One of my twitter friends who lives in Europe and buys ebooks from Amazon US has noted some curious pricing. In his experience a title priced at $9.99 in the US sells for $13.79 (in US dollars) when purchased from the Netherlands or Portugal.

On inquiry, Amazon explained that:
[1] Price can vary due to publishers granting different rights to different countries.
[2] “…a number of factors, including the initial publisher price.”
And “Using Kindle If You Live Outside the United States”

(I feel compelled to note that my novels are NOT used in the pricing example above. They are currently priced between $4.99 and $5.95, but they still experience a price differential.)

Googling turned up this two year old article on pricing differences which seems to point the finger at cost of doing business and cost of data transfer: guardian.co.uk

But there’s one more interesting fact in all this. Amazon pays the author or publisher a 70% royalty on ebooks sold in the USA, the UK, and recently, in Canada. But for those books sold to other countries the author gets only 35%–and that’s of the list price, not the higher price.

This seems like an area where competition is going to inspire change very soon.

Just a note for those who have Nook eReaders. My novel Limit of Vision is now up and available at BarnesandNoble.com.

I’ll have more to say on this book later, as the Amazon listing pulls itself together.

Goddesses is my Nebula Award winning novella originally published at SciFi.com. It’s now available at a nominal price for reading on the Kindle. Please have a look and let me know what you think!

Find it here at Amazon.com.

Announcing the fifth ebook by Mythic Island Press LLC!

Skye Object 3270a is a young adult novel set in the same story world as Deception Well, but with its own set of characters and its own set of challenges.

The cover concept is mine, but the digital painting of Skye and the final polish is by Sarah Adams.

What’s the book about? Well…

In an isolated star system far from any other human outposts, a space-faring “lifeboat” was discovered by a scientist from the city of Silk. Inside the lifeboat was a two-year-old girl in frozen sleep. She had no name and no history. The people of Silk believed her to be the only survivor of a star-faring great ship attacked in the void and destroyed by the automated warships of the alien Chenzeme. They rescued and revived the child, and named her “Skye.”

But the people of Silk face dangers of their own. Their city is in space, built around the column of a space elevator that rises from the planet’s surface into high orbit. Three-hundred kilometers below is the wild, plague-ridden planet called Deception Well. Far-above, a dusty nebula shrouds the star system. The nebula is made of drifting dust, gas, and tiny nanomachines left behind by an ancient and mysterious race. The microscopic nanomachines were made to attack and destroy any Chenzeme ship that enters the system . . . but they will defend against other threats too, and they have no loyalty to human life.

Still, life in Silk is comfortable, and the dangers of their world mean little to the city’s youth. Skye has grown into an adventurous, independent teen–but more and more she wonders about her mysterious past. Where did she come from? Who were her parents? And, most importantly, was she really the only survivor? When evidence of her past begins to awaken within her own body, Skye finds herself driven to explore both the dangerous surface of Deception Well and the airless reaches of outer space.

She is not alone in her quest. Her best friend Zia Adovna, the handsome young astronomer Devi Hand, and the adventurous Buyu Mkolu join her as she seeks to prove that other survivors of the great ship might still be found.

If you know any young readers who love adventure stories and are equipped with Kindle or Nook, please encourage them to download a sample!

Skye Object 3270a is available at:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble

Yesterday I announced that I’ll be self-publishing my fantasy novel, The Wild through my own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC. This isn’t as frightening as it might seem at first. Book publishing is changing rapidly, and it’s much easier for a small press to bring out a book than it used to be.

Also, I’m lucky enough to have a few advantages. I’ve got a track record—six novels published by either Bantam Spectra or Tor, and a couple of awards that will help with promotion. This venture would be a lot harder if I were a first-time novelist.

I’ve also got family behind me, ready to help with finance and promotion. With luck, I’ve got other people behind me too—yes, I mean you who are reading this. You’ve been very patient with me through a long, dry spell and I truly appreciate it.

For you, I’ve got an offer and a request. We’ll be printing up twenty-five to thirty pre-publication (advance reader copies or ARCs) of The Wild. With luck, they’ll be ready to go out in early January.

We’d like to send them to a diverse set of interested readers: some who read mostly fantasy, some who don’t, some who like challenging books, some who prefer simpler fare, eclectic readers, occasional readers, writers, non-writers, men, women, different ages, different geographies . . . you get the idea.

What we ask in return is that you read the ARC within two to three weeks and answer a questionnaire on it, and on you, as a reader. Our goal is to discover and address potential problems with the story, and to determine how best to market it (and if we can harvest a few marketable quotes on the side, even better).

