The “Blood Feud” Experiment

March 4–10, 2012 was the eighth annual Read an E-Book Week, and with the goal of expanding our readership The ’Warp joined e-book distributor Smashwords’ tie-in to the event by offering our young adult dark-urban-fantasy novel, Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1, for $1.00 (a 75% discount from the $3.99 we normally charge at Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and DriveThru Fiction).

It was very much a last-minute decision: Smashwords didn’t send out an advance notice about the Read an E-Book Week promotion until Saturday, March 9—the day before it kicked off. That meant hitting the ground running if we were going to get the word out about the sale.

Promotion: Posted news and links in the SWC and Pandora Zwieback blogs, as well as their Facebook pages and my DeviantArt page (where Bob Larkin’s covers for the Pan series have become quite popular). E-mailed all my contacts at the Jacketflap YA book community. E-mailed press releases to comic, sci-fi, goth, and horror news sites, as well as io9, Jezebel (they’re always discussing Twilight and The Hunger Games, so why not?), Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal. Asked family and friends to spread the word via Facebook and Twitter; provided an ad jpeg they could pass around. Posted topic threads on Goodreads’ Blood Feud page, as well as comic and Kindle message boards, touting the sale. Contacted Richard Boom, a major Lorelei and Pandora fan who owns the comic-art agency Boom Art Department. Richard has a network of friends and followers who have a talent for placing material onto news sites and message boards I never knew existed or that ignore my press releases (that’s how word on Blood Feud initially spread last year).

Results: Comic Related, Forces of Geek, and First Comics News ran the press release, as did—through Richard’s efforts—Broken Frontier, Comic Bastards, Word of the Nerd, Geek Girl’s Manifesto, and Comic Buzz. My buddy J. D. Calderon posted the news on his Oswald Chronicles site and DeviantArt page. “The Dome,” host of the weekly podcast Sci-Fi Saturday Night (where I was interviewed back in December), passed the word on Twitter, which was in turn passed along by others. Friends posted the ad on their Facebook pages. Goodreads mentioned it in a YA e-book sales thread. Found the topic thread deleted(!) at one comic site forum. Got scolded at the Kindle fan forum for posting a press release as a topic instead of making a more personal “Hi, I’m a small-presser and would you please please buy my book?” cry of desperation. A British site called Local UK News picked up the press release from Comic Related (…the hell? But, hey, I’ll take whatever press attention I can get.). Got ignored by io9, Jezebel, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. No great shock there—unless you’re a medium- or large-sized publishing house, or an e-book self-publisher who’d already sold tens of thousands of copies before their journalists ever knew you existed, they ignore everyone.

Nevertheless, word did get out. According to Smashwords’ statistics, there were over 150 views of Blood Feud’s page between March 3rd (when I started announcing the sale) and March 10th, and a sharp increase in downloads of the free sample chapters.

So, how’d we do?

Books sold: Two.

Wow. That was even more unexpected than the Local UK News link.

I can’t say I’m totally surprised; disappointed, but not surprised. Not everyone has a Smashwords account, and I can see how having to set up one before you can purchase the book would be a headache for potential buyers. And SWC wasn’t the only participant in the event—just the list of publishers offering the 75% discount ran over 1,200 pages on the Smashwords site! It was pretty easy to get lost among the mountain of available titles.

Still… two? Geez, I hope this works better when I eventually offer it for 99¢ at Amazon and Barnes & Noble…

Postscript: In an odd turn of events, news of the Smashwords $1.00 sale resulted in a small increase in Blood Feud sales at Amazon—where the Kindle version sells for $3.99. Huh.