Monetizing Your Intellectual Property

So you've got this story you want to e-publish. It's about 5000 words long. You've seen the success Barry Eisler has had with The Lost Coast, selling a short story on Kindle for $2.99, but you don't have Barry Eisler's fanbase. So you decide to price it modestly at 99 cents.

After it goes live, you mention it a few times on your blog, on Twitter, on Kindleboards.com. Then you move on to your next project, content that you'll forever earn money on this short story.

But are you truly maximizing this story's potential?

No. You're not even close.

Let's look at five of my short stories. The Screaming, a vampire story that originally appeared in an anthology six years ago. Symbios, a sci-fi/horror take that originally appeared in Apex Digest. Shapeshifters Anonymous, which was originally in the Wolfsbane & Mistletoe anthology. Serial, which I wrote with Blake Crouch expressly for Kindle as a freebie. And Truck Stop, a Jack Daniels/Jack Kilborn crossover I wrote for Kindle.

The Screaming appeared in trade paperback, mass market paperback, and then in a reprint anthology. I recently released it as a standalone ebook for 99 cents on Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords. But I didn't stop there.

The Screaming is in my $2.99 collection Horror Stories (which is also available as a self-published trade paperback.) Horror Stories is part of a larger, omnibus collection called 65 Proof (also available as a trade paper.)

I did the same thing with Symbios and Shapeshifter's Anonymous. They're both available as singles, in Horror Stories, and in 65 Proof.

Three stories. Fifteen ways to buy them.

Serial, which Blake and I wrote a few years ago, is still available for free (and still in the Kindle Free Top 100.) We also released it for 99 cents, and, incredibly, people are buying it. Since authors can't release ebooks for free on Kindle, Nook, Sony, or the others, we went through my legacy publisher to do so. But realizing that Serial might be missed by those who don't shop for freebies, we put it out at 99 cents for those surfing Amazon,'s other areas, and we sell a few hundred copies a month.

We also sold Serial to Cemetery Dance for the anthology Shivers VI, where it appears between the covers with Stephen King and Peter Straub. Serial is also in 65 Proof, and Blake's collection Six in the Cylinder. And Six in the Cylinder is in his omnibus Fully Loaded, which is also available in print.

But we weren't done monetizing Serial.

Banking on Serial's popularity, we released a longer version called Serial Uncut, on all ebook platforms. It's also available as a trade paperback, which includes my story Truck Stop, and Blake's story Bad Girl, along with more original content. Naturally, Truck Stop and Bad Girl are also available as 99 cent stand-alones.

Serial Uncut has proven to be very lucrative, earning us tens of thousands of dollars. We just wrote a sequel, Killers, which is now available.

Can you guess where we're going next? Killers Uncut will be out soon, in ebook and self-published trade paper. Then it's a no-brainer to bundle both versions (which will be a whopping 90,000 word novel) into Serial Killers Uncut, which will be a $5.99 ebook and a $15 paperback.

Horror Stories and Serial Uncut were also sold as audiobooks to Brilliance Audio. And Serial had its film rights optioned. My agent is working on foreign deals for these properties.

You're getting the idea, right?

A single intellectual property can be exploited in multiple ways. It can be sold as a single, as a part of multiple collections, as an expanded version, as a bundle. It can be sold to anthologies and magazines, to audio and foreign markets, and can be self-published in print.

The more ways you package it, the more chances you'll have to reach new eyes.

In the past, a brick and mortar bookshelf had limited space. If authors wanted to be discovered, they improved their chances by taking up as much of that bookshelf as possible.

These days, the bookshelf is the internet, and it is infinite. The more IPs you have for sale, in various packages and formats, the more potential fans you'll find.

You don't need to have fifty unique IPs to have fifty products for sale.

Different people are looking in different places for different things. But if you properly package your story, you can vastly improve your reach. Just as in the print world, the more places you appear, and the more shelf space you occupy, the more you'll sell.

And for those keeping track of such things, I'm selling about 1500 ebooks a day.

Guest Post by Jon F. Merz

I love success stories.

I especially love success stories when the recipient of success struggled to attain it. The reason we all relate to the movie Rocky is because it personifies the American Dream. To wit: "You can do anything if you work your ass off."

Jon F. Merz is, by any account, a good writer. He's sold a lot of fiction to legacy publishers, has a lot of words under his belt, and began self-pubbing on Kindle around the same time I did.

Initially, he had some success. Then the success began to recede.

Merz didn't understand why.

Anyone who reads this blog knows the value I place on luck. You have to have the right book in the right place at the right time.

But you can give luck a little help by also having the right price, the right description, the right cover. You can also improve luck by doing this as many times as possible. The more books, the better.

I'm fond of saying that ebooks are forever (and you should begin forever today, not tomorrow.) I also believe that with infinite shelf space, a writer should take up as much of it as they can.

So last month, on my blog, Merz openly disagreed with me. (You can find our exchange in the comments of Lee Goldberg's guest post.)

I invited Jon to give me a call, then got busy and blew him off. But I did ask him to write a guest post, which he did on January 24th. Again, because I've had a lot of guest posts lately, I haven't had a chance to post it.

Well, now I have a chance to, along with a follow up post by Merz a month later.

It's very interesting reading...

Tales of an Ebook Nothing...
by Jon F. Merz

So, last week I called Joe out. Here on his blog. Maybe you saw my comments. I've ventured into indie publishing on the Kindle and my sales have been pretty awful. Joe's constant preaching of his and others success has, frankly, grated on my nerves for no other reason than I'm jealous as hell that I'm not selling thousands of dollars worth of ebooks on a monthly basis. I wanted answers as to what I'm doing wrong and I asked Joe to put his money where his mouth was.

But before we get to the goodness that follows (namely, Joe taking one of my books apart bit-by-bit) a little backstory is in order.

