The Book That Wasn't There

It's Old Yeller time, friends. I'm putting a book out of its misery.

At the end of the month, My Dog Needs Surgery is going to the big bookstore in the sky. A collection of stories and essays, it was, in concept, a cheap and easy way to raise money for my dog, who needs expensive knee surgery. In reality, it was neither cheap (thanks to the formatting and cover) nor easy. It was just a big mistake. A series of big mistakes, actually.

Mistake #1: The concept (or lack of same)
"I'll just slap a bunch of stuff together and sell it" does not a cohesive collection make. The book needed a unifying theme beyond You wanna help a cute little doggie, don't you?. In fact, at least one person seems to have been offended by the blatant fundraising angle: The book received an anonymous, reviewless one-star rating on barnesandnoble.com the day after it went on sale. Another irate consumer trashed the book on Goodreads because it wasn't actually about, you know, dog surgery. That this individual had purchased the book without reading the product description or any of the reviews seems to have been my fault.

Mistake #2: The title
I know. I've written about this before. Dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. I suppose it really was my fault that some poor schmoe with a sick pooch downloaded the book thinking it would include tips on giving a schnauzer a soothing post-operative bath. I was going for so-blunt-it's-funny. I got so-obtuse-it's-useless. Since putting out My Dog Needs Surgery, I've become much, much more aware of the importance of Amazon recommendations. Someone buys one of your old books, you want them to buy your new one, right? But what's a casual reader -- someone who stumbles across my mystery novels because they like Sherlock Holmes, say -- going to make of CUSTOMERS WHO BOUGHT THIS ALSO BOUGHT MY DOG NEEDS SURGERY? Nothing, that's what. Meaning they'll skim right over it and click on Sherlock Holmes and the Flying Zombie Death Monkeys instead.

Mistake #3: The price
I've written about this, too. Not only is 99 cents a good deal for a collection, it's too good a deal. From the author's perspective, anyway. I went with 99 cents because (A) it seemed like what you'd stuff in a collection jar on a feel-good whim and (B) I thought it might attract some of those Amazon bargain lovers who occasionally descend on a title like a great swarm of prose-devouring locusts. Didn't happen. So the book limped along earning pizza money each month when I needed serious vet money.

Which is why as of March 1, My Dog Needs Surgery is turning back into a pumpkin. Or a file on my hard drive, anyway. I'm going to remove it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. People talk a lot about how easy it is to put out a book these days, but the opposite is true, too. Click click click, and you can make a book go poof.

The stories I'll rearrange and repackage and repromote. Stay tuned. The essays...aww, screw the essays. Who buys essays?

I want to thank all the fine folks who gave the book a boost with online reviews. (Well, except you, anonymous one-star schmuck and "Why isn't there a chapter on pre-surgery shaving?" lady.) Your efforts weren't in vain. Amy still hasn't had her surgery, but you helped pay for many a bag of Beneful. If you come back to help out when I try this again, that dog'll surely have her day after all.

Comments

[Jeff Q.]

I think you're going about this all wrong. You've already got the cover, you just need the story! Imagine - a dark and moody thriller about a man willing to do anything - ANYTHING - to get his dog that surgery. It's like Dog day afternoon, but actually with a dog.

[Ben]

Steve, for what it's worth, I bought it and read it and loved it. And I hope my 99 cents bought a stitch or two for your dog.

[Steven T.]

I second Jeff Q. And Ben while I'm at it. Still, I think the changes you're looking at will help. On the other hand, depriving your dog of surgery while you gorge yourself on pizza...? That's a bit rough, no? Keep the essays, I'd say. They're solid and can be thought of as an extra. That and a gag reel...

[Brad Kalmanson]

Bought a copy on both Amazon and B&N. Also posted several times on my facebook page. You are a good man and a great author. Hope things work out better next time. You'll have my support.

[Steve]

I think I'd still need a new cover if I wrote that thriller, Jeff, because the title would *have* to be My Dog Needs Surgery! instead of My Dog Needs Surgery.

Thanks for the kind words and support, Ben, Steven and Brad! It's much appreciated. Unfortunately, I needed a few thousand more of you to get the money for the operation. Maybe instead of hoping hundreds upon hundreds of people would buy the book at 99 cents, I should have priced it at $3,000 and tried to get *one* person to buy it....

[Patrick]

I liked the stories in this book. I'm allergic to dogs, so I just buy books with pictures of them on the cover. Kindle books are also hypoallergenic.

I'm hoping for a new series of MacGuffin adventures.

[J. Steven York]

Hey, I bought it, and I recommended it -- nay -- beat people about the head and shoulders telling them to buy it. Unfortunately, nobody every listens to me.

But unfortunately, you're probably right on all points. As we say here, AFLE, or "Another F#$king Learning Experience."

And you didn't mention the other important thing about the price. Thanks to Amazon's royalty structure, each copy sold only netted you a little over thirty cents, whereas if you'd priced it at $2.99, you'd have pocketed over two bucks a copy. It's hard to make any real money at 30 cents a pop. Not impossible, but very hard.

I'm also starting to think there's a kind of "price ghetto" at the 99 cent point too. Most of the purchasers are bargain hunters, and serious readers just somehow assume that 99-cents = trash. I'm even getting the feeling that it's creeping up to the $2.99 price point too. All our short-stories are still 99 cents (though I know people who are experimenting with $1.49, $1.99, or even higher for longer stories), those were never great sellers for us anyway, and certainly not great money makers. Our novels actually seem to sell BETTER at $4.99 than at lower prices, and we've bumped the $2.99 short collections and novellas to $3.99. It hasn't hurt sales so far as we can tell.

All of which is strange and counter-intuitive, but we're all still figuring this business out.

[Steve]

Glad to hear you liked the book, Patrick (and that it didn't make you sneeze).

Thanks for the insights into pricing, Steve. I've been thinking about this for a while now, and your comment's the clincher. As of March 1, not only is My Dog Needs Surgery going away (to be replaced by a higher-priced collection down the road), I'm raising the prices on Naughty and Dear Mr. Holmes. Ebooks will go from $2.99 to $3.99, while the Dear Mr. Holmes paperback will go from $9.99 to $11.99.

You heard it here first, folks! If you want to get my e-collections cheap, now's the time to act!

[Ray]

I just finished the $.99 dog book on my Kindle. I downloaded it because I read your Holmes novels and liked them. $.99 was a fantastic price. Because of this book, I just downloaded your Naughty Christmas stories for $2.99. Would I have paid more? Probably, but be careful raising prices. I am waiting for some publishers to lower their prices from 14.99 to 12.99 or something less. Those others and publishers now make zip/zilch/nada/zero from me because they got too greedy.

[Steve]

Hey, Ray! Thanks for weighing in! It's nice to know that My Dog Needs Surgery served its intended purpose at least once: raising some dough for my dog while promoting my other ebooks. I'm thinking I'll probably do another 99 cent title one day with the same goal, but I definitely *won't* give it such a weird name! (Kudos to you for having a healthy sense of curiosity. Unfortunately, I think a lot of readers aren't so adventurous.)

You can rest assured that I won't be jacking up the prices of my other titles too much. I still think $3.99 is a bargain for a book-length story collection, and now I can put out something a little shorter -- a Holmes on the Range novella, say -- and reasonably price it at $2.99. (Anything less than that gets a horrible royalty rate that makes it very, very hard to see a decent payoff for one's work.)

So stay tuned. More e-experiments are on the way....