When Dr. Suess wrote Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, I’m sure that he had no idea of how
books would be available on the Internet.
Or, maybe he did.
Today’s entry is shameless self-promotion, just to
demonstrate how an independent author’s books become available in lots of
places.
I’m going to choose one of my works to show you
the availability.
Don’t Come
Around Here No More – A Tale Of Sardis County is available in both print
and eBook.
Your choice of eBook copies can be found at Amazon,
Barnes
& Noble, txtr,
Kobo,
Blio,
Flipkart,
and Smashwords. It’s also available at places that I can’t
create hyperlinks for specific pages, like iBooks, Scribd, and Oyster. Scribd and Oyster will have it available on
August 19, 2014. You can preorder it
everywhere except Amazon, where it’s already available.
The print editions are available in several
places, too: Amazon,
Barnes
& Noble, and Books-A-Million. There are probably several other places that
it’s turned up, but those are the big three for print editions. At Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million,
your local brick-and-mortar stores can also order the print editions of any of
my work, and have it for you within a few days, if you’re nervous about
ordering online.
I don’t distribute through Google Play for two
reasons: 1) I found the instructions on
Google Play itself to be too confusing to wade through, and 2) Smashwords doesn’t
distribute through them, either. Vook does distribute through Google Play, but I found their instructions
too confusing as well…and I didn’t want to upload all of my stories again just
to distribute through one channel.
My point is this:
as an independent author, your books can be available everywhere that
sells books, just like books published by the big New York publishers. There are several differences between being
independent and being a slave to the big boys:
on the plus side, you keep more royalties and keep all rights to your
work. On the bad side, you don’t have a
huge promotional budget. Being
independent and publishing through a print-on-demand service like CreateSpace
means that you won’t have a lot of remaindered books taking away from your
royalties…but it makes print editions hard to find without ordering online.
Overall, however, it’s best for all authors to be independent…and I’ve
covered that in a couple of earlier blog entries.
Marketing yourself? We’ll talk about that another day!
Meanwhile,
Keep reading!
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