Not to be outdone by the stellar (and very well deserved) accomplishments of Dr Rohn, I am thrilled to report that my novel By The Sea has notched up its twentieth sale. Thanks everyone!
To add to the good news, lulu has sent me my first tranche of revenue, a thrilling £6.27, based on my first ten sales. As befits this truly twenty-first century publishing enterprise, the money sailed my way by PayPal.
The only blot on the event horizon is that Siege of Stars, the first volume of my SF epic, has yet to leave the launch pad. C’mon, you SF fans.
You can order either or both books here. Do it. Do it now, or this guinea pig girrafe Sydney-based postdoc gets it.
The who gets the what now?
Promise, as soon as I get paid…
And all for £1.99 – I say.
Henry, If I send you some
fine haggiscash and a fab free Prog Rock CD, gonna send me a copy of Siege of Stars?—
Arse-futtock – Lulu don’t accept Debit Cards like Switch. (Debit Crunch?)
Henry, you just lost another thrilling shiny shilling.
Chat Information Welcome to Lulu.com! An online representative will be with you shortly. Your wait time will be approximately 0 minute(s) and 4 seconds. Thank you for waiting.
Chat Information You are now chatting with ‘bla bla’
Lulu: Welcome to Lulu. Please hold while I review your question.
Lulu: Hi there.
Lulu: We have not heard from you. Do you wish to continue the chat?
Lulu: Methods of payment Lulu accepts are Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, and PayPal.
steelgraham: Not Switch then, the main UK debit card operator?
Lulu: We accept debit and check cards, as long as they are connected with one of the major credit card companies listed above.
steelgraham: I’m screwed then. I actually know the author of this book and met H Gee a few weeks ago at a conference in London. He is keen to sell via Lulu of course, but looks like I’ll have to get a credit card – I hate them.
steelgraham: credit card companies (not Dr Grants)
Lulu: I truly apologize for this. You may also refer to the link below for all methods of payment Lulu accepts.
Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/en/help/ordering_faq#forms_of_payment
steelgraham: square 1, thanks anyways Dory P, I’ll probably simply end up requesting a free copy from Dr Gee but that defeats the whiole purpose of me paying him via Lulu for the goods. It’s a terrible front cover anyway and despite my alternative suggestion, he went with a real eye ******.
steelgraham: out….
Lulu: I truly apologize for this.
Lulu: Anything else for today?
steelgraham: nope – it’s cool
Lulu: Okay. Have a good one!
Dory P (oops): Thank you for using Live Chat! If you find that you need additional assistance, please refer to our Help Knowledge Base.
Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/help/
How strange. But lots of people have trouble with Switch, especially outside the UK. Why don’t you set up a PayPal account. Brilliant, and takes about 4 seconds.
scribbling….
Thanks H G and £1.99 is now in your bank – from mine.
—
“This probably explained why, right
now, she was as randy as a goat,”
Who wrote this?
1) Grant
2) Gee (aka Germs)
3) Steel
4) Lulu
or all of the above? (you know ya make me wanna sh……
—
Next week, we’ll be discussing “The Blind Leading The Blind” by Simone McFetchy – Hedge.
A cautionary note, though – readers under 18 should read these books with their eyes shut Said Wing Commander Smeaton.
Don’t get your banter, Squiffy. :)
But congratulations, Graham – you are the first person to buy Siege. I hope you enjoy it…
‘Big goat randy mountain’?
Thanks Henry – I will read this asap.
2010 is free…
Actually, Graham, I quite fancy the idea of a free prog rock CD. Last night I watchde Twelfth Night Live from London_, a DVD loaned me by a fellow commuter. I was quite fond of Twelfth Night(band) as the singer (Andy Sears) was a school friend of mine.
Drop me a line with your address Henry and I’ll ship you a copy of this
(I was sent a number of copies my Audiocracy founding member, Tobin Mueller).
Well, whilst that not the first e-book that I’ve downloaded, it’s the first one I’ve paid for. I’m a really really slow book reader so I can’t comment in detail yet on Siege of Stars.
As Henry alluded to, setting up a Pay Pal account was real easy. A few seconds after ordering the book, a couple of emails arrived. Lulu direct you to your downloads page. This contained a clearly displayed download link and within a few seconds, the PDF version of Siege of Stars was on screen.
Should I choose or require to do so, obviously I could print off a copy or export the PDF to a portable reader etc.
Great place (Lulu) and I’ll certainly recommend it to others.
—
I found this page at Lulu very interesting and I really like this concept.
