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2011-10-10T08:31:00.000-07:00

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Authors and Publishers: How to Sponsor Kindle Nation Daily

2011-02-20T15:15:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Kindle Nation's Sponsorship Info Page for authors and publishers. Over the past few years we've built a special relationship with some of the greatest readers in the world, people who read on Kindle. If you have a good book that is available on Kindle, sponsoring Kindle Nation and our partner sites can be an excellent way to bring it to the attention of readers. The purpose of this web page is to explain how sponsorship works and to provide you with direct access to sponsorship sign-up via PayPal as well as all the information you need to choose your sponsorship options wisely and make the program work as well as possible for you.

Just to be clear, we don't promise that your sponsorship will "pay for itself," and we don't even consider it an ad in the usual sense, because what we write about each book, or even whether we accept it as a sponsor, is entirely up to us. But we do guarantee that when you sponsor Kindle Nation you'll get a great deal of exposure, and we believe good exposure can give a good book a chance to connect with readers.

The only rigid requirement is that your Kindle edition must be priced at $9.99 or below, since the Free Book Alerts are all about helping our readers find great reads that are also great bargains. However, we strongly encourage you to take further steps -- title, cover image, product description, reviews, price, and of course the quality of the book itself! -- to make your book as attractive to readers as possible so that you don't waste your money, our time, or our readers' attention.

After you sign up and send us information and materials on your book, we'll respond within 7 business days with a schedule for your sponsorship to appear. (We appreciate your patience with our response time, which is a result of our time-consuming effort to make sure that all sponsored titles meet Kindle Nation Daily standards. We reserve the right to reject any sponsorship and will refund a prospective sponsor's full payment immediately upon make such a determination.)

We do make editorial decisions based on our sense of our readers' interests. If for any reason we choose not to provide you with a sponsorship opportunity we will refund your payment in full. Please be aware that we must occasionally make small changes to sponsorship schedules -- usually involving no more than 2 or 3 days -- due to our efforts to provide the best possible reading experience for readers and subscribers.

CONTENTS:

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CHECK OUT OUR TRACK RECORD

We update these public spreadsheets daily to show complete, fully transparent results for our sponsors:

Please be aware that we provide valuable exposure, but it's up to you to make your book attractive to prospective readers. You may find it helpful to click on the links above to see how different sponsoring titles have performed depending on price, genre, title, reviews and ratings, cover art, and other factors.

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SELECT A SPONSORSHIP OPTION

Option 1 - Free Book Alert Sponsorship - 1 Day: Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert sponsorship live on web and pushed directly via Whispernet to over 6,000 Kindles owned by paid subscribers.

Option 2 - Free Kindle Nation Short Excerpt Email Sponsorship - 1 Day: Free Kindle Nation Shorts excerpt and sponsorship to be emailed to 5,000 opt-in free email subscribers and pushed directly via Whispernet to over 6,000 Kindles owned by paid subscribers. It's your choice whether to sponsor another author's Free Kindle Nation Short or your own, but the most powerful option is to sponsor your own.

Option 3 - Free Book Alert Sponsorship - Weekly Newsletter Email Blast: Weekly Kindle Nation newsletter email blast sponsorship emailed each Tuesday to 5,800 opt-in free email subscribers. This is one of our most powerful sponsorship options because the free opt-in newsletter with live web links to your book achieves a very high level of engagement and response. This option tends to be sold out 6-8 weeks in advance, so schedule early if possible!

Option 4 - Gold Sponsorship: This is a powerful medley of sponsorships that includes Options 1, 2, and 3: the Free Kindle Nation Short Excerpt Email Sponsorship, the Free Book Alert Sponsorship - 1 Day, and the Free Book Alert Sponsorship - Weekly Newsletter Email Blast. Since the Weekly Newsletter Email Blast option tends to be sold out months in advance, it is important to plan ahead for the Gold Sponsorship. (If you sign up for a Gold sponsorship, please specify whether you prefer to have all of your sponsorship days occur in the same week, or to have your daily and excerpt sponsorships occur as soon as possible rather than being held to occur in the same week as your weekly sponsorship).
Option 5 - Silver Sponsorship: The Silver Sponsorship combines options 1 and 2 and allows a savings of $10 on the package.

Option 6 - eBook of the Day Sponsorship - 1 Day: This package includes several elements: a one-day Planet iPad Free Book Alert Sponsorship; a small linked mention of title and author near the top of the Kindle Nation Daily website for at least 18 hours; a single "Kindle for the Web" sample post on the Kindle Nation Daily website at some time between noon and 8 pm Eastern, with brief linked mention of title and author; one Facebook status post and one Twitter tweet linking back to the "Kindle for the Web" sample post; one sidebar "eBook of the Day" box on the Kindle Nation Daily website for at least 18 hours, with linked title, author, and cover art; and an "eBook of the Day" box on key pages of the Kindle Lending Club website for at least 18 hours.

Option 7 - Platinum Sponsorship: The Platinum Sponsorship combines options 1, 2, and 6 and allows a savings of $20 on the package.

Option 8 - Kindle Lending Club Sponsorship - Weekly Newsletter Email Blast: Weekly Kindle Lending Club newsletter email blast sponsorship emailed each Wednesday to over 12,000 opt-in free email subscribers. Since this option is available for just one sponsorship each week, you may wish to schedule early if possible.
Option 9 - Ruby Sponsorship Package: The Ruby package combines options 1 and 6 and allows a savings of $20 on the package.

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CHECK ON AVAILABILITY AND SCHEDULE IN ADVANCE

Our sponsorships are very popular with authors and publishers and are booked well in advance. Check here to get a rough idea of the availability of different options and packages before you sign up. Please be aware that we update this availability information manually as we are able, so at any given time actual availability may extend a week or two further out on the calendar. Once you sign up, we will be in touch with you within seven business days to schedule your sponsorship formally. Signing up holds your place in the scheduling queue, provided that you send us required information and materials promptly.

As of April 5, 2011 the closest available dates for the several sponsorship options are as follows:

Option 1 - Free Book Alert Sponsorship - 1 Day: JULY 25, 2011
Option 2 - Free Kindle Nation Short Excerpt Email Sponsorship - 1 Day: OCTOBER 5, 2011
Option 3 - Free Book Alert Sponsorship - Weekly Newsletter Email Blast: JANUARY 31, 2012
Option 4 - Gold Sponsorship (The Gold package is composed of options 1, 2, and 3, so each component's availability is based on its specific options' availability. The decision, then, when someone signs for a Gold sponsorship, involves whether she prefers to have all of her sponsorship days occur in the same week, or to have her daily and excerpt sponsorships occur as soon as possible rather than being held to occur in the same week as her weekly sponsorship.If you sign up for a Gold sponsorship, please specify whether you prefer to have all of your sponsorship days occur in the same week, or to have your daily and excerpt sponsorships occur as soon as possible rather than being held to occur in the same week as your weekly sponsorship).
Option 5 - Silver Sponsorship (The Silver package is composed of options 1 and 2, so each component's availability is based on its specific options' availability.)
Option 6 - eBook of the Day: JUNE 25, 2011.
Option 7 - Platinum Sponsorship (The Platinum package is composed of options 1, 2, and 6, so each component's availability is based on its specific option's availability.)
Option 8 - Kindle Lending Club Weekly Newsletter Email Blast: JUNE 22, 2011.
Option 9 - Ruby Sponsorship (The Ruby package is composed of options 1 and 6, so each component's availability is based on its specific option's availability.)

We are always happy to schedule a sponsorship in advance to help you reserve a date and plan a campaign for a book that is yet to be released. Please request an appropriate earliest sponsorship date and email us and tell us when we will receive your materials: at least 10 days before the sponsorship date. It is important to schedule a sponsorship date at least 10 days after the book will be uploaded to the Kindle platform in order to optimize the effects of the sponsorship. (In such instances it is essential that you provide us with your title and latest possible publication date immediately, and then you must forward all other materials at least 10 days before your sponsorship date. There may be a $25 change fee in instances where we are forced to reschedule your sponsorship because your publication date or materials are delayed beyond the deadlines for your sponsorship date.)

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SIGN UP AND PAY WITH PAYPAL OR A CREDIT CARD

Please use the pull-down menus and buy button on this page to select an option that works for you.

If you have any difficulty using this feature, please email us at hppress@gmail.com or free to simply PayPal the indicated amount to hppress@gmail.com and follow up with an email stating the option you have chosen and providing the material on your book as specified in the next section.

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SEND YOUR EBOOK INFORMATION AND MATERIALS AND AWAIT OUR SCHEDULING EMAIL

Once you have signed up for a sponsorship, it is important that you send an email to us immediately at hppress@gmail.com with the following information:

your title, 10-digit Kindle Store ASIN, and Kindle Store link;
up to 150 words to help us describe your book to Kindle owners (but please note that we generally will take descriptive text and cover art from your book's Kindle Store page);
any preferences regarding dates (although we are not always able to honor such preferences);
and an e-copy of the entire book, as a review copy for me, in any format (MOBI, DOC, TXT, RTF, HTML, PDF but NOT EPUB, AZW or DOC-X) that I can easily send or convert to my Kindle; this may help me to provide a personal testimonial as well as your sponsorship copy. Please send the actual copy rather than a gift coupon or that sort of thing.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are selecting the Free Kindle Nation Short Excerpt Email Sponsorship (Option 2), the Gold package (Option 4) or the Platinum package (Option 7), you will also want to email us the excerpt that you would like us to run as a Free Kindle Nation Short.

For Free Kindle Nation Shorts submissions, I recommend at least 5,000 words and no more than 20,000. When sending a Free Kindle Nation Short excerpt, use DOC, TXT, RTF, HTML, but NOT MOBI, PDF, AZW or DOC-X. Try to make the submission substantial enough to differentiate it from the "free sample" that is available on every Kindle book page. (The FKNS feature does not have to be an excerpt, but that often works well. Something else that might work in some cases would be a discrete short story that observes one or more of the same characters in a different situation....)

Please note the following when sending your ebook information and awaiting our response:

If you send your sponsorship materials from an email address other than the address associated with your PayPal payment, it is essential that you include the PayPal-associated email address in the subject line of your email. Otherwise we will not be able to link the two emails and schedule your sponsorship.
If you sign up for a sponsorship, please expect to wait about 7 business days (10-12 days overall) before you hear from us. We generally vet submissions before scheduling them, and even if we have already vetted yours, we schedule on a first-come, first-served basis.

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TIPS AND IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Remember that the combination of a $2.99 price and a well-targeted marketing campaign may help to turn your book into the kind of easy impulse buy that can help it to climb the bestseller list in its category. For more information on the real effect of prices in the Kindle Store, see this inexpensive ebook on pricing and royalties for Kindle books.

A $2.99 price may not seem like much, but with the 70% Kindle Store royalty it could earn you over $2 per each copy sold, which compares favorably with paperback royalties from Big Six publishers.

A Kindle Nation sponsorship will do a lot to shine a positive light on your book, but you can also help to make the most of that if your book has received some genuine positive customer reviews before the sponsorship occurs.

Please pay close attention to file formatting specifications, or you will end up wasting significant time for both of us. When sending a review copy for me, use MOBI, DOC, TXT, RTF, HTML, PDF but NOT AZW or DOC-X. When sending a Free Kindle Nation Short excerpt, use DOC, TXT, RTF, HTML, but NOT MOBI, PDF, AZW or DOC-X.

Sponsorships are generally posted by 12 noon Eastern time. Sometimes sales and sale rankings can take a few hours to update on the Kindle platform and in the Kindle store, so be patient. Most of our sponsors see a positive bump in sales and sales rankings about four to six hours after their sponsorships go live.

While the vast majority of our sponsors have experienced dramatic short-term and long-term results, please be aware that we can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear here, and we can't even make a silk purse of a silk purse if the Kindle page for it makes it looks like a sow's ear. When a sponsor submits an erotica title with a full-color cover photograph of a model's hindquarters and 0 customer reviews (or poor customer reviews), there's a fair chance that the thousands of avid readers among our thousands of very discriminating subscribers will feel more insulted than inspired.

We generally send you a link and a copy of our first tweet when we've posted your sponsorship, and you should feel free to use social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to pass the word along and retweet our message.

A number of our sponsors have asked me how they could best keep track of their sales rankings over time. I use free services called NovelRank and Title Z and they do a good job of tracking historical patterns.

I should say here that although $9.99 is the maximum price we will allow for a sponsored title, our experience says that most authors sell so many more copies in the $2.99 to $4.99 range that it is well worth their choosing the lower price point in order to attract readers and maximize royalties.

Please be aware that some of our sponsorships, including eBook of the Day and Free Kindle Nation Shorts sponsorships, actually post very late in the day and tend to have more impact the day following your scheduled date.

If you request a cancellation or postponement of a sponsorship date after it has been scheduled, please understand that we may charge a change fee of $25 based on the time involved in processing your changes.

Plenty of Good News for Indie Authors and Publishers in the the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey

2011-01-29T12:17:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Windwalker

Why would an author or publisher be interested in the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey?

Well, first, we all know that without other authors we would be nowhere, and one of the best things about other authors is that, with a very few, largely inexplicable exceptions, authors are voracious readers.

So, as a reader, you have every right to click here and participate in the survey. The deadline to participate is midnight Hawaii time Monday, January 31, 2011. There are 15 questions and most people tell me it takes them about 10 minutes from beginning to end.

But equally important is that the survey results are already shaping up to spell good news dramatic significance for indie authors and publishers. You can wait until you've completed the survey and you will be delivered automatically to a survey results link, or, if you're not the waiting kind, feel free to go ahead and click here to see the results now. Here are a few of the takeaways from the first 1,900 respondents:

Respondents continue to have strong positive feelings about bestselling authors (56% positive, 3% negative), but they don't think much of the big agency model publishers (10% positive, 41% negative). Indeed, they have much more positive feelings, for instance, about:

Independent and emerging authors (52% positive, 1% negative)
Small independent publishers (35.5% positive, 4% negative)
Kindle Nation Daily (71% positive, 2% negative)

Influences such as electronic and print media reviews, bestseller lists, Oprah, or big bookstore displays in pointing readers to the books that they actually buy are in decline. Instead, respondents ranked the following, in order, as far more likely to influence them to buy books:

recommended or listed by Amazon.
recommended, listed, or excerpted on Kindle Nation.
reading a free excerpt, author interview, or other material on Kindle Nation or another source.
recommended by a friend, relative, or colleague.

Indie authors and indie publishers cannot survive without indie readers, and increasingly, readers are acting as if they are in charge when it comes to selecting the books they will read or acting as if they, the readers, are the final price-setting authorities:

89% of respondents identified with the statement, "I frequently choose to delay purchasing an ebook that I want to read if I believe that the price is too high."
76% of respondents identified with the statement, "If publishers keep charging higher bestseller prices, I'll buy more backlist or indie titles."

Take the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey

Here, if you are interested, are links for our previous Kindle Nation Survey Results:

Kindle Nation eBook of the Day Results Rock, Available in a Separate Spreadsheet; Availabilities in February

2011-01-22T08:26:00.000-08:00

By Steve Windwalker

One thing that's been exciting for us here at KND has been that our newest and least expensive form of sponsorship, the Kindle Nation Daily eBook of the Day, has recently been catching up with its more expensive alternatives when it comes to results for authors and publishers. I've just broken out a spreadsheet isolating the past 4 weeks' KND-EBOD results and it is now public at http://bit.ly/hD7EMM. We've added staff to help keep up with all of this, and we have availability as soon as February for KND-EBOD sponsorships.

One of the things that we've seen in the past month, as Rudy Kerkhoven suggested in his analysis above, is that the value of the same sales ranking as between, say, November and the present, has probably increased by a factor of 2 or 3 times. My hope is that by being totally transparent about sponsorship results we can help authors and publishers spend marketing dollars wisely, and also continue to play a role in helping to connect writers of distinction with the greatest readers in the world. (Pardon my sloganspeak, but what part of that is not true?) There are links to results for all of our different sponsorship offerings at the top of our Sponsorship Info Page at http://kindlehomepage.blogspot.com/p/sponsor-kindle-nation-daily-free-book.html.

indieKindle News for Authors and Publishers, January 21, 2011 - Featuring Indie Publisher David Niall Wilson's Post: "How Do I Sell My e-Book? A Publisher’s Thoughts"

2011-01-21T13:54:00.000-08:00

Plenty of things to keep up for authors and indie publishers today, and here are just a few of them:

First, some news for authors and indie publishers from Amazon. The company announced today that it is expanding its 70 per cent royalty program for Kindle sales, already offered in the U.S. and U.K., to ebooks sold in Canada. In the same press release, Amazon announced almost parenthetically that it was changing the name of the Kindle Digital Text Platform to "Kindle Direct Publishing." So, we stop saying DTP. We start saying KDP.
Second, now that it has a spiffy new name, Kindle Digital Publishing launched a spiffy new (apparently) monthly newsletter for KDP authors and publishers. If you haven't seen it already in your inbox, you can read it here in your browser.
Third, if you haven't noticed already, Kindle Nation is conducting one of its twice-a-year major surveys of our readers, and there is plenty there that will be of interest to authors and publishers. Our last survey got about 2,000 responses from Kindle owners, and several of our questions and choices this time around focus in on what influences readers to buy Kindle books, and what kind of things create friction that keeps them from buying books even if they are interested in reading them. Most authors I know are also prolific readers, so I hope that you will click here to participate in the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey and here to see the results.
And finally, I thought Crossroads Press publisher David Niall Wilson shared some important insights in his post today under the title How Do I Sell My e-Book? A Publisher’s Thoughts, so I was especially pleased when he agreed to allow me to cross-post it here. You may notice that there's a nice mention of the Kindle Nation Daily sponsorship program toward the end, but all I can say is that it was totally unsolicited and unexpected.

The post first appeared this morning here at David's eponymous blog. And while you've got that clicker working you might want to check out these Crossroads Press listings in the Kindle Store.

Here's David:

By David Niall Wilson

I have seen far too many ‘gurus’ chime in on this subject, and after nearly a year in the business of growing a digital publishing company, I feel like I have some value-add to bring to the mix. I’m not a ‘guru’ and do not ever want to be considered one, but I have been doing this for a while now, and I’ve observed some things you might find usesful. It’s worth the effort, I think, to try and get it all into perspective in my own mind.

