Don't buy my book tomorrow!

If trying to introduce people to my books has taught me anything (it has), it's that you have to be willing to try new things, because you never know what's going to work.

When Amazon introduced the Kindle Select Program last fall, with the ability for authors to give their books away, I was skeptical. How would offering a book for free help me make money?

Well, after the program had gotten up and running, I saw it working out for the brave authors who tried it, so in February StoneHouse Ink and I gave it a whirl, making THE LONELY MILE free for three days, giving away 42,000 copies and launching a bestseller in the aftermath of the explosion. We sold eight thousand books in the three days following the promotion, and 12,000 total for the month of February, sending the book rocketing as high as #21 in Amazon's Paid store among all books, #2 in all Suspense Thrillers.

It was a ride I'll never forget, and one which I've yet to come close to duplicating, despite going back to the well and trying the free thing a few times in the months since.

The fact is, things are constantly changing in the wonderful world of publishing (as if you haven't heard that one before) - and especially selling - books.

All of which leads back to my initial point. Gotta try new things.

To that end, I decided to try something a little different with my new supernatural suspense novel, REVENANT. The way the Kindle Select Program works is the author or publisher gets five days of free promotion in exchange for making the work exclusive to Amazon for ninety days. I had three promotional days left for REVENANT approaching the end of the ninety day period, so I decided to use those three days during the last three days of the period, then re-up with Kindle Select, and use all five promo days at the beginning of the next ninety day period, giving me eight free days in a row.

Something different. Worth a try, right?

Well, there was a problem. Of course.

Turns out you can't schedule the free promo days with Amazon until after the new ninety day exclusivity period has begun, so there will be a break of one day between the three free promo days at the end of the old ninety day period and the five free promo days at the beginning of the new period.

That day is tomorrow. Saturday, September 29, 2012. The only day during the nine-day stretch from September 26 through October 4 when you will have to pay to download REVENANT.

I don't know if making my book free for eight days will do a damned thing for it or not, but I do know Medallion Press made FINAL VECTOR free for fifteen days at the end of August and we went on a pretty good sales run immediately following that promo. I figure it's worth a shot, but I will feel a little guilty if you buy the book tomorrow when you could have gotten it free the day before or the day after.

So please, spare me the feelings of guilt. Don't buy my book tomorrow. Get it free on Sunday. Or wait and buy it on October 5, if you prefer...

Caught in the middle: Amazon vs. IPG, Part II

Three months ago, I wrote a blog post detailing the contract battle between Amazon and IPG, book distributor for Medallion Press, publisher of my thriller, FINAL VECTOR. In that post I detailed the reasons why I found Medallion's support of IPG unacceptable. You can read the entire post here, if you're interested.

In the intervening three months, I asked for and received a reversion of rights letter from Medallion for FINAL VECTOR, leaving me free to pursue another publisher for the book or even, as was my intention, to publish the book myself.

I was just about at the point where I was ready to re-release FINAL VECTOR - I mean, literally, a week or so away - when I discovered IPG and Amazon have reached agreement on a new contract. This means Medallion's electronic titles (of which FINAL VECTOR was one) will once again be available for purchase at Amazon.

As I stated in my post back in February, the inability for readers to purchase my book at the world's largest ebook retailer was the reason why I wanted my rights to FINAL VECTOR back. Now that it will once again be available in that venue, I have withdrawn my request for a reversion of rights and plan to leave the book with Medallion Press.

Why would I do that? Why voluntarily stay with a publisher when I could release the book on my own and get a bigger cut of the royalties?

Here's why: Medallion Press showed faith in one of my novels when, to that point, no one else had. They believed in an unknown writer enough to offer me an advance and a path to publication at a time when self-publishing was still considered basically career suicide for a novelist.

I wanted all along to justify the faith they showed in me by earning out that advance through sales and then by making both of us - gasp! - money. I was well on my way to doing so when the rug was pulled out from under both myself and Medallion Press thanks to a contract dispute they had nothing to do with.

Am I crazy? Maybe. I have in my possession a letter enabling me to make more money from, and have more control over, a book that I wrote, and I am going to completely disregard that letter. If that makes me crazy, then so be it.

But some things are more valuable than the almighty dollar. Not many, I freely admit, but there are some. One of those is integrity. I like to think I have some. And I want to show Helen Rosburg and everyone at Medallion Press that they knew what they were doing when they signed me.

This is not to say I won't ever request my rights to FINAL VECTOR back from Medallion, but if I did it before earning out that advance I would always feel like I had walked away from a job before it was finished. My folks raised me better than that.

