Sometimes Publishing Gets Weird

From time to time I check to see how my books are doing on Amazon.com. I check the ranking, review the descriptions, think about cover design and whether or not I can afford to have a better one done.

And, I look at the price. Now, since I set the price when I publish the book, that might seem odd, but the fact is that I only set the suggested retail price. Amazon can change the price at which they decide to sell the book, and so I sometimes see it available for a lower price, which I will occasionally announce so that anyone who's thinking about buying it will be tempted all that much more.

But today I looked at the price, saw that Amazon.com has Blowing It! available in paperback for $6.75, which is 75 cents below list—nice—but that someone else has it new for $6.32. Now, I have recently made the book available for expanded distribution, so that retailers other than Amazon can carry it. Now, this seller charges $3.99 for shipping, and if you buy it from Amazon with an order totaling $35 in eligible items, you can get it shipped for free, so Amazon is probably still a better deal.

It doesn't, by the way, make any difference to me.

But what was truly bizarre is that the price for used copies of Blowing It! start at (are you ready for this?) $19.05. For a used copy of a book that you can buy new for $6.32. Makes perfect sense.

And even stranger is that one seller (I'll leave it to your curiosity to find out which) sells the book for $999.11! If I could sell even one copy for that price, I would be very happy indeed. In fact, if you are of a mind to pay that kind of money for a copy, shoot me an email and I'll arrange it. I'll even throw in the shipping (which this seller doesn't)!

And let me make something perfectly clear. Blowing It! and Eric's Secret are print-on-demand titles. There is no such thing as a first edition, and they will be in print for as long as I want them to be. Each book is printed when you order it and not a moment sooner. There is absolutely no reason to pay more for a used copy of any of my books than for a new copy (although if you can find a used copy for less, jump on it).

Perhaps someday, when I'm dead and gone and my heirs decided to withdraw the books from circulation, existing copies will be worth the extra money, if only for the novelty. But for now, save your money and buy a new copy or a Kindle edition, and have a good read.

And use the money you save to buy some balloons. $992.79 will buy enough balloons to fill a house. And that, I can get next to.

Corrections Complete (I Hope)

The corrections to the Kindle edition took far less time than I though they would, thanks to the ease of editing HTML in SubEthaEdit. The corrected Kindle edition is now available. The print edition is available through CreateSpace, but may take a couple of days to become available again on Amazon.com.

With luck I'd found all the errors, and Blowing It! will now be a smoother read.

Corrections, Step One

I have submitted what I hope is the final edition of Blowing It! to CreateSpace to correct the many typographical errors. For up to 48 hours (though in my experience with CS more likely less than 12) the print edition will not be available.

Next step is to correct the Kindle edition, which takes longer because I have to edit the HTML files to avoid changing any of the formatting adjustments I made. But I will be working on it daily until it's done, and I'll post when it's submitted.

Thank you all for your patience and kind words about the book. After I've corrected this book, I have another one coming up. Not the suggested sequel (sorry, not yet), but something else.

But that's a subject for another post.

Time To Breathe

The novel has been out for a few months now. I have sold more than 20 copies, and given away 170. Now that there are people out there reading the book, it's time for me to let it go.

Blowing It! is not the kind of book you can shout out to the world about. It has a very small potential audience of people interested in balloons sexually, or interested in people who are interested in balloons. So it's basically time for me to let the book take on a life of its own, whatever that life might be.

I'll be here to fulfill orders if needed, and I am now going to dive in and correct all those typographical errors I alluded to earlier (I would have sooner, but my only printed copy of the book was with my wife, who has finally finished reading it).

And then I'll let it go, go on to other book projects that I can tell anyone and everyone that I wrote, and that may have larger readerships, though only time will tell.

Perhaps Blowing It! will catch on widely enough in fetish circles to make me think about going back to do the sequel. Perhaps not. But I'm still very happy that I wrote the book and went through the self-publishing process. I've learned a lot.

And if you are one of the almost-200 people who have read the book, I hope that I have created something that was worth your time, and that you'll eventually find a way to let me know.

And, straight from the heart, I want to say "thank you."

I've Got Readers

At least, I've got downloaders. I've given away, as of this writing, 137 copies of the Kindle edition of Blowing It! and there's still some 16 hours left on the promotion. It will be interesting to see what happens in the time that follows, if I really do sell more books after the free promotion than I sold before.

If you are one of the nice people who downloaded my book in the last couple of days, you can help. Review it on Amazon, talk about it in the balloon forums, leave comments here on the blog. Even if you didn't like the book, just talk about it.