First of all, books are books. Stephen King’s eBooks sell better than those of a new writer no one has heard of. Blogs about and reviews of Stephen King books get more notice than those of lesser-known authors, and generate more sales. Authors – in short – who were already popular before putting their titles out in eBook format are still more popular than authors who were not. Authors who bring an audience from mass market publishing to their eBooks sell better than those with no track record. These are facts, and no amount of blogging, posturing, or tears will change them.

So what do you do?

There are solid answers. Covers matter. That said, you don’t need to go out and break the bank on a professional cover designer to get a very good, commercial cover. I’ve done some extensive analysis on our titles, and I can tell you that there is absolutely ZERO evidence in my data to show that the cover art is a huge factor unless it is godawful. If your little brother did it in Microsoft Paint, or you let Calibre generate it for you, or the colors are all mis-matched, you’re going to lose sales for the same reason a similar cover would not work on a print book. It looks amateurish.

That said, there is a lot that can be done with Photoshop, and there are people out there with some amazing artwork that won’t cost you an arm and a leg. You just have to look for them. Join the community at Deviant Art and meet some of the wonderful artists there. Browse the public domain photo sites. You may pay some for the rights to an image, but you can often find one you’ll like for a very reasonable price – or even free. Then all you need is to study some books, see what sort of font and text arrangement appeals to you, and find someone capable of dropping it onto your image. All that is a fancy way of saying – most of you aren’t going to make hundreds of dollars on your eBook right off the bat, and investing a bunch of cash in a cover is a serious risk that isn’t really necessary, in my opinion (and experience). Some of the covers we’ve used that I think are the most mundane have resulted in great selling titles, and several titles with amazing covers have not done well at all.

Copy-editing and format matter. If you just run a word document through some conversion program and slap it up, it’s not going to look good. If you don’t get at least one other set of eyes carefully going over your work, it’s not going to read well – it’s going to have typos. Almost no-one is perfect enough to write without errors…and though you may see them easily in another person’s work, you may also NOT catch them in your own. Do yourself a favor and – even if you have to pay a small fee for it – find a proof-reader worth their salt. Then salt them.

On most eBook sites you can assign “Tags” to your books. This might seem trivial, but it is not. There are whole groups out there cross-tagging one another’s books to bring the numbers of people “agreeing” with them high enough to bump them up the search ranks. On Amazon, for instance, if you search the word BLOOD – the book with the highest ranking on that search term is going to come up first. Also, books that have the word BLOOD in their title may start getting that book listed in the “related” products and sent out in “you might also be interested in” e-mail notices.

Price matters. If you are a known quantity,and you present new, original work, you can get more for your eBook. If you are NOT a known quantity, or if you are bringing back older work that can be bought used and cheap in print editions, don’t be greedy. If you charge the $2.99 league minimum at Amazon, you will get more per sale than you ever got from a print publisher per sale by a huge factor. Print books pay (average) 4-10 percent royalty. If you sell your book through Crossroad Press – for instance – you get 80 percent of $2.05 (about what Amazon pays us per sold title after deducting their “delivery” fee) – that’s a good chunk per sale, and it adds up fast. We sell new, original works higher – $3.99 and $4.99 – and those seem to be workable prices as well, but keep in mind what you are asking of your readers. Ignore everything else and buy my book. Give them as many reasons as you can.

Do a good write-up for the book. I sometimes have a hard time getting my authors to help with this, and I do what I can, but a good solid “hook” in the product description is crucial. In print publishing you usually have little or no input to what the publisher puts up as a description, but here – in the digital world – you can write it and even change it with impunity.

When you get reviews, respond to them positively, even the bad ones. Never drop to thelevel of a sour-voiced reviewer. You’re just playing into their game, and you’ll regret it before all is said and done. Remain professional.

Visit forums and bulletin boards and blogs that are related to a: your genre and b: eBooks in general. Be a pro-active part of their communities before blowing your own horn, or it will backfire.

Make sure your author info is available. Set up your Amazon Author’s Page. Set up your Smashwords profile. If you get reviews complaining about typos – proofread and re-publish. Never believe that because someone else did a thing, you can copy what they did and it will work for you…it’s not going to. Each book, and each author, is unique in some way, and requires an individual approach.

Product, product, product. If you have words sitting around out of print, or languishing for years without publication, I suggest you dust them off and get them out there. A body of work in eBook format can generate steady sales much more quickly and reliably than one, or two eBooks. One thing is certain – a story or novel on your hard drive for ten years unread made you no money at all.

The bottom line is – you don’t need a guru. You need hard work, patience, attention to detail, and the same bit of luck you always needed to succeed. It’s easier to get IN the door of digital publishing, but the doors are open very wide. In the old days readers clamored at the publishing door for more to read. Now those doors are big and revolving, and the readers disperse in all directions as they pass through. Latching onto them and drawing them to your work is a whole new ballgame. Pay attention, learn from what you see, don’t let ANYONE tell you the best way to do a thing is”blah blah” unless they can show that “blah blah” has worked for a lot of people over time. And just SAYING that it has worked isn’t enough. Show me stats on how that new expensive cover built sales. Show me, in other words, the money. And don’t do it by showing me someone already successful.

Also, don’t listen to tales of inflated sales. You can go to Novelrank.com and put in the ASIN of any book there and track it. If it’s already being tracked, you just log in and add it to those you are tracking. This way, when someone claims a thousand sales, you can check, and if you see a title upcoming you want to keep an eye on to see if something someone did worked for promotion – you have some (albeit imperfect) stats. I’ve seen some eye-opening whoppers told on the net about huge sales that I observed personally through Novel Rank to be much smaller. Keep in mind that Novel Rank is not perfect, and that it only tracks from the moment you START tracking, so any sales prior to that you can’t see. Hype is what it is.

(Ed. Note: Although I think Novelrank is a worthwhile tool, I do want to point out my experience here that its software tends to undercount U.S. Kindle Store sales, especially in times of rapid growth such as the past few weeks. This is natural given the fact that the software must be based on backward-looking algorithms, but I'm just saying that I wouldn't use Novelrank numbers to challenge anyone's sales claims. --S.W.)

I am happy to offer advice if asked, but that’s all it is. I don’t know how to make your book sell better for CERTAIN – I only know what is working at Crossroad Press. We’ve grown in leaps and bounds, sales are up (best month ever happening now).

One last thing…Kindle Nation Daily sponsorship. While this is not a guaranteed success – I have found that if you listen to them – go in with a good cover price, a decent cover, at least a couple of good reviews on your book already (and not fluffy, gushing ones either – real reviews) – you can generate a good number of sales that last over several days…

We have sponsored several books there, and at least three of them did very, very well. I would recommend their service to anyone.

Enough for one day…

-DNW

Just How Big is the Kindle Revolution? Our Estimates: Amazon Has Sold 12 Million Kindles, and There Were Over 10 Million Paid Kindle eBook Sales in the Last Week of 2010

2011-01-14T02:33:00.000-08:00

By Steve Windwalker

Amazon inducted bestselling author Nora Roberts as the third member of its Kindle Million Club yesterday with a press release stating that Roberts "has sold 1,170,539 Kindle books under her name and her pseudonym J.D. Robb." So we now have the following members in the Kindle Million Club, and you can click on these links to fill your Kindles up with hundreds of their titles:

Come to think of it, when you look at the long lists of titles by Roberts and Patterson, it is all the more impressive that Larsson was able to storm the castle with a single trilogy. But there's definitely a lesson here for emerging authors, and it is a lesson that many Kindle Nation faves like Imogen Rose, Scott Nicholson, Paul Levine and J.A. Konrath have learned well: trilogies, series, and multiple titles allows authors great efficiencies when it comes to building exposure for their books.

While the Kindle Million Club will always be an elite club, it is also very likely that membership in the club will expand geometrically in the next few years. By this time next year I would expect the club to have about 10 members, and to be very close to inducting its first "indie author" member. By mid-decade we'll see a dozen members of the club who are operating, at least for current ebook purposes, without traditional publishers.

Which brings us back to a topic we've been discussing ever since the first month the Kindle came out back in late 2007: just how big is the Kindle revolution?

In last week's Kindle Nation weekly digest we hinted that I would be back this week with some analysis to support my belief that:

first, Amazon recently passed the 12-million mark in total Kindles shipped since November 2007; and
second, readers downloaded about 15 million Kindle ebooks, including 10 million paid books, during the final week of 2010.

Frankly, the details of triangulating in on how many Kindles there are in the world can get a little dull, but here are our estimated benchmarks for cumulative Kindle sales during the past three years and change:

Kindle Launch - November 19, 2007
100,000 Kindles - March 2008
750,000 Kindles - October 2008
1 Million Kindles - March 2009 (Kindle 2 Ships)
3 Million Kindles - December 2009
4 Million Kindles - July 2010
6 Million Kindles - August 2010 (Kindle 3 Ships)
8.5 Million Kindles - December 12, 2010
11 Million Kindles - December 24, 2010
12 Million Kindles - January 2011
22 Million Kindles - December 2011 (conservative projection)
35 Million Kindles - December 2012 (conservative projection)

All of the figures for 2008 and 2009 are consistent with figures we estimated contemporaneously, and of course others then claimed at each of those points that our estimates were far too aggressive. In each case, however, the sales arc on which my figures were based was eventually confirmed and became the consensus view.

Now we're not trying to prove our case to a jury here, and of course Amazon doesn't disclose these numbers. But a few things that Amazon has said in the past year or so help, nonetheless, with the triangulation:

Jeff Bezos announced at the end of 2009 that Amazon had sold "millions of Kindles."
Amazon announced on December 13, 2010 that "in just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we've already sold millions of our all-new Kindles with the latest E Ink Pearl displays. In fact, in the last 73 days, readers have purchased more Kindles than we sold during all of 2009."
Amazon announced on October 24, 2007 that it had sold 2.5 million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7), with the 2007 holiday season still to come and the July 2009 paperback edition yet to be released. The Potter book has continued to sell briskly in the past three years (hardcover #1 for the entire year 2007, and both hardcover and paperback editions remain in the top 1,000 even now, in January 2011.
Amazon announced on December 27, 2010 that in just 4 months since its launch the Kindle 3 had already become "the bestselling product in Amazon's history, eclipsing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)." That statement referred both to hardcover and paperback copies of the Potter book, for which I would estimate Amazon's total cumulative worldwide print sales to be about 7.1 million copies.
Finally, Amazon said throughout the month of December that it would not be shipping Kindles outside the U.S. in time for Christmas delivery, and all of the indications available to us here at Kindle Nation are that international Kindle shipments in the three weeks since Christmas have been very, very brisk.

I will leave you to connect your own dots there, if you are interested. Call me unrigourous, but this is not graduate school. Of course it doesn't really matter in the long run if Amazon has shipped 12 million Kindles to date or 11.75 million or 12.3 million, but if you come up with a figure of fewer than 11.5 million you haven't connected all the dots. The technical term is that they have shipped an even gazillion, and the Kindle's sales velocity is not slowing down. Au contraire.

So what about my claim that readers downloaded 15 million Kindle books, 10 million of them paid, in the last week of 2010? Actually, those figures are conservative, despite the fact that my friend and colleague Morris Rosenthal (who brings a lot to the table where statistical estimates of Amazon sales are concerned) puts the figure at 3 to 3.5 million.

There are some important numbers that I cannot share here because they involve confidential information concerning my own sales figures and figures that have been shared confidentially with me by other authors and publishers, so let's take a different approach. We'll call it "common sense," and there are several different ways we can come at this. Let's start with something we got from the world of the Nook:

Barnes and Noble issued a press release on December 30 saying both that it had sold "millions of Nooks" so far and that customers had downloaded "nearly one million NOOKbooks purchased and downloaded on Christmas Day alone." So we can extrapolate that on Christmas Day alone there was at least one ebook sold for every three Nooks.
We begin with the expectation that there were 11 million Kindles by December 25, but let's say that 1 million of those were secondary Kindles, defunct Kindles, etc. On the other 10 million Kindles, assuming that Kindle owners are every bit the active readers that Nook owners appear to be, that would lead us to conclude that they downloaded 3.3 million Kindle books on Christmas Day alone.
Amazon stated earlier that about 20 percent of Kindle books are downloaded to Kindle apps on other devices. While Kindle device sales were certainly brisk ahead of Christmas, so were sales of all the other devices that run the Kindle purchasing and reading app. Thus it makes sense to stick with the 20 percent figure for Kindle purchases on other devices, and if we do the math, that would come to 825,000 Kindle books downloaded on other devices. Let's round it down to 4 million. Yep, that's 4 million Kindle books purchased and downloaded on Christmas Day.
While the annual rush period for print book publishers, retailers, and authors runs from Black Friday to Christmas Eve, it's a very different calendar in the ebook business. Sales peak on Christmas Day and hold at very high levels through the first week of January as people open new ebook readers. On December 25, 2009, I sold over 1,700 copies of my bestselling ebook, which was more than 3 times my sales on any previous day. But that ebook's daily sales did not slip below 1,000 copies a day on any of the next 10 days. That experience runs parallel to what I have witnessed but cannot disclose about dozens of other ebooks by other authors, so that I am confident that if Amazon sold 4 million Kindle books on Christmas Day, its sales for the following 6 days did not slip below 2 million copies a day, for a total of over 16 million Kindle books sold during the final week of 2010, and the figure is probably higher still by a million or more. Even if a third of the downloaded Kindle books were free, that still comes to over 10.5 million paid Kindle books.

Or here's another way to look at it, and we start again with the 11 million Kindles figure as of Christmas morning:

That figure includes 4 million previous-generation Kindles that were shipped by July 2010 and another 2 million Kindle 3s that were shipped prior to Labor Day. Let's say that no paid ebooks at all were purchased on a million of those units during the last week of 2010, and that only an average of 0.5 ebooks were purchased that week on the other 5 million units. So there's a very conservative start, with 2.5 million paid ebooks sold on those ancient Kindles.
Then let's take the 5 million new Kindles shipped since August. Let's say, again, that a million of those weren't used to download a single ebook for the final week of 2010. On the other 4 million, let's hypothesize something like this:

1 million units downloaded 0.5 books each (0.5)
1 million units downloaded 1.0 books each (1.0)
1 million units downloaded 2.0 books each (2.0)
1 million units downloaded 3.0 books each (3.0)

That comes to 9 million paid ebooks loaded directly to Kindles, and that would suggest 2.25 million ebooks loaded to Kindle apps on other devices, for a total of 11.25 million.
Again, I believe these models and the results of 10.5 to 11.25 million paid Kindle ebook sales for the last week of 2010 are conservative, because, for one thing, I believe that about 3 million Kindles were opened for the first time on or about Christmas Day and it would confound my understanding of human nature to think that, in the hands of people who love to read, those newly unwrapped Kindles led to only 6 million ebooks downloaded. I just don't see many of those folks saying, "I can't wait until Monday morning so I can go to the public library to find something to read."

We could go on and on, but I sense that your eyes have already long since glazed over. Again, it doesn't really matter if there were 11.25 million paid Kindle books sold during the last week of 2010 or 9.7 million, but we can be quite sure that the figure was far north of 3.5 million.

I have no doubt that there will be a few publishing industry insiders who read this post and conclude once again that I've been drinking that Kindle Kool-Aid again, and that I am totally caught up in the hype of the so-called "Kindle revolution." They will point out that everyone knows that ebook sales are really only 8 or 10 percent of the trade book market.

To which I say, yep, it's apple-flavored Kool-Aid and, well, how do you like these apples? ... as reported today by Bob Minzesheimer and Craig Wilson in their USA TODAY Book Buzz column:

E-books surge: Egads, as cartoon heroes would say. E-books had another great week after up to 5 million digital reading devices were unwrapped for the holidays. Last week, the e-book outsold the print version for 18 of the top 50 books on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, including all three Stieg Larsson novels. The week before, 19 had higher e-book than print sales. That was the first time the top 50 list has had more than two titles in which the e-version outsold print.

Over Two-Thirds of Our Kindle Nation Sponsors Climb into the Top 3,000 Overall, and Sponsorships Are Available

2010-12-21T09:35:00.000-08:00

By Steve Windwalker, editor of indieKindle and Kindle Nation

The peak annual period for shopping in the Kindle Store begins at around 5 pm Eastern on December 24 and continues for the next two weeks, and as it approaches we've been payng close attention to the results that Kindle Nation Daily sponsors have been getting in their efforts to connect with more Kindle readers. Our December 2010 Kindle Nation Sponsorship Results spreadsheet is available for all to see and has now been updated through December 20. Here are some of the benchmarks:

14 out of 55 sponsoring titles overall have climbed into the top 1,000 in Kindle Store sales rankings
29 out of 55 sponsoring titles overall have climbed into the top 2,000 in Kindle Store sales rankings
37 out of 55 sponsoring titles overall have climbed into the top 3,000 in Kindle Store sales rankings, including

8 out of 8 Free Kindle Nation Shorts sponsors/excerpts
18 out of 21 daily Free Book Alert sponsoring titles

Among titles priced at $3.79 and up, 4 out of 9 have climbed into the top 5,000
Among titles priced at $0.99, 15 out of 17 have climbed into the top 2,100
Among titles priced at $1.99, 2 out of 2 have climbed into the top 1,500
Among titles priced at $2.99, 18 out of 29 have climbed into the top 3,000

Finally, 10 out of 18 of our newer and less expensive Ebook of the Day sponsoring titles have climbed into the top 10,000, but we're working to strengthen the presentation on this and we see progress: 3 of the last 4 have climbed into the top 5,000, 2 of them into the top 2,000.

I personally don't believe much in advertising, but I do believe in connecting, and I see these sponsorships as a way of connecting with readers who are engaged and responsive.

What might an author or publisher get from sponsoring Kindle Nation, other than a warm fuzzy feeling for helping a hard-working guy like me?

There's never a guarantee of success, and definitions of success can vary widely among authors and publishers. But if you have written or published a book of real distinction and you want to increase exposure and connect with more readers, we work hard to help you in that effort. We have over 10,000 regular readers between our several platforms, and we often refer to Kindle Nation readers as the greatest readers in the world. If I had to describe their reading habits, I couldn't do it, but I can tell you that as readers they are prolific, savvy, price-conscious, ecumenical with respect to genre, and they don't care for trashy books, trashy covers (even though I do), and trashy reviews (I know, because I've written a few!).

