#dystopolis

[chris-xyzabcarchive]

Some news about old books

Okay, so: soon, you'll be able to download Dystopolis from a bunch more digital retailers, including Kobo, iBooks, Barnes and Noble and Overdrive (if you successfully persuade your library to stock it).

The reason why it's taken over a year to actually get to this point is really kind of embarrassing - I use Smashwords to distribute to other ebook retailers, and for a long time I had no idea what was preventing it from entering their premium distribution channel. Turns out, it was a badly-formatted table of contents.

I've also updated the interior of the book, too, making a few corrections that never got corrected and changing the design so it's a little more digital-friendly. These should get pushed to Kindle owners soon, and anyone who bought the book through Smashwords or Gumroad should soon be able to download new versions. Changing the paperback version is a little trickier - I'd need to essentially republish the whole thing, assigning a new ISBN, and I'm not sure it's worth it (my books sell a lot more through digital channels, by a factor of about 10 to 1, and the ISBN I own is my last one). We'll see on that front.

There's no ETA on any of this - ultimately, it's up to individual retailers to ping Smashwords, and that can take anywhere from an hour to two weeks. But either way, it's coming. If you were holding off because you made the mistake of buying a Nook, or whoever it is that sells Kobo devices, or maybe you just want to read it on your iPad - your chance is coming soon.

In the meantime, I'll, uh. Probably try and write something else.

[chris-xyzabcarchive]

A quick reminder: my latest book will go up by two American dollars and ninety-nine cents in a week, so this is your last chance to get it at the current price. $4 is a steal for any book, really, even a bad one. And I don’t think it’s bad. I’m a little biased, though.

[chris-xyzabcarchive]

Hey! If you've read Dystopolis, I'd appreciate it immensely if you'd leave a review over on Amazon about it. I'm not just saying this to massage my ego (though there's always that) - the more positive reviews there are of my work, the more it boosts Amazon search rankings, the more I sell, the more I buy chocolate to stuff into my stupid body.

Of course, if you hated it, um. Probably keep it to yourself. I'm not telling you that you can't yell about how awful it was, but it'd be pretty depressing for everyone involved.

[chris-xyzabcarchive]

Numbers

First: if you haven't already bought Dystopolis, you can do so here. It's currently $8.99 in paperback, and $4.00 as an ebook. Quite a few people seem to like it. What follows is a breakdown of sorts of the first month-and-a-bit of sales, which probably won't interest anyone who isn't interested in the publishing side of all of this, but I'm guessing there might be one or two who are. So. Here we are.

In the last five weeks, I've sold 44 books. This includes 8 print copies (18%), 13 full price digital copies (30%), and 23 discounted digital copies (52%). When it comes down to royalty breakdown, however, I've earned by far the most from full-price digital copies (46%), followed by the copies sold during the recent discount (28%), followed very closely by print copies sold (26%).

The reasons behind this are fairly straightforward, of course - I make the most from digital sales, despite the fact that the retail price of Dystopolis in ebook form is less than half of its print counterpart - ignoring the fact that the Kindle publishing program allows for 70% royalties, it actually costs a substantial amount of money to produce and ship a print book in the first instance. Additionally, Amazon (as a third-party seller, despite owning Createspace, where the book was originally published) takes a decent cut even after the costs of production are taken away. Not that you should be discouraged from buying a paperback if that takes your fancy. It's nice to hold something in your hand, after all, and I spent quite a lot of time on the typesetting.

The thing that maybe surprised me the most was the surge in interest over the last week, helped mostly by the fact that the book was being sold for a fraction of its original price (99 cents for two days, followed by $1.99 for another two, and so on) and possibly also helped by the fact that I was pushing it fairly aggressively.

Promotion has to be factored into all of this, actually. Most of the original batch of sales came from the few who know me well enough to trust this blog, and then a small sampling of the large number of people who follow Arden's online presence. With the recent sale, I have no doubt that quite a few sales came from Ashton Raze, the lead writer of Starbound, retweeting this fairly desperate plea to over 3,500 people. The flip-side of this, of course, is that even ignoring the various other fronts on which people were highlighting the promotion, that creates a ratio of one sale for every 163 people.

I suspect the message of this is that only so much comes from exposure; initially, you need to nurture an audience. Which I sort of do - of all of the people I interact with on the interact with on the internet, I think most of them have bought my book (and if you haven't, shame on you), but at the same time don't. There's an element of dialogue in the way I interact with computers, but it isn't quite as two-way as it could be; this whole medium, for me, is still fairly one-way.

