Saturday, November 5, 2011

Experiment in Freeness

I decided to publish Bad Apple 1 on Smashwords at $0, only in epub and not for distribution.  How long would it take Amazon to drop the Kindle price, I wondered.

Since yesterday afternoon 42 copies have been downloaded and it's been linked in 5 libraries.  I also raised the price of 2 and 3 to $1.99 at Amazon and BN.  We'll see how long I last thru this experiment.

Amazon has announced a Kindle lending library.  If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow books to read.  Someone said this leads the way to a subscription service like Netflix where you would borrow books.
How do authors get paid in this case?  Someone said something about advertisements.  If it's like the minimalistic adverts on Hulu, I'm not opposed to that.  I'm sure it doesn't apply to indie books anyway.

I'll confess what a big/huge/major sticking point for me is re: any fantasy type novel.  It's when I can't pronounce the main character's name.  My reaction is "Screw this" and I drop the book.  How do you pronounce Riyira?
I'm sure I'm missing out on a lot (actually I should be honest and admit I'm not at all convinced of that).  Maybe I just don't have the fantasy gene.

No comments: