Dec 12, 2011
A Possibly Stupid Mistake
I may have made a mistake today. I had an “aw, fuck it” moment and clicked a button and—hours later, of course—came across advice that suggested maybe I shouldn’t have clicked that button. Reasonable, sound advice.
Such is the life of the non-lawyer minded self-publisher.
It’s possible that it wasn’t a mistake at all. If it was or wasn’t a mistake of astronomical proportions, I promise I’ll tell you all about it in three months time.
For those three months, one of my e-books is enrolled in Amazon’s KDP Slect program. Look right over there, in the right-hand column, and you’ll see the words “Available exclusively at Amazon.com until March 10th, 2012″ right under Hard Lessons. I didn’t initially plan on doing it to Hard Lessons. I meant to do it to the e-book “single” of my story “Bodies in Motion,” which I was planning on selling for $0.99 as an incentive buy.
First, a bit about KDP Select: Amazon currently offers Prime members the ability to download a number of books for free. The publisher (that’s me!) still gets paid… something (this is determined by a bunch of stupid math). I wouldn’t have done this if I was doing it just for the payout, at least directly. Through most ebook sites, a $0.99 ebook would net me all of $0.35 royalty per download.
However, there’s the possibility that enrolling in the program could mean a lot of good exposure; readers who might not ordinarily try my work out for two or three bucks certainly might try it out for free, and then—given that they’re bound to love it—they would march on to pay full price for my other ebooks. So far, it’s proven to be a relatively reliable way of building sales for other authors.
What I didn’t think about—or catch, when reading the fine print—is that the content can’t be for sale in other formats, or in other stores. Chances are, Amazon’s lawyers are going to consider having the story available in an anthology as falling into those forbidden categories. (Luckily, this only refers to me selling things I have the rights to; the story is also available in Cleis Press’s Best Gay Erotica 2011, but I don’t have the right to pull that one out of bookstores.)
To be on the safe side, I’m enrolling Hard Lessons in the same program; I already can’t sell it through other venues for the next 90 days, so I might as well see if it can help accrue the benefits that I was hoping “Bodies in Motion” would alone. Amazon already makes up the bulk of my ebook income, so I’m not missing out on a massive amount of sales. I am possibly inconveniencing readers, but only for a short time, and I hope that the benefits might outweigh those losses. (There are also ways to convert non-DRM Kindle books to other formats; if there’s enough curiosity about this, send me a message on Facebook or Twitter or by e-mail and I’ll throw some links up.)
Regardless, this will only be in effect until March 11th, 2012. If it’s shockingly effective, and I find myself swimming in a vault full of cash, a la Scrooge McDuck, it may go on for longer. But probably not. Or at least, not with the same book.
Now, there’s a chance that I didn’t make a mistake at all. Even if this works out for the best, though, I still made a stupid decision without doing the necessary research. I should have well-and-learned by now that any move that restricts what I can do with my writing in any venue is one that should be considered closely, not decided on randomly while feeling slightly in the dumps about this month’s sales numbers.
Writers: read contracts. Understand what you’re getting into. Make decisions based on logic and understanding. Read Chuck Wendig’s The Precarious Portentious Perils of Self-Publishing. In fact, read everything that man writes. I recently finished Double Dead: so much fucking fun.
It’s 1:00 in the morning, so I’m going to post this shit, and then maybe I’ll post something nice for you later. I finished a story on Sunday, one that frees a huge, awesome project up to move forward. Maybe I’ll share a taste with you.
Buy: