epublishing

Goodreads swallowed by Amazon

goodreads_iconCue the Ambivalence Machine. Goodreads has just “joined the Amazon family.”

While all indies should be happy and thankful that Amazon helped break traditional publishing’s stranglehold on the market, lack of competition–or in this case, a blow to independent reporting and reviewing–isn’t really good for anyone.

It will be interesting to see how other book distributors like Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple react. Is this the warning bell Apple needs to get off their ass and actually make iBooks work? Will Kobo take the challenge and soak their parent company Rakuten for more bank to fight the good fight?

Or are we watching the end game?

Free Holiday Bonanza on Amazon!

amazon_xmasHappy Holidays!

To celebrate the season and get 2013 off to a rousing start, I’m setting a slew of my titles on Amazon to “free” at different points over the next week and a half.

If you like crime fiction, fantasy, psychological suspense, and dark humor, you might just find a favorite in the list below. Please pass it on to friends and family!

Finding Emma | 12/25 – 12/27

one bad twelve | 12/25 – 12/27

Seven Into the Bleak | 12/25 – 12/27

Assassin | 12/26 – 12/28

The Sword of Kings | 12/28 – 12/30

Three the Hard Way | 12/29 – 12/31

Three of a Kind | 12/30 – 01/01

Three on a Match | 01/02 – 01/04

Happy reading and have a safe and joyful holiday!

Not so funny

After less than scintillating results on, well, every e-book retail outlet except Amazon, I was inspired to create what is quite possibly the worst drawn cartoon in the world.

I would be more charitable to Amazon’s competition if:

  • Smashwords could assure me that they’d actually ship the e-books I ask them to.
  • Barnes & Noble wouldn’t blame Smashword’s staff for not having my books on their site.
  • Apple actually acted like books were sold online.
  • Kobo improved a search engine that displays a search of “iden, matthew” on Page 2 and Page 3 of the results. And created some sort of system whereby indies could compete with Trad Pub titles.

Until then, it’s probably back to Select for me, like every other indie author except Bob Mayer.

Click for bigger version.

Read Some Blog, Get Some Book

Some interesting things afoot here in Matt Iden Land. To wit:

I’m guest blogging on Omnimystery News today about the inspiration for my protagonist, Marty Singer. If you said Spenser, Reacher, or Pike…you’re way off. Check out the blog to find out why!

Omnimystery is also kindly holding a contest for Blueblood, the second in my Marty Singer series. Three copies (paper or electrons, your choice) being given away. Head on over, read the blog post (you’ll need a code found in my guest post), and enter the contest. Ends October 25! Enter now or be forever cursed!

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A Reason to Live is being featured on the Bawdy Book blog tomorrow, October 19. While ARTL isn’t the steamy norm for this corner of the internet, blogger Jennifer Adams was kind enough to make an exception in my case (hey, there aren’t one but TWO sex scenes in the novel). Please swing by and give her a vote, a comment, or at least one tick upward in her site metrics.

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Kindle Nation Daily is set to run a sponsored excerpt of A Reason to Live on October 23. Their “Free Kindle Nation Shorts Excerpt – Email Blast” goes out to “over 32,000 opt-in email or Kindle edition subscribers.” They’ll be running a 20,000 word excerpt from A Reason to Live that I hope will wow a whole new raft of consumers in time for…well, it’s a little early for Christmas, but never too late to read a book!

This is the last of three recent attempts to buy love on the internet, the other two being ads on Ereader News Today and Goodreads. When all the numbers are in, I hope to do a wrap up on the return on investment (and effort).

Sign up for the KND newsletter at http://kindlenationdaily.com/22447-2/.

Amazon opens its doors in India

Interesting news today from Amazon: KDP authors can now reach the world’s largest English-speaking democracy. Amazon announced that, in partnership with Croma retail stores to sell the Kindle, Amazon’s digital bookstores have thrown their doors open to the 1,000,000 books available for the Kindle e-reader at www.amazon.com/kindlestoreindia.

“We are proud to launch this new Kindle store for Indian customers — offering Kindle book purchases in rupees and the ability to buy and read the work of many great Indian authors,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle Content, Amazon.com. “In addition, we are excited to work with Croma to make Kindle available at retail outlets across India.”

[Read more…]