Is free really a good price?

he New York Times says, “Earlier this week ... the No. 1 and 2 spots on Kindle’s best-seller list were taken by “Cape Refuge” and “Southern Storm,” both novels by Terri Blackstock, a writer of Christian thrillers. The Kindle price: $0. Until the end of the month, Ms. Blackstock’s publisher, Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, is offering readers the opportunity to download the books free to the Kindle or to the Kindle apps on their iPhone or in Windows.... Publishers including Harlequin, Random House and Scholastic are offering free versions of digital books to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-retailers, as well as on author Web sites, as a way of allowing readers to try out the work of unfamiliar writers. The hope is that customers who like what they read will go on to obtain another title for money.”

The thing is, I don’t think anyone knows if this is a good idea or not. A sample of a new corn chip in Costco may whet my appetite and encourage me to buy a whole bag [which I will later regret, but still]. But a whole book? Does it really encourage buyers? Or does it cause people to further mentally devalue ebooks, meaning they won’t want to pay much for them and see nothing wrong with pirating them?

In Blackstock's case, the two books cited were part of a series, so the corn chip analogy might apply.

I have downloaded free (and legal) versions of Beautiful Children: A Novel (still not read) and a Suze Orman book (read, mostly, although I felt chided). Neither download has caused me to buy the book or more books from the author.

You can read the whole NY Times article here.

Has Barbara really been gone three years?

I can't believe my friend Barbara Seranella has been dead for three years. I still have some of the last emails she sent me, while she was waiting for a liver transplant. You know, the kind of email you keep because you have a bad feeling you might not get another one.

Barbara was one of a kind. She ran away from home at 14 and rode with The Heathens motorcycle gang. She learned how to fix cars when she lived in a hippie commune in Haight-Ashbury. She was also a heroin addict, and did the kind of things that people do to support their habit. By the time she was 21, she had been jailed 13 times. Somehow, though, she got sober, became a mechanic (she had great stories about some of the celebs she had helped, including Alan Alda), and then a best-selling author.

She was the most generous woman I've ever met. When I was first published, she introduced me to important people at Amazon and Borders. We toured Oregon and LA together. I gave her feedback on her last book.

But even though she had been clean for years, she had Hepatitis C from a dirty needle. I remember getting together with her in Portland. She was complaining that she had some kind of weird adult-onset acne. It was really broken capillaries from her failing liver. She fought back, and she fought hard, with Interferon and two transplants. She was waiting on a third when she died.




Barbara and I at the 2002 Left Coast Crime. Back when she was healthy. We both did stand up comedy. The picture does not show the very famous mystery writer to my left. Although we sat at the same table, she acted as if we weren't there at all. Of course Barbara, being Barbara, knew all the gossip about her and the pretty young man who was with her.

God, I miss her.

How putting my old books on the Kindle let me buy a new raincoat

I thought I would report back on my Kindle experiment. About a month ago, I started putting some of my out-of-print adult books on the Kindle. YA and children's books tend to be given longer to prove themselves and to stay in print longer. With books for adults, if you don't continue to sell well, you're out.

It’s hard to think that a book you loved and labored over is now forgotten except for the occasional library reader.

Then I heard about how out-of-print books could have a second life on the Kindle. I started by putting my best-reviewed book to date, Learning to Fly, on the Kindle. Then I added four books of my series in order: Circles of Confusion, Square in the Face, Heart-Shaped Box, and finally, Buried Diamonds.


I priced them all at $1.99. For each one, Amazon gives me 70 cents. Amazon just announced a new plan that will go in effect June 30. If you list your book at a price that can be as low as $2.99, you'll get about 70% instead of 35%. So at that point, I will raise my prices and make about $2 a book.

To read more about how to do this yourself: http://aprilhenry.livejournal.com/660518.html



So far, I've made enough to buy this:

A book reading that looked painful

A guy was in town the other night to read from his first novel. I’ve been seeing it praised everywhere, so I decided to go. There was a good turnout, probably 30 people. He had been written up in the paper that day. As far as I could tell, there was no big contingent of friends - just people who wanted to hear more about his book.

