Been Busy Writing and Such

I haven’t spent a whole lot of time blogging.  Also, when I spiffed up my site and turned a few pages to posts, which I thought were blocked from my RSS feed–they weren’t, and jacked up the feed.  Oh well.  I will be emphasizing my newsletters and putting my content there instead of on this blog, which will be more off-the-cuff musing like I’m going to do now.

I’m just plugging away, trying to either get the words ready for consumption or simply just get them out there.  I dug into the dregs of my old electronic files.   I found a fairly large chunk of a historical I wrote ages ago, reread it, and it wasn’t that bad.  A historical!  I’d forgotten about it.  Maybe I’ll finish it. I’ll get a few other opinions.  I have always been ahead of my time [heh] and it’s somewhat paranormal, written before paranormals got huge.  Some of my old files were unrecoverable, and most I had to convert from Word Perfect format.  Remember when we used Word Perfect?  That was back in the days of Netscape Navigator, when almost everybody was on AOL.  We had scrolling marquees, animated gifs and shiny website hit counters right there at the bottom of the page.  Those were the days.  Pretty soon we might look back and remember when everybody used WordPress and Amazon was king.

Because we are in a new Google era now, WordPress too, and Amazon.  It seems every time I turn around, people are debating about the KDP Select program Amazon just rolled out. The news traveled near instantly.  Amazon sent out letters to its huge database  of KDP users and changed the back end to make it easy to sign books up to the new program.  The deal is that you have to pledge 90 day exclusivity of your book to Amazon and they will let it be in its lending library and have five days of free pricing.  Authors get paid when the book is borrowed, exactly how much we have yet to see.

This, right on the heels of Amazon’s app where you scan what you want in a store and go back to buy it on Amazon for a discount is a kick in the teeth to competitors.  Mark Coker of Smashwords immediately wrote a WTF post.

I love Amazon’s Prime program myself, but the free monthly book is way down there compared to the free movie streaming.  I bought Amazon Prime because of the free shipping–it pays for itself quickly.  Prime users are going to borrow the higher priced best sellers they’d have to shell out $9,99 for anyways, not the 99 cent or $2.99 book by a lesser known indie author.  The free pricing will get folks to download, but five days isn’t much.  Also, I notice that folks busy downloading a lot of free books from unknown authors often aren’t getting around to reading them.

I plan to write some nonfiction, maybe under a pseud.  That’s what I’d price at a higher amount and put on the KDP program.  I think downloads would depend on how much people vibed to the content, more than if I’m a familiar author to them. I prefer to keep my fiction nonexclusive.  Not everybody has or wants a Kindle.

Amazon provides the bulk of my e-book sales, by far.  The Nook is popular as is B&N, but they simply don’t seem to be the market monster Amazon is.  Without Smashwords, B&N and the rest, the little option that authors have for Amazon autonomy will be lost, in things such as pricing.  Looking at the way the wind blows now, it’s easy to see that Amazon likes to call the shots on certain things.  Once it’s positioned to call more and more shots, I think it will, and exclusive Amazon authors will eventually lose the autonomy they’ve gained by the recent publishing changes. But they might make more money. Right now it’s like calling a coin just tossed into the air.

All in all, I think it’s a good thing.  I call Amazon a monster, but New York was freakin’ Godzilla as far as authors were concerned.  Note the word was.  Practically overnight, everything has changed.  Authors have another option. I like the idea of the public calling the shots as to the books that make it.  Darcie Chan, a Amazon bestseller, was profiled in the Wall Street Journal.  Her success came after New York turned her non-genre book down flat.  She spent around $1000 for online marketing, but her traction was a result of readers reading her book, liking it, and spreading the word.  Period. That’s the way it should be.

I’m trying to get Heart’s Desire free on Amazon.  Readers can help by clicking the tab on the product page that asks them if they found a better price elsewhere and stating they can get it free on Smashwords, Kobo, Diesel E-books, Sony and the like.  I have to wait for the free Smashwords price to trickle down to the other retailers.   It takes ages.  Then, I have to wait for the price difference to come to Amazon’s attention.

There’s a couple Romanceland reviews out there of authors who don’t write white heroines, a rarity.  Lena Matthews gets a B from Dear Author, Beverly Jenkins, an A from Smart Bitches.

I can’t recommend Ernessa’s 32 Candles enough.  It’s woman’s fiction, but has a definite romance vibe.  I’ve been writing so much, I haven’t been reading a lot.  I will settle down with Seressia Glass’s paranormal next.

Did I mention the entire Eastman Family and Friend’s series is up on Amazon and Smashwords?  Too Hot is cogitating on B&N, should be up too shortly.