There are no grand conclusions, here. This is more of a data-dump, and I'll need some time to figure out what it all means. But it's interesting. And gratifying. Holy hell. The final point of all of this is that forty-four people have bought Dystopolis, and that's pretty damn lovely. I hope you're enjoying it.

[chris-xyzabcarchive]

No outrage is mustered here on behalf of anyone in particular; nobody is precisely to blame for the way things have turned out. And the writing is never less than thoughtful, understated, philosophical.

Another review of Dystopolis. Goodness me. You're all so lovely.

[chris-xyzabcarchive]

Reminder: Dystopolis is still a book what I wrote, and you can still buy that from an assortment of Amazonian retailers: in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia (as well as all the non-English speaking ones too). It should be up on other sites like Barnes and Noble in a couple of weeks.

Also! If you can't afford the print edition (or it isn't currently available in your region), and don't have a Kindle (buy a Kindle), the Kindle reading app is available for just about anything: iOS, Android, PC, Mac, and probably some even weirder ones I don't know about. And if one of your friends has bought Dystopolis, they can send you the file without facing any issues: the digital edition is 100% DRM-free, albeit encoded in Amazon's weird proprietary format. The key thing, though, is that if someone sends you the ebook and you only have a computer, you can still read it.

Here's what a real live human being said about Dystopolis recently:

"I picked up Dystopolis in the early afternoon. I read the last page in the evening of the same day. At no point in between was I able to tear myself away. Fraser's created a fascinating ecosystem of stories that both satisfy and somehow leave you wanting to delve deeper." (via)

All this, about a book that contains a nightclub called the Scarlet Sturgeon and a police chief who looks like Bill Nye the Science Guy. (I never actually said he looked like Bill Nye, but that was my visual reference. Sorry if you've read it and thought of someone else.)

Again - if it isn't too painful, please share and reblog this as much as you can. Or, if you don't have a blog, go to your nearest village square with a megaphone and start screaming in a shrill guttural monotone. Thank you.

[chris-xyzabcarchive]

Well, crap. There's an issue with the print edition of Dystopolis (not an error - those who have already purchased it won't notice the difference) which means that for the next 24 hours or so, it won't be available for sale as it goes through another round of revisions. Sorry about that. I'm my own worst enemy sometimes, honestly.

[chris-xyzabcarchive]

Hi. Over the last three years, I've been writing a book. It's about a post-apocalyptic city in the future, aggressively guided by the ideology that a meaningful life is always better than longevity, or happiness, or a crude moral framework. It has a sex robot in it, a vampiric journalist, and a love story about an exiled assassin, amongst other things.

If you're sold already, you can buy the paperback here for $8.54 and the Kindle edition here for $4 (UK: print, ebook, CA: ebook, print arriving soon). If you buy the print edition, you can get the ebook for free, DRM-free. Which is neat.

If you need a little more persuading, here's the blurb:

Two hundred years after a catastrophe that ruined the planet, humanity re-emerges with a whole new purpose and ideology.

In the newly-built city of Stopfordia, a traffic cop is embroiled in a murder mystery. A chef at a diner on the edge of town turns to androids to satisfy his basest desires. An assassin, facing exile, finds her whole life transformed. A farmer finds himself on trial in front of a jury of thousands for a crime of horrific proportions. A journalist, facing unemployment, turns to a life of crime to keep the stories bleeding in. And a sex worker peers behind the curtain, only to discover that life in Stopfordia is not as it seems.

This is the world of Dystopolis: where the pursuit of a perfect life can take you to places you’d never expect to end up.

And here are a couple of things that good people have said about it:

"With Dystopolis, Fraser has imagined something that walks in with a scifi badge on, then sneaks up on you with a pitcher-full of vulnerable, tragic, real life."

Josh Gaines, author of Clara’s Quilt and Michigan, Ten Cents

"Dystopolis is like what Rod Serling would’ve written at the peak of his career – incisive, insightful, optimistic, and gleefully terrifying all the same."

Casey Morell, author of Halcyon

If this all sounds interesting to you but you don't have any money, consider sharing this with people you know by clicking that little reblog button. You'd be surprised by how much it helps. Oh, and if you do have money, conside reblogging this anyway.

In advance, and maybe a little hopefully: I hope you enjoy it.