Kindle Unlimited

 The rise of the independent author ("indie") has set up a curious dance between the indies, their readers, and Amazon, which leads the world in indie-published books.

It all goes back to a little over fifteen years ago, when Amazon introduced the Kindle.  The idea of an ebook had been around for a while, and business people had long been reading documents on the screen (and often then printing them out), but the Kindle was different.  About the dimensions (width & height) of a small paperback but much thinner, its screen showed what looked like a page in a real book, not like text on a web page.  And the person reading could choose their favorite font to read it, Times or Helvetica or whatever, and make it bigger or smaller for reading ease.

Great!  People loved it!  But wait!  There were hardly any ebooks to read on the Kindle ereader.  Amazon begged traditional publishers to digitize some of their list, quickly digitized a whole lot of out-of-copyright classics (Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, here we come), and launched.

Immediately people bought up Kindles and loved them.  One could have dozens of ebooks ready to read on a device lighter than one paperback.  Half a million were quickly sold.  But there were fewer than 100,000 titles for those half million readers to read.

Enter the indies.  Everyone knew that there were thousands of people out there who imagined they could be great writers if they ever had a chance, or who had been trying to interest traditional publishers for years without success.  Come right on in! cried Amazon.  Give us your Word document, and we'll do the rest!  No more gate-keepers1  Anyone can publish a book!  And so KDP was born (Kindle Direct Publishing).

It was very exciting for the indie authors who got in early.  Pretty much anything would sell, and because the indie books were new, readers snatched them up in preference to the out-of-copyright classics they'd had to read in high school or college.  It quickly became obvious also that there was a great reader hunger for books "just like" popular books, and the indies could provide that.

For example, traditional publishers wouldn't publish a book too similar to one already out there, not even because of plagiarism issues, but just because they thought the market was saturated. But it wasn't. These were the days when the "Twilight" series, teenage romance with vampires and werewolves, was very popular.  Amanda Hocking sold hundreds of thousands of copies of KDP ebooks about teenage romance with vampires and werewolves (different setting, different names, different plot of course).

And traditional publishers rarely let their authors publish more than one or maybe two books a year.  KDP didn't care.  Anyone could crank out a book every couple of months, or put up a whole lot of books that had been written over many years, and KDP was fine with that.  So if someone found a new favorite author, they could count on lots of ebooks by that author on Amazon.

Other companies noticed what Amazon was doing.  Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Borders (with their Kobo branch) all jumped into ebook publishing.  And they started offering 70% royalties, rather than Amazon's 35%.  At the same time, traditional publishers all raced to digitize anything to which they had the publishing rights, and they put their own ebooks up on all platforms.

So Amazon had been first, but others were coming up fast.  KDP quickly raised its ebook royalty rate to 70% (at least for ebooks priced from $2.99 to $9.99) and tried to figure out how to hang onto its indies, who were starting to "go wide," that is publishing on all ebook platforms, not only Amazon (including me by this point).

Once traditional publishers had all their books as ebooks for sale on Amazon, B&N, etc., of course, that spelled the end of the brief golden indie age.  Now readers could choose from a great many ebooks, including new releases from the traditional publishers, often better than the average indie book (once a lot of people who should never have imagined themselves authors saw what Amanda Hocking was doing and thought they too could make big bucks).  Maybe gate-keepers weren't as bad as we thought?

But Amazon's big advantage was its indies, even if the indies quickly found out they weren't going to come anywhere near Amanda Hocking's numbers.  Amazon still had more indies than anyone else.  Even if a lot of bad indie books were flooding the market (by this time most lucky to sell 3 or 4 copies, ever), there were also a lot of good indie books, promising readers lots and lots of titles by their favorite author, not only one a year, and books "just like" some book everyone loved.  So Amazon had to make sure its indies didn't wander off ("go wide").

It did so by promising benefits to indie authors who stayed exclusive to Amazon.  It tried offering various marketing tools to its exclusive indies, but soon it settled on "Kindle Unlimited."  Avid ebook readers could pay $10 a month (it's recently gone up to $12) to "borrow" and read as many exclusive indie ebooks as they wanted.  Given that most indie ebooks are priced around $4 or $5, this was a bargain even if one just read three books a month.  But avid ebook readers, especially in genres like contemporary romance, might read three or more books a week.  They loved it.

Indie authors are paid on the basis of how many pages a KU member has read.  (Your Kindle knows what you're reading, how fast, how far you've gotten...  Does it know what you had for breakfast?)  It's helped a lot of indie authors find readers in today's saturated market, because someone would "borrow" and read an indie book through KU, knowing it cost them nothing extra, even if they might not lay out $5 for an ebook by an unknown.

(Incidentally, KDP has also started publishing paperbacks, and a lot of indie authors like having a physical book, but for almost all KDP authors ebooks far, far outsell paperbacks.)

That brings us to my own current experimentation with KU.  My ebooks are mostly "wide," available on all major ebook platforms.  But fantasy is a genre that can do well with KU members.  So I've made my "Shadow of the Wanderers" exclusive to Amazon for 90 days (one promises exclusivity for 90 days, then can renew if desired).  It's never sold very well, either as an ebook or under its original title of "Voima," when traditionally published.  Yurt fans don't like that it's not Yurt, but it's one of my favorites.

