Why Amazon price matched my free short stories

Why my short stories are free:

Amazon recently price matched my 5 short stories that are free at every other online store.  I use these as a way to get my writing out there so that people will hopefully buy my novels if they like the shorts.  It was very common for sci-fi and fantasy authors to write short stories for magazines like "Astounding" and "Amazing" back in the golden age of pulp fiction.  This is my eBook version of their strategy.

Ereader News Today

Ereader News Today http://ereadernewstoday.com/ is a website that has "Tips, Tricks, And Free Ebooks For Your Kindle".  I talk to Greg, the admin of the site, to let him know about the short stories when they went free on Amazon.

The site is wonderful for Kindle readers because it alerts them to deals and also gives tips for using the devices.

Anyway, he emailed me this question:

"Hi John,

Was there anything that you did to get your books free or did Amazon just decide to make them free?  Another author was asking me about this and I wasn't sure."

 

My long winded response

Short answer.  I made the stories free elswhere.  Then, on the Amazon page of each, there's a spot near underneath the Amazon rankings that says:  Would you like to give feedback on images or tell us about a lower price?  
Tell them about the lower price on one of the other stores, preferably B&N as they're the biggest competitor.  A Smashwords link probably works too.  After that they price matched mine a few weeks later.  Theoretically it will happen faster if more than 1 person reports lower prices, though I don't have statistical evidence of that. The Author does not make any money off of free eBooks that are price matched.

That wasn't as short as I expected, lol.  As far as the long answer goes, I spent some time figuring this out as much as possible. Much of this is my personal opinion after paying attention to responses from Amazon and watching their behavior.

Amazon doesn't really want to give books away for free. That said, they pay very close attention to what everyone else is doing, especially Smashwords and B&N right now.  Authors like giving away free ebooks if it will bring readers to their paid books. (it does - free ebooks on Amazon had directly resulted in 17 sales of my 2 paid books since Friday, when I only had 3 all month before that)  Amazon sees that it works and realizes that it has to match the successful activities of its competitors while also trying to come up with new means of leading the market. 

They didn't do it very often before because until last month, their contract didn't allow for them not to pay the author if they price matched for free.  In April they added a provision that stated they would not pay the author if they pricematched a book that was free elsewhere.  Then it looks like they matched authors that had their books free on Smashwords or B&N from what I can tell; that's largely speculation though.

I still think Amazon would prefer to sell the books.  I don't think they will offer a free option anytime soon, though I could be wrong.  They know a lot of Indie Authors tend to be crafty marketers and have created a system for those authors to work with.  I know that I've had 20,000 downloads since Friday between all 5 books.  I think a lot of them will be read later and some even forgotten by those readers, but I've seen my for sale books jump and I expect a larger number of purchases of them for at least a month or two as a result.

Anyway, I hope that helps.  I also hope I didn't bore you to death. ;)  lol.  Hmmm . . . I should make this email into a blog.  *laughing*

Have a good week and feel free to email me any time if you have any other questions. :)

John

Anyway, I thought I would share my speculations on this blog as I mentioned in the letter.  *grin*  The eBook revolution is really an extraordinary event and it's fascinating to see the world changing at such a rapid pace with every new technology.  It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Good Chapter, Bad Chapter

Writing

I absolutely love writing.  Most of what I write is sci-fi and fantasy with humor thrown in.  I've written 3 books and I'm working on more.  I've also written a few short stories, but they're actually harder for me.  I like books better.
Book two is better than book one and book 3 is the best.  I like book 1 a lot and think I did an excellent job with it.  The characters are rich and vivid and the dialogue is fun.  But it was my first book and I had to establish the characters.  In a lot of ways it was really hard and there's a good deal of information that I had to deliver to the reader.  That information took time away from the characters, dialogue and plot.
In book two, all of the characters were established, so I could get to the story.  I define and refine them more with each book. 

The dialogue in book 2 includes a lot of banter and humor in it.  I've had a blast writing it.  Book 3 was very action packed, but there was a part of 2 that really slowed me down.

Good chapter

Sometimes the words flow and I find myself grinning while I write. This is what I love. I'm reading the book and enjoying the story immensely. The characters are vivid in my mind and on the page. Every once in awhile, all of the words fall onto the page in perfect order and show exactly what I'm thinking.
I love it when a line happens that seems brillian to me. It's something I wish I had said in real life. The character in the book becomes impressive for having said it and the other characters are impressed by that cleverness.
This is one of my favorite things that I wrote in book 2
He handed his expenses pouch to Sir Danth. It had enough gold in it to rent a room as long as it wasn’t unreasonable. “See if you can get a room on the top floor facing the fortress,” he told the knight, pointing at the three level inn. “If it’s too expensive, take whatever you can.”
“I was under the impression you wished to handle matters of money, Master Tathan,” the knight said with a frown. Tathan really wanted to know how he did that.
“I have someone to go talk to,” Tathan replied cryptically.
“Why not give the money to your cousin?” Sir Danth asked, holding the pouch out to Liselle.
“Because, people don’t take money pouches out of the hand of an armored knight with a big sword, but they do take it from pretty young women,” he explained, gesturing toward Liselle.
“Nonetheless, I prefer to allow you or the pretty young lady do the talking,” the knight replied, handing the pouch to Liselle. “I promise to use my big sword to hit anyone who should attempt to take the pouch from the pretty young lady.”
Tathan sighed.
“You sigh a great deal, Master Tathan. Did you know?” the knight replied.
I loved writing that, it makes me grin.  The words were flowing here and the rest of the chapter did too.  Writing was easy and fun after this because of momentum that was created.

Bad chapter

Sometimes the words don't flow. This is when writing gets hard. I could stop and come back later, but the book never gets written that way. It's a bit like golf. You hit an amazing shot and that's what makes you love the game. Then for the next five holes every shot finds the nearest sand trap or water hazard. If you want to finish the game, you have to keep hitting.
I hate it when I don't love what I'm writing. It becomes more like work than fun. At one time it would stop me, but I've improved since then, but now I keep writing.
A part of me expects every sentence to be brilliant with light glowing out of the letters and a choir of angels singing it's praises, but that's a bit of an unreal expectation . . . yeah, just a bit.  They're not all going to be like that though.
So, when I get to one of those chapters where it's just not flowing great, I keep writing.  I try to make everything decent and hope it reads well. 
Hopefully, those great chapters where everything is brilliant will carry the reader over the one or two chapters that are merely interesting.  Then they'll get to the next brilliant chapter and have a grin that's just as big as mine when I wrote it.

Mapmaking for fantasy worlds

Most books in the fantasy genre have maps at the front.  Lord of the Rings is the obvious example.  Many people have seen a map of Middle Earth at some point or another.  If there isn't a map in a fantasy book, it can actually upset the reader greatly.

The thing about fantasy books is that they are generally set in a world of the writer's imagination.  Most of the time those worlds are epic playgrounds spread throughout kingdom, mountain ranges, forests, continents and exotic cities.  The writer can see these places in his/her imagination, but the reader can get a little lost with "They went to the forest, then climbed a mountain west of there, then went to the caves to the north, and then along the windy river to the city in the south."

So it really helps the reader if a map is provided.  That way the reader can visualize what's going on as they read.  In well developed worlds, there are usually a number of maps.  Some of them will center in on countries or even detailed city maps.

How the writer goes about making the maps can vary.  I write fantasy novels, but I'm terrible at drawing.  I'd love to eventually pay someone for professional looking maps, but right now my children need food.  I've tried telling them to stop eating, but my wife says that's a very bad thing.  *sigh*  So I have to draw the maps myself.

Here is the "world map" that I've drawn.  It's not actually the entire world, rather just the northern continent.  However, there's enough space here to fit numerous series of books.

Now the first thing you might notice is that the writing is amazing!  Yeah, that's not my handwriting.  After I was done drawing everything by hand, I scanned it into the computer and used the free image editing software called GIMP http://www.gimp.org/ to erase my terrible handwriting and add in the words with a much nicer font.

It was difficult trying to figure out the different symbols.  My first couple of versions didn't look anything like this.  You couldn't tell where a country started and where a river ended.  I looked at numerous other maps to see how they had done it and then improvised with a hodge-podge of different styles.  The important thing is that it's fairly easy to tell what's what.

You may notice that there are very few cities named.  I honestly don't know what cities are where in most cases.  I haven't made them up.  The first part I made up was the Kingdom of Paruth.  It was a setting for the original book I was going to write with a character named Calren.   After writing the first chapter of that story, I had him meet Pelya, a female soldier of the Blue Wyverns mercenaries.  Then I wrote her biography and had her start out in the city of Dralin.  I placed the Blue Wyverns in the Kingdom of Deller.  That's when I drew the map of those kingdoms.  It looked quite a bit different at the time.  I actually wrote about 4 chapters of Pelya's story only to realize that it was more like 4 books worth, so I stopped writing for a few years and did other things.

When I came back to writing, I couldn't find what I had already written, which infuriated me to no end.  I've since found it, but I think that perhaps it was a good thing that allowed me to start with a fresh slate.  I decided to start with an image I had in my head.  It was of a man standing in a mountain valley headed home.  That book, I finished.  It's called Rojuun.  I've since turned it into a trilogy called the Willden Trilogy.

The problem was that I hadn't conceived of that part of the map, so I had to draw it.  Then I came up with the kingdoms of Mayncal and Brindlyn as well as the Iynath Empire.  Well, I hadn't conceived of those either.  So they were placed to the east of the original maps.  The Iynath Empire is mostly desert.  I was raised in the Mojave Desert and found myself amazed at how everything west of the Sierra Nevadas was lush and green while everything to the east was dry and largely barren.  That's probably where I got the inspiration for that sort of climate set up.

The Willden Trilogy wasn't named right away.  I honestly didn't know what to name it by the time I was done with the second book.  For lack of anything better, I decided to name it for the Willden Forest.  All three of the books spend at least some of the story in that forest, so it made sense.  I used GIMP to chop out that part of the map and placed it in the books so that the reader could see better where the companions were traveling.

My next trilogy will be the story of Pelya and will be set in the city of Dralin.  Since the Willden Trilogy sounded really good, I decided that I would go with a running theme and title all of my trilogies based on their location.  So the next trilogy will be the Dralin Trilogy.  I haven't made a map of that city yet.  I plan on writing the first book and making up the locations as I go.  When I publish the book, I hope to have a map of the city in it then. :)

How to sit down and write

The journey of writing -

The first time I sat down to write a book, I got a lot of work done around the house.

It seems an odd statement, but it's true. Whether you want to write the greatest novel ever or something small like a poem or song, there comes a point where you need to get around to writing it. While I say "sitting down", you don't actually have to do so if you prefer to write while lying down or standing up. ;)

Coming up with the story is usually the easy part. Maybe you come up with ten stories, and can't decide between them, but there's always some sort of story. Even most poems and songs have a story or central idea.

I started out by trying my hand at a few poems. Then I went on to short stories and finally a novel. But the same thing held true with all of them. The hardest part was sitting down and actually writing the thing.

So you finally decide you're going to sit down and put that idea you have in words. You turn on your computer, boot it up and turn on your internet browser. First you want to check your favorite pages: twitter, facebook, sports, blog and the like. Then you have to write a few comments or responses to various things. You have to tweet that you've finally sat down to write as well.

Two hours have passed and you realize that you haven't even opened a blank document to write in, so you do that immediately! While that's opening, you have to go to the bathroom. Then you have to get a fresh drink. The problem is: you're out of your favorite drink. Time to make a quick run to the store.

At the store, you meet your neighbor. She tells you about an event she'd like you to attend. It's for charity of course. Perhaps you can spend some of your time to help out a little bit.

Two months later, you open up a new blank document. This time, you're really going to write . . . just as soon as you check the page views on your blog . . .

Okay, so that's how it works. When I first started writing, I found myself doing stuff around the house. I got some things fixed, a corner of the attic was cleaned out. All of my laundry was washed, things like that. It happens. Life has a lot of distractions.

Writing takes a lot of focus. There comes a point where you have to force yourself to remain in the seat and start writing. Just say no to housework and charity for a while. I have a family with three kids who want attention quite often. (silly little buggers) I have to be responsible and do a semi-decent job of raising them, but there comes a point where it's okay to tell them they need to let you write.

Writing -

Now that you've sat down, and you're ignoring that last load of laundry and that letter to your congressman that you've been meaning to write for the last 2 years, you need to write.

"It was a dark and stormy night" . . . no no no. *jam down the backspace key* "It was a bright and sunny day" . . . *jam the backspace again* . . . *sigh dramatically*

It's very hard to sit down and write. The first thing you need to do is sit down and force yourself to focus on the story. The second thing you need to do is actually write. This is the second place where a person gets hung up.

I always expect that first sentence to have some glowing, divine light shooting out of it. I want an epic "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" sort of entrance. It's not going to happen. For all we know, he re-wrote that 20 times before getting it right. He probably started with "It was a dark and stormy night" just like the rest of us. ;)

Write something.  Even if it's not great.  Just start writing.  Write the first sentence or line, then the next and the next.  After you're done with your first paragraph, you're probably going to hate it.  Don't change it right now though.  Go ahead and write your second, and your third.

The first key to writing is to sit down and write!  It's also the hardest.  I can't stress enough that the best way to get started is to sit down.  Stay seated.  Write.  Write some more.  Write even more.  Don't stop writing.

After a while, you'll get some momentum.  You'll get a flow going.  You might even start to have fun. :)
Best of luck to you.  :)