Thursday, December 8, 2011

Should We Stay Or Should We Go

with Kindle Lending?

It seemed so obvious it was worth a shot and then when I got there I said no.  Since I am not writing in a popular genre--suspense, paranormal, predictable romance, I started to say "what's in this for me?"  I tie up my books for 3 months and watch people borrow Joe Konrath, Karen McQuestion and fill in the blank.  Some people are going to do great.  More of us would do great if it wasn't restricted to 1 book per month.

The Fire comes with a month free of Amazon Prime which you need in order to borrow a book.  So you have the 1 month and the 1 book.  Why waste it on someone you've never heard of?  Fling with 2 5 star reviews instead of John Locke with 250 5 star reviews (whatever).  It doesn't make psychological sense.

So that's why I said no thank you for the moment.  There's no point in tying up my books for 3 months when I don't have a good feeling about this.  Amazon offers you a 5 day free promo over the course of 90 days?  Like you're kidding me?  What good is that?  Am I missing what's great about it?  You do it now and what about on St. Patrick's day.  You have nothing in March.  You have nothing in February.  You have nothing in January.
You sit there with your hands tied 1 of a million books available.  Is it still for sale?  I'm lousy at reading contracts so I'm sure I missed a lot.  Okay so if it's for sale then I guess as people are scrolling through all these other books they'll make note of you.  So being in this program offers us greater visibility?

My crystal ball is cloudy at the moment so I have no idea how this is all going to shake-out.  You can always sign up later.

Update-ish:  I made a hash of my bookshelf at Amazon, enrolling then backing out of the lending deal.  I was just checking up to see if everything was back to right and decided to go thru the foreign sites.  This is so unbelievable to me.  The verrine book sold a copy in France!  I had to send for a book on verrines from France to research for this book.  There are a ton of them there (none here).  But apparently not digital.  I hope she thinks I did a good job.  It's more of an American take on verrines than a strictly French perspective.

No comments: