Quote:
Originally Posted by queentess
A thousand times THIS. Take, for instance, my recent experience with a traditionally published author. I'd heard about his work from some other people, so I bought the first in the series and read it. I immediately purchased the other two books in the series and read them right away. After that, I bought two more complete series to give to my brother and my dad, and my brother has since bought a set to give to one of his friends. If you write a book really well, it will spread organically.
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That's exactly it! That's the way it works. My own experience with my e-published backlist has been very much the same. I self-published 12 books last month at $2.99 (I was going to make them $1.99, but Kindle's royalty rate jumps from 35% to 70% at $2.99, so...) in large part to grow my audience; the cheaper the books, the more people will buy them. What's been happening is that someone will buy the first book in my mystery series, or the first medieval, then a few days later, they'll buy the other five. I see this time and again (Smashwords makes it easy to track this kind of thing.) Sometimes people will just buy all six at once, I assume after reading an excerpt. My hope is that these new readers will recommend me to other readers, and so on, so that when my new work is published, my reader base will be that much more robust.
I could have priced the books higher, bought advertising (now,
that's a waste of money), launched a big, time-consuming promotional campaign... but all of that wouldn't have had nearly the same effect as just making it easy and inexpensive for new readers to discover me.
This is the wave of the near future, BTW, print-published authors e-publishing their backlist. Expect to see lots more soon. Methinks the self-promo threads are going to be pretty busy!
Pat