Interesting, inevitable: buy the content and get the e-reader for free

I spotted this little nugget yesterday:

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’m making my books Kindle-only

At the risk of helping to perpetuate Amazon’s vice-like grip on electronic publishing, I’ve decided to enrol my books in its KDP Select programme. There are various upsides to that, but it does mean that the books must be exclusive to Amazon.

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.

1,500 ebook sales

I sold my 1,500th ebook today – it wasn’t the 1,500th copy of Coffin Dodgers (that’ll happen later tonight), but I’m delighted all the same.

I made another ebook – non-fiction, this time

I know what you’re thinking. “Man, if only Gary did more blog posts in which he tried to flog his bloody ebooks!” Well, have I got a happy surprise for you!

Bring Me The Head of Mark Zuckerberg is a new ebook by yours truly, and it’s available right now from – yes! – Amazon UK and Amazon US. This one’s non-fiction: it’s a collection of various tech pieces I’ve written in recent years, some of which are funny and some of which aren’t. Hopefully we’ll all agree on which ones are which.

Ready for some blurb? Let’s go!

Things move fast in technology. In 1998 Google was still in a garage, Microsoft ruled the world and the internet was made of wood. iPods, YouTube and Facebook were years away. Phones were rubbish, getting online cost a fortune and Gary Marshall tried to convince the readers of .net magazine that the Hitler Diaries had been written by a small dog. 

Luckily for him, the dog didn’t sue. 

Gary Marshall has been writing about technology like a pixelated PJ O’Rourke since 1998. In this collection of tech journalism from titles including .net, PC Plus, Techradar.com and Official Windows Magazine Gary picks through the PR nonsense, inflated claims and the reality distortion fields of the tech industry to concentrate on the big issues – issues such as, “does Google’s Eric Schmidt really own a coat made of human skin?”, “just how evil does Facebook need to become before people stop using it?” and “why are we being chased around the internet by adverts for horrible shirts?”

As ever, comments, Amazon reviews and offers of six-figure book deals would be very much appreciated.

1,000 copies of Coffin Dodgers

A wee milestone: Coffin Dodgers just sold its 1,000th copy, and to gladden my heart further it’s just outside the humour top ten (it’s number 12) and number 440 in the UK Kindle Store. The charts are updated hourly, but the book has been in or around the humour top 20 for more than a week now. As ever, I’m very grateful to everyone who’s said nice things about it or recommended it to anybody else.

I’d love to say I’ve learnt some really important lessons about publishing, but I haven’t. I’ve noticed a few things, though.

* First and foremost, ebooks don’t follow the “big splash then slow decline” sales model: my sales appear to be accelerating. In its first month Coffin Dodgers sold 89 copies; so far this month I’ve sold 260. That’s happening without my involvement, so I’m assuming there’s a positive feedback loop where Amazon spots books that are doing reasonably well and recommends them to readers.

* People don’t read free samples. That might be a side-effect of 99p pricing – people think “oh, what the hell”, because 99p isn’t very much – but it’s clear that people aren’t going “new author, eh? I’ll download the free sample to see if I like it” before hitting the buy button. I’ve had a few refunds and at least one one-star rating on Goodreads.com, which I’m not going to obsess about. Oh no. (For what it’s worth, the total number of refunds is about six, which isn’t a lot.)

* One star. One! No explanation. Just one star. One!

* Amazon’s Kindle is where it’s at: it’s to books what iTunes is to music. Last month I sold 272 books on Amazon UK, 3 on Amazon US, 3 via Smashwords and one via Apple. The difference might be sheer luck – maybe iTunes would show the same feedback loop as Amazon if I’d sold more there – but for now at least, you could concentrate solely on the Kindle without losing much sleep or many sales. It’ll be interesting to see if that changes now that the Kobo reader is selling in WH Smith.

* As I’ve mentioned before, pricing is key when nobody knows who you are. Whether you like it or not, 99p is the price people expect to pay for ebooks from unknown authors. If your objective is to be read – and mine is – then pricing higher is probably counter productive.

* One!

