Skip to main content

Kindle Spring Sale

I'm breaking my usual absence of posts at the weekend to comment on the Amazon Kindle spring sale. They have a range of new books on sale at ridiculously cheap prices. I'm most interest because my latest book (which hasn't been mentioned here because it technically doesn't come out until 5 April, though it has been spotted in Waterstones) The Universe Inside You is one of these books, just 99p in the UK and $1.57 in the US.

Some have questioned whether it makes good business sense to sell a book that costs £12.99 (admittedly often quite heavily discounted from this) for just 99p in ebook form. I think as long as it is a limited duration offer, as this is, it makes a very good way of drawing a new book to people's attention. After all, for 99p it is surely worth taking a punt - and with awareness enhanced, it will hopefully then be more obvious as a print book.

The process started yesterday and so far it seems to be going pretty well. At the time of writing, The Universe Inside You is the #54 bestselling paid Kindle book in the UK, second only to The Selfish Gene (also currently 99p) in science.

I'll be posting some more detail about The Universe Inside You in a few days time... for the moment, it is an interesting reflection of the benefits ebooks bring. You can't do this sort of promotional pricing on real books, but ebooks give the flexibility to use a short-term discount to draw attention to both the electronic and paper versions.

Comments

  1. I'm not at all sure, but we are where we are Brian - We live in a society where many important things are not valued - in some sectors, the www has produced what I call an ebay economy - a rise to the bottom

    I guess we cannot sustain ourselves in a 'Poundland' economy.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope