New Covers for the Short Stories
December 26th, 2011The experimenting continues. I’ve put together new ebook covers for my two single short stories. Here are the original versions:
And here are the new versions:
What do you think?
I upgraded the cover on Hooks just to make it match. The real subject of this experiment is In The Tide. Several writers have seen increased book sales by getting the pricing on the first book in a series down to “free.” Personally, I’m not a fan of “free” for a quality novel, but I thought it would be interesting to see if there would be any increase in readership if I could offer a related short story for free. Since In The Tide is something of a precursor story to The Nanotech Succession, (ideas for the series were developed in it, though it’s not part of the series’ story world), it’s my best candidate.
The short story with it’s new cover has been uploaded to both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The next step is to try to figure out how to get the price down to “free.”
Posted on: Monday, December 26th, 2011 at 5:45 pm
Categories: Cover Art, Short Stories (Ebooks).
Tags: sales strategy, short story cover
December 26th, 2011 at 6:01 pm
Happy Holidays! I must be honest, either cover will work for me, which must mean that neither of them are bad. You had me at “precursor story to The Nanotech Succession”. I don’t know why this series is so compelling to me, other than your superior writing style, but I don’t need it to be free. I cannot wait to get them in my hands. You rock, Linda!
December 26th, 2011 at 6:31 pm
Thank you, Lee! And Happy Holidays to you.
Free is a strategy which I suspect will soon burn out from overuse. The theory is, readers who have never heard of you will grab a book or story by you if it’s free. Thousands of downloads have been known to happen that way. Then, if they ever get around to reading it (big IF) and if they like it enough, they might go on to try, and pay for, some of the author’s other work. It’s worked for a lot of authors, but so many are using it now, I’m sure the effect must be in decline. At any rate, the short story sells for only 99 cents now, and because the price is so low I only get 35% of that, so I’m not giving away a lot of money on it. The challenge is, I can’t directly set the price to zero. So I have to do that somewhere else, and hope Amazon will match.