Author: Scott William Carter

A Few Thoughts on Kindle Un/Limited (and the Biggest Mistake Amazon Is Making With Writers)

If you’re not familiar with Amazon’s new subscription service for ebooks, here’s two articles for background:

Those articles both offer more than a knee-jerk anti-Amazon response, which you’ll often find in the media, but both sum up what I’ve been hearing from readers: meh.

kindle-limited

Been thinking about this a lot for the past week, as the debate on this is raging all over the Internet. The one area where I think Amazon is making a mistake is their bizarre fixation on getting authors to go exclusive. I have mixed feelings about what these kinds of book subscription services will do to the book industry in the long run (look at what Spotify and Pandora have done to muscians’ incomes), but as it stands right now, Kindle Unlimited (which should really be called Kindle Limited because it’s less than 1/5 of their ebook catalog) is a lot like Netflix. Netflix has some original content but it’s mostly backlist.

There are times when going exclusive makes sense for a writer, if you get some combination of money or exposure that makes it worth it. Think of selling a story to Ellery Queen magazine. That’s a short term exclusive. Or House of Cards on Netflix. Long term exclusive. Game of Thrones is exclusive to HBO, which is short term, because you can eventually buy it on DVD. A lot of shows put up their first couple seasons on Neflix hoping you’ll get hooked. You could do the same thing with Kindle Un/Limited, opt in with the first book in a series. But for me, I won’t do that because of their demand for exclusivity. I want my loss leaders on all platforms. Imagine if Netflix demanded that every TV show and movie had to be exclusive to them. They’d go out of business in a heartbeat. That Amazon thinks they can pull that off just makes me shake my head. They’re not asking traditional publishers to be exclusive in the program (most of which have turned them down; the name books in there Amazon is paying full royalty on), but they demand it of anyone who’s in Kindle Select.

If they uncoupled this from Select, it might be good for authors to use in a limited way, such as for the first in a series, but Amazon’s bizarre fixation on exclusivity prevents this. I happen to love Amazon. They really have done more to advance the cause of literature than any company in the history of the world, but their obsession with getting indie authors to go exclusive is a mistake, and it also gives easy fodder to their critics.

FREE for a limited time: THE GRAY AND GUILTY SEA

guiltyseaA dead girl on the beach. A private investigator haunted by his wife’s death. Get THE GRAY AND GUILTY SEA for FREE for a limited time.

Set on the moody Oregon coast, The Gray and Guilty Sea is FREE as an ebook for a limited time from all of your favorite retailers.  Readers have called the book, the first in the Garrison Gage mystery series, “irresistible,” “unputdownable,” and a “fascinating character study.”

Want to find out why?  Now’s your chance.

Download the ebook for FREE:
Amazon | B&N | Kobo | iTunes

“Carter’s writing is on target.” – Publishers Weekly

  

A curmudgeon. An iconoclast. A loner. That’s how people describe Garrison Gage, and that’s when they’re being charitable.

After his wife’s brutal murder in New York, and Gage himself is beaten nearly to death, the crippled private investigator retreats three thousand miles to the quaint coastal town of Barnacle Bluffs, Oregon. He spends the next five years in a convalescent stupor, content to bide his time filling out crossword puzzles and trying to forget that his wife’s death is his fault. But all that changes when he discovers the body of a young woman washed up on the beach, and his conscience draws him back into his old occupation – forcing him to confront the demons of his own guilt before he can hope to solve the girl’s murder.

Author’s Note:  A newly revised and reformatted edition of The Gray and Guilty Sea was published in June 2014.

  

If you get hooked on the grumpy Garrison Gage like many other readers, there are two more books in the series:

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A New Edition of The Dinosaur Diaries (and Some Thoughts About WIBBOW)

dinosaurdiaries2_ebookcoverMy first short story collection, The Dinosaur Diaries and Other Tales Across Space and Time, has been republished by Flying Raven Press  (links to retailers below).  This is my own publishing company, of course, which gave me an opportunity to package the book in the way I really wanted it, with a snazzy new cover and everything.  The eighteen stories originally appeared in places like Asimov’s, Analog, Ellery Queen, and Weird Tales, among others. I have nothing against the fine folks who published the book originally back in 2010, but it was just time to make a change. 

I never liked the original cover much, and I also didn’t like that in the print edition they tried to squeeze 80,000 words into under 200 pages. It made the book seem quite thin, and even if the number of words is the same, it can give a potential reader the sense that the book is not worth the money if they happen to pick it up.  This print edition stretched it out to around 250 pages.  The original ebook was also four years old, so I took the opportunity to reformat it with some of the better tools available today.

From a business perspective, this was probably not the wisest use of my time. Yes, I’ll see a higher royalty, but honestly, if I was interested primarily in what was in the best interest of my bank account, the time spent re-publishing this book should have been spent working on new material.

From a writing perspective, however, it feels great.

Here’s how I see it.  I know there are writers who can approach writing purely from a business perspective, but that doesn’t work for me.  A few years ago, when Dean Wesley Smith and I were co-teaching some “Indie Publishing” workshops to help writers get started in this arena (this was way back in the cave man days of indie publishing, you know, circa 2011), I coined an ugly acronym as a test writers could use whether some non-writing related task was worth their time:  WIBBOW.

Which stands for Would I Be Better Off Writing?

Lo and behold, this ugly acronym actually caught on and I see mentions of it around the Internet, often by people I’ve never met.  The idea was that as indie publishing gained popularity, there were even more tempting ways to spend your time other than writing new material that could make you feel productive but, when playing the long game, might not be the best choice.

However, the thing about WIBBOW is that it is entirely subjective. It’s up to each writer to decide whether something is worth doing when measured against spending that time writing.  For me, re-publishing The Dinosaur Diaries passed the test, because I also operate by another motto:  Write for yourself, publish for the shelf.  What I mean is that no matter what happens with my writing career, I want to feel good about my choices.  I want to feel like I wrote what resonated with me (hoping it does for others) rather than writing what I think resonates with others (and hoping it will for me). And when I publish something, I want to be able to look at it on the shelf (even if that’s metaphorically, online) and feel that the book’s presentation is giving it the best chance to find an audience—and even if it fails it that regard, that I’ll always be proud of it when I look at it.

I’m proud of this book.  I hope my readers will feel the same.

* * *

dinosaurdiaries2_ebookcoverThe Dinosaur Diaries and Other Tales Across Space and Time

More About the Book

Available Now:

Ebook:
Amazon | B&N | Kobo 

Paperback:
Amazon  | B&N

 

Presenter at North Coast Redwoods Writers’ Conference September 19-20

redwoodLife is so busy these days I don’t have a lot of time for workshops and conferences.  However, a couple years ago I was a presenter at the North Coast Redwood Writers’ Conference in Crescent City, California and had such a good time that I couldn’t resist making a return appearance this year when I was invited to be a presenter.

It’s a cozy little conference held at the College of the Redwoods, Del Norte. I have been to the area many times to hike in the Redwoods, which of course is why I have a hard time resisting the temptation to go again. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of walking among trees that were around when the dust was still settling on the Roman Empire.

On the panels I’m on and the workshops I’m presenting, I’ll be talking a lot about what’s happening in publishing right now, on both the traditional and indie side, and what writers can do to find success.  If you’re anywhere close to the area, take a look at the conference schedule to see if it’s something that might interest you. Since it’s a very small conference, there will also be a lot of opportunity to chat and ask questions. Hope to see you there.