exclusivity – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

All of my books other than Searching for Malumba have been re-submitted to Smashwords, and should be available there soon and propagating to the various other online bookstores soon afterwards. Malumba comes off of Kindle Select in late July and will be popping back up everywhere soon after that. This marks the third time, I think, that I’ve gone back and forth from “Amazon exclusivity” to “available everywhere,” and I will obviously let you know the next time I change my mind again.

What’s made the difference? Mostly that my books aren’t selling for shit on Amazon right now anyway, and so there’s no good reason not to broaden the number of places they can sell poorly at. 🙂 I feel like I’ve done enough free giveaways over the last six months or so of Amazon exclusivity that I’m reaching a saturation point with people I currently reach who might download them, so it’s time to spread my reach out again and see how well that works for me. At least BA Vol 1 will be showing up on OpenBooks again, and it is, notably, once again permanently free on Smashwords and the Smashwords affiliates if you haven’t checked it out yet.

Also: I’ve hinted around a bit at this, but it’s official now: I have a cover artist in the early stages of working on the cover for Tales from the Benevolence Archives, and the characters will be on the cover. I am so fucking stoked for this that I don’t even know what to do about it. Who’s the artist? His name is Jamie Noble Frier. This guy. I cannot wait to see what his early sketches of Brazel and Rhundi look like; we’ll see how much he’s willing to let me post of the early stuff.

I, uh, guess I ought to go work on getting the book finished now. 🙂

I think I’m going back to KDP Select again, y’all.

Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 hasn’t been on KDP Select for close to a year now, and Skylights and Sanctum of the Sphere were both removed from the program when their terms ran out in June and July, respectively. I wasn’t super pleased with the payment changes on Kindle Unlimited, and I wanted the flexibility back of having all of my books available on all the markets I could reach.

Months later, all the markets I can reach aren’t selling any books, and Amazon sales are suffering as well, since I know Amazon does more passive marketing for you on books that are in KDP Select than otherwise. I’ve come up with a solution for the folks who want my books in other formats: they can email me and ask for them. Having BA 1 available at Barnes and Noble and the iBookstore has resulted in one or two downloads a month (that’s across both) and Smashwords is generally good for about 30. Openbooks.com used to be a good source of downloads, but those have dried up recently, and I have good reason to suspect that they may never have been real in the first place.

So, screw it. I haven’t sold a single copy of Sanctum or Skylights in any other market since I made them available. And if you really want Skylights as a .epub I’m pretty sure you can figure out how to email me and ask for it and we can work something out. And the other thing? I did 200 free downloads of Benevolence Archives in a single day the last time I had it on Select. Smashwords has 324 total.

This… is not worth it. I’d originally thought to use BA 1 as my free book to drive sales to my others, and to not ever use free promotions for the other two books. Right now what I want is people reading and reviewing my books, and I think I may just need to focus on getting more copies out there and floating around regardless of how much money I make from it. That means Amazon, where I can push more downloads in a single day with a free promotion than months on another platform. And if I decide 90 days from now that I was wrong again, well, I’ll put them up everywhere again.

So, yeah. Expect all of my ebooks to be Amazon exclusives by this weekend. Note that print editions will still be available through Barnes and Noble’s website if that floats your boat, but we’re gonna take another long look at exclusivity and see if I can’t find a different way to make it work.

If you want to download something for Nook or through the iBookstore while you still can, check out the “My Books” link in the masthead for all the links you could possibly desire.