Rich Adin whose blog (An American Editor) which is largely about the work of book editors often goes off sideways and writes on related and unrelated topics that interest him on his blog , and always in an interesting and thought provoking way, so I often repost articles he has written as I feel they are of interest to you guys too.

He also is my guardian angle in the sense that he corrects my more stupid mistakes as well, a very useful and helpful characteristic of his I find.

Anyhow, here he ponders on the “free ebook” phenomena, and as always reaches some interesting conclusions.

So, read on, the word is with Rich.

———————————————————————

Every day I find another traditional publisher is offering free ebooks. Amazon has made a business out of offering free ebooks. And let’s not forget the many indie authors who are offering their ebooks for free.

What is this doing to the market for ebooks?

I admit that I may be atypical in my buying and reading habits, but I do not think so. I have watched my to-be-read (TBR) pile grow dramatically in the past couple of months from fewer than 300 ebooks to more than 1,100 ebooks. If I obtained not another ebook until I read everything in my TBR pile, at my current average rate of reading two to three ebooks per week, I have enough reading material for between 367 and 550 weeks or 7 and 10.5 years.

How has this impacted my buying of ebooks? Greatly! In past years, I bought ebooks regularly. Granted, I was buying mainly indie and low-priced, on-sale traditionally published ebooks, rarely spending more than $6 for an ebook, but I was spending money.

That has all changed. Now I rarely spend any money on an ebook. In the past three months, the only ebook I paid for was Emma Jameson’s Blue Murder, which is her sequel to Ice Blue (which I reviewed in On Books: Ice Blue), at $4.99. Otherwise, all I have done is download free ebooks.

Read full story »

Guest writer Phyllis Zimbler Miller discusses the whats and hows of the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Program, (KDP) and I hope clears up a number of misunderstandings about this self-publishing program that Amazon offers to writers.So the word is with Phyllis:-

—————————————————————————-

Advice for Participation on the KDP Select Program Taken With a Pinch of Salt

Get out your salt shaker! You will need to take the following advice from me with a grain of salt, the same as advice from any other writer or blogger.

I am in favor of Amazon’s KDP Select program, but I think you should make your own decision.

Let’s start with some basics.

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is for everyone – there is no exclusivity required. (As of now, basically you get 70% royalties if your book is priced between $2.99 and $9.99 while you get 35% royalties if priced below or above these numbers. As with everything involving agreements, carefully read the fine print for other costs or charges.)

KDP Select is NOT for everyone – there is exclusivity required for 90-day periods (you can keep renewing) for your ebooks. Note that the physical books of these ebooks are NOT required to be exclusively on Amazon. (This program was first offered in November/December 2011.)

Read full story »

I came across this rather neat “How to do it” guide just now, and thought I would share it with you.

It is a clear and easy to follow step by step instruction on creating your own ebook for your kid(s) to enjoy, written by a Mum who seemed to be having trouble finding ebooks that were suitable for her daughter, who isn’t into the more normal form of kids ebooks ( as she puts it, she is not big on Fairy Princess Barbie books).

Anyhow, I read this and immediately wanted to share it, as it seemed to me to be such a good idea. It does require a certain knowledge of how to work with a computer, but if you can manage that, you can then easily enough produce a whole series of custom made ebooks for your kids to enjoy. Seems such a good idea to me.

So, read on and get creative.

————————————————————————————————

How to make your own ebook by Jess (Link to her blog at the bottom of this post):

Tabby is getting to the point where she needs more to read than just sight words, but finding her books that are age appropriate and worth reading – let’s just say I’m not big on Fairy Princess Barbie books – is pretty darn hard. So when I saw Playdough to Plato’s great idea of making your own Easy Reader books, I knew I had to give it a go. I thought of going with the paper model, maybe putting it together in InDesign and printing it out, but then I thought that maybe I could make a Kindle Book! I’m techie, how hard could it be?? Turns out, happily, not very hard. Here’s how you do it.

A couple of notes: first of all, I did this on my Windows based PC. It looks like it would work for a Mac, but I don’t know and I don’t have a way to test. Also, from what I’ve read, the resulting file would work on a variety of eReaders, but since I only have a Kindle Fire, that’s all I’ve tested the file on. This is the method that worked for me and I’ve had no problems with it, but mileage may vary, etc. I am happy to have any feedback from you and I will try to help if I can!

Read full story »

XinXii and Mondial Media, have just announced that they are going to work together to bring indie writers and self-publishers to the world of mobile phones.

They have agreed to bring ebooks that are published via XinXii to the platforms that Monia Media supply with other forms of media already. What this means in practice is that from now on, authors who publish via XinXii can choose to have their ebooks made available on a number of the world wide platforms that Mondia Media already supply, thus their ebooks can appear on Vodafone live!, T-Mobile T-Zones and Sony Mobile PlayNow.

So anyone who uses any of these systems will be able to browse through the ebooks that XinXii offer via this deal. Obviously a great opportunity for all you indie writers out there to really get your ebooks seen and purchased by readers all over the world, and a real advance on what XinXii already offers you in distribution terms.

Read full story »

The well proven sales technique of giving people coupons so that they can download your ebook for free has been shown to be a very good way of generating interest and ultimately, sales of your ebook.

XinXii a German Digital self publishing house has now added this to their support tools for indie authors.

As Dr. Andrea Schober – Founder and CEO of XinXii puts it in a press release:

“We are extending the possibilities for indie authors and self-publishers with the introduction of coupon codes. From the platform for publishing and marketing your books on your own XinXii author page to free of charge conversion to ePub and mobi format and the distribution to leading international E-Book shops – we do everything possible to constantly improve and simplify self-publishing and to offer an efficient and effective all round solution. The authors are provided with an effective tool to consolidate their individual marketing activities with the distribution of their books on XinXii. Moreover, the new tool helps independent authors to act more professional, and it facilitates their success“.

The idea is that you offer a particular ebook to potential readers for free for a limited time, in the hope that they will read it, enjoy it and tell others about your ebook. Apparently they have created a system for doing this which is extremely simple, requiring no programming knowledge, simply a couple of mouse clicks and it is done.

Loss leaders, an ancient and proven sales technique.

Read full story »