So. All these books I’ve been talking about? The Netwalk Sequence reissues, plus A Different Life: What If?, The Enduring Legacy, and Becoming Solo?
Guess what. Not a one has a link to Barnes and Noble, aka Nook, in the universal Books2Read link. Until this year, Nook has been my best-selling vendor.
I’ve been fretting about the dearth of sales on what has been my best sales platform to date, and, well, now I have a pretty good idea of just why that has been happening. No links to Nook.
I’ve gotten lots of suggestions from other indie writers about how to manually add those links in B2R. Taking a deep breath because that means nine books to fix (not the eight I had erroneously claimed on social media last night). But there are other issues I have to consider as well, most explicitly a.) how to republicize each book and b.) rebuilding trust in my readers that when I say there’s a link to Nook, there really is one.
Add in the issue that in the next two weeks I will be dealing with cataract surgery and the aftermath, plus gearing up to promote box sets for three series (once I make them, that is). There will be some conflicting issues for sure, and I’m thinking that perhaps the box set I most dread (the one with the Goddess’s Honor series, dreading because of all the short story pieces that will go into it) needs to be my first one. It’s the only series unaffected by this link issue.
So, what to do, what to do?
I’ve decided to start by running a reduced price feature on each individual book, starting on Fridays and running for a week. I’m going to call it the Nook Oops promotion. That means that every $4.99 book will be $2.99 for that week, and the $2.99 books will be $1.99, with the exception of Becoming Solo, which is brand new and releasing in time for the Halloween season.
It’s not much, but it’s something. I’ve added individual links to Barnes and Noble on every promo slide I’ve made for these books in the last year.
Will it work? Will I start seeing Nook sales again?
I don’t know. It’s worrisome.
Part of me splutters and growls because of course this sort of thing seems to happen to me, just about every damn time I start to gain some traction in this writing business. If it’s not an important reading expanding my market getting canceled because the venue’s ceiling fell in, or the big periodical that bought a story that would be a splashy debut losing important funding and the principal person behind it dying, or Covid happening just when I wrote a book that might be my Big Breakthrough…or…or…or….
One of these days, something’s gotta break in my favor, right? Right?
Time’s running out, though. I’ll be sixty-five in a few days. It’d be awfully damn nice to have one of these breakthroughs happen sooner rather than later.
Ah well, enough whining for now. I need to schedule price changes on a book and think about the promo for the upcoming week. Time to get to work!
