Updates and Welcome

Good morning, all!

First off, I wanted to thank everyone for all of the support on yesterday’s post, and to welcome the new readers. I’ve gotten a lot of comments and e-mail, so my apologies if I haven’t responded to everything yet. I’m working on it.

I’ve spoken to several of the authors who pulled their WPT stories, but if those authors choose to take me up on my offer, it will still take some time to read the stories and get contracts drawn up and signed and so on. That said, I’ll definitely announce things as soon as I have anything to announce.

Other assorted updates:

1) Author Lisa Mantchev posted on Twitter yesterday that the Wicked Pretty Things anthology has been cancelled by the publisher. Given the number of authors who pulled out of the project, and the public outcry, I’m not surprised. I haven’t seen any announcement or release from the publisher yet.

2)  Cleolinda on LJ has a good roundup of the WPT situation, including some background information.

3) The unraffle fundraiser I’m running for rape crisis centers has raised $840 so far. If we pass $1000, I’ll draw another winner and give that person a cameo in Libriomancer. Details here.

4) Being kicked in the kneecap hurts. (This brilliant insight is brought to you courtesy of last night’s karate class.)

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

E-book Updates

Yeah, I know. Jim never posts twice in one day. But I had a lot to babble about, and I’m going to be gone this weekend for Constellation, so figured I’d get the latest e-book data up now.

Let’s start with an update on Goblin Tales [Amazon | B&N | Lulu]. The book came out on March 15, and the March sales were pretty darn good, in my opinion.

Amazon: 130
B&N: 55
Lulu: 20 (18 print and 2 PDF downloads)

The book is also up on iBooks, Kobo, and Wizard’s Tower Bookstore (which will hopefully help international readers). However, I don’t have sales data for these sites yet.

Overall, that’s close to $400 in sixteen days. Nice, eh? Especially for short fiction. So the short term results are looking nice indeed.

The long term? That’s harder to say. April sales for the first week show 20 copies sold at Amazon, 12 at B&N, and 5 at Lulu (4 print, 1 download). Not bad, but a definite dropoff. I’m not going to make any confident predictions here, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see the same sales curve I get with my print books, where there’s an initial spike in sales followed by a dropoff to a lower long-term rate.

Moving on to overall e-book sales, I received my royalty statement from DAW, which had some interesting data. I graphed e-book sales of the goblin trilogy and the first two princess books below. (Red Hood hasn’t been out long enough to generate multiple data points.)

E-book sales jumped in July - December of 2010 for all five books. Even for Goblin Quest, which is a four-year-old book. Not as dramatic an increase for the goblins, but a noticeable one. A number of people have commented on a spike in e-book sales around the end of last year and the start of this one. I’m guessing some of that is due to the holidays, and all of the people who received e-readers and gift cards to spend.

I have no idea if this trend will continue. It would be rather silly to base predictions on a single-period jump. But it’s interesting.

All total, e-book sales make up about 4.3% of total goblin sales and 6.8% of princess sales, but those percentages appear to be increasing over time. For Red Hood’s Revenge [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], which came out in July of 2010, e-books represented 6.7% of total sales.

So there you go. I’m happy to say I’m continuing to earn royalties on all of the goblin books and the first two princess books, and Red Hood should start paying out as well once the reserve against returns goes away.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.