Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Book_Doctor
Please cite your source. I don't believe that Mr. Howey ever said such a thing.
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I never would. I happen to own a Kobo and a Droid tablet. My wife has a Kindle. I write on a Mac and use the iBookstore and iTunes regularly. I worked in a Barnes and Noble for two years while in college and spend most of my money in their awesome stores. Sony gets all my money via my PS3 and PSP. I certainly don't play favorites.
However, if B&N reached out to me about doing some promotions, I would be jumping up and down and dancing a jig. I've never heard from them. I get emails from the teams at Kindle, the iBookstore, and Kobo all the time. They work with indies no differently than they work with their major publishers. As long as we make readers happy, they don't care how we published or with whom.
I'm hoping B&N chooses to do something similar with my books. I've had my works up on their site longer than I have at Kobo or the iBookstore. In fact, I left the Kindle Select program *because* I wanted to support Nook owners. I was getting a sprinkling of emails from people with other devices begging me to leave Select, which would mean giving up a ton of money every month from the lending library. I did this anyway. I've been losing money every month in order to not be Kindle-exclusive. I keep hoping this money will be made up by purchases in other outlets, but it isn't even close. I do 95% of my sales on the Kindle store. And so, in supporting owners of other devices, I've taken a huge pay cut (we're paid for every "free borrow" by Amazon).
I keep hoping this will turn around, but from what I've been told, piracy is much more rampant with epubs and on other devices. Kindle owners, for whatever reason, tend to spend more money. I get emails from people now and then who have "sampled" my book from download sites. They paypal me a few bucks and compliment the work. I enjoy this, and don't believe in fighting piracy (all my books are DRM-free to make it easier on the end-user to do what they want with them). Still, it is a concern.
All this rambling is just to point out that I do support all devices and all users. And I've made decisions to assist them which have had a negative impact on my earnings. Amazon wanted I, ZOMBIE for a 90-day window. I wasn't going to do that to my tiny other fraction of readers who read on something else. We agreed to 30 days. And somehow, fighting my primary distribution network (and payer) in order to make life better for those who provide only a fraction of my ability to write for a living makes me a bad guy.
I don't see how I could possibly win.