Hugh Howey

Bestselling author of Wool and other books. Currently sailing around the world.

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Second Suicide

Check out this awesome cover from M.S. Corley. The short story is SECOND SUICIDE, and it just went live on Amazon. 99 cents (or free on Kindle Unlimited).

With Jason Gurley retiring from cover art (he dropped the mic and walked off the stage, because he’s a badass like that), Corley is stepping in to work his own magic. I added him to the Indie Toolbox on the sidebar, in case you want to contact him. Just don’t bumrush him and make it impossible for me to get my covers!

secondsuicide_ebook_FINAL copy

27 replies to “Second Suicide”

Nice! Is there a drm free source? Hate to be a downer, but I was just wondering. I just had to wait waaaay longer than I would have wanted to to buy a scifi book I’ve been looking forward to for years and I had the choice to either buy the overpriced DRM version or… well. Went with the dead tree format, but still, it’s been nagging on me.

Oh, thank you. That would be pretty great. I assumed so since all the buy now buttons have an amazon link and a “drm free” link. Not used to amazon ebooks, will have to investigate further!

I have a ton of .99 short stories that have not been exclusive with Amazon like my novels, simply because Amazon pays only 35% where I can get 60% on all other platforms. I can’t seem to get a straight answer from Amazon on this. Perhaps someone can answer for them. If I pull my short stories from other sites and go exclusive with Amazon, will they actually pay a full subscription price for that story when a KU customer reads ten percent of it?

Love the cover. Will read this later today.
Jason Gurley is retiring from book covers?!?!?!?!!?
I think I might go have a little cry

Jason may be retiring (and yes, I’ve shed a few little author-ish tears) but he is having a sale on all remaining pre-mades. Just thought I’d pass that along. Maybe you can score one to pull out–to the amazement and awe of all–at some future point.

I’m sorry if this has already been asked, but do you foresee a collected, printed volume of your short stories sometime in the future?

Hugh, are you aware that this shows up as $3.21 on Amazon.ca? $3.21 for a short story? Now, it may be Amazon gauging your Canadian readers, not you, but how is that justifiable? Amazon makes sure I have to buy it on Amazon.ca, not .com, even when I’m traveling in the US, just so they can charge me more. And it’s not like they have to pay higher shipping costs to send an ebook to Canada!

It’s $3.41 for South Africans. It appears that $2 of this is what David Gaughran refers to as the Amazon Surcharge: http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/amazon-hold-back-the-growth-of-e-books-around-the-world/ and $0.42 is local VAT.

This surcharge reduces your effective royalty on $0.99 ebooks to 10% of the cover price on many of your international sales. This is not always limited to +$2 – I had to pay $11.99 for the ebook version of Dust.

No pressure, but I’m sure many people would love to see you cover this phenomenon on AuthorEarnings.

I’ve seen similar in Europe, but it’s inconsistent across a few of these short stories.

For example, the “Second Suicide” costs 2.68€ (same as “Glitch”) but “Promises of London” costs 0.89€.

I’ve already notified Hugh via email about this inconsistency, he should be looking into it hopefully.

Hugh Howey recently published a short story on Amazon called “Glitch” which I really enjoyed. I don’t see where he announced this short story. Hopefully, my comment will get posted to help others discover it. I am hoping for a “second chapter” to this short story!

Great cover! I have a question. I know you just did new covers for your Molly Fyde series. How often to you change covers on your ebooks? Do you have strategies about that? (Like every other year or…) Does it help new sales to refresh covers periodically? Have you found certain types of covers help sales? Do you see any indications that your “better” covers sell better?

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