join me tonight!

I'm going to be on Stacey Cochran's "Book Chatter" LIVE tonight at 9:00 pm, EST-- I'm going to talk about my recent sales successes and failures. Hope you'll join us!

I can now assess my mistakes. For one, I raised the price too high. Fifty cents doesn't seem like much, but think about what it would be like if a zero was added to that. Imagine raising a price from 99 dollars to 149 dollars. Would you be willing to pay that much more? I still want to try $1.19 and see how I do. If I don't fare much better, then I'll go back to 99 cents.

Second, the problem may have been that I raised the price on an existing product. I think I'd do better releasing a new book at $1.49 (or higher, once the new Amazon royalty rates change). Clearly the appeal of Faking It wasn't only the book itself, but a "great book at a great price". I thought perhaps it was time to let the value of the writing speak for itself, but I underestimated that readers loved that just as much (even though some said they'd have been willing to pay more).

Good lessons all around. It'll kill me to have to take the book offline even for 24 hours while the new price reduction goes into effect, but hopefully sales and rankings will rebound as a result.

Finally, I got two happy surprises today. Came across this glowing review of Faking It and Ordinary World, and the WickedWriters website re-posted the guest blogpost I did for Anthony Policastro and The Writer's Edge. So, if you missed it the first time, check out WickedWriters!

Have a fab weekend, everyone!

not part of the tour, but one more guest post

I get to plug one more appearance. My friend Anthony S. Policastro (you may remember his guest post back in September of last year) invited me to write a post about being a Kindle bestseller. His blog, The Writer's Edge, attracts many self-published and aspiring authors. So, here's my post in which I try to re-trace my steps using the 4 "P"s of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.

In the meantime, I have a question (or two) for you: Is there anything you'd like me to cover on my own blog? Any questions, any subject matter? If there is, let me know. I recently read something about blog overload, not to mention blog burnout. In other words, so many blogs to read and follow, so little time. I can vouch for this both on the reader and writer side of blogging. This piece (and I'm sorry I didn't bookmark it, otherwise I'd give you the link) suggested that it's more important to blog about things of substance than blogging every day. Most of what I post here seems to be pretty mindless, and I want to keep my followers, so I'd like to know what keeps you coming to "I'll Have What She's Having", or what would keep you coming.

And I haven't forgotten about the titles-&-characters challenge. As you read yesterday, I'm pretty swamped right now. Might not happen until the summer.

Anyhoo, enjoy the guest post, and have a good weekend. See you on the B side.