My first novel, The Fixer, came out in May 2002 from Kensington Publications Corp. Scott Nicholson and I were both there at the same time. But while Scott enjoyed a few more years, my own experience with Kensington was short-lived. Long story, short, my first agent only wanted me writing vampire novels, so I fired her. Unfortunately, she and my editor were best pals. That didn't bode well for my fledgling career. Suddenly, planned publicity evaporated and they brought out four novels within a really short space of time. Subsequently, by the time my third novel in the Lawson Vampire series came out, the first one was already out-of-print.

My plans to convince the publisher that they needed to reprint the first book involved a pretty big fan letter campaign that produced thousands of letters of support aimed at Kensington...and one very pissed off letter back from the president of Kensington to me, telling me in no uncertain terms that the series was dead to them and to please tell my fans to stop flooding them with letters.

So my first publisher dropped me. Not a nice feeling. Especially since I'd come up dreaming (like most everyone else) about big advances, publicity and bestseller lists. Now I was orphaned.

I moved to a second agent, who looked good on paper, but in reality sucked mightily. Any deals done during my time with him were ones I worked my ass off to bring to the table myself. I was busy looking for a new home for Lawson, simply because I knew the series had incredible potential and just needed the right editor/house behind it. I started doing work-for-hire novels for the bestselling Rogue Angel series from Gold Eagle. I was the first writer they brought in after the original team that had created it. Over the course of the intervening years, I've written eleven of those novels. (And, according to some Amazon reviews, have single-handedly destroyed the series because I don't let the heroine hack her way out of every troublesome spot.)

Around this time, I was working on a project that I felt sure would be my break-out bestseller. Parallax was a spy thriller about two professional assassins - one a Mafia hitman and one a retired German terrorist - who kill at the exact same moment in time and develop a psychic bond. The resulting cat-and-mouse game intertwined with a nefarious plot, was certain to catapult me onto the lists. I felt sure of it.

I worked my ass off on that novel. More rewrites than I'd ever done before. And this was while I was co-authoring two non-fiction books, working on Rogue Angel, etc. etc. But Parallax was good. It was damned good.

My second agent submitted it around New York. And the reactions from editors were more than encouraging. They loved it. We had one go so far as to tell us, "the world needs Jon F. Merz's voice." Seriously. Hey, it's publishing, you know you can't make this stuff up!

But as nice as all that praise was, the worst was yet to come. Because along with the great things they said about the book, they also delivered this buzz kill: "We can't buy it."

WTF? That was some sort of joke, right? Nuh uh. Turns out, editors have almost zero power. And the sales people they had to pitch the book to, decided that since Parallax wasn't a straight spy thriller, nor was it straight SF, but some sort of weird amalgamation of the two, it would be too difficult to even attempt to sell to their accounts.

Never mind that it was a great read. All that mattered to the sales people was they couldn't easily label it and it would therefore take too much trouble to try and convince key accounts that it would sell.

I was pissed off beyond belief. The reasoning was ludicrous. But it was also indicative of the changing face of publishing. And it was a hard lesson to learn.

I'd always resisted the idea of self-publishing. All right, that's not *exactly* true. I'd given it some thought. But I hadn't made much money with my writing so far and trying to think about doing it myself was a pretty awesome undertaking given everything else I was involved in. I was also, frankly, still one of those who saw self-publishing as the refuge for those who didn't want to do their time in the trenches and earn their way to a legitimate deal. (And yeah, that was my sentiment. Honestly. I'd read a lot of self-published stuff and everything I'd read was crap. Throw stones if you want, but that was my experience at that time.)

But Parallax getting turned down because it couldn't be easily shelved into some narrow category really annoyed me. So I heard about Amazon's new Kindle publishing program. This was back in 2009 and I put Parallax out.

It sold great. Better, the reader reviews were almost universally positive. I felt vindicated. And the sales really helped on the home front. I played around with price points quite a bit, trying to maximize revenue and strike that balance between too little or too much. This was about the same time Joe was doing his first title out there as well. Interesting times, to be sure.

And then I screwed up. I took my eye off the ball. Instead of capitalizing on the initial momentum that Parallax had gained, I got wrapped up in other projects. I was content to let Parallax sit out there and generate the passive income I'd always dreamed about. I did about $10,000 in sales during those first four-to-six months. I put out another trunk novel of mine - Vicarious, a supernatural thriller. It did okay, but nothing like Parallax had. I was starting to see problems.

Then all momentum died. I started putting other parts of my backlist out, but my sales simply didn't take off. And for the past year or so, I've sold consistently but completely unimpressively. I make a few hundred bucks each month with a combination of novels, short stories, and novella pieces. I've experimented with covers, and studied a lot of the market trying to understand, although I certainly haven't had as much time to devote to it as I wish I had. Contrary to what some believe, I'm not out here looking for an easy solution. If anything, the fact that I've experimented as much as I have rather than simply come over here and kiss ass is proof that I have tried to find the solution on my own.

But after reading post after post of others enjoying the level of success I want for my own ebooks, I've grown frustrated and tired of my own failed experimentations. As I've said elsewhere, I'm all for cutting out the middlemen and getting my stuff right to the people who matter: the readers. I just need some help finding the path.

So here I am: on Joe's blog looking for a way to kick the afterburners into gear and really get my sales up. My latest novel is The Kensei, out last week from St. Martin's Press. It's the 5th book in my Lawson Vampire series, but I want to get my first four Lawson vampire installments out onto the Kindle - a lot of people are asking about them.

But I want to do it right.

And with that, I turn it over to Joe, with the expectation that as harsh as his critique may be, it will hopefully provide some of the answers I've been seeking. And if they do, I'll be the first to shout it from the rooftops.

Thanks.

Joe sez: This was the part where I was supposed to get all preachy and lay down the tough love about tweaking his covers and descriptions, lowering his prices, and keeping at it. I was then going to point out specific examples of what to fix, and end with the rallying cry of, "Just keep on keeping on, and hopefully lightning will strike soon."

