Writing with a mission.

Tag: Publishing

Free-eBooks.net – a good place to post your permafree book.

Many indie authors know that having a permanently free book (a.k.a permafree) available for readers to download is a great tool to use when building your mailing list and garnering new readers for your books – especially if it is the first in a book series.  But for many new authors, the problem is knowing how to go about making people aware of the fact that your free book is available at all.  No matter how good your work is, if people don’t know about it, they won’t read it.

Alas, I am a relatively new author, having just released my second fiction book – The Tucson Prophecy.  This book is now permafree and is the prequel novella to my full-length paranormal thriller novel The Seer (The Seer is now available for pre-order through a variety of retailers and being released for sale on November 11, 2016).  When I released my book, I had ZERO people on my mailing list, and a pitifully small following on my Amazon author page, Goodreads author page, and blog (read less than about fifteen followers all-told).  So my big challenge was (and is) HOW do I make people aware of my permafree book so they will give me a chance as an author and possibly buy my book The Seer when it comes out.

Enter Free-eBooks.net.  Now, as a matter of full disclosure, I have already listed The Tucson Prophecy for free on a number of retailers, even getting up as high as #13 in the top 100 free books on Amazon.com for my category (yeah!).  I have also reached out on social media and even handed out fliers to people on the street advertising The Tucson Prophecy.  All this activity had netted me a total of  eight sign-ups on my email list as of yesterday.  In keeping with the great indie tradition of never resting on my laurels, I next set my sites on putting my book on the free ebook list sites.  Through my research, Free-eBooks.net came up and I decided to give it a go.

I uploaded my permafree ebook 23 hours ago, and already I have 4 downloads from Free_eBooks.net and someone else just signed up on my email list.  Not bad, in my opinion.  Now, I have no way of knowing if the recent email list sign-up was from my listing at Free-eBooks.net, but it encouraged me to keep plugging away at making more and more people aware of my free book via the free ebook list sites.  So here’s to all of you indies out there.  Keep writing great books, and give Free-eBooks.net a try!

Happy writing,

C.L. Wells

Should authors say ‘NO’ to Amazon’s KDP Select Program? (part 1)

I’m an indie author.  I published my first book last year on Amazon’s KDP Select program.  For those of you who don’t already know what KDP Select is, it is a program whereby you, as the author, agree to make your ebook available exclusively through Amazon for at least 90 days.  In return, you get the following:

  • Preferential promotion through Amazon’s KDP Select promotional advertisement program.
  • Detailed sales and readership statistic reporting not available to titles that are not in the KDP Select program.
  • Ability to run promotional pricing, including free giveaways, which are not available to non-KDP Select titles.
  • Promotion to Kindle Unlimited users as part of their ‘free’ reading program, thus exposing you to a sizable group of readers who may not otherwise see your book through the other advertisement methods.

Sounds good, right?  Amazon is the largest online book retailer, and they are agreeing to give you preferential marketing status so that your book is advertised to a much wider audience than it otherwise would be.  What’s not to like?  Well, actually, there’s a lot not to like.

Mark Coker, creator of the ebook distribution site Smashwords.com, gave an interview as part of the Indie Fringe 2016 conference on the top trends of the publishing industry.  It is a great interview that I highly recommend.  You can watch it here.  In that interview, he discusses KDP Select.  He had many good points to make, but I want to drill down on just two of them in this post.

  1. The KDP Select program effectively buries all independently published books that are NOT in KDP select in an advertising black-hole.
  2. The KDP Select program is training one of the largest indie reader groups in the world to expect to read books for free, thus undermining sales of indie author titles and ultimately de-valuing indie author ebook titles en masse.

The combination of these two effects is having a negative effect on the indie ebook market.  In order to get premium access to Amazon’s customer base for a new ebook, authors are being asked to give their books away for practically free to a large segment of would-be book buyers (Kindle Unlimited users).  You will get some limited financial reimbursement for this from Amazon, but only for pages actually read, and at a much lower reimbursement than what the book’s selling price actually is.  To add insult to injury, Amazon actually won’t agree to the reimbursement rate until AFTER the sales month ends.  You are effectively surrendering your right to sell your ebook at the selling price you want to this large group of ebook customers.  These readers, whether they like the book or not, will certainly not then BUY the book that they have just read for free.  So, if you sign up for KDP Select, you are effectively discounting your book to the point that you will likely not make much money on this large group of users.

Now, let’s say you take your book OUT of the KDP Select program after the first three months.  Your $3.99 ebook is now positioned to make money hand over fist, right?  Wrong.  Now, all those Kindle Unlimited users, who have likely already read your book for free, don’t want to pay to read it.  Additionally, all the other books still in the KDP Select program are showing up in searches ahead of your book.  Thirdly, your book is no longer new, further negatively impacting your search result standing in the coveted ‘new books’ searches.  Your options?  Lower your price even more in order to compete against a game stacked against you, or re-up for KDP Select.

Ask yourself, all things being equal, why would anyone want to buy your ebook for $3.99 on a market flooded with thousands of new ebooks a week when they could either a) read a similar book for free as a member of the Kindle Unlimited program, or b) find dozens of other books on the same topic listed before they even see your book, that they could buy for the same price?  The answer?  They probably won’t buy your book unless you are an author known to them or your genre is so small or niche that you happen to be on the first few pages of their search results.

The net result is that if you DO sign up for KDP select, you are 1) automatically lowering your per unit sale profit by a huge margin, thus undercutting your overall profitability, and 2) contributing to a system which is rigged by Amazon to ultimately force all indie authors to lower their per-unit prices in order to compete.  In a game rigged like this, where even a book priced at $0.99 is too pricey, nobody wins.

