The Early Numbers are In--Kindle Select Free Books

I promised to return here to talk more about my experience with the new Kindle Select Lending program where authors can make their books free a few days every 90 days. Joe Konrath just made his numbers public yesterday so he beat me to it, but now...

The Numbers are in on the Mosiman Experiment...

And the Numbers slay me...

I'll give you a total number of downloads of my books on Kindle since January 1. 8073. Eight thousand and seventy-three. I like it! That does not include books not in the program. It also doesn't include books that had good downloads between Dec. 28-31, and those included the first books I put up for free, two short stories.

Here are how the numbers came out on each title.

WIREMAN-4272
BAD TRIP SOUTH-1454
UNIDENTIFIED-1049
HORROR TALES-676
HORROR TALES 2-662
                             ----------
                              8073
It's maybe one-fourth, total, of the downloads Konrath had, but it ain't chopped liver, baby. Especially since I've been putting up Kindle books for a year, compared to Konrath's three years, and considering he is Kindle's darling, which he richly deserves and I mean that sincerely, and right now I am not on Kindle's radar. Also, I don't have nearly as many titles up in the program as our good guru. So I think this was a very respectable showing of just five titles over11 days. (What would have happened if I'd had 27? Woohoo.)

Yes, I know I gave more than eight thousand books away. And I expect to get eight thousand in good will, if not in money, but I'll take the money, and I trust that audience I just reached for free is going to come back to buy. I'm already getting sales I wouldn't have otherwise gotten from people who might not have known about my work before. Is it translating into money, yes, it is. Can I brag about how much money? No, I can't, because this experiment is something that will have repercussions a month from now, two months, three months from now. I'll know then what these free giveaways have wrought. Do I think it is going to translate into more money and more readers? You betcha. Oh, you betcha, Grasshopper.

I am working harder than I have worked in years on my writing and my career. I am compiling new short story collections, (LIFE NEAR THE BONE). I am doing some edits on formatting and scanning and doing OCR work on my novel, NIGHT CRUISING, one of my important back list titles I want available as an e-book on Kindle.

However, I am not too crazy busy to bring you some blog interviews here from a few great, interesting writers. The first one is scheduled for January 28 with James Robert Smith. We hope to interview Rick Hautala in February. I'll have a guest blog post here for you every month, sometimes more than one a month, we'll see how my schedule works out. So don't go away. Put this page as a Favorite, come and see me, leave a comment, Google + me, or whatever--you know, just come on back when you can. I think we're going to have some good times.

And I tell you what. If I start making bags of money on e-books, you'll be the first to know, because I want this blog to be informational and EVERYONE wants to know how the Kindle Select Program is doing.

Kindle Select Free Books

Like many other novelists, I've been making some of my e-books available to the Kindle Prime lending program, and taking advantage of the promotion to make my titles free for 5 days out of 90. This weekend, January 6-8, it will be bookfest, since three of my titles will be up for free download. (BAD TRIP SOUTH, HORROR TALES, and HORROR TALES 2) Yesterday I had put up WIREMAN, my first novel from 1984, for free and had more than 2000 downloads. The book made it up to 34th place out of the Top 100 Kindle/Mystery/Thriller titles and 311 in the overall free Kindle store of 15,000 titles.

Why are authors giving away their books? It appears that being generous this way introduces our work to some new readers and rewards our fans. It is publicity and promotion by the largest digital book seller in the world. More than one fourth of the 2000 downloads for WIREMAN were from the UK, and I had a few downloads from Germany, Italy, and Spain. As a writer, this makes me happy. Some might see it as having lost 2000 sales. But that's not true. It's 2000 people, the majority of whom have never read a Mosiman book before and might never have known of my work otherwise, and some of them will like my work enough to buy more books.  Some kind souls might even leave reviews.

My cash sales have increased, but I can't tell for sure by how much since the dashboard for Kindle Direct Publishing hasn't updated the past six weeks' sales data since December 31. Once it updates, I'll know for sure.

Is it a good idea for all authors to make their books free? I'd say no. I have 16 titles on Kindle so I can put 7 of them in the program and keep all my other books available for the Nook, Kobo, Sony, Diesel, and Apple. (Joining the Kindle Select program requires you make your books in the program available exclusively to Kindle.)  If I had 4 or less titles up, I would not join this program.  It means the book is completely tied up on Amazon for three months.

I see a mad rush of authors joining Select and making books free. I'm not sure this is a sustainable system or that it will be a good idea to use the program in another two or three months. The market may be saturated to the hilt by then, although over the Christmas season it is said there were 4 million Kindle Fires sold. That's 4 million readers looking for books. Still, I don't know how long it will be useful to authors to join the exclusive program and make free book promotions. Maybe I can write another blog about it in a couple of months, when I know more how it works out.

