​Since The Spiders of Halros was featured on Wattpad it’s started getting some reads. The determining factor is unquestionably visibility. You can see from the graph below that prior to January 8th, almost no one was reading the book. Over the past two weeks with no other change—beyond being placed on Wattpad’s Featured Fantasy page—the same book, with the same blurb, and the same cover went from the 89 reads it had garnered in the months prior to some 4600 reads. Note that Wattpad credits you a read for checking your submission, so 37 of the 89 previous reads were me. It’s too soon to say if this trend will continue (or drop off again) and of course putting a book on Wattpad is the same as giving it away, but The Spiders of Halros is already free elsewhere, so why not?  The hope is that an author can find new readers and some of them will stick around. Time will tell.

Ivy’s Tangle is available now. For those of you who are wondering, the Legend of the White Sword is a young young adult fantasy series. I thought middle grade originally, but having read up on age/level categories on the internet—which is never wrong—I discovered it’s young young adult. Who knew? The protagonist, Jack, is fourteen, and it’s told in the first person. That apparently pushes the book up into young adult. The series will contain no sexuality (beyond kissing) and no significant swearing… which knocks it back down to young young adult. The books in the series are short which makes pricing the e-books trickier. There are no hard and fast rules on e-book pricing, and book prices range from free to crazy. Somebody’s blog (I can’t remember whose) suggests selling all e-books at 2.99. That’s as cheap as an author can go with amazon before the royalty rate slips. I’m trying to get new readers, so I priced Ivy’s Tangle at a buck fifty to start. Free hasn’t worked out well with The Spiders of Halros. It seems that people download free books, but rarely read them, placing no value on a free product, or assuming it’s crap (often a fair assumption). If you read the book and enjoy it, please take the time to review it somewhere. I could use some reviews. Thanks.