Free book (Kindle/Smashwords) The Adventures of Kid Combat Volume I: A Secret Lost

[greencat]

free at Amazon.com:
The Adventures of Kid Combat Volume I: A Secret Lost by Christopher A Helwink

Kid Combat - the books used in schools around the United States - is now available everywhere! Evil. Corruption. They are everywhere in Elmcrest. In the first volume of this exciting series, Kid Combat's group struggles to open their new secret base, keep their identities a secret, and save one of their own from being kidnapped. Meanwhile, a trap is set, one that Kid Combat falls right into...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004YLP71S?tag=discounter-20

[Little_bear]

Also free at B&N:
The Adventures of Kid Combat Volume I: A Secret Lost

At B&N the next two books in the series are also free:
The Adventures of Kid Combat Volume Two: The Heist of Spring Road Toys

Kid Combat is back! Taking place directly after the events of Volume I, The Heist of Spring Road Toys continues the Kid Combat adventure. It has been a busy few weeks for Kid and his closest friends. As work completes on their secret base The Playground Kid Combat looks into the Spring Road Toys case and finds out he has a new enemy...

The Adventures of Kid Combat 3: Jones Strikes Back

Jones returns to Elmcrest - more determined than ever to find out who Kid Combat is. After throwing himself a lavish parade down Main Street, Jones starts plotting with a certain rouge boy to bring down Kid Combat and his friends.

[koland]

Yes, this and several others getting their own posts are just more of the indie-published freebies being "punished" for being free on smashwords.

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by koland

Yes, this and several others getting their own posts are just more of the indie-published freebies being "punished" for being free on smashwords.

Punished?

[crich70]

They are still free at SmashWords itself as well.
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/kidcombat

[koland]

Originally Posted by Nyssa

Punished?

Amazon reserved the right to drop the price and pay authors less if they found them selling elsewhere for less.

Many took advantage of them never checking, giving books away on Smashwords or their own websites, but charging at Amazon (where sales were often 100 times the other stores).

So, Amazon started paying attention: indie authors then figured out they could get a free listing and try to get more sales for their other books, by dropping one book free at Smashwords or B&N (PubIT). Thus the flood of free books (and many indies either put in fake publisher names or the name of the publisher of their paper books, to make it harder to tell they are indie published).

Between this flood of free books and the flood of spam books (put together by automated tools, without any actual writing, they generally sell for 99 cents each and are the same giveaway titles you see on so many spammy web sites), the Kindle store is going to be more and more difficult to navigate, if we don't get better search tools.

[Nyssa]

Interesting.

[greencat]

Equally, there have been a lot of self-published authors who wanted to make their works free on Amazon but haven't been allowed to. At least, they now have a route for doing so.

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by koland

Amazon reserved the right to drop the price and pay authors less if they found them selling elsewhere for less.

Many took advantage of them never checking, giving books away on Smashwords or their own websites, but charging at Amazon (where sales were often 100 times the other stores).

So, Amazon started paying attention: indie authors then figured out they could get a free listing and try to get more sales for their other books, by dropping one book free at Smashwords or B&N (PubIT). Thus the flood of free books (and many indies either put in fake publisher names or the name of the publisher of their paper books, to make it harder to tell they are indie published).

Between this flood of free books and the flood of spam books (put together by automated tools, without any actual writing, they generally sell for 99 cents each and are the same giveaway titles you see on so many spammy web sites), the Kindle store is going to be more and more difficult to navigate, if we don't get better search tools.

Originally Posted by greencat

Equally, there have been a lot of self-published authors who wanted to make their works free on Amazon but haven't been allowed to. At least, they now have a route for doing so.

So self-published authors have been trying to game the system and Amazon is fighting back for their promised share of the pie (from listing the books). Then if the author tries to "steal" that share, amazon takes the whole pie. Very interesting...
Is Amazon asking for too much? Because I'll tell you, I have downloaded and in some cases purchased books from them that I know I wouldn't have elsewhere.

[greencat]

I'm not sure there's much deliberate gaming going on - just that some authors want to maximise their readership (rather than necessarily receiving a monetary reward for it). Amazon pretty much has the largest ebook readership so naturally these authors want to be there. Some may want their book to be paid for on Amazon but free elsewhere (but the Amazon T&Cs forbid it), others would simply like their book to be free everywhere.

Obviously Amazon is in the business of selling stuff so getting the balance between free and non-free is critical to them. Too much free content and people don't need or want to pay for any other. Too little and Kindle owners (potential and actual) might go elsewhere.

As you indicate convenience is a big factor. Personally, I'd pay 10-99c just for the ease of having a book delivered to my Kindle. If it's free - I won't even bother looking at other outlets.

The spbooks (spam-books) are a different matter. I think I read somewhere that, by traffic, Amazon is the 4th largest search engine in the world. Now they are in the content business and being targeted by spammers I suspect that search engine is going to get a lot tweaking over the coming years. They seem to be getting better at identifying republished Gutenberg works and removing duplicates - My guess is that they'll start being able to do the same with PLR material soon.

But the one thing that seems to guarantee a good position in Amazon's search engine are sales - unless the spammers can manufacture those - it's hard to imagine it getting too overwhelmed.

[Nyssa]

Who does spam books work? What is the purpose, if they're not "real" books, and how does one recognize one?

[greencat]

Spam books work in one of a few ways. Either you start with an existing Private Label Rights book (a book that basically means the purchaser can do what they like with) and either publish it as is or alter it a little. Or you start with a collection of PLR articles and get software to select a few to make into a book around a particularly topic.

It should be said - that the results vary. You might still end up with a useful book at the end of it. Or the book might be poorly written and inaccurate (they are most often non-fiction). But if you read a lot of books in that area of interest - then you might experience a feeling of déjà vu.

Spotting the spam book isn't easy. As you might imagine, the description above could often be applied to a lot of conventional books too. But the spam books quite often have covers that look a book (ie 3D), odd reading titles or descriptions (ie keyword stuffed) or lack credibility in some way. For example, the person may be writing about a particular disease but appears to have no track record in that area. Again not a guarantee of positive identification as that could apply to conventional books too.

It's not all bad - I suspect there are a lot of unwitting yet happy purchasers of spam books. It is, after all, in the spammers best interest to ensure you don't return it. And one my long term predictions for the future is that of computer written fiction books ie all of the common tropes, 1000s of characters, descriptions for a genre are fed into a piece of software and out pops a book which might need a little human polishing. I suspect we'll see the first books of this type in the next 20 years. Perhaps Dan Brown, James Patterson and Barbara Cartland etc will still be publishing new books long after their deaths.

[Nyssa]

You know there are just some things I really didn't think I would have to worry about, and now there's this. Well, at least most of the Indy books I have were offered for free at either Amazon or Smashwords.