In the company of Kings, Koontzes and Grahams

Best Sellers in Psychic Suspense Top 100 Paid  

A HUMBLE Australian grandmother from the working-class  suburb of Strathpine is mixing it with the giants of popular literature.

Jane Sharp’s Vision: Complete Trudy Harper Psychic Investigations is published by Bent Banana Books. As many of you know BBB is me, Bernie. Or should that be I, Bernie? Never mind. This is not about me. Or I. This is about Main Jane.

Vision, containing all 20 Trudy Harper mysteries is in Amazon Kindle Top 100 in Psychics and Top 100 in Ghosts.

Jane’s tales are competing well with the books of Dean Koontz, Heather Graham and Stephen King.

I sell a book at a fair price

Available HERE @ $2.99 and free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers 

THE jury is still out on the success of my non-price based promotion of Jane Sharp’s psychic mystery anthology, Vision: the Reluctant Psychic.

My publishing hut Bent Banana Books publishes Jane’s book.

With the literary  explosion propelling millions of eBooks into cyberspace, literally hundreds of thousands of authors are filling Amazon bookshelves.

Amazon has millions of eBooks for sale but only a few hundred titles will rake in the big dough.

Maybe it is because writers are usually better at English than maths. Whatever the reason, many wannabees do not seem to realize how astronomical are the odds of having a best-seller to your name.

KDP is the arm of Amazon which facilitates self-publishing. KDP provides a calculator which estimates sales based on Amazon ranking. You would hope it is reasonably accurate.

So let’s look at an author whose book is ranked 1000, above millions of its competitors. Predicted sales are 100-300 copies a day. I would imagine the range of the predicted sales is so wide as books sell in different numbers during various months of the year.

Depending on the cover price, the 1000th top seller should be returning a reasonable income to its author.

What of a book ranked 5000, still ranked above millions.

The calculator says 10-30 books a day. Even at the top end, it is barely a decent wage by many western standards.

These figures debunk the myth that eBooks have allowed a significant number of authors to give up their day jobs.

So how did Jane’s book go? Well it improved from 500,000 to 90,000. Sounds impressive.  One or two sales can provoke such a movement so I am not getting carried away.

But it did show you can market around things other than price. That is worth crowing about. In this instance we pushed "free to Kindle Unlimited members" and Jane's birthday which by coincidence fell on the day of our promotion.

And now we press on towards #5000. Any suggestions for our future tactics?

Jane says I did all right and that reminds me of a song:

Freestyle: Steele Hill goes H2H against Justin Bieber

Hill V. Bieber: 

Battle of the the intellects

MY anthology Naughty Nineties (buy it here) was travelling nicely on page 4 of Amazon’s category, popular music books.

     Sure  five Justin Bieber books were ahead of it but the Steele Hill collection was beating the Justin Bieber quote book.

     In the twinkling of an eye  – I swear it was less than three minutes – Naughty Nineties had slipped to page 7. The Leave it to Bieber quotes remained on page 4.

     Now I know how John Lennon felt when he returned his MBE gong in protest against the war in Biafra and Cold Turkey slipping down the charts.

     How had Bieber bested Steele Hill in that            instant-karmic skirmish of the war of pop words?                        Buy Naughty Nineties here                                             

     To set the record straight, Steele Hill goes H2H, quoting  against Justin Bieber.

How readers can bookmark Australia Day

12 Apostles, Victoria, Australia

WELL, it’s Australia Day and many cities and towns around the country will have citizenship ceremonies to welcome people from all over the world. You are true-blue Aussies now.

How Safe is the Right-Wing Woman from Punk-feminist Liberals?

Right Wing Women ‏@rightwingwomen  2h

Daily Quotes is out! http://paper.li/rightwingwomen/1295998224 … Stories via @bentbananabooks @parnassusreads

It is a funny ol’ world, the tweetsphere.

I just received a mention on Twitter from Right Wing Women. They say there is no such thing as bad publicity but…

The Shocking Truth about the 1990s or How I Learned to Straighten my Hair and Love my Naughty Side

New release HERE

My latest ebook is out just in time for Australia Day. Forgive me if I speak about myself in the third person. I think it might add a bit of gravitas. Read on to decide if it works.

Youthful Dystopia

A.G. Chambers is a young author resident in New Zealand and her first novel Jaded Rein is a cross-genre piece which for convenience I have labelled dystopian fantasy. You have come this far you might as well read my review.