I had a discussion about book pricing recently with one of my favorite bloggers, Sebastian Marshall. His new book, Ikigai, is being sold for $7.77. He doesn’t really care how much money he makes off it (his portion goes to charity, anyway), but he didn’t want to lower the price because he thinks that it would signal that the book isn’t high quality. I said that I’d accept that possibility for a chance of reaching a larger audience.
And due to lowering the price of Life Nomadic to 2.99, I’ve been able to reach an incredibly wide audience. In the past month I’ve sold far more copies of Life Nomadic than all other months combined. Reviews have been coming in, and lives have been changed. Despite much thinner margins, I’m even making more money from it. I couldn’t be more happy about all this.
Make Her Chase You and Life Nomadic
So, one good experiment deserves another. Make Her Chase You is now only $2.99 for Kindle and $9.99 for paperback (as I write this, the price hasn’t updated for paperback, but I imagine it will soon). Life Nomadic is still $2.99 for Kindle, but is now also only $9.99 for paperback. You can buy Life Nomadic here.
In addition, both books can be “borrowed” for free if you’re an Amazon Prime member (I actually get almost as much money if you do this).
The Tiniest Mansion
EDIT: In an effort to get this book out quickly, I accidentally uploaded a file that doesn’t have the last chapter (Rialta stuff) or the wrap-up. I’ve uploaded it now, so after 12 hours or so, delete the book from your Kindle and re-download it. Very sorry about that! Thanks to reader Kaila, there will also be a bunch of typos fixed!
The one book people constantly ask me to write is a book on RV living. It makes a lot of sense-there are only a few topics I’m really an expert on, and RV living is one of them. What has always held me back, though, was that I have my doubts about whether enough people would buy it to make it worth the time to write it.
I’ve been working very hard on SETT in the past 6-12 months, too, and now feel like any time I spend doing anything besides SETT is stealing time away from it. Between possibly being financially unviable and not really having the time to spare, the RV book got put on the backburner.
Two weeks ago I was preparing to board a plane from San Francisco to Boston. Flights are sacred to me, because there’s no environment in which I’m more productive. I couldn’t really work on SETT, though, because the next steps required an internet connection. What could I do instead?
Maybe I can write this entire RV book on a round-trip flight, I thought. Boarding had already begun, so I didn’t really have time to think about whether or not it was actually possible. Instead, I just decided to do it. I would write as much as possible from SFO->BOS and EWR->SFO, and then format it and publish it when I was done.
As I waited for other passengers to board, I wrote an outline on my phone. Once we hit 10,000 feet, I started typing like a maniac. The nice thing about writing about a topic you know inside and out is that you don’t actually need that much time to think; it’s almost conversational. By the time the flight landed, I had written 8000 words, which is the equivalent of about a dozen blog posts.
On the flight back to San Francisco, I wrote the rest, clocking in at over 14,000 words, and had an extra hour to revise and edit the book. Yesterday I published it to Kindle, under the title The Tiniest Mansion.
As you can probably guess, it’s $2.99, like my other books.
Unlike my other books, The Tiniest Mansion is probably only interesting to people who actually have an interest in living in RVs. It doesn’t have many stories or tangents, and not much of the knowledge is useful outside RV dwelling.
However, if you ARE thinking about living in an RV or live in one already, I expect that the book will be indispensible. I’ve lived in an RV 100% of the time that I’ve been in the US for almost five years now. I’ve been through pretty much everything, and done every RV modification conceivable. Despite only being around 75 pages or so, the book comprehensively covers every area of RV living from modifications to security, including a section dedicated to Rialta living. I think you’ll really like it.
You can buy the Kindle version of The Tiniest Mansion here.
Thanks
Wrapping it all up, I want to again say thanks for supporting my work. I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to make enough money to live from a few self-published books. If it wasn’t for my awesome readers buying them and leaving reviews, I’d have to spend a lot more time playing poker!
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Sorry about not posting last week. I spent the time getting The Tiniest Mansion ready to be published. Incidentally, this is either the last or second last post I’ll ever write on WordPress! SETT is coming SOON!
Shout out to my friend Maneesh (who, as far as I can tell, has no interest in living in an RV) for buying the first copy of my new book. And a holler at Todd for taking the cover picture (shown up top).
As always, please leave me a review if you buy any of my books. People click books with lots of good reviews, and Amazon uses that information to recommend my book to other users. A good review is worth more to me than the money I get for a sale.
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