In a nutshell, for those who haven't heard me spout it before, here are my plans for ebook success:

1. Write a damn good book.

2. Make sure it has professional cover art.

3. Keep the price under $4.

4. Make sure the formatting is flawless.

5. Write a good product description.

6. Upload to Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords.

7. Repeat. Over and over, until the world can no longer ignore your work.

In Jon's case, I would have concentrated on #2 (I think his covers are too dark, so they don't look clear as thumbnails or in grayscale), #5 (I believe his descriptions can be beefed-up), and #7 (more is better.)

But, as fate would have it, Jon didn't wait for me to give him his critique and pep talk. He went ahead on his own, and...

Well, I'll just let him tell his own story.


The End of Fabruary
by Jon F. Merz

I’m excited about things ahead for one big reason: the preceding month has been renamed to “Fabruary.”

Let me explain…

I’ve always viewed the coming ebook revolution with something of a jaded eye. After a decade or more in this business, I’m always wary of supposedly “new” things. But I’ve also been playing around with ebooks for a few years now. I had some early success with it with regards to Parallax and then, after putting out a host of novels, short stories, and a few other things, my sales flatlined at about $100 earnings each month for the last year. That means I was making about a hundred bucks on sales of everything I had out on the Amazon Kindle platform. Not impressive, by any means – especially when I’d read blogs by other folks like Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking (she just bought a house for cash with her ebook earnings), and even some closer friends and colleagues – all of them were enjoying some serious success.

And I wasn’t.

So, I decided to try to remedy that. At the end of January, I put my entire Lawson backlist – four novels, a novella, and four short stories – out on both the Kindle and the Nook platforms. In February, I also debuted a new novella, SLAVE TO LOVE, and then in late February, I reworked the cover of Parallax, dropped its price to 99 cents, and put an excerpt from THE FIXER in the back of it. The goal was to use Parallax as something of a gateway drug to my Lawson series.

The results have been amazing.

Thanks to a series of incredible covers, the Lawson backlist is selling very well, indeed. As of this moment, THE FIXER alone has sold 450 copies on the US Kindle store alone. Priced at $2.99, the novel has earned me $900 and change this month. That’s 100% gorgeous passive income – and it’s 9 times what I made in total for the previous 9 months.

Ah, but I’ve got more than one Lawson novel. I’ve got four. The other three are all selling triple digits. The novellas are closing in on 3 digits and the short stories are selling very well.

So, by itself, the Lawson backlist was generating very strong sales during the shortest month of the year.

Then I dropped the price on Parallax. Until I reworked the cover, I’d sold 4 copies all month. After I dropped the price to 99 cents, I sold many more copies. As of last Friday, I’d sold just over 150 on the Kindle and perhaps 50 on the Nook.

But on Saturday morning, something incredible happened: Barnes & Noble featured Parallax in an email promo to its customers. Nothing elaborate; just a simple shot of some book covers. Parallax was featured in its “thrifty reads & great stories” section. I had no idea this had happened until very late Saturday night. Saturday morning, I saw that Parallax had suddenly sold 55 copies and I thought, “huh, interesting.” I continued to watch the numbers climb all day and into Saturday night. By midnight, it had done 347 copies for the day.

Incredible. My sales rank in the Nook store was beating the likes of JD Robb/Nora Roberts and I was on par with ebook success Amanda Hocking. I had no way of knowing if the trend would last, but yesterday, I sold 233 copies.

Staggering.

I have no idea if the Parallax burst will last, but I’m thrilled to have gotten such an amazing push. I’ve sold 25 copies this morning. You can still get it for the Nook HERE and on the Kindle HERE for just 99 cents. It’s a great book, one of my best.

So, with all that said, I’m very excited. The ebook revolution means that I have the freedom to write whatever I want and get it out there as soon as it’s ready for mass consumption. No longer do I have to slave over a proposal and hope that an editor in New York understands the scope of the project, gets excited, can then pitch it to a room full of supposed experts, gets the green light to acquire it, makes a decent offer (lol), and then tells me the book will be out in about a year. Now, if I have an idea I think is cool, I can just write the thing and put it out. If it flops, no biggie. If it’s a hit – all the better. But the amount of time and number of hoops to jump through for me to reach my readers has now been drastically winnowed.

After all, it’s always been about the readers. Or rather, it should have always been about the readers. That hasn’t always been the case with the traditional publishing model.

But now, it can be.

Am I through with traditional publishing? Probably not. But I will say this: my attitude has been changed tremendously given the success I’ve had in the shortest month of the year. I have big plans to get a lot more material out for ereaders – more Lawson, new series, fun stuff – a veritable ton of things that have only been ideas and “failed” proposals until now. (I say “failed” only because they didn’t sell in the traditional publishing world.)

The landscape is changing. Dramatically.

Borders has gone bankrupt. Is B&N going that way, too? Probably not since they adopted an ebook strategy. But the thing about ebooks is this: they’re not going to stop. And more people will get an e-reader. I love the feel of traditional books, but even I have been reading some things on my iPhone lately. We’re either at a tipping point or beyond it now. Millions are reading ebooks and millions more will soon join them.

Traditional publishers need to seriously revamp their contracts. Right now, the industry standard is 25% net on ebook sales.

That’s crap.

And as much as they may insist that costs are high for producing an ebook, it’s a bogus argument. I can put an ebook out on the Kindle and it takes me perhaps thirty minutes to do. Same for the Nook. I can hire someone to design a great cover.

So why would I give a publisher more than 50% of the proceeds from ebook sales?

For me personally, there’s a lot to think about in the coming months. Where do I want my career to go? With THE FIXER TV series moving ahead, do I want my books tied up by a traditional publisher that doesn’t pay me a fair rate?

Before the ebook revolution, the folks in New York (by and large) determined the destinies of writers.

Since the ebook revolution, that power has shifted. On a seismic scale. Writers now control their destinies. We can write what we want and sell it to our readers. Fewer middlemen means a lot of very good things, indeed.

I’m excited.

For the month of Fabruary, I just broke $3,000 in earnings for my ebooks. 30 times what I’d earned each month for the previous year. (and frankly, there are many writers making a LOT more than that right now, so my potential for sales isn’t going to go down, it’s going to go up as I a) produce more material, b) the number of folks reading ebooks climbs, and c) the number of e-readers sold climbs…)

That kind of success can make a person stop and think.

