99 Cent Experiment Bites The Dust

Sales were up, yes. But not enough to sustain the experiment.

Numbers, you say? Previously, sales were about 1 per day, 30 per month, of all three Skeptical Juror books combined. We cleared about $2 per book, because $2.99 qualifies for a 70% royalty on Amazon.

With a price of 99 cents, Amazon only allows a 35% royalty, or 35 cents per copy. So we have to sell around 7 times as many copies to break even. 

We only sold about 60 copies in the month of the experiment. 

So, we have to try harder to publicize the book, because frankly, if you're going to buy at 99 cents, shouldn't you be interested enough to buy at $2.99?

A new E-Tome from the Skeptical Juror Guy

We've taken the Smashwords plunge to publish a book that is not intended to see the light of day as a print work. Inferno: An Inquiry Into the Willingham Fire will be an ebook first, and most likely, always.  

Smashwords converts an uploaded book into a number of different formats, for reading on all the different ebook platforms out there. Kindle, Sony, Nook, and Apple, the major players, all have their platforms.  We've priced the book at 99 cents, continuing our 99 cent experiment in other markets. 

The SJ's book about Cameron Todd Willingham is selling, slowly, at Amazon. Mostly in Kindle format. This book is an extension of that one, an investigation of the possible actual causes of the fire. While people mostly debate as to whether or not it was arson, there's nothing else written about the question of if it's not arson, what could have caused it?

One of the advantages of ebooks is that publishing color graphics is so much easier than in print. So there are plenty of pictures and graphs to illustrate points made in the text. 

We're also treating this as a learning experience for our upcoming publication of The Rate of Wrongful Conviction (thrilling title, isn't it? We have to come up with a better one), coming soon. Ish.

The 99 cent Experiment

Given the results obtained by Joe Konrath and other writers (though they are fiction writers and TSJ most emphatically is not), we're trying a little experiment, starting today.

We're dropping the Kindle pricing on the books about Byron Case, Cory Maye, and Cameron Todd Willingham to 99 cents each.   Amazon will only transfer 35 cents of that to us...however, we're currently making less than $2 a day on all three titles. Not a lot of risk, there. 

99 cents may get us all the way to #1 in the categories the books are listed in. Once that happens, we may get some attention in various venues. Certainly, we expect to sell more copies, in an absolute sense.   

And there's other publishing news coming. Interesting times are ahead.

The Kindle Edition of Book #3 is Available

The Skeptical Juror and the Trial of Cameron Todd Willingham is now available on Amazon.

This whirlwind effort was written in just about 4 weeks, then edited and submitted to both our digital print house and Kindle in less than a week! Kudos to TSJ for marathon days, nights and weekends in the Chair of Writing. Talk about your buns of steel!

In just a few days (we hope by next Tuesday) the print version will be available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well. We'll update the links when that happens.

Cameron Todd Willingham is a case getting national notoriety right now. No sooner had the Kindle version become available than we sold a copy, with zero marketing efforts! No telling what might happen with a bit of marketing on our parts.

Here's hoping that this is the big break the entire series needs. Watch this space!

Marketing Efforts and Future Directions

Cory Maye, as noted, is on Amazon now, so the next big effort is marketing. We're mailing books with a cover letter to a bunch of Mississippi newspapers, and we've submitted to a listing that goes to 35,000 librarians. Hey, if we could get one book in each library.....

And, watch this space! Last weekend we noticed a new bookstore had opened just two blocks from our house. It's been open since the first of August, so perhaps we're a little slow on the uptake. We walked down to Gatsby Books to meet and talk to the owner, Sean Moor.  He's a nice young man who has been making a living selling books online and on Amazon. He took it to brick & mortar to have the experience of running a bookstore. His collection of used books is of extremely high quality, and he also carries new books.

He's enthusiastic about local authors. You can get much more local than two blocks away! After some discussion we took him up on his offer to use his store space for a book signing, tentatively scheduled for 7pm October 20, 2010. We'll be working on some flyers, and other ways of publicizing the event. 

We also left a copy each of Cory Maye and Byron Case with Sean. We're in a bookstore!! Yay. First one anywhere.

So we'll be planning and working for the talk TSJ will give at the signing. Maybe we'll draw people in by talking about self-publishing. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Print Edition now on Amazon

As you see, the link to Amazon now leads directly to the print edition of The Skeptical Juror and the Trial of Cory Maye. This is the first (and as of this date) the only book about the case.

We are working at present at marketing this book, and Byron Case as well. Two in a series...what will be the third??

Cory Maye To the Printers!

We've finished editing the proof copy of Cory Maye, and have released it for production, which means that quietly, in the night, without notice to anyone, it will appear on Amazon. When we discover it, we'll let you all know.

Which means we go back to compulsively checking Amazon. Frequently. Because who knows when it will appear? It's like mushrooms sprouting after rain. Well. In rainy places. Not in Southern California, because it'll probably be November before we get rain again.  Gosh, I've gone all Bulwer-Lytton, here. 

But you know what I mean. 

The incidence of errors in the proof wasn't too bad. Either that or our editing got really crummy. You'll let us know, I'm sure. We've ordered a case of publisher's copies for publicity purposes, we'll be mailing them out to interested parties, including every crime reporter in Mississippi whose address we can dig up. 

More updates as news happens!