I hope that helps.

Currently there is availability in early March for daily Free Book Alert sponsorships and Free Kindle Nation Shorts excerpt sponsorships, and in January for eBook of the Day sponsorships. We continue to offer a Silver package that knocks $10 off the price of a combo of the daily Free Book Alert sponsorship and the Free Kindle Nation Shorts excerpt sponsorship. See our sponsorship info page for more information and sign-up.

In New Attack on Author Productivity, Amazon Announces Free Offering of Neilsen BookScan Data

2010-12-09T07:45:00.000-08:00

Some indieKindle readers may be under the impression that Amazon is doing good things for authors and indie publishers these days, but I dunno.

The ~~bookseller~~, er, ~~ebook trailblazer~~, er, ~~global behemoth~~, er, multi-platform international publishing company announced a new venture this morning that is likely to reduce total creative productivity among American authors by 60 to 75 per cent during the next year.

What evil has Amazon wrought?

The company announced today that "authors who use Amazon’s Author Central service (http://authorcentral.amazon.com) can now view Nielsen BookScan’s weekly geographic sales data for their print books for free."

The sordid story of author suffering in the grip of ASRS (Amazon Sales Ranking Syndrome) has, of course, been chronicled with increasing frequency on the web and was the subject of documentary coverage here at indieKindle just last week. It has been known to affect entire families and even certain neighborhoods such as Park Slope and Studio City, and now -- it appears -- the syndrome is showing an amazing resiliency and ability to fight back against antibodies, antidotes, and 12-steppers.

Prior to Amazon's launch of the Kindle in November 2007, it was widely believed that there was, roughly speaking, a 50:50 ratio between the time that professional authors spent writing and the time they spent checking their Amazon Sales Rankings. Post-Kindle, the ratio, at least in the U.S., has exceeded 2:1 in favor of time sapped from writing by ASRS.

Amazon's "free" offering of Neilsen BookScan data to individual authors will, in all likelihood, be the final tipping point for ASRS, after which few new books, if any, will ever be finished.

Amazon's news release follows:

Weekly Nielsen BookScan Data for Print Book Sales Now Available for Free to Authors in Amazon’s Author Central Service

For the first time, authors can track their books’ weekly print sales, including geographical distribution, as recorded by Nielsen BookScan (widely regarded as the best source for industry print book sales)

Author Central also launches tracking of historical Amazon bestsellers rank for each of an author’s books

SEATTLE–Dec. 9, 2010 –Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that authors who use Amazon’s Author Central service can now view Nielsen BookScan’s weekly geographic sales data for their print books for free. Author Central is a free service provided by Amazon that helps authors promote their books and reach more readers. Also announced today, Author Central has added a feature that shows authors past history on the Amazon bestsellers rank for their books.

“Authors are an important community for us,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Amazon. “We’re really happy to make it easy and free for them to see geographical BookScan data updated weekly, as well as historical Amazon bestsellers rank, for their books. We hope this creates an improved feedback loop for authors and enables them to develop more effective methods for reaching the widest possible audience.”

For the first time anywhere, authors can access timely geographic sales trends aggregated across retailers by Nielsen BookScan, widely regarded as the best source for industry print book sales. The new “Sales by Geography” feature displays a map of the continental United States, highlighting the areas where copies of authors’ books have been sold. The new “Sales by Week” feature displays a bar chart of an author’s sales recorded over the trailing four weeks. Authors can also see how many copies of each title were sold by print-edition type, e.g. hardcover or paperback. Digital book sales are not included in BookScan data. Nielsen BookScan estimates that it tracks 75 percent of print trade books sold in the United States, collected at more than 10,000 online and offline locations.

“I love the new sales information features on Author Central, especially the interactive sales map,” said Sarah Mlynowski, author of “Gimme a Call.” “Seeing retail sales by city allows me to effectively target my offline and online promotional efforts—and track their impact.”

The new Amazon Bestsellers Rank History enables authors to see their bestseller rank over time, without needing to frequently refresh their books’ pages on Amazon.com.

“Authors hate to admit it, but checking our Amazon bestsellers rank can become nearly addictive,” said Karen McQuestion, bestselling author of “A Scattered Life.” “Author Central has made it easier for me to track my rankings over time. This feature, along with others on Amazon Central, saves me time which is better used for writing.”

In addition to these new features, authors who use Author Central have the opportunity to share the most up-to-date information about themselves and their work with readers. Authors can view and edit their bibliography, add a photo and biography to a personal profile, upload missing book cover images, add video, information about speaking events, and use a blog to connect with readers. Authors only need a book listed in Amazon’s catalog to be eligible to join Author Central. The Author Central service is also available in the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.

Authors can learn more about Author Central and these new features at http://authorcentral.amazon.com.

Of course this look into the dark side of Amazon Sales Rankings won't fit you ... but perhaps you have an author friend who feel the slightest tinge of recognition???

2010-11-29T06:41:00.000-08:00

Thanks to past Kindle Nation featured author John Yunker for sending in this absolutely hilarious, spot-on video that he and his talented wife, short story author Midge Raymond, created for the relentlessly growing fellowship for those of us who are powerless over our need to check our Amazon sales rankings....

If there's any justice in the world, this video will sell them more books than a dozen "book trailers."

Tip or Treat for Authors and Indie Publishers: How to Create a "Kindle for the Web" Sample of Your Kindle Book on Any Blog or Website

2010-11-28T18:37:00.000-08:00

By Steve Windwalker

11.28.2010

Here's a great tool to help any indie author or publisher connect with readers by sharing free samples of their work. All you need is a website or a blog, a Kindle edition of your book, and the patience to follow some very basic instructions.

What's it all about? Earlier this Fall Amazon launched the beta version of "Kindle for the Web," a new feature that should be a tremendous benefit for indie authors and publishers in their efforts to introduce ebook readers to their books, but unfortunately the company has been rather coy when it comes to sharing information to help embed "Kindle for the Web" samples on author and publisher websites and blogs. In fact, the specifics of the way the company has rolled out "Kindle for the Web" have led many authors to a mistaken conclusion that their books are somehow not eligible for the program.

Au contraire.

The beta "Kindle for the Web" program works for just about any book in the U.S. Kindle Store, except for free public domain books, based on my entirely anecdotal and unscientific research.

So let's see if we can use this post to help open an important door for our readers and for anyone else with whom you would like to share this information. (We have to begin by sending you to another web page to copy the "script" for this tool, because if we simply pasted the script here you would see the tool rather than the script).

Here are the steps:

Go to this web page -- HTML SCRIPT TO EMBED "KINDLE FOR THE WEB" SAMPLE ON YOUR BLOG OR WEBSITE -- and copy the HTML script from that page into a blog post or onto your website. (Be sure set your blog post or other environment to "Edit HTML" rather than "Compose" mode before you paste the script.
Select the Kindle edition for which you would like to provide a free sample, and isolate and copy its 10-digit ASIN (this stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number, and you can think of it as Amazon's version of an ISBN) to replace the ASIN in your script.
Add your own material or copy before and/or after the script to make the most of the sample feature.

Good luck! And please feel free to share your comments or email them to hppress@gmail.com. Naturally, as with anything else, getting this feature to work on your blog or website is only half the battle. The other half, or more, is attracting readers to see the feature on your blog or website.

Here's an unadorned example of how the "Kindle for the Web" Sample script looks in a blog post:

Note: You may substitute the 10-digit ASIN of your choosing within the single quotes for “asin:” and you may also experiment with and change the values for width and height to make “Kindle for the Web” reader fit your blog. Of course, we hope you will keep the ‘ebest’ value for “assoctag:” which supports the Kindle Nation Daily and indieKindle blogs.

Tips from Bestselling Author Scott Nicholson for Authors and Publishers: Maximizing Your Movin’ & Shakin’

2010-11-24T03:31:00.000-08:00

(Ed. Note: Please welcome bestselling author Scott Nicholson to indieKindle for this guest post this morning. I would be happy to consider similar pieces from other authors, but Scott is a shining example of a successful author who possesses some real wisdom and is willing to share it. And just to underline how important his overall approach has been, let me note that Disintegration remains firmly in the top 50 in the Kindle Store sales rankings more than three weeks after its Kindle Nation sponsorship. --S.W.)

By Scott Nicholson, Guest Author
http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/

I’ve worked with Stephen Windwalker and Kindle Nation Daily several times this year, my first year as an indie author. And I can tell you from a career in media and as a New York author, marketing is a real crapshoot. The fact that I spend my marketing money here is a testament to my faith.

Windwalker has that thing called “target audience.” If you’re a Kindle author, he can introduce you to a Kindle audience better than anyone on the Internet except Amazon itself. KND subscribers are voluntary—they want the message. And you’re part of the message. (Ed. Note: When Scott refers to KND throughout this article, he is referring to the Kindle Nation Daily sponsorship program, which is described on this info page.)

But it’s not fair or realistic to expect KND to be the magic bullet. To maximize the impact of an instant audience, you should already have a platform firmly in place. So take the time to build your business from the ground up, starting by writing the best book you can, revising it, getting some proofreading or peer editing, and then seeking out professional cover artists (I use Neil at Ghostwriter Publications) and formatting (I use Ted at Dellaster Design).

While you’re doing that, grow your newsletter and meet Twitter and Facebook friends. Don’t worry about “numbers.” Better to have 10 people who share your enthusiasm than 1,000 “followers” who ignore you. Cultivate people who believe in your message and contribute to their lives as you can. Then, when your KND sponsorship is scheduled, mobilize your friend base. Try to get your book up a little early if you can, as a “soft opening.” That will give you time for sales, reviews, and a chance to work out any kinks. Then inspire your friends to amplify the sponsorship with freebies or other unique opportunities.

In my case, giving away Kindles as prizes on my blog tour was a natural fit. Even people without Kindles who participate will probably buy kindles later and maybe buy my books. If not, we had fun meeting and learning about the new digital era. It’s like giving away seeds to your gardening neighbors—it’s likely to come back in the form of tomatoes and zucchinis.

Price low, as Stephen recommends. I fared much better dropping to 99 cents for a limited time, because even after a number of books, there are plenty of people who don’t know me and won’t spend $6 or $9 on an author that’s new to them. I want people to try me because I believe they’ll want my other books, too.

I’ve done very well with my KND sponsorships. My crime thriller Disintegration hit #44 overall on the Kindle list the day after my sponsorship Oct. 31, partly because I already had the launch in place through my newsletter, with the stated goal of hitting the Top 100 (because then I’d give away an extra Kindle, so it was not only a team effort, it also carried personal incentive for participants). Disintegration was also a #1 Kindle Mover & Shaker, proof of its rapid rise up the charts.

The Red Church hit #144 after a Scary Short feature on KND a month ago and has stayed highly ranked in “Ghosts” ever since. Drummer Boy hit the 300s during a one-day blitz. On Saturday, Nov. 6, I ran a mini-campaign built around As I Die Lying and hit #317. The only time I didn’t get big success was when I released my YA paranormal romance October Girls under a pen name. There were only two reviews at Amazon at the time, few sales, and no one knew who “L.C. Glazebrook” was. That to me showed the stark difference a foundation makes.

But don’t get hung up on rankings. Books have a natural rise and fall in the Kindle era, so don’t panic when you slip. You’re going to slip. Every writer in history eventually slips. You can always come back by staying positive, staying consistent, and staying visible without exhausting your social capital. And your next KND sponsorship will build on the previous effort. It’s a long-term investment in your business, not just a quick buzz.

Most importantly, think of your readers as “friends.” I’m uncomfortable with the words “followers” and “fans.” It implies a note of smug superiority. But you are nothing without your readers. Treat them like gold, and treat them like equals. So treat yourself like gold. That’s the true secret to success.

--------------------------------------
Scott Nicholson is author of 12 novels, including the thrillers Speed Dating with the Dead, Forever Never Ends, The Skull Ring, Burial to Follow, and Cursed! With J.R. Rain. His revised novels for the U.K. Kindle are Creative Spirit, Troubled, and Solom. He’s also written four comic series, six screenplays, and more than 60 short stories. His story collections include Ashes, The First, Murdermouth: Zombie Bits, and Flowers.

Join his Kindle giveaway blog tour at http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/blogtour.htm.

Planet iPad Blog Editor Tom Dulaney weighs in on the "Pedophile eBook" flap

2010-11-12T06:02:00.000-08:00

By Tom Dulaney
Editor, Planet iPad

How utterly appropriate the an ebook published on October 28 has triggered a massive online debate about our freedom of speech. The internet is afire with arguments, citizen to citizen in open net forums, just in time for Veteran's Day. We honor the men and women who gave their lives, their limbs, their health and—at the very least—years of their lives to protect that freedom. We argue the shape and care of that freedom vigorously.

Two things are abominable and totally repugnant in America: pedophilia and restrictions on our freedom of speech.

The two clashed with a self-published ebook in the Kindle Store titled “The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure,” purporting to be a how to guide. The book appeared in Amazon's Kindle Store on October 28. It was removed yesterday during the firestorm of web protest. That fire ignited another: A rousing, heated, passionate debate of free speech, of what—if anything—should be censored, of who has the power to restrict even the most disgusting expression of ideas or opinions.

Pretty much lost in the outcry is an amazing truth about Amazon and the ebook phenomenon. By making it so easy to publish a book on Amazon, the company threw open the doors to allow every person to enjoy "freedom of the press" as well as freedom of speech. That is a major event in world history, to this reporter's thinking.

It took a couple of weeks for the offensive book to come to wider attention, but blog site TechCrunch was one of the first to spread the word widely.

From TechCrunch: "One thing Amazon loves to tout about their Kindle bookstore is their huge collection of wide-ranging titles. I’ll say. Here’s a great example of something I’m pretty sure you won’t find in rivals e-bookstores: The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure.” Yep, that’s the actual title."

TechCrunch also quoted Amazon as responding with this:

“Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable. Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.”

All over the net, the debate continues today. Listen to some of the voices, using their right to speak freely, reveal the complexity of keeping our free speech unrestrained while protecting our children—and our society:

“But just because it's [pedophilia] against the law isn't necessarily a great reason [for censorship]. For example, I'd be okay with them selling a book about how to grow marijuana.”

“....censorship shouldn't be allowed but at the same time I'm all for it when it's silencing something that can lead to cruel punishment, torture or even death of a human or animal.”

“If this book was to help pedophiles get away with it or do more of it or anything like that I'd have a harder time defending Amazon. I don't know what's in the book."

"Hopefully we can trust Amazon not to publish a book that will be likely to get children molested.”

“Amazon (or any other business, for that matter) is in exactly this position of authority. They have the ability to decide what we can read by offering it or not.”

“I am totally against book banning of any sort. Think about some of the books that people tried to ban... the Bible, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Harry Potter series, to name just a few.”

“If banning is allowed on one book, it WILL lead to banning a whole lot of other books."

"Only those in a position of authority can be censors.”

“We need to protect ALL of our rights, not just a few. And the slippery slope WILL kick in eventually.”

And then there is the new form of free speech, the "troll," or outrageous statement online whose only purpose is to provoke an angry response. The troller and friends then have a good laugh over the responses. Here's an apparent troll, which was posted in the only positive review of the book on the Amazon site, before Amazon removed it:

“This is an ABSOLUTE must read for me. I have been looking EVERYWHERE for this and was about to give up hope..”

One side of the discussion worries—and rightly so—that any precedent allowing the constriction of free expression will lead to more controls. This is the “slippery slope” argument.

The other side argues that those who transmit news and ideas have a responsibility to protect readers by vetting their content.

The Supreme Court, time after time, has permitted objectionable speech because to do so would have a “chilling effect” on everyone's right to speak freely. The court decided free speech is so valuable it is worth it to cope with horrible speech.

There are calls and pressures coming to bear that demand Amazon take on the burden of deciding what is acceptable speech.

Others, while repudiating the pedophile book, argue that it is too dangerous to give that power to any company, or to any government body.

Amazon, in the words quoted by TechCrunch, tried valiantly to keep in its own patch which is the business of selling books, saying: “Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.”

Ever since Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1919 that Charles Schenck did not have the right to oppose the military draft in print (Schenck lost), fierce arguments break out each time ideas appear in print that offend or threaten the majority. That is a very good thing.

America's “policy” is that speech should be free and unhampered by any restraints. That's stated in our Bill of Rights, the First Amendment. But the Founding Fathers left it to us to argue it ought on a case-by-case basis.

And that's what we're doing this week.

We, as a nation, cannot ignore the heart of darkness and evil by keeping it out of print. We won't know where and how to light a candle of sanity if we cannot look into the abyss and see it for the nightmare it is.

Beyond that, as citizens, we have an obligation to look—at least some of us must be able to look.

Had more people looked at a book titled Mein Kampf (My Struggle), written in a jail cell by a failed Corporal, back in the 1920s and early 1930s, then perhaps World War II and the deaths of millions would not have become part of our history.

So this is the wonderful noise we are hearing and reading today, especially on Veteran's Day. We say in our nation, “Let freedom ring.” The truth is, we must ring that bell individually, for ourselves, as we are not doing in passionate debate.

Nations around the globe will watch this debate and shake their heads in wonder or dismay. Many will not understand how such a book could even be published. Many will not comprehend how the author might escape punishment.

And many will will no doubt wonder why a nation armed to the teeth as guaranteed by the Second Amendment even has to deal with the free speech issues guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The could logically think that in a nation awash with guns, armed neighbors and friends would be ample “chilling effect” to curb the more outrageous expressions of free speech.

We shoot off our mouths around armed people who do not shoot off their guns in response.

Go figure.

And happy Veterans Day to fellow veterans from all conflicts and all peacetime years.

Author Fan Mail: Mercury Falls author Rob Kroese

2010-11-12T04:19:00.000-08:00

One of the treats that ensues naturally from my work with authors and publishers here at Kindle Nation and at several thousand other blogs under my close control is the steady stream of obsequious and inappropriately affectionate email messages that I receive each day. This is as it should be, and it is my untested theory that many of the email messages are actually perfumed. Unfortunately the reason the theory remains untested is that I cannot figure out how to enable my Mac's magical and revolutionary "scratch and sniff" feature. (Ordinarily I have my 12-year-old son handle such operations matters, but there is simply no good reason why he should be made aware of the likelihood that I daily receive perfumed missives from otherwise reputable male and female authors.)

