Free Books
My book has just become available on Amazon’s Kindle Select program. This means that Amazon Prime members, who also own a Kindle, can borrow my book for free. You might think this to be a terrible option for me, why give my book away for free? Well, Amazon members can only get one book per month for free. And they need to be a prime member with a Kindle. So that narrows the audience some what.
And I should get paid for this transaction. Amazon has money that they will use to pay authors based on the number of times your book was checked out. If 1,000,000 books are checked out in a month, and they have put $1,000,000 aside, and my book is checked out 5 times, I’ll get $5. Not as much as I would have if those 5 people bought it, but if those 5 people wouldn’t have bought it, it’s 5 more people reading the book.
We’ll see how this experiment goes. The biggest drawback is the e-book must be exclusive to Amazon while it’s in this program. That means no buying the book for your Nook or iPad. Those markets aren’t quite as big as the Kindle, but they are not insignificant. Will it be worth it? Who knows, but we’ll see if anyone even borrows it.
3 Comments
Tamarynn · January 12, 2012 at 12:37 pm
“The biggest drawback is the e-book must be exclusive to Amazon while it’s in this program. That means no buying the book for your Nook or iPad.”
That may not be entirely true. There are kindle apps for ipad and android, so it could be possible that they can still borrow the book. I’m not sure what the extent of the prime/kindle/lending experience is, though. At first I was disappointed that your book was only available (digitally) through kindle, but since I’m running android on my nook I was able to install the app and read it just fine.
Wayne · January 12, 2012 at 1:47 pm
You can read purchased Kindle books on those things, but the lending program can only be done on the Kindle. I have had people ask to be able to guy it for the Nook though, which you can’t do to the best of my knowledge.
Tamarynn · January 13, 2012 at 10:21 am
I’ll send you a PM regarding that.
I found this article, which is very interesting and related to the topic here:
Top 10 Self-Published Writers Make 449% More Money Through Amazon Lending Library
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