Monday, February 13, 2012

KDP Select and Me

I signed up for the KDP Select program, which allows readers to rent Chicago Stories: West of Western free, but will pay me for each rental. Sounded good to me, especially since libraries struggle with ebooks. Some publishers are refusing to allow libraries to lend their ebooks. 

Signing with KDP was one of my better ideas. Following Rob Walker's advice, I decided to use the promo days a couple at a time.This last weekend was my first, and my sales jumped a whopping 5000%! So okay, I hadn't had all that many sales before. Still.

And the books were free for the two day promotion, so I'm not getting any $$ for them. Who cares? As a debut author, getting those books into readers' hands is gold. Love you, KDP.

Next: finish revising Chicago Stories 2: Ravenswood and get it off to my editor, Elizabeth Lyon, for vetting next month. Or eviscerating. Then rewriting and I hope to have it off to the formatter in June.

Next weekend I'm going to Chicago for actress Marjie Rynearson's Story Structure Workshop.  Actor/director Jeff Dudek invited me and these are theater people, not novelists. The workshop offers me a fresh way of approaching a story and I hope it will help me with plotting.

And I'm taking spending some time in Pilsen, the Mexican/American neighborhood Seraphy's working in in my third Chicago Stories mystery. I love Pilsen.