Thanks, Shahid, for taking the time to respond and I am glad to hear that you will be keeping up some direct sales and deals, but this is really what concerns me most:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shahid
2. Our current plans are to keep the number of books enrolled in the Select program limited to a small subset (about 10% to 20%) of our catalogue, and to have them enrolled in the Select Program on a rolling basis. Thus some books may not be available through other venues, but that will only be for a limited time (hence the greying out of options, not deletion…the grey will be becoming black in a couple of months).
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I flat-out don't really care if authors/publishers decide to go Amazon-exclusive with a new release for potentially better promotion/exposure and to boost their initial sales/word of mouth. It's their prerogative and I hope it works out well for them, and I just ignore those until they become available elsewhere on terms I personally find more favourable (and openly available to me as a Canadian without doing hoop-jumping with the buying of the US dollar gift cards and the faking of the US billing address and the using of the US-based VPN IP proxy), if they ever do and if I still remember it exists at that point.
But the thing about pulling existing books from other venues to KDP Select them is that it really does destroy the re-download capability in many venues for your existing customers who have already purchased the book, and they will then have to re-purchase the new version if and when it appears back in the catalogue.
This has already happened to some of our fellow MR members over at B&N and Smashwords who can no longer get a copy of their paid-for books in the store's archive and have seen new listings for the same book go up when it was re-added. Here's some linkage to their experiences: B&N (seems to
start here, with more discussion over the following pages and
more details here, Smashwords
#1 #2
Perhaps it's B&N and Smashwords' fault for allowing an author/publisher's explicit removal of their books to really remove every trace of them, but in the meantime, pre-existing paying customers are left with no recourse (aside from issuing coupons on Smashwords to drop the price of the new version to free) and new customers who happen to buy things during the "rolling" period before the next grey-out will also be screwed and I would personally make a point of avoiding any author/publisher who made a habit of doing that, no matter where I bought my books.
Incidentally, Amazon adds an extra $2 to the price of every e-book purchase for people residing in a number of countries around the world,
such as Sweden. This may not be a concern, but personally, if Canada still had that Whispernet surcharge, I simply wouldn't have bothered buying the few Kindle books I have from them, I don't care how cheaply they might otherwise have been priced.
Anyway, I wish you and your authors well with the program and I would also suggest when doing tie-in deals to the Free eBook of the Month, perhaps consider offer discounts on individual related titles by the same author, alongside whatever bundle there is.
There's been a number of times when I passed on the tie-in deal which did have some books I'd have otherwise liked to get, but I already owned a substantial portion of the bundle in one form or another, such that I might as well simply wait for a general coupon sale to pick up the "missing" parts, at which point I'd have forgotten I more-or-less wanted it.