P.S. - Now that the book is available again, it is priced exactly where I was planning on pricing it - a very reasonable $3.99. If you've read and enjoyed my Amazon bestseller THE LONELY MILE, I think you might like to give this one a try as well...

Caught in the middle: Amazon vs IPG

A little over a year ago - February 10, 2011, to be exact - Medallion Press released my thriller, FINAL VECTOR, in ebook form. Sales were sluggish for most of that year, until finally beginning to hit their stride in early February of this year.

Following the phenomenal success of my next thriller, THE LONELY MILE, FINAL VECTOR began to develop a following, spending most of the first three weeks of this month hovering between #75 and #100 in Amazon's Political Thriller category. Sales, while not earth-shattering, were steady and increasing.

On February 19, I made the disturbing discovery that FINAL VECTOR was no longer available for sale at Amazon. Not wanting to overreact, and assuming there was some sort of computer glitch going on, I did nothing. The book remained unavailable the next day, and by the 21st, when it was STILL not available at Amazon, I informed a representative of my publisher, assuming the situation would be rectified.

It wasn't, and I have no idea when it will be, if ever.

Medallion Press uses IPG as their distributor, and when negotiations over the terms of a new contract between IPG and Amazon fell through, Amazon made the decision to pull all IPG ebook titles from their digital marketplace. According to IPG President Mark Suchomel, "Amazon.com is putting pressure on publishers and distributors to change their terms for electronic and print books to be more favorable toward Amazon...I have spoken directly with many of our clients and every one of them agrees that we need to hold firm with the terms we now offer."

I'm being advised by Medallion Press that they support IPG's decision and am being asked to support Medallion in the interest of fairness and balance. Here is my take: Not being privy to the details of the negotiation between IPG and Amazon, it would be presumptuous of me to support either side.

I am being asked to take on faith that Amazon's contract demands are unfair to IPG, and perhaps they are. But without seeing those demands I cannot know. Here is what I do know, though. Amazon is the largest ebook retailer in the world and they are growing, and any distribution agreement for one of my books that does not include Amazon is unacceptable to me. Period.

Amazon is perceived as the big, bad bully on the block, and if IPG, or anyone else, wishes to make a stand against them on principle, that is their right. More power to them. But their principled stand is affecting plenty of other people who may or may not wish to be affected.

I'm not here to shill for Amazon. I don't know whether they're trying to bully IPG or not. But the nature of negotiation is that the side with the power gets to dictate the terms of the agreement. The more the power rests with one side, the more that side can set the terms. It's the way of the world.

And here's the thing. Amazon is the eight hundred pound gorilla in the ebook world because they are not afraid to try new things, to innovate. My thriller, THE LONELY MILE, has become successful largely due to promotional processes Amazon has developed and used to promulgate their success.

Anyone who does not like the way Amazon does business is free to shop elsewhere, and, in fact, should do exactly that. But my goal as an author is to entertain readers, and being asked to do so without having the opportunity to entertain the millions of readers who routinely shop at Amazon does not work for me.

FINAL VECTOR is still available at other outlets, such as Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million and others, and of course Kindle Fire users can download apps allowing them to purchase the book elsewhere and still read it on their Kindle. But all of that is beside the point, which is this: IPG's job is to distribute my book to where the readers are. If they are unable or unwilling to do that, they should step aside for a distributor who will.

JK Rowling says, "Bookstore? I don't need no stinking bookstore!"

I love bookstores. I've been an avid reader since I was a little kid, and anyone who loves books will be able to relate when I say there aren't many things better in life than spending a couple of hours browsing through the new releases, trying to decide what to buy next.

I mention this as a preface to the following question: What obligation does an author have to try to support bookstores, the vast majority of which are struggling mightily, caught between a down economy and the ebook publishing revolution?

As basically an outsider to the debate (my debut thriller, FINAL VECTOR, was published in ebook form only, as will be my followup, THE LONELY MILE, at least for the time being), I can't help but be amused by the bookstores' hysterical reaction to the news out of Merrie Olde England that JK Rowling intends to make the ebook editions of her smash Harry Potter series available ONLY through her own Pottermore website, bypassing not just Amazon, but the brick-and-mortar Barnes and Noble, Borders, Waterstone's, and all other physical booksellers.

Why am I amused? Because as a mostly unknown author it would be just about impossible for me to have ink-and-paper editions of my upcoming StoneHouse Ink thriller, THE LONELY MILE, stocked in any of the gigantic chain stores, even if there were ink-and-paper editions to sell, even in my own local area.

Space is limited in a bookstore, obviously, and why would Barnes and Noble allot any of that valuable space to an author most people have never heard of? Even if I begged and groveled? It's a financial reality that the bookstores have to allot space to the books they believe will best sell. In genre fiction, that means stocking the biggest names only.

