Bleg…

Posted on by March 6, 2013

Larry Correia’s next book, Monster Hunter Alpha, is coming out soon and he needs a favor…  

From Larry-
That’s the favor. Word of mouth is the best advertising ever. If you guys like MHI and MHV tell your friends to go get Monster Hunter Alpha. (preferably on preorder or the week it comes out) MHA comes out on July 26th.  If you’ve got a blog, and you want to plug me there, I will say nice things about you to your friends.  Facebook, Twitter, bathroom graffiti, I don’t care. Share the love!
Um…. yeah, right Larry 🙂
If you want autographed copies, here is where you go to get them: http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/ah-correia-larry.php  (I’m doing signed bookplate stickers this time, because I can’t afford to fly to Minnesota again, and it is too expensive to ship 10 cases of books to Utah, have me sign them, and then ship them again).  If you want personalization, put that in your instructions. I’m flexible like that. (however, keep in mind there is only so much space, okay? Last time I had a few people ask me to write small novellas, and there is only so much space on a book plate!)



Now, on the preorder or release week thing, let me explain. Here is a little peek behind the curtain into the publishing industry.  This is a very competitive business. Making it onto a bestseller list spurs future sales and boosts your career. The biggest and toughest one to get on is the NYT. MHV made it to #27 when it came out.

Some of you may remember when I went around with an idiot about how this meant that I wasn’t a *real* bestseller. Let me break this down. The NYT is broken up into fiction, non-fiction, and young adult. We’re looking at fiction. The NYT only shows the top 35 fiction books in three categories. (hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market paperback).  So I’m competing against every paperback fiction book on sale in the country.   
This next part is important. It is based on books sold during that week.  So you can have a book that sells ten thousand copies in a week, and zero copies the rest of the year. That book will be a NYT bestseller. You can have another book that only sells a thousand copies that week, but sells a thousand every other week of the year. That book will sell way more copies than the first one, but it will not make the NYT.  That’s called velocity. 
The velocity part is why the release week (and the preorders that ship that week) are so very important.  A book will normally sell the most when it first comes out.  So, barring something that comes along later to cause a bunch of publicity (Movie adaptation, Oprah book club) you either make the list when you release or not at all.
I read the E-ARC and am ordering a hard copy (dead tree edition or what ever you want to call it)… I have copies of all of Larry’s books thus far and will happily add this one to the library.  
So, my bleg is go help a buddy out, and lets use the blogsphere to help one of our own (shooter, blogger, competitor) get on the NYT best seller list. That way we can all say we knew him back when! 🙂 

Congratulations once again, Larry. Success couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy!!!

Comments

Bleg… — 7 Comments

  2. NFO,

    Have Larry e-mail me a thumbnail of his cover and a brief synopsis and I’ll be happy to post it first/second in the queue on my blog.

    I did this for another friend of mine for his first e-book and it worked okay. He got a thousand or so sales out of it during the first month.

    I’m finishing up a book this summer, late, so I might just be asking Larry for a return favor.

    Regards,

    –AOA

  5. I can’t stress enough how awesome this series is. Do yourself a favor and pre-order a few signed copies from Uncle Hugos. They don’t cost any extra and you get to have Larry’s undecipherable squiggle on them. I have it on all of my copies.

  6. Already have Alpha and Dead Six preordered from Amazon, and have at least one friend who’s confirmed to have ordered MHI. I have two others I may loan MHI to, in order to hook them, but I don’t think it’ll take much.