So far I'm having a good time, I'm getting more sales, more reviews, and a big promotional boost on the Kindle site. For right now that's great. I have no complaints. Stay tuned for updates...and enjoy a few free books on me.

THE PECULIAR LIFE OF A WRITER: FREE E-BOOK AND WHAT ROBERT BLOCH HAD TO DO WITH I...

THE PECULIAR LIFE OF A WRITER: FREE E-BOOK AND WHAT ROBERT BLOCH HAD TO DO WITH I...: I don't give my books away for free, or I haven't before, because the public, and rightly so, perceives "free" as rather worthless. But sinc...

FREE E-BOOK AND WHAT ROBERT BLOCH HAD TO DO WITH IT

I don't give my books away for free, or I haven't before, because the public, and rightly so, perceives "free" as rather worthless. But since I have three titles in the Prime Select program at Amazon on the Kindle, I will now and then make a story or book free. If a person has a Prime account they can get those titles for free, but for those who do not have that special account I thought it would only be fair to offer a book to them free now and then.

It's almost Christmas so before the truly big rush, I thought I'd offer my readers a free copy of INTERVIEW WITH A PSYCHO on Kindle.com. (See link to your right.) It was written when I lived in Ft. Lauderdale, FL and the editor of the anthology PSYCHOS was alive. I was in the Horror Writers Association and they had luckily talked Mr. Bloch in looking over and editing an anthology for the organization. Many members submitted stories. INTERVIEW ended up being one of the chosen stories, along with a new short story (at that time) by Stephen King. 

During the compilation of this anthology, Mr. Bloch died. I was devastated. I had become pen-pal friends with Robert Bloch and we had written back and forth to one another a few times. I don't know why he bothered with me, a pretty unknown writer, but that was the sort of man he was--kind, good-hearted, a wonderful man. I wrote him in my excitement when I'd been nominated for the Edgar Award for my novel, NIGHT CRUISE. He was sincerely happy for me and mentioned, just as a side remark, that he'd never been nominated or won the Edgar. I sat reading his letter in stunned silence. The man who wrote PSYCHO that was turned into one of the most iconic movies ever, never was even nominated for mystery/suspense's highest award? How could that be? Who had made THAT mistake? I wrote back asking that, how could that possibly be? If anyone ever deserved that award, it was Robert Bloch. I felt bad about my own nomination because why would I deserve it, if even the inestimable Mr. Bloch hadn't received it? I knew that when the committee overlooked Robert Bloch, they really messed up. Not that it matters--the man was great and a terrific writer and he didn't need any nomination or award to prove that.

The last I heard from him was a postcard he sent me that arrived only days before his death. I have that postcard now and it's one of my possessions that I'd never part with. It was a private little message, a quip, what he was famous for with his tremendous sense of humor, and it made me smile. I stopped smiling when I discovered he'd passed on. RIP Robert, my old buddy.

So this story I'm offering for free download for three days has this kind of history behind it and that's one of the reasons I published it newly in e-book format. Catch the read and enjoy your Christmas present from me to you. It's not as good as what Robert Bloch did in his famous novel, PSYCHO, but it does pay him homage.

Christmas for Writers and Readers

It's easy to know what to give a writer or reader for Christmas. Books! Now that many people own e-readers, it's easy to go to a site online and give the gift of a book. You can choose from novels, biographies, histories, even children's books.

If you're really feeling generous, give an e-reader. Now that tablets have come out, the best one around appears to be the Kindle Fire, with the Nook tablet as runner-up. Other tablets cost more and don't do much more so I'd consider those two the best bargains for the bucks. Do you know someone who is single or lives alone?  Give him an e-reader that will browse the web, let you read books with hundreds of thousands of titles to choose from, watch streaming movies, listen to any music ever created, and play a few games when bored. That's what the new Kindle Fire and Nook tablet do. What more could we ask for as writers and readers?

I have a Kindle 3rd generation that has the lifetime 3G for downloading books when I buy them. It has changed the way I read and cleared up a lot of room in my house. I also travel a lot and have little storage room for physical books, but with my Kindle I have hundreds of books at my fingertips.

When I was a child of 13 who wanted to grow up to be a writer, it could not have possibly occurred to me that one day instead of a library in my home with shelves of books, I would be reading on an electronic tablet. If someone from the future had told me that's what was in store for me, I wouldn't have been able to even grasp such a thing. Today so many people read this way that it's become normal. What a long way we have all come, baby!

