I’ve been refining a margarita recipe, we have shrimp fajitas at least once a week it seems like, and this morning I gave huevos rancheros a shot. They turned out to have pretty common ingredients (eggs, tomatoes, chiles, tortilla, cilantro) and I didn’t need to go out for anything.

I have to say, they turned out incredibly well:

Here’s the recipe I used.

Here’s all three books in the Beautyman series put together as a single Kindle edition. It’s $6.99, which is a savings of four bucks if you bought them all individually.

That’s The Saints Go Dying, The Marinara Murders, and The Con Before Christmas, back to back to back.

Three books to read.

No extra downloads.

Save some money.

Such a deal!

On Kindle, Nook
, and Kobo.

One of the things that happens when you read biographies of all the presidents is that you read about vaguely boring Presidents like Martin Van Buren. (For a less boring taken on Van Buren, here’s Seinfeld and “the Van Buren Boys.”)

But he did some interesting things, usually not while President though, as his administration was crippled by the Panic of 1837, the worst economic crisis until the Great Depression, at a time when no one had invented the tools for a government to address them.

He was very much the founder of the modern political party system. He was governor of New York (very briefly) and a Senator as well. And he helped popularize the word OK during the 1840 presidential campaign.

He was the first in a line of presidents between Jackson and Lincoln who were all basically fighting about slavery. Jackson had the nullification crisis, so he didn’t get out unscathed, but from Van Buren to Lincoln, it was pretty much the only thing people were fighting about, and it threatened the Union at every turn.

The author clearly likes Van Buren, but is realistic in his historical assessment and argues that Van Buren deserves “a second thought,” and based on this book, I’d agree with that.

I’ll quote from the final chapter of Ted Widmer’s biography:

He does not need fame, or pity, but Martin Van Buren is worthy of a sober second thought. Quite simply, it’s antidemocratic to expect all of our leaders to be great, or to pretend that they are once they are in office and using the trappings of the presidency for theatrical effect. It goes without saying that we need our Lincolns and Washingtons–the United States would not exist without them. But we need our Van Burens, too–the schemes and sharps working to defend people from all backgrounds against their natural predators. For democracy to stay realistic, we need to remain realistic about our leaders and what they can and cannot do. In other words, we need books about the not-quite-heroic.

I think that sums it up pretty well.

Kindle
Paperback
Nook
Kobo

The Little Book of Likes is dedicated to helping small (and very small) nonprofits build an audience of readers–and potential donors and volunteers–on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

This short guide leads Executive Directors and nonprofit marketing managers through the ins and outs of a simple social media strategy that is effective and sustainable. With real-world practical advice, it recognizes that nonprofit managers usually have better things to be doing than updating Facebook.

Like The Little Book of Gold, it was written specifically for small nonprofits as a “road map” to the often confusing and changing world of social media. In many way, it describes the core of the work Side x Side does when we work with nonprofits on social media.

If you work in nonprofits and need some guidance in social media, I hope you will check it out!

Nice illustration from Ted McCragg.

Speaking of social media, I’m on App.net! Is anyone else?

Sales Report

After four months of sales, I’ve paid for the upfront production costs of the book, which is–quite honestly–much faster than I expected.

It’s been a high percentage of sales too. Since I do love making charts and graphs, here’s the last four months of sales of the book, by format.

As you can see, the paperback is the most frequently sold format, but not by much. Followed by Kindle, then audiobook. But it’s pretty close to even thirds.

Perspective authors take note! This mix is very unusual for an independent author. Most self-published authors sell hundreds of ebooks for every paperback, and that’s been true for my fiction. I very rarely ever see paperback sales of The Saints Go Dying or The Marinara Murders. But The Little Book of Gold is aimed an audience that is not as likely to have Kindles. Or, even if they do have Kindles, it’s a book that the reader is more likely going to want to pass around and share after they read it. So paperback sales have been high.

Audible’s Bounty

One of the Audible surprises I’ve come to really enjoy is their “Bounty” program. On the second check I got from Audible, I received an extra $75. This was very confusing. What did I do to earn a free $75? My book was one of the first three downloaded books for a new Audible subscriber! 3 times, each time earning me $25. Audible has a variety of membership programs, where for a flat monthly fee, you can buy one (or more) audiobooks a month, usually for much less than the listing price. Audible assumes that the first few books must have been a lure to get someone to sign up, and rewards each of them with $25.

I’ve since had 6 bounties, or a free $150.

