Here’s one for anyone who doesn’t like ebooks: Coffin Dodgers, the dead-tree edition.  I’ve published the book via Lulu.com, and I’ve tried to make it as cheap as possible: it’s £5.24 plus delivery, and I’ll get a whole 21p of that.

I’m on track to deliver my 15,000th ebook tomorrow, and I’ll write a post sharing some numbers and thoughts when I get the chance. The numbers are roughly 10,000 paid copies and 5,000 freebies, with the UK Kindle edition of Coffin Dodgers accounting for 99% of those figures.

Just a wee reminder if you read and enjoyed the book: if you could spare a moment to write a quick review on Amazon, I’d really appreciate it.

Whether you’re selling ebooks or giving away MP3s, designing T-shirts or creating iPhone apps, if you’re creating something for public consumption then sooner or later somebody’s going to criticise it.

How you feel about that will depend on the mood you’re in at the time, the way it’s expressed and the critic’s grip on reality — iOS app reviewers in particular often appear to come from different, more stupid planets — and even the nicest criticism can sometimes feel as if somebody’s ripped your heart from your chest and stomped on it as you stand there jetting blood – but it’s important to separate the reviews that matter from the ones that don’t.

As a rule of thumb, if the review’s at either end of the scale — if it’s one star out of five, or five stars out of five — then the review doesn’t matter. As nice as they are, five star reviews often mean that the reviewer knows you and likes you, or quite liked the thing you did and wanted to give you a big thumbs up. Similarly if it’s a one-star review, the reviewer may have decided in advance to hate what you’re doing, and only paid attention to it to confirm the initial prejudice and give you a good shoeing.

Sometimes — I’ve been guilty of this — the score is pushed in one direction or another because nobody reads or cares about two and a half star reviews, so you try and entertain with fulsome praise or a devastating slagging. I once wrote that Feeder were the best live band in Britain when what I really meant was that of all the British bands I’d seen that week, a list that began and ended with “Feeder”, Feeder were definitely the best.

The ones that do matter are the ones that say “but”. This looks good, but. The story is believable, but. The drum track is amazing, but. That’s criticism you can use. You might not agree with it — your response to it may well be “You BASTARD! How dare you suggest that my description of thirteenth-century dentistry was irrelevant to the wider narrative! I am AWESOME!” — but if you choose to pay attention to it, it can be a really big help.

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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

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.