My wife, as many of you know, writes really funny and fun fantasy novels under the name Kristine Grayson. She has been selling the novels to Soucebooks and they have been doing some great stuff with them.
Suddenly today Sourcebooks decided to give away for one week only on Kindle and Nook the Grayson book Kris wrote about publishing. It is wonderful fun and even has Sheldon McArthur the book dealer as a character. The book is called Wickedly Charming and came out in May, but for Kindle and Nook you can get it for free thanks to Sourcebooks for this one week.
On the publishing side of things, this will be an interesting experiment on using “loss leaders” to promote indie books. Our publishing company, WMG Publishing has up about ten Kristine Grayson books. If this push to make Wickedly Charming free for a week works and brings in new fans for Sourcebooks and the new Grayson book coming out of Sourcebooks called Utterly Charming, then it will also push the sales of WMG Publishing books.
So go get a free copy. And I will report back in time as the data comes in on the success of a loss leader on the other Grayson books.
For your Info, Dean:
I just looked it up and it (still?) costs 4,12 EUR in the German Kindel store this morning.
Dean, is there anything you can do about the ***** DRMs ?
Not that they will limit me from doing bad things since
1st I won’t do them even without DRMs,
2nd as you know they are automagically circumvented,
but since I know that you’re not a DRM proponent either, I would have thought it would be DRM-less.
That is a Sourcebook novel, not a WMG. Kris sold the book to Sourcebooks and I guess they do DRM. I didn’ t know that. Some traditional publishers still do, sadly.
If the book was a WMG Publishing book, trust me it would have no DRM. (grin)
Folks, me and Kris had nothing to do with this going free. This was all her publisher and they didn’t ask.
But because we have the WMG books in place, the traditional publisher doing this to promote Kris’s next book coming out is doing wonders for the WMG books as well.
I love indie publishing, and this is a prime example that if you can, go both ways.
Kindle store …
sorry.
Oh, I DO trust you on that one. Hence the question about you/Kris beeing able to do anything about it.
If customers AND writers together can’t change a publisher to dump DRMs, who can ?
Nope, nothing that can be done. Company policy decided way above a writer level. Eventually someone in traditional publishing will catch a clue that DRM is worthless and just makes readers angry.
Oh, and glad you see good impacts on the WMG side of things
PDF & EPUB formats are available directly from the Sourcebooks website, too, with DRM. I nabbed both formats, myself.
I ordered it because of the deal; but frankly, under normal circumstances I wouldn’t even glance at a cover like that. I’m not a romance reader; and looking at that cover, I would guess romance, not fantasy. MAYBE romance-fantasy, but the emphasis on the romance. That cover would be practically invisible to me.
But I’ve loved Kris’s last two stories at Amazon, so I’ll give this a shot.
Unfortunately even on the amazon.com site, if you are in the UK like I am, it’s still selling for $6.44
Top 10 in Kindle store (even Free side) will equal additional add-on sales across the board. Congrats on the big win and kudos to the publisher for doing this. Also, it will now reach a *bunch* of neve could be fans, because it is free. Meaning, no matter how GREAT the book, it will get it’s first one star review. Sadly, many “authors” can’t handle this and get quite upset. I know WMG writers earned their exemption from this emotional state long ago .
Rejection slips, bad reviews, thick skin, growing checking account balance; it’s all good. -Steve
Picked it up this morning and it was #7 free in Kindle!
Just picked up a copy to read on my iPad (once again taking advantage of the free Kindle reader).
Oh, and in case you were curious, the Amazon rankings as of today, Wed., Oct 5, 9:57 a.m.) were:
#7 Free in Kindle Store
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Romance > Fantasy, Futuristic & Ghost
Way to go, Kris!
– Liz
Downloaded it on Tuesday, as I’m curious.
I’m not much for romance, but I’ll give it a try since it’s free. (And who knows? Maybe I’ll like it enough to buy the rest of the series. Hope springs eternal, or something like that.
)
I did recently buy Kris’ first Retrieval Artist novel after reading the sample on Smashwords…I simply had to, it was so good!
I picked up your wife’s book about a month ago (in paperback) at a closing Border’s store. It is in my TBR stack.
This post was a nice surprise to me. I look forward to reading your wife’s work!
Kelly
This may be perfect example why a loss leader works. I never would have bought this book on my own dime. Not because I do not read romance or fantasy, because I do. But I only spend my own money on them after I am familiar with the author’s work. It comes from a recommendation from a friend, or I take a book out from the library. THEN I start buying. I am half way through the book (and I only found about it because I am lurker on your site
) and I LOVE it.
I went in suspicious because there were some bad reviews and now I feel whoever gave a 1 star review is either crazy or downloaded a book in a genre they are not interested in to begin with. (Or is someone your wife has pissed off). If the book stays as wonderful as it is at the moment she has gained at least one new fan, who next time will spend the money to buy the book!
I’m also curious about the numbers. Looking forward to the follow up post.