So, today's KDP Select exclusive-or-else sf/fantasy backlist title feature falls into the category of Not Sure If Want, which, actually, is something that applies to the entire slushpile, for several reasons.
This is a book I've actually read and mildly enjoyed and own in a paperback acquired some time ago and had on my wishlist to buy to support the author at some point when there was a good sale and I had a bit of extra money to spend, which was possibly going to be this week since there's a
60% off coupon which might be good until Friday morning and I was thinking of "rewarding" the MZB Literary Works Trust for offering their other book free yesterday with a tie-in sale boost that would benefit one of their actual living authors.
Only, this was on my Fictionwise wishlist and now it's been yanked from catalogue for at least 90 days and who knows how long beyond that, possibly permanently.
While I'm not ungrateful for the freebie offer, I am also not happy, as this illustrates one of the many problems that pervade the entire exclusive-or-else setup.
And it makes me paranoid about the contents of my FW intended purchase wishlist, though I suppose if an author's works all disappear, I save money because I'm probably going to completely forget about possibly wanting to buy them anyway without that reminder.
I have few qualms with authors choosing to KDP Select their new e-book releases as an Amazon exclusive. It's their prerogative if they want to see if they get better sales that way.
But I really don't like it when authors yank existing releases from other stores to go with the KDP experiment. It's still their prerogative and perhaps they only have a tiny pittance of sales from those outlets compared to Amazon, but if they have any at all, they're doing a distinct disservice to their readers in those other stores, who may not be able to pick up the rest of a series they've grown to enjoy if their reader happens not to be a Kindle or even if it is, be charged a premium for each title if they happen to live in certain regions of the world.
Here's a fun bit of empirical testing for you to try:
- Open a browser which is not logged into your Amazon account (or just log out)
- Go to the main "Kindle Store" tab in the navbar (it might be under Kindle eBooks) and from the dropdown menu at the top-left under the navbar, select "Africa" or "Middle East" as your region and click Go.
- Search for any indie/KDP book you already know the price of which shouldn't be affected by geographic publisher differences
- Notice the sudden hike in per-book purchasing cost?
- For bonus fun, hit up Wikipedia for a comparison of the monthly average wages and living costs for someone in a random country in one of those regions compared to say, Canada
Anecdotally, Amazon also inflate the costs for selected individual countries in Europe/Asia Pacific, but you can't see those under the generic setting any more and would have to entire a full fake address into your account to check.
I don't consider it a good thing when a book that used to be available worldwide at the same point-of-purchase pricing to all in multiple formats that could be openly loaded or converted onto the reader of one's choice goes to only becoming available to a relatively select few at differential pricing in a proprietary closed format that may well also be DRM-restricted, with no longer any way to tell for sure until after purchase.
And I think it's going to backfire on authors in terms of useful exposure. A book I could once point people at and say "you might like to read this, and it's readily available to you in your obscure locale and can be easily put on your niche gadget" is now not only missing the two latter parts of something that might be an added-value attraction, but now I'd also have to hedge a potential recommendation with "you might pay $2 extra for it if you're overseas and here's a pointer to a tutorial on learning how to strip DRM and convert, the former of which may be considered illegal where you live and the latter of which may be beyond your limited tech skillz".
At that point, I'm probably just going to skip the recommend if I can think of something else which fits.
And seriously for serious, how many of you people reading this (assuming you've gotten this far and haven't just skipped to the freebie listings) would actually, if the books of an author you kind of mildly liked to read suddenly disappeared from the store you were used to buying them, would really and truly follow the author to another store just to get their books in a different and possibly incompatible-with-your-reader format?
I'm not talking about your favourites whom you'd even resort to reading in paper, but for someone new you thought was nice light fun and you might buy another if it looked good and was on sale.
Chances probably are, if a Kindle book was no longer available on Amazon and one could only get it through Sony's horrible Reader Library software app which they force you to install and use to shop at their store, only the most persistently stubborn would bother and most people would just shrug and move onto something else that looked interesting and could be more readily and conveniently gotten.
Going KDP Select with an established book cuts out the author's previously established audience, and while they may get many more eyeballs seeing that their work exists, the lock-in of the exclusivity automatically limits the potential audience for that work again.
Posters on MR tend to be incredibly blase about using the tools. "Oh, don't worry be happy, you can strip and convert just about anything from Amazon; easy as reciting the first 3 digits of pi with Calibre and a little apprenticeship lesson."
Leaving people's individual levels of tech-savviness and the ensuing issues of just how "easy" it really is for the general public aside, it so happens that Amazon breaks the tools every so often and there may not always be people around who are ready, willing, and able to fix what they break.