And it should.

Joe sez: Remember the end of Rocky? He lost the fight. But he still refused to give up, and then went on to eventually win in numerous sequels.

That's life. And that's the writing biz. There will be ups and downs, but you can't take it personally either way. Selling a lot doesn't mean you're the best writer on the planet and you deserve all the cash you're making. Selling a little doesn't mean you're a loser who will never amount to anything.

You just need to keep at it until you get lucky.

Merz kept uploading new material, kept experimenting, kept rethinking his approach, until luck struck.

Best of all, his luck saved me from having to keep my promise to help. Jon found success, and I didn't have to do a long blog post, lecturing him.

Which is why I'm thrilled to have him guest post. Let this be his lecture to you.

Guest Post by Blake Crouch

Today's guest post if from my frequent collaborator Blake Crouch, about how legacy published authors must come to grips with self-publishing...

Here's Blake:

So I finished a novel back in August that I’d been writing for a year and a half between other projects. I thought it was probably the best thing I’d written, the closest I’d ever come to fully realizing the initial idea. My writer friends who I swap manuscripts with agreed. Even my lovely wife, who can’t deal with my SERIAL stuff, loved it. My agent loved it, and we went through several edits and took it out in October to a number of publishing houses.

“You’re losing money, Blake, every single day RUN is not for sale.”

Around December, Joe started making a point of telling me this every time we talked on the phone, emailed, or Skyped. I thought maybe he was right.

I had a great December selling ebooks.

January came close to doubling that.

“Blake, this is the best thing you’ve ever written. You know that novels sell better than short stories. Why are you sitting on this?”

Now, every time Joe said this, it was like a gut punch. Because I knew he was right. I knew the potential monthly income I was turning my back on, the new readers I was missing out on.

We’re in the Wild West of ebooks, and my best work was on the sidelines. We hadn’t had any offers on RUN, but had gotten very close with a couple of dream editors. It’s always been a tough market, but with Borders going under and the ebook-induced turmoil, it’s harder now than ever.

So I released RUN myself this past Saturday, for the following reasons, and many more:

1. It’s my best book. A lot of my work has a horror bent, and this certainly does, but it’s far and away the most commercial thing I’ve written. It has the most potential to earn me new fans, and now I have a substantial backlist for them to dive into if they dig it.

2. As I’ve blogged about here before, I need more novels. My novels far outsell my short story collections, single stories, and novellas. This was an opportunity to add a fourth novel to my catalog.

3. For the first time in my writing career, I can support myself solely through writing. Releasing RUN has the potential to launch me to the next level, and the window for doing that is open and here.

4. Numerous ebooks, already released, have been picked up after the fact by publishers. See Michael J. Sullivan, H.P. Mallory, the Encore crowd, etc. If numbers are strong, it can help an agent make an argument for the sale and negotiate a better advance.

5. Ebook royalty rate: 25%. This royalty rate is so completely biased in favor of publishers, it’s not even funny. The ebook rights to my catalog are far and away the most valuable thing I own.

To give a publisher the exclusive license to my e-rights when I have no control over pricing, and in light of that 25% royalty rate, is a terrifying proposition. This all adds up to my suspicion that, even if an offer were to come, I would have a very difficult time parting with those rights if the offer wasn’t stellar and life-changing money.

6. No one knows yet what the selling trajectory of an ebook is, although we do know that it doesn’t follow the traditional arc of sliding into coop and needing to sell huge in those first 6 weeks to stay alive. Konrath is a prime example. All of his titles have been his greatest sellers at different points in time, and at different price points. But if a book is never available, you can never find that sweet spot where it works for you. Your old books sell your new books, and vice-versa, and the more books you have available, the more you will sell, and the more you sell, the more you sell.

7. I don’t know what the future of RUN will be. Will I always control the e-rights? Will I ultimately sell them? Hard to say. But I know that having it available right now is a great weight lifted off my shoulders, because there is no longer any benefit to sitting on good work, and waiting for a “Yes.”

Joe sez: Not only is RUN the best novel Blake has written, it's the best thriller I've ever read. That's not an exaggeration. RUN is powerful, moving, frightening, exhilarating, and the end will reduce you to tears.

I considered it my duty, as a friend of Blake's, to nag him to self-publish RUN, but he wanted a big traditional publishing deal. And guess what? I understood his thinking. RUN should have gotten a big traditional publishing deal. Blake should have been offered six-figures for RUN, months ago. It has "blockbuster" written all over it.

But the current publishing climate is awful. Publishers aren't buying as much, and they aren't paying as much. And every day Blake waited, the legacy publishing climate got worse, the self-publishing climate got better, and he missed out on making money.

How much money?

Let's be conservative and say RUN sells 20 copies a day. If he'd self-pubbed it nine months ago, like I told him to, He'd have $10k in his pocket right now. Ouch.

Double-ouch because 20 a day is a low estimate. I sell 90 copies a day of Endurance, and it isn't even my best selling ebook. If I'd waited nine months to publish Endurance, I'd have missed out on about $49,000.

That's what I mean by, "Ebooks will earn money forever, but you should start forever right now, not tomorrow."

It could be that RUN does really well as an ebook, which might spark some publisher interest. But if it is doing that well, Blake would be foolish to sell the rights. A 25% ebook royalty is really 14.9% after everyone takes their share. If ebooks are the future, why would any author choose 14.9% over 70%?

I encourage all of my blog readers to pick up RUN. It's terrific.

I also encourage all of my blog readers with a book on submission to rethink their priorities. I know you want a big book deal. I felt the same way, not so long ago.

But that was before I was selling 800 ebooks a day. Right now I'm earning $1 a minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Big book deal? No thanks.

Blake sez: It’s so annoying when Joe’s right.

If you’ve benefited from any of my posts here, I would humbly ask that you check out RUN, available for $2.99 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Here’s the pitch:

For fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Thomas Harris...

