New Gold City

Source: Shitao, "Don't ever let go of my hand......." Last week I reported that I was doing an experiment on the Kindle Direct Publishing promo system. I wanted to see what would happen if I didn't use the multi-pronged marketing apparatus that's set up around KDP free books. See the blog entry for that HERE . The results are in and not so happy. Over a two day period, Saturday and Sunday, I received 230 downloads of my novel, Beyond the Will of God . Two weeks earlier, I'd pushed on the marketing apparatus hard and received over 10,000 downloads in three days.  This was not a controlled experiment. The biggest wild card in it is that the poor showing last weekend may have been because those fishing for free books were saturated from my offering just two weeks earlier. If that's so, it makes me doubly wonder about readers in search of freebies. Maybe it's a smaller group than we realize. Or maybe they don't use Amazon's standard Kindle Free lis...

I recently received two reader reviews on stories of mine available at Amazon's Kindle Store. Both reviewers were rather unhappy. That's fine. I know that fiction, like most everything else, is a matter of taste. Not everyone is going to like everything they encounter in life -- from movies to food to music. The experience of bad (sad?) reviews got me thinking about the Indie Author Experience and how different it is from the status quo, old school legacy publisher experience. As an indie writer I can edit and change my stories in a matter of a few hours and have them re-posted by the next day. Writers beholden to old school publishing houses (even small independent ones) are locked into their published content -- even electronically -- for a very long time. The process of bringing a novel or memoir or whatever to publication requires the extended efforts of many different people (a team, really) over a year to eighteen months...or more. Once a product is deemed complete, it g...