I have an older Kindle 2 model. It's old enough that once upon a time, when Amazon broke the old serial number=PID scheme which allowed one to strip the DRM from files directly downloaded for one's Kindle (the new method took some time to figure out), I'd have been completely out of luck as back then, Kindle for Mac had been released for the better part of the year but still in DRM-stripping limbo as far as the tools were concerned because no one had yet figured out how to decrypt books downloaded to it. And back then, I didn't have a hand-me-down netbook to run K4PC upon, and the current version of WINE simply did not work at all with K4PC even for opening pre-existing book files, much less registering and downloading new ones.
I'd have been completely out of luck if I'd had to switch to a different reader because my original K2 had a screen problem that ended up with its being replaced.
Since then, Amazon has broken the K4PC/Mac tools twice in various ways, and also messed with the actual Topaz and Mobi formats so that merely altering certain metadata will thwart any future attempts to remove DRM on the very same files.
These things did get fixed, but at the moment, there are perhaps 2-3 people actually actively working on maintaining the tools and all of them are following over from the work of other people who used to work on the tools and have since lost interest and "retired", as the apprentice himself did. There's no guarantee whatsoever that anyone will be maintaining them in the future, much less be willing to try and reverse-engineer whatever Amazon changes the next few times around.
And as for the convertibility of their various proprietary formats, right now there's a multi-thread, multi-page discussion over in the Mobi/PRC forum which has been going on for well over a month, just trying to figure out by trial and error the new file structure and metadata arrangement for the non-DRM versions of what gets generated by Amazon's newly-provided official KindleGen and get stuff to output in a file that's readable by actual Kindles.
Despite that cozy suburbian safe-and-conveniently-applianced everything-within-driving-distance neighbourhood feel that Amazon likes to promote, the virtual arms race going on behind the scenes is considerably more one sided when it comes to the balance of power than Mutually Assured Destruction.
I've been saying for months now that while I'm pleased enough to pick up interesting freebies from it, I don't think that in the long term the KDP Select exclusive-or-else thing will ultimately prove beneficial to customers, authors, or the general e-book market overall.
Already, people have been yanking their stuff from other outlets not only to exclusively enroll it on Amazon, with all the non-Amazon-customer liabilities already mentioned whith the Amazon ones probably don't care much about, but also to
noticeably raise the asking prices, possibly in the hopes of making their wares
more attractive as a "borrow" instead of a purchase and better their chances of hitting that Kindle Lending Library monthly jackpot.
It's one thing if an author thinks their work is regularly priced too low and thinks the reading audience will accept an increase more commensurate with what they want to sell at. It's quite another if they end up artificially inflating the base cost in the hopes of it paying off in the KLL lottery.
Like many of the things associated with the obligatory exclusivity, it may help individual authors benefit in the short term, but in the long run, I think it's going to worsen things for the customer and the reading audience, and finally, the authors themselves. And I really don't think this trend is something I want to continue, even though I've been benefitting from and enabling it for several weeks now.
Anyway, you probably just skipped a whole bunch of TL;DR because you likely don't care about much besides grabbing books which seem to be free with no immediately apparent visible costs to you, so on with the show.
Changing Fate by Elisabeth Waters was originally published by DAW books in paperback in 1994.
Waters was a long-time Marion Zimmer Bradley writing protegee, as well as her personal secretary, and this is a high fantasy adventure with a bit of romance, originally based on a short story she wrote for the long-running Sword & Sorceress anthologies which MZB edited when she was alive, and Waters edits now.
As I've mentioned, I own and have read this, having gotten it during my secondary MZB-discovery phase when after having read the works available in the library, I went and hunted down related stuff in the new and used bookshops.
It's not particularly memorable, but I do kind of recall it being a nice, light, medium-quality read that was pleasant enough that I don't regret the time spent. Mind you, since it's not that memorable I could be totally misrecalling it and maybe three chapters in you'll start screaming "My
eyes!! They
BUUUUURN!!!!!"
But as H.P. Lovecraft reminds us, "the most merciful thing, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents" and if that proves the case, in time you'll forget like I did.
Anyway, this is free (apparently with DRM, but who can tell anymore) probably just through today, courtesy of the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust @ Amazon
main UK DE ES FR IT Additional charges may apply in certain areas.
The MZB Literary Works Trust also has a large portion of works by MZB, Waters, and other related authors available in DRM-free MultiFormat at a low cost worldwide
over at Fictionwise using the 60% off discount coupon mentioned above.
Description
Akila uses her wits and her shape-changing abilities to save her brother Briam when their home is besieged. But that leaves them both on the run, with Akila trying to keep them safe, while Briam finds more trouble to get into. When he is chosen as year-king in the city of Diadem, Akila struggles to save his life, finding help in the most unexpected places.