 

So if you are a KU member, you can read it all summer for free, or anyone can buy it.  Here's the link.  It's epic fantasy, in the spirit of Norse legend (though without Thor and Loki).  I've given the opening below to whet your appetite.  Happy reading!

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

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Roric put his sword across his knees and his back to the guesthouse wall.  When they came to kill him in his bed asleep, they would find him neither in bed nor asleep.

Swallows swooped through the twilight air, then disappeared back toward the barns as the sky went from yellow to darkest blue.  He shifted on the hard bench, listening but hearing nothing.  Even the wind was still.  He reached into the pouch at his belt and absently rubbed the charm there with his thumb:  the piece of bone, cut in the shape of a star, that had been tied into his wrappings when he was first found.

It would be good, he thought, to see Karin one more time.  But it did not matter.  They had said their farewells as though they knew they would not meet again short of Hel.

The moon rose slowly above the high hard hills to his left.  His shadow stretched at an angle, dark and liquid, across the rough surface of the courtyard.  He bent to tighten a shoelace and turned his head to be certain the soft peep off to his right was nothing more than a night bird.  There was another shadow next to his.  Someone was sitting beside him.

 

Indie Book Covers

 There's an old saying, "You can't judge a book from its cover."  It means that glancing at something's exterior won't necessarily tell you all the complicated and interesting things within, and many an excellent book (among other things for which the book is a metaphor) may have a nondescript exterior.

But this saying does not apply to indie book publishing.  In a bookstore full of traditionally published books, someone may wander around, be intrigued by a title or a cover, or go to their favorite part of the store and see (for example) a new book on the US Civil War they haven't seen before, and pick it up.  Some of the titles they see will jog a memory of seeing that book reviewed favorably by (for example) the New York Times, or seeing it on a best-seller list.  The cover image isn't all that important.

This is why you will often see these days a traditionally published book that doesn't even have a cover image, just the title in interesting script on a solid cover background, or at most maybe a tree or an abstract shape.

Things are different for indie books.  There is no physical bookstore where someone may wander, looking at a finite number of books, selected by the staff as worthy of buying and reading.  Instead one is on an on-line bookstore, along with literally millions and millions of other books (including traditionally published ones), knowing perfectly well that a lot of the books are not worth buying.  (The advantage of indie publishing is anyone can publish. The disadvantage of indie publishing....)

So the cover becomes very important.  A well done cover serves a lot of purposes.  If interesting and intriguing, it can catch the potential buyer's eye.  If professionally done, it is a marker that the author cared enough about her book to try to do everything right, including (one hopes), story, editing, and formatting.  The style and content of the cover tell the genre:  a passionate-looking couple for romance, rockets or planets for science fiction, a pastoral scene with a church for a book of religious musings, and so on.

The cover's whole purpose in life is to make the potential reader look at the book's description and read the first few pages, then, one hopes, push the Buy button.  The cover is not strictly an illustration of any particular scene in the book, but it should convey something of the flavor of the book.

For example, A Bad Spell in Yurt, my first published novel, has a great cover by Tom Kidd.  It indicates without a doubt that this is fantasy, but the wizard hero's rueful expression, pile of books, and lack of swords indicates that this is not epic fantasy and has a good touch of humor (the title helps).

 

Tom Kidd read the whole book before he started painting the cover, but often the artists whom indie authors get to do their covers will just take suggestions from the author as to what the cover might show, in a simpler illustration.  Dane of EBook Launch did a very nice cover for me of The Starlight Raven without actually reading the book.  A young woman suggests the book is for and about teens (which it is), and in the front there's a raven with stars in its feathers.

In other cases, I've bought covers from graphic artists who put interesting covers together from stock photos, then I added my own title and author name to this "pre-made" cover.  Such was the case with Shadow of the Wanderers.  This one, the potential reader should be able to tell at once, is epic fantasy with a strong Norse component.

 

And sometimes I've used my own photographs. A picture of a staircase in the ruined castle of Fleckenstein, in Alsace, is on the cover of my (non-fiction) Positively Medieval.  I like it because it is very clearly authentically medieval, old and worn by many feet over the centuries, and because it seems to draw the reader into the book.

Self-publishing is free, but the serious indie author has got to assume that she'll be paying for a good cover at some point.  Without that almost subliminal hint that the right cover can give the potential reader, the book may never be bought and read.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023
 

Shadow of the Wanderers

In the tradition of Norse legend….

I've got a new ebook, but it's not really new.  It's Shadow of the Wanderers, an epic fantasy.  Three young people are drawn into battles between the immortals:  Roric, a fatherless warrior; Karin, the exiled princess he loves; and Valmar, a reluctant king's son.  Earth and sky are under the sway of the Wanderers, the lords of voima, the power of life and strength.  But even the time of the immortal Wanderers must end.

