Experiments in Publishing (Take 1)

Those who read this blog reg­u­lar­ly may remem­ber my past posts (here, here and here) about the Ama­zon Kin­dle and recall that I have mixed feel­ings about it. You’ll also know that I’ve been inter­est­ed in what authors such as J.A. Kon­rath have accom­plished by releas­ing books on the Kin­dle itself. (Heck, some of you even knew about Konrath’s suc­cess­es before I did.—Thanks Kurt.) And now, since recent­ly becom­ing a hap­py Kin­dle own­er myself, I’ve decid­ed it’s time to make an exper­i­ment in this new fold. So let me tell you about it.

Pub­lish­ing Exper­i­ment 1: If we know any­thing for sure about pub­lish­ing right now, it’s that it is chang­ing. Authors, I believe, must become the sci­en­tists run­ning exper­i­ments with new tech­nol­o­gy, new pub­lic­i­ty strate­gies, mar­ket­ing, you name it. There’s just too much mon­ey involved for the big (and some small) press­es to car­ry out the kind of test­ing and idea-try­ing that needs to be done. That leaves us inde­pen­dent authors to try things out on our own.

In that spir­it, I’m releas­ing a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries in the Kin­dle for­mat just after Christ­mas. A Long Way from Dis­ney is offi­cial­ly out now, but I’m “releas­ing it” on Sun­day Dec. 27th, a day I’m call­ing Dis­ney Com­man­do Sun­day! The think­ing here is that by ask­ing peo­ple to all buy the book on a sin­gle day, I can go after the top of Ama­zon’s Kin­dle best­seller chart and gar­ner more atten­tion (sales) there, espe­cial­ly with the after-Xmas new Kin­dle own­ers.

I’ve priced the col­lec­tion low ($.99) because I’m more inter­est­ed in how many copies of the book I can get out there than in how much mon­ey I can make off of sales. For those who’ll be count­ing, the $.99 price point will give me 35 cents and Ama­zon a hefty 64 cents per book sold. They’ll win out regard­less, but it’s their sand­box and I want to play.

You can buy this Kin­dle book on any com­put­er once you’ve estab­lished a Kin­dle read­er preference/Kindle account. You have three choic­es here. You can do this with:

1) An actu­al Kin­dle. 2) An iPhone run­ning the Kin­dle App (down­load) or 3) Any PC run­ning the new Ama­zon Kin­dle soft­ware for PC (down­load here).

You can­not buy the Kin­dle book for any­one else, and no one can buy more than one copy. It’s cer­tain­ly an inter­est­ing set of rules, isn’t it? Well, this is what Ama­zon has set up. If you’d like to aid this exper­i­ment, please for­ward this blog post to oth­er authors, read­ers, Kin­dle own­ers, and exper­i­menters in the pub­lish­ing field. It should be inter­est­ing to see what this can gen­er­ate with a min­i­mum of pub­lic­i­ty and zero bud­get.

If you’d like to sam­ple any of the short sto­ries from this col­lec­tion, you can hear any/all of them free online at my web­site and find out more about the Kin­dle exper­i­ment here. I hope you’ll choose to come along and help make some waves with this idea. I do think that the more suc­cess­es inde­pen­dent authors have with this new means of get­ting things done, the bet­ter it will be for all of pub­lish­ing. Per­haps that’ll be our next debate.

I’ll be back lat­er this week with a few sto­ries from the col­lec­tion and then again next Sun­day for the big sales kick­off! See you…

Seth Har­wood pod­casts his ideas on the pub­lish­ing indus­try and his fic­tion for free at sethharwood.com. He will be teach­ing an online course (The Essen­tial Art: Mak­ing Movies in Your Read­er’s Mind) with Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies start­ing in Jan­u­ary. His first nov­el, JACK WAKES UP, is in stores now.