In any case, which is to say, I digress. It probably goes without saying that I am far too busy to actually read these groveling, sniveling messages. I do respond, usually by saying "Great stuff!" or "Great to hear it!" and I always sign off by saying "Cheers," which I am told means one thing to upper crust types like myself and quite another to regular drinkers like myself. But even though I do not actually have time or patience to read them -- after all, I read 9 freakin' sponsorship submission novels an hour here! -- I suspect it would be a fine thing to share them here on my indieKindle blog for authors and publishers, if only to help train in the aforementioned pleasant and much-appreciated quality of obsequiousness.

So, I've selected at random the following message from a recent Kindle Nation sponsor, er, let me check for the name, here it is, Mr. Kroese, how would one pronounce that exactly? As I have taken pains to say, I didn't read it, although I failed to mention the other reason for not reading such emails, which is that I fear that reading such messages from the "author" hoi polloi might taint my humility, which I have been told, or perhaps I imagined being told, is among my several most charming qualities.

So here's the set-up:

Dear Mr. Windwalker (if that is your real name):

Perhaps you misunderstood the terms of the deal that I offered you. In exchange for agreeing to ghost-write your memoir, entitled “Walking with the Wind: One Man’s Journey to Overcome His Crippling Fear of Open Spaces,” you were supposed to use your Kindle Kung-Fu to boost my novel, Mercury Falls, “as near as possible to the top 100 books in the Kindle Store WITHOUT ACTUALLY BREAKING INTO THE TOP 100.” As you recall, I promised to make a $500 donation to the Gwendolyn Strong Foundation (http://www.gwendolynstrongfoundation.org/) if Mercury Falls rose higher than 101, but you assured me THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN. I feel, sir, that I have been duped. While I am sure that the GSF will use my $500 for worthwhile things like saving the lives of thousands of very small children, I cannot help be feel that this money could be better spent on my OWN charitable enterprise, confusingly also named “GSF.” My organization, “Greedo Shot First,” raises awareness about the fact that Han Solo was acting in SELF DEFENSE when he shot the bounty hunter Greedo in the Mos Eisley Cantina. But now, thanks to your abject trickery and my habit of looting the GSF treasury whenever I feel the need for a Taco Bell run, Greedo Shot First will remain woefully underfunded. I hope saving the lives of a few thousand innocent children is worth that cost, Mr. Skywalker.

Rob Kroese

P.S. I also object to your characterization of me as a “madman.”

P.P.S. I assume we’re still on for ping-pong tomorrow? Call me.

Thank you, Mr. Croesus! Cheers!

Okay. Let's Make This INTERESTING.... Let's Make Mercury Falls Author Rob Kroese Pay!

2010-11-09T13:37:00.000-08:00

By Steve Windwalker - 11.9.2010

If you've already seen last night's Free Kindle Nation Short featuring Robert Kroese's Mercury Falls, you may have noticed that I resorted to sophomoric name calling of the worst kind.

I said Rob is a madman. I believe I said something like "the best kind of madman," but still. I had a couple of beers with dinner, and that's the way I am.

Should I apologize? No. I mean, Hell no. I'm not Lebron James here.

Besides, things are going awfully well for Rob just now. He self-published Mercury Falls, and along came one of the coolest publishing companies in the Western world, AmazonEncore, to track him down and offer him a contract. He's at a point in his life where he'll probably take being called a madman as a compliment. I hope so. He looks tougher than most authors, possibly even tougher than me.

But maybe he's not a madman after all.

Turns out he's a pretty good guy. I mean, as far as I know. And things are going his way. And he wants to give a little something back.

So it's our job to make him pay up.

Rob is going to make a donation to the Gwendolyn Strong Foundation based on the highest sales rank Mercury Falls hits in the Kindle Store during the 24 hours after this Free Kindle Nation Shorts email goes out. Here's what he wrote to me:

If Mercury Falls hits the top 300, I will donate $100.
If it hits the top 200, I will donate $250.
If it hits the top 100, I will donate $500.

When the Free Kindle Nation Short went out a little before 11 pm Monday, Mercury Falls was at #485. Earlier this afternoon it jumped up to #236 and as I type these words at 4 pm Eastern time on Tuesday it's at 186.

So we're in the money already, but it's up to you.

Want to go easy on him? Buy the book tomorrow.

Want to really make him pay? Click here to buy it now.

We can do this, people. We can make him pay. $500 for a bestselling author like Rob? He might not be able to take the limo to get his latte in the morning.

Sure, it's true that there is a really great charity involved. Children, too. Whatever.

But what we've got here, people, is a chance to make the madman pay.

Then we'll see whether he wants to go around making people laugh out loud in the future.

The Gwendolyn Strong Foundation (GSF) seeks to raise awareness about and fund research for Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), the leading genetic killer of young children, and support those impacted by SMA and other life-altering diseases.

With A Little Help from Our Friends and Colleagues: A Cross-Post on Colleagues and Connections from Joe Konrath's A Newbie's Guide to Publishing

2010-11-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

Joe Konrath, r., with Barry Eisler, Kathy Kulig

(Ed. Note: Thanks to Joe Konrath for permission to cross-post his excellent post from A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, and it's great to see that about three dozen of the authors Joe lists here are once or future Kindle Nation Daily sponsors. If you aren't on Joe's list, let me just suggest that subscribing to and reading the Kindle edition of his blog would be about the best thing a writer could ever do with 99 cents a month. And, if you'll join me in subscribing to the fundamental Karmic notion that Joe presents in this post, please consider the further possibility of -- say, once or twice a week -- dropping a buck or two to check out one of our Kindle Nation sponsors, who, after all, are indie authors just like you and me.... --S.W.)

With A Little Help

by J.A. Konrath

This isn't a competition.

It never was, really. Very few readers only read one author. The vast majority like several authors, and the more a person likes to read, the more authors they wind up discovering, and following.

In some cases, price may be a bit prohibitive. If your book budget is $40 a month, you might have to choose between two new hardcovers, or five paperbacks. But, by and large, readers don't pick one book over another book. If they want to read them both, they eventually will.

Which brings us to authors helping authors.

If we're not in competition with one another, then it makes perfect sense to help each other out. After all, we're all in the same boat.

I do this a lot. Anyone who has ever done a booksigning with me knows that I spend a lot of time pimping my peers' books--often moreso than I pimp my own.

That said, here are some writers I'd like to share with you.

Simon Wood is a guy I've known for years. I really liked his book Working Stiffs, and you can get it now on Kindle for $2.39. But even better, if you buy this ebook, or any of Simon's ebooks, until the end of the week, he's donating all of the proceeds to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. Simon obviously understands this "helping others" thing.

Tom Schreck is a friend, and we wrote a story together called Planter's Punch featuring Jack Daniels and his series character, boxer/social worker Duffy Dombrowski. The Kindle version has been out for a while, but Tom has just released the story, along with his other terrific Duffy stories, in print. Duffy to the Rescue is a great collection for those who still like dead tree books, and all proceeds go toward Basset Hound rescue.

Parnell Hall is a funny guy, and a good writer, and a singer of dubious talent. But his songs are pretty damn funny. Check out his video for King of Kindle, which features cameos by a whole slew of famous mystery authors. (You might also check out the King of Kindle Bouchercon Edition, which features a fat, bearded blogger you might recognize.) His books are even better than his videos. Try Suspense, which is only $2.99 on Kindle. Hmm, I wonder why he chose that price...

Next week I'm doing a blog interview with the multi-talented James Swain, who is burning up the Kindle charts with his thrillers. Until then, check out Jackpot, the cover art done by my guy Carl Graves, and priced on Kindle at $2.99.

Marie Simas is a friend of this blog, and her ebook Do Tampons Take Your Virginity is a memoir about what happens when you grow up in an insane Catholic family. My wife just finished reading it, and loved it. It's a bargain at $2.99. I'll be interviewing the author sometime this month.

Dating My Vibrator by Suzanne Tyrpak was terrific, and even though it isn't the type of thing I normally read (online dating disasters?) I really enjoyed it. And for 99 cents, so will you.

Blake Crouch and I go way back. We're currently working together on two projects. One is the eighth and final Jack Daniels thriller, Stirred (the sequel to Shaken.) We're also working on a follow up to Serial Uncut called Killers Uncut, which ties up loose ends while showcasing a few bad guys from Jack Daniels's past. Both Stirred and Killers Uncut (along with Shaken and Serial Uncut) feature Blake's serial killer Luther Kite, who appeared in his terrific thrillers Desert Places and Locked Doors--both now $2.99 on Kindle.

When Draculas was released two weeks ago, Blake and I went on Kindle Boards and offered to buy people's ebooks if they bought ours, as a quid pro quo gesture. Quite a few authors took us up on this. Here's a list of them all. If you're looking for new writers, these folks are the future. And they're all $3.99 or less.

Stars Rain Down by Chris J. Randolph - $2.99 - After a devastating alien invasion, the last scattered survivors are forced to employ savage and unthinkable tactics in the battle for their future. Even if they win, can humanity ever be the same?

Down the Drain by Daniel Pyle - 99 cents - Bruce has lost everyone he ever cared about—even his cat. Now, when he thinks he’s finally alone in the house, something will come clawing its way out of the plumbing to prove him wrong.

Take the Monkeys and Run by Karen Cantwell - 99 cents - When film loving suburban housewife Barbara Marr talks her two friends into some seemingly innocent Charlie’s Angels-like sleuthing, they stumble upon way more than they bargained for and uncover a piece of neighborhood history that certain people would kill to keep on the cutting room floor.

No Good Deed by Mary McDonald - 99 cents - Mark Taylor, a photographer in Chicago, discovers first hand that no good deed goes unpunished when the old camera he found during a freelance job in an Afghanistan bazaar gives him more than great photos. It triggers dreams of disasters. Tragedies that happen exactly as he envisions them.

Wishful Thinking by K. Crumley - $1.59 - One stormy night Maevis Etherwood came home and found her husband in bed with another woman... What exactly transpired afterward remained a mystery, even to Maevis herself.

Gone by Karen Fenech - 99 cents - FBI Special Agent Clare Marshall was separated from her sister Beth in childhood when their mother tried to kill them. Now Clare learns that Beth lives in the small town of Farley, South Carolina, but when she goes there to reunite with Beth, Clare discovers her sister is missing and that someone in the town is responsible for her disappearance.

Camille by Tess Oliver - 99 cents - At a time when society conforms to the strictest rules and most proper etiquette, sixteen-year-old Camille Kennecott and her guardian, Dr. Bennett, live a most unconventional life. They hunt werewolves.

Love Lust and Petty Crime by Harclubs Bartag- $2.84 - Emmet Storch was an unemployed sponger who thought he had no calling in life. All that changed when he landed a job in the call centre at the monolithic Star Insurance where, from the very first day, he was magnificent.

Empath by Frank Zubex - 99 cents - After being shot in the cemetery, Detective Nick Crowell encounters ghosts and people with paranormal problems. In this collection of nine stories, five of which were originally published in DemonMinds from 2007 to 2008, you'll read about people who's lives have changed so drastically that they seek out Detective Crowell for help.

Blood Spring by Erik Williams - 89 cents - A husband and wife lost in the woods... A feral family that worships an ancient god... Who will make it out alive?

Failing Test by J.M. Pierce - 99 cents - You know him, but you can't remember his name. He is the one that is always there, in the background, all but invisible to those roaming the hallways. What if he had a secret? What if it was a secret that even he didn't know?

Pain by Harry Shannon - $2.99 - A Top Secret virus infects the water supply of a mountain town. Two mercenary soldiers, a retiring doctor and a handful of terrified patients struggle to defend a remote ER against a mob of the living dead. Through one long, harrowing night the living will learn there are many different kinds of... PAIN.

The Usurper by Cliff Ball - $2.39 - Ever wonder what would happen if our worst fears were realized and we elected someone who was willing to destroy the USA, even if he was destroyed himself? The Usurper is that novel. It is a fictional account of what would happen if the Soviet Union and KGB were given the chance to take down the United States from within.

Reining In by Dawn Judd - 99 cents - Khalida is a five thousand year old vampire. As technology and national security become more prominent, it becomes harder and harder for her to hide her secret from the world. In order to remain undetected by humans, she creates a network of people whose only job is to hide her identity.

Gnelfs by Sidney Williams - $2.99 - Cries in the night from her daughter, Heaven, are just the beginning for Gabrielle Harris. What seem to be nightmares about Heaven's favorite cartoon characters soon lead Gab to a stranger paranormal conspiracy focused on revenge.

Space Junque by L.K. Rigel - 99 cents - Char Meadowlark accepts an invitation to visit the Imperial Space Station from Mike Augustine, her dead sister's fiancé. While she's in orbit eco-terrorists start a planet-wide war.

Top Ten by Ryne Douglas Pearson - 99 cents - A killer who believes himself an artist of unmatched talent is incensed when he is placed last on the FBI's most wanted list, and begins killing off those fugitives above him, each in a twisted manner that serves his creative vision.

The Knight of Death by Brendan Carroll - $2.99 - An apparent kidnapping and rape become the first steps in a mystical journey for the Chevalier du Morte when a routine mission precipitates a spiritual fall from grace. As the tables turn on the abductors, the immortal Knight sinks in a corrupt quagmire of sin while fighting to recover his lost purpose and identity.

Fruitbasket From Hell by Jason Krumbine - $2.39 - My name’s Alex Cheradon. I’m a private investigator. I do NOT slay vampires, battle demons, fight zombies or vanquish evil spirits. In fact, you know what? Let’s just strike a line through the whole supernatural genre and call it a big no-no for me, okay?

Daughters by Consuelo Saah Baehr - $2.99 - In this sweeping, uncommonly stirring narrative spanning 1883 to 1957, Baehr chronicles the lives of three Palestinian Christian women: Miriam Mishwe, her daughter Nadia and Nadia's adopted child, Nijmeheach fated to struggle with the competing claims of loyalty to family and love for a man.

The Fall: An Undead Apocalypse by Robert J. Duperre - $2.99 - An ancient evil, trapped in the ruins of a lost Mayan temple for centuries, has been unleashed. It takes the form of a deadly virus, one that causes violent insanity in the living and the recently departed to rise and walk.

Swallow by Tonya Plank - 89 cents - Sophie Hegel is a shy New York lawyer from small-town Florence Arizona, known not for the Renaissance but for housing a large prison. She's just graduated from Yale Law School and landed her first job when, one evening she feels a fist-like ball form at the base of her throat.

A Dance of Cloaks by David Dalglish - $2.99 - Thren Felhorn is the greatest assassin of his time. Marshalling the thieves' guilds under his control, he declares war against the Trifect, an allegiance of wealthy and powerful nobles. Aaron Felhorn has been groomed since birth to be Thren’s heir. Sent to kill the daughter of a priest, Aaron instead risks his own life to protect her from the wrath of his guild. In doing so, he glimpses a world beyond poison, daggers, and the iron control of his father.

Not What She Seems by Victorine E. Lieske - 99 cents - Steven Ashton, a billionaire from New York, and Emily Grant, on the run from the law... and when they meet he can’t help falling for her. What he doesn’t know is that interfering in her life will put his own life in danger.

Need to Know by Christine Merrill - $2.39 - The new man in Liz Monahan’s life is a rogue secret agent who’s trying to kill her. But at least he’s single.

The Heretic by Joseph Nassise - $2.99 - In this internationally bestselling series from Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Award nominee Joseph Nassise, the ancient Templar Order has been resurrected as a secret combat arm of the Vatican, charged with defending mankind from the supernatural enemies that threaten them at every turn.

The Ways of Khrem by D. Nathan Hilliard - $3.99 - Cargill the Bookseller lives a quiet life, in a modest house, overlooking the vast city of Khrem...a magical metropolis of cavernous streets, lofty spires, and dark secrets. His life is turned upside down when Captain Wilhelm Drayton of the City Watch arrives at Cargill's doorstep and confronts him with his criminal past.

Courtesan by D.A. Boulter - $2.99 - She needed a ship to escape pursuers; he a companion on a trip to the stars. The deal seemed straight-forward, but neither told the other everything.

eBully by Dave Conifer - 99 cents - Vice Principal Steve Lukather is desperate. Just like last year, an internet bully is terrorizing one of his students at Lakeland Middle School.

Powerless by Jason Letts - 99 cents - Mira Ipswich couldn't have ever known the startling difference that separates her from the rest of humanity. But when she discovers a strange anomaly in the midst of her seclusion, her parents are forced to reveal she exists in a world where everyone is imbued with a wondrous natural gift. Everyone except herself that is.

Asylum by Erik Lynd - $2.99 - Forced into a psychiatric hospital by uncaring parents, a teenage boy must master the strange power within himself to overcome the horror gathering in the shadows.

Broken Wings by Sandra Edwards - 99 cents - Rio Laraquette thought the legend was nothing more than an enchanted tale about star-crossed lovers who left behind a fortune. That is, until she figures out that she—in a past life—was the culprit who stole a shipment of gold and silver and buried it somewhere in the hills of northern Nevada.

Cameo the Assassin by Dawn McCullough-White- 99 cents - Cameo, an alias for Gwen, "the thrall of a vampire," has two masters to serve. One is Wick, the aging, spell-casting head of the Association of Assassins, who assigns missions to the battle-scarred Cameo. The other is Haffef, Cameo's vampire "Master," who years ago rescued her from certain death after her vicious rape and beating and a deadly attack upon her younger sister.

One Insular Tahiti by Thea Atkinson - $2.99 - Luke MacIsaac is dead, but not restfully so. In his watery afterlife he takes notice of an infant girl struggling to survive her birth. He feels a peculiar attachment to this girl and revisits her birth over and over again knowing she can survive if she is given a purpose. He wills her to be his mother in his next incarnation.

The Summoning Fire by David Michael - $3.99 - All Reese Howard has left is pain. Pain and a pump-action shotgun.

White Seed by Paul Clayton - $2.39 - White Seed hews closely to the record of Sir Walter Raleigh's second doomed attempt to plant the British flag in Virginia. The depiction of the colony's physical and moral disintegration between 1587 and 159o evokes a harrowing sense of human fallibility. Readers will find this saga, which soon achieves page-turner velocity, to be both a dandy diversion and an entertaining education.

