A small fry writer with a small independent publisher, I was recently charged with getting my book ‘The Long Staff’ up as an ebook online.

I did some online research and received some great advice from great fellow writers on Twitter, and decided that I would go with Kindle first. It seemed like a good place to start, and I figured that I could always go to other electronic formats later. Since its rise, I have read many articles on Kindle and Amazon, and generally find myself swaying between thinking they are the rebel alliance, helping to free poor writers kept down by the traditional publishing establishment; and thinking that they are in fact the evil empire, slowly trying to destroy the publishing industry from the inside out…

I’m sure that neither statement is actually true, but there are a lot of people on both sides of the argument, and since I sit somewhere in the middle of traditional publishing and being self published, I find it easy to sympathise with both sides… Therefore, I was slightly torn as I took this tentative step towards my majority share royalty payments… surely there’s a catch?

I put these worries aside, it would be a good way to reach new readers, especially some of the great people I have met from outside the UK through Twitter and Facebook. Also, the version of the book being uploaded is a new edition of the story, with some minor changes made and, hopefully, almost all of the technical errors picked up… Ask any author, sometimes the little buggers just hide until you see the book in print, then they jump out and shout ‘Ha, ha!’

I tried my best to read through the Kindle Terms and Conditions thoroughly and carefully tried to gauge a fair price for my work. This again, is an issue I have come across on other writer’s blog posts. Is the ‘Buy this for $0.99’ the right route, or is this simply undervaluing your work? Also, with the amount of completely self published work out there on Kindle, does the ‘$0.99’ approach simply brand you as being cheap and cheerful? I decided to go with a similar amount to some of my peers, half what the hard copy costs, but not ridiculous.

So, with bated breath, I pressed the submit button, and now my baby is available electronically for all of you lovely people out there… I hope that if you do decide to invest in a copy of the book, you enjoy it. Also, if you use this function, the book is available in the Kindle Lending Library. Feel free to post any reviews on Amazon, or send them to me directly and I can post them to my site.

Go on, you know you want to!! Order now for only £3.99!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2012 at 2:26 PM and is filed under News & Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.