Picture this: A landscape of American genocide...

5 d a y s a g o

A rash of bizarre murders swept the country…

Senseless. Brutal. Seemingly unconnected.

A cop walked into a nursing home and unloaded his weapons on elderly and staff alike.

A mass of school shootings.

Prison riots of unprecedented brutality.

Mind-boggling acts of violence in every state.

4 d a y s a g o

The murders increased ten-fold…

3 d a y s a g o

The President addressed the nation and begged for calm and peace…

2 d a y s a g o

The killers began to mobilize…

Y e s t e r d a y

All the power went out…

T o n i g h t

They’re reading the names of those to be killed on the Emergency Broadcast System. You are listening over the battery-powered radio on your kitchen table, and they’ve just read yours.

Your name is Jack Colclough. You have a wife, a daughter, and a young son. You live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. People are coming to your house to kill you and your family. You don’t know why, but you don’t have time to think about that any more.

You only have time to….

R U N

The List Hits the Kindle Top 100

On Feb 15th I dropped the price of my technothriller novel, The List, from $2.99 to 99 cents on Kindle and Nook.

As of 2/15/2011 7:30pm, The List had sold 592 copies sold on Kindle in February. That had earned me about $1200.

Here were the Amazon rankings prior to changing the price:

#1,078 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

#13 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals

#14 in Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals

#57 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Action & Adventure

Now, a little over eleven and half days into the experiment, The List has cracked the Top 100 overall bestsellers on Kindle.

Here are the new numbers:

#78 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

#2 in Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals

#2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals

#8 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Action & Adventure

At $2.99, I was earning $2.03 per download. And I was selling an average of 43 ebooks a day.

At 99 cents, I only earn 35 cents per download. I'm now selling 533 sales a day.

At $2.99, I made $87 a day.

At 99 cents, I'm now making $187 a day.

Now, the automatic reaction to this might be, "Wow, cheap prices = more money! I've got to lower the price of all my ebooks to 99 cents!"

But that assumption is incorrect.

My horror ebook, Trapped, which is currently ranked at #325 on Amazon, has sold 3640 copies this month. It is priced at $2.99, and I earn $2 per copy sold.

On Trapped, I'm earning $276 a day, selling 138 copies daily. For it to earn that at 99 cents, I'd have to sell 6 times as many copies, or 828.

Maybe I could, if it climbed high enough into the Top 100. Certainly the best selling ebooks are hitting higher numbers than that. But that's going after the two birds in the bush, when I'm pretty happy with the one currently in my hand.

The List, originally ranked at #1100, was a better gamble.

So what about my other titles? I have a few novels that are ranked higher than The List was. Should I drop their prices to 99 cents and see what happens?

Prior to this price change, I was selling 534 books a day of 14 other fiction titles, not including The List.

Currently, I'm selling 539 a day.

So my belief that a bestselling ebook improves the sales of backlist titles doesn't seem to have much merit.

Which means, based on the data I've accumulated, it might be a wise move to lower the prices on some of my other ebook novels. By guesstimate, if I have novels ranked over #1000, it stands to reason that I should drop them from $2.99 to 99 cents. But for novels ranked lower that #1000, it is too big a gamble, so I should leave those at $2.99.

My novel Shot of Tequila is my poorest selling ebook novel, currently ranked at #2523, and having sold 453 copies this month at $2.99 each.

I have just lowered the price on it to 99 cents.

I have no idea if sales will take off like they did with The List, or if Tequila can crack the Top 100. It might. It might not.

But I'll keep Tequila at 99 cents for two weeks and see what happens. Tequila is currently earning me $33 a day, averaging 16.5 copies daily.

In order to match that, I'll have to sell about 100 a day at 99 cents.

I'll start keeping track once the new price goes live.

It should be interesting to see what happens.

Even more interesting is a dilemma I haven't had to face yet. The List is currently in the Top 100 at 99 cents.

So when, if ever, should I switch the price back to $2.99?

Added: At 5:30pm Shot of Tequila was lowered to 99 cents on Amazon. Its rank is #1405, and I sold 483 copies so far in February.

Guest Post by Jeff Strand

My guest today is Jeff Strand. You may know know him as my co-author of Suckers and Draculas.

By coincidence, that's also how I may know him.

Anyway, Jeff has been at this ebook game longer than anyone. But we really can't give him props for that, because in 11 years of ebook sales he's made exactly $73.41.

That's $6.67 a year, before taxes. I'm posting this because a lot of my blog readers like hard numbers.

But now Jeff has finally decided to join the rest of us in 2011 and publish on Kindle, and...

Well, I'll let Jeff tell you.

The Long, Strange Trip of “The Sinister Mr. Corpse”
by Jeff Strand

My introduction to the world of e-books was back in 1999, when author Pauline Baird Jones encouraged me to send one of my novels to an electronic publisher. My initial reaction was “Sure, or, in a similar vein, I could print out my manuscript, sprinkle a little Fresh Step on top, and let my cat defile it.” But after a little more research, I decided to give it a try, and in 2000 three of my unpublished novels came out as e-books. (Out of Whack was also supposed to come out that year, but its route to publication was hampered by the minor detail that the publisher sucked.)

Back then, you were an “e-book author” before everything else. Stephen King had given the format a bit of legitimacy with Riding the Bullet, but 99.999% of the e-book authors were not Mr. King. I could’ve played a drinking game with the number of times I heard “Let me know when it’s a real book.” Despite my insistence that my publishers provided cover art, formatting, editing, etc. there was still a very real perception that E-Book = Self-Published = Crap.

But, hey, I threw myself into e-books full force. I spent three years on the board of EPIC, an e-book authors’ organization, two of them as President, and emceed the EPPIES awards banquet (in a tux!) nine times. I continue to emcee awards banquets (in June, I’ll emcee the Bram Stoker Awards for the third time) but I will never, ever, ever, ever be on the board of a writers’ organization ever, ever, ever again. That way lies a descent into the gaping jaws of madness.

