B&N Customer Review Of The Day

Today, according to Smashwords, The Silver Ring has been downloaded 1,000 times at the site. What this means exactly, I'm not quite sure. Even though someone downloads it -- and with Smashwords you can download a number of different formats -- it doesn't necessarily mean anyone is actually reading it (which, despite what some people may say, I think is the most important part). Sale numbers and download numbers are nice, but even with 1,000 downloads, what exactly does that mean? If people are reading it, are they enjoying it or hating it or just very indifferent about it? The novella has been reviewed twice at Amazon, a few times at Goodreads, zero times at Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble has this thing where you can just put star ratings, and according to the site, it has been reviewed eight times with only one customer review:

Not sure if you can see the customer review there at the bottom right-hand corner, so here it is closer up:

Um, yeah. Everyone always says how Amazon reviewers are the crazy ones, but I think we just found one here at B&N. Personally, I think it's hilarious ... at least from what I can even understand based on the "review" written. Apparently this prissy58 is upset that she wasted her time on a very short book which, mind you, is free. Also, the introduction at the front of the novella states the length, but whatever. I just found this amusing and wanted to share. They say customer reviews are important for potential readers, and maybe that's true. I wonder if potential readers to The Silver Ring will be turned off by prissy58's comment. Let's also hope prissy58 doesn't download the free version of Through the Guts of a Beggar as that's even shorter!

Pre-Order, Pre-Order, Pre-Order

The Hint Fiction anthology isn't slated to be released for another eight months, but it's already up for pre-order at Amazon for those of you kind generous folks who like to pre-order now so you'll be pleasantly surprised months down the line when a package arrives at your place. According to the product details, the book is 192 pages long and its dimensions (because we all worry about such things) are 6.2 x 4.5 x 1 inches. They also list the release date as November 1st, but I'm not sure if that's definite -- the month, yes; the specific day, no.

Alas, there is no cover yet. I've seen the color sketch, and it's pretty groovy, and once all the final touches are done you better believe I'll post it here.

In other news, remember how I'd made The Silver Ring available for free download on Smashwords? Well, it's been exactly one month (only does February count as a full month or am I slighted a few days?), and in the course of that month the novella has been downloaded, as of this moment, 396 times. That comes out to about 100 downloads a week. Again, just because it was downloaded doesn't mean it's actually being read, but still. Something to definitely think about, I'd say.

Upon Getting Kicked Out Of A Nursing Home

I'm mixing things up for this week's Freaky Friday Fun. After my last post about The Silver Ring (which is now up to 221 downloads so far, thank you very much), I felt it was only fitting to read a little bit of it to y'all. (Well, the real reason is because Smashwords allows authors to post videos about their books, and I'm curious to see if a quick reading by the author has any effect.) This is my first time doing something like this, so please be gentle. And enjoy.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CWP7MzMcNo

How I Spent My Snow Day

Before we begin, you know how I said I didn't think it was possible to unsubscribe to comments once you subscribed? Well, I was wrong. You can unsubscribe very easily, apparently. When you receive an e-mail, there's a link you can click on to manage your subscriptions. However, on the site itself, if you're subscribed to a certain post, there will be a link that says something along the lines of Manage Your Subscriptions, but if you click on that it won't work. So you can only unsubscribe from the e-mails you receive, not from the website. Get it? Got it? Good.

Now, as many of you know there was something of a blizzard here on the east coast last week. Almost all businesses were closed. I got to stay home from work. Which should have been nice and relaxing, but I decided to do some writing. Only it wasn't writing, per se, but the other side of writing, if you get my drift.

Anyway, last year I posted a sf thriller novella called The Silver Ring online. It was something I'd originally written in high school and set aside to collect virtual dust until last year I pulled it back out and reworked it a bit. It's a fun little story that I revised specifically for online reading (30 very short fast-paced chapters) and I've been experimenting with it off and on ever since.

A few months back I downloaded the Aldiko ebook reader onto my cell phone. I absolutely love it. It's linked up with Feedbooks and Smashwords to download books instantly onto your phone, or you can download books (the epub format) elsewhere and then import them via a USB cable. When I first downloaded the reader, I scoured through both sites looking for books to download. The books ranged from classics to bestsellers to self-published crap. As you may know, Cory Doctorow is a huge advocate of giving away e-books for free, and so of course I downloaded three of his books. I also have downloaded issues 2 and 3 of Electric Literature. Those downloads were not free. Each cost me $4.95 from Smashwords. But I really like the journal and I think the cost is more than reasonable.

