Prices and Shipping Costs, and Other Boring Book Stuff

 

Pardon any typos, I'm still doing the speech to text thing. 

We investigated the costs of producing and shipping our print books, and got some bad news: We're actually losing a little money on a couple of the books, and making hardly any on others. I'm all for a fun hobby, but this is also supposed to be a business, and when it comes to style--red is a bad look on a business.

So we have to increase the price of a couple of the books, by a dollar. This, of course, doesn't apply to the traditionally published books, Haunted Noble County, Indiana and Images of America: Albion and Noble County. In those cases the publisher sets the retail price.

On the matter of shipping costs, we took some books to the Post Office and did some figuring. Basically, sending our books to anywhere in the U.S. is $4.77 to ship, plus the cost of envelopes. There's also handling, but we don't get enough mail orders to charge for our time.

It means to mail one book to you is $5.00, which for Haunted Noble County is now set up on our website:

https://markrhunter.com/haunted-noble-county 

Hitting the buy button will take you to a PayPal area for payment, and it will give us the address to ship it to. According to the Post Office, ordering two books would increase shipping to $5.22.

 

 

 You might be money ahead to buy the book direct from Arcadia Publishing, where shipping and handling is a dollar less:

https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/collections/vendors?q=Mark%20R.%20Hunter&contributorID=14550 

 

Last time I checked Amazon S&H was actually more, but a lot less if you have Prime, or a larger order to go with it: 

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Mark-R-Hunter/author/B0058CL6OO 

 

It's also online at Barnes and Noble and--wait for it--copies are available at the Barnes and Noble store at Fort Wayne's Glenbrook mall:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/%22Mark%20R.%20Hunter%22

 Has anyone seen Haunted Noble County, Indiana for sale at any other brick and mortar locations?

 

So you can get a signed copy direct from us through the website, or from Butterfly Alley Gifts here in Albion: https://www.facebook.com/p/Butterfly-Alley-Gifts-61551021355135/

 You can also get signed copies at one of our upcoming author appearances, which I'll give you information about on my next post. If you show up somewhere with a book you already bought, of course we'll sign it ... but don't count on that increasing the book's value.

 

I have to stop for now ... my talking muscles are getting tired.

Oh, just one more thing: When I say "we" set up this or set up that, it's actually Emily who did it. Even if I could type right now, my lack of talent on computer design verges on legendary.

 

 

 As usual, all our books can be found here:

·        Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

·        Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

·        Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

·        Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

·        Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

·        Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

·        Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

·        Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

·        Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

·        Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

·        Substack:  https://substack.com/@markrhunter

·        Tumblr:  https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

·        Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

·        Audible:  https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

 

Remember: Support both your local author and your local mail carrier.

Lost in the Amazon

I noticed recently that if I went to Amazon.com and searched for "Mark R. Hunter", I did not come up first.

In the Kindle store, the first six hits didn't have "Mark R. Hunter" attached to them in any way, and none of them had the word "Mark" at all. In fact, four of them also didn't have the word "Hunter".

Under books, "Mark R Hunter" was the sixteenth match. Realizing I forgot to put in a period, I typed "Mark R. Hunter" ... and came in 19th, right after Operative Thoracic Surgery by Larry R. Kaiser and Glyn Jamieson.

This bothered me.

I suppose it's partially because sales were flat last autumn ... except that Operative Thoracic Surgery ranked at 1,333,795, and doesn't have any connection to my search other than "R". (To compare, The No-Campfire Girls ranked at 1,033,462.)

I understand ranking lower than more popular books of the same name, but this was like searching for George Washington and getting fifty matches for Abraham Lincoln. What bothers me about it is that when I'm talking to someone about my books, I tell them to just search for ... Mark R. Hunter.

On searching for myself on Google I ranked third, but at least the first two matches were a different Mark R. Hunter. I guess now I have to memorize: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO.

And my memory's not that great.

(In all seriousness, I've done some research, and it seems on Amazon you have about thirty days to make some sells before your book sinks into obscurity, and is afterward ignored by their algorithms. In other words, you have to make sales to be visible, but you have to be visible to make sales.)

https://www.markrhunter.com/

(Another note! This turned into fake news sometime after I wrote it in November, because I'm again  the first to come up under a search for my name. I'd imagine it's because since then, we put More Slightly Off the Mark on the market.)
 

Happy Book Selling Season

Being preoccupied with National Novel Writing Month, which is by definition a month long, I haven't done any work to sell my books in November.

You're welcome.

There's no better way to tell if promotion works than by not doing it for awhile, and sure enough--promotion works. So, although you're already inundated with people asking you to buy stuff this time of the year, I'm asking you to buy stuff.

It's the perfect time, since you can give my books for Christmas, or read them yourself and then gift them (be careful with coffee, and cookie crumbs). We have nine books now, which still astounds me, and the best place to check them all out remains our website at:

www.markrhunter.com

For those of you who don't do the internet shopping thing, to my knowledge the only place where you can physically pick up copies is the Noble Art Gallery, at 100 E. Main Street (the corner of Main and Orange) in Albion, Indiana. They don't have my latest book, because things have been crazy in my life and I haven't had time to talk to them about carrying it, but I believe they have all the others--and if you want to see Radio Red, just contact me or them and I'll get it up there. The advantage is that the Noble Art Gallery also has all sorts of art from all sorts of other artists, so you can support them and do some Christmas shopping.

The exception is the Barnes and Noble store at Glenbrook Square in Fort Wayne, which as of a couple of months ago still had a few copies of Images of America: Albion and Noble County.

If you do like online shopping, go to amazon.com or the Barnes and Noble website, do a book search for Mark R Hunter, and there I am. Many of our books are around at other websites, too, including the Simon and Schuster site.

And finally, just contact me or Emily! We have a supply of books at home--if it's not too far from Albion, we'll even deliver. Get them from me, our website, or the Noble Art Gallery, and you can get them signed. In our house, we still do cursive.

Also we'll do bulk discounts for someone who wants to, say, buy three or four books. Or nine.

We're still at Barnes & Noble ... brick and mortar

We stopped at the Glenbrook Square Barnes & Noble on the north side of Fort Wayne last week, and I was very surprised to find they still have our book in stock:

 I say "book" singular, because it's the only one of our nine that we've managed to get into a chain bookstore--the others are either through small publishers, or independently published, and it's not easy to find shelf space for those. In any case it was a suprise, because I've always heard that major book stores won't keep a book for longer than a couple of months before they return the unsold copies, to make room for new releases.

But that's not the only Noble County related book they had in their history section:

Yay for local history books! For those of you who don't know, Ligonier is indeed within Noble County. The author of that book, Daniel L. Replogle, was my high school science teacher, far enough back that we'd probably both rather not discuss how far back it was. As for the other author, John Martin Smith, I got a look at his vast historical photo collection while we were researching for Albion and Noble County.

Of course, it goes without saying that you can get all of our publications at Barnes and Noble online, as well as all your better online bookstores ... and some of the worst ones.