There is no such thing as a free lunch, or whatever the saying is. I prefer “all things be equal, you tend to get out as much as you put in”. Translated, this tends to mean big dollars and a big push (usually by a publisher) equals big sales. Small dollars and guerilla marketing tends to get you small sales. Not because it is ineffective, it simply tends not to scale as well as what the big boys and girls can do.

btw, my same title is also on Scribd with less results, which I attribute to a smaller population of shoppers/browsers.

It’s all good though, I wrote my book simply to tell a story which I enjoy. That story is about a hidden corner of the West, river rafting, fatherhood, and healthy normal teenage daughters. Sharing with others is nice and even gratifying if they like it. Time will tell!

My taste is a bit rough but I enjoyed “The Misogynist” by Emily Downs.

It can be a bit vulgar at times. Be warned. But it’s cheap.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Misogynist/dp/B001V5J4VO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246301307&sr=1-2

She is the bestselling author of “Lisa Loves Girls”

http://www.amazon.com/Lisa-Loves-Girls-ebook/dp/B002EZZJ4Q/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246298800&sr=1-7

2 books for under 2 bucks. THe kindle will own publishing.

It’s embeddable Flash previews are reason enough to look at them. They’re pretty nice.

Thanks for the App Stories.

@Dave in DC:

I think people are skittish about PayPal-based solutions, because they don’t have a working model of how the transaction is supposed to go. “What happens after I push this button?”

At least with Amazon and iTunes, there’s confidence in What Happens Next.

@Jack Kilborn:

Thanks for commenting, and for your post. I wasn’t sure which name to use for you.

I’d forgotten that “free” wasn’t an option for self-published books. Good that you had a publisher who could swing that.

Does your publisher get more information than the DTP manager provides? Because without some way to handle tracking information, I don’t know how they gauge the effectiveness/conversion of banner ads and whatnot. Glad to hear you think they help.

Please keep updating your site with info about how it’s going.

@Alan Gratz:

I did look at scrib’d, but it doesn’t seem ready for what I want. But more solutions are better, so I’m hoping something comes of it.

One thing to point about e-junkie: it’s $5/mo for up to 10 products, so the scaling works better for people with multiple titles. (Right now, I have two: the pdf and the ePub.)

They say the profit split was 80/20 author/scribd. I got all excited, thinking perhaps that this was an alternative to the $5 a month e-Junkie charges for listing items…until I also read somewhere that scribd takes another .25 off the top as a surcharge on each thing that sells. Cancel enthusiasm. For a $1.00 item (that’s the lowest amount they’ll let you charge) you’d end up making .55 after they take their 20% cut and their .25 surcharge. That surcharge really kills the lower price points!

A few larger publishers are selling e-book versions of dead tree tomes (O’Reilly is a prominent vendor on the site) and they are charging what–insanely–looks like full hardcopy price or close to full price for their books. Meanwhile, you have professionally published fiction writers selling novels for $2. Two dollars for an entire novel! Would that automatically price short stories out of that market? I don’t know. I’m going to do more snooping on their site.

Obviously name-recognition, branding, and price point come into play, but publisher involvement isn’t necessary to the extent it is in the print world. In print, distribution and marketing dollars push sales. On Amazon, not so much.

Not that there isn’t any marketing. Blake Crouch and I tried to put SERIAL up as a freebie ourselves, but Amazon won’t let authors do that. We had to work through my publisher. This turned out to be the smart way to go, because my publisher was able to get SERIAL a big launch, which included sidebar placement, and that went a long way toward making it #1. So did the fact that my recently released novel, Afraid, did very well on Kindle a few weeks earlier.

So now SERIAL is being downloaded at an alarming rate, and that can only help sales of my other books.

But I’d argue the free preview feature on every Kindle title is designed for exactly this sort of try-before-you-buy.

In this case, the freebie leads to branding because being on a bestseller list makes people aware we exist. Point of purchase and product placement work the same way on Amazon as they do in bookstores, and the books that are displayed sell more copies. Had we charged for SERIAL, chances are we wouldn’t be a bestseller, making it harder for people to discover the book.

So this isn’t a case of a freebie being equal to a free preview. This is a case of having your book face-out next to the register at Borders, instead of spine-out in section.

Just like the NYT Bestseller list, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Being on the List makes more people aware of you which sells more books.

My goal, as an author, is to be read. Some of the readers become fans, some fans become buyers. But the first step is getting readers aware of my work. The Kindle is a terrific platform for that.

The current system keeps Serial in the #1 slot for no real reason other than being free.

Sort of. There are dozens of free and thousands of cheap Kindle books, but not all of them reach the bestseller lists. Marketing, name-recognition, timing, and ultimately content all help.

The Kindle is U.S.-only, likely due to do rights issues.

Actually, Kindle is US only because of Wifi issues, not rights issues.

Should one raise or lower the price? Do ads work? Do reviews help?

In my personal experience, and in polling Kindle owners, a price point of less than $2.00 seems to be the way to sell the most books and make the biggest profit, unless you’re already a bestseller.

Reviews do help, but not necessarily what the reviews say, or even the rating. But the more reviews a book gets, the more attention it gets, the more downloads it gets, the more reviews it gets, etc.

As for ads, yes, they help. But at this point, only publishers can advertise on Amazon.

Internet Billboards (all the sites that mention and point to your Kindle book) also help a great deal. Authors who post on Kindle forums, and participate in Kindle newsletters, sell more copies.

Is it a way to get rich? Not yet.

But let’s see how things play out in the coming years…

love it!!