* This isn’t a living. Assuming sales of 300 copies a month, which is pretty good, that’s around £90 in royalties per month – it’ll keep you in Moleskines, but it won’t pay the mortgage. What it does do, I think, is prove that no matter how niche your book, it’ll find an audience. And it encourages you to write more by flattering your ego, and by making you think things such as “okay, one book doing 300 a month is ninety quid, but if I had ten books doing that…”

* I really need to get my arse in gear with my other books. A non-fiction one is imminent, and I’m swithering between two fiction titles: one’s a sequel to Coffin Dodgers and the other one isn’t. Time to commit, I think. Or two write two books simultaneously.

I think this is a good idea: ebooks you can touch

New ebook publisher Blasted Heath (vested interest alert: they’re friends of mine and occasional employers) gave me one of these the other night.

It’s the Blasted Boxset, 5 ebooks on a USB drive in a presentation tin.

I think it’s a really good idea, and hopefully there will be more like it: while ebooks are wonderful things, if you want to give one as a gift you’re reduced to printing a receipt on an inkjet.

Parent? iPad owner? Here’s a free app

I’m really taken by children’s book apps, and you can get an award-winning one for free: the Jack and the Beanstalk iPad/iPhone app is available here. I haven’t tried this one yet, but it looks like fun.

Coffin Dodgers: can I call it a bestseller now?

I’m quite delighted to see that Coffin Dodgers is currently number 20 in Amazon UK’s Books > Fiction > Humour chart, as well as number 33 in Kindle Store > Books > Humour and number 56 in Books > Humour > Fiction. I can’t say being in the top 20 has changed my life, but it’s certainly helping to sell more books: total sales are at 913*, and I’m selling around ten books per day at the moment.

If you’re interested, my highest overall chart placing so far is #608 “out of over 400,000 books in the Kindle Store”, Amazon tells me. That’s quite good, isn’t it?

I mentioned before that sales were overwhelmingly from the UK, and that’s still very much the case: for every 1 ebook I sell in the US, I sell 25 books over here.

Thanks once again to everyone who’s been nice about it, reviewed it or told anyone else about it. I’m very grateful.

I am still working on another book, but it’ll be months before I’ve got anything sensible to say about it.

* It might be higher than that: anything sold through Smashwords, such as iBooks, Sony or Kobo sales, takes ages to be reported. 

The angry face of DCI Banks

I’m hopeless at catching programmes when they’re actually broadcast, so it’s taken me a while to get round to watching the DCI Banks adaptations of Peter Robinson’s books. I like the books, but I encountered exactly the same problem I had with the recent dramatisation of Mark Billingham’s DI Thorne novels. No, not the annoying sidekick, or the maverick cop breaks the rules but always gets his man blah blah blah… the problem I had was overacting. It was bad in Thorne, but even worse in Banks.

Put it this way: if you created a drinking game where you had to down a shot every time DCI Banks made this face:

You’d be very pissed very, very quickly.

That face put me off the programme. I mean it. It’s not just his “I’m angry at a suspect” face. It’s his “I wish I’d had some toast before leaving the house” face, his “I wonder what I’ll have for my tea” face and his “I’m feeling quite chipper today, actually” face.

I don’t get it. Was there a memo that says all TV detectives are allowed two facial expressions, Really Pissed Off and Absolutely Fucking Furious?

Free ebooks from a new publisher

A new ebook publisher launches later today: Blasted Heath. I need to declare an interest – one of the founders is a friend of mine who occasionally pays me to write things – but I think what they’re doing is really interesting: they’re picking authors who they believe deserve a bigger profile and marketing the hell out of them. I’ve read two of the launch authors – Ray Banks and Douglas Lindsay – and loved their books, so if BH can maintain that level of quality they’re on to a winner.

I like some of their other ideas too: ebooks are DRM-free and provided in the major file formats (Kindle, ePub and PDF) to ensure maximum compatibility, and if you fancy giving books as a gift there’s a nice wee box set with the books on USB stick inside a presentation case. I know both Blasted Heathens, Kyle and Allan, and they’re definitely on the side of the angels.

Blasted Heath is giving away a different book every day this week, so if you fancy something a bit different you should pop along. Today’s giveaway, Douglas Lindsay’s The End of Days, is a hoot.