A Look at the KDP Select Program

When I put the first in a trilogy of Post Cold War thrillers on Amazon for the Kindle, I decided to opt for the KDP Select program. I had heard lots of interesting chatter about how the free book option could affect sales. If you're unfamiliar with KDP Select, the author agrees to make the book available exclusively for the Kindle for ninety days. During that time, you have five days to offer free downloads. Also, Amazon Prime customers can borrow a copy from the Kindle Owners Lending Library free and the author shares in a pot of money that runs around $600,000 a month.

Sounded like a good deal. For authors like my friend Tim Hallinan, who has a new Poke Rafferty Bangkok thriller, The Fear Artist, coming out next week, it's a great deal. He gives away multiple thousands of books on free days, and he sees an uptick in sales of his other books. He also collects cash on borrowed books.

Unfortunately, I'm not in the same league as mega-sellers like Tim. I'm a small press writer with small press sales numbers. A couple of weeks after my book became live on Amazon, I used two free days. I promoted it on several groups, including mystery list DorothyL, in my blog, Facebook, and anywhere else I could think.

I checked my rankings frequently during those days, and it went down to double digits. My KDP Report showed almost 500 free downloads. Although it didn't approach Tim's numbers, I was elated. But as I kept checking in the days that followed, I found no uptick in sales.

I had hoped one result would be at least a few reviews. Didn't matter whether they were good, bad, or indifferent. After nearly three months, there has been none. Ditto for Prime borrowers. With the ninety days running out next week, I'm preparing to put the book up on Smashwords where it will be available for all the other ebook readers.

With three free days left before my time runs out, I decided to do a little experiment. I scheduled the gratis downloads but did no promotion. The only mention of it is on my blog, which has had only a handful of readers so far. Guess what I found. At 10:55 p.m. last night, the first day of the giveaway, 140 copies had been downloaded. It ranked number 49 in the suspense category.

How did people find out about it? Beats me. But I suspect the results will be the same as before. The Kindle will hold up to 1400 books. I expect most of those downloading my free book will leave it buried deep in the device's digital innards until God knows when. It was an interesting experience, but I don't think the Kindle Select program is for people like me. For those with a name that commands respect in the marketplace, go get 'em.

The Queen of Patpong

by Jean Henry Mead

If I were giving a lecture on characterization, my primary example would be Tim Hallinan’s Poke Rafferty series. Although his novels are thrillers, his characters take precedence over the plot and readers care about them, especially the women who people his books. Tim has an uncanny ability to write convincingly from the female point of view, although he admittedly has no daughters or sisters of his own.

I was enthralled with Rose’s story in Tim’s soon-to-be-released fourth Poke Rafferty novel, The Queen of Patpong. He plunges his series family into imminent danger and then artfully incorporates the backstory to explain why his wife's former lover wants to kill her. As a beautiful virgin teen, Rose--then known as Kwan--has an alcoholic father who plans to sell her into prostitution, but she's lured to Bangkok by an acquaintance who sells her to a tavern owner. There she's expected to dance seductively on stage and “entertain” the customers.

Years later travel writer Poke Rafferty marries her and they adopt a street child to complete their family. But it's the events that take place during Kwan's maturation that make the story so riveting.

The novelist handles the subject with compassion and wry humor, avoiding explicit sex scenes, yet portraying the gritty side of Southeast Asian life. It’s a book that’s difficult to put aside.

Tim spends six months out of the year in Thailand and Cambodia, writing in Asian coffee houses. He explained that  on New Year’s Eve 2001, he walked alone through Bangkok all night long. "As I wandered through the back streets, the little neighborhoods tourists don’t see, I asked myself why no one wrote about Thai life beyond the temples and the go-go bars. Within about half an hour, I had Poke and his entire family in my head, as well as one of the two main plots of A Nail Through the Heart, which was the first book in the series. What I like best about the character of Poke is that he’s an outsider who doesn’t understand the culture and who has to learn more about it for his marriage to survive—and to live through some of the situations in which he finds himself.

“The Queen of Patpong is an important book to me because it follows the path several young girls set out on every day, the path that takes them from the dusty, impoverished northeast of Thailand into the brothels and bars of Bangkok. I'd known for some time that I wanted to write Rose's story, but I couldn't find a way to begin it until an e-mail landed in my inbox. I'm part of a small group of people who put up a little money each year to pay parents in the northeast to keep their daughters in school rather than selling them into the sex trade.

