Archive for the 'The Variant' Category

• e  6 Free ebooks correlated with increased print-book sales

  In books and in movies, increased sampling usually generates more sales than it costs.

• e  31 How much should ebooks cost?

  Adding up the publisher’s expenses shows there is plenty of room for flexibility in pricing.

• e  13 Kindle, international edition

  Amazon’s Kindle, the e-book reader I adore, is now available in more than 100 countries.

• e  39 Why some folks got The Variant free

  When I published The Variant for 99 cents, I invited readers to explain why they should get it free. Here are some of the requests.

• e  5 Popcorn Fiction

  A new online anthology features short stories written by top screenwriters.

• e  19 June figures for The Variant

  It’s interesting to note how much better the Kindle sales have held up than the downloads — likely the self-fulfilling nature of being on the best-seller list for its genre.

• e  5 Variant cover artwork

  Since you released “The Variant” independently, how’d you get the nifty cover art?

• e  1 NPR on Twitter and The Variant

  NPR’s All Things Considered tonight has a piece by Alex Cohen about how artists use Twitter, including me with my short story The Variant.

• e  13 Variant mid-month sales figures

  Since the last update, sales for The Variant have been much stronger for the Kindle version than the downloadable version.

• e  19 40 reviews in 24 hours

  If we can get to 40 Amazon reviews of The Variant by noon (LA time) on Thursday, I’ll share a scene from my never-finished comedy Greeks, a collegiate buddy comedy set in mythological times.

• e  18 Spelunking the Kindle market

  How many books does Amazon sell on Kindle each day? Is there a classic long tail — and is it even worth being on it? Amazon is incredibly opaque with the details, even when you’re publishing on their system.

• e  18 How much does a short story earn in a magazine?

  I really had no idea what people were getting paid for short stories, so I asked Matt to dig up some numbers.

• e  3 Welcome, NY Times readers

  The NY Times has an article today about The Variant, the Kindle, and my Twitter followers.

• e  15 A week of The Variant

  My short story has been on the market for a week. As promised, here’s an update on how the 99-cent experiment has gone.

• e  11 Mapping The Variant

  Partially-redacted sales data for The Variant is available for curious data-miners.