Selecting Not To Select Kindle Select

I re-joined the gym yesterday. I've gone twice so far. I feel unbelievably good for having done so. It's not going to be cheap, so if you feel like supporting my good health habits, start saving your pennies for a copy of Hot Mess, releasing later in March.Speaking of which.

I've been involved with a couple of e-publishing projects in the last month or so, and have been trying to get a good idea of exactly what the costs and benefits to the independent author are when using e-distribution; read on for my thoughts on the matter and details of HOT MESS' release.




A while ago, I posted a copy of my first play, POST, on Amazon. It's been more of a control than anything else – something to get the ball rolling, as it were. I've talked it up occasionally – the most recent school shootings (it's a video link; I wasn't about to link to FOX) have been one such instance, given POST'S subject material and its production, unedited, a few weeks after Columbine back in '99. When I've had a day or two's free promotion and publicized it heavily, I've had a few downloads, but otherwise it hasn't gotten a lot of play.

More recently, on Valentine's Day, my short story Sweetheart was featured in SASSY SINGULARITY.I've had the ability to communicate closely with the book's editor regarding the patterns she's noticed in the anthology's performance. Same pattern. We had a heavy publicity blitz for about 48 hours, including blog posts (not well-interlinked, now that I think about it – a note to self for next time), Facebook posts, Google Plus, Linked In and Twitter threads. There was an early spike in orders, then a slow, steady stream of purchases over the subsequent days since. SASSY SINGULARITY has not yet run a free promotion, and even without doing that it cracked the top 100 paid Kindle books in its category.

As a corollary to the SASSY project, I took Restaurants Are Rated Out of Four Stars: a foodie romance  and uploaded it as a $.99 download. Business there has been slow. I'm not surprised: it's available for free on my website. The good news? Traffic to that page of rlbrody.com has been up.

Finally, I've also been able to watch the sales of a fellow author who has a respectable back catalog and who has taken full advantage of Amazon Select's free-day promotion – and her sales have been up since the close of her most recent promotion, so it's possible that Kindle Select is a lucrative choice for some.

Which brings me back to HOT MESS . Which, because I don't think I've mentioned it yet, has the most incredibly beautiful (even on black-and-white Kindle e-ink) illustrations compliments of this talented woman. Her album is called Pre-Apocalyptic Love Song. How can you not go check it out?

Anyway. HOT MESS. The climate change anthology you've all been hearing about for months now.

HOT MESS will be available for Kindle users. But given that we're planning on an Amazon price point of $3.99, and in light of  what I've learned from other self-publishers, I don't believe that we are placing ourselves at a disadvantage by making the book available on multiple platforms, bypassing Kindle's Select restrictions.

I'll be sure to keep everybody in the loop as we go forward, but if you can recommend (or warn us away from) any particular platforms – comments are welcome! So far, we're looking at a few possibilities in addition to Kindle – any strong feelings on Smashwords or CreateSpace?


…I actually did mean for this to be a post about the gym. Oh well. Another time.

PS – something is messed up with the paragraph formatting on this. Will fix tomorrow. Booo, hiss.
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Published on February 28, 2012 20:56
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