Has MagicLand Hit the Amazon Version of the Budget Book Table?

The Kindle version is suddenly fifty cents. They're basically giving it away.

Background Image licensed from Adobe Stock; image shashup by author

My first novel, MagicLand, was published in December 2021. Seems like forever ago, and in the publishing world, it is. One of the accepted clichés in the publishing world is that if a book hasn’t flown off the shelves within a year, it never will. Bookstores begin the shunning process.

These books become relegated to the bargain bin to make way for the newest political memoirs.

It took more than a year, but it looks like my first novel has finally achieved the coveted status of bargain basement.

This wasn’t my idea. I don’t know if this is an Amazon thing or if my publisher set this price, but I doubt the publisher did without alerting me. I’ve only recently begun receiving royalty statements (averaging about two dollars per month!). So the timing for that would be weird.

Well, my loss is your gain. If you’ve been holding off on checking out MagicLand, here’s your fifty cent chance.

I won’t be partying like it’s my birthday because I can’t afford no Bacardi…

Sorry, got lost there for a minute.

Another truism in the publishing world is that only a tiny percentage of all published books sell more than 1,000 copies. Truth. MagicLand is under 700 last I checked (I rarely review my royalty statements because I don’t enjoy crying).

It’s not like it has received bad reviews.

The scariest one was the first one. I submitted a book review request to Kirkus Reviews, which is not the golden land for author reviews many folks think it is. The general assumption about Kirkus is that they never dole out bad reviews.

But the process works like this: Authors submit their book to Kirkus for review. If the book gets a bad review, the author has the option to make the review private on the Kirkus site. Nobody who isn’t crazy would be okay with letting the review reach the public eye if Kirkus issued a bad review.

Surprisingly, I see mediocre reviews on the Kirkus site. For me, mediocre would be bad. But we all have our individual litmus tests, I guess.

Kirkus said this, though, and I was happy enough¹:

“A bracing dystopian tale that deftly mixes magic, evolution, and romance featuring a wiccan priestess and a humanoid who fall in love against all odds.”

Scare over.

Publishers Weekly later surprised me with a review, too. They said²:

“Bastille’s debut artfully combines magic, technology, and romance. . . . [He] handles the multilayered plot well, creating a fascinating world populated with empathetic characters.”

BookTrib also liked it³:

When Feathered Quill wrote the following, I almost contacted the reviewer to see if she wanted money to be my publicist:

MagicLand: A Novel is a high-octane text worth turning the pages to see what lurks ahead. Bastille's deftly-wrought prose is nothing short of sublime. The vivid world-building of artificial intelligence and magical creatures is breathtaking.

MagicLand then became a finalist for a 2023 FeatheredQuill Award.⁴

I would have preferred an outright win, but I’ll take it. At least I got a bunch of cute stickers (without the 50 cent price):

Here’s the thing, though, about writing and publishing at my age. I’ve written all my life but only recently started trying to get published. I spent most of my career life doing other things. People like Stephen King and other über successful authors earned their good fortune because they did what I didn’t do.

A lot of them did it with an Underwood typewriter and whiteout. I have no idea how they managed to accomplish what they did. No jealousy here. Only admiration.

I had my share of encouragement as a young writer in high school, too. Science Fiction writer Gene Wolfe praised one of my short stories when he visited my high school writer’s workshop class.

But I didn’t follow the writer’s path from there. I wrote novels and stuck them in drawers, and, later, disk drives, while I worked through an art direction and copywriting career, then a software career.

When I edged toward my retirement age, I had one item on my bucket list that was a must-have: Get a book or two out into the world, and whatever happens, happens.

MagicLand did that for me. No bargain basement treatment by Amazon can change that. I’m even working on a sequel for it, even though the masses aren’t clamoring for it.

That’s the life of a writer. We write because we want to be a part of newly-created worlds of our own designs, and, in my case, my characters’ designs, too.

Notes

I have no idea if the 50 cents is a special temporary price, so if you’re at all interested in MagicLand, now’s the time.

It’s geared toward the younger crowd. That wasn’t my original intent. It just turned out that way. MagicLand is a profanity-free zone. Many of the sales have been to libraries, as this review I received from a reader attests:

Wonderful, clean, thoughtful and thought provoking. I will read this to my grandchildren ages 12, 8 and 4 and I know they will love it!!! I found your book in the city library and now I just have to get a copy for myself. Your book is of the same caliber as the writings of CS Lewis. I look forward to more from you.

So if you’re looking for Game of Thrones-type fantasy, MagicLand is not for you. But for fifty cents, what do you have to lose?

UPDATE: Thanks to Ellen Pepper for pointing out that the Canadian prices are at the original price point. This is presumably true in other countries, such as the U.K. and Australia.

1. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/charles-bastille/magicland/

2. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781631955648

3. https://booktrib.com/2021/09/08/magicland-paints-a-new-fantasy-world-while-harkening-back-to-beloved-favorites/

4. https://featheredquill.com/feathered-quill-book-awards-2023-winners/