Freebies and Promotion: A Few Thoughts

So our recent experiments with Amazon Kindle's free promo service has come to an end - wherein we offered most of our Kindle novels and comic books for free for a limited time to see what kind of effect it would have on sales.

Boy, were we overwhelmed! - shifting over 700 copies in only a few days, and also securing our first ever 'sales' in foreign territories. In fact, we reached out to all of the Amazon European sister sites: .de, .es, .it and even .fr all accounted for a significant number, though it's fair to say that they were mostly our comic books, rather than the prose works - graphic works will always cross cultural boundaries better than the purely written word, although quite what they may make of the peculiarly British humour of Arf and Mo is anyone's guess...

It's been an interesting time, in which we saw our books briefly chart very high on the Amazon Free Kindle lists, with our comic books both reaching the top spots in all their categories. Seeing our books at the No. 1 ranking was quite a buzz. And as a 'loss leader', our free offer for Maranatha has already sparked some interest in the pay-for prequel, Venus in Saturn. It's also made Chaz think about the idea of producing something to be offered permanently for free on the Kindle store - perhaps a collection of shorter works, or a novella of some sort (he does, after all, have a good many ideas of all sorts floating around the place).

In short, it's been a fascinating experiment, and opens up a very interesting future for FWB and its products. You may recall a post on this very blog not all that long ago where Chaz basically discounted the whole idea of the Kindle book reader as having any real impact on the publishing world any time soon - well, he's more than happy to revise that view now, seeing how times have well and truly changed!

No doubt we'll continue to pick up the long-term effects of this promotional period for some time to come. Interesting times, as they say.

Arf and Mo Arrive on Amazon Kindle

Things have been quiet on the Fenriswulf publishing front lately but for all lovers of lowbrow, underground COMIX, Chaz 'n Frang's dubious animal duo, Arf 'N Mo, have now just made it across to the popular e-book platform.

Here's the link for UK readers:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arf-and-Mo-ebook/dp/B007P7ZZRE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333029254&sr=8-1

and for our US-based cousins:

http://www.amazon.com/Arf-and-Mo-ebook/dp/B007P7ZZRE/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1333029481&sr=1-1

"From the broken pen of Frang McHardy and the even more broken imagination of writer Chaz Wood, meet Arf and Mo, British underground comics' best-kept secret of the last ten years...

Follow the adventures of a bloated German Shepherd mutt and a psychotic white lab rat as they belch, break wind and bludgeon each other across an increasingly surreal landscape of early 21st Century British culture.

GASP! as anarchic Arf becomes a police dog, but ends up as Inspector Gadgie's lapdog!
SQUEAL!! as Mo explores the infinite wonders of sexual sado-masochistic vivisection!!
CHOKE!!! as our duo find work in a call centre...but will their peculiar brand of customer service satisfy their demanding manager???
PASS OUT!!!! as everyone else concerned drinks more beer than has ever been consumed in an Amazon Kindle funny-animal comic book before!!!!

All this and much, much more lies within this first sizzling satirical slice of sleazy surreal salami... "

This is Issue 1, a compilation of some of the best strips from over the past 10 years. Not all the best though, as there will be a second issue out sometime in the future...

Arf & Mo...are Coming!

Now available: the first issue of Arf & Mo - anarchic animal antics featuring the titular duo of Chaz & Frang's warped creation: Arf, a bloated beer-swilling German Shepherd and Mo, his psychotic and twisted white lab rat buddy. Together, the pair have lurched through a series of bizarre, satirical and downright crazy lowbrow adventures over the last ten years, and this compilation brings together some of the best moments of their cartoon careers to date.



The original Arf & Mo was privately printed in 2001 and barely saw the light of day, but now they're back, in a big bumper collection that no fan of scabby, underground toilet humour should ever be without. At 40 pages, including a new foreword from creator Chaz detailing the misfit duo's origins, it's a must!

Of Books, and More

Taking a break from commissions and artwork for a moment (okay, for a whole day...), Mr. Chaz decided to get back to basics and get some more Wolfish "product" out there. The old Cafepress.com shop has had a new batch of stock added, including greetings cards featuring lowbrow comic characters Arf and Mo in their first piece of merchandise their debut small-press comic of 2001 (at the Fenriswulf shop, here). This is but the beginning of what Chaz is intending to be Arf and Mo's renaissance year, with the duo's comic strips repackaged and rebound for a whole new audience (insofar as there was ever an old audience...). Art prints and other items featuring one-off characters and concepts are also up for sale there, and more will be added in months to come. The limitation of the free cafepress store is that we can only produce one design of any particular item. If sales allow, we will consider looking at a premium package but at the moment, overheads need to be kept to a minimum. I'm a bit bummed that cafepress don't have lower prices, but I'm still shopping around for the best long-term deals.

This month we notched up another couple of US sales of "Maranatha", not long before entering that same book in Amazon.com's Breakthrough Novel Award, a contest for unpublished and self-published works. It may not make the grade as all the supporting material for the entry was written and thrown together the night before the closing date, finding out about it only by chance while cleaning out my spam email folder. Still, never having previously considered entering any such competitions in the past, it gave me the idea of actively looking for more in future.

In other news, Mr. Frang, Fenriswulf artist and contributor to the "Surfeit of Mandrake" anthology, has joined Chaz on his commercial commision adventures due to the arrival of an unexpected, but rather welcome, deadline. So everyone has been busy with artwork of late, and the end of March may see a little relaxation and the commencement of some serious work on the Arf & Mo volume for production.