These books had significantly larger printings than my previous two books.
I printed 700 copies for the first book (200 that I more or less sold, and then 500, that I more or less didn't). And 200 for the second one (starting to run out of copies just about now, four years later).
The third and fourth books were different:
- They were not Science Fiction or Fantasy.
- I had a wholesale guy who was willing to work with me on them, which meant they would be sold at the stores (they still are, the first two books are still not at the stores).
- They were going to be PRed (now I know this does not mean much, but back then...)
So I thought I had all the reasons to be optimistic
... and printed 2,000 copies of each.
I got tons of PR. People said the books were good all over the papers, National TV, and National Radio.
So far, two and a half years later, I sold something like 200 copies of each.
About a year ago I got a phone call from my wholesaler, who is a REALLY nice guy. He said something along the lines of: "we are moving to a smaller warehouse, and I've got thousands of your books here. Do you want to take them, or shall we destroy them?"
I'm just a regular guy living in a not very large apartment, so I said: "looks like I have no choice. Destroy them."
So never mind the monetary loss (something like 20K$), but how can I possibly justify such damage to the environment?
So when I found the Mendele website (Warning: the site contains mainly Hebrew characters), a few months later, I was delighted. I started selling my books as Ebooks there, and so far I've sold only a few, but I'm happy as punch!
