Speaking of Amazon…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing

20111004144517I got an email about their Kindle Scout program the other day; does anybody know anything about it?  It appears to be a crowdsourced approach to publication, only Amazon is your publisher and not just a distributor.  (Note to non-indie writers.  There’s a big difference.  I publish my books.  Amazon’s my distributor.)

Anyway, it appears that the program’s been around for a while– I got the impression from the email that it was a new thing– so I’m surprised that I’ve never heard of it prior to getting the email last week.  Have any of you fiddled around with this at all, either as a reader or a writer?  Anybody have a book out there that could use a nomination?

What it seems to be to me is less a control on quality of the work and more a test of which authors already possess a long enough arm online to drive “nominators” to the site– which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I doubt I can compete even if I had a book at the moment I wanted to nominate, which I don’t.  We’ll see what happens when the Skylights sequel comes out, sometime next spring.

As of about twenty minutes ago, I’m entirely Amazon exclusive.  It may be that the other retailers haven’t realized that the plug is pulled for a day or two, but I’ve pulled everything down this evening other than Amazon.  I have some ideas for promotions that I’ll be letting y’all know about in the next few days.  I’m hopeful that things will work out the way I want them to.

Meanwhile, Malumba is easily outpacing Sanctum in terms of pre-orders so far.  I’m starting to hear from alpha readers already and so far the response has been impressively positive.  I didn’t have super high hopes for this one to do much, but I’d love to be proved wrong.  Check it out!  Just $4.95!

11 thoughts on “Speaking of Amazon…”

  1. Good to know you’re getting the good response, both from the readers and from pre-orders. And always nice to go in with low expectations and be pleasantly surprised.

    I’ve had a feeling about this one since you started talking about it.

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    1. i think when they say ‘publisher’ it means it’s them who published for you in terms of means, distributor also means they can do that since they have their own amazon author’s account and site for readers to buy your books.

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  3. I recently started receiving emails by Amazon France (I live in France) about the scout program, asking me if I have anything to publish, thing is I have absolutely nothing published yet, so this seems to be a wide spread campaign.

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