While taking a short break from obsessively Googling your name and checking your KDP dashboard, you wander over to search for your book on Amazon. Imagine your surprise when – gasp – you see two listings. Or three listings. Or even more! Someone named IHeartBooks is selling your paperback on Amazon! Not only that, but – horror of horrors – they’re charging more than you are. Or maybe less than you are. Or maybe you’re one of those authors who’s stumbled across a copy of your paperback selling on Amazon for $6,789 or some such outrageous price.
One very important inexpensive marketing tool indie bloggers don’t talk about enough is the simultaneous publishing of both electronic and paperback versions of books – ebooks and pbooks.
A study by The Pew Center indicates that 19% of adults in this country now have tablet computers and 19% have dedicated ereaders. These numbers are up from about 5% in 2010. That’s remarkable.
But these statistics still mean that the bulk of the population doesn’t own technology designed to optimize the digital book reading experience. For this reason, indie writers should seriously consider making their next novel available as a paperback as well as an ebook. Such a move expands the reading market significantly. There are dozens of Print-On-Demand (POD) companies out there offering a variety of support services (to get started, check out one list here) to support indie writers who are so inclined. Continue reading “The Portable Advertisement by David Biddle”
Born in Udine, in Northeastern Italy, in 1952, Guido Mattioni has lived and worked in Milan since 1978. Writing has always been his job and his life as well. During 33 years of journalism he has worked for daily newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines while holding almost every professional title possible, from reporter to editor-in-chief and deputy editor to special correspondent. He has traveled all over the world, especially in the USA, where he has visited almost every state. Mattioni, who recently retired, is still an active columnist and freelancing contributor to Italian national dailies and magazines. When he was younger he wrote two non-fiction works: one historical and the other on Economics. Whispering Tides is his first novel, and it is also available in its Italian version – Ascoltavo le maree. One of the yet few Italian “Indie” writers, he is utterly convinced about the positive impact of this revolutionary wave that is giving – he says – full meaning to the expression “freedom of press”. He is married to Maria Rosa, an Oncologist who is, quoting Guido, “someone much more socially useful” than he is, “apart from being definitely a much more beautiful person too”. If he could be reincarnated he would like to do it as a chef because cooking is the pastime he is most fond of. He is an atypical Italian because he suffers an incurable allergy to soccer.
Whispering Tides by Guido Mattioni
When his beloved wife Nina suddenly dies – after 23 years of life together – Alberto Landi understands he has to leave Milan Italy, where he has always lived and worked. He leaves his friends, colleagues, a good job and the polluted big city he has never loved which has now become even more intolerable to him. He is fifty, he is totally alone and he is confused, but he definitely knows that he has to escape very far away, across the ocean, to the only place he and Nina had always loved together. He lands in Savannah, Georgia. There, in a natural paradise governed by the breath of the tides and with the help of many dear friends – colorful human characters as well as wise animals – he starts to rebuild his new life. His dream is coming true until the day he wakes up one morning and discovers that… Whispering Tides is available from Apple iTunes, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, and Amazon in paperback and Kindle format.
While taking a short break from obsessively Googling your name and checking your KDP dashboard, you wander over to search for your book on Amazon. Imagine your surprise when – gasp – you see two listings. Or three listings. Or even more! Someone named IHeartBooks is selling your paperback on Amazon! Not only that, but – horror of horrors – they’re charging more than you are. Or maybe less than you are. Or maybe you’re one of those authors who’s stumbled across a copy of your paperback selling on Amazon for $6,789 or some such outrageous price.