Some costs, however, are not.

The books uploaded onto Feedbooks are completely free to download. Readers go to that site knowing that whatever is there they can download without any problems. Smashwords, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. Some books are free to download. Others are not.

What's nice about Smashwords is that for each book they show you the approximate word count. It's fascinating to see just how much some writers charge for certain works. Like this e-book, which is roughly 38,000 words and costs $4.99. Then you have this e-book, which is roughly 150,000 words and costs $15.00. Or you have this e-book, which is roughly 1,700 words and costs $0.99.

It goes on and on.

The big debate right now is just how much e-books should cost. Personally, I think e-books should cost as much as they need to cost. Yes, I think they should be cheaper than the print version of a book, but just how cheap? At what point does the publisher (and author) start losing money?

I have no problem with paying for e-books, but when I do, I look at them just like I would a regular book I would find at the bookstore. Meaning, I really have to be impressed with the description to purchase it, or if I have to be a fan of that author's work, or something. I'm not just going to buy it to buy it.

And let's be honest here -- most of the authors putting their stuff on Smashwords (not to mention the Kindle Store) are not authors who have a huge following. Yes, yes, Joe Konrath is making thousands of dollars a month on his e-books, but he's Joe Konrath. You can't compare apples with oranges.

For the rest of us though -- the under published, if you like -- what is our option if we want to post something on a place like Smashwords?

We can make our books free to readers who are more likely then to download them, or we can charge some kind of fee and hope and pray that some readers who have probably never heard of us before will take pity and purchase our book.

Sure, money is nice and everything, but having people -- a lot of people -- download and read my stuff is even nicer.

The final phase of The Silver Ring experiment went into effect last week during the blizzard. I spent hours on the computer formatting the manuscript to upload onto Feedbooks. I'd decided I liked Feedbooks best, because with the epub format they actually manage to separate chapters. And besides, people who go to the site know that whatever is there is free, and they are readers, gosh darn it.

Unfortunately, after hours of staring at the computer screen, my little novella didn't seem to want to upload properly. It would upload and I could publish it, but then it would disappear after a half hour or so. I tried contacting Feedbook's support and got no real help. Then I said to myself Screw it and tried my hand at Smashwords. This worked much better and the novella was uploaded in no time at all.

As right now gaining readers is more important to me than gaining a few bucks in my PayPal account, I made The Silver Ring available at Smashwords for free. I purposely did not tell anybody about it. I did not mention it on Twitter or Facebook. I obviously didn't mention it here on this blog. I wanted to give it a week and see what would happen.

As of this moment (1:00 AM eastern time on Wednesday) The Silver Ring has been downloaded on Smashwords 177 times. That may seem like a somewhat impressive number, but remember that just because a book is downloaded does not mean that it's read. However, according to my nifty Smashwords dashboard, the novella has been linked in 5 member libraries, which is basically five people who have added a hyperlink in their library profiles to my novella. Not a big deal, perhaps, but it's still something.

Over the course of a week (six days, really, as I didn't completely upload the novella until early Thursday morning), I received a few Google Alerts about the novella. One was for this site, listing the novella as a free read. Another was for this ebook sample. Then on Monday I received an e-mail from someone who runs this website asking if I would be interested in allowing them to post a PDF of the novella to their site so their readers could download it for free.

As I made the novella free to a number of formats (that's the great thing about Smashwords, the book becomes available in pretty much every format) I decided to tweak the version I have in the Kindle Store. If I could, I would make it free to download, but as an author you can't. The lowest you can price it is at 99 cents. So I figure if people are going to pay for something that I'm pretty much giving away for free elsewhere, I should reward them with something a little extra. So I added a bonus short story to the Kindle edition. Not much, but it's something. Remember, it's not like I'm looking to make a lot of money here, and I could just delete it from the Kindle Store, but it's nice having the book linked at Amazon as it's, well, Amazon. Plus, I changed the product description around to this (not to mention made it so the file was not DRM enabled):

A young man finds a mysterious silver ring that holds extraordinary powers -- a ring that the darkest evil in the universe wants for its very own.

