Kindle: the Unexpected Game-Changer

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kindle, kindle touch

A few stolen moments, sitting on a smoothed out piece of driftwood by the lake, reading my kindle and thoroughly enjoying the sunshine--particularly since the device's display isn't competing with it, but is instead clear and easy to read.

Okay, so the title of the post makes it seem like it’s about five years too late. We all know the Kindle has changed all kinds of games and–for now, at least–is keeping up with the game-changing action, in ways that are sometimes more freeing for authors (in relation to gatekeeper/publishers) and in other ways more restrictive and monopolistic (in relation to choice of distribution channels and options for selling).

Such topics have been discussed exhaustively. So instead, I propose to add to the large body of posts about the personal process of acquiring and using an e-reader–and in particular, a Kindle.

Why the Kindle?

As a Canadian, I did feel a little disloyal. The Kobo touch is a pretty slick little device, and was at the vanguard in its particular form factor. But none of my research (including exploring the device itself on a couple of occasions) seemed to reveal a function that would allow me to make annotations and highlights and then export them and use them elsewhere.* For me, this was important, because I wanted to be able to load up my writing on the device and read it on the kind of interface a consumer would experience–but with the added ability to mark it up so that if I found typos, or wanted to delete things or make notes to self about revisions, then I could do that easily and quickly. Kindle could do this, and nothing I could determine about the Kobo allowed for it (nor Sony etc.).

KDP Select Update: The Power of Free*

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free promos, increased sales, kdp select

So, I obviously hadn’t been leveraging the synergies sufficiently when I posted my last KDP update. In the wake of reading a piece about the power of free and how it worked spectacularly well for the author, I thought I’d best give it a try.

Warning: this post is not necessarily all that engaging for most readers. It’s mainly aimed at fellow writers who are trying to decide whether or not to do the KDP Select program and drills down into the fairly dry details of my little experiments.

And, for those of you writers who have read many many of these KDP Select follow up posts, I’d say the three things that make these figures a little different, at least to the other reports that I’ve read on KDP Select results are:

1) I’ve got several books in multiple genres;

2) I’ve tried the promo on different days in different ways, with vastly differing results;

3) the improvement in sales has been palpable and gratifying, but not the kind of mind-blowing figures others seem to have experienced.

KDP Select: an Update on the Big Bucks for Exclusivity Proposition

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kdp select

Some of you have already read my previous post, expressing the KDP Select formulation in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma–as well as the update on that post, which was the result of Catana, one of my writer friends, pointing out that the Kindle Library only allows for one book download per month. The basic recap, for those who have not read them, is that with the one book per month limit for Amazon Premium members, it seems pretty clear that for an author like me: 1) whose price point is below a certain threshold, and 2) who isn’t particularly high profile as a writer, opting into KDP Select–and thereby having to go exclusive with my listings and remove them from Smashwords and all its distribution outlets–probably isn’t worthwhile (conceptually it’s upsetting to have to do anyway, but my hypothesis was that even at the level of revenue, it wasn’t worth it). Most Amazon Premium members, in order to make their membership worth it, would more likely use their “free” signout on someone far higher profile, whose books are significantly more expensive. I know I would.

I also decided to test this, by enrolling several of my contemporary romance novels, published under a different pseudonym, which I hadn’t gotten around to listing on Smashwords. I was just curious to see how they did, and since they were already exclusive by default, I wasn’t losing much. I also figure that for those of you who are wondering how well this might have worked for you, I can at least provide some kind of baseline.

So, the basics: I enrolled four books. Three of them were 50K word contemporary romances at $1.99 each. The fourth book is a 3 in 1 bundle of the individual books for $2.99.

ASIDE: Those of you familiar with the royalty scheme at Amazon (books priced at $2.98 and lower, as well as books priced above $9.99, only provide the author with a 35% royalty off the cover prices, while books in the sweet spot range between $2.99 and $9.99 provide the author with a 70% royalty) will note that I’m getting exactly the same royalty by selling all three books for $2.99 as I am for selling each book at $1.99–even though the reader is paying double. I wanted to see to what extent people would go for the half price value bundle versus the individual books (fyi, they mostly go for the value bundle, which sells about as well as An Immodest Proposal, my top seller as Kathryn Anthony, but I still do get the occasional single sale).

I enrolled them on the date of my previous post or thereabouts–namely, around the 10th of December.

So–what kind of big buck$$$ did I rake in as a result of enrolling these books into the KDP Select, exclusivity deal that prevents me from listing them elsewhere? How many eager readers downloaded my indie-priced books for free, thereby making me eligible for some as-yet unknown portion of the KDP Select Fund pie? 

KDP Select: The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Tags

Amazon Prime, kdp select, prisoner's dilemma

UPDATE: as Catana points out in the comments, the analysis below is partly premised on a mistaken assumption that I made (and which Amazon is not in any rush to correct in their KDP Select Terms of Use). Namely, I’d assumed that the library consists of unlimited loans. But it doesn’t. It’s one per month. So, most users are likely to use their one “borrow” for books that are more expensive (~$6.50 or higher, to make it worth the $79 annual fee)–NOT books at indie pricing. This means that we’re still where we were before, but many indies (esp. people like me who aren’t in the US, and so are less likely to check the Amazon Prime Lending Library’s terms) won’t realise this, and will opt in under a false assumption. Tsk, Tsk, Amazon. No doubt it was just an oversight. I’ve left the rest of the post intact, because depending on your pricing and your popularity, this analysis might still be relevant in helping to determine whether you will opt in or not. /update

In Homer’s The Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis were fearsome sea monsters who existed in sufficient proximity to each other that any sailors who wished to brave those waters had to sail very carefully indeed, between the two horrors. More contemporary speculations posit Scylla as a rock shoal and Charybdis as a whirlpool.

And at the moment, I find myself to be caught between the two of them. To break it down:

Learning to fly

The best metaphor I can think of, at least off the top of my head, is that we’re clustered at the edge of a cliff, during an earthquake. The leading edge of the cliff’s underside is eroded, and the cracks are starting to show, in the ground beneath our feet.

This is the publishing industry.

Those who cling, not just to print itself, but more importantly, to the business models that arose out of exploiting the efficiencies of print–contracts and pricing based on overhead, printing costs, distribution, etc.–are at the edge of that cliff. The seismic shift in the industry is going to crumble the ground right out from under them–is going to, and is presently doing just that.