The rest of the slushpile yield, sorted for the first time in ages:
Bram Stoker/World Fantasy award-winner David B. Silva finally offers the story mentioned in every blurb, which won him said 1st award:
The Calling He also offers another non-award-winning short:
Brothers
Previously-included ISFDBed Jane Toombs returns with the 2nd part of supernatural thriller, for which we've gotten the first one free:
Hallow House - Part Two
Adam Pepper has minor
ISFDB credits for horror. He offers:
Skin Games: A brutal crime drama
ISFDBed Ruth Nestvold returns with another mini-collection of previously-published fantasy shorts:
If Tears Were Wishes And Other Short Stories
Helen Smith returns with a 2001-Victor Gollancz satiric mystery about (maybe) alien abduction:
Being Light
Fellow MR member author Ruth Francisco offers her 2004 Grand Central Publishing paperbacked debut novel, a crime suspense with supernatural elements:
Confessions of a Deathmaiden Her self-pub speculative thriller about an extremist religious fundamentalist takeover of Europe is also free:
Amsterdam 2012
Previously-featured fellow MR member author Paul Levine returns with another in his Jake Lassiter legal thriller series, this one 1996 William Morrow-published:
Fool Me Twice
MIRA-published Rick Mofina offers another mystery/thriller short (maybe repeat):
Lightning Rider (Dangerous Women & Desperate Men)
Tyrus-published Seth Harwood returns with a short about street crime:
Jordan in the Time of Cold War
Don Pendleton is the writer of those popular Mack Bolan Executioner paperback action/adventure novels. Linda Pendleton is some kind of relation of his. Together, they
fight crime! offers some kind of self-pub mystery/thriller:
Roulette (The Search for the Sunrise Killer)
Previously-included small-pressed Barbara Taylor Sissel returns with another suspense thriller:
The Volunteer
Karen Cantwell has had a story published in a mystery anthology by Wildside Press, who do a lot of sf/fantasy reprints and new releases and are one of the recommended publishers to look at if you are browsing for such at Fictionwise. She offers the cozy/comedic-looking:
Citizen Insane (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #2)
Shirley Kennedy is a California-born Canadian resident who wrote quite a few Regency romances for Signet. This is not one of them:
Who Killed Rudy Rio? (A Holly Keene Mystery)
Jessica Barksdale Inclan returns with another literary/women's fiction/maybe-romance novel published by New American Library in 2006:
The Instant When Everything is Perfect
Ginger Simpson's western romantic maybe-suspense was originally released by Fictionwise-available small press Lachesis in 2009 and picked by small press BWLPP later:
Embezzled Love Books We Love/BWLPP also have some more assorted freebies today.
Ellora's Cave non-erotic Blush-line-published Sam Cheever, from whom we had an official freebie a while ago, offers a paranormal fantasy romance with fae and Olympians in it. From one of the supplied blurb review quotes, this is apparently moderately lengthy and has an actual backstabbing intrigue/adventure plot:
Guardian (The Monad Chronicles)
Mona Risk is another Ellora/Blush writer. She offers a contemporary romance:
Babies in the Bargain
I bought two of Diana Bold's books from small specialty Cobblestone Press via Fictionwise last year out of curiosity when they were in the new releases section with the extra 15% off and there was a 50%+ discount coupon to stack with it. I've since
read them both and they were fairly decent, and good enough that I'd read another of hers, which is good, since she offers for free the following self-pub medieval historical romance:
Halycon Rising This, from the looks of it, seems to tie into another medieval romance of hers which has been Cobblestoned.
Specialty romance/erotica imprint Siren-published Dee Dawning is back with some apparently-comedic erotic shorts:
Linkage
Previously-included Wiley-published business text writer James D. Best is offering a number of his historical and political thriller novels, including at least one new tale about his shopkeeper-turned-wild-western-gunslinging amateur sleuth if you've been following them:
Linkage for the lot
Previously-included minor ISFDB credited Dave Jeffery offers a children's/YA spooky adventure tale:
Beatrice Beecham's Houseful of Horrors
Paul Moxham is an expat Australian screenplay writer who says he has won a particular specified prize for a particular specified screenplay and Google backs him up. This is his children's/YA adveture tale set in 1950s Britain:
The Mystery of Smugglers Cove
Not only does this author's staidly-titled book have an entertainingly cracktastic synopsis, but he's also got what I rate as the 3rd-best set of brazen author lies I've yet come across in his bio. I therefore include for the lulz:
The Mike Murphy Files and Other Stories
Chris McMullen says he's a Ph.D and a physics and astronomy instructor at Northwestern State University in Louisiana. He encourages you to use his book for education, and given that apparently there was a survey done not too long ago which showed that
55% of adult Americans polled were unaware that the earth revolved around the sun and last year's poll indicated that
MR had 31% responding US resident membership, chances are good that 17% of you either could benefit from this or know someone who might:
Basic Astronomy Concepts Everyone Should Know (With Space Photos)
And now if you'll excuse me, I think I need to head over to Fictionwise and see what else on my wishlist I should buy while the 60% is still good which may well be in danger of disappearing from catalogue on terms and prices that I like and reappearing in one venue only at possibly greatly-inflated price and in a format I've developed a pathological aversion to and with a bonus round of DRM-or-Not Roulette.
If you have anything you'd rather not see undergo the same, I advise you to do so as well.