Somebody bought the 10,000th copy of Coffin Dodgers last night, and I thought I’d provide a breakdown of the numbers for those of you interested in the whole self-publishing thing. As you’ll see from the figures, it’s clear that giving copies away for free is a brilliant marketing strategy, except when it isn’t, and that it works exceptionally well, except when it doesn’t.
Category: Books
Stuff I’ve read or helped to write
-
Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a £500 copyright licensing fee
From time to time I get a wee panic about Coffin Dodgers and I have to go and check that I took the U2 lyrics out: there’s a scene that revolves around a U2 song, and in the first few drafts of the book I quoted a couple of lines from it. That’s a no-no, as Blake Morrison explains:
For one line of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”: £500. For one line of Oasis’s “Wonderwall”: £535. For one line of “When I’m Sixty-four”: £735. For two lines of “I Shot the Sheriff” (words and music by Bob Marley, though in my head it was the Eric Clapton version): £1,000. Plus several more, of which only George Michael’s “Fastlove” came in under £200. Plus VAT. Total cost: £4,401.75. A typical advance for a literary novel by a first-time author would barely meet the cost.
The linked article is two years old. I very much doubt the fees have gone down since then.
[Via Lexi Revellian]
-
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 saleSo 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.
-
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.
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)
-
“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.