Originally the book's title was Voima, from a Finnish word meaning power, a term I use in the book instead of magic--and besides, it isn't really magic.  Although Baen launched it with a great deal of fanfare over twenty years ago, it has never sold well.  I think the problem is that it is not like Yurt.  People who read C. Dale Brittain books want magic and wizards and good-natured humor.  But there's plenty of seriousness in Yurt too, as I hope those fans have noticed.  And hey, aren't some of them George Martin fans too?  After all, I very much like Martin myself!  (And Voima originally came out two years before Game of Thrones.)

So I decided to rename the book and give it a new cover, in the hope of attracting different readers.  The cover you see is by Shardel, and I got it through SelfPubBookCovers.com, which I recommend to any self-published author looking for a good cover.  You don't decide what you want on your cover but rather look through hundreds of pre-made covers (without titles on them) and see if you can find one that suits your story.  I thought this one suited by my story just swell.

The ebook is available through Amazon and B&N and Kobo and iTunes under its new title.  The content is the same!  The opening can be read for free on Amazon here, or below for those who don't want to bother clicking.  Enjoy!

* *  * *

1

Roric put his sword across his knees and his back to the guesthouse wall.  When they came to kill him in his bed asleep, they would find him neither in bed nor asleep.

Swallows swooped through the twilight air, then disappeared back toward the barns as the sky went from yellow to darkest blue.  He shifted on the hard bench, listening but hearing nothing.  Even the wind was still.  He reached into the pouch at his belt and absently rubbed the charm there with his thumb:  the piece of bone, cut in the shape of a star, that had been tied into his wrappings when he was first found.

It would be good, he thought, to see Karin one more time.  But it did not matter.  They had said their farewells as though they knew they would not meet again short of Hel.

The moon rose slowly above the high hard hills to his left.  His shadow stretched at an angle, dark and liquid, across the rough surface of the courtyard.  He bent to tighten a shoelace and turned his head to be certain the soft peep off to his right was nothing more than a night bird.  There was another shadow next to his.  Someone was sitting beside him.

He was on his feet with his sword up in an instant.  But the other, seeming for a second less substantial than his shadow, did not immediately move.  When he did, it was to stretch out weaponless hands, palms up.  “Would you attack me unprovoked?”

Roric did not relax his guard.  “You intended to do the same to me!”

The other gave an amused chuckle.  He wore a wide-brimmed hat that shadowed his face from the moon.  “So that is why you are sitting outdoors when all others are asleep.”

“If you are not come to kill me,” said Roric cautiously, “and you have not come to warn me, why are you here?”

The other did not answer for a moment, and when he did it was in a soft voice.  “Perhaps it is because we could use you.”

“Me?” said Roric bitterly.  “A man who may be dead before morning, and if he lives will be an outcast at least, and probably outlawed as well at the next Gemot?  No one needs me.”

“I do not think you will be dead before morning.  But I must agree,” with another chuckle, “that you will be of less use to us if you are.  I need to ask you several things, and I am interested in your answers.”

Roric leaned on his sword, listening but still hearing nothing ominous among the quiet sounds of the night.  The other person, whoever he might be, was not a wight or he would not cast a shadow.  But his soundless materialization on the bench suggested someone of great voima:  a Weaver, perhaps, or a Mirror-seer—even a Wanderer.  But if he were one of these, he should already know the answers.

“All right, then,” said Roric, and a smile came and went for a second across his face.  “We may as well talk while we’re waiting for the attack to come.”  In the moonlight this man—if he was a man—seemed so unreal, so much a product of his own vision, that he could have been talking to himself.

“Then what have you done, Roric No-man’s son, to make your fellows want to kill you and cast you out?”

“I’ve loved a high lord’s daughter,” shortly.

“And so your king has come to kill you?”

“How did you know a king wants me dead?” demanded Roric, raising his sword again.  This person who knew his name but apparently not much else could in fact be one of the king’s men, here to distract him from the coming attack, only seeming insubstantial because of night and moonlight.

But the other again gestured with upturned palms.  “This is a royal manor, and the crown on your shoulder-clasp suggests royal service.  Is your king planning to kill you himself?”

“No, not with his own hands.  He couldn’t!” with a grim laugh.  Roric lowered his sword again; whoever this person was, he did not seem one of Hadros’s men.  “The king is my sworn lord, and he would be outlawed himself.  But I wondered at the time why he sent me to this manor on such a trivial errand.  Still, I did not suspect treachery until I saw the warriors arrive by stealth:  three of them, my king’s fiercest fighters.  I would not have seen them at all if I had not forgotten my knife in the hall at dinner and gone back for it.”

“Sit down by me,” said the man.  Roric had still not seen his face.  “I do not like having to look up at an armed man when I’m trying to talk to him.  Now tell me,” when Roric had slowly seated himself, his sword again across his knees, “do you intend to kill these warriors?”

“I will not stand quietly while they kill me!”

“But are they not beneath your notice?”

“One of them I could certainly outfight,” said Roric, “probably even two.  Three I think will be harder . . .  My tale is already short, because it starts with me, but the end should be very interesting.”

There was another faint chuckle from beneath the broad-brimmed hat.  “So your intent is to give up your life to make a glorious song?  I would not have thought a life for a song a good bargain.  The song will not cause your king much distress, nor comfort the lady.”

© C. Dale Brittain 2016