Nothing personal; it's just business. It only makes sense from a financial perspective.

But of course, JK Rowling is one of those "biggest names." She might just be the biggest of the biggest names. The launches of her Potter books have been EVENTS, each one more gigantic than the last, with anxious and adoring fans lined up around the block outside the stores, waiting breathlessly for the midnight opening of the store on release day, so they could rush in and spend their money on the latest Harry Potter adventure.

But here's the rub, the thing I find so deliciously ironic. JK Rowling is the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room. I don't mean that literally - she looks quite lovely - but in a very real way she has outgrown the need for bookstores or anyone else to help sell electronic editions of her work. The very thing that made her book releases so attractive to bookstores - her unparallelled popularity - has made her realize there is no reason to share any of the take with bookstores or anyone else.

I'm sure there's nothing personal; it's just business. It only makes sense from a financial perspective.

So all of this leads back to my original question: Does JK Rowling - or any author, for that matter - have any obligation to support brick-and-mortar bookstores? Or does the continuing rise of ebook popularity mean the symbiotic relationship between authors and bookstores is doomed?

Sometimes, you CAN judge a book by its cover

Interesting post by Joelle Charbonneau at Do Some Damage today. In it, she wonders about the effectiveness of cover art for e-books. What's the point, she wonders?

With physical books, the covers provide a very specific purpose - to draw the reader in, to make her curious about the book, to get her to open it up and skim through the pages, with the ultimate goal, of course, being to interest her enough to make a sale.

But with ebooks, there are no readers wandering through the bookstore, pulling your book out and examining the cover. There's no physical book at all!

It's a really good question, and one I wondered about myself for quite a while. My answer is a long one, though, so I thought instead of writing an endless comment at Do Some Damage, I would write a post on the subject myself.

You may or may not know the history of my debut thriller, FINAL VECTOR. I originally signed with the publisher, Medallion Press, for a mass-market paperback edition of the book. A few months after signing the contract, however, and almost a year before the book's release, Medallion bowed to the new realities of the publishing world and eliminated mass-market paperbacks entirely, choosing instead to publish ebook editions of those books slated for MMPB.

This gives me an interesting perspective, because although FINAL VECTOR was released this past February as an ebook, the cover art was designed to be placed atop a paperback book.

And it's a damned good cover, I think. I've gotten literally dozens of compliments on it, and although I had nothing to do with it beyond providing some ideas, I believe it represents the book well.

That's the point. Although you will not find a single copy of FINAL VECTOR in your local bookstore, the cover still matters, for a couple of very important reasons:

1) First impressions still matter, whether the book is inked onto dead trees or transmitted through the Interwebs to your handy dandy reading device. Whether the reader finds out about FINAL VECTOR through the "Readers who bought (X) also bought" feature at Amazon, or through a review they read, or a blog post, or whatever, they will still form a powerful first impression when they see the cover art.

A cover that appears sloppily designed or unimaginative or generic will likely not invite the reader to check out the book further, and will leave certain negative impressions foremost in their minds, both about the book and the author.

On the other hand, cover art that is interesting or entertaining or different may just convince the reader to pursue the book further, maybe check out an excerpt, which is exactly what I'm going for as an author, particularly an author most people have probably not heard of.

2) Ideally, the cover should give a potential reader some idea of what she's getting herself into when she downloads the ebook.

The design for my upcoming release from StoneHouse Ink, THE LONELY MILE, captures the feeling of the book perfectly, and in several different ways. In the book, a divorced father faces what might just be every dad's worst nightmare: His own teenage daughter is kidnapped by a sociopathic killer, and he's responsible.

The cover is meant to evoke a feeling of brooding, of darkness, of a man facing a gathering storm alone. Check it out, and tell me if you aren't left with that exact impression.

Same thing for the cover of my September horror novella release from Delirium Books, DARKNESS FALLS. The plot revolves around a big old farmhouse whose owner went insane twenty years ago and savagely murdered the main character's entire family while he was at school. My protagonist's name is Tyler Beckman, but the star of the novella is really the house - it stands at the heart of the entire story and drives the plot.

So when the folks at Delirium asked for my input on the cover art, I immediately thought of a creaky farmhouse, dark and disturbing, with ghostly-looking windows and an overgrown yard. My goal was to draw the potential reader's attention and at the same time try to pass along a little taste of what the book is all about.

So that's my answer, Joelle: Yes, the cover of an ebook is absolutely as critical to the book's success as the cover of a mass-market paperback, trade paperback, or hardcover offering. You can write prose like a master, but if the outside of your book turns people off to the point they're not willing to try it, no one will ever know.