So this morning I woke up to an email from Amazon to me as a KDP author asking me to send an email to Hachette basically beating the Amazon drum and spouting the party line. I’m sorry…what? While I agree with Amazon as a consumer–I think traditionally published ebooks are often priced way too high–I […]
Amazon
Midweek #ROW80 Check-in and Amazon’s Going To Monetize Fanfic?
So the Hammer and Gobsmacker are still working their way through Riven. I’m not bleeding too badly yet. There’s nothing being mentioned that I didn’t kind of expect. While I’m waiting on that, I’m up to my ears in historical research, dipping into all kinds of interesting stuff, figuring out what I want to keep, what […]
Why Don’t Etailers Let Us Really OWN Ebooks?
The first thing I saw when I logged into Twitter this morning was a Tweet about this article, which reports about Amazon wiping the entire library of a user without explanation or recourse–this would be after they swore they wouldn’t do so without being ordered to do so by a court following the completely ironic debacle of […]
The Dubious Value of the label “Kindle Best Seller”
First, an aside. A PSA for women who need jeans with room in the ass (without that big gap in the back). Zappos is currently having a sale on Levis and they HAVE THE 529 style jeans made for curvy women (the one the people at the Levi’s outlet told me last year were being […]
Thoughts on Amazon and India and the Future of KDP Select
Today I broke a 12 minute mile! 37:49 for 3.2 miles, thank you very much. It’s amazing what dropping the temperature 20 degrees will do for my performance. Ahem. Back to our regularly scheduled post. So I got notice in my email this morning that there’s a 70% royalty option for Amazon India. Of course […]
Say What You Want About Amazon’s Business Practices, But They Treat Customers Right
There’s a lot of time, effort, and press devoted to Amazon bashing in the book business. The Big 6 hate them for their loss leading sales practices designed to get their Kindles out the door and forced them into agency pricing. Other people (myself included) have been up in arms about KDP Select. Small business […]
Amazon You Confuse Me
So Susan’s been updating sales numbers this morning and asked me if I’d had many of my $2.99 + titles sell at the 35% rate. Say what? Honestly, I’d never looked. I have my spreadsheet where I enter total copies sold and it calculates the royalty for me. There’s a whole other page where I […]
Thoughts on KDP Select
So by now everybody who’s currently distributing through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (and everybody else who’s seen it on Twitter) has heard about this new KDP Select. I am not a fan. Is this a good business decision for Amazon? Sure. They’re doing something else to try to corner the market on ebooks. Since largely […]
Pondering The Freebie
One of the often lamented aspects of self publishing is that despite the myriad of awesome opportunities we have to publish digitally through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others, we do not have the opportunity to give stuff away for free like the publishing companies do. Or do we? Certainly we can’t list work for […]
Borders…Rethink your Stance in How You Deal With Self Publishers
So Borders filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. Anybody surprised? Anybody? No? Only Borders themselves? It’s been a long time coming. I knew it was gonna happen as soon as they announced their Bookbrewer program, which I commented on here. Really bad business decision on their part. Let’s assume that all self publishers are STUPID and […]