Author: Matthew Iden

Kindleboards: The Best Resource Around

Posted on

For many indie authors (and Kindle aficionados), this post will fall into the “water is wet” category of late-breaking news, but I’ve found it’s foolish to make assumptions about what others know and don’t, especially when it comes to the rapidly-changing face of digital publishing and the internet.

The Best Resource Out There
Kindleboards (www.kindleboards.com) is a site that has to be at the top of every digital self-publisher’s bookmarks list. It is a supremely helpful site that, in digital publishing terms, has been around since the Stone Age (about 3 years) providing a forum space for budding digital authors, Kindle book lovers, and geek and gadget people in general.

The forum section boasts around 55,000 registered users and several thousand are online at any one time. A subset of those are writers (detailed below), but many more thousands are readers interested in one thing: digital books.

[Read more…]

Feeling Free

Posted on

If I had any doubts about the power of promotion, they were laid to rest this past weekend.

My crime fiction short story collection Three Shorts has been free since about the first week of February. In a month, it had been downloaded a respectable–if unspectacular–500 times. I had heard of other indie authors garnering thousands of downloads, but I’m a relatively unknown new-comer and I was more than happy to see hundreds of downloads fueled by little more than a change in price…I didn’t do any specific promotion beyond Twitter, Facebook, and a blog post.

[Read more…]

Where’s the Party? Crime fiction, thrillers, and mysteries

Posted on

There’s a Crime Fiction Writers group on LinkedIn that I belong to. Recently, this question was posed: what’s the difference between crime fiction, thrillers, and mysteries? I thought about it and responded:

Crime fiction: the party’s going to happen
Thrillers: the party’s happening
Mystery: the party’s over. Who drank all the beer?

[Read more…]

Key West: Setting as Character

Posted on

I can say that, after a short trip to Key West, Florida,  I’m more interested than ever in the concept of “setting as character”. Key West is so rich in history, personalities, and opportunities that you’d have to be made of wood not to see the story-telling potential in the place.

After walking around the streets and docks of the small island, story ideas and plot lines just started sprouting. I’ve already got a heist-caper halfway planned out in my head, thanks to the rich environment.

[Read more…]

Amazon flexes its muscle… (reblog: Write to Publish)

Posted on

Robin Sullivan over at Write to Publish has a nice post about how, as an indie author, you can keep from being left in the cold as Amazon–love ’em or hate ’em–goes about its quest to retain market leadership in publishing (c.f., KDP Select exclusivity, flexing contract muscles on Independent Publishers Group, etc.).

Find it here: http://write2publish.blogspot.com/2012/02/amazon-flexes-its-muscleauthors-caught.html

My take:

  • It would be foolish to forget that authors’ interests and Amazon’s interests are often ALIGNED, but they are not IDENTICAL. I waxed poetic about this when Amazon announced KDP Select.
  • Diversification isn’t just a good word for crossword puzzles. Whether we’re talking financial investments or outlets for your writing, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Amazon is the biggest basket, but not the only one.
  • I find those who boycott or hate on Amazon without referring to history or the bigger picture irritating. This is hopping on a bandwagon. Where were those people when traditional publishers kept the majority of authors under their thumb and allowed publishing as an industry to stagnate for the last thirty years? You can recognize Amazon for what it is (a corporate entity running a tight P&L sheet) without pillorying it or hopping into bed with it. Celebrate them when they do good, chastise them (or even fight them) when they do bad. Extremists make life hard.