She finally achieved literary success at the age 87 when she received a National Book Award in 2002. She’d been a poet for over 50 years by then and despite all she had been through had kept writing.

I couldn’t help thinking as I read about her life–what if she had given up on poetry in her fifties and sixties when things were rough? What if she hadn’t kept going? It was in her seventies that she began to break through.

In other links, Digital Book World has two great articles: one on Barnes & Noble’s strengths, and one on Barnes & Noble’s weaknesses. The article on the weaknesses includes a look at Amazon’s KDP program to contrast it to Barnes & Noble’s Pubit that is well worth the time to read.

First off, the Sony eBookstore and iTunes were terrific in responding in a reasonable amount of time to the change of the price to Free, and then ending the sale after we raised the price back to $4.99.  Considering that the pricing was being done through Smashwords, this was an impressive turnaround time. We’d do a sale with them again in a heartbeat.

We also confirmed that it takes a while for a free version to get over to Barnes & Noble, and also confirmed that a different e-bookstore (not Barnes & Noble) tends to be irritatingly sloooooooow in responding to price hikes after a sale is over.

If you want Amazon to match the temporary sales price set at Free, Barnes & Noble and iTunes tend to be key markets that need to be part of the sale. We decided we’d learned enough already and stopped the free sale at Barnes & Noble before it could begin. We had no need to trigger a free sale at Amazon this time around.

I strongly advise any tiny press planning a temporary sale to be careful about which e-retailers you do it with. Most will honor your request to raise the price back up once the sale is over, but there’s one or two out there that will drag their feet for months, and you’ll probably have to file a complaint with Smashwords Customer Support to contact those e-retailers to get them to cooperate and raise the price back up.

So you may want to think carefully about which e-retailers have your e-book in their inventory if you’re going to do a temporary sale.  One option is to do the sale at the very beginning when an e-book has just been published, then wait until after the sale is over to ship the e-book at the regular price to those few e-retailers that have a pricing behavior problem.  That way you can do a temporary sale as a marketing strategy when the e-book is first released, then get coverage in all e-stores later on.

Another option is to avoid certain e-retailers entirely for e-books if you want temporary sales to be done for that e-book on a regular basis. But remember to weigh the convenience of doing so against the disadvantage of lost sales if that e-retailer can get you into markets otherwise inaccessible.

But no two e-books are alike, so what works best for one e-book is not the same as what works best for another.

We’ve gotten the data we wanted for the first go-round, and so we’re going to start the process of wrapping things up before the new year begins. I’m looking forward to being able to do a temporary sale of the first book in a series in the future.

It’s already available for free on: Sony and Apple and Smashwords. I’ll post when Barnes & Noble and Kobo and Amazon do likewise.

Next year is going to be a very busy year for new work being published, so I feel comfortable doing this even if it proves to be an utter disaster (i.e. the novel stays stuck at free with the distributors).  Also, I’ve always wanted to test out what Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman were talking about at their 2009 Worldcon panel.  I think Neil Gaiman is right about how we discover new authors–we find them through libraries, friends, and other ways of sharing.

I was probably spouting too many platitudes because there were a couple of life crises that happened during the last two months behind the scenes, and as a result I had to hunker down and focus on using what little time I had to just write. Everything else–blogging; getting the editing done on stories to be published as ebooks; marketing plans–got temporarily paused.

I now call times like these the “Time of Turtle Steps,” because even when I keep working, I feel like a turtle surrounded by hares. It feels like everyone else is racing past me while I plod along far, far behind.

And yet, I’ve now learned enough to know that I’m wrong. Those turtle steps add up over time if I keep doing them step by step by step…the hard part is to keep going. Too often we stop out of despair.

Let me give an example from my own experience. In October, a couple of crises hit at the same time.

I wasted a lot of mental energy in October beating myself up for my slowed pace in writing and in working on my career. There was little time to write, and my final word count for the month was 23,255 words.

In November, I decided that while I couldn’t participate in NaNoWriMo since I wanted to keep working on my novel in progress, I could at least change my attitude and stop beating myself up. The crises continued to eat up lots of time in November, but once I accepted that I was a turtle, I found I could mentally relax and enjoy the writing more when an opportunity appeared to grab an hour to write, and I passed the 50,000 word mark for November two days ago.

So my productivity more than doubled once I stopped beating myself up about my writing pace and lack of time to do career tasks.

There are times in our lives when a crisis hits and we have to jettison everything but the most essential tasks. Be kind to yourself and don’t beat yourself up for the slowed pace. It’ll just make it harder to get anything done.

Be a turtle. Do each step by step by step, and keep going…and you’ll be surprised by how far you can get in a month. I certainly was.

Unfortunately, the way “Parallels” is currently distributed, that likely could  have happened to it. So instead a different experiment will be done in a month or two, where a free short story (that ties into a novel) will get shipped off into the world that will stay free permanently.

We’ve also got some ideas on how to deal with the “temporary sale price becoming a near-permanent sale price” issue and will probably try one out next year.

And yes, I’m being deliberately vague here. I will say that this is only a potential issue if the ebook is being distributed on many different e-retailers at the same time. It’s a bit like herding cats–it can be difficult to get them all to move in the same direction.

I highly recommend that a tiny press or indie author use a short story first to test where possible snafus might show up in doing a temporary sale.

So for a limited time, my short story “Parallels” will be available for free. It’s just been flipped to free over at Smashwords, but I don’t know how long it will take to change at the iBookstore and other e-stores. Days? A week? Two weeks? A month? Part of the reason we’re doing this test is to find out.

But the story won’t stay free forever, at some point in November we’ll be flipping it back to $0.99 and then watching how long it takes to go back to the original price at the e-bookstores.  If I learn anything worth sharing, I’ll do so.

NOTE: This experiment got cut short, for the reason listed here. We’ll be doing this with a different short story instead.

Oddball and niche projects that are unappealing to traditional publishers don’t have to sit in a drawer anymore. And yet that oddball project can be the perfect opportunity to take risks and grow as a writer. Kristine Kathryn Rusch talks about the importance of this in her latest blog post today, Believe in Yourself.

Unlike independently published authors who publish at the $0.99 price point to fuel sales, Freethy’s books are primarily priced between $2.99 and $5.99. Her self-published books come from her extensive backlist, whose rights were reverted after the books went out of print. Freethy repackaged the books and put them on sale again, finding gold in books that had been taking up space in her closet”

The full PR announcement is at:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/author-barbara-freethy-sells-over-one-million-self-published-e-books-in-2011-132522313.html

I notice she’s selling not only through Kindle, but also made sure to have her ebooks on the Nook, Kobo, Sony, and Smashwords. Also has a deal with Overdrive.

Just for fun, let’s calculate what that is in cold hard cash. If we take a 70% cut of $2.99 for a self-published ebook, that’s about $2.09 per book. Sell 1 million ebooks at $2.99, and that’s $2,090,000.

Nice! This is fascinating times we live in.

Thanks to Passive Guy and David Gaughran for getting the word out.