Isolation has been giving me some time to rethink my whole \u201cbusiness” of writing. I can\u2019t stop writing, but whether or not I can get the resulting stories out to potential readers is another matter. Many projects that I thought I would be able to get into paper copies I could sell have stalled out. It doesn\u2019t help that practically all streams of income that my wife and I relied on have dried up. I can\u2019t, in good conscience, spend the money for cover art and pre-publication charges that would enable me to produce a book that I can\u2019t sell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I\u2019m a little too set in my ways to tackle a Kickstarter project when I don\u2019t have the necessary mailing list volume that would be necessary to make that work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I\u2019m experimenting with ways to increase my ebook sales volume. The standard method seems to include advertising a book for free, in order to build readership, hoping that some of those people would go buy other books in the series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And now I run up against Amazon the monopoly. I sell my ebooks through five venues; Kindle, Barns & Noble, Apple, Google, and Kobo. Four of those use the ePub version, Kindle uses its own variant. If I want to sell a Kindle book for zero cost, I have to sign up to be Kindle exclusive and take all ePub versions off the market. Since not everybody uses Kindle, that leaves a portion of my readership out in the cold. I\u2019m not going to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I experimented, using the blog-recommended method of setting the non-Kindle versions to zero and letting the Amazon computers notice that and price match the Kindle version to zero as well. Unfortunately, Amazon either changed their policy or just has it in for me. When I tried this on Star Time<\/a> a while back, they instead just took the Kindle version completely off the market. You couldn\u2019t buy it at all. Admitting defeat I put it back to its normal price and it came back on line. So, due to Amazon\u2019s policy, not only am I prohibited from putting my book out for free on Kindle, I can\u2019t put it for free anywhere else, or Amazon takes it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This time, I\u2019m setting Star Time<\/a>, the first book of the Project Saga <\/a>to 99cents, on all ebook markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kindle<\/a> B&N<\/a> Apple<\/a> Google <\/a>Kobo<\/a>. And Paper copies from me at normal price<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll be advertising this here and on Twitter and Facebook and anywhere else I can think of that\u2019s cheap. (I can\u2019t afford an advertising budget either.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Please spread the word to any of your friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Isolation has been giving me some time to rethink my whole \u201cbusiness” of writing. I can\u2019t stop writing, but whether or not I can get the resulting stories out to potential readers is another matter. Many projects that I thought I would be able to get into paper copies I could sell have stalled out.… Continue reading Promoting Star Time Ebooks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":110,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/ST-2inch.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4t90x-146","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4098"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4102,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4098\/revisions\/4102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}