Thursday 10 April 2008

1/3rd off! Pre-order The Dog of the North for only £9.89!

It seems discounting has started early on The Dog of the North, now available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk for only £9.89 (RRP: £14.99). Also offering the title at below market price are Waterstones, pickabook.co.uk and dvd.co.uk. (My experiences of dealing with pickabook, however, are so uniformly poor that if I can cost them a single sale by my negative recommendation, I will be delighted).

Discounts are, on the surface, not good news for a Macmillan New Writer, whose royalties are calculated on the sale price. On the other hand, people are much more likely to buy a 470-page hardback for under a tenner than they are at fifteen quid. My primary interest, as an unknown debut novelist in hardback, is in sales volumes rather than high unit royalties.

I don't know whether such discount wars are common for a book no-one has heard of two months before it's published. What I do know is that it doesn't do my sales prospects any harm.

5 comments:

Tim Stretton said...

Err...meant to post this own my own blog...

Nonetheless it's not irrelevant to the MNW gang, so I'll leave it up here instead.

mattfwcurran.com Web Admin said...

Tut. Shameless, Tim.

But yes, I'm about to pre-order mine (unless you're doing a book launch down in London?)

Tim Stretton said...

Book launch details are still being finalised. Plan A is to have it in Chichester, but it clashes with the Chichester Festivities which takes up a lot of Waterstones' time. So we may end up with a London launch after all. Watch this space!

Shamelessness is not a vice the writer should apologise for. Incompetence with Blogger, on the other hand, is less praiseworthy. What if I'd posted it on the "Adventures in Lingerie" blog instead? (Or worse still, posted an "Adventures in Lingerie" piece here?)

mattfwcurran.com Web Admin said...

What if I'd posted it on the "Adventures in Lingerie" blog instead? (Or worse still, posted an "Adventures in Lingerie" piece here?)"

Please do, Tim. I, like a few of my fellow MNWers, would not be averse to a blog entry covering adventures of any kind!

(PS: is there such a blog? Where is it?)
(PPS: Just joking).
(PPPS: No seriously, where?)

Frances Garrood said...

I think a discount is good news. Mine (coming out in August) is still full price (I just checked), and I very much hope that it will go the same way as Tim's. As for Adventures in Lingerie, I might just pinch that as my next book title (unless anyone else is thinking of using it?)