Bound by Blood by Kimberly Hoyt & Danielle Bourdon - $2.99 - He was willing to give up eternity to have her, but would he die to keep her?

October Breezes by Martia Rachel Hooley - $2.99 - Skye Williams knows everything there is to know about mistrust: Dad skipped out when she was five, leaving Mom with an angry daughter and an upside-down mortgage.

The Kinshield Legacy by K.C. May - $2.99 - A mysterious stone tablet with five magical gems has sat abandoned in a cave for two hundred years. The kingdom is in ruins, with only warrant knights to keep the peace. But then, the gems in the tablet, one by one, disappear.

Cries in the Dark by P.A. Woodburn - $2.99 - Two prostitutes vanish. Chimps are mysteriously missing from a primate sign lab. Is there a possible link to a biomedical research facility? While premed student Alex Buchanan confronts her new-found ability to communicate telepathically with animals, the body toll mounts.

We Interrupt This Date by L.C. Evans - $2.39 - Since her divorce a year ago, Susan Caraway has gone through the motions of life, feeling at best mildly depressed. Now she is finally coming out of her shell. Just when she decides on a makeover and a new career, her family members call on her for crisis assistance.

Forbidden The Stars by Valmore Daniels - $2.99 - At the end of the 21st century, a catastrophic accident in the asteroid belt has left two surveyors dead. There is no trace of their young son, Alex Manez, or of the asteroid itself.

Monster Mashup by M.J.A. Ware - $2.99 - Monsters, magic, goblins, zombies, and more. Be prepared to sleep with the lights on. This collection of nine short stories will have you looking over your shoulder, avoiding mirrors. and jumping at the slightest sound.

The White Hairs by Noah K. Mullette-Gillman - $2.99 -The White Hairs is a work of spiritual mythology. Somewhere on a white and snowy mountain, is a young creature learning how to leave his body and travel the world inside of the wind.

Jenny Pox by J.L. Bryan - $2.39 - Jenny Morton is a quiet small-town girl from South Carolina whose touch spreads a deadly supernatural plague--she can't touch anyone for long without killing them.

Lonely is the Soldier by Jeffry S. Hepple - $2.84 - Follow the career of 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta officer R.A. Lincoln from Delta selection through the start of the War on Terror.

Night Touch by John C. Hamilton - $2.99 - Christopher Price roams the dark streets of Manhattan, terrified of his past, searching for a future. Dr. Willard Pull: dentist and concerned citizen. Blood lust sends them on a collision course. One of them is a serial killer. The other is a vampire.

Out of Time by Monique Martin - $2.99 - When a mysterious accident sends Professor Simon Cross and his assistant, Elizabeth West, back in time to 1920s New York, they find it's more than a the world of Prohibition and speakeasies. It's a world where the underground is run by the underworld, and where vampires and mobsters vie for power in the seedy underbelly of Jazz Age Manhattan.

A Little Girl In My Room by Claire Farrell - 99 cents - A Little Girl in my Room & Other Stories is a collection of dark flash fiction by upcoming author, Claire Farrell. This book is Rated R: Adults Only. Some may find the themes addressed disturbing.

The Book of Biff by Chris Hallbeck - 99 cents - The Book of Biff is a single panel comic about spaghetti, time travel and toast. The strip centers around a child-like mad scientist named Biff who may be part cockroach or possibly an alien.

Northwoods Deep by Joel Arnold - $2.99 - Deep in the north woods, two sisters become lost; one stalked by a murderous ex-husband, the other unable to rid herself of the leeches that appear mysteriously on her skin. All are drawn to an old, dilapidated cabin. Inside lives an old man with awful urges, accompanied by a Rottweiler possessed by something…unnatural. But it’s what resides beneath the cabin that they should really be worried about.

The Adventures of Whatley Tupper: A Choose Your Own Adventure by Rudolf Kerkhoven & Daniel Pitts - $2.99 - Whatley Tupper is an A-grade janitor at a B-grade university about to become entwined in C-grade fiction! Yes, there is something in the air tonight... Adventure! Romance! Carbon Monoxide!

In the Mood by Ellen Fisher - 99 cents - Jude Patterson is a sexy but shy romance novelist who discovers the flowery language he's always used in historical love scenes doesn't translate well to contemporary romances. Alyssa Stone is a beautiful fan who offers to help him learn to write better love scenes. Jude is fascinated by Alyssa, whose confident and sensual demeanor conceals a very vulnerable interior. Before long, he's the one showing her how to write love scenes... and maybe even how to write happy endings.

So there you are. Quid pro quo in action.

And to the authors I've listed here, I encourage you to link to this blog on your blogs (or on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever.) We're all in the same boat, so we all should be rowing.

Shake Rattle and Roll! Kindle Nation Citizens Quietly Flex Muscle

2010-11-08T02:38:00.000-08:00

(This article appeared first as part of a Kindle Nation Daily "Around the Kindlesphere" post on November 7, 2010.)

By Steve Windwalker

We're serious readers here, not the types to oil up on the beach and flex our muscles. But just in case you were wondering how much influence you and other Kindle Nation citizens have, and how much independent authors and publishers depend upon us to clear the sand away and support distinguished work by emerging authors, we have a few tidbits to report as of 4 pm EST Sunday 11.7.2010:

Today's Kindle Nation Daily sponsor, J.M. Zambrano's The Trophy Hunter, has climbed from #35,798 to #308 in the Kindle Store in the past 24 hours. This debut novel, still available for 89 cents with this link, is currently #2 on the Kindle Store Movers and Shakers list, #4 in Horror, and #18 in Women Sleuths.
Right behind Zambrano at #5 on the Movers and Shakers list (it was #2 earlier today) is the book that was featured this weekend in our Free Kindle Nation Shorts excerpting program, Scott Nicholson's hilariously frightening As I Die Lying, currently up from #3,526 to #318 in the past 24 hours.
This is not new territory, of course, for Nicholson. Last weekend his KND sponsorship helped launch his new novel Disintegration, and since then the book has soared from #2,093 to #41 in the Kindle Store. Smart authors like Nicholson do plenty of other things to help get the word out about their books, of course, but it's nice to know that those of us who just flat out love to read can play a role in making a book into a success. (By the way, watch this space for a forthcoming guest post by Scott Nicholson on steps that authors can take alongside their Kindle Nation sponsorships).
Other books that have had a nice ride lately with a little help from the citizens of Kindle Nation include Daniel Silver's Cop: A Novel, Nirmala's Living from the Heart, J.A. Konrath's Shaken, L.J. Sellers' The Sex Club, and many, many more.

Updates and Tidbits: ELECTION, DISINTEGRATION, CUSTOMER REVIEWS, SCHEDULING, PLANET IPAD

2010-11-02T03:46:00.000-07:00

Just a few updates and tidbits to share with authors and publishers who check in on indieKindle today:

Please vote! Today! Early and Often!
If you noticed my post from Monday morning on Scott Nicholson's DISINTEGRATION cracking the top 100, you'll be happy to see that the trend continues, and DISINTEGRATION is now in the overall TOP 50 IN THE KINDLE STORE. And Scott has offered to do a guest post for us - coming to this space soon -- on the other things that authors and indie publishers can do to make the most of the magic of a Kindle Nation Daily sponsorship.
Along those lines, two things that I strongly suggest that any author or publish must focus on well in advance of a Kindle Nation sponsorship are CUSTOMER REVIEWS and PRICE. Er, excuse me, my CAP LOCK key was stuck. Kindle Nation readers are savvy and price-conscious and -- as Amazon's best customers -- they pay attention to those stars and sometimes even to the reviews behind them. Nuff sed?
Thanks to folks who have signed up in the past few days for sponsorships at Kindle Nation and Planet iPad. There was an overwhelming response to the first indieKindle newsletter, but I do expect that, by the end of the day Wednesday Nov. 3, everyone who signed up in late October will have received a formal scheduling email.
A word about Planet iPad sponsorships: it is a relatively new blog, and we're still seeing what kind of response we'll get for sponsored books. We've run two, and one did better than I expected while the other didn't do as well as I expected. Planet iPad traffic is running better than 15 percent of Kindle Nation traffic and ramping up, but it's still very new. One way to hedge on the risk of a Planet iPad sponsorship is to try to a Kindle Nation eBook of the Day sponsorship, which includes a Planet iPad sponsorship. I'm not trying to upsell you; I'm just suggesting a way to avoid relying solely on the newer site's traffic.

Rudy Kerkhoven Analyzes His Experiences as a New Kindle Author

2010-11-01T03:15:00.000-07:00

(Ed. Note: Thanks for Rudy Kerkhoven for granting permission to cross-post this interesting look at his successes and learning experiences during the first 10 weeks of his launch of a new independently published book. --S.W.)

Also, be sure to check out:

Ten Weeks in Review: What Worked, What Didn’t

Posted on October 31, 2010 by rudykerkhoven

In August, when I first learned about publishing with Amazon’s DTP, I knew absolutely nothing of what to expect. While I found a few blogs where authors included a few detailed experiences of how their first few weeks and months went, too many were from established authors or those few who got very, very lucky. So, that’s why I focused by blog on these details I couldn’t find elsewhere.
So, to begin, here are my sales graphs in the 10 weeks since “The Adventures of Whatley Tupper” has been released:

I now want to continue on from a post of mine in September, telling what worked and what didn’t, in my own case, in the last 6 weeks.

What Worked

Kindle Nation Daily. I went into detail about it in a previous post here, and the sales spike from this one-day sponsorship stand out in the above sales graph without any need for labeling. Although I haven’t noticed an ‘after-glow’ from it, that doesn’t mean there isn’t or won’t be one, and either way, who cares. Any advertising that can pay for itself in a single day has to be worth it. Every book I will release, I will utilize this extraordinary advertising tool, although I do think the gimmicky genre of my book helped (and I don’t expect the same results when “The Year We Finally Solved Everything” has its KND sponsorship on December 7th). And it does seem like the $79.99 cost for the one-day sponsorship has stabilized. I think it’s a fair price.

Daily Cheap Reads

This has been great, especially for a free service. If you look at the sales graphs, you can see a second spike just in the last few days which I can attribute to DailyCheapReads. Unlike many other blogs/websites that have a daily feature on an indie book, DailyCheapReads seems to have a reader base that extends beyond other indie-authors. So, when your book ends up on DailyCheapReads, you’re not just preaching to the choir. All told, in the two days from my book’s posting on DailyCheapReads, I had more than 20 sales. That’s more than I had in the previous 2 weeks. But, there’s more to this…

Amazon Customer Discussions

I’ve mentioned this before and I know it’s a contentious issue because people aren’t really supposed to promote their books on these forums. However, I was lucky enough this time to get someone, who picked up my book after reading about it at the DailyCheapReads site, to start her own thread promoting my book. As soon as this discussion started, sales started picking up again. I really think this is one of the best ways to get noticed by customers who don’t frequent KindleBoards and those other websites and it wouldn’t have happened without the DailyCheapReads posting.

What Didn’t Work (or I can’t tell)

Author Interviews. I’m wary about writing this. I’m saying this just in terms of what I’ve noticed in terms of sales. By no means do I think that an author interview has no merit, but I don’t think it has a noticeable effect on sales. Honestly, the people who read interviews with authors are people who have already heard of the authors. I don’t think it does much in terms of opening you up to new readers. THAT SAID, the fact that these interviews remain online and can be stumbled up by people at any time afterward cannot be discounted. But it also can’t be measured. Same thing with…

Indie-Book Websites. Again, I’m wary of writing this. And, again, the fact that these postings remain online indefinitely is great. But, for most of these sites, it seems the readers are the same people who frequent KindleBoards and other sites where they are likely familiar with your book already. In the end, I didn’t notice any change in sales after being posted on most of these. The effects could very well be more long term, or unconscious, but they are not obvious. That said, I do plan on utilizing these for my next books (that said, if I haven’t pissed anyone off with this posting!)

What’s Next

In mid-November, “The Adventures of Whatley Tupper” will be the KindleBoards Book of the Day. Also, I’m still waiting for a few more reviews (some I’m sure are on their way in the next month, some I’m still hoping). I’ve yet to receive any reviews from a long-established book reviewing site, and I imagine a positive review on one of these would be extremely beneficial. Here’s hoping.

Finally, I’m going to stop detailing all of my sales quite soon. At the 3-month mark, I think that will be it. I do find it a little tacky when established writers continue to talk about their sales (maybe it’s because I’m Canadian, and it sounds too much like boasting, and I don’t like boasting), and while I’m hardly established, I think the point of my blog so far–detailing one un-established author’s sales after releasing his first ebook–will have run its course.

Hallowe'en Lives On as DISINTEGRATION Cracks Kindle Top 100

2010-11-01T03:03:00.000-07:00

Good morning! The candy may be gone, but Hallowe'en lives on this morning as yesterday's Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert sponsor, Scott Nicholson's DISINTEGRATION, has just cracked the top 100 in the Kindle Store and is currently #1 on the Kindle Movers and Shakers list!

You can start reading a free sample from DISINTEGRATION right this minute, below, without even leaving your browser. But take a few seconds, first, to get up and make sure the doors and windows are locked.

PayPal is down and out in Paris, London, and everywhere else

2010-10-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

Brad McCarty seems to have the scoop at The Next Web. Unfortunately this outage may temporarily impede sponsorship transactions.

New sponsorship opportunities allow us to open up the calendar a bit with some lower price points

2010-10-28T06:57:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed, our Kindle Nation Daily sponsorships have been so effective and popular that we are currently scheduled well into January for daily options and well into May for weekly options. I'm very attentive to the need to keep a delicate balance between the desire to provide helpful connections between readers and writers and the need to provide readers with the full range of useful content that drives them to take time to read and/or subscribe to Kindle Nation in the first place.

That being said, we've created some new options that open up new sponsorship opportunities for authors and publishers, and the calendar is currently wide open! They are listed on the sponsorship info page here and included on the PayPal pulldown menu, but here's a quick summary:

* 1. Our relatively new sister site, Planet iPad, is growing by leaps and bounds. Its readership and impact, for now, is just a fraction of Kindle Nation's, but it has doubled in the past ten days and under the editorship of Tom Dulaney is already pushing 20 percent of the levels that it has taken Kindle Nation nearly two years to reach. We've just set up a one-day Planet iPad Free Book Alert Sponsorship that is priced very low and the calendar is wide open.

* 2. At Kindle Nation, we've added Option 6 - eBook of the Day Sponsorship - 1 Day, a package that includes several elements:

a one-day Planet iPad Free Book Alert Sponsorship;
a small linked mention of title and author near the top of the Kindle Nation Daily website for at least 18 hours;
a single "Kindle for the Web" sample post on the Kindle Nation Daily website at some time between noon and 8 pm Eastern, with brief linked mention of title and author;
one Facebook status post and one Twitter tweet linking back to the "Kindle for the Web" sample post; and
one left sidebar "eBook of the Day" ad on the Kindle Nation Daily website for at least 18 hours, with linked title, author, and cover art.

Note: To reap the full benefits of Option 6, you'll want to make sure that your ebook is compatible with the "Kindle for the Web" sample feature, which you can see in this recent Kindle Nation post on Paul Levine's novel Reversal. If you want to check with me on compatibility, send me a simple query with your ten-digit ASIN in the subject line of your email.

*3. Since the weekly email blasts on which Gold Sponsorships are partially based are sold out until mid-May, we've added a new "Option 5 - Silver Sponsorship" package which allows you to save $10 on a package consisting of Options 1 and 2. Options 1 and 2 are both daily events and there is availability beginning in mid-January for each.

Please keep in mind that everything I've said about availability here should be taken as a snapshot based on the status of things before I send out this newsletter.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats in Joe Konrath's Marina

2010-10-28T06:53:00.000-07:00

It takes more than just a pretty face to launch a thousand ships these days, and the same goes for a dozen bestsellers. As I write these words on the morning of October 28, Joe Konrath has 5 of the top 17 titles on the Kindle Store Movers + Shakers List, which by definition also means that he has at least 5 titles in the Top 400 overall in the Kindle Store.

How does he do it? He's not just the hardest working man in the book business, he's also, by my lights, the smartest.

Every author and every publisher would do well to go to school on the very specific steps that Joe takes to cross-pollinate his various titles and brands with his other work and even with novels by other authors. And Joe makes it easy to learn with excellent posts like this one on his blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing. If you have a Kindle, subscribing to the Kindle edition to have his frequent posts pushed directly to your Kindle will probably be the wisest use you could ever make of 99 cents a month.

By the way, the same principles of cross-pollination also work well in association with Kindle Nation Daily sponsorships. Authors like Paul Levine and L.J. Sellers have seen a powerful "halo effect" benefit where a sponsorship for one title also paid off dramatically for other books or series. In cases like these, the author has a distinctive brand, a number of highly regarded books, and a willingness to price creatively for maximum marketing impact.

Pricing Your eBook For Best Results

2010-10-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

It's not my job to tell you how to price your book for the Kindle Store, but I don't mind working overtime to share a little experience. Long story short: $2.99 is the sweet spot, 99 cents can be a very powerful lure in a "loss leader" kind of way, and anything over $4 or $5 is likely to have a chilling effect on your sales and royalties if you are an indie author. Am I say your book is worth any less than Fall of Giants? Hell, no. I'm just reminding you that your royalty payments aren't just based on A, they are based on AxB, where A is the royalty per book and B is the number of books sold.

My primary concern here, of course, is that I want to see our authors succeed with their sponsorships. And if you've been seeing dozens of other authors' books climb from #100,000 to the top 1,000 in the sales rankings, and your $7.99 novel only makes it into the top 15,000, I'm just saying: it wasn't because I said nicer things about someone else's book.

(And yes, if you are wondering, you can click on the cover image to download a copy of my book on ebook pricing to your Kindle or just about any other device for $2.99.)

Every now and then we have an unexpected opening.... Let me know if you are interested!

2010-10-28T06:43:00.001-07:00

Occasionally there are events that unanticipated sponsorship openings in our calendar, often with pretty short notice. When that happens, I send out a brief email describing the sponsorship availability and the price, with a request that interested parties get right back to me right away. I try to handle such events as efficiently as possible on a first-come, first-served basis. If you would like to receive an email from me when these openings occur, please send an email to hppress@gmail.com with the following in the subject line:

unexpected sponsorship opening

Thanks.

