KDP freebie backlist round-up for 2012-02-08

[ATDrake]

Amazon has recently changed its Product Info to no longer display the DRM status of Kindle books. They've also just changed their search listings to no longer display which books are KDP-ed with the "Prime" lending available (at least not to Canadians) yet still insist on showing the listings of the books which are only KDP-lending "free" along with the genuine $0.00 stuff during the filtered search.

Thus I can also no longer easily distinguish the time-limited KDP Select exclusive-or-else-but-up-to-5-days-free-out-of-90-if-you-don't-mind-screwing-your-readers-elsewhere stuff and the price-matched-in-selected-regions-only with free-to-all-via-Smashwords books nor be able to tell which sf/fantasy backlist books are available to all our MR members without having to undergo an apprenticeship process, and not just the select few who have compatible hardware/OSes which will support learning to use the tools.

This is extremely annoying and I encourage you all to complain. Preferably to Amazon CS or at the official Kindle feedback address which sometimes pops up on the screensaver.

Basically mainly romances and short stories and a few continuations of series in the slushpile. And some educational science books for people who are interested in educational science books. Not sorted.

Nebula Award-winner Eric James Stone repeats his short: The Man Who Moved the Moon

Harlequin-published Patricia Watters offers a romantic suspense with implied cowboy not actually mentioned in the blurb, from the shirtless be-hatted bandanned display of what the Smart Bitches Trashy Books romance reader blog likes to call "man-titty" on the cover: Justified Deception

ISFDB-ed Aaron Polson contributes to another freebie issue of the e-magazine: Shock Totem 3: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

Daniel Pyle is a relative newbie (ISFDB entry) but he quotes praise in his blurbs from more established ISFDB-ed authors and he offers a compilation of a horror novel and novella: Mountain Madness

Medallion Press-published Kathy Carmichael (I think we may have gotten her book as a freebie last year) offers a spoof gothic romance comedy novella with matchmaking wizards: Your Magic Touch

Donna Fasano who writes as Donna Clayton and has been Harlequin-published offers a contemporary romance: Return of the Runaway Bride

Mainak Dhar, author of Zombiestan, offers: Vimana: A Science Fiction Thriller He says this has been picked up to be published by Penguin India this year. He also says it's like Star Wars meets Transformers, if that's something you want to read.

As it turns out, Robert Swartwood does have an ISFDB entry. But he also helpfully provides the names of specific venues in which his works have appeared. He offers the self-explanatory: The Man on the Bench (Novella): A Tale of Suspense And here is his 10th Annual Chiaroscuro Award-winning short story he offers free to all via Smashwords: In the Land of the Blind: A Zombie Story

ISFDB-ed David Bain offers a short story: About the Stars, About the Rain

Previously-featured Michael Haskins offers the 1st in his Mick Murphy Mystery series, if you've been following them. He helpfully tells us he wrote this longhand from Tijuana, Mexico, to just outside Los Angeles: Revenge

James D. Best offers another in his shopkeeper-turned-cowboy historical western detective adventure series if you've been following it: Murder at Thumb Butte (A Steve Dancy Tale)

Chris Orcutt helpfully provides not only the names of the venues in which he says he was published, but he also provides the titles of the stories which he says were published, as well as the year and provenance of the award he claims to have received. Unfortunately, he spoils this appearance of professionalism by acting like a flouncy Fanfiction.net author by demanding a certain number of sales before he releases the next book in his series (no moar chapterz unless u R&R plz!1111!), but otherwise his info is pleasantly informative (and Google backs him up on the one thing that I checked) and his blurb is nicely laid out and seems promising, so: A Real Piece of Work (The Dakota Stevens Mysteries)

Robert Wolff also has a decently-informative what-I've-written-and-where bio which is backed up by his publications by Rodale Press, who do health books. He offers some sort of general/literary fiction novel involving fitness and enlightenment: Go Tell It On The Mountain: Journeys along the 10 trails of wisdom

Ellora's Cave-published Ann Cory offers a contemporary romance: Penny Serenade (Tokens of the Heart)

