Free? Free? FREE?

What is this free of which you speak? The days you get to price your book at zero on Amazon's KDP Select. (See link for a blog post I wrote a while back explaining how it works). That means you get zero, zilch, nada for each and every "sale".

Why would I want to give my work away for free? Authors say making the first book in a series free generates sales of subsequent books. That may indeed be true for them and if so, I'm happy for them. But I just can't get my head around the concept. I don't want to just sell book 2 (and book 3 soon) of my crime thriller series - I want to sell all 3 books. If I want to make one free, I'll do it when I want and for as long as I want - via Smashwords, which will let me set my own prices.

My books aren't exactly expensive at full price. I work hard to write them - hundreds, if not thousands of hours. I want people to make a decision to buy and hopefully read my books, not download a freebie and probably never look at it. My ebooks cost less than the price of a cup of coffee. Anybody who doesn't consider that one of my books is worth the price of a cup of coffee is not my target audience.

KDP Select & Large Fries To Go, Please

So I looked at KDP Select - amazon's amazing new offer for indie authors. Sign exclusively with us for 90 days and we will put your ebook in our amazon prime lending library. You get a share of half a million dollars in December alone. $500,000? Just for December? Where do I sign?

Read the small print. You get a share of the money pot depending on how many times your book is borrowed as a proportion of all borrowings. And the library is growing rapidly by the hour since amazon emailed all us indie authors yesterday. But in return, amazon demands exclusivity - you cannot sell or distribute your book anywhere during that 90 day period - that presumably means you can't sell your books off your own website and you can't give books to reviewers.

Where it really get complicated is if you have ever sold your book via smashwords. Quite apart from the fact that you have to wait for smashwords to pull the books from B&N, Apple, Sony and other sites (which can take a few weeks), you need to remember that even if you unpublish a book from smashwords, the site retains a copy to service previous customers of that book, which they will presumably distribute to said customers who wish to re-download. Bang go amazon's terms & conditions then. And once you violate amazon's t&c, the wording is sufficiently vague for them to get away with anything.

I'd maybe consider it for a new book. But you'd have to have a huge proportion of downloads (not numbers, but % of total downloads) to be making real money at this new game. So I'll pass for now and stick with smashwords and getting my books into as many different outlets as I can.

But KDP Select does sound like a menu option in a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, doesn't it?