Kindle Unlimited: What's in it for readers?

Summer is typically a slow time in the news business, but this summer's news has been anything but slow: undocumented kids showing up by the thousands at the US border, renewed fighting in Gaza, and somebody in Ukraine blowing a civilian jetliner out of the sky.

But the news that sent the indie author blogosphere into a tizzy this week hit a bit closer to home: Amazon's announcement about Kindle Unlimited.

This new program (offered only in the U.S. so far) is an ebook subscription service. As a reader, you pay Amazon $9.99 a month to join KU; in return, you can download an unlimited number of books from the KU store, although you can only have ten books out at a time. This is in addition to the Kindle Owner Lending Library program Amazon already offers to its Prime members; that feature allows you to borrow one book a month.

Before you ask, I don't know whether Prime members who also join KU will be able to borrow eleven books at a time. Maybe I'll check that out -- in the interest of research, you understand -- and let you know next week.

Anyway, readers who are mulling over the idea of joining KU have a few things to consider. First, of course, is the cost, especially if you're already a Prime member. Prime costs $99 a year, but it's totally worth it if you buy a lot of stuff from Amazon; it gets you free two-day shipping on a lot of items, as well as a boatload of streaming movies and TV shows for free, as well as entry into the KOLL program. By contrast, the $9.99 a month for KU adds up to nearly $120 a year. That can be worth it if you read a lot (we do love voracious readers here at hearth/myth), and if you buy a lot of the books you read from Amazon. If you shell out $10 a month or more for books, then KU might be a great deal for you.

But not every book at Amazon is available through KU -- not by a long shot. For one thing, you won't find a ton of bestsellers in the KU store; some traditional publishers are participating, but not (at least right now) the Big 5. So if your reading tastes run to newly-published books reviewed by the New York Times, you'll probably be disappointed.

Still, in a storefront that features 600,000-plus titles, you ought to be able to find something to read. And if you like books by indies (we do love readers of indie books here at hearth/myth), you're in luck -- Amazon thoughtfully included every book enrolled in KDP Select in the KU store.

Which is the long way around to mention that a few of my books are available at the KU store: the Pipe Woman Chronicles Omnibus and The Maidens' War; two great anthologies that I'm honored to have stories in, Summer Dreams and 13 Bites Vol. 1; and a short story, "Lulie", which has a spiffy new cover in honor of the event.

You can try KU for free this month. Even if you don't end up joining for good, it's a way to pick up some free summer reads without having to make a trip to the library. What's not to like about that?

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These moments of unlimited blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Bits and bites.

It's been a scattered sort of day here, so this post is liable to be a little disjointed. Here's what's going on:

• 13 Bites launched today, October 13th! And Yrs Trly has two stories in it. Well, one and a smidge. The full story is called "A Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Gotta Do," and it's a Pipe Woman Chronicles prequel featuring Joseph and George; the smidge is a flash fiction piece I wrote for a prompt at Indies Unlimited not long ago. In all, we have 13 stories (hence, 13 "bites") from 10 authors, all of whom are members of the BookGoodies Authors' Group on Facebook. BookGoodies is turning into a pretty rad site for both authors and readers; we recently surpassed 1,000 author interviews on the site, and we have a chat board where we talk about all sorts of book-related stuff. Anyway, this anthology was the brainchild of Alan Seeger, who proposed the project, volunteered to be our editor, and has done a bang-up job. Joseph Picard did the cover art, and he also has a story in the book. We'll have a paperback version eventually, but the Kindle edition is available right now on Amazon for $2.99. We're donating all proceeds to children's literacy programs around the world. It was a neat project to be involved in -- I got to make some new friends, we may all find new readers, and as a bonus, we'll be helping kids learn to read. And, oh yeah, we have a website for the book, too: 13Bites.com
• I spent all day yesterday with my head down in my computer, tinkering with Crosswind. And I'm happy to say that when I was done playing around with it, I felt it was ready to send off to my editor and beta reader. So the e-mail went out early this morning. Whoo hoo! If all goes well (i.e., if they don't send it back and tell me it stinks), it should be available sometime around November 20th. We'll have a cover reveal here presently....
• In addition, the final "bridge" short story will be out next week. I expect "Prophecy" will be available around the 23rd or so, but I'll let everybody know in the usual social media places when it's up and running.
• Leading up to Crosswind's release, I'm going to do another round of free days for the five Pipe Woman Chronicles books. It will start this Wednesday, October 16th, with Seized being free Wednesday through Saturday. Next week it'll be Fissured's turn; then Tapped will be free during Halloween week; then Gravid; and then Annealed. Please let your friends and neighbors know!
• I guess it's good that I'm getting all this out of the way this week, because NaNoWriMo starts in a couple of weeks. Aieee.... My project this year is the first draft of the second book in the Land, Sea, Sky trilogy, which will be called Undertow.

