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.

The mysterious event Apple is holding later this month just got a little less mysterious.  They are apparently going to make it easier to self-publish books through their iBookstore application.

Apple is going to be holding an exclusive event in New York city later this month to possibly launch a new program for their iBooks and Publishing platform. Sources close to the matter have told us that they intend on launching a new digital self-publishing platform to get peoples content into the iBookstore. This is a huge step forward for Apple to compete with Amazon (DTP) and Barnes and Noble (Pubit).

One of the only ways to get listed into the Apple iBookstore if you are an independent author is to go through a 3rd party such as Smashwords. They assign you a free ISBN for choosing them and they will submit your books to iBooks and tons of others.

Apple will be taking a cue from the new Amazon program that gives indie authors an incentive to publish exclusively with them. There is no details yet on the actual semantics of the program and how it will work. One has to wonder on the revenue share system they will employ to be competitive with other mainstream self-publishing systems. The one thing we were told is that they will use the EPUB format and make it very easy for people to convert their documents or existing books to comply with their format.

My self-published mainstream novel Life Line is in the iBookstore (as well as Amazon Barnes & Noble, and the Sony ereader store), but I published it directly with Apple rather than Smashwords. To do so you need (a) a Mac and (b) your own ISBN number, which costs about $100. It’s a little more cumbersome than publishing with either Amazon or Barnes & Noble, so I’m also hoping that they manage to streamline and simplify the process. At the very least they should either rescind the requirement to have an ISBN for each book you publish, or provide some way for writers to easily obtain one through the iBookstore publishing process at a reduced cost.

Read the full article and comments here.

I have the Nook Touch, the black-and-white e-ink reader Barnes & Noble released last summer. I love it, and use it almost every day, in addition to my iPad (which my wife has commandeered to read the complete Dresden Files). I wanted a small, light, touch-based ereader, and at the time the Nook was the only game in town.

Barnes & Noble’s released their first Nook Color just about a year ago. A new version of the Android-powered device is set to debut next week.

The biggest question is how much the new tablet will cost. With the Kindle Fire on sale at $199 (it ships November 15), there’s some pressure on B&N to come close to matching that price, though Amazon is allegedly losing money on each Fire it sells (our sources suggest the Fire currently costs around $220 to build). With that being the case, Barnes & Noble is more likely to come out with a faster, more powerful Nook Color that costs $249, though we wouldn’t be surprised to see it at $299.

At the same time, the company may leave the original the Nook Color on the market and price it at $199.

Read the full article at CNet.com.

… 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.

In my review of the new Nook (which is unfortunately one of the posts that got blammoed when I had a site crash last week and which I haven’t yet recovered), I stated that I was a pretty big fan of Barnes & Noble’s new e-reader device. I still am, but I’m also having some hardware issues that are big enough to make me exchange mine today for another one.

For the past couple of days the touch screen has been buggy. It wouldn’t turn pages when it was supposed to. Most of the time it was acting “stuck”; in other words, it wouldn’t work for a few pages so I had to use the hard buttons to move ahead, but then it would correct itself and the screen would start working again.

Last night it got decidedly worse.

I was reading a really riveting scene in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest when it froze up again. Sometimes turning on the screen saver and then going back fixed the page turning, so I tried that.

Unfortunately, the entire touch screen died and didn’t come back.

This is a big problem with the Nook because the only way to unlock the screen saver and get back to your text is with the touchscreen. No touchee, no readee. So I was completely screwed. I fiddled with it for a couple of minutes before giving up in great disgust and going to bed.

This morning it was working again, but I’m not taking any chances. I’m going to exchange it today for a new one and hope this is an isolated incident and not a symptom of a broader problem with the touchscreens.

I think I want one. I love reading books on my iPad, but it really does suck for outside reading. I’m finding I’d really like a device I could take to the beach or pool, rather than having to cart around physical books.

The new Nook isn’t too expensive at $139 (though I would prefer something in the $99 range). I’m thinking I’ll ask for some B&N gift cards for Father’s Day and put them toward a purchase.

I’m not interested in the Nook color because I already have a tablet. I only want a dedicated ereader device that I can use outdoors.

And yes, I’m quite aware that I’ve said in the past that dedicated e-readers were going to go the way of the Dodo, and that I really dislike e-ink. Well, I still do dislike e-ink, and don’t see this taking over as my primary ereader, but I do see it having its uses (as I said, mostly for the beach or pool reading).

As far as them disappearing into the realm of extinct consumer devices like the 8-Track or HD-DVD, I still think it’s going to happen eventually. I did predict that dedicated, single-purpose ereaders were going to have to drastically drop their prices to remain viable, and that’s certainly happened. I also still think they’re going to either have to become completely commoditized, with pricing in the $20-$50 range at some point, or they’ll have to add features that make them more like full-fledged tablets (see the aforementioned Nook Color).

I’ve watched a few videos of the new Nook in action and they’ve made the page turning tolerable, though it’s still not nearly as elegant — or cool, or gimicky, whatever, pick your term — as the iPad’s page turning. But at least it’s at a level that I think I can live with.

