The free promotion of my collection of short stories, An Act Of Mercy ends today (1 December). To download An Act Of Mercy free please visit http://www.amazon.com/act-mercy-other-stories-ebook/dp/B00EHS74CS/ref=asap_B00CEECWHY_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1417418604&sr=1-4. If you read any of my books please do consider leaving a review.
Many thanks,
Kevin
As an author I would love to gift my Kindle titles to family and friends. If I lived in the US this would present no difficulty owing to the facility, on amazon.com to “give as a gift”. However, as a UK-based writer the ability to gift copies of my books is not available. I am at a loss to understand why a facility available to US authors can not be extended to writers based in the UK.
Amazon has many great author features including KDP Select which enables writers to promote their works by offering them for free, or at a reduced price for upto 5 days in any 90 day period. I am, on the whole a fan of Amazon but I can not grasp why the ability to gift publications is restricted to US-based authors.
After having posted this I will send a word copy of my latest collection of short stories, “The Suspect And Other Tales” (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Suspect-other-tales-Morris-ebook/dp/B00PKPTQ0U), by e-mail to my mum. It would be wonderful if, instead of having to do this the title could be gifted by me from the Amazon Kindle Store. I will raise the suggestion with Amazon and will post their response once received.
Thus far I have published 4 collections of short stories and 1 longer work. All my books are available solely in ebook format.
For some time now I have been considering producing print versions of my books using the Print On Demand (POD) services of Createspace (https://www.createspace.com/). My reasons for considering POD are:
Having said all that,I hesitate to embrace POD as my longest story, Samantha runs to 29 pages and I am not sure whether people will pay for print books of that length. I could get around this issue by producing an anthology of my writing. However this would, I understand mean that I would lose all my Amazon reviews as these pertain to the individual titles, while an anthology is a different beast and would be reviewed as such.
In short I need to give this matter much more thought rather than jumping in feet first. Any advice from authors who have both ebook and print versions of their works available would be most welcome as would comments from readers of both formats.
In a recent interview the author, Ian Mcewin argued that very few novels earn their length. Mcewinn states that he likes to read novels in one sitting and many longer works would benefit from being considerably shorter. Personally I believe that both short and more lengthy works have their place. A good long novel which holds my attention is well worth the effort while a shorter work which fails to engross me receives the thumbs down.
Mcewin makes a number of other interesting observations including his statement that several Amazons competing against one another would be good for the book industry, (I am inclined to agree with him).
For the article please visit http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11067429/Author-Ian-McEwan-Very-few-novels-earn-their-length.html
On 24 November I wrote about my frustration at the failure of some authors and publishers to enable the text to speech facility on Kindle e-books thereby preventing blind people (and others who are not able to read print) from accessing them, (see http://newauthoronline.com/2013/11/24/the-silence-is-deafening/. I subsequently made contact with the author however, having heard nothing I have, today contacted the publishers to request that the text to speech facility is enabled. I will update you if/when I receive a response from either the author or publisher. Many thanks to all of you who commented or reblogged my post. Your support is very much appreciated.
On looking over my Amazon author’s page I noticed that the one on amazon.co.uk contains my biography, a photograph of yours truly with my guide dog Trigger (Trigger is the dashingly handsome one), while that on amazon.com has only a list of my books. I had assumed that information entered onto one author’s profile would automatically be copied, by Amazon to my other page. On querying the position Amazon advised that authors need to create author’s profiles on both sites, a fact of which I was previously unaware.
Perhaps I am the only author who has laboured under the misapprehension that the creation of a profile on Amazon automatically creates a page on both amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Obviously this is not the case but it would be extremely useful if, on creating an Amazon author’s profile the creator was offered the option to, at the same time create pages on both Amazon sites.
