The Flash Fiction Vol.1 of the Cutting Right to the Chase detective short stories is on the market in every online ebook stores of the web.
After many months of tests and doubts, I rescinded my exclusivity deal with Amazon Kindle Store and decided to give the other online ebook stores a go.
Here are the main stores where you can buy Cutting Right to the Chase Vol.1 (and this is the detailed product page of the book):
Why the other ebook retailers?
My very first experience with Smashwords, Kobo and company hasn’t been too bad after all. In fact, when I published the Italian translation of the Cutting Right to the Chase saga, Dritto al Punto, Chase! I thought of not selling them on Amazon Kindle Store only, and instead opening the market to other resellers.
Since the Italian ebook market is quite different from the international one, as it’s less dominated by Amazon and with Kobo, Nook and Smashwords in a positive up trend, I wanted to walk every profitable paths.
I can’t complain about my choice: at the moment, the overall turnover on Amazon is still the double of the other stores combined, however some days the peaks of sales on certain non-Amazon stores (such as iBook) are quite remarkable and are worth investigating.
What about Kindle KU?
KU stands for Kindle Unlimited and it’s a very nice program any Amazon user can subscribe to. The subscribers can read up to ten ebooks at a time without buying them. Like a library, you can ‘borrow’ the titles from the KU books gallery by paying less than £10 per month. Cool, isn’t it?
As an avid reader myself, I reckon that KU is a brilliant way of saving money and discovering new authors and titles. In fact, the traditional publishers are getting into KU pretty gradually, therefore the KU catalogue is plenty of indie authors and self publishers – and most of them are quite good writers.
Economically speaking, from an authorship point of view, KU has got some turnaround when it’s about flash fiction.
The royalties payment of the titles listed on the KU catalogue are different from the ‘regular’ Amazon royalties. The KU system is designed to reward long length novels, whilst the flash fiction isn’t really paying off from a ROI point of view.
I talked about KU and flash fiction also in an interview for the Aussie Overland website.
That’s why I decided to keep my long length mystery stories – the cozy mystery novella Into the Killer Sphere and the murder mystery story Pull the Trigger – enrolled in the KU program. That grants me also an exclusivity deal with Amazon. For what concerns my short stories, I published the vol.1 of Chase’s flash fiction series also in other online ebook stores, as I’m announcing with this post :D
This way, if my data projection is correct, I will be having a slight improvement both in sales and book’s visibility. In fact, not the 100% of my detective short stories’ potential audience reads on Kindle devices. I see this new chapter of Cutting Right to the Chase vol.1 as a way of broadening my audience and spreading the word about the Chase Williams flash fiction series.
Let’s see how things are going to roll from now on :)
Great information!