I also offer nearly all of my books, back list and new, as digital downloads for e-readers. You can find them on the Kindle site, Barnes and Noble site, the Apple store, Smashwords, Diesel, Sony, and so many other places for sale on the internet. As a writer this has freed me and given me total control over my work and my rights to the work. I think it is a brand new world and it's a good one.

For the next three months I've even joined the program with Amazon where I'm offering two of my titles for free when you have a Prime account. That's the $79 a year account where you get free shipping on everything, streaming movies, music downloads, and now one free book a month. Amazon has become the biggest player of all when it comes to e-books and in some ways that's a good thing and in others it's a bad thing. No one wants to see the competition crushed. I will always want my work available for the Nook and the iPad and other e-readers and tablets. It's never good to put all of one's eggs in one basket, is it? But in other ways all writers want Amazon to do well because they are the ones running the big poppa show and if big poppa were to lose money or fail, then that would definitely hurt writers everywhere. It's amazing what Amazon has done in only a few years and you do have to give them credit where it is due in how well they know what people want and then making it easy for those customers to get what they want.

So if anyone wants to give me anything for Christmas, I'll take an e-book, and if you're feeling generous I'll take the Kindle Fire. Thank you, Santa!

E-BOOKS--The Need for Editing Before Publication

One of the few posts I've ever made on Facebook that caused such a furor of responses was about poorly edited e-books and what professional writers should do about the editing of their books before publishing them online at e-book sites like Kindle, Smashwords, Kodo, and B&N. 

I believe strongly in having your manuscript edited before e-book publication and also before sending works to an agent or editor for print publishing.  I'm fortunate at this point in my writing career to have spent most of a lifetime learning to edit myself--though this does not mean I don't also have a trusted colleague go over my work before publishing or submitting.  Not many of my novels, including my early ones, were edited by my print publishing houses to any noticeable degree.  I was always a good speller even before I used computers.  I spent years at a typewriter when I really did have to know how to spell since I had no electronic spellchecker.  I majored in English so I know all the rules for punctuation, run-on sentences, verb tenses, and all the rest of the skills a writer needs to turn out manuscripts that need very little editing.  These are technical skills, of course, and it takes many more years of experience to learn how to actually write fiction. 

Storytelling is an art, in either the long or short form.  I know it isn't fashionable these days to call a writer an artist or to talk about writing fiction as an art form, but I don't really care what other people say or proclaim about anything.  I know a writer is involved in making art with words and this makes him an artist and fiction artwork.  Although I've taught fiction writing online in paid courses students took from me on AOL, edited manuscripts and taught novel writing for Writer's Digest, and taught live courses in classrooms, I rarely found great writing from new writers.  But I did discover talented writers who, with work and practice, would eventually be publishable novelists. 

A professional writer, even a very good one with many skills, still needs editorial attention.  A new writer entering the e-book revolution and hoping to publish himself needs even more editorial supervision.  I fear many e-book self-publishers are not getting it and that is a shame.  It will mean those e-books will languish, the author will never get an audience or followers and fans, and the whole experiment of breaking through the glass ceiling in publishing will  have been for naught.  It will also mean the new author doesn't even know he has improvements to make in order to reach a professional stage of writing.

The first impulse a new author hoping to put up an e-book online is to have a friend or family member read his manuscript. What he really wants is praise.  It is natural to hope the work is good and a reader loves it.  It is good to respect friends and family, but a writer cannot rely on them to be critics and editors.  When people love you, they will be reluctant to criticize or correct, yet that is exactly what the manuscript needs.  Writers' groups, online and off, are terrific, but also unreliable when an author needs serious editorial feedback.  I belonged to a writers' group once in Houston, Texas and although about 60% of us eventually published novels with major NY publishers, meaning many of the members were talented writers, not much true editing could be done by one writer for another. 

What's a writer to do who wishes to publish his own e-book?  I think it comes down to two choices.  One is free and one is paid.  If the writer (no matter how professional, technically skilled, or multi-published) can get an established writer friend to read the work closely and make suggestions and corrections, that would be a most excellent choice.  But not many established or professional writers have the time from their own work to do this, so if you have such a friend the way I do, you are well blessed.  The paid solution is to hire someone to edit your manuscript before publication.There are freelance editors who can be hired. There are several editorial services online, too, some of which I am sure are very good.  I also offer my services for proofreading and editing, though I can't take many clients since editing, done right, is a time-consuming job, and I have a lot of my own work to do just like everyone else.

