Something’s been on my mind for awhile, and after discussing it with my wife, I’ve come to a decision. If you look in the Library, you’ll see some free ebooks. I made the decision some time back not to charge for individual flash fiction and short stories. I just feel like they’re too short to justify charging anything for them. Through Smashwords, I can distribute to almost every ebook retailer you can think of except for Amazon and Google Play, and I can mark the price as free. For Google Play and Amazon, I have to publish direct. Google will let me mark the price as free, but Amazon requires a minimum price of 99 cents. Since I feel like these are too short to charge for, this presents a problem with publishing to Amazon.
Third generation Amazon Kindle, showing text from the novel Moby-Dick. Esperanto: Amazon Kindle de la tria generacio, montranta originan tekston el la romano Moby-Dick. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Why not KDP select, where I can have free giveaway days every quarter and Prime members and Kindle Unlimited members can borrow them for free? Even if I only released the collections on Amazon, their TOS is pretty clear that if the individual components are available elsewhere, the collection can’t be in KDP Select. I know there are some who are able to get away with it, but I’m not going to chance it.
It’s not the best solution. Kindle members who don’t want to bother with Smashwords will have to wait to get the shorter stories (although to be fair, when I release a new book in KDP Select for its first 90 days, everybody else has to wait). But to make it easier for the less technically savvy readers, until such time as Amazon allows free as an option, I think it’s the best option. Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments.
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