The Deixis Press Weekly - Issue #48
What up, book fiends,
Yeah, I’m spoiling you with a newsletter two weeks in a row. It’s like how the olden times used to be, remember those? Ahhh, those halcyon days when I was hoeing
the rows of my press field, planting the seeds of all the books to come.
SPEAKING OF BOOKS TO COME, you know you can pre-order James Kinsley’s GREYSKIN right now, right? Oh, by the way, an influential newspaper1 will be reviewing it in a roundup in a couple of weeks. Why not get ahead of the curve? You can take your smug little enemies down a peg when you tell them you knew about this book long before it was cool.
Let me help you with some links:
Waterstones (HB and PB)
Blackwell’s (HB and PB)
Foyles (HB and PB)
Here’s that gorgeous trailer again:
There’s another book deal on at the moment, too, but I set it up in a rubbish way, and I’ve failed to promote it as robustly as would have been ideal. But here you go:
HANGDOG SOULS by Marc Joan is currently on sale on ebook for £3.99, but in just over 15 hours it will be back up to its normal price of £4.99. It was £0.99 for like a day and a half, then it went up by a pound, etc etc.
Marc’s book is so good, you guys, so good. Like how do I even express how good it is? The only person I know with adequate words to say how good is probably Marc Joan himself. He recently did an interview with Asian Books Blog that is just *chef’s kiss*:
Briefly, it is a novel-in-stories set in South India over a period of nearly three hundred years from the past to the near future (late 1700s to ~2070). It can be read on different levels, according to what kind of reader you are or what mood you are in. On one level, it is a set of more-or-less standalone stories and novellas that one can dip into at will. On another level, readers may enjoy the links between the stories; some of these echoes are rather subtle, others more obvious. And finally, some readers may appreciate the higher-level narrative that runs through the entire set of stories, and which deals with themes such as guilt, shame and, eventually, absolution, of a sort.
YOU WILL NOT REGRET THE £3.99 DEAL. You won’t even regret paying £4.99, if you see this after it’s over. Though you probably would have liked it even more at 99p.
Ok, ok, here is some Learning, which used to be part of this newsletter’s whole reason for existing:
Hangdog Souls is currently in a Kindle Countdown Deal. I’m experimenting with different ways I can promote the press’s books. The beauty of Kindle deals is that even with the special, temporary lower prices, the rate of return that I share with the author stays high. Normally, if you set your ebook prices too low on Amazon, you only get like 30%, but if you set it to be above a certain price you get 70%.
If I want to continue making books, I need to devote my soon-to-be-expanded non-ALPH free time to better marketing. My primary aim in taking this maternity cover role was to learn from big presses what they do for their authors. Guess what! They don’t do a lot more for their authors than I do for mine, in most cases—unless the authors are big brands in some way...
…but they do have a lot of marketing brains working out ways to milk all of their books as hard as possible. Makes sense; gotta line R***** M******’s pockets. For me personally, it’s not about the profit per page, but I do want my authors to have a lot of sales, because that helps them, you know, not die in penury. So, as the current runt of the publishing litter, I need to figure out how to wiggle in and squeeze the teat of commerce.
Yours,
Angel
P.S. Did you know that you too can write a Substack? Substack wants me to tell you that. Apparently, if you do it through the following link, we become somehow intertwined, and that makes people more likely to read what I have to say. Seems unlikely but whatever:
I’m not sure if I’m allowed to tell you it’s the Daily Mail, or if that will jinx it, or what. Anyway. Pretend you didn’t read this.
Ebooks are surprisingly lucrative for both author and press! Never feel bad about buying ebooks for cheap! But don’t let large presses rinse you with ebooks that cost the same as print books! This is a whole newsletter topic on its own really!