Judging from some comments by other independent authors, that too is higher than normal (as a percentage of sales), but makes sense when you consider the target reader: nonprofit professionals. And who are the biggest consumers of audiobooks? Professionals who are commuting to and from work. Learning about fundraising while commuting to work might be just the thing to encourage someone to sign up for a new service.

What’s Next?

I’m glad that my decision to take a leap with an audiobook has paid off. I plan to get all my books onto Audible eventually, but I’m not expecting the fiction to enjoy the same kind of numbers. Maybe I’m wrong! This whole process has been an experiment, and I’m constantly learning new things.
]]> http://erikhanberg.com/audiobooksworthit/feed/ 0 http://erikhanberg.com/audiobooksworthit/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ErikEmeryHanberg/~3/OVAZHtI0f-k/ http://erikhanberg.com/the-most-read-books-of-the-last-100-years/#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:30:01 +0000 Erik http://erikhanberg.com/?p=2249 This is an interesting project: Gabe Habash is reading the most popular books of every year, from 1913 to 2013.

Here’s his reading list.

Surprising how few of these books I’ve read, let alone heard of. What was popular in 1924 doesn’t mean that anyone will read it today (likewise, it’s hard to imagine in 80 years that anyone will have heard of 50 Shades of Grey–the most read book of 2012–let alone have read it). But it’s an intriguing way to access history and culture.

Some things I noticed:

I’ve read 8 of the 94 books (it’s not 100 books, because some were popular in multiple years). Only The Grapes of Wrath and The Good Earth were assigned to me. The rest I’ve read from this list were written by Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Steig Larsson, or Dan Brown.

John Grisham wrote the most popular book for 11 out of 100 years, including every year from 1994 to 2000. That’s an impressive run, and no one else on the list gets close at all (looks like Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Sinclair Lewis might be next for repeats).

For whatever reason, Publishers Weekly, who created the list, didn’t count Harry Potter books. This is just like The New York Times created a children’s bestseller’s list in the 2000s so that the “regular” bestselling books could get back to being #1 bestsellers (no one could get higher than #4 for awhile, thanks to Harry).

Cool idea!

Last year, I had one of my biggest weeks of sales ever for The Marinara Murders by making it free.

The book was enrolled in Amazon’s KDP Select, which meant that in exchange for 90 days of exclusivity with Amazon, I got some marketing benefits–the biggest of which, was the ability to make the book free for 5 days.

I tested this with modest success, until last March when the website EReaderNewsToday.com listed my book as a free one. I went from a few hundred free downloads to 11,000. Sales of The Saints Go Dying boomed, and then in the next few days sales of The Marinara Murders exploded. I sold hundreds of books, at full price, as word of mouth (and Amazon’s algorithms) did their work.

But those days are almost certainly gone for good.

Next month, Amazon is changing its affiliate rules. Any site whose affiliate link causes more than 20,000 downloads of free books will not get their earnings for the month. What does that have to do with free books? Well, sites like EReaderNewsToday get a huge portion of their revenue by sending thousands of people to Amazon–via affiliate links–to free books. Then they get a very small percentage of sales that customer makes on Amazon for the next 24 hours. This makes sense if you are linking to an actual paid product. But Amazon saw it as a loophole in their affiliate program, and it’s a loophole they’re closing.

That means that the big sites that drive thousands of free book downloads have every incentive to reduce their free offerings substantially, so as not to hit the 20,000/downloads in a month threshold, and lose all that month’s revenue.

It’s an open question whether this will be good for authors and marketing.

On the one hand, a good tool for marketing is gone. On the other hand, KDP Select’s effectiveness was already lessened (in April of last year, Amazon made some algorithm changes that reduced the post-free bump).

And, realistically speaking, while getting 10,000 new readers was great, reducing the massive scope of the free book economy is probably a good thing for self-published authors.

KDP Select had a good run. I’d already taken my books out of it, though, so that I could publish them on the Nook, Apple’s iBookstore, Sony, and other e-readers.

If there is any truism for marketing independent books, it’s that what worked last year likely won’t work this year.

Photo by Flickr user khawkins04 used under Creative Commons license

Wonder is a Young Adult novel by R.J. Palacio. Her novel tells the story of a young man born with a severe facial deformity who, at the age of 10, leaves the safety of his parents’ homeschooling and begins the 5th grade.

My name is August, by the way. I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking it’s probably worse.

You can read the book very quickly, but I think it will stick with you for awhile. I highly recommend it.

Click for more information from the library about the book and event programming.

I’ve also created a new “project” to track the presidential biographies I’ve read. In case you missed the smiling face of George Washington on my homepage, there you go.