Kris Rusch spoke of the sneaky growth (very sneaky in my case, but I’m not despairing yet! ;-)) and Dean Wesley Smith of the reasons for a Trade Paper Edition, for which personally I don’t see a reason yet. Yes, I’m still with Lulu (since 2009) and sold 3 books (one print and 2 PDF downloads) in 2 years and 4 months, and I’m not going to leaving them anytime soon. Because, like I told him during the Publishers Workshop, Lulu handles European formats (which is still what I use to draw – A4 sheets), CreateSpace doesn’t. And selling direct to bookstores in the US from ITALY doesn’t make sense yet.
When I have a bigger catalog, I might see if I can get my books in the few local English bookstores, but it’s a little early now. Or maybe I’ll do a new edition with CreateSpace. But at the moment, ebooks are the only real way to reach my readers, in my humble opinion. Because I don’t live in the US, so I’m aiming at an international market that is mostly on the internet. But this is just me.
I even added a folder with “print-only covers” on my FB profile, to show there are some print versions – actually some books that are ONLY in print, like the art books, or maybe two novels bound together because they’re short, so I needed a new cover for them. (Scoop: here’s the cover of the future print edition of CVE1 – The Spell + Allan de Sayek! 😉 Of course it’s a composite of the ebook covers…):
I’m also putting PDFs of SKYBAND on DriveThruComics, and they have more views than the novels. Not a sale, yet, but apparently a graphic novel draws more attention on DriveThru. They also have the wonderful possibility of scheduling release, so I’ll have the (back) issues out once a week, available every Monday morning, including the two Omnibus, so I’ll have time (hopefully) to complete chapter 11 by the time I publish all the others (which have been on Lulu since 2009). I won’t format this specific graphic novel for Kindle or Nook because it has prose pages that would be unreadable on e-reader screens… so I hope you enjoy the PDFs! 🙂
In spite M.Louisa Locke saying why Self-published authors know best, I don’t think I’m knowing more than anyone else, I’m just experimenting from my side of the pond and see what happens! 😉 I’m not experimenting with pricing, though, because I don’t think making my books cheap or free will sell them. I’m totally behind Zoe Winters on that. I don’t think the readers that go after the 99cents or free novels are real readers – like she says, they’re downloaders. That’s not what I’m looking for. Real Reader and Future True Fan, where art thou? 😀
Now, you reader of this blog, even if you don’t read my novels, please help me again in choosing a cover for the next release. Cover A is the original illustration for that story, dated 1997 or so (for which you can find the “manga” version on Barb&Masayo Stories), but it actually refers to the end of the story… so I did a new drawing (exhibit B&C) in two variations. What says thou, A, B, or C?
Thank you so much for your votes (and a special thanks to the mighty Joleene Naylor for checking the story before it comes out)!
Barbara G.Tarn - writer 
Madison Woods
/ 22/02/2012I like cove ‘A’ best 🙂
LikeLike
Barb
/ 22/02/2012Thank you! 😀
LikeLike
Shafali
/ 23/02/2012I like A, but it’s obvious that you don’t want to give away the end of the story…so C. The title stands out more than it does in B. Your name needs to stand out a bit too:)
LikeLike
Barb
/ 23/02/2012I kinda like C for that reason… and yeah, I can make my name bigger on C as well! 😀
LikeLike
Shafali
/ 23/02/2012Didn’t see anything from you on facebook recently…busy?
LikeLike
Barb
/ 23/02/2012I try to spend more time on Goodreads… but this social networking is killing me (says the hermit inside me)! 😉 I’ve found a few more old friends, but yeah, you get only the blog feeds there for the moment… I’ve added a photo album on the author profile, though, did you see it? The “print-only covers”?
LikeLike
Joleene Naylor
/ 27/02/2012A or C – you know, looking at them small I think C because it is less “busy”, though you might want to make the title… bigger? – otherwise I love them all 😀
so about those graphic novels… *cough* 😉
LikeLike
Barb
/ 27/02/2012I made the name bigger on C, as suggested by Shafali.
SKYBAND is scheduled for Sunday nights releases on DriveThruComics, so the next Omnibus should come out at the end of April… the single issues are having more “views” than the BoI on DriveThruFiction, so hopefully somebody will hit that “buy” button at some point…
Back to work on chapter 11! 😉
LikeLike