Tag Archives: Nook

KDP Select, Authors and Giants

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giant stone carving of face with open mouth

Within a few hours of receiving the email from Amazon about KDP Select, I had a dozen more emails from clients and associates. Not the first time we’re startled by the stark light coming from O Most Powerful Amazon.

So off we march into two general camps.

Camp 1. Amazon-Centric Authors
You’ll find me here. It’s not that I don’t want my books available in all digital readers. I do. But I have only so much time to upload, groom and market on an individual platform. They all take time. Amazon provides such robust tools for authors, I haven’t made it through all the ways I can market in their system. My books are selling well in Kindle and I need every possible remaining hour to write. At this point I have zero investment in any other platform.

Camp 2. Other Authors
Members of the other camp tell a variety of stories. They may have gotten into Smashwords, or Nook, or the iBookStore, and be very invested in one or more of those platforms. If they are established anywhere besides Kindle, it’s going to be a tough decision to remove books from platforms and make them exclusive to KDP Select.

What I Did and Why
As soon as I grokked what Amazon was offering, I went straight to PubIt (that’s Nook) and removed the two books I had managed to load there. That took a big three minutes including taking a look at my sales record which, of course, was still at “zero” since I have not had time to groom or market for the Nook.

The Why
For 90 days I am more than glad to experiment. Do you get that the half a million dollars set aside for December is divvied out among the authors who participate in KDP Select? This is the first 90 day window. There will never be fewer authors participating than there are right now. I hope you don’t do what I did. Get it?

The Future
We’ll see how all this lending goes. Yes, there are huge ramifications floating in the Amazon-colored sky. What is happening to the whole lending system? I grew up in Carnegie libraries. What about Amazon’s ever-growing clout in publishing? Sure, it’s dangerous ground. Eyes wide open. Amazon is formidable and doesn’t seem to care much about rules. For now, however, they need authors, so I’m being fed well at the table of giants.

The Challenge
It’s the same challenge in every corner, people. To thrive today as authors, we need to be intrepid experimenters. We need to keep our eyes on our readership and our hearts in the next (ever better) book. As a lifelong writer, my experimental time and energy is going to the place where I find the biggest readership and the most respectable royalties. And for both of those, I say it’s about time.

Suzanna Stinnett

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Episodic Micronovel, you say?

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The episodic micronovel. What the heck is that?

In a discussion on Twitter with #OTable folks, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu and I came to prefer the term “micronovel” for short novels being prepared for digital readers. I write to a Kindle audience and secondarily to all the other e-readers. After publishing a few non-fiction ebooks, I’m now happily wading in the murky waters of a long-worked-on novel. But I’ve always wanted to publish it in a series. Huzzah! and Shazam! Now that option is a good one for both writer and reader. To describe the whole writing and reading experience of this type of thing, I’ve hit on “episodic micronovel” with Kevin’s nod of approval, which is meaningful to me.

Back to “What the heck is that?” Okay. You got the series part. The micro part means that it’s longer than an average short story but shorter than a novella. I could have used “novelette” but it just sounded so powdery. The micronovel episodes are going to come out about 70 pages each.

Form-wise, that’s long enough to sink into some characters and some painterly scenes. Long enough to reveal humans moving through the mandates of their minds and a few outcomes. Maybe even long enough for a reversal or three. We’ll see about that. Please join me in a crowd-sourced finger-crossing that I’ll meet my goal of publishing Episode 1 before the end of the year. I promise not to hurry.

Suzanna Stinnett

 

 

Writers who publish collaborate here

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einstein's desk

I’d like to invite you, writers who publish, to a new collaboration. We’re combining traditions which still work with innovations our readers are already using.

ePub is short for modern publishing. It’s also a format when you put the dot in front of it: .epub.

To get a good feel for the new landscape, I recommend you read Craig Mod’s article here:

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

I’ll be sharing some of his points as we journey.

Everything is a work in progress.

No matter what you think about writing or publishing, we are now in a changed world. This world awaits our input and our participation. I find it exhilarating — and profitable — in ways I barely imagined. Collaboration is key.

An ePub Club is a group of writers who support each other in a myriad of ways. We are helping each other grow more discoverable. We are using many shiny new tools and lots of good-ol’ traditional tools.

I’m Suzanna Stinnett, a book author and traveler in the epub world. I am the founder of Bay Area Bloggers Society, an O’Reilly Media-sponsored user group that meets locally to flatten out the learning curves of tech. We are forming ePub Clubs through the user group in our local area. You can do that too.

Suzanna Stinnett