Marketing Mix and E-books

Well, I put the price of my books down today. If you already bought one at a higher price, leave your contact details, tell me which book you bought and when, and I'll send you a coupon for a free book (of your choice). The reason I put down the price is that I was reading what other authors do and think about pricing, and I realised that I was charging too much. John Loke, for example, has about 6 books in the Amazon top 100 - and his philosophy is to charge 99 cents and, like Tescos, pile 'em high and sell them cheap. It seemed like a good idea to me. I had been thinking of a book more like a paper book - but an e-book doesn't carry those expenses of print, packing, postage, carriage, shelf space, stocktaking, warehousing and so on - so it's not fair to charge for it. So that's price sorted! So far as product goes, my Regency is far and away the most popular of the books I've published so far, which I'm thrilled about, because I love Regencies! There's a top 100 author with several Regencies in the list, which gives me something to aspire to. Place - well, Amazon seems to have the most sales, however, I have not yet published anything to All About Romance, which is surely a place a romantic novelist should be!

So far as marketing goes, John Loke said find out who likes your kind of book, go round to where they are, and shove it down their throat! Well, in essence, he's right. I know from experience that people who want to read my books because they know me never like my romances - because they don't like romances. Romance readers, on the other hand, love them. And that's not quite accurate, because people who like spicy romances don't like my sweet romances, that's how specialised the world is. People know what they like. QED, it's a total waste of time to try and market my books to anyone other than sweet romance lovers.

Anyway, I'm off to Greece for 2 weeks - I'm going to lie on the beach, think about everything I found out over the last couple of months, and write me a Regency.

One last thought, I'm actually really glad I just got some books out before I even knew what I was doing, because it is so easy to change things with e-publishing. I just won't be able to grumble at Microsoft for doing the same thing now! Isn't there a fancy word for it? When you throw things out and make improvements on the fly? It's not a bad way to progress.