Welp, it’s been a very interesting week, and I’ve learned quite a bit from my free experiment! After a bit of wonkiness with the free to paid transition, however, I’ve finally got things ironed out and stable. Rather than bump up from free to fully operational death star pricing, I’ve settled on a nice and neat compromise: $0.99!

Write Short Kindle Books: A Self-Publishing Manifesto for Non-Fiction Authors will remain at $0.99 through the rest of the month, but it’ll eventually bump back up towards full price after that point.

So yeah, you can grab a book that’s getting great reviews, a lot of positive feedback, and has done well in the charts for less than a cup of good coffee. I think that’s a fair deal no? I make about 35 cents per copy sold. Not a ton of green, but every sale adds up, and if folks grab it now, it’ll help me rebuild some of the lost momentum from earlier this week.

I’d really love to hit #1 bestseller in at least one of my paid categories, and every download, review, and social media share definitely helps push things towards that goal. For some of my categories, that shouldn’t be impossible, but I’ll def need a bit of a push and that requires you, dear hu-mans of the internet!

So what do you think of the book so far?

It’s been out for a few days now, and over 700 people have downloaded it. That’s awesome! If you’re one of the many who has checked out the book and are enjoying it, I’d love to hear what you think. You can do that AND give me a hand (or huge internet-spanning fist-bump, if your prefer), by leaving a short rating/review for the book on Amazon right HERE! It’s super simple, takes about 30 seconds, and is a HUGE help to me.

Reviews actually have some impact on book charts, and they’re important to book browsers on the Kindle marketplace who are looking to quickly determine whether a book is worth checking out. The more reviews a book has, especially if they’re generally positive, the more likelihood people will grab a copy. So do you think WSKB is worth a read? Let folks know!

A brief aside about the challenges of banging the cowbell as an indie ANYTHING

I know some people might read my posts, tweets, and messages around every book launch and go What an ass. Always asking for help. Always telling me about his books. Always asking for reviews. Always asking us to buy his stupid books. Blah blah blah. I actually had someone say as much recently — when I sent out an early call to my small book mailing list seeking beta readers for this very book, then followed up a few weeks later with a “which cover do you like better” email. Wasn’t asking for much, but for that person it was too much.

Listen, the truth is, I actually spend a lot of my own personal time helping other people out whenever I can — through emails, through my work, my writing, my projects, and just in general. I often don’t get paid for that time, but I love to do it. Like many writers, I struggle to make ends meet sometimes, but I try my best to promote other people’s work, help out author and writer peeps however I can, and generally be a nice and as helpful a dude as I can be — even if I’m having a crappy day.

Yet I often feel guilty asking others for help when I plug my books online, ask for reviews, asking for people to buy my work — especially around each of these launches. I understand it gets annoying. I cringe when I send out one too many Tweets about “Hey, my book is on sale, check it,” because I know that could be the one that spurs person x or reader y to unfollow and scrub me from their radar. I’ve tried to become more creative with my approach to make the dirty work that must be done a little more fun and hopefully a little more entertaining for everyone.

It’s a risk I have to take sometimes, because as an independent author, writer, developer, creator, I can’t count on other people to plug my work, to help me out, or to help spread the word. Many great people do that, and for that I’m grateful. But I can’t take it for granted. So I do what I can to bang the cowbell for my work when I need to the most.

The good news, is I try to be fairly quiet about it during other non-launch times of year, and I also try to create other content that offers additional value to folks while also boosting visibility of my projects that I need to promote. Like my new Indie Author Success Tips Video series I’m posting on the blog M, W, and F, for example.

So thank you for your patience, readers, social media followers, and other folks reading this. Cheers!