Quote:
Originally Posted by Grey Ram
What do you think of promoting sales on Amazon as an alternative to donations?
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Hi Grey Ram,
I don't have a problem with people purchasing the book off of Amazon. At the lowest price, I get around 35% but 34c for each book purchased isn't that bad.
However please try to use the Kindle edition from Smashwords if you can. The Amazon formatter has mangled all the paragraphs so it's not as neat as the Smashwords kindle format. I would actually prefer people to have the neater format and not pay than go to the effort of paying and getting a lower quality book. I'm trying to work out how to fix that at the moment.
I get the feeling that a lot of authors tie their books down needlessly, fearing always that someone might take advantage of getting their work for free, or locked into marketting restrictions by publishers equally fearful. It's a real shame too. Others are more advanced in their views. Within the writing group I am a member of, there is the full spectrum. I am probably at one end of the spectrum, but there are others equally retentive of their rights as I am progressive with mine.
Unfortunately, some are very good writers and the only way people will see their works is by paying the price. I would rather have others see my works and never make a cent from it if need be, but then I don't have to feed my family off the income from my writing.
Mr Ploppy:
Good idea. I've been toying with this, but really don't want to be deceitful in my approach.
To be honest about the entire process, it's tough writing a book to be marketted for free/donations. I can't afford an external editor, so a few more mistakes creep into the process than would otherwise be present in a professionally edited version, so I've been collecting the mistakes people mention for a corrected edition.
If you read my reviews, some people mention that. In one, I lost a "star" for it - 4 stars, but others have commented on it and still given 5 stars and justified the ranking.
But I will keep on trying to produce the best vesion I can for readers. At least as far as I can without being able to spend money on it. I guess that means some of the editing is crowdsourced
But otherwise there's no reason a book shouldn't be of similar quality to prepaid books just because it's not commercially produced and sold.
Regards
David