Sales this week

Okay, so, I realize I have been running repeated sales on series for the past couple years. This is because that makes sense financially. Generally, a series sale pays for itself in direct sales during the sale period, then produces profit in a slight uptick in direct sales and a sharp uptick in KU pages read over the next couple of months.

It makes no sense to run sales on books that aren’t in a series. But, on the other hand, it seems to me that probably some readers might like a chance to pick up non-series titles at a discount, and you know, it doesn’t cost all that much to run a sale, so why not? So in the future, I’ll probably put these books on sale periodically. Probably not more than once per year, though.

Now, to be clear, there’s only so much I can do with some of these books.

^{I don’t control this book’s price, sorry}

I can’t run a sale on The Floating Islands. Random House sets the price. As far as I know, they never run sales. I can only run a sale on The Sphere of the Winds. That means if you would like just the second book, here you go; if you would like the full duology, the overall price for both books together is at least reasonable.

^{This book is $1.99 this week}

So, that’s one duology where I don’t have the rights to the first book, only the second. Here’s the second such duology:

^{I don’t have the rights to this one either}

Hachette does run sales on occasion, but they don’t notify me when that happens and today, sorry, is not one of the times House of Shadows is on sale. At least Hachette does permit the first book to be linked to the second on a series page, which is nice. Door Into Light is also $1.99 this week.

^{Also $1.99 this week}

Once again, that makes the overall price of the duology fairly reasonable.

One more: Beyond the Dreams

^{Also $1.99 this week}

Of course Beyond the Dreams is a collection. I personally think the stories are pretty darn good. There’s a story set in the world of The Floating Islands, so that may mean you want to pick up this collection if you pick up that duology. Or vice versa. It happens to be my favorite story in the collection. I would be very curious to know how readers rate the various stories here and which they pick out as their favorite. Too bad there’s no function that lets readers rate each story individually as they get to the end of that particular story. That would be a neat feature for every story collection.

And finally —

^{Also $1.99 for this week}

I’m running a book launch promotion for No Foreign Sky via Written Word Media. This is the first time I’ve ever tried that. It has to be scheduled within a certain amount of time following the release of a book, and there are various other boxes to tick off to run this kind of promotion, plus it’s a bit pricey. I’m not sure what will happen. I mean, you never know what will happen with any promotion, but I’m particularly uncertain what will happen this time. I will be watching with considerable interest and it sure would be nice to see a lasting effect. I’m also running my first ever BookBub ad, scheduled to start at the tail end of this promotion.

Why, you may ask, am I going to this much trouble for a book that is not (yet) a series book? There is exactly one reason, and it turns out I’m not sure it was necessary. I scheduled both this book launch package and the Book Bub ad in order to do my absolute best to get this title in front of space opera fans, thus encouraging Amazon’s algorithms to show No Foreign Sky only, or primarily, to SF fans, not to readers who prefer fantasy.

I was really, seriously worried that early sales of this book would be so heavily slanted toward people who read my fantasy novels, and therefore to people who read fantasy, that Amazon would show my space opera to fantasy readers, not SF readers, and thus accidentally kill sales.

To my considerable relief, that doesn’t seem to have happened at all. On the product page, where Amazon lists “Products related to this item,” it’s all space opera. Not a fantasy novel in the bunch. WHEW. I think that means I dodged a potentially serious bullet. Maybe stacking a whole lot of SF terms in the keywords also helped. In fact, maybe that was all that was necessary. Not sure! But I am sure that for the month of June, No Foreign Sky has twice the KU pages read as Tuyo. That’s unusual and promising. I think that implies that Amazon is showing NFS to the right KU readers — that is, to space opera fans.