,000 and £3,000.” Research by the society shows that 75% of writers earn less than £20,000 a year and 46% less than £5,000.

As Ian Rankin says:

“The internet has pluses and minuses. It’s easier than ever to get your stuff seen by people. But it’s harder than ever to make a living from it. Look at the money that publishers are paying for new writers … less than they paid 20 years ago. They know first novels don’t sell many copies and, if writers decide … to sidestep the traditional publishing route and sell their stuff by themselves online, they’re having to sell it for virtually nothing – 99p.”

I’m not sure Rankin’s suggested tax breaks are the answer – especially at a time when library funding’s being cut all over the place – but it does demonstrate that whether it’s traditional publishing or self-publishing, most people aren’t making a living from it. The same, of course, applies to any supposedly glamorous kind of work: acting, being a musician, being an artist etc.  By all means do it because you love it. But don’t do it because you think you’ll make money from it.

Barnes & Noble said Monday that it will offer discounts on its Nook devices to customers who buy a digital subscription to People magazine and The New York Times.

For New York Times subscribers, it’ll offer a free Nook Simple Touch, a 6-inch e-reader that is priced at $99, or take $100 off on Nook Color, normally priced at $199.

It won’t be the last time an e-reader comes bundled with a digital subscription, especially as the devices are getting cheaper and cheaper. Tablets will inevitably follow – the Nook Color mentioned above is similar to the Kindle Fire tablet. I’m surprised Amazon isn’t giving free devices to its Amazon Prime members already.

The business model already exists: if you subscribe to cable or satellite TV, you essentially get the hardware for free; many mobile phones are free on contract, and so on. It isn’t hard to imagine somebody such as News International giving away a “free” Kindle Fire if you subscribe to the full-fat version of its digital service.

I don’t think I’m going to upset too many people – of the 2,100 copies of Coffin Dodgers I’ve sold so far, about 2,000 of them have been via Amazon – but if you really want to read Coffin Dodgers or Bring Me The Head of Mark Zuckerberg and don’t have a Kindle device or one of the many Kindle apps, then drop me an email and I’ll send you the book(s) in the right format for your device.

I’ll blog more about KDP Select and my ongoing e-publishing adventures soon.