Interesting piece here from iReaderReview:

2009-08-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

For Authors: Hard Way to get kindle readers

Help Kindle Chronicles Podcaster Len Edgerly Put the Kindle on the Agenda at SXSW Interactive 2010

2009-08-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

SXSW Interactive 2010, March 12-16 in Austin, will feature "five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs" including one, if Kindle Nation citizens vote early and often, by friend, colleague and The Kindle Chronicles podcaster Len Edgerly (below right with his wife and fellow Kindle enthusiast Darlene).

SxSW employs a democratic "Panel Picker" device to allow interested people to vote for the conferences they would like to see included, and Len has generously shared the following steps for Kindle Nation citizens who wish to cast a vote for his proposed panel, "Taming the Kindle: Guidance for Readers and Authors:"

Hi Steve,
Here are the steps for the PanelPicker:

1. Go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/users/register
2. Enter information to create a new SxSW account. Click on "Sign me up."
3. When activation email arrives, click on activation link in the email.
4. At the "Welcome amigo" web page, enter the following URL: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/2368
5. Just below the title of Len's proposed panel, "Taming the Kindle: Guidance for Readers and Authors," click on the thumbs-up icon.
6. You should see a message above the panel title saying, "Your vote was saved successfully."
6. If you'd like, you can scroll down to the comment field and add a comment.

The panel picker seemed to be overwhelmed earlier today but is working okay tonight. Thanks for offering to pitch this to your readers, Steve. Much appreciated!

Len

Around the Kindlesphere This Week

2009-08-19T07:43:00.000-07:00

There are a million posts (and podcasts) in the Kindlesphere, and here are a few that caught my eye this week and seemed worth sharing with you:

BlogKindle has a fun post referencing this very retro "new" Kindle case for the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX from Busted Typewriter. I have two recommendations for the very imaginative entrepreneurs at Busted Typewriter: (1) get these listed on Amazon's Kindle Accessories page pronto! and (2) whatever you do, don't offer one of these cases in the form of a copy of Gray's Anatomy!
If you want to follow up on my piece last week on textbooks for the Kindle and other devices, it's worth a trip to the Kindle Worlda thoughtful analysis and plenty of information concerning some recent developments in the e-textbook sector.
"Steve Shank of Arizona is a Kindle fan with 35 years of experience introducing new technology, dating back to his days as an early employee of Apple," says the show notes page at The Kindle Chronicles, and Len has a relaxed, fascinating interview with him as the centerpiece of this week's podcast. Extra bonus: great audio of the waves lapping the shore at Len's summer retreat on the Maine coast at the end of the show.
Over at my own indieKindle blog for authors and independent publishers, I rolled out a suite of services to help interested authors and publishers bring their books and articles before millions of ebook readers.
Abhi's iReaderReview blog weighs in with a piece on Amazon's latest Kindle controversy in a piece entitled Cons of sharing Kindle subscriber information with publishers. I filed my own view of the controversy here.

blog, where Andrys has

Free Software Foundation Launches Campaign to Persuade Amazon to Go DRM-Free

2009-08-19T07:42:00.001-07:00

Defective by Design, an anti-digital rights management (DRM) initiative founded by the Free Software Foundation in 2006, has launched a petition drive aimed at persuading Amazon to remove digital rights restrictions from the books that Kindle owners purchase and download from the Kindle Store. The DRM issue has been a contentious one since the Kindle was launched in November 2007, and took on an uglier dimension when Amazon surreptitiously and wirelessly removed two George Orwell novels from its customers' Kindles earlier this year. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos later issued a very strong apology for the way Amazon handled the Orwellian book removal.

The Defective by Design petition, located online here, reads as follows:

We believe in the freedom to read

We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon's are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon's use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.

That is why we readers, authors, publishers, and librarians demand that Amazon remove all DRM, including any ability to control or access the user's library, from the Kindle.

Amazon's assurances that it will refrain from the worst abuses of this power do not address the problem. Amazon should not have this power in the first place. Until they give it up they will be tempted to use it, or they could be forced to by governments or narrow private interests. Whatever Amazon's reasons for imposing this control may be, they are not as important as the public's freedom to use books without interference or supervision.

You can add your online signature to this petition here, if you wish.

Here is a list of Kindle books that have been tagged as DRM-free by their authors and publishers, and here is another with DRM-free tags placed by readers.

As an author, a publisher, Kindle owner, and reader, I have been a supporter of these campaigns. But it is worth stating again here my belief that ultimately Amazon will change its tune on Kindle DRM both because of campaigns such as the petition and DRM-Free tagging and because it will be a good business decision, just as it has been a good business decision for Apple, after years of consolidating its position, to remove many of the DRM constraints it has placed on iTunes tracks:

Just as a time came when Apple was able to locate its corporate self-interest in allowing customers to remove DRM from their iTunes store audio purchases for a price, a similar time will probably come for Amazon with respect to customers’ Kindle Store purchases. In both cases, the timing seems to require that some critical mass of the applicable publishers reach a certain nuanced understanding of and experience with the changing revenue streams and marketing channels that digital publishing and distribution allow. It’s not exactly dialectical materialism, but it is a world in which changes in politics must be driven by, rather than be the drivers of, changes in economic relationships.
We can’t all be Lawrence Lessig or Cory Doctorow, and neither Amazon nor Apple will ever be Google, Creative Commons, or Project Gutenberg. Most publishers possess little understanding of Lessig or Doctorow or anyone else who has discovered the viral (and, often, easily monetized) marketing power of setting one’s words free in selected venues, and many probably label them as the “free books crowd” and shut down reflexively in the face of any opportunity to listen to them or learn from them. Call me Pollyanna, but I believe that Jeff Bezos does possess some nuanced understanding of these issues, and in time, armed with the larger and larger payments his company’s Kindle division is making to publishers, will be in a better position to bring them along into a future where there is a wide acceptance of DRM-free electronic publishing standards. But on the Darwinian path to that future, it would be very uncharacteristic of Amazon not to continue to consolidate and strengthen its position.

Is It a Kindle World? 28 Million EBook Readers Projected by 2013

2009-08-19T07:41:00.001-07:00

We all know that a picture is worth 1,000 words, even in this economy. But are charts like these worth 28 million Kindles?

Thanks to David Rothman's heads up at TeleRead, they come tied to a juicy tidbit of Kindle projection from a pretty credible source:

The well-respected and extremely popular Tech-On blog (Tech and Industry Analysis from Asia, based in Japan, with a current Alexa traffic rank of 1,007) has a cover story today projecting a worldwide installed base of 28.6 million Kindles and other ebook readers within four years:

A number of promising proposals are popping up in the eBook market, almost as if it remains unaffected by the worldwide economic downturn that began in the second half of 2008. For example, the quantity of eBook readers shipped by companies like Amazon.com and Sony has soared from the end of 2008 through 2009. And right in parallel with that growth has been significant growth in the scale of the eBook content market, also from the second half of 2008.
Growth forecasts for the eBook market are rosy, too. According to a recent report from survey company In-Stat of the US, total global shipments of dedicated eBook readers will hit 28.6 million units in 2013 (Fig 1b). Considering that 2008 shipments were only about one million units, this represents a 30-fold increase in only five years.

And here I will add a few juicy projections of my own:

About 20% of those 28 million ebook readers will be Kindles.
The 20 million other ebook readers will not spell problematic competition for the Kindle, because the vast majority of them, by the end of 2013, will come with Kindle apps or some other kind of key to the front doors of Kindle Stores in half a dozen of the world's most populous markets, er, nations.
In addition to 28 million ebook readers, there will be at least twice that many other mobile devices (iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads, netbooks, Blackberries, and Swiss army knives?) running Kindle-compatibility apps.

Today's Kindle Freebies: Bestselling Hot New Releases That Are Free in the Kindle Store

2009-08-19T07:40:00.001-07:00

3. The Brass Bed by Jennifer Stevenson

(30 customer reviews)
Auto-delivered wirelessly

Kindle Price: $0.00

8. My Soul to Lose by Rachel Vincent

(19 customer reviews) | 2 customer discussions
Auto-delivered wirelessly

Kindle Price: $0.00

Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #2: Skyborn by JOHN JACKSON MILLER

(3 customer reviews)
Auto-delivered wirelessly

Kindle Price: $0.00

Bestselling novelist Scott Sigler's speech on the Future of Content Delivery

2009-08-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

Like Joe Konrath and Cory Doctorow, Scott Sigler is a talented, bestselling novelist who isn't afraid of doing some hard thinking about what the Kindle and other new publishing technologies will do for us as readers and writers and, oh, yes, people otherwise employed in the book trades. He releases many of his books in the form of podcasts, often free, and once you get past the introductory stuff he had some very interesting things to say in this speech (which is not G-rated) on the future of content delivery:

Click & Listen: FUTURE OF CONTENT DELIVERY mp3

And yes, you can download this and listen to it on your Kindle by following the instructions in Chapter 10, "Unlock the World of Free Audio on the Kindle," of FREE: How to Get Millions of Free Books, Songs, Podcasts, Periodicals & Free eMail, Facebook, Twitter and Wireless Web With Your Amazon Kindle, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, or Kindle for iPhone App.

Today's Kindle Freebies: 3 Public Domain Freebies That Are "Selling" Over 200 Copies a Day Each!

2009-08-17T07:46:00.000-07:00

Three classics top the billing as the most popular among over 7,000 free "public domain" books in the Kindle Store, as of Monday, August 17, 2009: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, and The Art of War. If you have any doubt about the value, for Kindle owners, of the value of "Free," let me just observe that all of these three books are currently among the top 15 titles overall in the Kindle Store, which means that they are "selling" over 200 copies a day each!

Amazon to Share Kindle Periodical Subscriber Info with Publishers

2009-08-17T03:41:00.001-07:00

Is this a mountain, or a molehill? Or should we just call it "1985" and hunker down for two weeks of blowback and a lawsuit or two?

At some point in the last few days, Amazon began including this line in the "product detail" information display for all its Kindle newspapers and magazines: "Your name, billing address and order information will be shared with the publisher." I got a heads up early this morning from Andrys Basten at the Kindle World blog, and felt it could be important enough to share with Kindle Nation immediately. Here's a screenshot of the information as it appears on the New York Times page this morning:

There are online forum discussions already in which some participants are saying that this will make the recent Orwell ebook removal issue look miniscule by comparison, while others are calling this a non-issue.

For my part, it does not surprise me that Amazon decided that it had to begin providing certain information to publishers, or that it had to begin informing customers if it was already passing along that information. My years at Inc. magazine a decade ago confirmed me that subscriber address lists are pure gold to magazine and newspaper subscribers, not least because they are frequently monetized as a significant ancillary revenue stream by being sold and resold to list vendors in ways that would be alarming to any subscribers concerned about privacy and identity issues.

But this could have been handled in a much smoother way, a way that would be far more sensitive to customer concerns. Why not send an email to customers allowing several security options for providing the information, even if one of the options involved cancelling the subscription rather than providing any information? It would have required a lot less time and attention to detail than Amazon will probably end up devoting to cleaning up the mess of another public relations mini-disaster.

There have been times in the past when I may have become a little exercised with frustration over a sense that some of Amazon's Kindle staff appear a bit high-handed and officious, particularly in dealing with the authors, publishers, and creative talent who provide so much of the Kindle's reason for existence. But each time I learn of one of these screw-ups, it just makes me stop and wonder when Amazon is going to figure out that the Kindle and its relationship with Kindle downloaders and uploaders is the leading edge of its brand image, and should be treated accordingly.

In other words, every single strategic and tactical decision about the Kindle that might lead to a discussion anywhere in the Kindlesphere deserves and needs to be vetted and discussed in Jeff Bezos' office, before it is executed. Like this one will be, even if only after the fact.

This Weekend's Kindle Freebies

2009-08-17T03:00:00.001-07:00

Elric: The Stealer of Souls

by Michael Moorcock

"An indispensable addition to any fantasy collection, Elric: The Stealer of Souls is an unmatched introduction to a brilliant writer and his most famous–or infamous–creation."
--Amazon Product Detail Page

And that's not all....

Just in time for back-to-school flu preparations, here is a free download of a recently published Citizen's Guide 2.0 to Pandemic Influenza Preparation and Response created by a public health team at Stanford University and published by InSTEDD.org (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters). (Thanks to Kindle Nation subscriber Peter Carpenter for the tip!)

Just click here -- http://instedd.org/files/FluManualv2_0_revised.pdf -- to view the entire book on your computer. You can then download it to your computer and transfer it to your Kindle by following these instructions:

Scroll to the end of the document and hover your cursor over the bottom center of the document to display this icon graphic.
Click on the far-right icon to download the PDF to your computer's downloads folder.
If you have a Kindle 1 or Kindle 2, you can get Amazon to convert the book to Kindle formatting and send it wirelessly to your Kindle for 30 cents by sending the PDF file to your you@kindle.com email address, or convert it for free and send it back to your computer for USB transfer to your Kindle by sending it to your you@free.kindle.com email address.
If you have a Kindle DX you can transfer this or any other PDF file to your Kindle DX via your USB cable.

Finally, speaking of Citizen's Guides: one more freebie if you do not have it already -- five free chapters are still available here of a different kind of guide, one that will not save your life but may save you hundreds of dollars!

FREE: How to Get Millions of Free Books, Songs, Podcasts, Periodicals & Free eMail, Facebook, Twitter and Wireless Web With Your Amazon Kindle, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, or Kindle for iPhone App

Now Live: This Week's Issue of The Kindle Chronicles

2009-08-15T12:14:00.001-07:00

TKC 56 Steve Shank

Steve Shank of Arizona is a Kindle fan with 35 years of experience introducing new technology, dating back to his days as an early employee of Apple.

And now you can list The Kindle Chronicles directly on your Kindle "Home" screen each week and listen to the podcast using the same full set of features to navigate, skip ahead or behind, or replay the audio file that are available to you while listening to an Audible.com file on your Kindle. For instructions see Chapter 10 of FREE: How to Get Millions of Free Books, Songs, Podcasts, Periodicals And Free eMail, Facebook, Twitter and Wireless Web With Your Amazon Kindle.

Not to worry: Pre-order Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol now for $9.99

2009-08-15T12:12:00.000-07:00

Fears that the Kindle edition of Dan Brown's forthcoming blockbuster novel The Lost Symbol might not be released concurrently with the September 15 hardcover release date have been dispelled as Amazon is now accepting $9.99 pre-orders for the instant bestseller-to-be in the Kindle Store.

There has been a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war going on between Amazon and some publishers concerning the prescriptive $9.99 bestseller price point in the Kindle Store and the possibility that some publishers have considered staggering release dates in what would probably be a self-sabotaging effort to artificially fortify new hardcover prices.

Random House announced this week that “now that all of our security and logistical issues surrounding the e-book of ‘The Lost Symbol’ have been resolved, the e-book will be released simultaneously with the hardcover on Sept. 15.”

Today's Freebies in the Kindle Store - Friday 8.14.2009

2009-08-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

Just in case you haven't seen these free goodies for your Kindle....

Curious about Kindle sales numbers?

2009-08-15T04:00:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 15, 2009

Curious about Kindle sales numbers?

If so, there has been plenty to chew on in the last few days.

Let's just establish up front that, in the long run, the most important Kindle sales numbers involve calculations of how many Kindle books -- or any other e-books, for that matter -- are being purchased and downloaded. Those are the numbers that are going to make a difference to authors, publishers, readers, and booksellers of every variety. For instance, it may be a good thing for Sony that the company has sold XXXX units of its ereaders in Japan, say, or globally. But until I see evidence that publishers and authors are experiencing significant sales of their ebooks to Sony device owners, those hardware unit sales numbers won't have traction for me.

On the subject of U.S. ebook sales, let me suggest the following very interesting and informative posts and links....

Joe Konrath's A Newbie's Guide to Publishing: You may already be familiar with Joe Konrath (or his alter-ego-de-plume Jack Kilborn) via Kindle Nation Daily, but in addition to being a fine author of suspense and horror fiction Joe is engaged very actively in experimenting with and thinking and writing about the world of book publishing from an author's perspective here in 2009. Joe has shared more information about actual Kindle edition sale and royalties, overall ebook downloads, and his approach to marketing and promotion than any other author writing today, and there's plenty to learn from what he has to say in his posts Ebooks and Free Books and Amazon Kindle, Oh My; Helping Each Other and Amazon Kindle Numbers.

Morris Rosenthal on Kindle Sales Rankings: On another front, the guy who has done more than any other commentator to parse Amazon Sales Rankings and their meaning over the past decade, author and indie publisher Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books, has turned his attention very useful to the meaning of Kindle Store Sales Rankings in a recent post entitled How Many Kindle eBooks Are Selling Based On Amazon Sales Ranking. Although I believe Morris is off by about 600,000 in speculating that there are about 600,000 Kindles currently in use, his overall calculations and research are very well-founded and they strongly suggest that Joe Konrath and I will soon be joined by hundreds -- and eventually thousands -- of other authors for whom revenue from Kindle sales alone begins to provide something like a livable income. Morris also makes a fascinating argument that, among those of Amazon's top bestselling titles that are available both in print and Kindle editions, there is now a 1:1 ration in sales units between the two. When seen in an overall context wherein this ratio moves strongly in favor of print editions as sales numbers decline out the long tail, this model seems generally consistent with Amazon's recent (and, at the time, stunning) announcement that, looking back over an unspecified historic period, Kindle editions sales had accounted for somewhere between 26 and 35 per cent of all sales when both print and Kindle editions were available. If you want to be present and accounted for as the ebook revolution continues to unfold, I highly recommend you follow Morris' posts.

Indie Authors and the Kindle Bestseller Lists. Even among bloggers who write about all things Kindle, there is occasional some confusion about, well, all things Kindle. Among those who commented on the above posts by Joe Konrath, one blogger focused on what Joe's success might mean for self-published authors. (Joe, by the way, is not a self-published author, although he is certainly one who is taking the bull by the horns and restructuring the traditional hierarchical relationship between authors and publishers). Trying to focus in on whether "self-published" authors could earn "a decent living" publishing for the Kindle, the author of the iReaderReview blog asked his readers "Do you think by 2011 self-published authors will be able to hit the Top 25 [in the Kindle Store sales rankings]?"

