Experimenting with prices a bit

I will have ‘Demons of Khemas’ available for 0.99 $ for a couple of weeks. Sales have been damn near non-existent this month (maybe not just me, I’ve seen some other writers complaining of the same thing, that their sales have dropped a lot this month, at least so far), so I figured I might as well experiment with pricing a bit. Of the two novels I have for sale now people seem to like ‘Fourth Sword’ while ‘Demons’ gets no love… well, it is kind of weird blend of genres, a sword and sorcery story which at least in places reads kind of like chick lit. I did have fun writing it, but I guess it might make sense that it will have a harder time to find readers. 😀

I guess that is one of the pleasures of being where I am right now – selling some but not all that much. Right now I feel rather free to write whatever I damn well please, but since I actually would like to turn this to something I get money from I will probably concentrate on what seems to sell best if something starts to sell noticeably better than something else.

I will probably do the next free promotions for both of these novels right after I have published the third, that SF story. Might help to get some attention to it – and the other two too, and maybe even the short stories, sales always do seem to pick up a bit after the free promos, not hugely but so far there have always been a slight bump. Well, right now the main thing for me should probably be just trying to get as many readers as possible anyway, rather than think about the actual sales, as long as I’m in the ‘never heard of’ category nobody will find me except by chance, and of those people who do stumble on my stories and like the cover, description and sample well enough to buy something not all will end up liking the whole story, so if I want some word of mouth to start happening I will need to get hell of a lot more readers than I have now.

On the other hand, I am not good when it comes to advertising. I don’t like doing it, for one thing, and the other part is that I don’t really know how to do it so that it would be useful. And then there is the fact that it may not affect the final results all that much. What it will do is accelerate the process if the novel is good enough, and yes, sometimes it can create bestsellers but for that you’d need the kind of resources the big publishers have, lots of money and advertising professionals. At the level I could do it – yep, with some luck it might accelerate things a bit if what I have is good enough, but if it really is good enough it will probably get to the same goal with time anyway. So I don’t see much point to use time for that. Better to try and get volume, as much published as possible, which will make me a bit more visible with time, being more visible will net me more readers, and – again, provided the stuff is good enough – maybe in time that word of mouth thing will appear.

Anyway, you can find the link to the novel ‘Demons of Khemas’ on the page titled ‘Novels’ (surprise…) if you are interested. Would put it here except those links are generated automatically now with WordPress and at least the ones to Amazon come out with this huge picture of the cover. A bit too big to my liking, but so far I haven’t been able to figure out how to make it smaller. And probably I will learn that just before WordPress changes something again and I will need to learn how to do it all over again. 🙂