dianeduane's blog

So some of you may remember that a little while ago I moved A Wind from the South from its free-at-website-only status to wider availability at Amazon, this time actually charging money for it... i.e., a shattering USD $1.99. (Having first made sure everyone who might have wanted it free had had their chance.) This was in the nature of an experiment, to see how (or if) low ebook prices worked for me.

So the first paycheck in which AWFTS was included has come in, and it wasn't bad. But the sales still weren't exactly stellar. So I took the experiment in a slightly different direction: I raised the price to USD $4.99.*

And suddenly sales have jumped.

Could it be that, when you're an author who's been established in print for a while, that it's not smart to price your book too low? Is it possible that people look at it and say, "Oh, this thing must be cheap because it's no good", and pass by on the other side? Or is this just some seasonal effect, or some other kind of coincidence?

It'll be interesting to see how the next month or two of sales goes. (BTW, for those of you who might want it, the book remains available for a lower-than-Amazon price at the DD.com shop. I'm waiting to see if the dreaded Amazon PriceBot notices the lower price and discounts the Amazon version of the book accordingly.)

*For international purchasers, VAT is added and the price goes up a little. It's $5.86 when you're buying it in Ireland, for example.

I need to write about this now, as it’s only going to get more difficult if I put it off.

Despite our hopes that our most senior cat Mr. Squeak would see some relatively long-term improvement in his general condition, subsequent to the time he spent in the vet hospital early in April on being diagnosed with renal failure syndrome, and despite a brief period during the middle of the month when he was genuinely doing better, the tide is unfortunately turning for the worse.

When he was released from the hospital, Squeak was put on meds for blood pressure management and to improve what remains of his renal function. At first he responded pretty well to these, and around the middle of the month he started acting more like the cat we knew from before last winter — being up and around a lot more, demanding food every time someone walked into the kitchen, getting in your face in bed in the morning (normally by sitting on your chest and purring deafeningly until you surrendered to the inevitable and got up and fed him), hanging around with whoever was up and working, and snoozing on and off when he was convinced that tthings were going well enough that he could relax his attention.

After the posting that went up yesterday on the unavailability of digital versions of the Young Wizards books in Canada, we had a really interesting response in the comments…

 Hi there,

When we saw this blog post we contacted HMH directly to inquire about where Canadian rights for the Young Wizards series stand. They confirmed that the titles do have Canadian rights, so as of a few hours ago they've been available to readers in Canada: (use this link.)

Nathan Maharaj
Manager, Merchandising
Kobo

You folks are stars.  Thank you, Nathan! We’ll update all the web pages at YoungWizards.com and DianeDuane.com to reflect this.

I also note this response to Nathan from”Jc”:

And are the errors fixed?

I’d say it’s a fair bet that they won’t be, and indeed can’t be, considering that the distributors of ebooks — like Kobo and Smashwords and B&N and Amazon —  are specifically enjoined by the publishers against changing the content of ebooks. Errors or other production issues in an ebook have to be addressed by the publisher in question itself.

Seriously — and it seems I have to keep saying this, since there are a surprising number of people who’ve been writing me in a “tone of voice” that suggests they think the errors in the files were somehow my fault -- believe me, they're not. They seem to have been introduced during the conversion of the books to digital format.  I'm presently working with the publisher to see how this situation can be put right, but everyone needs to be clear that I only have so much influence I can exert in these matters. While I personally supervise the quality of ebooks that come out of Badfort Press and Errantry Press, I presently have no direct quality control over ebooks produced inside Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and I don't know how soon this state of affairs might change. As consumers, however, you can add your leverage to mine. If you find that the presentation of the product you’re being sold falls below your expectations of quality, I urge you to contact the publisher yourselves and making your opinions known. If enough people do this, there’s a chance of something happening.

Anyway, congratulations to Kobo! I didn’t even know you folks existed until very recently. I’m impressed by your proactiveness.  :)  Canadian YW fans, if you would check the Kobo link above and make sure that it produces results for you, I’d appreciate it. (Please leave responses in the comment thread under the Out of Ambit posting.)

25 March, 2011: ETA: After contacting my publisher regarding the unavailability of the YW books to Canadian Amazon.com customers, the problem was fixed yesterday afternoon. Thanks for keeping me in the loop, everybody!

I have something new it's been on my mind to start doing over at my WordPress blog, but Lee the Tech Lady (who has increasingly been handling the details of the more twitchy stuff that goes on at the website) advises me that if I want to do that, our present install of WordPress needs to be updated. (Actually her language was a lot stronger than that, but never mind. "Antediluvian" was one word she used.)

So if things look a little peculiar at OOA over the weekend, or it vanishes completely for a while, please don't be alarmed. It'll be back shortly, and then I can start this New Thing.

More details about that later.

We're starting to put together the book trailer for the paperback edition of A Wizard of Mars (which comes out in May) and I thought I might start putting up some of the prettier separate frames as downloadable wallpapers for anyone who might like them.

These are all generated using the wonderful Terragen terrain generation and modeling software, which has been used in some interesting places (the highest-profile at the moment probably being the wonderful volumetric-cloud work they did for TRON: LEGACY). The terrain data comes from Martian radar altimetry sent home to us by the Mars Global Surveyor.

This one shows some very atypical weather in the Valles Marineris region -- secondary to some busted-loose wizardry monkeying with the surface conditions, as described in AWoM. The dimensions are 1920x1200.

More of these are available over at the Young Wizards website, at this link. (The biggest resolutions aren't available at the moment, but will be during March. It takes a couple/few days to render some of the more complex files.)