 Well, I can't afford that, you say.  Or how can I invest money in paying for editorial help when I might not make any money on the e-book?  My answer is  you can't afford not to seek professional help.  And how much money will you make on a book that is a disaster editorially because you didn't want to invest in it?

But something has to be done to save new, unpublished writers from putting e-books online for sale without having any kind of vetting at all.  If a person truly wants to create art, which is what the novel and the short story is, then he has to approach all aspects of its creation with responsibility and professionalism.  The e-book is a grand opportunity for struggling writers of talent.  I expect we readers will benefit greatly from this e-book revolution.  But now that there are no more gatekeepers as there was when writers had to actually interest an agent and an editor at a print publishing house, there is much more responsibility on the author's shoulders to make sure his offering is worthy of publication.  Even if editors won't or can't tell a writer his book is no good or not worth pursuing, editors can at least make sure the manuscript is technically correct and the author thinks about making some changes that will improve the work. 

We may all believe we can write books because we were all taught in school how to write sentences and papers.  But we were all taught how to apply a Band-Aid to a cut and how to remove a thorn,  and that does not make us doctors and surgeons.  We all may know our legal rights as citizens, but that does not make us attorneys.  Writing novels and stories, especially in this day when anyone can create an e-book, means we must make sure we are offering a work that is at least as good technically and creatively as what a print publisher would publish.  And that takes more than the author's eyes and judgment, it takes unbiased editorial attention.
  This is all we need ask of ourselves and our fellow artists.  It is not much.  But it is imperative.

BARBARA BUSH SHOWED HER MISCARRIED FETUS TO GEORGE

So George Bush wrote a book (not that I believe this, someone wrote it for him from notes, I'm sure) and he began talking about his stance against abortion, why it meant so much to him.  He said his mother had miscarried, put the fetus in a jar, and showed it to him.  He looked at it and thought, "That would have been my brother." and decided abortion (on the spot?) was evil.

Okay, but did it not occur to him that what his mother had done by showing him an aborted fetus in a jar might be, well, if not evil, then a strange turn of events?  I know he loves his mama and that's a good boy, but as an adult shouldn't George at least think this thing through and realize what his mother had done was shameful, misguided ,ignorant, cruel, disgusting, crazy, and way over the border of weird?  Couldn't he work this out and decide that Mama might be off her nut?  No, I guess not, he wrote about it in an autobiography.  Kook!

For what woman would do this?  First, put it in a jar.  "Hey, Doc, just slip that mangled dead fetus there into a jar of formaldehyde for me, will ya?  I wanna take it home to George W.  Maybe we'll keep it a while, bring it out on Thanksgiving."

Second, what woman, what MOTHER, would ever show a jarred fetus to her child?  Did Barbara not love George?  Was she saying by doing this," George, here's what would have happened to you if I had you aborted or miscarried."?  What, specifically and exactly, were her intentions?

Like many another woman I, too, miscarried a child.  It was terrible, devastating, heart-wrenching.  Once a woman is pregnant, whether she meant to be or not, she often grows to accept the situation (if she has support and the baby is very much wanted and is healthy and wasn't the product of rape or incest) and begins to live in the future where there is a live baby, diapers, nursing, loving/raising a child.  So when you miscarry, it can be full of anguish and despair.  I know because it happened to me.

So I cannot understand why Barbara Bush would have the fetus jarred (as if it was an object) and THEN think it the right thing to show the fetus to her son.  I could never in a million years have done such a thing.  Ever suggested to me (who in the hell would suggest such insanity?), I would have recoiled in horror.  My heart hurt.  My body hurt. I felt great loss.  One of mine was gone before he/she had a chance to llive.  Why would I ever want to bottle that little aborted being and then show it to my children?

I am flabbergasted.  No wonder George W. drank and did cocaine.  No wonder he is such a macho doofus.  Not to blame it all on Mama Bush, but God, she sure didn't help the boy out much, did she?

I don't know what this has to do with writing except to tell you that writers have hearts.  They do.  They have to.  They can't be really cruel and mean and dastardly and produce anything at all with any sort of heart to it.  I may not do well in social situations, but by God I do love humankind as a whole.  I love my miscarried babies enough not to show them around in a jar.  I love my children enough not to burden them with looking at a poor little fetus curled up in a jar.  I love people who have heart and I write about people with heart.  Writing also means putting yourself in someone else's shoes and seeing his point of view, but this time...with this woman...I cannot find a way to do it.  I have thought about it all day since hearing the news.  I can pretend to get what she might have been up to, but in all honesty it's just pretend.  What Barbara Bush did is despicable and stupid and crazy and senseless and if I wrote her into a book I'd portray her as one of the most twisted sisters in the world.