On the writing front

By Mike Jastrzebski

I have to admit my book sales are way down. In fact, they haven’t been this low since I first published on Kindle. There are many reasons for this.

First and foremost, I haven’t put out a new book in over two years. This is my own fault. I’ve been writing, but not pushing, and now that were putting a lot of effort into getting the boat into cruising shape I’m not writing much at all. I hope to have everything done on the boat by the end of January and then I can hit the keyboard. Of course this means that Stranded Naked Blues will not be published until March, but there are only so many hours in the day.

The second reason I feel that my sales are down is that when Amazon first offered its KDP Select program that gives Indie writers the ability to offer books free for a limited time and lend books to Prime members, I pulled my books from Barnes & Noble, the iBook store and other distributors and offered them exclusively on Amazon.

The Select program was great for increasing sales until Amazon began to tweak the way it counted free books. In my eyes, this has decreased the value of the program. Consequently, I did not renew in the Select program when my contract was up, and now I’m in the process of making my eBooks available with the other booksellers out there.

In doing this my wife, Mary, who is my editor, has been doing a re-edit of all my books, and we are now in the process of getting them ready to go live on the other sites. This is a rather time consuming job and I do not want to run any advertising until the books are all available on all of these sites, so I do not expect to see the sales bump back up until that point.

Finally, do I regret putting the books on Select? Not at all. It worked well for me for over a year, but everything is changing in the book business, and if a writer isn’t willing to go with the flow then he/she might as well give it up.

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