Not to crow, but it's worth mentioning here that my self-published guide to the Kindle 1 spent 17 consecutive weeks in the #1 position in the Kindle Store during the Spring and Summer of 2008 before going to paperback in late August, and my Complete User's Guide To the Amazing Amazon Kindle 2 spent some time in the top 15 when it came out earlier this year. There have, along the way, been other self-published titles in the Kindle top 25, and they have not only been books about the Kindle. But while it will continue to be interesting to plot the progress of individual titles, I suspect the more interesting sea changes will be those involving the kind of publishing perestroika that I write about in my Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex: How Authors and Publishers Are Using the Amazon Kindle and Other New Technologies to Unleash a 21-Century Indie Movement of Readers and Writers, including its chapter "Rebel Distribution and Amazon's Marketplace of the Mind: You Need a Publisher Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle." As these sea changes evolve, the "self-published" label will cease to exist in any meaningful way except inasmuch as it means "smart," and will be replaced a kinder, gentler sense of "indie author" and "indie publisher" that is embraced by readers, by authors who previously had chosen traditional publishing routes, and, of course, by the DIY renegades among us.

Price Breakdown on Kindle Store's 300,000 Books as of June 11

2009-08-15T03:59:00.001-07:00

Got Kindle DX Questions? We've Got Kindle DX Answers

2009-08-15T03:57:00.000-07:00

With Kindle DX here to stay, it makes sense to address some of the questions that Kindle Nation citizens have been sharing with me and elsewhere about the latest model. My hope is that some of this will be of interest both to prospective DX buyers and to Kindle 1 or 2 owners who are wondering if there is anything in particular about the DX that might drive a new-model purchase.

The Kindle DX Display

The Kindle DX display seems very easy on the eyes, but after taking, magnifying, and comparing screen shots of the same page from my Kindle DX and my Kindle 2, I can say with some certainty that the font size, font clarity, background, and contrast on the two models are similar.

However, there is a specific and valuable kind of serious improvement in the display legibility of the Kindle DX compared with the earlier Kindle models, and it involves all of the non-adjustable fonts to which we have grown accustomed on the Kindle. For those of us who tend to gravitate toward the larger font sizes whenever we are able with the Kindle, it can be frustrating to try to read the Kindle Home screen, the Kindle storefront, and other displays such as menus, bookmark listings, search results, the Settings page and even, for when we want to keep up with Amazon's touting of titles that are already big sellers from mainstream megapublishers, with the Kindle Daily Post.

On the Kindle DX, all these non-adjustable pages are far more legible and easy on the eyes, especially in less than optimal light.

The actual dimensions of the Kindle DX display screen (5 3/8" x 7 7/8", 9.7" on the diagonal) are a tiny bit smaller than the standard 6" x 9" of most trade paperbacks and allow for a printable page that is equal to the printable page in a standard hardcover book whose exterior dimensions are 6 1/4" x 9 7/16".

Although I am not impressed with the Kindle DX's usefulness for viewing PDF documents, the larger display performs beautifully with graphic files embedded in Kindle editions such as those found on Amazon's special page of Featured Books for the Kindle DX. These includes photographs and other art, graphic novels and cartoons, maps and charts, and more.

Side-by-side with the Kindle 2, the Kindle DX display is consistently a tiny bit slower to refresh. The good news is that the same situation that causes the DX e-Ink display to take a few milliseconds longer to refresh -- the fact that it contains more than twice as much text per screen -- more than offsets the cumulative effect of slower refreshes. By the time you finish reading any book on a DX you will have spent about half as much time waiting for refreshes as you would spend reading the same book on a Kindle 1 or Kindle 2.

Kindle DX File Managament

There do not appear to be any new developments or features with regard to folders, labels, groupings, etc.

Kindle DX Value: Is the DX worth $489?

It's such a subjective question. If you are having trouble keeping the wolf from the door, nothing is worth $489. But let me put it this way: if the Kindle 2 is worth $359, the DX is definitely worth $489 for its serious enhancements in display, legibility, and the compatibility between all the content it can display and the way that content looks on the DX. I felt that I needed to purchase a Kindle DX because of my role here with Kindle Nation and my Kindle books, but I was frankly on the fence about whether I would keep it, given how much I like my Kindle 2. Although I have not made a final decision, after 10 hours with the DX I am leaning toward calling it a keeper.

PDF on the Kindle DX

On the plus side:

The Kindle DX has native support for PDF files, so that you can transfer a PDF file directly from any computer to your Kindle DX via USB without relying on Amazon's 15-cent-and-up conversion service.
The Kindle DX display has more than twice as much "printable space" as the previous Kindle models, so many PDF files display well.
Kindle DX PDF support allows you to search inside a PDF document and bookmark entire pages, if the document is unrestricted and has been created from a text-based rather than a graphic document.

On the negative side.

The Kindle DX does not support "zoom," "pan," or magnification for PDF files, so if the display size (about 70% the size of an 8x11 sheet) is too small, you are stuck. Based on my first impressions I'm not optimistic that the DX will be much a solution for technical PDFs, PDFs with charts, etc.
The highlighting, bookmarking, annotation and clipping features that provide important functionality for other Kindle documents in an academic setting are virtually useless with PDF files, so that the promise of being able to use PDF files for academic courseware is unfulfilled.
Despite claims at Location 670 of the Amazon's Kindle DX User Guide, the Kindle DX does not consistently make optimal use of landscape-view rotation to magnify PDF files for easier viewing.
The weakness of the aformentioned features such as annotation and search is the same for PDF files regardless of whether you transfer them directly from computer to Kindle via USB or send them wirelessly via the Whispernet. When you send a PDF to your @kindle.com email address Amazon does not put the file through any conversion process, and it is impossible to have Amazon convert a PDF file to an .AZW Kindle file. Some technophiles will want to explore the potential for converting their own PDF files backward to .DOC, .TXT, or .MOBI files so as to convert them forward into a more useful format to take advantage of Kindle DX features. We will consult with friends who are more technologically advanced and revisit these possibilities in a future issue of Kindle Nation.

Portability, Use and Carrying Ease

This is another highly subjective matter. The Kindle DX weighs a little less than twice as much as a Kindle 2, and its heft, feel, and solidness is much the same as the Kindle 2 across a larger mass. If you are used to carrying a hardcover book, or a briefcase or moderate-sized backpack or purse, or a 7 x 10 planner, the Kindle DX won't bother you. It's easier to lug around than any netbook, laptop, or tablet computer or most hardcover bestsellers. I like the way it carries, opens, and performs both home and away, especially in the moleskine-like leather Kindle DX cover that Amazon manufactures and sells for it. I am finding it easy to use for one-handed reading.

I also expect that some of these issues of weight and heft may be different to different users. I'm a big, strong guy, and the idea of exercise or walking with, say, 2- or 5-pound weights would seem silly to me. If you are someone who would find it useful to carry 2-pound weights on a power walk, the Kindle DX might seem more burdensome to you. I also suspect that, at least for a while, I might be annoyed by the right-side control placement if I were lefthanded. The Amazon explanation that this annoyance would by mitigated by using the DX's ability to rotate to an upside-down display strikes me as a Youtube parody video waiting to happen.

Durability

I lack the courage to put my new Kindle DX through any drop-testing research, but I will say this. The DX feels every bit as sturdy as the Kindle 2, but I am sure that, if I decide to keep it, I will spring for the 2-year extended warranty. I did not purchase the extended warranty for my Kindle 2, and the difference is based on three things:

Since the Kindle DX is larger and heavier, I believe that the prospect of some mishap is naturally greater, assuming the same care.
I think the DX is likely to be my e-book reader of choice for the next three to five years, whereas I got the Kindle 2 with a strong expectation that there would be a compelling upgrade coming in behind it within a year.
For whatever reason associated with my household budget, there is a significant difference to me between $359 and $489.

The Kindle DX Web Browser

Primarily because of the size and automatic rotation of the Kindle DX display, it is far superior to its predecessors in its capacity to display web pages in an appealing and useful way. Whereas the Kindle 1 and Kindle 2 offered a choice between "basic mode" and "advanced mode" with the web browser, the Kindle DX toggles between "basic mode" and "desktop mode," and the combination of "desktop mode" and landscape orientation (see below) shows most web pages in a relatively impressive and useful way compared with earlier Kindle models.

Audio

One of the first things I did with my new Kindle DX when it arrived was to transfer and listen to the MP3 of last week's podcast of The Kindle Chronicles, and I noticed right away that the smarter placement of the two Kindle DX speakers on the bottom edge, where they are never covered by a Kindle cover or by laying the Kindle flat, makes for a greatly enhanced listening experience. Whether the audio is any different when conveyed over a headset or external speaker is a question I have yet to research.

Just bring your Kindle to your nearest indie bookstore today for ...

2009-08-15T03:55:00.001-07:00

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is sometimes fascinated by the issues that pop up, among my fellow authors and readers, as reasons for staying away from new technologies such as the Kindle and even print-on-demand publishing services such as those provided by Amazon's CreateSpace.com and Ingram's Lightning Source. Some of us are Luddites, some of us are anti-corporate (so we would prefer Random House, right?), some of us are skeered to death of being branded as DIY self-publishers, and ....

And here's the one for which I, as a former brick-and-mortar indie bookseller and member of the American Booksellers Association, have the most patience:

We want to support indie bookstores and we want to make it easy for our readers to find our books on the shelves in indie bookstores. Real bookstores.

Not Amazon. Certainly not the Kindle store. Not chains. Okay, maybe chains if they serve good coffee.

Of course. I love indie bookstores and the people who run them and work at them. I am well aware of the forces that have conspired against them over the past few decades, and it is true that I cannot help but notice certain parallels between the indie bookselling trade and the traditional newspaper business. These parallels may even include the prospect that changes in technology are making it inevitable that indie bookstores and traditional newspapers will share the same fate. But those of us who want to do all we can to keep indie bookstores and traditional newspapers alive are driven in most cases by honorable motivations.

That being said, I for one want to see signs from the indie booksellers themselves that they are doing all that they can, and being as imaginative as possible, in an effort to find ways to appropriate the newest and most interesting technologies to connect more readers with more books in more customer-centered ways. One example that tickles me: a favorite local bookstore of mine (and one that like my tiny publishing company may also have drawn its name from a venerable institution from my undergraduate days) is offering inexpensive delivery of all local orders, using emissions-free vehicles, in partnership with MetroPed, “Boston’s human-powered delivery service."

And here's another: another long-time bookstore fave o' mine, Vermont's Northshire Bookstore, has installed an Expresso Book Machine to offer almost-immediate in-store printing and binding of an incredible array of titles including thousands of titles from On Demand Books, thousands more becoming available from the 8,000 publishing partners of Ingram's Lightning Source POD facility, and -- I especially love this one -- a growing catalog of local-interest titles offered by Northshire's in-house Shire Books imprint. (Yes, this is how Lawrence Ferlinghetti would have begun offering his own Pictures of the Gone World and other City Lights Books titles at the North Beach store if the technology has existed back in 1955).

So, this is great, right? Despite the fact that the Expresso machinery takes up almost as much space as some entire bookstores and looks a lot like -- am I dating myself much here? -- Univac (or the latest invention of Will Farrell's unfortunate recent character), it is an interesting step toward the Long Tail and new-tech delivery systems for indie bookstores. I've been following the Expresso "ATM for books" concept and narrative since mainstream publishing industry veteran and chronicler Jason Epstein became associated with the concept a few years back. And part of what is exciting here is that Northshire is -- among its fellow independent booksellers -- one of the most respected bookshops in the country. I met founder Ed Morrow through ABA and the New England Booksellers Association decades ago and throughout my own bookselling career I never turned down an oppportunity to pick their or their staffers' brains about what might work in my store.

But the Expresso-at-Northshire experiment got me thinking about another potentially exciting way in which indie bookstores could welcome, and profit from, new technologies.

Okay, take a leap with me here. This idea involves indie booksellers actually marketing their stores to Kindle owners (or substitute another ebook brand here, provided that certain compatibilities exist) and inviting the Kindlers to bring their Kindle units into their neighborhood bookstores. If I haven't lost you there already, here's the concept:

Imagine all the books that exist or ever will exist in the public domain.
Add all the books that are or ever will be available through POD services of any kind including CreateSpace, Lightning Source, On Demand Books, and the Espresso.
Add all the other digital books or documents that any bookstore might ever be able to acquire or offer -- whether as a college bookstore agregating instructor's packets and lecture notes or a store like Northshire creating its own POD-and-digital imprint.
Render this entire (and, may I say, humongous?) catalog compatible with eBook readers in a copyright-sensitive but DRM-free format that, like PDF files for the new Kindle DX, do not require an extra data-conversion step.
Allow all booksellers from Amazon to indie brick-and-mortar shops and chains to offer as much as possible of this entire catalog in both digital ebook and digital print-on-demand as well as other print modalities.
Monetize the entire catalog with prices ranging from 49 cents for public-domain to $9.99 for bestsellers (and more when justifiable for technical books, etc.), a sensible royalty structure back to publishers (including Amazon Digital Services), rights holders, and authors, and a point-of-sale slice for pysical stores.
Provide apps to integrate the entire process not only with Kindle owners but with the iPhone, the iPod touch, the Blackberry, netbooks, laptops, and every other device imaginable.
Invite device owners to bring their Kindles or other readers into bookstores to browse and zap content right onto their hardware via USB, wireless, etc., and offer specific promotions (such as first-day in-store only downloads of the latest Dan Brown) to get readers into the habit of bringing their devices in.
Outfit the in-store operation hardware-wise with a user-friendly "music kiosk" like station that requires little or no staffing.
Offer a BOGO deal whenever a customer comes to the counter to buy a print-edition (with appropriate back-end monetization: "If you'd like to step over to the kiosk with this coupon that expires in 30 days you can also get a digital copy of this book for an additional 99 cents."

I don't know if it would catch on like the Univac thing did. Sometimes it seems as if it is the nature of e-commerce these days to drive us all away from the local toward the global, and certainly Amazon is well-positioned to take advantage of this momentum.

But there is great value in the local, and indie booksellers and their loyalists are working hard at the process of trying to figure out how to remain viable. If it makes any sense for them to install interesting monstrosities like the Expresso Book Machine in their stores to sell digital p-books, than it has to make sense to figure out and operationalize a process to sell digital e-books like the one I have suggested here.

Imagine all the booksellers, living life in peace....

When asking an author if her ebook has also been published as a "real" book will be like asking a musician if her album has been released in vinyl

2009-07-14T06:32:00.000-07:00

I recently noticed an interesting Tweet that gets right to the heart of so many issues that authors are thinking about when we try to make decisions about publishing for the Kindle and other new technologies:

kaytee4ever: my gf thinks Kindle isn't "real" publishing. Help! Know anyone who got a print deal after starting on Kindle?Any good arguments to tell her?

The Kindle is at the forefront of technological change that opens all kinds of new doors for authors, publishers, and anyone who likes to make reading an interactive experience. As with every medium, channel, or form of communication or commerce, there will be dreck (as there is plenty of dreck available from mainstream publishers).

But yes.

First, there have been people who got print deals after starting on Kindle, and here's one of the most thoughtful and interesting analyses of the most recent big deal: A Kindle Success Story: How to Promote a Kindle Ebook

Second, you may not see it coming yet, but we are approaching a time when a confluence of sea changes in reading habits, consumer practices, and technology will mean that asking a Kindle book author if her book has also been published as a "real" book will be like asking a musician if her album has been released in vinyl. Serious authors from Joe Konrath to, well, me are already making a decent living from the Kindle editions of our books.

Third, all of this will work best when it works as it often works with indie music and indie movies, with readers lighting the way for other readers so that the feedback becomes the filter.

Fourth, just to take it back to the totally understandable vanity issues that are implicit in the original tweet, I hope you will enjoy the bit of dialogue included in my post The Romance of Submission, a chapter excerpted from my book Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex.

Update: In case you were wondering if the Boyd Morrison book described in the above-referenced post really existed, here's proof:

Between Morrison, Amazon, and his new publisher, they have endeavored to wipe out all traces of the Kindle edition, but entering the ASIN from Amazon's main page still gets you this search result that links to a 404-page ghost.

The Romance of Submission

2009-07-14T05:51:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from

Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex:

How Authors and Publishers Are Using the Amazon Kindle and Other New Technologies to Unleash an Indie Movement of Readers and Writers

By Stephen Windwalker

Copyright 2008, 2009, Stephen Windwalker and Harvard Perspectives Press.

What is it to be a writer hard at the work of creating something wonderful, a work in progress that you will chisel away at and breathe life into and perfect until it is published and embraced by a welcoming audience of serious readers who buzz to one another and back to you that you have made something new, something of value, perhaps even something eternal?

In the middle of this faithful process, as you gird yourself against distractions and slave away at MacDowell or Yaddo or Starbucks, or in your garret, or on the Acela, or in your prison cell, there are blissfully intense moments when there is only you and the work. On these days the work is the best of companions.

Such moments may seem to validate Miss Dickinson's pronouncement that "Publication is not the proper business of a poet," so that you are inclined to apply it to your particular form of literary creation, whether it is your Dream Songs or your Ulysses, your biography of a racehorse, or your treatise on how to solve Sudoku.

But if you are budgeting time and funds so that you can afford enough daycare to allow you to finish your book, or trying to balance your writing with a day job, or to set enough aside to allow you to escape the day job, it may be difficult to fend off those thoughts of publication. If so, as the Belle of Amherst surely knew, these largely economic conditions may carry some strange elemental power – the power, perhaps, of the wolf at your door? – that puts you at risk of losing the very frame of mind that allows you to create something worthwhile in the first place.

