I just ran both of my books as freebies via the KDP Select program. The results? Outstanding.

My original plan was to have The Five Elements go free for 1 day, then do the same with The Hall of the Wood on Day 2. I changed my mind when I saw how well TFE was doing on that first day, extending TFE's free promotion into Day 2 so that both eBooks were free on that second day.

Here are the results:

The Five Elements, Day 1: 754 downloads
The Five Elements, Day 2: 1703 downloads

The Hall of the Wood, Day 2: 278 downloads

During the two day run, TFE rose as high as #2 in the Free "Best Sellers in Epic Fantasy" category:

It... [More]

2011/12/2 Update: Big thanks to the Amazon rep who reached out to me after I tweeted my issue with uploading The Five Elements to KDP as well as to Amazon's engineering staff. It looks like there was a combination of things going on here, but all is well now. I was able to upload the latest version of my book after a software glitch was fixed and the rep ran through some things which ultimately showed the error as being a false positive.

2011/12/1 Update: I've tried many formats: .docx, .doc, .rtf, .html. None work. I even tried uploading an old version of my document since it *did* work previously. Even that won't upload/convert. Bummer. I s... [More]

Surprise. Shock. Pity. Scorn.

Those were the range of emotions I felt once I'd read through what amounts to the complete and absolute implosion of an indie writer's career.

It all started with an unfavorable book review on BigAl's Books and Pals site where Big Al reviews indie novels. The book is The Greek Seaman. Its author, Jacqueline Howett. Big Al rated the novel 2 stars out of 5, not because of the story itself, but because of the numerous grammatical and spelling errors. He actually makes it a point to say that the story itself is interesting, but that the numerous errors create too many stumbling points for the r... [More]

I guess I never came out and said it, but I've gone indie. There's a lot of reasons for this, some of which I might get into in a future post. Suffice to say that after examining traditional and electronic publishing, writing a whole series of posts detailing how to self-publish on various platforms, and, finally, coming to the realization that it's really a personal choice (there's no right or wrong here) and that the right choice for me is indie, I've fully embraced the concept.

Two of the more immediate challenges I'm facing as I jump in are (1) generating more titles to sell and (2) getting people to buy the titles already out there and t... [More]