Amazon Kindle Select Program

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Kindle Select

 

My discussion today revolves around the Kindle Select program. This is a program that gives readers access to a large number of titles for a monthly fee. Kindle pushes authors rather heavily to become involved in this program. A lot of Indie writers do, I am not one of them. The reasons why will be revealed shortly.

The other day, I picked up an e-book by a new Indie writer for my Kobo. I needed a break from life’s realities, rewriting Bears Maul for the umpteenth time and working on Wind Riders 4.0. This book looked like it would be right up my alley, sci fi fantasy and a release into another time and place. Also, the price was right. Free.

So, the book was full of new writer’s mistakes, but if a read is decent, I usually overlook those kinds of things in a hurry. I read a famous alternate reality authors, quick peak, that was written worse than this new authors was. This book was more of a teaser book I thought. A lot of Indie writers will write a short book, put it up for free and hope for some decent reviews, while at the same time generating interest for the next book in the series. This little book was only 80 pages long, just under a two hour read for me. But it left me wanting more of this authors world and his characters. I looked on Kobo, but could not find more books by this author. A second book was available on Kindle.

The price was reasonable…Until I checked the page count. Are you kidding me? Almost $4 for a sixty-page e-book? At that price, mine are way to cheap. I should be charging $29 for mine!

Back to the Kindle Select program. For an author to participate, the author must give Amazon exclusive rights to the work for three months. I can’t even give it away to friends or for advertising campaigns, or review purposes, during that time frame.

Amazon takes a portion of the monthly dues paid by the readers and puts it in a pool to be shared among all the authors. In order to be eligible for a share of the pool, twenty pages of the authors work must be finished by the reader.

So, using the same Indie author from above, that author would be paid the exact same amount for his sixty-page effort as I would for my four hundred page plus work.

Not exactly fair is it? I tell you, I can and usually do bang out more than sixty pages a day in rough work, that is better formatted and put together at a rough stage than that particular author did for his finished, published work.

So, that is why you will not see any of my work in the Kindle Select program. Most of my readers come from outside the Kindle platform, I-books, Kobo and Scribed, then a very distant fourth Kindle. So why should I punish those readers to give Amazon exclusive rights to my work?

I may publish a sixty-page excerpt from Wind Riders 4.0 under a different name and ID number just for something to do. I’m at least two or three years away from publishing the whole thing anyway.