In 2003, my novel Mandibles appeared in actual print, and was soon followed by a few others. It was print-on-demand and thus didn’t really appear in bookstore shelves, but the “When are you going to publish a real book?” question had been answered. I still liked e-books, but I was no longer required to be a passionate proponent of them to market my work. Sweeeeeet.

Though the hardcover edition of my 2006 novel Pressure was available as a $25 trade hardcover and did get bookstore distribution, almost all of my work after that was part of the limited edition market. Unlike e-books in 2000, hardcover limited edition horror novels had a built-in market, and books like The Sinister Mr. Corpse, Disposal, The Haunted Forest Tour, and Gleefully Macabre Tales all started out exclusively available in $35-$50 editions. It was fantastic, because these books looked incredible, but in terms of reaching actual readers…well, your potential audience is not huge when you’re offering 250 copies of a $50 book. Once again, the format overshadowed the content.

And then, in 2009, it finally happened. My first mass market release. The paperback edition of Pressure was in bookstores everywhere for $7.99. My sister picked one up at a military base in Korea and my dad got one in a grocery store in Alaska. There was nothing to block anybody from reading this book. It was cheap and easily available. If you wanted a copy of Pressure, by golly you could get a copy of Pressure. Dweller followed. Suddenly, it was ALL about the content. There was nothing to explain except that it was about being best buddies with a serial killer.

I did a ton of book signings for it, and what question kept coming up? “Is it available for my e-book reader?” Being polite, I did not shout “Are you freakin’ KIDDING ME??? It’s a $7.99 paperback on the table right in front of you!”

In 2010, I looped around right back to where I’d started, with Draculas, a novel written exclusively for the e-book market. It wasn’t quite where I started, because this time I was piggybacking off JA Konrath, F. Paul Wilson, and Blake Crouch, but still, the world of publishing had changed to the point where it actually made sense to not even try to get a print contract!

In 2011, I looped around again with The Sinister Mr. Corpse…except that this time, there wasn’t even the cry of “It’s not self-published! My publisher is like any other publisher except for the format! I’m a real author, dammit!” The Sinister Mr. Corpse is a self-published e-book. Eleven years later, after clawing my way up through the ranks, getting my work in a format that everybody in the world would agree was a “real” book…I decided that the best home for my zombie comedy novel was to upload it to Amazon and Smashwords myself.

I can’t deny that there’s an element of frustration in watching the market change just as I broke through, but at the same time, it’s incredibly exciting. I can control the price. Upload it whenever I think it’s ready. Write whatever the hell I want. I have to admit that I’m nowhere near ready to abandon the pursuit of traditional publishing, and my next novel is going to my agent and not Amazon…but still, the freedom, and the possibilities the whole Kindle revolution offers are jaw-dropping.

Unless The Sinister Mr. Corpse tanks. Then I’ll be completely bitter.

Jeff Strand's 10 Reasons Why You MUST Buy The Sinister Mr. Corpse

1. I Was E-Published Before It Was Cool

Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary) was published as an e-book in May 2000. Back then, if you were e-published, everybody thought you SUCKED! You were a LOSER! I suffered for the technology! There was none of this “Oooooh, how I love my Kindle!” sentiment. I practically got beat up in playgrounds over this.

2. It’s Dirt-Cheap

It’s $2.99. Have you ever heard of an e-book only costing $2.99? Well, yeah, lots of them are these days, but still…$2.99 for a novel? That’s madness! Honestly, when you finish reading The Sinister Mr. Corpse you’re going to feel like a criminal for having gotten it so cheap. And there’s no better feeling than the adrenaline rush of committing a crime, even if it’s a white-collar crime like this one.

3. You Don’t Need A Kindle (Though They’re Awesome)

The Smashwords edition is available in a bunch of different formats, covering pretty much any e-way you’d want to read it, and you can re-download it if you change your mind. The Amazon edition does not have DRM (digital rights management) enabled, so if you use Blake Crouch’s handy guide you can convert it to whatever format you want.

You can also download the Kindle app (for free!) for your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, ColecoVision, or whatever and read the Kindle editions that way. The download links are on the right side of the Amazon ordering page.

This also means that you could copy and share it pretty easily, but if you do, I’ll hunt your e-pirating ass to the ends of the earth.

4. It’s Suitable For Zombie Fans and Zombie Haters

Love zombies? It’s a zombie novel! Hate zombies? It’s a satire! It’s the ultimate in have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too storytelling. If you’re humorless and grim, it’s possible that you won’t enjoy this book all that much, but that’s what my novel Pressure is for.

5. People Kinda Like It

“For pure, unadulterated, foul-mouthed, off-the-wall Strand at his humor-horror sarcastic best there is nothing that comes close to The Sinister Mr. Corpse.” — Savannah Now

“Those expecting the typical apocalyptic world full of flesh eating corpses will quickly realize they are in for a different treat altogether. For those familiar with Mr. Strand’s popular Andrew Mayhem novels, take the witty banter, sharp one liners and laugh out loud moments, and then turn it up a notch or three.” — Horror World

“With loads of relentless action and characters that make reading seem more like eavesdropping, The Sinister Mr. Corpse will have even the biggest stiffs among us laughing all the way to the grave.” — Rue Morgue

“I liked it, but Strand is a tool.” — J.A. Konrath, millionaire author

6. If You Don’t Buy A Copy, In Three Days You Will Be Walking Down The Sidewalk, Lost In Thought, And An Ice Cream Truck’s Brakes Will Fail, Causing The Vehicle To Careen Off The Road And Splatter You Like A Melted Cherry Popsicle.

Sorry, but it’s true.

7. If You Do Buy A Copy, In Three Days You’ll See An Adorable Orphan Walking Down The Sidewalk, Lost In Thought, And Because Your Senses Are Hyper-Aware From Having Read The Sinister Mr. Corpse, You’ll Save Him From An Out-Of-Control Ice Cream Truck, And Get A Reward That’s Way More Than The $2.99 You Spent.

Awesome, huh?