Julie Harris seems to have more published credits in translation than in English, which may be an artifact of her being an Australian author and Amazon's catalogue being skimpy when it comes to the overseas books. But she has had at least one hardcover out from UK publisher Robert Hale and offers a medieval historical adventure/maybe-romance that's not KDP-ed, but playing pricing catchup with Smashwords, so it may also still be free elsewhere: An Absence of Angels

Sourcebooks-published Lisa Renee Jones offers a few more of her paranormal romances. This is 2nd in her revised Ellora's Cave-published series which once again she assures you has hot super soldiers in it: Underground Guardians: Healer This one appears to be playing pricing catch-up with Smashwords, so you may also be able to find it elsewhere: Hot Vampire Seduction (Vampire Wardens 2)

Geralyn Dawson offers her 2003-Pocket small town romance: My Big Old Texas Heartache (Cedar Dell, Texas)

Marvel/DC Comics illustrator Steve Uy offers another in his graphic novel series: Jova's Harvest #2 Comic Book

Fellow MR member author Stephen Livingston offers a litfic short story which he helpfully informs us was first published in an anthology which is available from the University of St Andrews Department of English: Recycling

And just because I feel like it:

Brad Miller claims a lesser title than "Professor Rick", but has apparently been an elementary school teacher and offers "kid-tested experiments" which he says includes explanations to help the kids understand what underlies the basic concepts found in: Weird Science for Kids: Kitchen Chemistry

Sergey Skudaev offers a tutorial on: THE EASIEST WAY TO UNDERSTAND CHEMISTRY It's just for the very basics, though, and for more advanced understanding, you'll probably have to turn to:

Raymond P. W. Scott's:Principles and Practice of Chromatography (Chrom-Ed Book Series) offered as part of the "Reese-Scott Partnership" and a profound bargain on the $80-$300 you'd have to pay for Scott's Wiley/Taylor & Francis/CRC-published textbooks on chromatography. I now wonder what Reese has written, but not enough to go and check.

In the "kids, don't try this at home" category (unless mom & dad have a medical marijuana license or it's flat-out legal where you live): Growing Cannabis (Marijuana) in Rockwool [illustrated] [high-level formatting] A quick skim of the sample suggests that this is scientifically oriented and nicely informative and since I live in one of those bleak suburban satellite municipalities full of strip malls, car dealerships, and marijuana grow-ops, I've kind of wondered how it was done.

Enjoy, especially if you do have a medfical marijuana license or live where it's legal and decide to try out that last book.

[theenframed]

Thanks for posting these!

[Stormchild]

Thanks again for the time and trouble you take to post these. If I might ask, how do you find these? I have tried all types of search criteria with no success at all. If you would rather keep it secret I fully understand.

Thanks again.

[Synamon]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

This is extremely annoying and I encourage you all to complain. Preferably to Amazon CS or at the official Kindle feedback address which sometimes pops up on the screensaver.

Agreed and complaining email sent to Support.

[Blossom]

I grabbed the Geralyn Dawson (Emily March) book! It was on my wishlist waiting for a price drop. She is one of my favorites but at 3.99 a book other books take priority.

[CWatkinsNash]

Originally Posted by Synamon

Agreed and complaining email sent to Support.

I sent an email yesterday but the robo-response was irrelevant, so today I used their chat support. I didn't go into the DRM thing, I went with "why is this info not here?" and also brought up the annoyance of free-to-lend books sorting with free-to-buy books. You can read the chat log in my post here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...61&postcount=9

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Stormchild

If I might ask, how do you find these? I have tried all types of search criteria with no success at all. If you would rather keep it secret I fully understand.

There is no secret. The slushpile trawl really is exactly that.

For official publisher promo free e-books, many but not all of them will show up on the official Amazon Time-Limited Promotional Offers auto-listing, which is apparently available in different forms at least the US and UK stores. I'd link it but the bookmarks are at home on the Mac.

And Amazon has been kind of sloppy about keeping it updated in recent weeks. Sometimes the books show up late, sometimes they don't seem to show up at all (or are very deeply buried on the "wrong" page when sorting by Popularity which generally gives you the latest ones on the last few pages).