And if you haven't downloaded the book yet, there's still time to get it for free. Right here.

Giving It Away

It was a strange feeling to wake up this morning, go to my Kindle app, and search the store for "Balloon Fetish," and find my book listed at $0.00. Am I doing the right thing? Others who have tried free promos say that their sales increased after a free promo. I just want lots of people to read my book, because that's why I wrote it.

But if I can't even give it away ... no, that's just author's paranoia setting in. I've already given away four books, and the promo has just gotten started.

So, click here and have a good read. But hurry, because it's only free until midnight tomorrow (PDT).

And review, please. It doesn't have to be a good review, just an honest one.

Free Book, But Don't Blow It!

Blowing It! will be available for free from the Amazon Kindle Store, but only on Friday, September 14th and Saturday, September 15th 2012. Download, read, and tell me what you think! And then tell everyone else!

Click here!

Interesting Stuff I Find

As I said in my last post, I look around every now and then to see if my book is getting any wider exposure. And I notice interesting things. Like the fact that the book is listed in a couple of sites carrying textbooks. Hmm. Wonder what class my book would be used for? A little specific (and for that matter fictional) for Human Sexuality, I would think. And my ego isn't big enough to think that my book would form any part of a writing class.

Another thing is that several of the pages that show my book for sale have sharing buttons for the various social media. Now, I have a Twitter account for myself as fetish author, but Blowing It! does not have, for example, its own Facebook page, and is unlikely to anytime in the future. I think of Facebook as a place for people to be themselves with their real friends, and not so much a place to share their most intimate secrets (although from some of the posts I see, others might have a different opinion).

In any case, if you come across the book and hit the Facebook Like button, be forewarned that whatever you are liking has nothing to do with me.

Of course, as I have written before, promoting a pseudonymously written erotic novel is not easy, and so anything you can do to share with someone who might also be interested is much appreciated. But I don't expect you to go so far as to out yourself on Facebook. 

Pricey Options

Every once in awhile, I Google the search terms "Blowing It!" and "Tim Popper" together to see if anyone has got around to mentioning my book. And pretty much the only reviews I find are the one on Amazon, and reposts on various sales outlets of the blurbs I wrote myself. Most of these I initiated, and almost as many are automatically generated. But I got a couple of fascinating hits.

For one thing, there is a seller selling my book on Barnes & Noble. For $19.95. Plus shipping, I expect. Please, folks, don't waste your money. This seller is taking a gigantic markup, and I don't get any extra royalties, so you may as well buy the book from Amazon.com, or if you want to send a little extra my way, by the hard copy from the link on the blog, which links to CreateSpace.

Another hit was a site selling books to buyers in South Africa for 269 rand. That's about 32 bucks! Now, I don't know how import restrictions come into this, but something tells me that if a South African buyer can get it through some offshoot of Amazon.com, he might make out a little better.

If anyone knows, I would be delighted to hear.

I want everyone who's interested in balloon fetishism to read the novel. But I don't want them to pay more than they need to!

Need Some Advice

I want people to be able to buy "Blowing It!" in a more private way. You know, not have a telltale charge show up on a credit card statement and have a significant other ask questions.

I'm considering using PayPal and making an ePub version of the book available via email. Do you think PayPal is private enough? Is there some other method that's both secure and private? I could also offer a print copy of the book, although if it was ordered through me, I would have to charge about $4 extra to cover the additional shipping step (and I wouldn't be able to offer that option outside the US).

I'd really like to make more people comfortable buying this book. I know that, although erotic fiction (like erotic images and video) in general is now more widely acceptable, fetish fiction is still a much more private sphere of many people's lives. I'd appreciate any advice on how I can make buying this book a little easier.

New Prices Are In Effect on Amazon.com

The new prices have propagated through the system, and now appear on Amazon.com. I hope the lower price will encourage you to read my book and recommend it to your balloon-loving friends. Enjoy!

Preview Now Available at Amazon.com

A preview of the print edition of the book is now available on Amazon.com. You can see the first chapter of the book, a random page or two from the middle, and the last couple of pages. I suggest you give it a try; when I did, I got to some of the fun balloon stuff in the middle of the book.

Let me know what you think!

Learning To Promote

Now that I've written a book, if I want to sell it, I have to: (1) tell enough people that it exists, and (2) convince them that it is worth parting with four or eight bucks to obtain and however much of their life it takes them to read it.

