I know I've bombarded you with a lot of stuff lately, friends. Appreciate you suffering through my initial forays into the self-publishing market.
Here's where we stand on everything:
1. The actual, entire book is still on track to be published on June 12th. (More on that below).
2. If you have an iTunes account, you can pre-order the book right at this very second using the below link:
On June 12th, the book will be automatically downloaded and added to all of your devices for your reading enjoyment. ;)
(Also, if you do read the books, appreciate it if you would leave a review and a rating on the book itself.)
3. If you would like to pre-order on
Barnes and Noble (EDIT: PREORDER ON BARNES AND NOBLE
HERE!)or Kobo, it's coming, I promise. I'm not sure what the hold up is on B&N, but I know there's a backlog of a couple weeks on Kobo (anybody use this service anyways?). As soon as the Nook version is available, I shall let you know. With considerable fanfare, I'm sure.
In the meantime, if you want to
download the preview for your Nook, here you go: Nook Sample
4. If you are a Kindle User (which I see a lot of you are, based on the results of the contest), Amazon does not enjoy playing with Smashwords, which is my chosen distributor. In fact, unless I upload myself or sell 1,000 copies of the book, Smashwords will not distribute to Amazon. Fear not, I will make sure you guys get your copy in June - either by uploading it myself (most likely) or by selling the 1,000 books necessary to join the Amazon-Smashwords club (wanted, but we'll see).
In the meantime, you can
download the preview for your Kindle:
Kindle Sample
So a bit more on my decision to do pre-orders and wait until June 12th to publish:
Preorders have long been a marketing tool used by big publishers to sell lots of books. The premise basically is that you can build up weeks worth of sales and marketing efforts that will all take effect on the same day. So instead of a slow growth in regular orders, I have 8 weeks of activity. Ideally, this should bump my book up on the bestseller lists (A girl can dream, can't she?).
iBooks is actually really cool about supporting indie authors, so there's a chance if I get a lot of pre-orders, they will pick it up and market it as well. So if I seem a bit...pushy...with the pre-orders, that's why. Y'all know I'm hoping to make a drastic career change, and this is how we do it.
The other thing I noticed from my (still on-going) contest is a lot of folks still like the paper and ink versions. Well up until yesterday, I thought that was kind of impossible.
It's actually not - although it will have to be performed slowly.
The deal is that, using the Amazon company CreateSpace,
I can actually have my book printed and made available on Amazon.com (and also they will distribute to Kindle, which is nice). If I sell it on Amazon, I get ~$1.69/book. If I have a bunch of copies shipped to me, I actually can get ~$5.00 per book if I sell them myself.
So what does that mean?
Right now, I'm just toying with the idea of doing this. Obviously, my marketing strategy is to have the books available in every single market I can to reach the maximum amount of audiences. E-books are more profitable for me (I get $2.60-$3.10 per book sold) than if you buy the physical copy off of Amazon.com, but having physical copies to sell would allow me to do more in-person marketing (book readings, libraries, book stores, etc). I can buy 100 books for ~$550 and sell them myself for $10.99 (or less, I dunno). I might wait and see if I can use the eBook profits to support the physical copy purchase before I make any decisions.
Because while I totes want to have my own words in my hands, I don't want 99 copies of them.
(Important to note: If you purchase an eBook and want a physical copy, I will absolutely give you a discount equal to the price of the eBook. I might even put my John Hancock on it, for whatever that's worth)
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