I think that's it for now... Oh, wait! There is one other thing. My daughter Kat entered this week's flash fiction contest at Indies Unlimited. You can read her entry here. Voting commences Wednesday, but don't worry -- I'll give you a heads-up.

Have a great week, everyone.

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This moment of bloggy disconnect has been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

The button stash.

This is only about half the stash.

The other day, I began thinking about knitting a new jacket for myself. I have the pattern picked out, and I bought the yarn last spring. (It's Jean Frost's Boyfriend Jacket and Glenfiddich Wool worsted weight in a purplish blue, if you care.) But I hadn't yet looked in the button stash to see if I had anything suitable. So I pulled out the drawer and went spelunking.

The vast majority of buttons in my stash came from my mother. She was an inveterate sewer and crocheter, but an indifferent knitter. When I sorted through her things after she died five years ago, I found several storage boxes full of fabric, zippers and bias tape in a range of colors and lengths, a couple of shoeboxes full of thread, and buttons out the wazoo. (I also found half-worked projects, including crocheted doilies using hooks so small that I'd go blind trying to complete them, and a knitted cable cardigan that she'd abandoned in the midst of the boring torso. I sympathized. Then I tossed the whole thing -- for a number of reasons, not least of which was that the pattern was missing. I might have been able to puzzle it out, but it just wasn't worth it.)

The state of Mom's button stash, when I found it, speaks volumes about who she was. For one thing, all of the stuff in this picture was dumped into a drawer in her sewing machine cabinet. She had strung together some of those that matched (sometimes on thread, sometimes on twist-ties), but there are plenty more sets that she didn't match up. Maybe she gave up.

You might notice that some of the buttons in the picture above (particularly the big brown one in the center at the very bottom) look as if they'd been used. That's because they had. Both of my parents grew up during the Great Depression, and when money was scarce, they learned to reuse. Mom was not above pulling the buttons off of a worn-out piece of clothing before throwing it away.  The thing is, she collected them way faster than she reused them -- hence the massive stash.

Sometimes, too, I think Mom had a bit of magpie in her. Even with this collection at home, she would buy cards of new buttons if the price was right, or if she liked them. Also in the stash are five or six cards, three buttons to a card, of 1/2" brown buttons with a sort of candy-striped brown-and-white rim. They're cute -- I used some of them on a baby sweater awhile back -- but what would have possessed her to buy fifteen of them? An adult-sized shirt only takes six or seven.

There's history in here, too, of various kinds. I've found mother-of-pearl buttons still on their cards, Bakelite plastic buttons, cards of buttons from the '60s priced at 29 cents (those days are long gone....). And too, sometimes I'll come across a lone button left over from an outfit Mom made for me (and wish she had scavenged them when I outgrew the outfit because they were cute!).

I should sort through the whole stash at some point and get rid of the stuff I know I'll never use: the basic white dress shirt buttons, the gray ones from my father's work uniforms, and the random other fasteners that got mixed in over the years. I should do that. I should.

But for now, I'll keep spelunking. I did come up with candidates for this jacket in several different styles, but I decided to wait on a final choice until the project is done. Who knows? Maybe none of them will work, and I'll have to go to the fabric store. I suspect I may have a little magpie in me, too.

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In case you missed my Facebook post, I'm pretty excited that I'll have two pieces in the upcoming BookGoodies fiction anthology. One is a Pipe Woman Chronicles prequel starring Joseph and George. The name of the book is 13 Bites and it should hit Amazon next Sunday, October 13th. I'll have more info (including, with any luck, a buy link) next week.

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Oh! And happy second blogiversary to Indies Unlimited, and many happy returns of the day! To mark the toddlerhood of our li'l nuclear-powered deathstar superblog, I saved the cake from the hearth/myth blogiversary in August. It's only a little stale.

Seriously, I am honored to be a part of such a talented and knowledgeable group of authors and bloggers. That they're also a lot of fun to hang out with is...well, it's icing on the cake. Happy anniversary to Stephen Hise, K.S. Brooks, and the rest of the gang.

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This moment of button-spelunking blogginess has been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.