Back in February I posted up information for the Shades of A free book fund, a system where for every £35 copy of the shades of A omnibus sold I would spend £10 into shipping copies of the book to organisations, libraries and individuals over the world.
Unfortunately this system hasn’t worked out so well. Since then I’ve only sold 12 copies of the book, which due to international shipping only raised enough money to send out 8 copies. I’ve been able to send them out to cool places like the Martin Luther King library and The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health, but I’ve got a lot of books sitting at home and I need to get rid of them.
There are a couple of reasons I think the book sales haven’t been very high, current theories being:
-Most of the fans who wanted the special book already funded the kickstarter and have a copy.
– £35 is a lot of money compared to £20 for a pair of softback books.
I can’t do much about the first problem except pour more money into advertising, but I can do something about the price. I’ve talked to the kickstarter backers and they’re happy for me to drop the free book fund to bring the cost of the book down to £25, which means I’m far more likely to be able to sell it. While this feels unfair to everyone who paid top dollar for the book, I can’t sit on 300 books for the next 10 years.
This is a hard post to write but I’ll be pushing to get these books into shops over the next few months so I needed to make a proper announcement. For anyone wishing to buy a copy at the new price of £25 they’re available in the store, or you can always come say hi at a con for me to sign it for you in person.
To close I’d like to apologise to the 80+ people who signed up for a free book, to thank those who bought the books to send out what little I could and my gratitude once again to everyone who made this book happen.
Kind regards,
-Tab
