First: Thank you very much, readers and especially reviewers of The Secret! Two of you have posted very nice things–you know who you are, and to some extent I do too, and I appreciate it.
Second: The book continues to do better than I expected–especially in the UK. In fact it went to the #23 spot for contemporary fantasy, which is really quite nice. Since I expected nothing at all from the thing, its performance in the US has also been a nice surprise. Plus, I’d never sold anything at all in France or Australia before. Neat!
Third: Nearly all “sales” have been via Kindle Unlimited. I know this because I see very few sales in Amazon’s reports…but I’ve seen many thousands of “pages read,” which means either KU people or Amazon Prime people “borrowing” the book for a month. Unfortunately, sort of, Amazon seems to base the book’s Sales Rank on borrows vs. pages read, and doesn’t give me any direct data about borrows, so I have to draw inferences. (Incidentally, I’d LOVE to get data about how many people see the book’s page–or just the cover & title–and how many go on to take some action related to purchasing or reading the thing. That’d let me try out different descriptive text, covers, whatever…and that would help Amazon too. But they’re stingy with data.)
Fourth: When I’m looking at Kindle Unlimited titles, higher prices make me more likely to borrow that book–it feels more like a bargain. So I’m raising the price to $3.99 effective whenever the ‘Zon gets around to accepting and pushing out my changes. Last time that meant they screwed up my book’s description even though the one I provide via “Author Central” is supposed to prevail–see, the one I give when setting up the book doesn’t allow the formatting–but maybe that won’t happen this time. Or maybe it will. But anyway, a “sale” at $3.99 helps a lot more with the book’s rank, which affects how often Amazon shows it to people, and that may or may not apply to “borrows”…but either way I don’t see much downside.
So if you don’t have it yet, and want it for $.99? Hurry! (Or just ask me for a free copy. I don’t mind.)
Fifth: I’m going to be starting a daily writing regimen. Just half an hour a day, first thing in the morning. That’s for new material only–editing will happen later if at all. If I can keep it up, that’s a novel every 2-3 months…but I don’t know how it’ll go. Still, I’m hopeful.
Sixth: Have fun out there!
BTW, I loved it. You know I hated it to end. I’m an Amazon Unlimited member and I don’t ever really look at prices when choosing a book. So do you get paid per page read or any time your work is “borrowed”?
Glad you’ll be writing again.
Well, thanks for letting me (and other people!) know what you thought of it. I was wondering whether you’d like the thing once I finally published it…beta readers, at least, were pretty polarized about the ending.
As for payment, it’s sort of weird. At one point I got paid whenever somebody both borrowed a book and read past the 10% sample size, regardless of the length of the book or story. Amazon’s switched things around so now I get paid per page (or “Kindle Edition Normalized Page,” whatever that is). But it means I have no direct way to know how many “borrows” have happened…and yet Amazon’s still using the borrows to determine the book’s so-called Sales Rank. Clearly I don’t know what I’m doing, though, because TS’s sales rank has dropped off a cliff in both the US and the UK ever since I raised the price–even though my “pages read” total is trending upward. So I’m going to shrug and leave it alone while thinking of something else. {8’>
David! I’ve been wondering where all of your blogs are! And here’s one, dang, I’m a happy camper now.
I’ll read it, but as of this moment, I’ve been out of the loop while it looks that you’ve written something, a book or something — sorry, but one of your fans (me) is a little slow, but definitely glad to hear you’re thriving!! I like that, you deserve it big-time!
lpaulick
Thanks, Lynelle! Yeah, there’s a new book out. It’s been more fun to “watch people read” the thing than I’d expected–though Amazon’s ability to monitor pages read does strike me as creepy–and it’s inspired me to write more. Longer stuff, though, since readers seem to strongly prefer novels over short stories.
(Personally, I enjoy writing short stories–something new every few days! But some of my stories have yet to see a single sale or “borrow” on Amazon and none of them have done well.)
Not sure how I got on that topic. Thanks for coming by, though. {8’>