ARCs are expensive, so this is going to be a very limited list. Please don’t be offended if we don’t have a copy for you. But if you’re interested in being on the list, don’t be shy! Step right up and email me at linda at mythicisland dot com, and tell me a little bit about yourself and your reading interests.

As always, thank you for your interest in my work, and thanks for stopping by!

I’ve been wonderfully busy lately. Most of my focus has been on getting The Nanotech Succession ebooks off to market, which involved a big learning curve. And lest all that effort should go to waste, I’ve started spending more time promoting the books.

But this doesn’t mean I’ve been neglecting my upcoming fantasy novel, The Wild.

In mid-November we made the decision to publish The Wild ourselves, through my own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC. I’m really excited about it. I love the idea that–for better or worse–the book is in my hands. I get to pick the cover, the release date, the promotion strategy. If it all fails badly, I will have only myself to blame, but I can handle that . . . better to rule in hell perhaps? Well . . . we’ll see!

Tomorrow: an announcement and an offer . . .

I’m old enough that I feel a bit of a blush when I say that, but yeah. I now have a professional presence on facebook. These are my pages:

Linda Nagata

Mythic Island Press LLC

The Wild — a novel, coming in 2011.

So if you’ve got a facebook account, like me! Please! There’s not a lot of activity there yet, but you’re more than welcome to stop by and say hello.

If you’ve been reading my blog you know that I’ve been converting my first four novels–Tech-Heaven, The Bohr Maker, Deception Well, and Vast–into ebook format.

The books are not a series but they all share the same story world, so I’ve wrapped them in the collective name The Nanotech Succession, and ordered them according to their place on the timeline, rather than by publishing order. Here’s where to find them:

Amazon Kindle Edition
Barnes & Noble Nook Edition

If you’ve never read the books before, why not give them a try? Free samples can be downloaded at both B&N and Amazon.

If you have read them and enjoyed them, please consider writing a review, or giving them a shout out on whatever social media or real life reading groups you’re part of. I would truly appreciate it. And if you do, please let me know!

For a number of years I’ve been selling my out-of-print books via my website. I had a large initial stock – at least of the Bantam books – because my former editor moved her office to a different floor, and in the process she discovered several cases of my books in a storeroom and was nice enough to send them to me.

Selling these books is not exactly a lucrative enterprise given the time, trouble and postage it takes to mail them – especially from Hawaii – but I would much rather the books were read than not, and it’s really gratifying that people will seek me out.

I’ve also found that as time goes by more and more of my orders are from Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. This is really flattering, because these buyers are willing to pay additional postage of $22 or more. But the paperwork!

Generally I am not one to bash the US Postal Service. In my experience they almost always do a great job, and generally speaking it’s just as efficient and far cheaper to send something to or from Hawaii by Priority Mail than by one of the delivery services.

But with international packages a customs form needs to be filled out. Recently the USPS decided that this should be done online. If I don’t fill it out online, then the clerk at the post office will have to take my hand-filled form and enter it into the computer there. But the online form requires a phone number, both mine and the recipient’s. Well, mine is an unlisted home number not for distribution, and I may or may not have the recipient’s via PayPal. However, I have to enter something or the form won’t submit, so a string of zeroes has to do. Naturally it turns out the final form says “phone number if available.” Maybe the website and form should get on the same page?

But here is my primary complaint: the form is 4.75 inches high, there are five copies, and each copy prints out on a separate sheet of letter-size paper! Two forms could easily fit on one sheet of paper, but no. Apparently a decision was made to waste resources. So instead of the post office paying to produce a five-sheet form of very thin paper of the correct size, everyone using this form must now waste 2.5 pages of much heavier, letter-size paper.

I will be very interested to hear what our postal clerks have to say about this when I go to mail my package tomorrow.

Thanks again for all the input on what to do with my young-adult novel Skye Object 3270a. After considerable thought, and looking at the rather long timeline for revising The Wild and getting it into print, I’ve decided to go back to my initial plan of charging a small amount for this e-book edition of Skye Object 3270a.

So I am happy to announce that Skye Object 3270a is now available at my publishing website MythicIsland.com, priced at $5 for the PDF file.

So what’s it about? It’s a young-adult novel, aimed at an advanced middle school audience. Those of you familiar with my work will recognize the setting from the Deception Well story world, but Skye Object 3270a is otherwise independent of that book and its characters. It’s high action science fiction designed to be fun, exciting, and maybe a little scary. If you are fortunate enough to know avid young readers, why not buy them a copy?

Preview the first chapter here.

Click here to purchase the download.