A Kindle-Loving Author's Lament for Paper Books

Oh, Rhett! How I miss my beautiful back cover.

It's the week before launch. Which means I've been busy working on distribution. Thursday I'll pick up the 106 "real books" (i.e., physical copies) of The Beresfords from the awesome folks at Gorham Printing in Centralia, which should cover launch parties and stocking local University Book Store, but for those of you who can't attend a launch or who never visit brick-and-mortar bookstores anymore, I've also been getting the Amazon Print-on-Demand version going and the Kindle and Nook ebooks.

I don't have many gripes about POD--the quality is fine, and I do appreciate not having to stock physical copies. If I could change anything, it would be having a matte option for the cover and to not be charged sales tax (!) when I order my own books for resale.

But I do mourn the ebook versions of all my novels. And I say this as an avid Kindle reader! At least half of my reading happens on the Kindle, but I do wonder if, out there, other authors are shedding tears over ebook versions of their precious babies.

Why mourn the ebook versions? I give you five reasons:

1. My beautiful cover! Yes, the Kindle and Nook offer a thumbprint version, but Kathy Campbell did a lovely job, and details are lost when the image is shrunk down--"wood-grain" swirls, the cool Readers Group dealie and such. When reading physical books, we naturally see the book covers much more. I miss that. Yes, I can "Go To" the cover, but it's a nuisance. And, on the Kindle at least, Amazon starts you automatically at Chapter One, not the cover. Wah.
   
2. My beautiful back cover! Where else can you find the synopsis, blurbs, author bio/pic all in one place, and so artfully laid out? I love that stuff--it's one reason library hardbacks with no dustcover annoy me. Not to mention books with just an enormous author photo taking up the whole back cover. (I'm looking at you, Danielle Steel.)
   
3. The flawless formatting! Having used Adobe InDesign to do my own text formatting for the printed version, I spent time. There were page breaks where they oughtta be. Section breaks. Chapter Breaks. There was nary a widow or orphan to be found. Everything just so. Well, lovely formatting goes out the window in ebook versions. Why? Because the reader can adjust the font size, so text has to flow. Therefore widows and orphans appear constantly. All the breaks get messed up. Bizarre stuff just makes its way in. We've all had the experience of reading ebooks where sudden weird characters or formatting just appear like a bloom of water damage or spilled coffee on a physical book.
   
4. The special fonts and visual treats. The Beresfords features some handwritten letters and even a graduation invitation, all presented beautifully in the physical book. Alas, Kindle only offers two font types (Courier and Times New Roman, I think) and no fancy layout (see point #3). Therefore, the ebook version of Caroline Grant's correspondence with Frannie shows up as--drumroll, please!--italics. Nor could the Nook handle funky characters, such as one finds in Slobodan Milosevich (Blogger can't handle them either). So, Slobodan, if you download my book on Kindle, I want you to know that I got all the kooky accent marks and funny letters in your name right in my printed book.
   
5. And my final cause for lament: in the ebooks I can't control what I want the reader to see. (See #1.) I learned this from my last book Everliving. At a book club I discovered that the Kindle readers weren't even aware the book had epigraphs!(!!!) I loved those danged epigraphs. They meant something. They added to the reader's understanding. No matter--the Kindle kicked off the book at "Chapter One," and everything that came before was skipped over. (You will see in The Beresfords that I have learned. Pertinent quotes now take place after the words "Chapter One.") I can cram other info for the reader at the end of the book, following the text, but if the reader doesn't remember there's a Readers Guide (because he never sees the front cover), he might just stop reading at the end of the story and ditch the rest.

Okay. Done weeping and gnashing my teeth. I look forward to seeing many of you at Saturday's launch. If you can't make it, I'll have copies on me, but remember that University Book Store ships and gift-wraps for free, and their copies will be the same price as the POD version on Amazon.

 Or, just download it after May 5 to your Kindle or Nook. But remember--you've been warned!

Amazon...Because I'm Worthless?

Strangely, I'm not in this picture

This weekend was a perfect storm of ebook marketing research, from which I was able to draw one clear, immediate conclusion: My Books are Worthless.

Let me explain.

1. Amazon started a new program for its authors called "KDP Select." Under this program, you sell your ebook exclusively on Kindle (i.e., not on Nook) for 3 months. In return, you get to...offer your book for free five days in that 3-month period. Huh? As far as I could see, they offered no publicity for you. Just the chance to make ZERO off your book for five days. I know--you can't blame me for being tempted. I signed up Everliving and took it off Nook.


2.I've mentioned before that sales of all my books slowed to a trickle, making me think that my more-than-self-sustaining "hobby" was going to become like most hobbies, a drain on the wallet. If that was going to be the case, I wanted to see if price was an issue. Were people unwilling to try a new author (or a friend's latest book) because $2.99 was a deal-breaker??? Far be it from me to stand between people and great beach reads for the price of a cup of coffee.

3. I scheduled Everliving to be free on Kindle Saturday, January 7 and Sunday, January 8. Then I sent off emails to my favorite bargain Kindle book sites, DailyCheapReads, Pixel of Ink, and Kindle on the Cheap. It turned out only Kindle on the Cheap sent out an announcement, the other two sites perhaps being up to their necks in free ebooks and not in need of another.

4. On Saturday, January 7, Kindle on the Cheap posted about Everliving, and the "sales" started rolling in. I didn't check every hour, but the sales ranking peak I noticed at 7:09P was #160 on the Free list in Kindle/ #6 in Contemporary Fiction/ and #41 in Romance. These are stratospheric heights for a small-peanuts author like me, and the ranking translated to 2,772 copies "sold" on Saturday. (Royalties = $0)

5. On Sunday, January 8, the Kindle Nation Daily promotion I had scheduled back in June finally ran (five days after it was originally scheduled to run, which meant that, instead of getting a sales spike at $2.99, I got the sales spike at $0). The "Weekender" emailing ensured that Everliving stayed in the rankings. Again, I didn't check all the time (because I was watching the Broncos-Steelers game), but I caught a 1:11P sales ranking peak of #118 in Free in Kindle/ #4 in Contemporary Fiction/ and #30 in Romance. Yay! This translated to "sales" of 1,197 copies. Again, Royalties = $0.

What can I conclude from all this? That a few thousand people, with prompting, are happy to give my book a try for free, but far fewer are willing to do so at $2.99. I suppose some of the free-readers might so fall in love with me that they read my other books, but on the other hand, why bother, if they can just move on to the next free ebook? Who wants to fork out $2.99, if there are a bazillion free books to read?

Don't get me wrong--I love free books as much as the next person. There's a reason I'm trolling those sites and get most books at the library. But as an author, it does make me think I could do much, much better if I bagged groceries at the local market.

Oh, well. Back to Chapter 27 of the WIP...