Here are a couple of interesting blog posts, the first from David Gaughran on Amazon’s KDP select program and subscription programs in general:

I’m more concerned about how exclusivity could limit my creative promotions. These are the three best things I have done in the last six months to help sales or put money in my pocket:

LibraryThing Giveaways
Making the PDF of Let’s Get Digital a free download on my blog.
Crowdfunding the release of A Storm Hits Valparaiso.

Collectively, those three moves have been directly responsible for more than 50% of my revenue this year, and probably a lot more indirectly. The first two are certainly impermissible under the terms of KDP Select, and the third is up in the air, depending on your interpretation.

And the blog post that sent me to David’s site–Chuck Wendig on The Precarious Portentious Perils of Self-publishing (with all the usual Chuck Wendig profane and over-the-top style / you’ve been warned):

the DIY-slash-indie-slash-micropub-slash-selfpub route is a path fraught with perils all its own — perils different from those encountered by the writer going the “other” way. And I’d like to talk about some of those perils here and now, both in order to make new writers aware of them and, further, to ideate some solutions for the aforementioned perils.

One of those perils is “discoverability”–how does a writer connect with the readers who might like her books? We’re all still looking for the solution to that one, though I continue to strongly suspect that a combination of traditional and indie publishing is the likeliest way forward. That said, I’m going to be ignoring my own advice. I’ll be publishing my next book, Hepen the Watcher, sequel to The Dread Hammer, all on my own again, because I like doing things that way–I like being in control. I might try shopping around the next book after that, but right now I just don’t have the patience for it.

Onward!

Posted on: Monday, December 12th, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Categories: Publishing.