Sunday, March 25, 2012

Spring cleaning, or: stuff I should have said before now.

First, a big shout-out to the 814 people worldwide (yes, worldwide!) who downloaded Seized for free during the grand opening weekend promotion Friday and yesterday -- and an even bigger shout-out to those of you who paid money for a copy.  The free "sales" drove Seized to the #5 spot on Amazon.com's Contemporary Fantasy free book list on Friday.  I'm not going to claim bestsellerdom -- I can't in good conscience, since I was literally giving the book away -- but the interest is certainly heartening to this fledgling indie author.

Anyway, welcome to anyone new who has wandered here from a recent purchase of Seized.  And please, after you read the book, I'd appreciate it if you would go back to Amazon and post a review.  Reviews do drive future purchases to some extent (and that's as close as I'll come to getting on my knees and pleading...).  Thanks.

For those of you who missed the free event -- sorry about that.  I put the info out on Facebook and Twitter, which I was pretty sure covered everybody who comes here as well.  I promise to post here, as well, in advance of the next freebie day.

And for those waiting for a dead-tree edition of Seized:
  1. I spent some time last night formatting the paperback and uploaded it to CreateSpace.  Next, they have to let me know that the proof is ready for my review; then it takes about a week for them to send me the proof.  If it looks good -- and I have no reason to believe it won't -- I'll give CreateSpace the nod to publish it.  I will definitely post everywhere when that happens.
  2. Formatting a paperback is a lot more work than publishing an e-book.  Plus the paperback is way more expensive to buy, and I don't get nearly the profit from it.  (If I made the paperback $2.99, too, I wouldn't make any money at all from it.)  So I'd like to reiterate something I touched on last week:  even if you don't have a Kindle (or some other flavor of e-reader), you can still read e-books.  Amazon has free Kindle reading software for just about any platform you can think of -- click here to take a look.  I have the Kindle reader on both my iPhone and my PC, and it works like a charm.  You can resize the font (which is a big deal for us old farts).  And as I'm in the habit now of carrying my phone everywhere with me, I've always got something to read.  (I've also got a Nook reader and an iBooks reader on my phone.  The Nook reader -- and the Kindle probably does, too -- keeps track of where I am in the book, so that if I read on my phone on the way home and then pick up the Nook device later in the evening, I don't have to page ahead.  Amazing, huh? Sometimes, technology really does help us.)
  3. If you're after an autographed copy, you don't really need a hard-copy book.  There are a couple of ways to do it with an e-book.  Probably the least cumbersome is to go to kindlegraph.com and plug the author's name into the search box.  For example, if you type in "Lynne Cantwell", you'll pull up a page for all three of my books.  Each has a button below for requesting a Kindlegraph.  Click that, and away you go.  (A caveat: I think this only works for your Kindle books.)
One last thing:  I posted a couple of weeks ago about the Smashwords/PayPal dustup.  It looks as though Smashwords has been able to get PayPal to see reason, which is good news indeed.  But that doesn't mean the culture war is over.  Stay tuned....

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