As a creator, you can take advantage of the advanced features of Lulu, such as publishing and selling your digital content on Lulu. We provide you with the tools you need to publish and sell your own work, including:
Source
As you’ll have seen from exploring lulu, not everyone uses it to publish The Great Novel (not even me – hah! Thought I’d get that one in before
Grantanyone else did). A lot of people use it for personal photo albums, family cookbooks, calendars, lecture notes and other materials intended for quite a small group of people. And they do CDs, too – would be great for an unsigned band or anyone who wanted to sell CDs on the back of gig merchandise, I’d have thought.I like to think of lulu as a kind of farmer’s market – it’s a way of getting home-grown copy out to the public without the anonymity of middlemen. Because you’re selling direct to the customer, the customer base is likely to be small and ‘local’, that is, you’re likely to know most of your buyers in person.
But how does one reach a wider public? I’ve a feeling that word-of-mouth has a lot to do with this – and this applies to conventionally published material as much as POD products.
To this end I’ve send complimentary copies of Siege of Stars to
Good luck, Henry. Here in the States at least, the more connections for unknown novels the better – especially if your backers do fiction themselves. I’ve had several non-fiction and science award winners on my list of patrons and it didn’t mean much to the fiction review and publishing folks. It’s a separate universe. (Fun fact: the larger newspapers here that still review books won’t touch POD at all and they also shy away from anything that’s “popular” rather than literary.)
I did have a couple of successful fiction authors helping me out too, and they were able to jar the door open a little ways, but then it got stuck. I actually used that as a learning experience and went back and improved the product, but you only get one shot at impressing someone in the fiction business, and I’d used up my best contacts. I found online word-of-mouth to have less of an impact than I’d hoped. Those who liked the book mentioned it in their blogs once or twice – like I would. But there are so many books out there that even the books we may want to read don’t get bought. (Unfortunately, my spy network disbanded and I wasn’t able to track offline word-of-mouth activities.)
I hope you have more success. Beyond your contacts, your position as an editor at a venerable magazine should give you some advantage – you’re already in the writing field. You also might try voodoo or some sort of archaic Druid ceremony. In any case, I think just having produced the thing should be viewed as the achievement. The followup doesn’t depend much on the author or the material.
Apparently nobody had heard of the current Nobel Prize winner in literature either.
There you go Henry, still hope for you.
You also might try voodoo or some sort of archaic Druid ceremony
It’s worth a shot. We have the livestock, certainly, though I might need to borrow a goat.
@ James – might I ask you how much your novel RAD Decision sold? Is it still selling? It’s really a question of expectations management — I have no idea how well POD products do, except that they tend to sell rather small quantities. (As of today, By The Sea has sold 21 copies; Siege of Stars just one, to the gentleman in Glasgow).
It’s a funny thing that newspapers won’t touch POD products. I expect POD is still tarred with the vanity-press brush. Prairie Mary told me that she thinks that if POD authors could break through the reviewing barrier, then conventional publishers might have good reason to fear it.
I’m not sure being a well-known journal-type person is necessarily a help. As you say, the ‘science’ and ‘fiction’ worlds tend to be separate, although the heroid efforts of Dr Rohn and her colleagues at lablit are making inroads.
Is that the randy goat, then Henry?
‘heroid efforts’? Sounds painful
To anyone reading this, do NOT click on the link Richard has just offered above, particularly if you are eating.
And the randiness of the goat is not the issue, Richard. It’s the coagulative properties of the blood.
@mark – perhaps nobody you know! But your comment was intended to be comforting, so I’ll let it slide :-)
@heather
BBC news said it.
I’m innocent. I don’t even know the guy.
Rad Decision has sold around thirty POD copies, with a very slow trickle continuing. (I also continue the struggle to limit my annoyance every time I see a widely distributed nuclear power article or commentary – pro or con – that is just silly in its details and outlook.)
However, my novel may not be the best example for you since I’ve also offered it free online in serial form and download much longer than the POD has been available. There are usually one or two people a week reading it that way. In total I estimate 150 – 200 have read it over three years, with almost universally positive reviews. The periodic emails and homepage comments I get from readers I don’t know are a very nice tonic. Unfortunately, for professional reasons I’m somewhat limited in what I can do personally to promote it.
Incidentally, while most newspapers dismiss POD out of hand, I actually did have a book review editor at a major US newspaper who wanted to review it – but he was informed it was corporate policy not to touch POD.
It sounds like you’ve got a good handle on how things go in the POD universe. Good luck in your efforts to expand it against the forces of dark energy.
“His name is largely unknown in Britain and the United States…”
Q.E.D.