I have enrolled my novels, Questionable Interests and Taken Apart in KDP Select at Amazon. They will be available through the KDP Select Lending Library within the next few hours and will be available for the next 90 days, free of charge.
My novel, It Happens Every Day will be free for three days, beginning Friday and ending Sunday. As usual, I expect hundreds of readers to snap the book up during the promotion; just as they have the other books I have sold for no charge.
What is it about free stuff that turns people into penny-pinching curmudgeons? What real difference does it make if they spend $.99 cts on a book, as opposed to getting it for free? Maybe if I price my books at the rates dictated by the Agency Model, more readers would buy them. I mean, I know my books are good or so many people wouldn't have bought them over the past couple of years, and so many wouldn't be grabbing them when they are promoted as free. Are readers just that cheap? In the old days, Amazon let us price our books as low as $.49 cts, or even free for as long as we wanted. Then Jobs and the Big Five publishers came riding in on their tanks and forced Amazon to accept the Agency Model in pricing of books. Suddenly the Indie Publishers, (like me)were being passed over if our books were inexpensively priced and our work wasn't promoted by Amazon at all, while books published by the Big Five were taking front and center place in the promotions. At their exorbitant prices I might add.
Let's face it; e-books cost next to nothing to publish and the Big Five are charging as much for an e-book as they charge for a paperback, a trade-paperback, or even a hardcover copy. But some readers seem to equate quality with price. For that reason, I believe I will begin slowly increasing the prices of my books. I doubt that I will ever price them as much as a paperback, but perhaps readers will be more attracted to them if they cost more. Bless their contradictory natures.
Thank you,
Derek A. (Wings) Murphy
Author of Dolly Games, The Empty Heart, Congruencies and more.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
My writing style and content
Yes, I know my style is somewhat quirky in the placement of the ellipses, but they denote passage of time or change of location or pace.
As for the content; well, the content isn't always everyone's cup of tea. However, many of my readers have said that though the content wasn't what they were accustomed to and not what they usually looked for in a read; most of them have said that the story was compelling enough to draw them in and make them stick with the book.
Of course. You're asking why that should be. Well, I take great pains to make my characters as real as possible. If the character has another problem besides what I have presented him/her with in the story, then I also show him/her dealing with that other problem in order to develop the character fully. The only exceptions I have made to making the characters real is the short story, Wild Weasel Wilson and the Banshee Chicken. In it, I used stock, stereotyped characters, though the stereotypes my not have been recognized by many readers. The reason they were unrecognizable is because I knew a great many people in my youth who spoke and acted like Niedyck and his cronies. And the vernacular in which I wrote the story was one that I grew up hearing from family members and friends. It's very nearly another dialect of English, like the old Plug-a-ploo dialect spoken by the mountain-men of the 19th century.
Yes, I exaggerated the dialect. Why? you ask? Well, the story was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek, taunting leer at myself, my family and many of the friends I once knew. You would have had to grow up when and where I did, with the people I grew up with, to really get the story. Oh, sure, it's funny and at least one of my readers gets it; though she is of a later generation. She has known, and still knows, people who behave and speak as the characters in the story. So, yes, Wild Weasel Wilson and the Banshee Chicken lives on and re-echoes through the years, though the people who inspired the story are long dead or so respectable nowadays that they can't recognize themselves as the inspiration for the characters.
As for my other works; as I said, I make the characters as real as I can and give them problems to deal with that can be insurmountable. That they manage to emerge victorious makes them the heroes that I once read about as a boy in old Norse myths. Incredibly human and flawed, but willing and able to push their way through to the end and come out on top.
Thank you,
Derek A. Murphy
Author of Dolly Games, Congruencies and others.
As for the content; well, the content isn't always everyone's cup of tea. However, many of my readers have said that though the content wasn't what they were accustomed to and not what they usually looked for in a read; most of them have said that the story was compelling enough to draw them in and make them stick with the book.
Of course. You're asking why that should be. Well, I take great pains to make my characters as real as possible. If the character has another problem besides what I have presented him/her with in the story, then I also show him/her dealing with that other problem in order to develop the character fully. The only exceptions I have made to making the characters real is the short story, Wild Weasel Wilson and the Banshee Chicken. In it, I used stock, stereotyped characters, though the stereotypes my not have been recognized by many readers. The reason they were unrecognizable is because I knew a great many people in my youth who spoke and acted like Niedyck and his cronies. And the vernacular in which I wrote the story was one that I grew up hearing from family members and friends. It's very nearly another dialect of English, like the old Plug-a-ploo dialect spoken by the mountain-men of the 19th century.
Yes, I exaggerated the dialect. Why? you ask? Well, the story was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek, taunting leer at myself, my family and many of the friends I once knew. You would have had to grow up when and where I did, with the people I grew up with, to really get the story. Oh, sure, it's funny and at least one of my readers gets it; though she is of a later generation. She has known, and still knows, people who behave and speak as the characters in the story. So, yes, Wild Weasel Wilson and the Banshee Chicken lives on and re-echoes through the years, though the people who inspired the story are long dead or so respectable nowadays that they can't recognize themselves as the inspiration for the characters.
As for my other works; as I said, I make the characters as real as I can and give them problems to deal with that can be insurmountable. That they manage to emerge victorious makes them the heroes that I once read about as a boy in old Norse myths. Incredibly human and flawed, but willing and able to push their way through to the end and come out on top.
Thank you,
Derek A. Murphy
Author of Dolly Games, Congruencies and others.
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