Available FREE for just two days - Paskagankee

After the almost unimaginable (by me, at least) success of THE LONELY MILE in the Kindle Select Program - somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 sales after giving away over 46,000 downloads, I was chomping at the bit to enroll my new supernatural suspense novel, PASKAGANKEE, in the program as well.

No offense to all you Nook owners out there, but Amazon knows how to sell books, and for me to achieve 14,000 sales of THE LONELY MILE outside of the Kindle Select Program would have taken...well, let's just say I'm pretty sure I won't live that long, and neither will my children or my children's children.

So I approached StoneHouse CEO Aaron Patterson with the genius idea he had probably already thought of weeks ago, and he enrolled PASKAGANKEE in the program, setting up today and tomorrow, March 10 and 11, as Free days for PASKAGANKEE in the Kindle Store.

I have no idea what to expect. I know it's unlikely we will match the results of February 4, 5 and 6, when THE LONELY MILE spent the better part of two full days as the #1 Free download in the Kindle Store, and then tore up the Paid charts when we began charging for it again, but you never know unless you try, right?

Anyway, I would love to see everyone who has supported me get the chance to download this book for free. I'm proud of it, it was a long time in the making, and I think it tells a pretty cool story.

But you gotta hurry. I can't say it won't eventually be free again, but why take the chance? Download it now at the Kindle Store, and if you don't own a Kindle, don't worry, Amazon has free Kindle Apps for every conceivable device, and probably a few that haven't been invented yet. Like I said, Amazon knows how to sell books.

Thanks again for your support and I hope you enjoy PASKAGANKEE...

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.

Winner of the Free Kindle Fire!

My "Win a Free Kindle Fire" contest ended Monday at 9 a.m., and I wanted to thank everyone who took the time to enter. My goal in running the contest was to introduce my work to some new readers and maybe gain a little exposure prior to my new supernatural suspense novel, PASKAGANKEE, being released by StoneGate Ink later this month.

In conjunction with the running of the contest, I lowered the price of THE LONELY MILE to 99 cents for six weeks, a savings of 67% off the regular ebook price of $2.99, so even if you weren't the winner of a Kindle Fire, I like to think you took a little something out of the contest, anyway.

So here we go. Just in case you weren't glued to Twitter or Facebook to find out the results of Tuesday's drawing, I thought it might be nice to post them here, too. Congratulations to Karen Maria of Rollinsford, NH, the winner of the Kindle Fire! Hopefully you get lots of use out of it...

If you're curious, the way I ran the drawing was to assign a number to every entry. I then went to http://www.random.org/ and fed the numbers into their random number generator. The number that was spit out belonged to Karen.

It was a lot of fun doing the contest, and while I don't have immediate plans to run another, I fully expect to do more promotional stuff in the future. If that sounds enticing to you, be sure to follow me on Twitter, @AllanLeverone, on Facebook, or sign up for my (very sporadic) newsletter under the "Contact" tab at my website, http://www.allanleverone.com/.

Thanks again to everyone who entered!

Win a FREE Kindle Fire!

I read today that Amazon expects to ship six million Kindle Fire tablets this quarter alone. Most of the people receiving one will pay two hundred bucks, as it seems Amazon has no intention of discounting their brand-new product so soon after its release.

But you can get one absolutely free! I will be giving away one Kindle Fire to one lucky winner, and you only need to follow three easy steps to qualify: