The Rolling Sale - Round 2! (And Dragon Award Reminder!) · 6:53pm Jul 22nd, 2017
Of course this is from my site. Where else would it come from?
The final results are in! One Drink moved 142 units and garnered three new reviews, for a final tally of 172. I'll admit, it was a lot less than I'd expected, considering it has reached over a thousand copies in a single five-day freebie run several times before. I actually did expect it to quite easily shatter 500 moved, and make Dead Silver free. Market saturation, maybe? I don't know.
But, I do know the results, and the results are that One Drink's final tally was enough to knock Dead Silver down by 34%. Which means, starting Monday, July 24th and running through Friday, July 28th, Dead Silver will be marked down from its normal "heroic" price of $2.99 to $1.99! Two bucks for a 450-page mystery novel? Pretty good deal.
Of course, that's not all. If that was all that was going on with Dead Silver, it would barely warrant a special post. No, that date also marks the beginning of Round 2 of the Rolling Sale! Which means that copies sold and reviews added once again start adding up to massive discounts for the next title in line. Which is—Are you ready for this?—Unusual Events: A "Short" Story Collection!
Now, the nice thing about this next title (Unusual Events) is that there's a much wider array of discounts going for it. It is a more costly title, after all (it's still on "veteran" status in age). That, and the numbers needed to unlock the various sale tiers are much lower than Dead Silver's were. Why? Because One Drink was free, but Dead Silver is only at a 33% discount. So the tier numbers have been adjusted to reflect this. Additionally, the value of a review in terms of units moved has been adjusted as well.
So, how many tiers are there, and how many units need to be moved to unlock each deal? Here we go!
Deals Unlocked for Unusual Events Per Units of Dead Silver Moved:
- 0 units moved: Original Price: $5.99
- 1 - 3 units moved: 17% Discount - $4.99
- 4-8 units moved: 33% Discount - $3.99
- 9-15 units moved: 50% Discount - $2.99
- 15- 25 units moved: 66% Discount - $1.99
- 26-50 units moved: 84% Discount - $0.99
- 51+ units moved: 100% Discount - FREE!
Now, the lower number of units moved in this case does necessitate a small change to one other number as well: Reviews will not count as ten units moved with Dead Silver, but five. It's a necessary change to keep the tiers from being too easy to leapfroged by just a few individuals. The goal of a rolling sale is to get everyone involved!
So, same as before, units of Dead Silver moved will unlock successively higher tiers of deals for Unusual Events. Here's all the ways you can contribute to that number:
- Buy a copy of Dead Silver during the period of July 24th through July 28th
- Read a copy of Dead Silver via Kindle Unlimited (This counts!)
- Leave a review of Dead Silver on Amazon.com OR Goodreads to add 5 units moved to the total!
Ready? Set! You've got until Monday, relax! But then, GO!
Now, two other bits of news here. The first is that the SUBMISSION DEADLINE for The Dragon Awards for excellence in Science-Fiction and Fantasy is July 24th! Which means this weekend is the last chance you'll have to nominate your picks for the best of Sci-Fi and Fantasy in a wide array of categories for July 2016-2017! You don't have to nominate something in every category, but there's bound to be something you've read/seen/played with this many categories!
Speaking of which, Colony IS eligible for nomination. And yes, The Dragon Awards are okay with authors outright saying "Vote for/nominate me!" So at my urging, you can totally nominate one of my own books. Do I expect a win? Not very likely. But a nomination would be awesome ... and you never know! Colony is a pretty freaking fantastic book according to all the reviews, responses, and the like. So if it got its name out there ...
Anyway, it's your ballot, so fill it out how you'd like. Just, you know, fill it out before the end of the weekend!
Now for one last little note. Both the BOOKS and the WRITING SAMPLES pages accessed by the tabs at the top of the site have been overhauled! Both now contain embed links to Amazon samples of each of my books, meaning you can just click and link and start reading a short sample of each book without the muss and fuss of going to the book's page on Amazon, clicking the cover, loading the popup ... etc. You just click the link, and a new tab opens dedicated to letting you read a free sample in a nice approximation of a kindle layout! Handy! Good on Amazon for this feature; it's much better!
All right, that's all the news for today! See you Monday!
Those look like some attainable numbers.
And great to hear that Colony is eligible for a Dragon award! I'd forgotten about that award since the last round of Hugo shenanigans I'd paid attention to.
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Yeah, The Dragon Award is kind of in a funny spot because it was created in response to all the criticisms of the Hugo Awards. While the Hugos were busy burning themselves to the ground and pouring gasoline over the whole mix, Dragon-Con looked at the whole mess and said 'You know, all these criticisms against the Hugos are actually pretty reasonable. We're one of the largest Sci-Fi/Fantasy cons out there. Why don't we start an award and answer each of these complaints with it? That'll give everyone an alternative to the Hugo, and besides, Worldcon keeps telling everyone that if they don't like it, they can just go find another award. Let's give them one!'
So they did, and the response from the Hugo crowd was hilarious. All kinds of screaming that they were diluting the purity, about 'how dare they' compete with the Hugo, etc, etc. I did a post on it, actually, because after all the cries of 'Well go get your own award then!' the public did just that, and the result was really about what anyone would expect. Dragon Con, which is much larger and more representative than the Hugos (Dragon Con has something like 140,000+ attendees) crushed the Hugo awards for metrics of "anyone actually caring." The result ended up being a bunch of awards that actually sounded like things people actually knew of in the world of Sci-Fi and Fantasy because anyone can vote and attend, rather than the 'social elite' that Worldcon attenders like GRRM talk about being "allowed" to come.
So seriously, nominate and vote in the Dragon Awards! Everyone can! They don't care where you're from (unlike the Hugos), who you are (unlike the Hugos), how much money you make (unlike the Hugos), whether you just discovered the Geek realm of have been in it for generations (unlike the Hugos) ... Seriously, the goal was to fix the complaints and obvious shortcomings of the Hugo award, and boom! Pretty sweet award.
Also, it's called a freaking Dragon Award. And looks like this:
awards.dragoncon.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Dragon_Award-221x300.jpg
Dang cool looking.
But it's only in its second year, and still new, so there's plenty of room to grow and expand! So ... I'll keep pointing people toward it, whether or not I get nominated for anything.
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That is a sweet-looking award. Nominated Colony for Best SF novel (I don't think it qualifies as military SF, but people might vote for it there too if not otherwise directed).
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Woo! Thank you for the nomination! It's always awesome to hear how much enjoyment people got out of Colony, so thank you!
And yes, that is an awesome award. One of the winners last year put an even better picture up somewhere, and it was awesome! I promise to display it prominently and post pictures if I win. Might take a few years, though!