What you need to know if you want to buy Faerie Blood!

[annathepiper]

Third Place has provided me an ISBN for the ebook edition of Faerie Blood, O Internets, so my big project for tomorrow is going to be deploying for general release! Here is the Plan:

The mobi version will be going up on the Amazon Kindle store. I don’t actually need the ISBN for this version, since Amazon has its own internal tracking numbers for Kindle books, but an ISBN can be optionally specified.

The ISBN will officially be for the epub version, which I shall deploy to Barnes and Noble, to the iBookstore, and probably also to Smashwords depending on how much of a pain in the neck setting that up is. I’ve seen other writers posting about the headaches of Smashwords book conversion, so I need to read up on that and see how much work is required, or whether I can just straight-up post the perfectly lovely epub I’ve already handed out to Kickstarter backers.

I’m going to be targeting $5.99 as the retail price for versions of the ebook. This is comparable to prices I regularly pay for similar ebooks elsewhere, such as, say, with Carina. (And moving forward, for anything I self-pub, a pricepoint of $5.99 for a novel, $2.99 for a novella, and $.99 for a short story will be likely.) The instant I have confirmed links for these, I will be updating Faerie Blood's official page with them.

As a general point of interest, though, I will NOT be deploying the PDF version for general release. Two reasons for this: one, best practice for ISBNs is that if I really wanted to sell the PDF, I’d need another one, and two, PDF sales have declined sharply in ebook markets in general since the sales numbers haven’t supported them. But that said, I will continue to hand-sell the PDF to anyone who really wants one. It’s got the lovely high-res art in it, so as I’ve said before, it’d be a good fit for anybody with an iPad 3 or other tablet that’s friendly to high-resolution art.

For persons who want to buy the PDF, the same hand-sell prices I’ve offered before will still apply: i.e., $5 straight up to anyone who can pay me via Paypal.

Meanwhile, stand by for updates on the print edition! Third Place informs me that they’ll be queuing up the print run to target finishing up sometime late this coming week. So by next weekend, hopefully, I should have all the copies going out to Kickstarter backers. The rest of them will include contributors’ copies (most notably of course to the fabulous Kiri Moth, as well as a couple for Dara to keep in her own portfolio), as well as my initial personal stock. Chances of using a couple for a Goodreads giveaway are very, very high as well!

The plan for selling the print copies will be that Third Place will offer them for retail sale, so people will be able to go to their site to order them right off the Internet if so desired. Anybody who actually wants one signed, though, you can buy them directly from me. And if you specifically want one out of the first print run, let me know ASAP so I’ll know how many of this print run I can plan on selling to people.

For copies sold by Third Place, the expected retail price will be $16.99 plus applicable sales tax and shipping charges if you’re ordering from them online and want them to mail it to you. The main advantages to ordering from Third Place will be convenience (because you won’t have to wait for me, they can just print you a copy on demand), the ability to pay with credit cards and such, and the support of one of the most awesome bookstores in Seattle.

On the other hand, if you want to get it straight from me, I will ask $15 if you are local or if I can otherwise hand-deliver it. If I need to ship it to you, I’ll be asking $20 to cover shipping and packaging costs. As with the hand-sells of the PDF, the best way to get me payment for this if you’re not local to me will be Paypal.

Excited about being almost ready to offer this book out to you all!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Comments

[annathepiper]

I've been asking around about that, and the overall street word I've gotten (especially in direct advice from author Courtney Milan, who I wrote to to ask about this since she'd self-pubbed the third book in one of her series) is that it's actually less of a headache to work directly with Amazon, B&N, and the iBookstore. So I'll be doing that. B&N and Apple are both in progress setting up my accounts.

Smashwords remains interesting to me for two reasons, though. One, as a place that might get me onto the Kobo store--though I have an eye out for word about Kobo's soon to be launched self-pub system. It'll be interesting to see whether Smashwords deploying to Kobo on my behalf would be any more advantageous than going to Kobo directly.

And two, Smashwords IS device-agnostic, which is important.

I did observe though that Smashwords will not let me upload ANYTHING except a Microsoft word doc. Period. I can't upload my finished ebooks that I've already gotten, despite the fact that I've got perfectly lovely epub, mobi, and PDF files right here that I'd be happy to just set up for sale without having to throw them through a conversion system. :/ That their conversion is mandatory kind of pisses me off, so I'm just considering whether it's worth it to go to the trouble.

The actual technical difficulty of doing it I'm not that worried about, really. I absolutely have the technical ability to do it, I'm just annoyed on principle that in order to deploy to Smashwords, I'd have to go over my Word doc AGAIN and tweak anything that isn't exactly right for Smashwords. I've already done that work, saving out to HTML, and having Calibre convert for me. It seems extremely silly to have to do that again!

[mmegaera]

Yeah, if you're going at it from that direction, I can see that it would be frustrating. When I published Repeating History, I started with Smashwords, and then used the already-tweaked Smashwords Word version to convert to mobi for Amazon, and I was done, with six or seven salable versions from one major tweak and one minor. If you've already done all the hard work to convert all those versions, it does seem silly to have to let Smashwords do it again its way.

[annathepiper]

*nodnod* I thought about going through an aggregator like Smashwords for all the various services I was interested in; I was also looking at BookBaby. But Ms. Milan's advice had swayed me against that route, mostly because I wanted to avoid having a third party between me and my royalties as much as I can.

I gotta mull it some more though. Kobo I want to be on because they're pretty much the dominant ebook player in Canada, but I don't know when their self-pub system is supposed to go live. And right now I'm still only aware of Smashwords as a viable device-agnostic place to sell.

So I figure I have a couple of questions to settle.

One, I gotta decide whether to go ahead and deploy to Smashwords at all for the sake of having a device-agnostic place to sell. The alternative to that would be to formally deploy to the big device-specific places and hand-sell to people who'd like to just deal with me directly.

Two, if I deploy to Smashwords, I'll need to decide whether to have them deploy to Kobo on my behalf. Much will depend on when Kobo's self-pub system goes live. I wish I knew when that will be!

[mmegaera]

Well, I wish you luck in your decisions. I didn't think it through nearly as much as you did, but I probably should have [g].

[annathepiper]

Thanks much! :)