The Vanity Project (part 7) and a milestone UPDATE

After a couple of days waiting, TMP put up the Hobby News about "To Ur is Human", and it is currently sitting front and centre on the homepage:

I took a picture, 'cos I have no idea how long it is going to be there, and hey! I'm paying at least $5 for the privilege*.

Has it had an effect? Well I was getting a few clicks through to the blog page I set up for the rules I'm publishing, and the hits for it have just jumped dramatically, so it looks like it is have done. And following 3 days of no sales, - which is the longest sale free period since mid October, after the initial rush - I had a couple of purchases come through on the publishing sales report. These pushed my sales through a milestone. I have now sold over 50 (Fifty!) copies via Amazon. That's a lot more than I expected, as I may have said before. If the sales keep coming whilst the TMP ad is running, I'll carry on with it, but I think that once I get a sales free period of 7 days or more I reckon that's telling me that interest has peaked if not come to a complete halt. I'll pick it up again when I launch Vanity Project II.

Over on the dedicated page Dave from Oz asked me about if I'm going to do a pdf or not, as he can't find or get the rules through Amazon.com.au. Well, it took a bit of looking, but they are there (even if it says they are not in stock. Don't know what happens if you order one). You need to search "To Ur is Human" in books, and with the inverted commas, and then look at the alternatives searches that come up. Their search algorithm wants to concatenate "To Ur" to "tour" and "Ur Is" to "uris". Beats me, but there you have it.

I've gone for as wide a distribution as possible on Amazon, except for the expanded release to other booksellers and outlets as that cuts the royalty per copy down to about 30p, and I can't see Barnes and Noble ordering a whole heap of them to make that worth while. The Amazon marketplaces you can release directly into are .co.uk, .de, .fr, .es, .it, .co.jp, .ca, and of course .com. Based on how my ordering works for author copies, I'd guess that the European ones are all provided by the Amazon print-works in Poland, .ca & .com by their US based printer, leaving me to conclude they must also have a printer in Japan. I know from other conversations that Amazon's distribution starts to get a bit iffy when you get to Oz, and is non-existent in NZ, but delivery from Japan might be possible.

I am not, at the moment, going to do a pdf or Kindle version. Wargamers are notorious in some quarters for not wanting to pay for rule sets, so once I do that they'll pop up as a pdf generally. For example, if you type on DBA into Google, the second search that comes up is "DBA 3.0 pdf", and there's already a version on Scribd, which I'm pretty sure isn't official. Bob Cordery has been ripped off as well, as has another author of my acquaintance. Despite beliefs to the contrary the Kindle coding isn't uncrackable, and there's no way of making a pdf truly secure. I'm sorry to those of you who have forsaken paper, or who can't get a hard copy delivered for a price you are prepared to pay, but the material is copyrighted and I'll just have to live with not getting the sales. When the volume has died down to nothing then I'll look at the Kindle rights.

And finally, another milestone. Someone has written a blog about adapting the rules for Late Bronze Age Warfare. The rules are barely a month old, and people are playing with them already. It's a good post. Go and have a look: OB's blog.

*It lasted on the front page less than a day. You obviously need to time your submission just right. I think the last advertorial Bill the Editor posts on Friday evening hangs around all weekend. 

*** BREAKING NEWS*** Back up to Number 4 in Ancient Middle Eastern History best seller list. Plus also sold a copy in France, too!!! I'm so overcome I think I'd better go and sit down.

Oh. I am sitting down.

That's how excited I am. Don't know if I'm sitting or standing.