8. It’s Not Another Frickin’ Mash-Up

I’m not suggesting that Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was not the single most brilliant idea of the 21st century, because it totally was, but maybe you’re getting sick of authors saying “In my mash-up novel, you can’t tell which parts were written by me and which parts were written by F. Scott Fitzgerald!” You can buy The Sinister Mr. Corpse with confidence, knowing that none of it came from a public domain work by an author whose skills are far superior to my own.

9. I’m Saying “Please.”

Please?

10. Stick It To The Man!

The Sinister Mr. Corpse is my first venture into the world of self-publishing, and every time you buy a copy, some man is getting stuck! Fight the power! Support the little guy by heading over to Amazon right now and…okay, yeah, I’ll admit that Amazon fits the criteria of The Man, so you’re actually sort of supporting The Man instead of sticking it to him, but, still, they’ve created a world where I can self-publish a novel for the Kindle without people saying “You suck!!!” (See Item #1 above.)

Click HERE to get it from Amazon.

Click HERE to get it from Smashwords.

Joe sez: If you want to win some Jeff Strand books, head over to All Purpose Monkey's Blog and follow the instructions.

I'm proud that Jeff is finally releasing his work on Kindle, after I've been screaming at him for two years to do so. Strand, like Barry Eisler, is proof that you can lead a mentally challenged horse to water and make them drink, but it takes twenty-four months of nagging.

Also, for those who are still reading, here's my review of The Sinister Mr. Corpse:

Lately I've been accused of "shilling" reviews for my writing friends.

That's complete and total absurdness.

I do write a lot of 5 star reviews for friends of mine because I truly love their work, and it deserves five stars.

I never write a 5 star review simply because I like someone. Especially in this case.

While The Sinister Mr. Corpse is a laugh aloud horrific romp and well worth the low price, I'm not giving it 5 stars because I like the author, Jeff Strand.

In fact, Jeff is a jerk. A jerk, a ninny, a butthead, and a lowlife.

Now, Strand may get on his high horse (as per usual) and claim that I'm calling him a poopypants because I'm envious of his writing ability.

Nothing could be more untrue.

While Strand is, admittedly, an excellent writer, I'm not the type to be envious of anyone.

But I do feel a need to warn everyone who may come into contact with Jeff Strand to arm yourself with some pepper spray if he gets feisty, and a portable video game if he starts talking, because hooo boy that guy can TALK. And he never says anything the slightest bit interesting. He's lucky he's gets paid for being a writer, not for giving speeches, because he's so bland he could bore monks. His delivery is slower than a snail surfing on molasses. He's so full of hot air that HE is the true cause Global Warming.

You get the idea.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.

The Sinister Mr. Corpse: 5 Stars

Jeff Strand: 1 Star, because these isn't an option for zero

Trust me. I'm an author.

JA Konrath Interviews Barry Eisler

If you spend any reasonable amount of time with me (more than ten seconds), I eventually will begin evangelizing ebooks and self-publishing. While I've stopped doing this in public (with the exception of this blog), all of my peers who talk to me on a regular basis wind up getting an earful.

As a result, most of my friends have given self-publishing a try. Henry Perez and I have done Floaters. Blake Crouch and I have worked on so many ebook projects together I've lost count, the latest of which is Killers, the sequel to Serial. F. Paul Wilson has jumped into self-pubbing his backlist. I helped Robert Walker get his backlist live. Jeff Strand (who does a guest post HERE) after years of self-pubbing is finally plunging into the Kindlesphere. Ann Voss Peterson and I finished a short story that will go live, and are halfway through a collaborative novel. Lee Goldberg has gone from being vehemently against self-pubbing to endorsing it in certain instances.

And now, after two years of nagging, Barry Eisler has finally given self-publishing a try.

Barry is an interesting case study for a few reasons. First, because he's an international bestseller who commands big advances. Second, because even though I've been telling him for years he needs to write a short story, he never had.

Until now.

Barry used the incomparable Rob Siders to do the formatting for Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords, and the amazingly talented Carl Graves to create the terrific cover (which includes a photo Eisler took of the titular location using his iPhone.)

The result is The Lost Coast, a slick, fast-paced thriller short that went from idea to live in two short weeks. Here's the description:

For Larison, a man off the grid and on the run, the sleepy northern California town of Arcata, gateway to the state's fabled Lost Coast, seems like a perfect place to disappear for a while. But Arcata isn't nearly as sleepy as it seems, and when three locals decide Larison would make a perfect target for their twisted sport, Larison exacts a lifetime of vengeance in one explosive evening.

Includes an excerpt from the new John Rain novel, The Detachment (available soon), featuring Larison, Rain, Dox, Treven, and others. Also includes a fun interview with novelist J.A. Konrath.

Warning: this story is intended for mature audiences, and contains depictions of sexual activity, though perhaps not in the way you're expecting. 6600 words.

You can read more details about The Lost Coast on Eisler's website and blog.

Barry's ebook novels, released through his publishers, range from $5.99 to $9.99, so $2.99 seemed like the sweet spot for an original story.

How has it worked for him?

In 24 hours he's sold several hundred copies, and is currently ranked on Kindle at #566.

Included in the ebook is a Q&A I did with Barry, which I'm posting here for my blog readers. And it should go without saying that I loved the story, it's awesome, go buy it.

Barry will also be hanging around my blog for a bit, so if you have any questions for him, or just want to welcome him to the dark side, do so in the comments.

Q&A: J.A. Konrath Interviews Barry Eisler

Joe: Correct me if I’m wrong (not), but I believe The Lost Coast is your very first short story. Why haven’t you visited this form before?

Barry: Because you’ve never suggested it to me, you bastard.

Kidding, obviously — my reluctance has been despite your frequent blandishments, and I’m glad you finally got through to me. I think there were a number of factors. The thought of appearing in an anthology or magazine never really excited me that much, even though an anthology or magazine placement could be a good advertisement for a novel. And probably I was a little afraid to try my hand at the new form (though now that I have, I think I must have been crazy. Short stories are a blast to write). In the end, I think it was the combination of knowing I could reach the huge new audience digital publishing has made possible and make money doing it. Plus you just wore me down.

