Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand – so they’d be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren’t going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it’s not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.

So why give away the bits? Well, traditional book publishers have three big imperatives today: (1) protect print sales for as long as possible (in order to fund a longer-term transition to a workable new business model); (2) help keep physical bookstores in business (for the reasons set out in this article by Julie Bosman); and (3) do anything possible to curb the power of Amazon.com, the publishers’ arch-frenemy. Bundling bits with atoms helps on all three fronts. First, you give people an added incentive to buy a print book. When it comes to paperbacks, in particular, a customer essentially gets the physical and electronic copies for the price they’d pay for an electronic copy alone. That changes the buying equation. Second, you do something that helps physical bookstores in their own end-of-days battle with Amazon. Suddenly, they have a strong new sales pitch. Third, by offering the ebooks in a standard, non-proprietary format (ePub, say), you make the Kindle, which doesn’t handle the ePub format, considerably less attractive, particularly for anyone buying their first e-reader. (Why buy one that’s not going to accept those free ebooks you’re going to get when you decide you want a print edition?) Either Amazon stands firm with its proprietary format, or it retools the Kindle as a general purpose reader that can handle ePub. If it chooses the former course, it loses e-reader market share. If it takes the latter course, it weakens its grip on sales of ebooks and weakens the rationale for subsidizing Kindle purchases. There’s also one other potential benefit for publishers, which could be very important in the long run: By setting up their own site where customers download free ebooks, they open a direct relationship with book readers, something they’ve never really had before.

I think the premise of this article is flawed from the outset, namely, that readers would like to have both an ebook and physical copy of a book. I don’t see any evidence of that anywhere. I know lots of people who’ve made the jump to ereading, and every single one of them, without exception, has said farewell to print. Once you get hooked on ereading, you come to realize just how cumbersome print reading really is. Physical books are awkward to hold with one hand (slim paperbacks, maybe, but hardcovers? No way), have no built in dictionary, no ability to resize or change fonts, no ability to instantly purchase a new book any time of the day or night.

I simply don’t see a groundswell clamoring for this option, regardless of its technical feasibility.

Read the rest at RoughType.com.

From The Corner, by David Kazzie:

This is my guess as to how a book that couldn’t muster a sale a day became an Amazon bestseller, virtually overnight.

Early Friday morning, the book continued to appear on the Free bestseller list, even though it switched back to Paid. There was a little bubble above the price marked “Why is This Not Free?”, and if you scrolled over it, you got Amazon’s explanation about it (although I can’t quite remember what the explanation is) — regardless, the now-$2.99 book was getting bestseller exposure even though it wasn’t really a Paid bestseller. This only lasted for a couple of hours, but I think it helped get the ball rolling.

Also, I had so many free downloads, the book began to appear in other books’ “Customer Also Bought” pages. Amazon doesn’t seem to care if these books mix together on the Also-Bought lists, so many more people were seeing the book once it switched back to Paid status, even though all its prior traffic was due to free downloads.

Other factors that might have kept things snowballing: I write in a pretty popular genre (suspense/thrillers), and I’ve got a pretty cool cover.

It should be noted that several other books (from different genres) that made it to the top 10 Free List on the days I was there seem to have experienced similar success when switching to the Paid list. One book, Fresh Powder, has made it all the way to No. 26.

HERE’S THE BAD NEWS

Also worth a discussion — what doesn’t help or boost sales. I hate to say it, but I’m gonna. My blog, my Facebook fan page and Twitter feed didn’t help push the book beyond the confines of my regular following.

I like blogging, so I never have done it simply as a sales tool. But any sales generated as a result of my blog posts have been minimal at best.

As for Twitter: I think I’m a decent enough Tweeter — I interact with people, I retweet interesting content, and a good number of my own tweets get retweeted. I venture outside the insulated Twitter world of writers. I like the people I interact with on Twitter and on my Facebook fan page, and those are good ways to get my blog posts out or to tell one-liner Twitter jokes (to be honest, I think Twitter is really effective for sharpening writing skills). And I don’t use Twitter as a place to shill my books (I’ve probably sent a dozen or so self-promo Tweets, most in the days after I initially published the book).

But it’s probably been ineffective as a book marketing device. Now perhaps I don’t have a big enough following for it to make a difference. I know one thing — of the few hundred books I’d sold before all this happened, a good chunk were bought by my family and friends. I did very little self-promo, especially on Twitter, because I know how poorly other authors’ self-promo tweets worked on me. And the tweets I did send? Probably didn’t make a lick of difference. I hadn’t run any advertisements, but I had purchased two (ironically, the first one doesn’t even run until Feb. 27, and the second won’t run until March 31).

Read the rest here.

The KDP Select Program works this way: Amazon puts a big pot of money every month in a slush fund that gets shared by writers whose books are lent out through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. The more times your book is lent out, the more money you make. The catch is that you have to give Amazon exclusive rights to your book for at least 90 days, which means if you have it for sale on places like the iBookstore or Barnes & Noble, those have to come down for the 90 day exclusive time frame. The big question is whether or not this tradeoff is worth it.

I admit, I’m intrigued by this. I’ve been somewhat dismissive of the KDP Select Program, but this has me rethinking the value of it. I may give it a shot, since my sales on the iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, and the Sony eReader Store are pretty nil. If I do, I’ll definitely write about it here.

… buying a physical copy. Really. I have the first four in hardcover so I wanted to keep the series in the same format until the end, but I think that decision was a mistake. After reading fifty or so ebooks over the past year, I’ve gotten so used to the convenience of them that a physical book — especially a book as large and unwieldly as A Dance with Dragons — is not much fun to read.

I was trying to read it in bed last night, and it was, to be honest, a colossal pain in the ass. Especially toward the beginning (and I’ll have the same problem at the end), where the book is very lopsided when open, and hard to handle. I found it annoying enough to distract me a little from the reading experience. Not good. It’s my problem (the book itself is, as one would expect, beautiful), but still not good.

Yeah, yeah, I know, what a terrible thing to be complaining about. Cry me a river, yada yada. But I have apparently made the mental shift to ebooks more thoroughly than I’d thought.