I’ll report back on the results of this exciting experiment.

Update

OK, promotion’s over. 700 or so ‘sales’ in the US. and 1020 or so in the UK.

But I am two-and-twenty, gentle reader.

What happened was: Just prior to Christmas, I found myself corresponding with a UK publisher about Déjà Vu. He loved the book, which was hurray. But he thought that there was no market left in the UK, which was boo.

Like the Spanish, I decided to approach the New World.

Given that life is short, I contacted rather more literary agencies than I should have; within a few hours I had received one or two offers of representation and several more requests for the manuscripts of Déjà Vu, Flashback and The Amber Rooms.

By the end of the week, I had taken two phone calls – one with each of the agencies I wanted most – and was won over by Katherine Flynn and Ike Williams.

So it’s with Kneerim & Williams that I’ll be resting my hat. Katherine will be getting back to me with editorial notes on Déjà Vu quite soon, and we’ll take it from there.

Terribly.

Terribly exicted.

It’s fair to say that Nicholas Clee is traditional in his perspective.

Ebooks are destroying this economic model. …Will 99P become the optimum price for an ebook? If so, who is going to make any money out of publishing or writing books for such a market?

I agree with the first point here. The ebook is a disruptive entity. But anybody who has been around since the early 1990s has seen, in the music industry, an example of electronic merchandise destroying an economic model based on the physical. Perhaps ‘destroyed’ is the wrong term to use in this context. The market is still there. But how much growth does the CD market have? How much in the hardback market?

The second point speaks to a fundamental issue of business. One should not ask ‘How are all the employees of the legacy publishing industry – from receptionists to the CEO – going to maintain their income?’ because this leads to the problem that afflicts all publishers: they decide as a group, implicitly or explicitly, to act as a cartel. Prices are kept high. This creates situations where the electronic version of a book costs the same as or more than the tangible. Try explaining this to a consumer. It’s hard. ‘We need these prices because of the way our business was set up’ makes for poor advertising copy.

Now for the part that mentions your humble correspondent:

As for the financial implications – on the Me and My Big Mouth blog, the novelist Ian Hocking … has confided his sales figures and revenues from self-publishing ebooks with Amazon. Two of them have sold more than 8,000 copies. This is a figure that many conventionally published novelists would envy. But Hocking’s profit to date is only just over £300 (his revenue is just over £2,000).

Had Hocking chosen a conventional publisher, he might well have sold fewer copies, but he would have earned more, thanks to the publisher’s advance.

Yes, my profit is just over £300, but this figure is essentially meaningless (the revenue is more informative) as a proxy for success. First, I’ve ploughed virtually all the money from the first book into the second, and so on. ‘Profit’, then, in this context, represents the amount that I’ve decided not to spend. I might have adjusted that up or down arbitrarily. Second, my science fiction novels continue to sell in greater number each month, and unless I can find other book-related expenditure, this ‘profit’ figure will rise sharply. Overall, I believe it was more sensible for me (as a writer nobody has heard of) to price low and sell in quantity than opt for the preferred option of a legacy publisher, which, perhaps, is to price high and sell few.

The question of the publisher advance is an interesting one. It would certainly be in my short term interest to land a large advance, which I may not earn out. But, if I may say, the industry-wide behaviour of doling out these advances is one of the reasons the business model is unsupportable.

To return to this question: Is 99p too cheap for a book? I really don’t know. If you’re employed by a business that requires the new Ken Follett book to be £16 or more, you’ll probably think it’s too cheap and consider me an upstart who is undercutting you. If you’re an individual, creative person who is putting out a product and is in control of the consumer experience, you will think carefully about the impact that your price will have on the perception of the product. I think 99p for Déjà Vu represents good value. After all, you can get it from a library for free, and that doesn’t lessen its worth. Neither does picking up a second-hand copy from the church bazar.

Last word from Mr Clee, which requires no comment beyond a brief nod to its past tense:

An industry that paid unrecoverable advances for books, and then published them in formats that the public thought too expensive, had its eccentricities.

I wanted to share this excerpt:

Saskia enjoys a metric ton (or rather, tonne, as Mr. Hocking is British) of character development during the course of the story, since she begins from a point that’s worse off than a blank slate: the little she knows about her current life is a lie. As the plot progresses, she worries who she truly is, and if she’ll be lost to the resurfacing of her body’s violent personality. By the end, she’s far outstripped everyone else in complexity and sheer awesomeness.

Did you know that Déjà Vu’s price has been slashed by 16% to make it 72p? That’s 72p British pence, people.

Once an author’s book is in the Kindle Select programme, it is eligible for five days of free promotion every ninety days. So, as an experiment, I’m making my novel Proper Job free for today and tomorrow, just to see what happens.

Update at 11:30

I was concerned about what would happen to the rank of a promoted book. That is, when being promoted, at what position would the book enter the ‘free’ chart? Would it even go into the ‘free’ chart, or just be marked as ‘free’ in the paid chart? After the promotion, at what position would it re-enter the paid chart?

Well, Proper Job has essentially had its ranking stripped. It no longer has a ranking according to its Amazon information page, and on the KDP dashboard (the back-end that authors have access to), the ranking information is marked as ‘unavailable’. So it looks as though promoted books are de-indexed.

However, this doesn’t mean that people can’t find the book. 14 copies were ‘sold’ in the US since it became free; and 26 in the UK. To put that in perspective, I’ve sold at 86p only 34 copies of Proper Job since it was published in November.

I’ll post more data here as it becomes available.

Update at 12:00

Amazon has now indexed Proper Job in the ‘free’ chart, so I guess there isn’t a ‘limbo’ chart after all. The delay is almost certainly a lag due to database updates and letting an hour’s worth of ‘sales’ accrue to compute the new ranking.

As a data point, Proper Job was ranked at position 8,299 in yesterday’s paid chart and is now at 1, 665 in the free chart. That’s for the UK. In the US, the ranking is still classed as unknown.

Update at 20:30

Now ranked at 862 in the US for free books, and 34 in the Humor chart. In the UK, it’s at 304 in the overall chart and 18 in the Humour chart. US sales: 183. UK sales: 92.

Now, the paperback costs £6.67 and the Kindle edition costs 86p. I’d advise you to buy the Kindle edition – and if you don’t have a Kindle, why not buy one? You’ll get access to free out-of-copyright books and a growing marketplace of contemporary fiction.

The book evolved on several fronts across the course of its development. The initial draft was edgier. Its main character – then called Fabe, not Andy – was a crueller individual. It was novel where the main character and the reader laughed ‘at’ things. Now, the novel is one where the laughter is ‘with’.

Structurally, too, I changed some elements to take it away from the somewhat Hollywood three-act structure. These explicit frameworks are well and good in retrospect, but my experience of writing Proper Job has confirmed my prejudice that they are best applied in retrospect to help fix problems. They cannot be used as a blueprint. (That is, I can’t use them like that.)

So here it is. The final draft is about 60,000 words, I believe. With revisions, I probably worked through 200,000 or more.

Subtext and – of course – schmubtext. However, Proper Job is also about my relationship with Cornwall.

Thanks to my stalwart editor Clare Christian and equally stalwart proofer Olivia Wood, without whom Proper Job would be a wibbly pile of kack.

Publish and be damned.