I was not terribly specific on my last post: today, March 2nd, is the final free day for A Gift of Ghosts. If you haven’t reviewed it, today would be a great day to post a review. Or if there are people you’d recommend it to, again, today would be a good day. I’m at school all day, with two presentations, treatment plans, clients — it’s going to be a long day. It’d be nice to come home to a successful book giveaway!

I admit, though, I have low expectations. The problem with needing to use the day before my time ran out is that this week was/is midterms. I spent my time much more focused on school than on making sure the free book sites knew there was one more free book in the daily thousands of freebies. C’est la vie. It seems to me — anecdotally, at least — that people who get the book for free are much less likely to ever read it. It just sits on their Kindles, invisible amongst the multitude of other freebies. So I’m not going to feel badly about my own laziness, even if I have wasted the day.

I’d always planned to publish Ghosts on other platforms once the 90 days of KDP Select were up and it turns out that they conveniently finish right in the middle of spring break next week. Handy, since it means I’ll have time to work on the formatting and on creating a print-ready cover.

I’m going to use Create Space for the print version and Smashwords for the other e-versions. I think I’m probably competent enough to publish on all platforms by myself, but the Smashwords contract lets you stop publishing with them when you feel like it. If I reach a place where I’m making so much money (ha, ha, ha) that I feel badly about the 10% that’s going to Smashwords, I can pull the book off that service, make my own editions, and publish them individually. But at the moment the 10% royalties they’ll get seems as if it’ll be a reasonably good deal.

Unfortunately, I’ve discovered why people all use the annoying 99 cent prices: Apple requires it. You’d think if they were going to be such control freaks, they could be control freaks with round numbers, but no. So I need to change my price to a 99 cent number if I want to be in the Apple bookstore. If I hadn’t already been debating whether an unusual price forces potential buyers to think and potentially loses them, I’d be more annoyed than I am. But so it goes. I will join the ranks of the 99 cent pricers.

In fact, I already did. Since my time in KDP Select is coming to an end, I need to use my last free day. I wanted to experiment with the blurb again, but I decided I’d experiment with pricing, too. Unfortunately, it sort of messes up the experiment — I’ll never know whether the changes were the result of the blurb or the price — but unless I  keep Ghosts in KDP for another 90 days, this is my last chance to try these out. Well, last chance with a free book. Anyway, I wrote a “traditional” blurb — the kind that most people use, no quotes, no parentheses, no authorial chatting, and more or less a summary of the plot. A little more less than more. And I changed the price to $4.99. The $4.99 price is mostly because of the free day: I’m curious to see whether I get more downloads with a higher price, because it will look like a better deal. 

Immediate result: a dead stop to sales. I’d like to blame it on the blurb, but it’s probably a result of the price change. But it will be interesting to see what happens next week, after the free day. That’ll be the true test. The last time I changed the blurb I added details but also made it very first person — me, the author, chatting with an imaginary reader. That time the post-free day results were terrific, averaging 19 sales a day for the week after, before steadily dropping off. If instead sales stay steady at nothing for a couple of weeks, I’ll change the blurb back to quirky. With much happiness, I admit. I’ll feel like my quirkiness is being validated!

Alas, however, the $3.50 price point is probably gone for good.

A few months back, I wrote about goal-setting and all the “ought to”s that authors get hit with. And then a couple months after that, I wrote about rules and the surprising number of completely arbitrary rules I was being told to follow. (I might have been a little nicer in my description than ‘completely arbitrary’, but maybe not, too.)

I based my ideas about self-publishing on the ought-tos and the rules and the advice all over the place. Not that I did any of the ought-tos or followed the rules, but my conclusion was essentially that I shouldn’t worry about Ghosts, because unless I worked way, way, way harder than I intended to, and did a bunch of things that didn’t remotely interest me, no one would ever really buy it.

Note, please, that I love Ghosts. Truly, madly, deeply. I think it’s a terrific little book, I think Akira and Zane are great characters, I love the way the story unfolds. But every author feels that way about her work! An author’s opinion is worth nothing.

