>Shades--an eBook of short stories

>I'm continuing on with my eBook adventures. For those curious I posted about the creation of both
and as eBooks here.
So as my next project I decided to gather all of my short stories together under one name and release them (very few anthologies get published in the print world, so it was a chance to bring these stories back to life). First, I hunted through all my files and came up with 17 short stories that I thought were presentable. Many had been published previously or broadcast on radio and a few were orphans whom I believed deserved their moment on stage. It's a really eclectic collection--fantasy, horror, literary fiction, humorous, irreverent, violent and, well, weird. They do span the length of my career. I rarely write shorts stories (only 17 so far that are publishable) whereas I've written 16 published novels (and 6 unpublished novels). The curious thing is that they almost all ended up for an older YA/adult audience.

I gave the collection the title Shades in an attempt to describe the eclectic styles (there are all different shades of stories) and I bought an image at http://www.istockphoto.com and made my own cover. I'm pleased with the cover, though I feel it's utilitarian, but it shows some of the mystery of the stories. I may give it a new cover further down the road.

Here's a short description of a few of them and a guesstimate of when they were written.

Stubb This is my most recent short story. All about a boy who may be a werewolf. (2007)
Snow White and the Seven Elves a snarky retelling of the fairytale. (1997)
Garbage Day A young boy has a tough home life. He wants revenge. Exactly what does he put in the garbage? (1992)
Fairytale I seem to be channeling Ray Bradbury in this story. I could draw a direct line from it to Dust. (1993)
The Jesus Trilogy Three short looks at Jesus. Two have to do with the resurrection and one with Pontius Pilate and a rodeo. They are written in a bluesy style. (1997)
Virtual Dragon A cyberpunk kung fu story. Because...well...the world needs more cyberpunk.(1995)

And that's just a few of them.

They're available at Amazon (kindle) and Smashwords (most every eReader). Just visit the links here. It's fun to have the stories out there again. They usually have such brief lives.

Art

>Does Social Networking Work?

>I've recently released two ebooks unto the world.
and
As part of my awareness campaign I did several things. I blogged about both books. My blog appears on Livejournal, Blogspot and Myspace (aka deadspace) and it is "fed" to Facebook, Goodreads, Amazon, and Jacketflap. So my rough estimate is that around 5000 people have friended or follow me on these various networks. So that's a potential audience of 5000 (or 10,000 eyeballs if you're counting).
Arthur Slade's Profile
Arthur Slade's Facebook profile

I also tweeted and "Facebooked" about the books, exposing them to about 4800 people (many of them the same people as the first group). These tweets were also re-tweeted by several others for even more exposure.

Total sales in the last two weeks: 25

That may seem like a small amount but I'm actually extremely pleased by it (hey, there was even one sale in the UK). If I examine just my Facebook friends alone I have around 3200. But only a small part of them would be actual fans -- the rest are other writers, people who collect Facebook friends, other writers, teachers, other writers, etc. Only a certain portion of them would own eReaders and only a small portion of those owners would be interested in Draugr and Dust. Not everyone wants to read YA. And not everyone wants to read horror. Add to that all the other "noise" out there (how many tweets can you read in a day?).
Follow arthurslade on Twitter
Actually if the sales pattern continues of 12 copies a week by the end of a year I'll have sold 624 copies and made $1248. Hey, that's not too bad. Add to that the fact that I intend to release two more books in the Northern Frights series, a book of short stories and maybe even a novelette--all of that can only help sales.

So does networking work? It depends on what you hope it will achieve. I see it as a way to both join the community of other writers and readers out there (and the heavy metal/starwars/startrek/geek community) and a way to be able to communicate directly to people who enjoy my work. "Friends" won't just purchase something the moment you tweet about it. They have lives of their own (apparently!). I rarely like seeing a direct sales message (unless it's something I'm dying to get) so I don't expect others to want to see too many of my own. In fact, I think you're far more likely to sell books if you're a good online citizen and nice to people (hey, maybe that could be a t-shirt--be nice to people...it sells books!)

So the social networking works for me.

And it's a great way to procrastinate from writing...

Art

>Facebook Ad sells a Bazillion Books!

>Well, a long time ago (April 21st, 2009), I tried out Facebook's ad campaign to mixed results. Enough time has passed and I've saved up enough cash that I decided to try again.

I chose to advertise my recently released eBook DUST.
As you can see I made up a clever ad (which is relatively easy to do with Facebook Ads) and pressed the "go" button. Facebook allows you to choose your target audience, so I selected America (because the eBook is only available there) and young adult/horror. I chose to pay $5.00 a day for three days. Because I published this version of DUST it meant that I could track sales exactly. My hope was that people would see the ad, click on it and go directly to the Amazon kindle site, then voila--buy the book. And I'd pay off my mortgage (okay that's more of a long term goal).
Here were the results:

As you can see there were 91,000 impressions and 49 clicks. And the number of books sold during that time period = 1. Yep, only sold one. I needed to sell at least 8 to break even.

Now I didn't expect the ad to sell bundles of books. First the person who clicks on the ad would have to own an eReader, then they'd have to have $2.99 to spend, and finally be willing to take a chance on an unknown book. So obviously this ad wasn't hitting the impulse buyers (all I need is about 100,000 impulse buyers...is that too much to ask).

I have been told that advertising usually takes 3 months to imprint onto your audience's brains. At that point they are more likely to buy the "product." But I'm not prepared to buy 3 months worth of ads. I may try Project Wonderful next, which is much cheaper. And have been itching to give Goodreads a try, too.

Art