As promised, we have an interview with Jennifer Hudock today, another indie who got her start podcasting and then released her ebook after she had built up an audience. Her novel, The Goblin Market, is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
Thanks for joining us today, Jenny. Let’s jump to the questions!
I first noticed your novel being mentioned (retweeted) on Twitter. Since I write children’s stories about goblins, the title piqued my interest. Do you want to start off telling us a bit about the story?
The Goblin Market was originally inspired by Christina Rossetti’s poem of the same name. Much like the poem, mine features two sisters–one ensnared by the allure of the poisoned fruit in The Goblin Market, and the other so used to taking care of and cleaning up after her younger sister it feels like just another day when young Chrissie is kidnapped by the goblin king. On her journey Underground and into the faerie world, elder sister Meredith discovers that her ties to that world run much deeper than her kidnapped sister.
It’s very dark, much like the faerie tales of old before Disney got their hands on them and made them pretty.
Sounds interesting! You first published it as a podcast, didn’t you? That seems like a good way to build a fan base. How has it worked out for you?
I podcasted The Goblin Market from July 2009 into March of 2010, offering it free to listeners in hopes of building a fan base. I was very fortunate in having a lot of friends who were also podcasters, as they helped spread the word when I was ready to launch the audio. I am always surprised when someone I don’t know contacts me and tells me how much they loved the podcast. I’ve even gotten a few emails over the last year and a half from fans who hoped I would one day consider publishing it.
The first weekend The Goblin Market was live on Amazon and Smashwords, more than 90% of my sales came from fans of the podcast, so I think it gave me a slight edge from a promotional perspective.
What are you thoughts on pricing? I think you started out at $2.99 but have it on sale at $0.99 now. Do you sell a lot more at the lower price? Enough to make it worth the lower royalties at Amazon?
I did start out selling at $2.99, but am currently running a $.99 sale because I just recently got married. It was my way of celebrating and hopefully sharing a really exciting time in my life with a few new readers. After lowering the price I saw a huge surge in sales. It isn’t much in royalties at this point, but I am really excited about reaching out to new readers with the lower price.
Congratulations on your marriage!
You have a good-looking blog with lots of great content. Do you think it’s helping you sell ebooks? Do you do any link tracking to see which sales originate from your blog?
Thank you for the compliment. The Inner Bean is a labor of love, and I do think the more traffic I draw in with the content, the more attention it draws to the fiction I put out and the projects I do with others. Having my blog made a huge difference last year when I was working on the From the Dark Side Charity Anthology, the proceeds of which were donated to The Office of Letters and Light (the folks who bring us NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy every year). I also edited a second charity anthology, Farrago: The Michael Bekemeyer Project, to help raise funding for my dear friend, indie filmmaker Michael Bekemeyer.
I focus a lot of my content on indie authors, podcasters and eBooks, including a lot of book reviews. Ever since I got a Kindle, I can’t stop reading and that’s a beautiful thing.
As for link-tracking, I track outclicks through Sitemeter and Google Analytics, but neither of them are accurate as far as determining whether or not a sale was made.
Do you have any future projects you’d like to tell us about?
Right now I am working on the sequels to The Goblin Market, Jack in the Green and The Goblin Prince. I’ve also got a YA urban fantasy novel on the back-burner at the moment, but I’m not quite ready to talk about that just yet. I will say this: It’s going to be called Little Boy Blue.
Good luck, and thanks for visiting today!
If you want to learn more, visit Jennifer’s site and say hi to her on Twitter.
Thank you for the interview. I love the artwork for the book.
Thank you for having me on your blog, Lindsay.
And thank you for the compliment on the artwork, Jen. 🙂
Podcasts seem like a lot of fun. Did you experience and difficulties with recording?
Hi Reena,
The first 5-6 episodes of The Goblin Market show some of the difficulties of starting a podcast. I had really poor equipment so it was all trial and error at first. It’s a lot of hard work because you generally read and record straight through, and then go back in afterward to edit out mistakes, extra breaths and such. A typical 30 minute episode of The Goblin Market often took between 3-5 hours to get recorded and edited, even after I got the hang of it. It’s fun, but it is definitely work!
Wow! That’s impressive. Well done sticking with it. 🙂