Slashdot Mirror

It would be a dumb move if that was the only financial pool authors could draw from - but it's not; it's only there for the lending/borrowing. Sales via the normal channels are still sales that you obtain money from directly - it's the best of both options. The KDP-Select "free" days are a nice addition, it gives you a chance to release a new book with minimal barriers of adoption - though the uptake rates are dropping significantly from the original "tens of thousands per day" when KDP-Select free was announced - however, it's still useful for a product launch.

We recently moved a couple of books to KDP-Select strictly for the free days and it has helped (easier than managing coupons!), though after 90 days we're putting our books back to normal KDP and then sharing the eBook editions out via LightningSource/INGRAM.

http://elitadaniels.com/ - Fantasy - Vampires - Zombies

Except the big gain of the KDP-Select, the free days as you say, are already starting to lose its impact. We see each other on KB (Hi, I'm MrPLD) and we can see it falling away in front of us. We pulled ~2000 freebies last week over 3 days, but when it originally came out people were getting 10,000+, now more and more people are only seeing 50~200 freebies.

Sooner or later, we're all going to have to go back to the traditional way of getting our readership, we're running out of "pricing as marketing" strategies, unless we want to start paying readers $1/book (and yes, it will happen, I'm fairly sure).

I'm off the auto-renewal after 90 days on KDP, the free days were a nice thing, but I do wonder in some ways if Amazon isn't trying to make the independents destroy their own kind with this strategy [cynical hat on].

http://elitadaniels.com/

I'd be very curious to see what people thought about the similarities of these two images -

http://elitadaniels.com/images/zombie-cover.jpg

vs

http://www.criticnic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Passion-by-Lauren-Kate.jpg

Because while we did our artwork first, the Lauren Kate one has been more widely publicised. Every month we get people messaging us asking "Why did you copy the Passion cover? Epic fail!".

The only common element between these two book covers is that the central stock art image of the girl.

Hey, many thanks for that :D We've been quiet lately because we're building up to our latest release "My Boyfriend is a Zombie"... YA romance... already having fun with an Apple-vs-Samsung wrangle over the cover artwork ( http://elitadaniels.com/images/zombie-cover.jpg vs http://www.criticnic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Passion-by-Lauren-Kate.jpg ) ... fun fun fun ...

It's already a nightmare trying to cover all the bases as a book writer/publisher, adding more to the mix just makes things more annoying, confusing and likely to pop up crazy formatting mistakes. The forums are already filled with people having enough grief getting a decent looking eBook generated (though I blame them for using MSWord... tsk tsk *hugs LaTeX*). A lot of us would LOVE it if Amazon simply supported ePub, though that would in many ways erode their empire, at least in their view. Right now a lot of publishers are pushing out mobi / ePub / pdf as the main 3 formats to support, at least along with print publishing, unfortunately even within ePub there's a few quirks and you have to generate slightly different versions for iPad, Nook and 'everything else'. ... reminds me of the bloomen browser wars at their worst ... and to think I switched to doing novels / writing / publishing to try avoid this sort of crap *maniacal laugh*.

http://elitadaniels.com/

This is something that has had a lot of discussion in the past on various e-book forums. The publisher sets the price, not Amazon. When you submit a book for resale on Amazon they take their 75% or 32% cut depending on what you select (books under $2.99 are generally only eligible for the 75% cut).

A lot of independents have been working the 99c book sale pricing but lately we've been finding that it's just about impossible to make any sort of sane living at those levels, so we're gravitating more to the $1.99 and $2.99 brackets, sometimes pushing to $4.99 if it's a book from a popular series (Amanda Hocking, David Dalglish etc).

I'd be very surprised if any action is taken against Amazon, while they do have a strong hold on the distribution market of eBooks they aren't (yet!) controlling the publishing prices.

Most of us are just self-publishers in the eBook market, it's almost like the whole OpenSource software movement all over again.

http://elitadaniels.com/

At least a lot of non-Big6 writers are publishing without DRM on Amazon (and other platforms).

There's a new thread almost weekly on places like Kindleboards.com about DRM and it still always goes the same way though, lots of arguing on either side. In the end at least, more and more writers are explicitly choosing NOT to DRM.

We have several books out under a few pen-names, none of them are DRM'd and we're not the only ones ( http://elitadaniels.com/ ).

Gharr... stupid AC login (or lack thereof).

We're an independent publishing/writing team here, everything still goes through multiple edits, proofings and all the same stuff, it's essential to edit (doing your own editing is like testing your own software - it does not work!).

It costs anything between $1000 and $5000 to get a started after you've paid for editing/coverart/PoD-setup but it's a small upfront cost to pay compared to what you lose when a publisher just sits on your work.

The tide has begun to swing around - with no shortage support and cooperative marketing groups/forums on the net now the publishers really are going to have to fight to get a hold of the next group of big writers. The thing is, if the publisher is already trying to make you a sweet deal, then it's a deal you don't actually need.

Paul - http://elitadaniels.com/