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.

“EU says water is not healthy”, says made-up man

The Express:

EU SAYS WATER IS NOT HEALTHY

In a scarcely believable ­ruling, a panel of experts threw out a claim that regular water consumption is the best way to rehydrate the body.

The bizarre diktat from Brussels has far-reaching implications for member states, including Britain, as no water sold in the EU can now claim to protect against dehydration.

Any producer breaching the order, signed by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, faces being jailed for up to two years.

The Guardian:

This isn’t really a rule so much as a piece of advice, which member states are free to interpret as they wish… The claim wasn’t submitted for a genuine product, but was created as a deliberate ‘test’ exercise by the two professors, who were apparently already unhappy with the European Food Standards Authority. The panel were well aware of it’s absurdity too, noting drily that “the proposed risk factors,” the conditions addressed by the hypothetical product, in this case water loss, “are measures or water depletion and thus are measures of the disease (dehydration).”

Executive summary: the EFSA decided to be pedantic, and point out that water alone doesn’t prevent dehydration; you need sufficient water, as well as various other odds and sods such as salt.

The Guardian, again:

So the ruling seems pretty sensible to me, or at least as sensible as a ruling can be when the claim being tested is vexatious in the first place. It’s accurate advice, and it prevents companies selling bottled water from making exaggerated claims for their products, which is a good thing.

Comment on the Express article:

This must be the same group of so called scientist that made the false claim that man and CO2 is causing global warming. No wonder no body has any respect for science anymore.

Modern Warfare 3: “all the way up the bombast-o-meter”

John Walker is always worth reading, and his review of Modern Warfare 3′s singleplayer campaign is just superb.

Videogames often allow us to live out fantasies, to be who we could never be with our saggy, regular-person frames and lives. A soldier fighting in a near-future war, with access to the finest in military hardware? Maybe I could be the squad leader? Maybe I could be the hero? Maybe I could be the one who’s allowed to open doors? But no, of course not, you are – as ever – the grunt, being barked at throughout, forced to do whatever the game/game characters tell you to, which is usually to sweep up after them and the party they’re having in front.

It fascinates me that this is the successful formula, the secret behind being the biggest FPS series of all time.

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.

When health scares have wider consequences

The MMR scare strikes again. From the Brighton Argus:

Nine children at two Hove schools have been diagnosed with the potentially fatal infectious disease in the past couple of weeks – more than the entire number of cases in the whole of Sussex last year.

…In some cases babies too young to be vaccinated have contracted the illness from contact with infected older children who have not been given the jabs.

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.

The USB mix tape: what a brilliant little idea

This made me laugh.

Yours for £17. 

Arguing with RJ Ellory

I don’t usually edit or remove posts, no matter how much of an arse they make me look, but I’m making an exception this time: I went off the deep end about a series of tweets by the novelist RJ Ellory, and in doing so I made an arse of myself.

The tweets were about aspartame, and I felt that Ellory was rehashing internet conspiracy theory nonsense and being dismissive of anyone who disagreed. I still think that, but my original post was over the top.

It’s turned into a fun discussion thread, though.

The REM best-of is superb value for money

The deluxe version of the REM best-of (“Part Lies, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011) on iTunes is superb value for money: 40 songs and a further twelve videos for £11.99.

If you’re interested, the videos are for Radio Free Europe, Talk About The Passion, Fall On Me, The One I Love, Orange Crush, Losing My Religion, Man on the Moon, What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?, All The Way To Reno, Leaving New York, Supernatural Superserious and Uberlin. That last one’s from the most recent album and is a beautiful wee song.

See you at the overpriced reunion tour in ten years…

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.