Promoting a fetish book that's written under a pseudonym is an interesting challenge. Since my friends don't know about my fetish, and probably don't know anyone else with a balloon fetish (or at least they don't know that they know anyone), I can't well go to my Facebook page and announce the book to the world (although I often feel like it; it's so exciting that it's really hard to keep quiet).

I've had, as of this writing, nearly 1,000 page hits here at the blog, but only 9 copies of the book sold (all though Amazon.com, and all but one a Kindle edition). That's about a 1% turnover rate, which isn't horrible, but isn't exactly going to make my little book a blockbuster either.

Not that it needs to be, but I would be happy if more people were interested in reading it.

I've created a page at a book review site called Ask David. I don't yet know whether it will bring any business my way; it takes up to three weeks for the page to be created. It looks like a pretty busy place, though, so I'm hopeful.

I did get my very first review on Amazon.com (Thanks Carlos!): five stars, and a glowing review. But it won't do me any good unless a potential reader sees it. So, the other eight of you who bought the book, can you do me a favor and review and rate it? I appreciate it.

And if any of you are Amazon.com affiliates, and really like the book, and have a fetish-related site or blog (my, that's a lot of ifs, isn't it), I'd love you to include an affiliate link to the book. After all, you'll make a little money, too, if I do.

And one more favor (I ask a lot, don't I?): if you see the book mentioned anywhere besides this blog or Amazon.com, would you drop me a line and let me know? My address is balloonfetishauthor@gmail.com. If you forget to write in down, it's also in the Afterword of the book.

Hint, hint.

Face Palm

I just received my first copy of the published version of Blowing It! and, of course, I found a mistake right on the back cover. I've accidentally claimed that this is the first book-length work of erotic fiction. Punctuation error. It should read:

Blowing It! just might be the first book length work of erotic fiction written by a real balloon fetishist.

The rest of the copy is the same as the header of the blog, except that I misspelled "separate." Good thing I don't currently rely on the back cover to sell the book (since you can't buy it in bookstores). At some point I will make the correction, but it pulls the book off the market for a day or so, and so I think it can wait.

Of course, nobody is perfect, and I expect that, at some point, readers will begin sending me many other grammatical and typographical errors they find in the book.

But right on the back cover? Sheesh!

One More Step

Blowing It! print edition is now available on Amazon.com. That's my last publishing milestone for awhile. Now it's up to you, dear readers: read, review, and recommend.
And let me know what you think.
I'm all ears.

CreateSpace Preview Available

You can preview the first chapter of Blowing It! by clicking HERE. I hope the first chapter will give you the flavor of the book and encourage you to read on.

Kindle Edition Available!

Blowing It! is now a Kindle book. I was up late last night struggling with the inline CSS in my book's file, but it was worth it to see all the chapter breaks and font changes preserved in the Kindle edition.

If you search the kindle store for "balloon fetish," mine is one of only two titles to show up (the other is a short book excerpt called "Blow Me"), so it's really easy to find.

And another benefit of the Kindle edition is that you can preview the first chapter (actually a bit more than the first chapter) online before you buy the book. I think I can do that on Amazon, too, but not until the book is available through that channel. (I check Amazon every day looking for the book to show up there—soon!)

Enjoy!

For Mobile Users

First, I just got around to looking at this blog on mobile and realized that the link at the top of the page is missing in the mobile version. So, HERE IT IS.

Second, I'm struggling with Kindle formatting. But once I get it right, I'll be published for Kindle, and then I'll see about epub for those of you who don't have Kindle readers or apps. Might still get it done before the end of the night (lots of HTML/CSS twiddling).

It's a Book!

I have approved the proof of Blowing It! and it is now for sale in book form from the link at the top of this blog. It will also be available through Amazon.com in about a week. I have a little formatting work to do for the Kindle edition, but I'm going to try to wrap that up tomorrow and see how quickly I can get to the eBook market.

I hope you enjoy the book. Let me hear what you think!

Almost There

Marked up the proof, corrected the file, and uploaded the new version. In about 48 hours, I should get the okay for another proof. This time I have the confidence to review the electronic proof, which should take less than a day, and then Blowing It! will be available for sale.

For those considering self-publishing, by the way, I highly recommend physical proof copies of your book before you go to press. They make correction much easier. Of course, if you are doing an eBook, you don't have the option, but you can always print out physcial pages. Expensive, but worth it.

My proof copy, on the other hand, cost less than $10 shipped, and I got it in less than a week. Thanks to that, I am nearly ready, just weeks from finishing writing the book, to go to press.

I hope you enjoy it!