[Update: the book is now available again]
Arktos and I have mutually decided that we would rather go our separate ways with respect to distribution of my book Smart and Sexy.
I think if I could go back to 2015 and start over, I would have self-published from the beginning. At the time, I believed that the marketing a publisher could accomplish that I probably couldn’t would out-weigh the splitting of royalties. In practice, this marketing and displaying at conferences and whatever else never amounted to very much and I am pretty sure almost everyone who heard about and purchased the book did so through my personal efforts. Maybe 80-90%. Arktos did make some marketing efforts, but the results thereof wasn’t worth the hit I took to royalties. That is, I was hoping to make more money overall on a lower royalty rate as a result of much greater sales thanks to better marketing, but in practice there weren’t many additional sales and I lost money on the arrangement compared to if I had self-published without splitting royalties. Or at least I am as sure about it as I can be without running a parallel history to compare to. We all make mistakes, and this is definitely one of mine. My suggestion for young guys is probably don’t bother going with a publisher without a very good reason. Its even less needed now than it was in 2016.
I believe Arktos has already at this point removed all methods of selling the books they were previously using, especially on Amazon, with one exception. They have seven physical copies left in inventory if you want to get one directly from their site. There will be no more of that particular edition after those seven are gone so I suppose its a bit of a collectors item now. Our agreement to end our business relationship accounted for these already, so I won’t be getting anything from that if you do get those seven copies.
What I am going to do is arrange for a new edition to be published through amazon in the next few weeks or hopefully earlier. I will make an announcement about this when it is live. The content isn’t going to change, though some of the formatting will likely be a bit different since I am going to remake the kindle version from my old files. Also, some of the content free attribution pages at the beginning and end will be different but that doesn’t matter much. I plan both a physical and digital edition, but I will order a sample of the physical version first to make sure it comes out well before making that available. So expect the new digital version before the physical one. Both versions are going to have a lower price point than was available previously. I am thinking 2.99 for the kindle edition and 11.99 for the physical version when I get that finished. In the later case I need to make sure that reasonably covers the printing costs before fully committing to it as a price point.
As far as I know, anyone who previously purchased the kindle version should still be able to download it. But if for some reason that proves to be untrue, the free pdf file available here will remain downloadable. See the sidebar. This can be imported into kindle if so desired, and I would even say its a bit better in kindle this way because the images are handled better from the pdf.
This probably sounds a bit odd to have it for free and also sell it, but the idea is that people who want to and can afford to can use those methods to support the work. Consider it a sort of donation in which you also get something rather than nothing for your money.
In any event, I am looking forward to this new chapter (hehe) in the distribution of my book. And perhaps I will look into making an updated edition. No guarantees though.