Another formerly-useful tool that Amazon broke was the ability to search things by price and format, while excluding the public domain e-books. You can still do that by either inputting the fields via the advanced search option from their paper book store, or via one of the handy Amazon search-enabling engines such as eReaderIQ's (which adds an affiliate link to your results), or learn how to tweak the search string manually. It was a great way to find glitch freebies and unusual price-matched stuff that failed to show up on the official listings.

But as I said, they broke it last year by flooding in several thousand new public domain books which they refused to allow to filter out, and while one could work around that by only selecting books published before or after but not during March 2011, with all the KDP Prime-lending "free" stuff now renders that method doubly useless.

So, probably the best way to have a look if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for (and thus can't do a custom search on your chosen keywords/publisher with a price of $0.00) is to use one of the freebie listings auto-aggregators, such as eReaderIQ's free listings or Kinlibs, both of which likely add affiliate tags to the resulting links.

Kinlib shows the blurbs but their listings scroll weirdly in this horizontal format. eReaderIQ shows the covers and the categories (often totally misfiled, so the covers come in handy when you see some thing chewing on a skull in a "self-help" book).

For sf/fantasy/horror, the quickie way to check to see if someone's listing is even worth opening is against the Internet Science Fiction Database, which will generally tell you if someone has real published credentials (and not the imaginary ones imported from the alternate universe where they really are a best-selling award-winning author with their single CreateSpace book).

Some self-pub stuff does slip through (the ISFDB does in fact list CreateSpace as one of the possible publishers) but it's usually quite easy to spot, as the author will tend to have very few novels or stories which appeared in a very short time span in venues that seem to have only existed for a few brief years and mainly publishing just the single author or a handful of apparently very closely related ones at best. And their entries won't have a VERIFIED tag.

Romance people can check their stuff by looking at the author's Amazon Author Central page (generally available by clicking on the author name dropdown if they've filled it in) and checking to see if they have a known publisher in the paperback section or a known e-press for their Kindle books. Anyone who doesn't is probably lying about being a best-selling award-winning author of many beloved vague classics. Sometimes if they have no entries because their print books aren't hooked up to the e-editions, you can run a search on their name in the physical Books dropdown and see what turns up that way.

Mystery/thriller readers can probably do the same, but mystery/thriller writers tend to self-publish under invented press names which have only ever "printed" just their books (Books: Advanced Search: By Publisher is your friend) and lie like rugs about their credentials. But consider that getting an advance workout in sleuthing out the truth within their stories.

Hope this helps.

[scrapking]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

There is no secret. The slushpile trawl really is exactly that.
[...]
For sf/fantasy/horror, the quickie way to check to see if someone's listing is even worth opening is against the Internet Science Fiction Database, which will generally tell you if someone has real published credentials (and not the imaginary ones imported from the alternate universe where they really are a best-selling award-winning author with their single CreateSpace book).

Thanks so much for doing that every day for general consumption. As an SF fan, I really appreciate it!

[Blue Tyson]

Only 1 today, so : 365!

[CWatkinsNash]

7 for me. Thought it was 8, but turned out one was a duplicate. Don't know my total - calibre is busy adding more books.

[koland]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Robert Wolff also has a decently-informative what-I've-written-and-where bio which is backed up by his publications by Rodale Press, who do health books. He offers some sort of general/literary fiction novel involving fitness and enlightenment: Go Tell It On The Mountain: Journeys along the 10 trails of wisdom


Geralyn Dawson offers her 2003-Pocket small town romance: My Big Old Texas Heartache (Cedar Dell, Texas)

FYI - Wolff has four titles free tonight.

Link for Dawson's book - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005ME7PLG/...ksontheknob-20

[Joykins]

for trawling the slushpile...I have picked up some decent books from your posts and really appreciate the effort it takes.

[Stormchild]

Thanks for the answer and it makes me appreciate your posts even more.

[Stormchild]

eReaderIQ. What a brilliant site.

[Venus]

You are much appreciated.