And my editor side is pragmatic. In the gigantic sea of slush that is Amazon, even good little fishes get eaten by…drat, I can’t believe I’ve forgotten what eats Nemo’s mom. Ah, a barracuda! Yes, the barracudas munch down even really nice little fish. Although, really, that’s a pretty tangled metaphor, since it’s more like the nice little fish starve because the big fish get all the food. Ghosts is a nice little fish, and I fully expected it to starve. I truly thought that I’d be thrilled every day I made a sale, and that if I sold 100 books in my first year, I’d feel lucky.

I do feel lucky. But I also feel, more than ever, that the ought-tos ought to be ignored and the rules ought to be broken. Although, I suppose (my editor side at work again) that it’s possible that if I had followed all those ought-tos and all those rules, I’d be rich by now. But you know, I don’t really think so. I think I would have made my life difficult and stressful and miserable, and instead of feeling lucky to be where I am, I’d be feeling anxious about not doing better.

Anyway, today A Gift of Ghosts made it onto a paid Amazon bestseller list for the first time. It’s the Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Romance > Fantasy, Futuristic, Ghosts list, so yes, we can call it a niche and it looks as if it hit 80 but has now started to drop, so we’re not exactly heading into big money territory, but still. Yay, Ghosts!

If I’m counting correctly (always possible that I’m not), it sold 43 copies on Monday and Tuesday. I used a free day on Saturday, so it might have been the carryover from that.

Regardless of why it sold, though, my conclusions are twofold: 1) don’t believe the people who tell you all the things you must do and all the rules you have to follow and 2) don’t believe the people who tell you it doesn’t matter what you do because you won’t sell any until you have lots of books available, either.

And now, back to writing Thoughts. I discovered recently because of advice from my friend Tim that Sylvie is not my protagonist and neither is Dillon! In fact, it’s possible that Sylvie is my antagonist. I’m still trying to see how that plays out, but it definitely means some early revising needs to happen. (It seems really weird to me that your protagonist and antagonist could wind up with an HEA, but it looks as if that’s the direction I’m headed — since Lucas is the only character who’s quite clear about a goal, he’s the protagonist. Funny, huh?)

So I’m staring at the Kindle Direct Publishing Report page. It’s 5:08. Ghosts has been free for 14 hours and 8 minutes, and I have been so much more obsessive than I wanted to be. I think I managed to turn the computer off for an hour and a half. But I’m trying to refrain from pushing the Month-to-Date Unit Sales link again, because I just pushed it two minutes ago and really, how neurotic can I be?

I think, though, that there will be a moment sometime in the next two hours that I’d like to catch, so that I can write it down and post it to my OhLife and on some future day, I’ll get reminded of the exact, precise, specific time when 1000 copies of Ghost had been downloaded. And then I notice that there’s a little down arrow, indicating a menu, next to the View Report For Amazon.com field. And I look, and oh, you can also view the report for Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de and Amazon.fr and a few other Amazons, and that’s kind of cool.

Even cooler? At 5:08, 946 copies of Ghosts had been downloaded in the US. But 113 had been downloaded in the UK and 3 in Germany. Which means, basic math skills don’t fail me, 1062 copies total downloaded. And wow, wow, wow. Okay, lots of those people probably won’t read it and some of them won’t like it. But still, it is a thrilling feeling.

OhLife, incidentally, is a wonderful online journal: it sends a daily email that asks the question, How did your day go? and includes one of your past entries. Way too many of mine have been sad, and it’s made me less inclined to respond to the email. (Yesterday’s said, “Trying to write a girl from the 1950s. Six months ago, I could have called Mom for help with the voice. Sometimes the sad is just overwhelming.” Unsurprisingly, I didn’t feel inspired to answer it.) Today, though, today, I will definitely write back.

It’s 5:23. 961 copies downloaded in the US, 119 in the UK. Thank you all!