Is there an upside to all of this?  Yes, there is, and that will be the subject of my next post. 😉

 

The ‘mission’ of Fiction with a Mission

Book imageEvery revolution needs clearly stated goals, so I offer this as a humble start to a writer’s revolution (which I hope will become a culture-wide, industry-wide movement).  Having been fed up for years with the moral depravity that is foisted upon us in the guise of entertainment, I have decided to do something about it.  So, without further delay, here is the Creative Writing with a Mission / Fiction with a Mission mission statement:

Our mission is to use our gifts and talents as writers and creative artists to help make the world a better place, by producing quality writing and entertainment for the secular market which…

  • encourages critical thinking regarding the challenges and opportunities facing our world;
  • promotes a positive view of God’s interaction with humanity;
  • promotes a moral lifestyle that values sexual purity;
  • celebrates the values of honesty, justice, equality, freedom of speech and expression, and democracy for all genders and races; and
  • promotes and supports worthy causes by raising social awareness and providing direct material support for these causes.

Our creative standards:

In keeping with our mission, we commit to our audience that we will refrain from using vulgarity and graphic sexual descriptions in our fictional writing and other entertainment creations.

For those who are interested in joining with me in this endeavor, here are some steps you can take to help:

  • join the mailing list
  • download some of my books, read and share them, and post a review to one of the sites where you purchased it
  • keep reading this blog for new developments/action items

 

Sex in Entertainment

Recently I was watching a series drama on Amazon Prime.  The show had a decent plot, was interesting, and kept me engaged.  Suddenly, there was a scene of a graphically sexual nature in the midst of the story.  It added little, if anything, to the plot, but there it was.  Whether watching a TV show or reading a novel, this experience is commonplace in today’s entertainment industry.  In fact, it has become so prevalent in entertainment developed for the adult population in our culture, that if your favorite show or fictional reading material doesn’t contain sexually graphic material, then it is probably either written for children, written specifically for a faith-based audience, or is a reality TV show dealing with hunting in the Alaskan wilderness.

This is one of the reasons that I started writing fiction with a mission.  I believe that, like me, there are many people who do not want their entertainment to be frothing over with naked men and women cavorting like fleas in heat.  If Jane and Bob are having sex with each other and it is significant to the plot line, then there are many ways to get the point across without spending five minutes showing them in the act (or describing the same in graphic detail as is often the case with the written word).  Frankly, in most cases, many of these storylines seem to strain to include such episodes, and often in a way that does little to move the narrative of the story along.

There are many reasons I oppose using descriptions and images of graphic sexuality (i.e. pornographic material) as entertainment.  As this is a blog post and not a research paper (or one of my novels) I will mention just one (Covenant Eyes, Inc., 2015, pp. 22-23):

In 1982 and 1984, Dr. Dolf Zillmann and Dr. Jennings Bryant conducted an experiment with 80 male and 80 female college-age participants.100 These were divided into three subgroups, and each group was shown 4 hours and 48 minutes of media over a six-week period: (1) the “Massive Exposure Group” was shown 36 non-violent pornographic film clips; (2) the “Intermediate Exposure Group” was exposed to 18 pornographic film clips and 18 regular films; and (3) the “No Exposure” control group was shown 36 non-pornographic film clips.

….Porn seemed to condition participants to trivialize rape. Participants were asked to read about a legal case where a man raped a female hitchhiker and then recommend a length for the rapist’s prison sentence. Males in the No Exposure Group said 94 months; the Massive Exposure Group said 50 months (nearly half that of the No Exposure Group).

Our culture’s obsession with graphic sexuality as entertainment is often a contributing factor in sexual crimes, such as rape.  For that reason alone, we should seriously consider reversing this trend as a society.  I, for one, have had enough.  I am starting a revolution in the entertainment industry, and I hope you will join me.

One reason I write novels is that I believe I can tell a darn good story and I enjoy doing it.  Another reason is that I have had enough of being bombarded with sexually-saturated storylines in what passes for entertainment, and I intend to help provide an alternative source of entertainment to counter-act this trend.  One of the commitments I make to my readers is that my fiction will NEVER contain graphic sexual descriptions.

So, I challenge my fellow-authors to join the revolution!  And if you want to read good fiction WITHOUT graphic sexual material, then I invite you to read one of my books.

Cheers!

C.L. Wells

Reference:

Covenant Eyes, Inc. (2015).  Pornography Statistics: 250+ facts, quotes, and statistics about pornography use.
Retrieved from http://www.covenanteyes.com/pornography-facts-and-statistics

 

South Carolina Writer’s Group

I just started a meetup for authors in the Charleston, SC area.  You can get the details at http://www.meetup.com/South-Carolina-Writers-Group.  I started the group for the purpose of creating a network of authors (and their supporters) who will partner together for the purposes of:

  • Writing and publishing great fiction/non-fiction
  • Building an author platform
  • Gaining exposure as an author

The group is aimed primarily at independent authors (a.k.a. indie authors), but we welcome all authors and their supporters.  One of the central ideas behind this group is that we can accomplish more together than we can individually.  By pooling our knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm, we can help each other achieve our goals as authors.

We will fulfill the purposes of this group by engaging in the following (not an exhaustive list):

  • Presentations/discussions on the process of writing, publishing, building an author platform, and gaining exposure as an author.
  • Networking with other authors/author supporters for the purposes of supporting each other in the writing process, and trading services (e.g. beta reading, editing, critiquing, cover design, author website/blog development, marketing support, et cetera).
  • Providing a knowledge base of resources for every stage of the writing process including idea development, writing, editing, publishing, and marketing.

Cheers!

Christopher

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