In Tennessee, quite a few services are not taxable (such as grass cutting, landscape trimming, hair dressing). Could West Virginia be the same? A quick look at their website shows there are some exempt services (such as hair dressing, services that create capital improvements to real property (probably things like roof installations (materials would be taxed but the labor wouldn't). I could be wrong about specifics, but that's what I got from the PDF I found on the WV gov website.

Amazon doesn't really do any heavy lifting anymore. This is why you want to only use free promos to sell the next books in series. Otherwise, you're throwing your book to the wind and the free book ranking is going to do nothing but pad your ego (which is sometimes very nice too).

I'm still banging my head against the wall and regretting my biggest free promo. I gave away 6k books. Great. But what of it? Because the prequel wasn't listed in succession on Amazon's series page, so I got barely any co-sales.

Use free (or $0.99 which is also free, really) only to move other books (the exception is newbie writers who are just trying to grab any visibility at all starting out).

Latest example. I just ran a BookBub last week on Tuesday for a boxed set at $2.99 (reg price $9.99). I have a permafree book that's a prequel short story for the series. So, I also promoted the premafree at the end of the week. I didn't really care how many of the free books were given away, from a marketing pov. What happened? The boxed set sales doubled on the day of my greatest push for the free book. In other words, the free book moved more boxed set sales and helped carry more momentum. So it's all about moving the sales in tandem when you have a series. Otherwise, don't bother doing any promotion.

Audiobook-wise, if I get a Chirp deal, I advertise more than the Chirp deal in my sale at the same time. If other audiobooks are under $4.99 on Chirp, Chirp will often bundle multiple audios for a three-in one or two-in-one, whatever, for your series. It's the same principle and it can lead to  more sales than the Chirp featured audio itself. You can only do these multiple promos if you have a lot of books but it helps move sales.

After all that yapping, ^^, in your particular case, I'd probably go with $0.99 with the initial book set at the time of your new book launch. Make certain before the promo starts that Amazon has the books linked in series. You also could drop down the 2nd book and launch it at something like $2.99 instead of $4.99 or whatever your usual price is. BTW, by doing $0.99 like this, you have the option of then running yet another promo the next month and giving the 1st book away free. Just don't go backwards and up your pricing in any close sale.

I usually promote the first book when introducing subsequent books in the series. Advertising geared to the second book or later may be lost on people who haven't read the first yet.

BTW, AMS ads can be used to promote multiple books if you are content not to write a tagline as part of the ad. That means you could have an ad showing your first three books, which I've had some luck with. I haven't had luck with sponsored brand ads, which allow to show three books and then point to your author page.

Thanks Bill. I'll check out that promoting multiple books (with no tagline, which is fine with me). Still, I think I would have to advertise book two (I only have two). Otherwise I'd be waiting (or at least I'd think I'd be waiting) for them to read book one in order to buy book two.

Pretty much anybody could do something like book cover T-shirts. (I priced something like that once, and at the time, it could be done relatively cheaply, though it's probably more expensive now.) I didn't do it only because the people requesting it were all in Europe, and international shipping adds tremendous expense. But for an author whose fanbase is mostly in one country, it might be worth considering. I suspect you'd need a decent sized fanbase as well.

There are lots of on-demand options for t-shirts now.  And with many you only pay when you get an order.  Some require payment upfront while others will handle the sale for you and keep a percentage.

The highest cost is usually the proper licensing for the image(s) to be used on the t-shirt.  That is, there is no cost if you created the image yourself, but if you used stock art or paid an artist, you have to have a license that covers using the image(s) for sale on merchandise like t-shirts.

The responses to this thread generated a research interest...

FYI - From KDP Creating Kindle Editions with Audio/Video Content : "Kindle Direct Publishing. KDP doesn't currently accept Kindle Edition with Audio/Video content. This format does not currently support Enhanced Typesetting."

Also, I found the only area where animation within epub files is being broadly attempted is for children's books.

I'll create a sandbox and see what I can conjour... News at eleven.

R.C.