If you like the weirdness of The Warhol Gang, then you may be interested in the future of speed-of-light trading.

Abstract: We need to build islands at sea to house “relativistic statistical arbitrage trading nodes” that would avoid “light propagation delays.”

Couldn’t make this up.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’re already aware of my grand ebook experiment, where I’m selling my first book, Please, as an ebook. But what you might not be aware of is my pricing experiment. I’ve been quietly tweaking the price of Please and trying out different prices to see where the sweet spot is, and the results have been surprising.

First off, I want to stress the sweet spot for me is maximizing readership, not profit. If I can earn more money off fewer readers at a higher price, I’ll take the lower price/profit and more readers, thank you very much. I’m in this to have my books and stories read, not for the money. Such at it is.

OK, now that I’ve got that out of the way….

When I first published Please on Kindle, I set the price at $2.99. That seemed to be the going rate for indie books, so I figured I may as well start there. Please wasn’t exactly indie — it had been published by Raincoast back in 2002 — but it was close enough at this point. It did OK at the $2.99 price point, but I wasn’t exactly finding a new generation of readers.

So I followed the example of other writers who temporarily lowered their price to 99 cents to generate interest in their works. I changed the price of Please to 99 cents and waited for my new legions of fans to start messaging me.

Instead, my sales dropped. Considerably.

Now, when you lower your price to 99 cents, you expect your profits to drop because your royalty rate changes. With Amazon and I think most other services, you make 35% of the selling price up to $2.99, and then you make 70% for books priced $2.99 and higher. So there’s a financial incentive to set the price higher. The 99-cent price point is a loss leader of sorts — you lower the price and earn less but you get more readers into your virtual bookstore.

The problem was not only was I making less, but I was also attracting fewer readers. So that experiment blew up in the lab….

I decided to change the price back to $2.99, but then on a whim I set it at $3.99 instead. What the hell, I figured. If that price didn’t work, then it would only take a few minutes to change it.

I have to admit I was surprised when I sold more books at $3.99 than at $2.99 — and way more than when Please was priced at 99 cents. Why? I have no idea. Maybe it was people avoiding the lower price points because the lower prices are associated with lower-quality self-published books. Maybe the ebook version of Please was just starting to get noticed when I changed the price. I really have no idea.

So I’m going to keep experimenting. I’m going to drop the price back down to $2.99 for the month of April to see the difference. Then in May I’m going to raise it to $4.99. We’ll see what surprises June has in store.

Like I said above, I’m really interested in the number of new readers I can find for Please. The money is nice and all, but I’m not getting rich off the book, so whatever. I’d much sooner get more people interested in my fiction than earn a few extra bucks. Although both would be just fine.

I’ll post back here with results when I have them.

I also plan to do a post on how ebooks are changing my writing style. Because they are. But that’s still a work in progress.

And remember, vote loud and vote often.

Hell of a productive day. I sat down to tackle a scene near the end of The Apocalypse Corpse that I wasn’t sure how to handle — and killed it. No, really. There are bodies. In fact, I was so in the apocalyptic spirit that I wrote another Very Important Scene That Ties Up Some Story Threads and set up the finale of the book. Which I’ve already written in my mind, so it’s just a matter of getting it down in the Pages document now.

So I think the first draft of the book will be done shortly, although it’ll be rough. Very rough. And missing a few scenes. But that’s what first drafts are — the memories of the drunken night before.

Not bad considering I also did an interview last night about The Warhol Gang, and one this morning about the ebook phenomenon that is sweeping the free world. And got the pub date for the paperback version of The Warhol Gang in Canada (May). Plus, I remembered to feed the toddler. With some help.

Today’s touchstone in the new book: Alcor.

The picture above is a variation of another one I posted in my Flickr stream the other day. Spring!

Lehman Brothers

The Berlin Wall

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations

McDonald’s

Chernobyl

Yep, just another day at the office.

My newspaper column on self-publishing on Kindle went out on the wires and got picked up by several papers this weekend. As a result, I’ve had more than a few emails from writers — aspiring and established — asking how they can publish on Kindle. So I’ll just point everyone to this post I did a few weeks back explaining how to get your ebook in digital print.

If it doesn’t answer your questions, feel free to message me for more advice. It may take me a while to get back to you, but I promise I will get back to all of you. Eventually.

I’m just overwhelmed by messages since that column I wrote on self-publishing hit the wires and other papers picked it up. I’m trying to respond to all the messages, both positive and negative, but it’s taking some time to do that. Also, it’s sunny outside for the first time in six months, so I’ve been spending some time in the yard, rolling in the grass.

As some of you may have noticed, I recently self-published my first novel, Please, as an ebook when it went out of print. Self-pubbing an ebook is a lot like putting out a novel the traditional way — it’s not that hard to publish it, but it is difficult finding ways to get it noticed. In fact, in some ways it’s harder to get noticed with ebooks because there are so many more of them.

I don’t want to be one of those writers who babbles on and on about the business side and doesn’t talk about the craft, but I figure I’ve talked about the content of Please enough, and there are people interested in this self-publishing experiment. So.

I didn’t have any expectations of strong sales for Please when I loaded it onto the Kindle service — I just wanted to make it available to readers again. I was pleased with the initial flurry of sales, which was more than I expected, but they tapered off to three or four a day after the media attention died down. I thought I’d experiment with some online marketing, though, because, well, why not?

Halfway through ebook week, I decided to make my short stories free on Smashwords and drop the price of Please to $1.99. It was a promotion that Smashwords runs, so that’s why I did it there as opposed to Kindle.

Downloads of my short stories skyrocketed, which wasn’t hard, given they weren’t selling much before. Surprisingly, the story “Beat the Geeks,” which I consider the strangest thing I’ve written, was downloaded the most. I’m not really sure why people picked that one. Maybe it’s so strange they didn’t want to take a chance with their 99 cents on it? Or maybe word got out about it during the promo? Who knows.

I was more surprised by the boost in sales to Please, though. I wasn’t really expecting much — I was more interested in getting people reading my stories, which are quite different from the book. I sold about 20 copies of Please during the two days of the promo, and then Monday it dropped down to three. I hate Mondays.

Strangely, I only sold one copy on Smashwords during the promo — everyone else bought Kindle versions, even though the Smashwords version was cheaper.

Interesting times.

So to get back to the question posed in the title of this post, yes, apparently online promotions do work.

Next up, I’m buying some ads on Goodreads. I don’t really expect them to pay for themselves in the short term, but I’m told you have to think about advertising long term: just keep the book alive in the public consciousness and eventually people will start to notice it and check it out. In short, act like a virus.

I’ll keep you informed about the Please Experiment. I’m not really anticipating any sales records, because it is an older book. It would make more sense to try this sort of thing with a new book to really see how viable e-publishing is for a mildest writer like myself. So I may just do that.

I temporarily discounted my novel Please at Smashwords and made my stories free. Ends Sunday or when supplies run out.

The other day I posted about You Are Listening to LA, a mashup of ambient music and police scanner calls. Now the site has expanded to include

New York: http://youarelistening.to/newyork
Chicago: http://youarelistening.to/chicago
Montreal: http://youarelistening.to/montreal
San Francisco: http://youarelistening.to/sanfrancisco

It’s like we’re all living in Blade Runner, isn’t it?

…and I had to laugh at the tags for The Warhol Gang. Reminds me of my last relationship.

Anyway, here’s my profile if you’re also on LT.