Monday Links
Happy Monday, everyone! I had a long weekend of gardening and yardwork. In fact, I was so exhausted last night that I fell asleep on the couch and didn’t finish Game of Thrones. Must rewatch tonight! Here are a few interesting links I accumulated before I collapsed.
• Stephanie McAfee has achieved great success self-publishing, having sold 100,000 copies of her book, Diary of a Mad Fat Girl. In this guest post she talks about her marketing strategies and tips for other self-publishers.
• This isn’t directly about publishing, but Slate published an article about Prada bag knock-offs and how, contrary to what you might expect, the knock-offs lead to more sales of actual Prada bags. An interesting and counter-intuitive example of the results of piracy.
• Lots of pricing discussions devolve into simplistic pro- and anti-.99 pricing. Bob Mayer at his blog Write it Forward addresses the issue of pricing with more nuance, and talks about the business uses of different price points.
• Speaking of pricing, PC World addresses reader reaction to high ebook prices by trade publishers, and the tagging wars that resulted from consumer anger.
• And speaking of tags, Amazon has deleted ebook tags across the board. Did this result from these tagging wars, or perhaps from indie author tag threads, which resulted in hundreds of tags even if they didn’t really describe the book in question? No one knows why Amazon made this move, but nonetheless the tags are gone.