Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • A wee update on that whole free-ebooks adventure

    I’m buried up to my neck in deadlines just now but I thought I’d post a very quick update on my Coffin Dodgers freebie adventure. The sales figures for the last seven days, not including the freebies, are:

    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.

  • “Really, Jim, respectfully, you’re worrying about very stupid shit”

    In the US, magazines employ (employed?) fact-checkers to go through every line of a piece before publication. This is a dialogue between one such fact-checker and a writer. It made me laugh a lot.

    FINGAL: Do you have any documentation of that, like notes from your trip?

    D’AGATA: You’re asking for evidence of a rumor?

    FINGAL:     If you’re saying that there was a rumor, I have to find out whether there was in fact a rumor, even if I ignore the truth value of the rumor.

  • Cracking Amazon UK’s top 100

    It looks like free-as-a-marketing-strategy works: since Coffin Dodgers’ price tag reappeared, it’s sold enough copies to crack the Kindle top 100 in the UK. It’s currently sitting there at 91, and it’s number 1 in technothrillers and number 3 in humorous fiction.

    I’m quite pleased about that.

  • Why I gave away 3,500 ebooks*

    Did you take advantage of yesterday’s Coffin Dodgers freebie? If you did, you weren’t the only one: some 3,515 other people did too. That’s in no small part due to the people who posted and tweeted about it – if you were one of them, thanks.

    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?

  • Coffin Dodgers is free today. Tell your friends

    For no good reason I’m making Coffin Dodgers free for the next 24 hours. The UK version is here, and the US version is here.

    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

  • I write like Douglas Adams

    Here’s a fun wee diversion: a writing analyser that takes your text and tells you which famous writer you write like. I got Douglas Adams, although it seems that if you put in any kind of tech journalism whatsoever it tells you you write like Cory Doctorow.

  • Buy an ebook, get another one for free

    Simon Royle’s IndieView is a real friend to indie authors, and I’m happy to help with a tribute he’s organising in memory of Linda “LC” Evans. For one day only on 24th January, anybody who buys one of Evans’ ebooks can get another one free from a big selection of ebooks, including mine.

    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.

  • Good copy, bad copy

    I found Coffin Dodgers on a couple of pirate sites yesterday, and it really annoyed me. Assuming it’s actually there – there’s no guarantee that just because a free download site says it’s got a book that it actually has the book – it means I’ve fallen victim to the wrong kind of copying.

    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)

    (more…)

  • The other side of SOPA and anti-piracy legislation

    I like Michael Marshall, and his blog post about the other side of the piracy debate is worth your time. Not all anti-piracy sentiment comes from swivel-eyed loons or Disney.

    The government is supposed to be on the side of laws, isn’t it? Copyright is a law too. If they don’t defend that law in the new kind of social space that the internet represents, where will the laxity end? What other laws will be let slide on the grounds that they might impede the rights of Internet users to do what the heck they feel like? What about your right to privacy? You care a lot about that one, don’t you? What makes it so desperately important for the government to defend your rights there, but not defend others’ rights to be paid for their intellectual property?

  • “Long-term there’s no future in printed books”

    An interesting post on the appallingly named tech site Pandodaily: Confessions of a publisher, written by an unnamed “industry insider”.

    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.