[HenryMelton]

As an author, first you got to write a good book, but to sell it, you have to get it in front of people's eyes. For that reason alone, selling books as iTunes Apps is great, wonderful and fantastic. MUCH better than putting out a Kindle edition. I ought to know. I've done both.

Here's the results: The same book, Emperor Dad, award winning YA science fiction. The same pocket-change PR campaign.

Kindle -- out nine months -- zero sales.
iTunes -- out two days -- twelve sales.

I've written more details in my blog, but the figures speak for themselves.

[vmarks]

Hi Henry,

Why'd you decide to price at 4.99? What was the decision that said it's worth more than 0.99, or not worth 9.99?

How was partnering with Tomes? What is it that you like about Tomes, rather than perhaps doing it one of the other methods?


PS when you're in water and have a canoe that has filled and is sinking, you do the following: Turn it over so that it's upside down. Swim under it. Push it up out of the water and flip it over. You'll have maybe an inch of water in the bottom, but it will float. Then climb back in.

[HenryMelton]

Pricing: The first reason is that PDF versions of this novel have been sold at $5. That sets a logical cap on the price. That's what the Kindle price was too. Public domain app books were going for .99. I had to avoid going too low, because that devalued the book. It is an award winner, selling at a $15 list in trade paper. Plus with Apple's cut and the divide between the TouchTomes and me, it made a reasonable price. If you compare it to other non-PD app book novels, it not at all out of line, and that's the psychological line you've gotta walk. BTW. The sales are increasing day by day.

Partnering with TouchTomes: I've met the guy. I liked what he'd done with his Waterloo book/game thing. He had the skills and was enthusiastic. While I can program myself, I'm an old Perl guy. It would take too long to upgrade my skill set to the iPhone SDK.

Canoes: I'll keep that in mind.

[pcryan5]

How is this not spam?

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by pcryan5 

How is this not spam?

Doesn't have the hallmarks of spam.

He's been around for a couple of months, and done some other posts as well.

Besides that, I found what he said interesting to know.

-t

[Railroader]

Spam is like porn. You know it when you see it.

I too appreciate the OP's thread. Good info.

[pcryan5]

Interesting - I thought we were verboten from promoting stuff we sell / etc.
In that case I got two kids that are available for a song .... or a Kindle.

I do agree the OP point is of interest mind you...

[vmarks]

A comment on what is and isn't spam, and what sort of promotion we tend to tolerate around here:

Spam that is clearly spam - v1agra! and "I needed help converting my dvd to ipod, here's the software I foound, which I am coincidentally selling!" -- verboten.

Self-promotion that is not verboten: forum members who happen to make a product and mention it occasionally, link to it in their signature, or even provide assistance with it. See: moki of Ambrosia SW, CharlesS of CharlesSoft, owcLarry who joined to answer questions about ram testing and pricing. I do the MacNN podcast and held a contest - I put the contest info in a sticky at the top of all forums, and some people felt that was spam.

Henry's book falls under this sort of category.

Linking to a blog post (self-promotion continued)

Had Henry simply linked to the blog without any sort of context, I would suggest that he was farming for hits for his blog. That's inadvisable, and could be called blog spam. At the same time, I don't want Henry to copy/paste his whole blog post here. Summarizing it and providing the link so we can click through if we like is the right balance.

It's hard to say that Henry is spamming us, especially since he didn't even try and promote the book with the iTunes link.

[HenryMelton]

Or you might just consider the author too ignorant to know where the lines are. Hey, feel free to delete the thread. I didn't even know how to right the canoe.

[vmarks]

Originally Posted by HenryMelton 

Pricing: The first reason is that PDF versions of this novel have been sold at $5. That sets a logical cap on the price. That's what the Kindle price was too. Public domain app books were going for .99. I had to avoid going too low, because that devalued the book. It is an award winner, selling at a $15 list in trade paper. Plus with Apple's cut and the divide between the TouchTomes and me, it made a reasonable price. If you compare it to other non-PD app book novels, it not at all out of line, and that's the psychological line you've gotta walk. BTW. The sales are increasing day by day.

Partnering with TouchTomes: I've met the guy. I liked what he'd done with his Waterloo book/game thing. He had the skills and was enthusiastic. While I can program myself, I'm an old Perl guy. It would take too long to upgrade my skill set to the iPhone SDK.

Canoes: I'll keep that in mind.

The iPhone is using Objective C, which is what is used on Macs as well. For Macs, you can do a perl-obj-c bridge --
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?CamelBones
or
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?PerlObjCBridge

and shoehorn your perl into a Mac application that way. For the phone, I don't know that such a bridge would work well.

As for the pricing, I wasn't challenging you, I was interested in how you arrived at the decision.

Here's my issue with e-books that are DRM enabled:

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
-- Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
-- Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

The same unfortunate set of terms is true for iPhone ebooks.

Really, please read this blog post (not one of mine) -- http://diveintomark.org/archives/200...ure-of-reading

[vmarks]

Originally Posted by HenryMelton 

Or you might just consider the author too ignorant to know where the lines are. Hey, feel free to delete the thread. I didn't even know how to right the canoe.

Or that the lines are wibbley-wobbley, and that's why people say they 'know it when they see it.'

My wife wouldn't know how to right a swamped canoe, either. However, she's trained in all manner of firearms including those fully automatic issued by a government entity. At the other end of the spectrum is me. I know that there's a bullet, a trigger, and an end that I SHOULD NEVER LOOK INTO.

[HenryMelton]

In fact, my first ebook sales were plain vanilla PDF's. I'm selling a book to a reader to enjoy and close my eyes about what happens after that. That said, I won't refuse to sell DRM'd books if that's what it takes to find a reader.

One sad fact of life is a thing I noticed on the first day the App store was open. If an App had a previous life as a free jailbroke version, it was slammed with one star reviews for daring to charge, regardless of the value or quality of the App. I would love to have the option on charging nothing for a book as a promotional effort, but I dare not. The psychology of online products and their value isn't straighforward.

[vmarks]

I've been very happy with vanilla PDF which I can use in Stanza.

I also believe that the one star reviews you mention for jailbroken apps are the product of a vocal minority. Even if the number of jail token phone users is high I don't think the whiners are representative.