We've been a bit quiet on here since the Dreaming Demon published, so I thought I'd give a quick update on what's been going on since that momentous day. We've had some encouraging results, and sold some copies! We've also had some nice positive reviews on Amazon.co.uk and a couple on Amazon.com. We've noticeably had much more success on Amazon than on Smashwords, and several times the Dreaming Demon has entered the top 100 of the Amazon.co.uk Dark Fantasy best sellers list, peaking at around number 60. Not bad for a first release. After an initial flurry of sales, things have settled down to a steady level.

We've then been looking into publicity options. We've had a guest post on the Dark Phantom blog, and posted links on as many blogs, forums and websites who are happy to take authors posting publicity material - many places don't like this as they fear their forums will become overloaded with people trying to plug their own work, which I guess is fair enough. This means you've got to tread carefully, and not just post things willy-nilly, as the last thing you want to do is annoy your potential customers.

Many of the free publicity options available seem to only allow you to publicise a book when it's in a free offer period. We've been wrestling with whether this is a good plan or not. The main argument for running a free promotional period seems to be that if people like your free work, they might go and buy some of your other work. This is especially valuable if you have a series, where it makes sense that if you can grab reader's attention with the first book, they're likely to look for the next instalment and be prepared to pay. However, if you only have one book out, is this a worthwhile plan? Having read blogs of people who have gone down this road, it does seem to translate into several hundred downloads, which does get you visibility, and may pull in some more Amazon reviews. Whether that will translate into sales after the end of the promotional period remains to be determined. So, the question is, do we go for a free promotion now, or wait for the full novel to be completed (hopefully sometime early in 2015) to have something to feed off the promotion. We've also been trying to support other Indie authors who are in similar positions, by downloading or buying their novellas and doing what we can to help publicise their work if we like it. This is also a good way to connect with other authors and try to learn what has worked for them publicity-wise, and hopefully we'll start to integrate into the Indie author network that's out there.

The other thing we've been up to is working on getting our ratio up on www.critters.org. This is a great place to get feedback on your work from fellow authors, and we've put the first chapter up for review on there, which should be going live next week. Part of the deal with Critters is that you don't get your work sent out until you've critiqued a certain number of other folk's stories yourself. So my bus commute has been invaluable in allowing me reading time for the critters stories. I've found that the reading is the easy bit, but putting together a useful critique of a story takes quite some time, especially as you need to be diplomatic with your wording. Writes tend to be quite insecure about their work, and you want to help people make their work better, but not to make them despair and give up! Now we're looking forward to seeing what other authors think of the first chapter of the new novel, with the working title "Miss Silk and the Tomb of Menkare".

For less than the price of a cup of coffee we take you to the furthest shores. We knock on your door and take you on an amazing journey. Are you the burglar we’re looking for to help with a troublesome dragon that has stolen our treasure? We will take you on epic journeys in enchanted forests. You will meet elves, fairies, the wild hunt. We will take you to mountains and run from mountain trolls and storm giants. We will fight against tyrants and evil kings. We will be the companions of peasant boys and girls with big dreams and even greater destinies. We will fight for justice and seek blades magical and named.

We will take you with us while we walk the night with velvet paws. We shall meet pale strangers who dance with beautiful ladies until sunrise, and handsome dark men who dislike the full moon. They roam New Orleans and their pasts are mysterious and dark, studded with tragedies and lost loves. Their cousins are much more unsavoury. They hide under our bed and steal our breaths as we sleep. They creep at night and consort with ghouls and witches. Some are good and some are bad. Some dance to the beat of exotic drums, worshiping dark gods which show themselves only when the stars are right.

We take you to the furthest corners of the galaxy. To dystopian futures here on earth where humans fight for the last scrap food or fight in huge arenas for the gratification of a placid population, or the edges of the universe where colonists have forgotten about earth. Where wars are waged in places so far away the troops take decades to get there, to wars with evil arachnoids and to desert planets where water is rare and precious and exotic spices are mined.

We take you to the deepest darkest jungles to rediscover lost cities filled with secrets that would shake mankind, ocean floors with shipwrecks carrying mysterious cargoes, and locked vaults that shady organizations want to keep hidden.

We take you to peaceful villages where grisly crimes of vengeance have taken place, and unlikely detectives uncover the suspect’s motives like the layers of a cake. Where serial killers place their unfortunate victims and clever agents never rest until they catch them.

We take you with us in our worlds and we leave you there to be lost for days or even weeks. To meet the heroes and heroines and perhaps fall a little bit in love with them. To meet the dastardly villains and cheer at their demise. To be sad at the hero’s losses and nervously await to find out their fate. Will our heroes triumph? Will they perish? Turn the pages and find out. And if we do it right you will be thinking about the characters and places you have been for days after you have finished the book. Sometimes the heroes become your friend and never quite leave you.

And all this we do for less than the price of a cup of coffee. Next time you are wondering if you want to download a book for 2.99 ask yourself: Isn’t worth it? 

As folks new to the publishing game, we need to start to understand our potential customers, and the lie of the land in the writing market, and I'm currently subscribing to several blog RSS feeds to try to learn from people who have traversed this path before. From the first dip of my toe into this water, I came across an animated discussion at the passive voice blog about whether new self-published authors should give away their works for free, charge a nominal amount, or charge close to the price charged by established authors. 

The case for giving away a first novel for free is that people may give you a try on impulse if there's no outlay for them, and free books get many more downloads than pay books. By building your author "brand", accumulating fans, and drawing them into your work and your world, they're more likely to be prepared to pay for future novels.

The counter arguments are many. First, if you're a first time author, you don't yet have the follow-up novels available that would benefit from this strategy. Depending on the writer, a novel can take from a couple of months to years to complete, so that approach needs the long term thinking to be built into your plan from the start. Its also clear that there are a lot of free books of dubious quality out there, with poor grammar and spelling. If you price your offering in amongst these, it may get lost in the noise and low expectations. There is also the question of how many of the free e-books that are downloaded actually get read. If you've invested money in purchasing a book, you're less likely to just let it languish unread on your e-reader, and you're therefore more likely to become a fan who will buy subsequent titles. 

As a scientist, I liked this interesting analysis on how differently priced e-books perform, with e-books in the $2.99 to $3.99 range appearing to give optimal returns. To me this feels about right for a novel by an unknown author. That equates to around £2 - £2.50, which is less than we spend on a coffee at Starbucks or Costa. A coffee takes the Barista around a minute to prepare and gives only 20 minutes of enjoyment. A book can represent a year of hard graft by the author, and keep you entertained for days or weeks. 

However, the arguments seem to have been well worn in the writing blogs as to why people (myself included) are much happier to invest their money on an impulse to buy a coffee than to buy a book. We'll pop in to grab a coffee (and maybe a slice of cake) at the slightest opportunity, without giving it a second thought, but we tend to put a lot more thought into whether we're going to press the "buy" button for an e-book. Why do we have this different perception of the value of these two items? That might get a bit philosophical, but here's my thoughts.

I know  I'm going to enjoy my coffee, especially if its from a coffee shop I've been to before. With a book, each one is unique, so I am taking a chance on whether I'm going to enjoy it. This is why people often stick with authors they already know and love. 

If a coffee's bad its only ruined 20 minutes of my life - if I invest time in a book that's bad, I feel cheated out of a couple of weeks reading time (although I'm finally starting to learn to actually leave books I don't like unfinished, and start a new, better one). 

Of course, even better is to buy a book and a coffee, and read one while drinking the other. 

Alex has some strong opinions on why we should value books more highly which she will be adding to the blog shortly, but in the meantime I'd be interested to hear other opinions from folks out there.