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Schlock Books now available through Amazon.com!

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Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management and Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between are now available through Amazon.com. If you want to write a review, you can. If you’ve been waiting to buy from a big online bookstore, now you can. If you’ve been hoping to inflate my Amazon rank by blogging the book, now you can.

In unrelated news, it’s still my birthday. I wonder what nice thing you could do for me today [insert fiendish grin here].

Seriously, this is a big step for us. We take about a 50% revenue hit selling the books this way, but we know that this is a required first step to put them in front of a wider audience. I would LOVE to see Amazon placing regular monthly orders for a few dozen books, because that’s a lot less work for Sandra than shipping them out ourselves. That said, we’ll still be shipping books from store.schlockmercenary.com, and that’s the only way to get a signed copy (other than bringing your book to a convention where I am.)

–Howard

17 thoughts on “Schlock Books now available through Amazon.com!”

    1. That’s the first two PUBLISHED books. The first 1000 strips, from June 12 of 2000 through March 8 of 2003 are not yet in print.

      We’re working on getting those first 1000 strips into print, but it’s a very large-budget project. Naturally it is going to be easier to budget for it if the existing books are selling well.

      1. ok, which would you prefer? The higher-profit but more work of me ordering them from you directly, or the lower-profit but less impact of me ordering from Amazon?

        1. I would prefer that you do what you’re more comfortable with.

          Ultimately this may mean that everybody shops at Amazon, unless they want a signed book. That’s fine. I make less money, but I have happier customers, and I will eventually benefit a lot more from that.

          I’m taking the long view, I guess.

          –Howard

      2. I came this close to adding the following: “The purity of humor in this book requires it be cut with baking soda, so that you do not die of laughter after the first, warm hit.”

        But thought that might be TOO much…

  3. Would it be better for us to order books (for gifts, obviously I already have my (signed!) copies) from you (more money straight to you) or through Amazon (getting Amazon to buy more books from you, increasing popularity in their DB, etc.)?

    1. Do whatever works best for you. Right now, though, I think a lot of Amazon orders would be nice, because they’re easy for us to fulfill — especially if Amazon asks us for a case of books, and we only need to ship one time in order to cover dozens of orders.

      –Howard

  4. Happy Birthday! So, I have to ask: How Old Are You Now? ^_^

    (oh, and you can be sure that the next time I order textbooks from Amazon, I’ll be padding the order with stuff I want to read *wink*)

  5. 55%, right? Plus $35/yr, which is a drop in the bucket, I guess. 🙂 About 50, but man, it hurts. GUD Magazine is wavering on putting issues on Amazon. Putting Issue 0 up would be a loss of a few cents (on the print cost, not to say anything of contributor payment) per sale, but we’re hoping to do bigger print runs with later issues.

    Good luck with it! And I’d love to hear how it changes your sales dynamic, if at all.

  6. Review Written. Hope it helps.

    Now the question I have is this: I want to get the signed copies of the books. However I want to help your numbers on Amazon.com.

    Is it better for you for us to buy from Amazon or from you?

      1. Alas, Penguicon conflicts with The National Association of Broadcasters convention in the city of lost wages. I can’t make it this year.

        I’ll catch up with you sometime and will have a stack of Schlock books from Amazon with me.

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