Why I Released Five Novels Exclusively and Simultaneously on Kindle and Amazon

One of the joys and curses of being an obsessive and compulsive writer of long form works of the imagination, meaning the novel, is the inability to cut off the flow. In other words the greedy muse must be served.

Most of my work is stand alone non-genre stories although I have among my published books written a six book mystery series about a female detective in Washington D.C. My stories are character and theme driven and deal with human conflict in mostly contemporary settings in some ways similar to The War of the Roses, and Random Hearts, which have been made into movies, and The Sunset Gang which became a trilogy on PBS.

Some are cast as thrillers or novels of suspense, intrigue and romance or whatever classification comes to mind. None are traditional genres.   A primary element in my work is the mysterious nature of love and attraction. Every story stands by itself. They are all different.

For the past five decades I have been writing stories, long and short, pretty much every day of my life. Considering the pace of about three to five pages a day every day the result is a considerable build-up of manuscripts that could not possibly be marketed in the accepted way under traditional publishing marketing.

The publishing business as it has been constituted for years is locked into marketing one book at a time, which has worked for them and for some authors, but not all. What the new e-book reading devices have done is changed that paradigm.

As an author of my output I am offering a body of work. Why not five novels out of my inventory to be introduced by the largest bookseller in the world? Amazon offered me the opportunity to assist in the global promotion of these five books in exchange for exclusivity. And I took it, gleefully, happily. The new titles now join the 27 non-exclusive books on Kindle and all other venues where electronic books and print on demand trade fiction copies are sold.

Additionally, Kindle and Amazon apps on iPad, Blackberry, iPhone  and whatever mobile device that allows the software increases the availability to any reader who taps into their vast inventory of books. Kindle and Amazon's reach is ubiquitous.

My goals are clear. I want to keep my authorial name alive in my lifetime and beyond. I want readers to be introduced to my entire body of work, not one book.  E-books will never go out of print and the competition will be fierce in the future with millions of books available in cyberspace.

The time is fast arriving when all writers, especially novelists, will have to take charge of their own destiny as the marketing of books morphs to the Internet. The old paradigms of publishing and big box book stores as their major outlet are shrinking precipitously. Book display space, even in major outlets like Walmart, will no longer equate with a profitable cost per square foot. Less space, less physical books to display, less foot traffic, less opportunity for print book sales.

For the author that means less advances, less print run, less promotion by traditional publishers. Everyone connected to traditional publishing will have to rethink their day job and that includes, agents, publicity people, backpack and bookcase manufacturers, libraries, and on and on.

To get one's authorial identity above the chatter on the net will take resourcefulness, creativity, cunning and above all luck. The filters for getting known and read are gone. Everybody is a reviewer. Everybody has an opinion.

Fiction book pickers like Oprah will lose their influence as others compete and proliferate.  Self-promoting talking heads on TV will have their moment but competition will make their manufactured large ghost written book products ebb with their ratings.

The paper book will survive but will be reduced in scope and marketed in new and innovative ways, but never in the mass numbers as before.

When the first stirring of the e-book possibilities began more than a decade ago, it struck me that here was an opportunity to liberate an author from total dependence on the traditional publishers and take one's future destiny as a novelist into my own hands. I quickly got my novel rights reversed, set up my own publishing umbrella and digitized all of my books.

The early days of the e-book invention were a disaster and finding a commercial outlet for my digitized books was nearly impossible.  Many an entrepreneur bit the dust. In those early years I was an evangelist for the process and was usually met with ridicule and disdain.  Barnes & Noble entered the field and after years of financial failure abandoned it only to return to the fray to play catch-up.

Then came the SONY Reader in 2007. To celebrate this entry into the field, SONY asked me to speak for it at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. Still skeptics abounded.

It wasn't until the Kindle was introduced that I felt certain that the future had arrived. Un-tethered to a computer, the Kindle seemed to me the most compelling hardware to connect the reader to book content ever devised.

I bought one of the first and saw for myself that while the printed books had served its purpose for centuries, the Kindle offered the dedicated reader a new way to read content that in no way impinged on the one-on-one communication system that connects reader to author. Other devices will follow and compete, but at this moment in time Amazon's Kindle is the leading product of choice for the dedicated reader.

Hence my decision.