Reader Question Day #46 – how to sell 7,000 books, the romantic inclinations of Molly Cravenlock, and more
Note that today’s post contains mild spoilers for SOUL OF DRAGONS and SOUL OF SORCERY.
LJL asks in response to my post that SOUL OF TYRANTS sold 7,000 copies:
What kind of advertising/publicity do you do?
I don’t do much in the way of advertising or promotion. I think the biggest thing I did was make the first book in the series (DEMONSOULED) free, and enough people like it that they continued on to the sequel, SOUL OF TYRANTS. I suspect advertising or publicity is kind of a waste of time, because the only publicity that actually works is a.) someone reads the book and likes it, or b.) someone reads the book and likes it after hearing someone they know read the book and liked it.
Of course, getting those things to happen, that’s the trick.
Also, what do you charge per title and what kind of % of that do you actually take home?
For this book, I charged $2.99 for it. You get 70% on Amazon and Kobo and 65% on Barnes and Noble, so that works out to about $2.09 and $1.94, respectively. Other ebook retailers pay about 60% to 70%, depending on the retailer and the price of the book.
Matthew Fischer states, concerning the ending of SOUL OF SORCERY:
Amazing series. but I think that Molly should marry Lucan.
Molly would have strong opinions about that. Strong, sharp, steel, blade-shaped opinions. 🙂
But, to address the question seriously, attraction between men and women is rarely governed by rational concerns. In Molly’s case, she was attracted to Riothamus of the Tervingi because a.) he was brave enough to act as the emissary following the Tervingi defeat at Stone Tower, and b.) he refused to use his magic to kill, even though he easily could have, because he would one day be the Guardian. That combination of bravery and compassion was enough to attract Molly to him. Lucan Mandragon, by contrast, is also quite brave, but by the time Molly meets him for the first time at the end of SOUL OF DRAGONS, all the compassion has been burned out of him…and he gets worse from there.
Additionally, Molly doesn’t like Lucan. And it’s not the kind of dislike that masks sexual tension, but the fact that she thinks he’s dangerous and untrustworthy, and should probably be killed before he does something catastrophically bad.
Lucan, for his part, would have absolutely no inclination to pursue Molly, because a.) he’s still in love with Tymaen Highgate, and b.) by the beginning of SOUL OF SORCERY, he has concluded that the Demonsouled are the cause of the world’s woes, and he’s going to fix that by killing all the Demonsouled – including Molly.
So a Molly/Lucan pairing is unlikely.
Rohaya asks:
Got onto your Demonsouled series after completing the Ghost series. Like the Ghost series, I love your Demonsouled series. Can’t wait for the latest in both…sigh! One question that I have in the Demonsouled series – what happened to the serpent people that still had their limbs?
The Ang-kath, the serpent people who have kept their limbs, are still out there. I haven’t quite figured out how to work them back into the books, though. (One of the reasons is that they mostly live far to the east, further east than even the original Tervingi homeland, and only rarely come to the west, where the Grim Marches and Knightcastle are.) Additionally, there are two branches of the San-keth faith, the western and the eastern. The western San-keth have featured in the DEMONSOULED books so far, but the Ang-kath are mostly concerned with the eastern branch.
-JM