This Kindle edition contains a bonus short story.

(Download the novella for free at Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/9764)

Anyway, I've talked enough for this post. If you're interested in downloading The Silver Ring onto your ebook reader, please do. It's completely free, after all, so what do you have to lose?

To Self-Publish Or Not To Self-Publish

Isn’t it funny how the times change? Years ago someone would be crucified for suggesting writers self-publish their work. And those that actually self-published their own work, well, they were looked down upon as jokes. Nowadays though, with publishing being where it is in the barrel, self-publishing has become tolerated, if not almost accepted in some circles. Keep in mind when I say “self-publishing” I refer to those print-on-demand places that don’t charge an upfront fee but will publish the book for you and then give you a little (should I say tiny?) royalty based on how much the retail is set at.

As so many more publishers are going the POD route, what difference does it make if a writer is published by one of those or they decide to self-publish their own stuff?

Theoretically, the final product would be the same, wouldn’t it? I mean, assuming the person doing the self-publishing knows how to properly layout the text, can provide substantial cover art, etc. A publisher is supposed to back your work, help promote it, but let’s be honest here -- the bulk of promotion lies in the author’s corner anyway. The benefit of having a publisher back you is your book is more apt to get reviewed by respected magazines, might get decent distribution, though in terms of most small press publishers that still doesn't mean you'll end up in major bookstores.

Why am I bringing this up? Do I plan on self-publishing a novel or short story collection? No, not at all. But I’ve been thinking about my pet project, the novella I posted online and also uploaded to Kindle. As I mentioned before (either on this blog or the old one), the project was more an experiment than anything else. Yes, it’s always nice to make money, but the purpose of putting The Silver Ring online was to try to attract new readers. I do pretty much no self-promotion on the thing at all, but the website has been linked to enough places that there are visitors every day.

My initial plan was to do the PDF thing, the novella and a bonus short story for a donation of 99 cents, and while a decent amount of people have donated (thank you again, everyone!), it’s definitely nothing that will buy me a new car any time soon ... or even a clunker. But again, this thing was never about making money. Ultimately it’s about the reader, giving the reader what I hope is a good product.

Only, the more I started thinking about it, is a PDF copy really a good product?

In the end, what does one do with it? Read it on the computer, sure, or else they print it out. And once they print it out, then what? It’s not like you can put it on a bookcase, and even if you tried, what would be the point? It's not really tangible, something you can carry around and show people. No, of course not, so what happens to it? Most likely, it ends up in the trash.

When I launched the novella back in May, the whole Hint Fiction contest had been in full-swing, and then with everything in its wake the project sort of got put on a back-burner. But like I said I’ve been doing some thinking, mostly about self-publishing, and I’ve been playing around with the idea of releasing The Silver Ring as a digest-sized paperback. It would include the entire novella plus the bonus short story and host that great cover my friend Wyatt made for it (even better, it would hopefully be wrap around too). And, as this was never about making money, the plan would be to price it just above the manufacturing cost, so that it would be as cheap as it can be. Right now I’m thinking around eight bucks, and that would include domestic shipping (international shipping might be another dollar or two). I would limit it to 100 copies, signed and numbered, and could sell them directly from the main website -- otherwise, going through Lulu's online store and Amazon and elsewhere, the retail price would be more expensive to off-set their costs, and then you would have to pay shipping on top of that.

So I would really like to hear your thoughts. Not necessarily regarding my novella, but in general -- are you more apt to buy a book if it’s priced reasonably than you are a PDF? Are PDFs a waste of time? Are actual printed books a waste of time? Is the fact that a particular story -- like my novella -- completely free to read online make you less likely to purchase a copy of the book? Or do you not care at all?

Every reader is different, just like every writer is different. What works for (or appeals to) one, won’t work for (appeal to) another. It’s trying to find the balance that is the hard part, and truthfully, I don’t think there is a way to find it.

Of course, this is all speculation right now. Just throwing the idea out there. And please keep in mind that those who had originally purchased the PDF and would like to buy the book as well will have 99 cents factored out of the cost.

Now, as Martin Landau always says in Entourage, does that sound like something you might be interested in?

P.S. My official thoughts on self-publishing are the same as giving your work away for free -- I don't see a problem with it as long as you know exactly what you're doing (self-publishing or giving your work away for free) and have a damned good reason for doing it.