Another Round At The Crow Bar: #23 November 2018

ChristinaEngela

5 years ago

Hello friends and fans!

Welcome to my 23rd newsletter: November 2018! Coming up in this edition of Another Round @ The Crow Bar:

Regular updates, new releases, and a monthly spotlight on one of my books, this time “Demonspawn“.

In Brief:

The new Shop page is now fully functional, providing free and paid eBooks for download in PDF format, accepting payment via PayPal and PayFast internationally, using Visa, Mastercard and even Bitcoin! (Who actually uses Bitcoin anyway?)

If you’ve had a look at the new site, you might also notice I’ve set the prices for these same eBooks (which you can buy as epub files from places like Amazon and others) considerably lower than wherever else they are available, averaging around $2. The reason for this is, overhead costs.

As I explained last time, other service providers that distribute and sell my books take a cut from the proceeds – and more often than not, this is an unkind, even cruel cut! While the standard price is set at the source platform – let’s say $4.99 for a book on Lulu, Lulu will take around $1 and the rest goes to the creator as royalty fees.

Amazon for example is the biggest distribution and sales network on the planet – but they are also the most capricious. Amazon will sell the same book for the same $4.99, but will take much more for “service fees”, including passing on the costs for the download data by the buyer to the creator, so that in the end Amazon takes the lion’s share of the purchase, leaving the poor author with only about $1 of that sale. This is the obvious reason why I’ve been referring all my sales traffic to Lulu instead of Amazon, where I get the most out of my sales. The trouble is, most people don’t know Lulu, or recognize the name as well as they do “Amazon”, and I’ve even had a few people say so as if my directing them there is some kind of “trick”. It’s no trick folks – seeing as I have to do my own marketing anyway, it just makes little sense to me to push a channel that rewards me the least rather than a channel that rewards me the most!

It’s a sad fact that most authors write for the pleasure of it, but we publish for the fame and mostly, for what financial rewards we can get from it. What’s sad about it, is that the industry tends to be very much a rigged game run by billionaire fat-cats, and indie authors like myself tend to get lost in the red-tape and cogs and gears of the machine.

By all means, buy your favorite author’s books from Amazon if you like, but believe me, in order for that author to make any worthwhile money off their sales on Amazon, their sales would have to be in the hundreds of thousands of units! I’m still a long way off from that, so if you can imagine how frustrating it is when I hear some writers bragging about sales figures in the thousands per month while I am still battling to get above five paid sales and between 30 and 60 free downloads per month! If you really want to support me as a reader, you can buy direct from my website instead, where the whole proceed of each sale comes to me. If you’d prefer to buy the book in epub format, you can still get it from Lulu for a little more.

Unfortunately, in order to use PayFast (a South African PayPal equivalent or better) I’ve had to display the currencies on the website in worthless South African “ronts” – but rest assured, the costs still work out roughly equivalent to the USD amounts quoted on each product page.

It’s been a pretty rough adjustment period, making sure all the shop links and cart pages and check-outs work, but that is now done, and while sales are still frustratingly slow, trickling in via Lulu (with little or no help from greedy Amazon), I’m hoping that the new shop site will take things further!

All this talk about the new website and current sales aside, on with the show!

New Releases

At the moment, I’ve been busy with the marketing side of the business, and I haven’t done much in the writing pool! These are my most recent new releases:

In August, I was very proud to present my very first short animated film: “Bang! Splat!”: A children’s story …for adults! “Bang! Splat!” is based on “Innocent Minds“, and features some of the characters from my Quantum Series of novels – namely, Dr. Gleichstein and his little dog Vluffy. Dr. Gleichstein is a quantum physicist – and as everyone knows by now, quantum physics is a little like ordinary physics, except that you spend a little more time looking for your eyebrows.

“Deanna is a quaint planet, home to odd-ball quantum physicist Dr. Gleichstein and his little dog Vluffy… and a few uninvited guests.

The Herr Doktor and Vluffy are faced with quite a conundrum – even bigger than the Doktor regularly losing his eyebrows. Their home is overrun by mutant two-headed cockroaches – and not even a hammer will stop them! However will they solve this problem?”

On A Personal Note

Fan Mail & Honorable Mentions

“Demonspawn” got a wonderful review on the 3rd of October by Lee Hall, a UK-based book reviewer!
“Demonspawn” got a second amazing review on the 6th of October from Aimee-Ann of the book reviewing website “Redheadedbooklover.com”.

I display my Fan Mail & Compliments with pride, gratitude and humility. You are always welcome to have a look.

Hate Mail & Horrible Mentions

I’m rather proud of my hate mail, and you can review it here – but be forewarned, don’t do it while eating or drinking or you might choke while laughing at it!