Joe: I really liked the Larison character in Inside Out. Though he’s one of the antagonists in that book, I wouldn’t actually label him a villain. He’s more of an anti-hero, sort of a darker, scarier version of John Rain. Why did you decide to write a short about him?

Barry: As usual, it wasn’t a conscious plan; more something influenced by my interests, travel, and reading habits. Anyone who reads my blog, Heart of the Matter, knows I’m passionate about equal rights for gays. At some point, I was reading something about gay-bashing, and I had this idea... what if a few of these twisted, self-loathing shitbags picked the absolutely wrongest guy in the world to jump outside a bar? That was the story idea that led to The Lost Coast.

Joe: The ending of Lost Coast is pretty ballsy (in more ways than one.) You could have gone a more conservative route, but you didn’t wimp out and shy away from what I feel is a laudable climax. Are you purposely inviting controversy? Was this the story you intended to tell from the onset?

Barry: I imagined it from the beginning as a pretty rough story — a little about redemption, a lot about revenge. But midway through it got darker than I’d originally envisioned. Thanks for saying I didn’t wimp out because for me, the story was being driven by Larison, who while being a fascinating guy is also a nasty piece of work. When I’m writing a character like Larison, there’s always a temptation to soften him a little to make him more palatable to more readers, but in the end I’ve always managed to resist that (misguided) impulse. For the story to come to life, you have to trust the character as you’ve conceived him and as he presents himself to you. For better or worse (I’d say better), that’s what I’ve done with Larison.

Joe: After this interview, there’s an excerpt from the upcoming seventh John Rain novel, The Detachment. This is also a sequel to Fault Line and Inside Out, featuring your hero Ben Treven. It also showcases Larison, Dox, and a few other characters from your past novels. Was it your intention all along to bring both of your series together?

Barry: I’m afraid that “all along” and related concepts will probably always elude me. Usually I get an idea for the next book while I’m working on the current one, and that’s what happened while I was working on Inside Out. I thought, “With what Hort’s up to, what he really needs is an off-the-books, totally deniable, awesomely capable natural causes specialist. So what has Rain been doing since Requiem for an Assassin? And how would Hort get to him? Through Treven and Larison, naturally... and the next thing I knew, I was working on The Detachment. It’s like the Dirty Dozen, but deadlier. Plus there’s sex.

Joe: Your sex scenes tend to err toward the aggressive side. That isn’t a question. It’s an understatement. The question is, why do you think the US is so repressed when it comes to sex in the media, especially homosexuality, and at the same time so tolerant of violence?

Barry: George Carlin had some typically wonderful insights on this subject in his book, Brain Droppings. When you look at not just our laws on drugs and prostitution, but the whole approach to those laws (unlike just about any other regulated area, drugs and prostitution are dealt with without any weighing of costs and benefits), it becomes obvious America has some hangups about pleasure. With regard to homosexuality specifically, some of the craziness is probably driven by self-hatred; some by the need for an Other to denigrate (Orwell was all over this); some just by inertia. As for the relative comfort with depictions of violence as opposed to sex, I’ve never understood that, either, because in fiction I obviously enjoy them both

Joe: Will we be seeing more short stories from Barry Eisler?

Barry: Yes! Got a great idea for a Rain/Delilah short set in Paris in the period between the end of Requiem for an Assassin and the kickoff of The Detachment. The research, the research...

The List Experiment Update

For those of you just tuning in, on Feb 15th I dropped the price of my technothriller novel, The List, from $2.99 to 99 cents on Kindle and Nook.

As of 2/15/2011 7:30pm, The List had sold 592 copies sold on Kindle this month. That had earned me about $1200.

Here were the Amazon rankings prior to changing the price:

#1,078 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

#13 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals

#14 in Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals

#57 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Action & Adventure

Now nine days into the experiment, here are the new numbers:

#123 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

#2 in Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals

#2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals

#9 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Action & Adventure

So we've seen a dramatic increase in sales.

But is it enough of an increase?

At $2.99, I was earning $2.03 per download. And I was selling an average of 43 ebooks a day.

At 99 cents, I only earn 35 cents per download. I'm now averaging 205 sales a day.

At $2.99, I made $87 a day.

At 99 cents, I'm making $71 a day.

But in the last few days, The List has been selling stronger, averaging about 250 sales a day. If it can hold that number, or do even better, that's $87 a day--matching what it made at $2.99.

This is curious. At first glance, it seems like price and profit have found an equilibrium.

But there are obvious certain benefits to the 99 cent price point. Because it is now higher on the bestseller lists, it is seen more often. And 99 cents is more of an impulse purchase.

I like this book, and so do readers, and it's logical that the more people I get to read it, the more potential fans I'll make, and those fans will probably so and buy my other, more expensive ebooks.

What I've done here is the equivalent of putting turkey on sale for 19 cents a pound at the grocery store. The sale brings people in, then they buy other items that aren't on sale.

So is it working? Are my other sales going up?

Prior to this price change, I was selling 534 books a day of 14 other fiction titles, not including The List.

After the price change, I've been selling 547 books a day.

So there's a slight raise, which adds up to about $12 a day.

Now, this isn't a perfect experiment. I also launched a new ebook, KILLERS, this week. While I'm not including the KILLERS numbers, it has increased my virtual shelf space, and might be a small factor in slightly higher overall sales.

On the surface, this experiment looks to break even for me monetarily. But I won't know for sure until I get more data.

However, if The List does crack the Top 100, then these numbers could indicate that I'll make more money at 99 cents, both on that ebook and on my backlist, than I did at $2.99.

I've still got a ways to go. Last night, The List was ranked as low as #112. If it can stick around this rank until the weekend (when people buy a lot of books) then I may have a shot at the elusive Top 100. I've hit it three times before, but those were with new releases. The List has been on Kindle for two years.

Wouldn't it be amusing if it hit the bestseller list after two years of sales?