So I'm not going to pretend that I know enough about self-publishing yet to say that I can fully appreciate the announcement of KDP Select this morning. But in a nutshell, holy shit! :) So you can put up a title exclusively at Amazon to be lent to Amazon Prime members, yet still get paid a percentage of a monthly pot of a half-million dollars. AND you can choose 5 days every 90-day period to make that title free--thus stimulating downloads by non-Prime members? Amazing. Of course, this will work best for those who have other titles that the above will generate interest in, so it might be a tad early for me. And I'm sure that even this will not sit right with some authors, based on the never-ending debate about pricing, lending and so on. But I'm certainly going to be watching this closely, that's for sure. Once I have a larger backlist available--I'm thinking a year from now--this could be huge. For others, this will be huge already.
About the only downside I see at the moment is that it requires that the titles are not available elsewhere in the same format, though if I remember paper books are okay. Thus you can't sell from B/N, Smashwords and so on, or even your own website. For many authors who have books out through other available channels, I suspect it would be more trouble than it's worth to take down titles, but for somebody who's just about to put out a new one, this Christmas gift came early.
Very, very interesting day.
I have a number of titles out, yes, but it's relatively easy to unpublish them. For example, I have decided to include "Shackled" in KDPS, since it isn't really selling anywhere despite it's excellent reviews. Hopefully KDPS will get it more noticed. I unpublished from B&N and it was done within an hour - Smashwords within a minute (though I don't know about the extended network, but truth be told, I wasn't particularly included there, as I don't have ISBNs.)
ReplyDeleteIt's an interesting development, to say the least. In a regular library, every book is checked out at least once since it's free. Will that be the case for KDPS? Who knows... :)
YA: Emergence
Fiction: Shackled
Shorts: Disappear, Hooded, Incompatible