He began by saying, “I’m going to read from Chapter 12.” And that’s just what he did. He didn’t set the scene at all. You had no idea who the characters were. The chapter was made up of two scenes of two people talking. I thought the first two had once been in a relationship, but I think they might have been brother and sister. Sometimes there would be four or five exchanges with no dialog tags or “He set down his coffee,” and the author didn’t vary the pitch of his voice, so it was a little hard to follow who was speaking.

Still, it was well-written.

When he was done, he looked up and said, “Does anyone have any questions?” He let about a second go by and said, “Well, since no one does I guess I’ll...” Then someone raised a hand. He tried to call it good three or four more times. By this time the whole audience had realized he was intensely nervous. A few of his answers were fascinating, but I think he was so anxious he just had trouble letting his real self shine through.

I looked on his Web site and Portland was only his second reading. The first had been in his home town. Should you ever find yourself in similar situation:
- Tell the listeners what the book is about.
- Share some interesting stories about how you came to write it.
- Seriously consider reading the first chapter or part of the first chapter, which doesn't require any set-up.
- Although this guy didn't, I think reading for longer than five or ten minutes is probably too long.
- Think about starting the question and answer period - if no one has any initially - with “One question people have asked me is...” to prime the pump. Remember that it might take folks a minute to raise their hands.
- It might help just to begin by admitting that you are very nervous.

I still bought a book, and just today I saw another outpouring of praise for it.

Putting my out-of-print books on the Kindle

I’ve been published since 1999. Which means that, like many authors, some of my books are out of print. You can buy them used on Amazon or half.com, or you could break into my basement and steal a remaindered copy or two.

It’s hard to think that a book you loved and labored over is now forgotten except for the occasional library reader.

But now out-of-print books can have a second life. I started by putting my best-reviewed book to date, Learning to Fly, on the Kindle. Today I added Circles of Confusion, which has yet to sync up with the print version (but it did eventually with Learning to Fly).

What you need
-An Amazon account, which you already have if you have bought something from Amazon.

-The words. With luck, you still have the Word file that you submitted to your publisher. And again, with luck, they had you make changes on the file and re-send, rather than someone at the publisher someplace making changes. I’ve been proofing my old Word files before I post them on the Kindle. Nothing like not looking at something for five plus years to see typos.

And if you don’t have the words? You can scan in the book or manuscript. Lee Goldberg told me he scanned some of his out-of-print books using Omnipage 17 software. For one book, I used blueleaf-book-scanning.com and because I didn’t ask for anything fancy and didn’t ask for my book back, it only cost $12.15, plus $4.75 to mail them the book. Then they emailed me a word file.

-A cover image. My husband made me some new ones, using photos from istock.com. The photos were inexpensive, and my husband worked for free.

-Proof that you own the copyright. I just held up my “reversion of rights” letter from St. Martins to my Web cam, snapped a photo, and emailed it to Amazon. (Wait until they ask you for proof to do this step.)

-The ISBN of one of the print editions. When you are filling out the form to put your book on the Kindle, use the ISBN of your printed book. This will link it up with all your old reviews, both from readers and from publications.

What you get
-Probably not a ton of money. At least I haven’t yet. I’ve heard from other authors that their lower-priced books sell more copies than when they had a higher price. So I priced mine at $1.99. I figured more folks would take a chance on me. Amazon and I split that, 65%/35%. So I get 70 cents, which is still 70 cents I wouldn’t have had otherwise. So far, I’ve made under $100.

-More readers. More readers for books I loved but no one could buy anymore, except for the occasional used copy changing hands. More readers who might be willing to pay more to read Kindle books my publisher holds rights to, or even my newer print books.

For more info
Here’s where you need to go on Amazon to get started. They have a lot of information about how to do it.

This is Lee Goldberg’s experience.

And while I doubt anyone else has had JA Konrath's success, here’s part of his story.

How about you?
Got more info than what I have, or know a blog that does? Know how to put books on a Sony E-reader or a Nook? Let me know.

More of the covers my talented husband designed for when I put the books on the Kindle