I don't wish to provoke hand-wringing, hair-tearing angst or to send ten thousand writers running for fee-based therapeutic relationships that they can ill afford. (Shrinks, in my experience, aren't much good at solving underlying economic problems anyway). There are plenty of activities on the spectrum of creative endeavor where one need not be tied up in knots about one's literary output and its ultimate place in the world. The conventionally established professional author, whose work reaps nice advances and then sells well enough to "earn out" those advances, is usually well enough inoculated against such dreary and careerist considerations that she needs only to balance her writing efforts with such concessions as she may choose to make to her publisher's marketing demands or to the claims of celebrity. Such an author may be the fortunate inhabitant of a "zone" where one is so well guaranteed audience, promotion, distribution, and compensation that such considerations may be treated as trivial afterthoughts. And while some of the habitués of this zone may indeed be hacks who license their characters or record half a dozen formulaic page-turners each year with the next-generation iteration of the Dictaphone, there are others who have worked long and hard at good and durable work that extends our literary culture, fills our leisure hours with civilized delight, and illuminates the human experience.

No doubt there are many other writers of distinction who, keeping closer to Miss Dickinson's dictum, work well and steadily with no regard whatsoever for the business of publication, whether they write only to be writing, for no audience at all, only for themselves, or only against some future time when they will brook their first considerations about what to do with what they have been writing. Perhaps they can work this way because they are the otherwise idle rich, or they combine a good day job with abundant energy and discipline in lives where distractions are scarce, or they are incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized, or they are prohibited for one reason or another from telling their story. But for the vast majority of us who would seek out a place for writing as part or all of the work of our daily lives, neither of these extremes is the reality.

Very few of us are driven by a serious desire to become millionaire authors, but we would like an honest chance to make a decent living writing good books and getting them into the hands of discerning readers. Yet it is in staking even such modest claims for our creative work that we risk subjecting ourselves to a writer's purgatory.

Want to submit your manuscript through traditional publishing channels? Then those "blissfully intense hours when there is only you and the work" are about to be subjected, like a teenager's love affair or even the bonds of best friends or blood brothers, to the intrusive, perverse, distorting pressures of societal judgment. You've been working privately, passionately, one-on-one with your manuscript, teasing and massaging it into the book you have lived to write, but now you must submit it and then wait passively to see if this relationship passes muster in the eyes of agents, editors, publishers, reviewers, and peers. You have quietly bestowed your passion on this companion, and now you must dress it up and take it to the prom. Even if you have always kept your own creative counsel, lived and worked by your own aesthetic, and been your own toughest editor and creative jury, now, by the simple act of inviting your companion into the glare of public scrutiny, as if assuming fairness in its consideration, you are turning the tables on yourself.

By accepting your role in this aptly named submission process, you are implicitly validating its legitimacy and encouraging its cliques of rather mean-spirited girls and boys. Later, as you open and file away their rejection slips, you will of course be formalizing and finalizing the concomitant process of obliterating your own confidence in your capacity to create, to evaluate, to rethink, and to revise what you are creating. As in most initially blissful high school romances, once they are subjected to the harsh judgments of the reigning popular crowd, someone is bound to get dumped.

It isn't hard to imagine the famous final scene of break-up dialogue between a fickle novelist and his manuscript – what, your fiction doesn't talk back to you? – as the pages are about to be consigned to the back of the file cabinet or the hard drive's least trafficked subdirectory….

"Shit! I thought you loved me. All you wanted was to get published!"

"Well, sure. After I spent every day with you for two years, it would have been nice."

"I never realized that was the only reason you were interested in me."

"Oh, c'mon. Don't guilt trip me. Can't you accept that I have needs too?"

"If that's all you were looking for, why didn't you just pay for it?"

"Pay for it?"

"Sure. Why not? There are plenty of places where you could take your money and your so-called needs and get published without—"

"Without what?"

[Tears]

"Without paying any attention to what's really inside me."

"Maybe. I mean, I suppose. But I would never want it to get around that I was paying for it."

"It's hard to believe that you're the same one who believed in me."

"Oh, come on. Was I supposed to totally ignore the things that Lindsay and Winona and Heather were saying about you?"

"Hah! They call themselves agents and editors. They are nothing more than glorified slush-pile interns."

"Well, everybody else listens to them. I'm never going to make it as a published author if I don’t listen to what they say. I know they will want to publish me if I can just go back to the drawing board and tighten up the story line a little."

"Story line? What about my characters?"

"It was nice, baby. You know I will never forget you. Maybe if I can just get published we can get together sometime, in the future."

Okay, this bit of fun has its limits, but hopefully it has helped to illuminate a worthwhile distinction: too often, it would be more apt to mangle Miss Dickinson's phrases by noting that it is not publication, but submission, that is not the proper business of poets and other writers.

Is there a choice?

We have ceded to the major publishing houses and their gatekeepers the central roles in determining which written creative work will be widely disseminated in our culture, and in the process we subject ourselves as writers, and to a lesser but still significant degree as readers, to agonies of waiting, wishing and hoping, and quiet desperation. It was not gratuitously that publishers established this hegemony, with its concomitant power over our creative and intellectual lives. There was, especially in the half-century between 1920 and 1970, a golden age of American publishing. Many of the subsidiary "imprints" of today's global media empires were, then, small, fairly informal shops where editors were motivated by their passion for literature, where an author celebrating the publication of his novel or not quite making it to his next royalty check or advance might well be found, of a morning, sleeping one off on the sofa in one of his editor's homey book-lined offices. Almost everything about the book industry, from the ubiquitous independent bookshops to the number of books reviewed or excerpted in mass-circulation magazines like the Saturday Evening Post or Collier's, to the abundance of serious "mid-list" titles kept in print by publishers, was well laid out for a mass culture of readers, and thus, in turn, for the care and feeding of enough quality writers to keep the culture in good books.

Lest I seem to be invoking some nostalgic "It's Morning Again in America" sepia tone of a glorious past, I recommend Jason Epstein's thoughtful and intelligent 2001 memoir of that era in the history of the publishing industry, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future. Of course there were market forces, personal ambitions, and intra- and inter-corporate competition at work in the publishing industry between 1920 and 1970, and barriers organized around class pedigree, racism, and sexism were every bit as prevalent in the publishing industry as they were in American society at large. But the fact remains that before the dramatic, power-concentrating frenzy of mergers and acquisitions that occurred in the last third of the century, the American publishing industry was generally keeping up its end of the bargain with the country's creative culture and its audience of readers.

Writers submitted their work to agents and editors with some faith that it would get a reading, and thus would be given all the chance that any writer could expect. There was an ample array of potential entry markets, including college and literary magazines, the pulps, and even a surprising number of slick mass-market magazines that gave significant space to fiction each month and paid competitively for it. Mass periodicals from the Saturday Evening Post to Time, whatever their politics might be, were self-conscious of a responsibility to guide and broaden the culture, if perhaps not to deepen it, rather than merely to reflect its shortcomings.

In other words, there was a long period in American publishing when one could observe significant correspondence between the best work that was being written by our novelists and poets and biographers and the work that the "popular crowd" of publishing gatekeepers was admitting into its world of published books. During most of this time, our Anglo-American culture did much to promote its own better moments: Epstein notes that authors from James Joyce to James Baldwin used to grace the covers of Time magazine. Today, in a kind of weird apotheosis of the real and metaphorical linkages between high school clique culture and American literary culture, the bestselling author you are most likely to see on magazine covers at your favorite newsstand may well be Paris Hilton.

The reasons why Ms. Hilton is a bestselling author are perhaps more interesting than most of what one will find between the covers of her books. Publishing houses search out brand-name celebrities whose platforms guarantee bestseller status, because both the publishing houses and the retail bookstore chains desperately need high turnover bestsellers to generate the revenue necessary to justify their existence in a world of literary-industrial conglomerates that is, increasingly, all about the bottom line. Such name-brand authors may be genre fiction writers who have identified a certain formula for repetitive mass-market success and are willing to abide by their publishers' pleas not to monkey with the formulas. But just as often these days the celebrity authors are cross-over stars: people who are cashing in on the notoriety they've gained on MTV, Court TV, American Idol, ESPN, Entertainment Tonight, People, their own television or radio shows, or, given its increasing "news" coverage of the icons who become known to us through these aforementioned portals of mass culture, the network news.

It shouldn't shock us that readers buy a lot of these mass-produced cookie-cutter books. First, they are only one more confirming symptom of the national multi-media fixations that have already been proven for OJ, Wacko Jacko, Britney, Paris, Monica, and so forth. Second, sometimes there is interesting material in these books. Finally, although the range of more interesting alternatives to such books is definitely not narrowing, our public access to them is limited because neither the publishers, the chain bookstores, or the big-box stores whose deeply-discounted offerings of a few hundred bestsellers often drive independent booksellers out of business are willing to make a marketing or space-allocation commitment to books that do not stack up, from the get-go, as bestsellers. If you are looking for something to read on your flight, there are only so many titles available at the airport bookstand, and all of them are there because the corporate buyers or distributors are certain that they will be bestsellers and that "you" are most likely to buy a book by an author you've heard about already.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, in a Spring 2008 piece on niche political marketing, drew a clear portrayal of the largely homogeneous culture that existed in America before anyone had ever heard of niche markets and long-tail economics:

"Fifty-five years ago, 80 percent of American television viewers, young and old, tuned in to see Milton Berle on Tuesday nights. Tens of millions, rich and poor, worked together at Elks Lodges and Rotary Clubs. Millions more, rural and urban, read general-interest magazines like Look and Life. In those days, the owner of the local bank lived in the same town as the grocery clerk, and their boys might play on the same basketball team. Only 7 percent of adult Americans had a college degree."

Entering the book section of a Walmart, Super Stop 'n' Shop, or BJ's has something in common with stepping into the 1950s in terms of the diversity of culture and selection. If you have written one of the top 500 novels of the year, but it never makes it into the top 300, it is unlikely that it will turn up on the bookshelves in those short-tail book departments.

None of this is great news for readers, but it can be especially depressing for serious writers, because the big cultural picture distills to a very simple message: the mainstream publishing industry, to the extent that it is embodied in the five global media empires that dominate the American book trade at this writing, is not interested in what you are writing, is not going to make meaningful judgments about your work based on the quality or distinctiveness of your content, and is instead much more interested in hooking up with someone who is already "popular," even if it means hiring someone else (you, perhaps?) to do the ghost writing. The industry's popular-crowd cliques, it turns out, are not fair, and they could care less about what you may think is special about your "companion" of the last couple of years.

(This book is available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions).

Would you like to help with a blurb for my bestselling new book on the financial crisis?

2009-07-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I published the Kindle edition of a book on which I have been devoting a great deal of time and energy over the past few months, The Worried Citizen's Little Survival Guide to the Greatest Financial Crisis of the Century: Understanding and Surviving the Domino Depression. Here's a link to its Amazon page.

It's not a book for the CNBC talking heads, and it may not even be a book for Paul Krugman or Ben Bernanke. It's a book for people who've been working hard, feel like we've been thrown to the curb in this financial crisis, and and want simple answers to some very basic questions: How did we get here, how much worse is it going to get, and what can we do to protect ourselves, our families, and our future?

If you believe there's a need for a book with this kind of commonsense approach to these worrying times, I would like to invite you to take a few moments to participate with me as I try to re-make the usual process of marketing a nonfiction book. Between now and the time when the paperback edition of my book is published late this month, I am inviting people who really know what is going on in this financial crisis -- working people, labor and community organizers, seniors, teachers, librarians, people who run small businesses and nonprofits, young people trying to figure out how they are going to pay for their education or start a career, and others who have already lost a great deal through no fault of their own -- to join with me in spreading the word about The Worried Citizen's Little Survival Guide.

Okay, if Bernanke, Krugman, Jim Kramer, and Stephen King all want to send in blurbs, I might be able to use them. But I would really like to have a couple of lines from you, if you feel like sharing your comments publicly.

I've posted some sample chapters of the book, along with the Table of Contents, on Facebook just to make it easy for you to see what it's all about.

If you would like to share a comment or "blurb" with me directly, you can enter a comment here or, better yet, email me at hppress@gmail.com.

If you include your name, any brief identifying info, and a snail-mail address and I include your comment in (or on the cover of) the paperback edition of the book (scheduled for July 31 release), I promise to send you a free signed copy of the paperback! (In response to a question from Donna, let me suggest that it would be helpful to have comments, blurbs, and reviews by Monday, July 15).

Such comments could become back cover blurbs, comments on the book's web page, or readers' comments in the front matter of the paperback edition. I would also welcome a brief review on Amazon or, if you have one, on your own blog. If you would like to write an Amazon review, short and sweet would be wonderful, and you will find a link right under the title information at the top of the book's Amazon page: http://bit.ly/4BXrG

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this note, and -- if I may be so optimistic as to presume -- for your interest in helping me get the word out about a book that I believe can help to make a difference in the daily lives of many hardworking people.

Thanks for your interest in The Worried Citizen's Little Survival Guide.To read or find out more about this book, email hppress@gmail.com

For more information, see the The Worried Citizen's Survival Blog at http://worriedcitizens.blogspot.com/

Copyright © July 2009, Stephen Windwalker and Harvard Perspectives Press.

Publishing Perestroika in the Age of the Kindle: You Need a Publisher Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

2009-06-15T08:33:00.000-07:00

It's the Real Thing: A Meditation on Immortality and Commerce

2009-06-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

It's the Real Thing

A Meditation on Immortality and Commerce

We play at it. We work at it.

It makes us laugh or weep.

It reveals to us

Something divine deep within us,

And something diabolical.

It is sex,

And it is what we build in the absence of sex.

It is beauty,

And it is in the creations that we imagine

As we run in sheer terror from our demons.

It is built upon physics and fart jokes.

It is spoken and written and painted and sung,

And that is just the tip of the ice sculpture.

It is in the sweet smell of morning bakeries,

the tangy tumult of teargassed rebels,

the rhythmic challenges of bass-thumping football paraders.

It is in what we proclaim and what we hide,

In what we share and what we charge for.

Is it still there, we wonder,

When, as we begin to create,

We sometimes allow ourselves the risky freedom

Of using our creations

To seduce,

To intimidate,

To mystify,

To pay for groceries,

To promote ourselves?

There, when we sense

Fuzzy boundaries between our creative energies

And our economic lives,

Our natural self-preserving careerism,

It all becomes so confusing.

After all, we are not only creators

But critics as well.

We are audience too:

We read,

We listen,

We meditate.

We see ourselves

Not only in the brightest mirrors

And stillest waters

But also in the terrifying imponderables

Of Rachmaninoff

And Dostoyevsky

And Van Gogh

And Danielle Steel.

We are audience,

We are organisms,

We have taken drug-addled journeys beyond,

On which we have seen past the seams

That seem to organize the universe,

Water from stone,

Being from sky,

Puppy from Citgo sign,

Sonnet from soccershot from tonguebath,

Sand from breath,

Shadow from nipple.

Our ability to act and to create in the present moment

Is betrayed by our tendency

To be neurotic

About anything related to the questions

Of who and where we will be tomorrow,

Of who will carry our lines

(Our soliloquies and our DNA)

One hundred years from now,

Of how much loot we will take with us

Or pass on.

Trained to think

That our own physical lives are finite,

We speculate about our souls,

But we hedge our spiritual bets

With obsessions about what we might create

That might live, in some sense, another day:

Live to be seen,

To be heard,

To be read,

To be discussed,

Or even to be bought and sold.

Jealously guarding our energies,

And our projected reputations,

We look all around us,

And especially within ourselves,

To judge what in our culture is worthy

Of our time and our reflection.

We are biased

In favor of anything that we create ourselves,

Of anything that comes from a friend

Or lover

Or family member,

Anything that has been created by a member of our tribe,

Our neighborhood,

Our college class,

Anything that seems to be about us,

Or someone that we know,

Or would like to know.

Will we settle for vicarious immortality:

The immortality of a fellow traveler?

We know what we like

We resist what we are told that we should like,

But we don't want to miss out on anything cool,

Anything that might give us pleasure,

Anything that might lead

To a pleasant sexual connection,

Anything that we believe

We should be the first one in our group

To tell the others about.

Some days we rise in the morning

And wish that the world were limited

To our neighborhood:

That the only players

Were the garage band down the street

And the folksinger on the subway platform.

Then we log on

And connect

With a billion other provincials.

But time and again

We break through the barriers of parochialism and prejudice

And we find the most wondrous works of art,

The most compelling visual and textual and sensual meditations

On our nature,

On our plight,

On something mutually recognizable

In our common capacity for hallucination.

These moments of epiphany drive us

To play, to create,

To hunt down something archetypal

That we acknowledge but cannot quite remember in our past,

To set ourselves aflame

With the intensity of our intentions and our nightmares.

Out of all this comes drivel and dreck,

But also something more,

Something hopeful,

Something that once in a great while

We sense is the real thing.

How do we find the real thing?

How do we know when we have found it?

How do we know when we have made it?

There is no handbook for this moment,

Any more than there is a handbook for love.

(And yet there are so many for love!

Are they all impostors?)

Indeed it is a lot like love,

Or a lot like lust:

Who cares what the difference is,

Or if there is a difference?

Don't we know it when we know it?

Can't the quest for love or art,

In its purist moments,

Be polymorphously perverse,

Free of any hierarchy or compulsion to rate,

Yet still and all fixed only on what is beautiful,

On what is beautifully grotesque,

On what may give rise to beauty?

Looking for love,

Do we confine ourselves

To top ten lists of others' favorites,

Or are we hotly vulnerable

To the taboo thrill

Of looking in all the wrong places?

The answer need not even be spoken,

Neither with love nor lust nor art,

Neither with what others create

Nor with what we make ourselves.

What we love,

What stirs us

To our highest and lowest moments,

Whether it involves

Sound or sight or words or ideas

Or the touch of another body,

Whether it is ornamented and accessorized

Or narrative or naked

Or humorous or monstrous,

Is nobody else’s call.

Can the entire process

Be reduced and distilled

To the synesthesia

That has been engineered in our genes

By generations of aromatic aphrodisiacs,

Cool, syncopated movie trailer themes,

And gender-transcendent, bare-bellied,

Masturbation-miming rockers?

We will love where they lead us,

What they make us think or feel,

Who they make us into,

Who they bring into our bedrooms:

What are you wearing?

What are you reading?

What’s on your night table next to the Chivas?

Wanna screw?

Maybe you will when I tell you my last book read!

Are you you, or “The Brand Called You?”

Is that a swoosh on your manuscript

Or are you just happy to see me?

We are the Indie Nation:

You and me and Bukowski and Eggers and Robert Redford.

I’ll tag your novel if you’ll buzz about my poem,

And Google will send us both a micro-payment.

Stephen Windwalker