Turning to the issue of Amazon book reviews, I welcome the fact that reviews posted on one Amazon site now also appear on both amazon.co.uk and amazon.com (so, for example a review of my short story, Samantha which appears on amazon.com also shows on the UK site). However the issue is clouded owing to the fact that anyone casually glancing at a page on one Amazon site will see that a particular book has x number of reviews, however if he/she scans down the page reviews on another Amazon site, for the same book may well become visible. I would suggest that the total number of reviews on all Amazon sites for a particular book should be clearly displayed without the need for the reader to scan the entire page. The number of reviews and, more importantly the comments contained therein influence reader’s decisions as to whether to purchase a particular title. I would be interested to hear what other authors and readers think?
I well recall telling an acquaintance I had published an e-book, on Amazon only to be told that she would love to read it but, unfortunately she did not own a Kindle. In point of fact you don’t need to own a Kindle in order to read e-books sold in the Kindle store. Kindle books can be read on your PC together with a number of other devices including Android phones and Apple products, the only cost (apart from that of the purchase of the device itself) being that entailed in purchasing the e-book as all of the apps are free! For details of Kindle’s free reading apps please visit http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771&ref=kcp_ipad_mkt_lnd.
My short story, Samantha will be free in the Kindle store from 29 November until 3 December. For details of this promotion please visit http://newauthoronline.com/2013/11/27/promotion/
I have written previously about the pulling of erotic titles by the retailer WH Smiths and Smith’s supplier, Kobo due to erotic (adult) titles being found on the retailer’s website. The concern was that children might access such material. Obviously children (in the UK those under the age of 18-years-old are so classified) should not be accessing erotic material. There does, however appear to be something like a witch hunt developing with authors not falling into the adult genre having their books pulled. See, for example the comments accompanying this post, http://www.serenajanes.blogspot.ca/2013/10/now-for-something-sweet.html#comment-form). I haven’t read any of the author’s works, however the short extract provided in the forgoing post does not, on the face of it appear to warrant her book being withdrawn from sale.
As I mentioned in my previous post regarding this issue adult fantasies (those concerning consenting adults) ought to be available for adults to view and purchase. Rape and incest fantasies are certainly not my cup of tea. However I am not aware of any convincing evidence that works of this nature lead to the commission of crime. In the absence of such proof I can see no valid reason for prohibiting their sale as certain UK newspapers appear to be agitating for. In short fantasy is precisely that, fantasy as opposed to reality and people should be free to fantasise provided that their fantasising remains exactly that, fantasising.
I recently blogged about how I had, totally accidentally breeched KDP’s terms and conditions by my collection of short stories, The First Time, being available from an outlet other than the Amazon Kindle store (see http://newauthoronline.com/2013/10/20/terms-and-conditions/). One of the commenters on my post said that he had heard of other people experiencing this problem and that authors should be wary of publishing their work on a variety of platforms if they intended to make it exclusive to Kindle at a later date. I am inclined to agree with him given my recent experience! If you want to make your books exclusive to Amazon in order to benefit from the promotion features of KDP Select then I would, personally not publish your work elsewhere. Having said that my long short story, Samantha appeared on my blog prior to being made exclusive on Amazon. However I, naturally have control over my blog and was, as a consequence able to remove Samantha prior to making it exclusive to Kindle. Never again will I make the mistake of making my books available in a variety of stores when my intention is, at some point to make them exclusive to Amazon Kindle. It is, quite frankly not worth the hassle.
While browsing the web earlier today I came across the below article on how to get started in the world of self-publishing, http://www.publishlawyer.com/carousel7.htm. The article dates back to 2002. it is, none the less a useful source of material for those just starting out in the field of self-publishing. The main criticism I have of the piece is it’s concentration on traditional print books (the world of e-books receives only a fleeting reference). However given the vintage of the article one can, I think forgive it’s concentration on the printed word.
For those with limited financial means or budding authors who wish to start out by producing an e-book only rather than a print book, I recommend taking a look at Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing which allows authors to market their e-books free of charge. For KDP Select please visit http://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/KDPSelect
K Morris - Poet 