{"id":305,"date":"2009-06-14T10:13:44","date_gmt":"2009-06-14T15:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quackingalone.wordpress.com\/?p=305"},"modified":"2009-11-15T19:42:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-16T00:42:00","slug":"sweat-the-small-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/14\/sweat-the-small-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Sweat The Small Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you know that Golden<\/a> <\/em>and Faerie<\/a> <\/em>-\u00a0my\u00a0books now out in paperback - are\u00a0about Arts & Photography?\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was a shock to me too.\u00a0 I can only imagine how much it surprises, and perhaps appalls\u00a0the highbrow artsy browsers at Amazon.\u00a0 I can hear them murmuring and muttering\u00a0now, one\u00a0of those<\/em> books in our section?\u00a0 Love and lust, sex and second chances, over the top head over wonder worm heroes in love - right here with books about art?\u00a0 How dare the writer post such drivel in this section!<\/p>\n

Well, this invasion wasn't intentional.\u00a0 I self published\u00a0Golden<\/a> <\/em>and Faerie<\/a> <\/em>through the Amazon subsidiary, CreateSpace.\u00a0 I chose that service after some research into\u00a0pricing and retail channels.\u00a0 With their pro plan, I can price my books reasonably, price them at numbers I'd pay for a book.\u00a0 With some of the other services, by the time the initial publishers' commission got added on, and then Amazon or the retail channel commission got added on, a paperback book would be priced at $25 to $30.\u00a0 Lord knows, I'd never pay that for a \u00a0paperback and wouldn't expect anyone else to either.\u00a0 With CreateSpace and the pro plan, my books get automatically listed on Amazon.\u00a0\u00a0I can price them well (now listed at $12.95) and everyone can still make a little money.\u00a0 It's that automatic part that's caused me some trouble.<\/p>\n

When I did the initial book listing, I paid a lot of attention to the category, genre and sub-genre. I debated pricing with my marketing-manager hubby.\u00a0 What I overlooked was one small drop-down list.\u00a0 It was the browse section, meaning, where\u00a0books are listed for browsing on the Amazon site.\u00a0 The\u00a0first entry, where you'd get set if you don't change it, is Arts & Photography.\u00a0 It's such a small little list compare to the rest of the data on the site.\u00a0 Small and easy to overlook.\u00a0 But sometimes, the small things are the big things.\u00a0 Yes, I should have sweated the small stuff.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It takes about 15 days for changes from CreateSpace to automatically feed up to Amazon.\u00a0 I'm counting down those days.\u00a0 How did I discover the problem, you ask?\u00a0 Well, it was the sales numbers.\u00a0 They were nonexistent for the longest time, and finally I sold\u00a0a couple of copies.\u00a0 Neither of my books may end up as break-the-Amazon-servers bestsellers, but I've\u00a0sold enough e-books that I felt my sales numbers for the paperbacks should have been doing better than that.\u00a0 So I checked and, sure enough, I'd screwed up.<\/p>\n

My books will - soon, Please God and Please Amazon\u00a0- find their proper home in the romance section on the Amazon site.\u00a0 Until then, I amuse myself by thinking about the couple of copies\u00a0that have sold so far.\u00a0 They could have sold through my links from Scribd, Smashwords or my website, but I like to imagine that I converted a couple of the arty types.\u00a0 I like to think that a couple of those folks read the product description and the sample pages and decided - By Jove, perhaps some of this romance stuff is art!\u00a0\u00a0A girl can dream.<\/p>\n

My hubby is preparing the sequel to Faerie<\/a><\/em> - A Golden Forever<\/a><\/em>- for CreateSpace.\u00a0 Once he gets all the conversion stuff done, I'll enter the data and sales channel management.\u00a0 This time, I'll check everything including the small things that have a big impact.\u00a0\u00a0 Yeah, I'll sweat the small stuff.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I'll\u00a0keep an interested eye on sales of the paperbacks and think about possible converts.\u00a0 I wonder if there are other idiots like me (come on, I can't be the only one).\u00a0 I also imagine that there could be - from time to time -\u00a0a very interesting variety\u00a0in the browse of Arts & Photography on Amazon.\u00a0 Sci Fi?\u00a0 Literary Fiction?\u00a0 Chick Lit?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I'm a lawyer so loopholes are\u00a0part of my stock-in-trade.\u00a0 A case could be made that all writing is art and could belong in that section.\u00a0 However, as much fun as staging a site sit-in\u00a0might be, my\u00a0wallet dictates otherwise.\u00a0 I hear it in my head now, bellowing in a deep voice - \"Feed me, moron!\"<\/p>\n

So, I'm counting the days until Amazon\u00a0fixes my screw up.\u00a0 Maybe, the lesson to be learned from this is that there is no small stuff.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sweat it all so Amazon doesn' t have to\u00a0sort it out.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Did you know that Golden and Faerie -\u00a0my\u00a0books now out in paperback - are\u00a0about Arts & Photography?\u00a0 It was a shock to me too.\u00a0 I can only imagine how much it surprises, and perhaps appalls\u00a0the highbrow artsy browsers at Amazon.\u00a0 I can hear them murmuring and muttering\u00a0now, one\u00a0of those books in our section?\u00a0 Love and ...continue reading \"Sweat The Small Stuff\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":735,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions\/735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}