Don’t Panic: KDP Select still works, you just might have to work it a little differently
I haven’t posted for awhile on any topic, including on indie publishing, but that is because I have been working steadily on writing Bloody Lessons, the third book of my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series (if you want an update on my progress go check out my facbook page.) I also felt I had pretty much exhausted what I had to say on the ins and outs and pros and cons of using KDP Select. However, with the change in Amazon’s rules for Associates, a whole discussion has erupted about what this means for indie authors. See this balanced review of some aspects of the discussion. See, in addition, this good overview of the issues around free as a selling strategy and Amazon. One result of this change and subsequent posts about it is I have had a number of requests to comment Read more…
Why DIY Publishing is not a Dead End
This morning I read a post by Anderson Porter about a four-piece article written a few weeks in the Boston Phoenix by Eugenia Williamson, entitled The dead end of DIY publishing. I had read the Williams piece earlier, and the more than fifty comments, which in my opinion had done a more than adequate job of pointing out its problems. But when Anderson seemed to accept much of her analysis, and labeled the comments as “the usual pitchfork-waving, spittoon-dinging dismissals, I found myself spending the rest of the morning writing a reply. When I finished, I thought I ought to expand abit, and post what I had to say as a blog, thereby at least justifying a morning lost to writing on my next book. So here goes: I am a DIY self-published author, who found Williamson’s piece upsetting because Read more…
Why I don’t worry when people read my books for free: No DRM, Free Promotions, and Free Returns
Sometimes it just feels like several strands of conversations in cyberspace all come together to force me to write about certain topics. This happened to me this weekend when I read a post on SheWrites bemoaning Amazon’s liberal return policy for ebooks and then saw this same issue, along with a rehashing benefits of the KDP Select program, being discussed on the Yahoo group site, MurderMustAdvertise. And finally I read a post by Alan Baxter on Publetariat about DRM, entitled “I’m an author, take my stuff for free.” In all three cases, the arguments seemed to revolve around whether or not it is good for authors when people can get their books for free. So, enough is enough, universe, guess it’s time for me to come out squarely on the side of Free. When I think about DRM, using free Read more…
KDP Select Free Promotion: Discoverability Experiment, Part One
Ok, I confess I stuck the term discoverability into the title since it seems to be the new marketing buzz word. As a professional historian who has spent most of her life in the past, I am getting rather a kick out of riding the wave of change within publishing — even using new words for old concepts like marketing, promotion, and publicity. In this blog I have frequently posted about these issues, the importance of branding, the possibilities of blog tours, and the use of tags and categories, all describing what I have learned about how to sell books as an indie author. The bottom line of all those posts has been about how an author can get potential readers to discover their books, when they don’t have the same opportunities available to traditionally published authors (publishing house book Read more…
Why Self-Published Authors Know Best
I ran across this quote today, from a post that historical romance novelist Courtney Milan wrote this week as an open letter to agents. The traditional information storehouse has been inverted. Right now, the people who know the most about self-publishing are authors, and trust me, the vast majority of authors are aware of that. For the first time, authors are having questions about their careers, and their agents are not their go-to people. While not having an agent, in fact having decided in the fall of 2009 not to look for an agent for my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I can’t really speak to this group’s effectiveness in this new publishing climate. Neither to I want to go into whether or not I think that the decision on the part of some agents to begin to publish their Read more…
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