frozen dreams – Page 11

The first reports of FROZEN DREAMS Kickstarter books in the wild!

I sent the first (and absolutely largest*) wave of signed FROZEN DREAMS books out a couple of days ago, and I’m naturally terrified that they’ve all been promptly offered up on whatever dark god renegade USPS cultists worship. But so far they seem to be showing up OK:

The one-month FROZEN DREAMS anniversary!

People always seem to only sporadically talk about the numbers to this stuff, so I figured I’d demystify it a little.

Basically, I put up FROZEN DREAMS a month ago (June 14th): as of last night (July 13th) it had moved 114 units. The vast majority (104) were Kindle books; obviously, 10 were paperbacks. Working out how many books were sold during the Kickstarter is complicated, because of multiple formats and people getting extra copies, so I’m going to use 150 as a low-ball estimate. So, we’ll call it 260 in total, and 114 for the month.

All of that means… well, a lot of people seem to have different opinions about what it means, and the implications are likewise not uniform*. I think that it’s doing fine. I think that it’s also fair to say that arguably the book’s doing better than average.

FROZEN DREAMS audiobook progressing nicely.

We spent tonight prepping the audiobook for FROZEN DREAMS (that’s not the link to it; the audiobook isn’t ready yet) for Audible. It’s progressing well, I think. The files are almost ready and the biggest limiting factor is probably going to be the auditing process. As you might imagine, Amazon is going to want to make sure that the book is what it claims to be. I’m sympathetic to that, really. I can think of at least three ways to cause mayhem otherwise, and I’m not even trying hard.

Things continue on.

FROZEN DREAMS book rewards mailed out!

Oh, not every single copy from the Kickstarter rewards. Some people haven’t filled out their surveys (FILL OUT YOUR SURVEYS). But I spent the last day or so prepping ’em and checking ’em off the lists, and earlier this afternoon I dropped ’em off at the Post Office. Then I drank a beer.

And then I dozed for a half hour, because people either drink more or drink less these days, and I’m in the ‘drink less’ camp. But FROZEN DREAMS is still out the door. That’s a big, big step towards finishing up the Kickstarter. Huzzah!

First wave of FROZEN DREAMS, ready to be mailed!

Guess what I did this evening? That’s right: I signed, and I stuffed, and I taped, and now I have a ton of padded filled manila envelopes ready to go to the post office tomorrow. I’m going to need to get a cart to transport them, but that’s OK.

Just signed 3.25 boxes’ worth of books…

…it went faster than I expected, actually. Listened to a bunch of AC/DC and Beastie Boys and everything just flowed. Lettering and so forth to follow, then packing ’em up, and yay but I can get this off of my list!

The FROZEN DREAMS books start getting prepped tomorrow.

Got all the stuff I need.

The first wave is the easiest: multiple-copy and international orders I think I’m going to have to handle at the post office itself. Fortunately, there aren’t that many of either. Most of the FROZEN DREAMS orders are pretty straightforward.

It’s official: FROZEN DREAMS has broken three figures in sales! Huzzah!

Trying to calculate that was surprisingly hard, actually: the Amazon reports don’t always line up with each other. But I can fairly say now that, even by the most pessimistic standards, I’ve sold at least a hundred copies of FROZEN DREAMS on Amazon by now. Which is, obviously, awesome.

It’s also a good excuse for me to dial back* the incessant book-plugging a little. I’m not particularly sorry that I did it — this is how you get people’s attention, after all — but now that I’ve hit this milestone I can tell myself that it’s done quite well for the first month of a first book. And, more importantly; I can spend some of that time to work on other things. I think that’s reasonable.

Moe Lane

*I mean, I’ll still plug it. Just not quite as constantly.

07/05/2020 Report, various things.

I did a surprising number of things today, actually.

The pre-order store is now closed on Backerkit. Sorry, folks, but it’s time to wrap it all up. You can still get FROZEN DREAMS on Amazon.
Bought a mess of postage for mailing out the books. My wife and I spent some time experimenting with packaging and whatnot; we think that a combo of bubble envelopes and plastic wrap should do to get the books out safely.
My wife also worked out how we’ll be lettering the books. I still need to come up with a good signature for these. Pick it now, hey?
The books will start going out, hopefully, in the next week or so. Domestic first, then international. Then it will be done, except for the people who haven’t filled out their surveys.
FILL OUT YOUR SURVEY, IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY.
And then it’s time to get on with the FERMI RESOLUTION RPG. Current count is 26,900/37,800. Some of the work is up here.

So, not an unproductive day.