[Steven Lake]

Question 1: what exactly does your friend do?

Well, these days he does book covers. He used to run a publishing business, which is when he did the billboard.

Question 2: what is really good?

Well, his business went up 2-3 times what it was before the billboard and he did that easily. Probably more if I knew the exact numbers. I only know that he was raving about how much it helped him. I also saw a nice uptick in 3rd party work for him as I was a developer at the time and he contracted with me for author websites.

Question 3: What is the population that will see this billboard?

Oh good heavens. Quite a lot actually. I had planned on putting it on the I-94 corridor between Chicago and Detroit. Even though it's 2 lanes a large percentage of the way, it gets massive amounts of daily traffic, both local and interstate. It's the busiest highway in Michigan second only to 131.

To me, a billboard seems like a total waste of money to sell books especially ebooks that are not available at the big bookstore.

They already sell through BN and Amazon, so I think that's close enough.

Your website is just way too long for people driving down the road especially with the dot net.

Perhaps, but the name is catchy, and if it's still too long, I can always point them to earthfleet.net which autoforwards to my site already.

As to charging the 99 cents, that is way too little money to charge. Most 99 cent books aren't worth free. If it is a full book of more than 200 pages $2.99 is the least you should charge. If I can't talk you out of the billboard, price your book either $4.97 or $4.99. Be sure to use the 97 or 99. Both sell better than round numbers. Oh and do put them on Amazon if you do the billboard so you don't look like a scammer.
A $5 book will catch way more eyes than a $1 book.

Readers are finicky. Don't make yourself look like a cheap indie.

That's funny that you should say that as I've had the opposite results. The more I charged, the less people downloaded and read my book. When I hit $4.99, all downloads just completely stopped for several months until I reduced the price, and even then they only picked up as the price went down. When I asked people why they wouldn't pay the higher prices for the books, the vast majority said they only read free books or that, since I'm not some big, famous author or well known name, they're not going to risk even 99c on a book until I'm well known. Now I don't know if that's just because they're snobby people and I happened into a really bad lot, but that's kinda been my experience of late. And it's not because my books are bad. Everyone who reads them loves them, but they also tell me they either won't pay even 99c, or they will only if they have a good running history with the author and know their books are good, which is something I lack as I'm a good author, but very much unknown, which is probably my fault as I haven't been able to promote my books like I should the past 6 years. Of course, I have the excuse of taking care of my mom during that time.

Now, one thing I'm considering doing, and my brother in law suggested this, is to make the first book of each series free, to draw in new readers and once they're hooked, then charge for the other books in the series, which this would be used towards new readers who've never heard of me before, and established readers who know me but have never read that particular series. But either way, my goal is to gather more attention to the books and get better known as an author. So far though that's proven rather frustratingly difficult. Hence the consideration of a billboard. I mean, I'm really just trying to find any way to get noticed and draw in readers. Again, I'm not a bad author. I just have the ever present issue of overwhelming obscurity.