The Web Splash: One Week On

Hard to believe it's been a week already! Now that I've calmed down a bit, I thought that I'd give you a little rundown on why I decided to do the Web Splash (Part I) and how I organised it (Part II).

I've been asked a few times why my ebook is launching ahead of my paperback. Quite often traditional author launches have a hard-cover launch to generate buzz for the coming paperback. Launching my ebook first is really the same concept. Also, the more sales and publicity the ebook generates, the easier it becomes to convince booksellers to take it in-store.

As I mentioned before, the great thing about ebooks is that there are no distribution issues. Anyone, anywhere can buy them! With that in mind, the internet seemed a perfect tool to help spread the word. Yes, I could have waited until the paperback to make a big deal, but with limited distribution I'd be hard-pressed to encourage readers in the US, Canada and other countries to give my book a shot.

With my publisher, we discussed a critical issue when it comes to ebooks: price. Larger publishers appear to be doing themselves and their authors no favours by pricing ebooks higher than hard copies. Yes, it may drive paperback sales in the short term, but in the long term, the author may lose out. However, we didn't want to price the content too low. There are varying opinions on how low is too low, with some publishers giving away books for free. I'm definitely not against this and I think it can certainly help drive publicity. But for the time being, we decided pricing the book at £1.90/ $2.99 seemed just about right. And with Christmas coming and Kindles set to tip the market in favour of ebooks, December 1 made sense as a launch date.

Watching marketing strategies employed by other authors, I'd learned that driving sales on one day can make a massive difference to rankings. Still, I wasn't about to ask everyone to buy my book on a particular day -- it just seemed a step too far. But I could ask people to help spread the word about my book and hopefully get some sales in the process. All I need was a catchy name and something everyone can relate to: the little guy (me) versus the big guy (Amazon).

And so the Take On Amazon quest was born!

Tomorrow I'll talk about the logistical issues of organising the splash on blogs, Facebook and Twitter -- and what the results are like one week on. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments section! Happy Wednesday.