Why this instead of the similarly priced Kindle? Mostly because I want a touchscreen, and prefer the uniform bezel size and not the clunky, 1980′s style keyboard jammed across the bottom of the thing that’s part of the Kindle experience. I’d bet some pretty large dollars that the next version of the Kindle does away with the physical keyboard altogether and goes purely touchscreen.

If/when I get one, I’ll report back on how I like it.

But it’s neither too big of a catch (the ads don’t interrupt the reading experience), nor too big of a discount ($25 less than the currently least expensive Kindle).

So let’s look at this for a moment. It’s really not a bad deal. The ads are on the homepage and the screensaver, so instead of your favorite wallpaper when the Kindle goes idle, you’ll see a sponsor ad. Not an awful trade-off. No ads while you’re reading a book. So it’s not intrusive, and probably very easily ignored.

But the discount is only $25, bringing the price down to $115. That’s still really cheap, but I don’t think it’s cheap enough. I think Amazon should have gone for broke and priced it at $99, breaking the sub-$100 barrier. If nothing else, that would have a huge psychological impact in the market. Amazon’s all about gobbling up market share anyway. A $99 Kindle is better positioned to do that than a $115 Kindle.

The $99 (and lower) Kindle is definitely coming — it’s only a matter of when. I’m just surprised Amazon took this intermediate step rather than just going for broke and pricing this new ad-supported Kindle at $99 right from the start.

More info from TG Daily.

Nothing terribly new here, but it is interesting to note Amazon’s continued refusal to release any sales numbers for its Kindle hardware.

ANALYSTS have wondered what profit margins Amazon makes on its Kindle hardware business. “It is difficult to say Amazon is making much money at its new device prices of $139,” writes Marianne Wolk, an analyst at the Susquehanna International Group, in a report to clients at the end of June.

I still think the days of dedicated ereaders are numbered. They may remain as niche products (and even then, only if the price continues to drop until it’s almost a throwaway item, in the $20 to $50 range), but mass market penetration is simply not going to happen.

A nice run down of a number of e-reader apps.

Via ZDNet.

Barnes & Noble has been having some success recently selling their Nook e-reader. They’ve been promoting the device heavily in their stores and recently did a big push for Father’s Day. They’ve been pleased with the sales of the unit, though haven’t released any specific numbers sold. They even have an iPad app, which I have and is fine in its own right. Not as elegant as the iBook reader (the gaps between paragraphs in the B&N app are huge, and unfortunately not adjustable, which irks me), but the themes — various combinations of fonts and background colors — are a cool idea that also happen to be useful.

Some time ago I had this to say about the Kindle Reader after I got my iPad and played around with iBooks for the first time:

The Kindle Reader is dead after this. There’s no way in hell anyone is going to pay money for a device that does one thing only and does it in a completely shitty way compared to the iPad. Kindle Reader = extinct technology. The software may survive, but the hardware is toast.

I also had this to say:

True, the iPad is a multi-purpose device, which I’ve already argued is going to either kill the Kindle and Nook and their e-reader brethren or force them to (a) reduce price to an almost throwaway point or (b) incorporate additional functionality (i.e., iPad-ize them).

Point (a) above is already starting to happen. On Monday, June 21, Barnes & Noble dropped the price of the Nook by a sizable margin. They cut the price of its wi-fi and 3G Nook from $259 to $199, while at the same time introducing  a $149 wi-fi-only version. This is just the first salvo in what I predict is going to become an ongoing war between Amazon and B&N (and probably Sony at some point). This is a grab for market share in what is going to be a rapidly shrinking market of single function e-reader devices.

What about Apple? I hear you ask. (Yes, my hearing is very good.) Why aren’t you including them in this price war?

Because they’re not in it. They’re above it. Or beside it. Take your pick, but precisely because the iPad is a multi-function device makes them immune from this downward pricing trend. That may anger and irk fans of the Nook and Kindle, but I’m sorry, it’s true. When Apple launched the iPad the future of single function e-readers became very dark and grim, with the half-life of a soap bubble. Oh, they’ll be around for a few years more, with prices dropping faster than BP’s reputation, but the iPad chopped their heads off in one fell swoop.

They’re dead, they just don’t know it yet.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet had this to say about the Nook price drop:

The move is likely to put Amazon on the defensive and the e-commerce giant appears to have been either caught flat-footed or resting on its early Kindle lead. Many folks have noted that Apple’s iPad is a dedicated e-reader killer, but let’s exclude Steve Jobs & Co. from the picture. Even excluding Apple, Amazon looks a bit behind the curve on e-readers.

Amazon may have been caught flat-footed, but they didn’t stay that way for long. Later Monday afternoon they responded with their own price cut on the Kindle. They dropped the price from $259 to $189.

I’m really curious to see how low the prices of e-readers is going to get, and how fast. My money’s on one of the majors (Amazon, B&N, or Sony) dropping to a $99 price point by Christmas.