Home Straight

Finishing up Lab Rat One, which I'm theoretically releasing on Thursday.  That will make five books published, with two more to come this year.  I've put tentative plans in place for next year's covers - for Hunting, Bones of the Fair, and The Sleeping Life (though it remains to be seen whether I'll get through them, since The Sleeping Life was only halfway through first draft when I started my revising spree).

My advertising for Stray was a moderate success with a nice spurt of thirty-odd sales in a few hours shooting me up briefly into the sub-rankings (once you get in the top 5000 or so, you start appearing in various sub-genre lists). 

If you see anyone on those sub-genre lists (unless it's an extremely obscure sub-genre), that person has sold dozens of copies in the last few hours (going up to hundreds of copies a day for lower numbers).  Whether I've achieved the result I was aiming for in the broad sense (starting to appear on the "Customers who bought this book also bought" recommendations) remains to be seen, but I think my spurt was a little too short this time around.

With the promotion advertisement past, I'll be reverting prices mid-July, with Stray and Lab Rat going to $2.99 (my "first six months" price) and Medair, Champion, and Stained Glass Monsters will be $4.99 (my standard price).  Price and your chances of selling as a self-publisher are really impossible to predict - some people won't pay more than $0.99 or $2.99 for a self-published author.  But many do - and some don't even look at books priced that low, on the "you get what you pay for" philosophy.  I'll stick with my current system, with the occasional month-long special for promotional purposes, which should capture both markets.  Or not.  Thinking about covers is much more fun.  :)