Palm Springs Mid-Century Modern

During our recent visit to Palm Springs I became more familiar with the mid-century homes featured in my first mystery book, For Sale in Palm Springs. In that story, a Realtor is brutally murdered inside a home that he has listed for sale. In odd coincidences I found myself walking through an Alexander tract home build in the late 1950's with a realtor. Was there a murderer lurking around the corner? Hiding in a closet? No, not during this trip, but these homes are certainly interesting and the father and son team that built them in the late fifties and early sixties put up so many that they doubled the size of Palm Springs by doing so. We're sure there is another murder mystery lurking within these homes and the neighborhood, we'll just have to spend more time in Palm Springs.

Pricing - always a difficult topic

After selling the Henry Wright Series - currently 5 full length books and two short stories - on our own through DesertDreaming.com, we are now only selling through online distributors - mainly Amazon and Smashwords. Links on DesertDreaming will take you to Smashwords, we will no longer be emailing out files and CD production has stopped a while ago.

Why the change? When we first decided to publish these as eBooks online - after receiving a lot of rejection letters from literary agents - there were no Kindles, no iPads, the only place to read the books was a PC or a Palm. Since December of 2009, 3 million Kindles have been sold. In the first month of availability, Apple has sold 1 million iPads. DesertDreaming is going to ride that initial wave of eReader adoption by making sure that all of its works are available on these devices and that they are priced right so that everyone will read them.

That leads us to the topic of pricing. We just changed the price of 4 of the 5 books on Amazon and Smashwords. Amazon puts a 24 hour hold on books after prices are changed, so right now Amazon book sales are suspended until tomorrow. For Sale in Palm Springs is still 99 cents on Amazon, we'd give it away for free if we could, but Amazon won't let us. (Smashwords does, you can download it for free!) We've just set the other prices at $1.99 per book, the short stories - available on Smashwords - are still 99 cents.

It's tough to decide to reduce prices, but with many other eBooks priced at $1.99 and a lot of pressure, it was the right thing to do. No eBook author is in this for the money (at $1.99 sale, Amazon gives the author $0.70, or about 1/3). You need to sell a LOT of books to make this a full-time job.

Will the price drop spur sales? Who knows? The challenge remains to write a compelling story with a good set of characters that everyone will want to read.

Albert Simon