“A member of the group sent me a description, complete with photos, of a meeting she'd had with the grandmother of a teenage girl. The teacher had heard that the grandmother was going to accept 60,000 Thai baht (about $1,500 US) from a pimp in exchange for the girl. The meeting took several hours but by the end the grandmother -- who really was living in dire poverty-- accepted a little less than $100 per month to keep her granddaughter in school. One photo of the girl, sitting on a metal stool, her back as curved as the letter C, gave me the first scene of Rose's section of the book."

He was worried about the main section of the book because it's mostly about women "and women at an intimate and difficult juncture in their lives. So I'm especially happy that female reviewers have been extremely kind -- even enthusiastic -- about it.”

I'm one reviewer who's definitely enthusiastic about Tim Hallinan's novels.

(The Queen of Patpong will be released into bookstores August 17 by William Morrow, but the novel may be preordered from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and other online sources.)

Spring: a Time for New Beginnings

Spring is just around the corner, at least on the calendar. It's a time to start looking for new growth. A time for new beginnings. Today the sky is a solid blue, as unblemished as a newly-painted wall. The trees are still bare, except for an oak in the backyard that won't give up its leaves until the new buds are ready to pop out, but the sun beams down like the snow and ice of a few weeks ago are history.

If you're mired in the swamp of an unfinished manuscript, one that requires a new breath of life to get it over the hump, now is the time to get your brain stimulated for that final dash to the finish line. That's my situation.

I found a good resource to stir your creative juices. It's The Blog Cabin at Tim Hallinan's website. If you don't know Tim, and you should, he writes the popular Poke Rafferty mysteries set in Bangkok. He writes present tense stories as smooth as any I've seen.

The articles I'm referring to are in a weekly series running on Wednesdays which deal with the subject of Plotting vs. Pantsing. He has a different author each week tell about how he or she writes. They are quite illuminating and most go beyond the question of writing style to touch on other areas of the writing process. The series began back in January. The current offering is Number 7 by Leighton Gage.

Other authors who have contributed include Helen Simonson, Gar Anthony Haywood, Jeremy Dun, Rebecca Cantrell, Bill Crider, and Stephen Jay Schwartz. They offer lots of great ideas on writing. The comments on the articles are filled with much fodder for the creative mind.

Tim's website also contains some great advice on writing in a section titled "Finishing Your Novel." As he puts it, this section is for you if:

"You’ve started a novel but are having trouble finishing it, or
You want to start a novel but aren’t sure you’ll be able to finish it."

Tim's home on the web offers a great store of other writing advice as well. I highly recommmend spending a little time at the Hallinan website.

Now that I've received my springtime rejuvenation, I've gotta get back to writing. See you later.

Chester Campbell.

'Tis the Friday Before Christmas

by Chester Campbell

‘Tis the Friday before Christmas,
and all through the place,
not a writer is stirring,
not even to save face.
The laptop screen is blank,
the ash tray overflowing,
but the only thing at work
is the Christmas tree’s glowing.

Call it holiday malaise, or Yuletide lethargy. I have an idea for my next Greg McKenzie mystery, but I have yet to write the first word. I’m plagued with an inability to switch from promoter mode to writer mode. With a new book coming out in April, I’ve been courting reviewers, looking for signing opportunities, searching out other ways to promote.

I suppose my real problem is difficulty in allocating my time. Some people think retirement is just a bunch of leisure. I’ve even heard talk about fears of boredom. Those folks would get disabused of those notions if they came around my house. Besides frequent trips to the grocery, Wal-Mart, Office Depot or the post office, there’s hauling and picking up grandson at school or Taekwondo. Plus volunteer jobs like delivering Meals on Wheels and folding newsletters at church. Not to mention the inevitable visits to doctors or dentists for my wife or myself.

Between all that running around, I manage to scoot up to my office for occasional snippets of time during mornings, afternoons and evenings. And while on the computer, there are all those listserve messages beckoning with their highlighted displays.

It’s a wonder I get as much done as I do. I’m envious of authors who regularly work on their novels for four-to-six-hour stretches. And there are those like my friend Tim Hallinan who flies off to Bangkok and Phnom Penh to write. I have too many family responsibilities to afford that luxury (plus I’d probably have a hard time surviving that life at my age).

I’ve never done New Year’s resolutions, but maybe that’s my solution. I’ll allot certain days and certain time blocks for writing and others for promotion. But what to do about all those email lists? Ay, there’s the rub. The Bard was lucky he didn’t have Internet.

www.chesterdcampbell.com