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.
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