Authors Alice Hoffman and Alain de Botton compete for author douchebag of the day. Hoffman tweets the phone number and email address of the awful reviewer and de Botton essentially curses the career of the NYTBR critic. See more here.
In better news, publishers are just giving away the farm on Kindle which is great for Kindle users (and also those who have iPhones or iTouches) but not so great for everyone else. What’s free?
- Mary Jo Putney’s Loving a Lost Lord (a return to straight historicals)
- Dee Tenorio’s Kiss Me Again
- Lara Adrian’s Kiss of Midnight (first in the Breed series)
Quartet Press, a new romance epublisher, is open for submissions.
Joe Wickert looks at Fast Company’s cover story of Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Kindle numbers are eyebrow raising.
Recently, Bezos claimed that Kindle e-books add 35% to a physical book’s sales on Amazon whenever Kindle editions are available. Put another way, for every three print copies of, say, Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Outliers” the site sells, it also sells one Kindle e-book — or about 25% of total sales.
Barnes and Noble released an iPhone app. It allows you to search for a product, reserve it at the store or purchase it online. The purchase link takes you out of the iPhone app to the Mobile Safari program. The locator feature which uses your current location to suggest a bookstore is off because it recommended a bookstore about 2 hours from me even though I have 2 Barnes and Noble stores within 10 minutes of my “current location.” The program is also very buggy, crashing everytime I selected an item from the search list.
Buggy apps = poo
I <3 the Kindle app. :)
There are so many books for Kindle free on Amazon right now, including Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon and a bunch of Harlequins (Leslie Kelly, Brenda Jackson, Elizabeth Rolls, etc.). Just brows through the top 100 Kindle books and quite a few — in several genres — are available.
When they’re free, it doesn’t seem as bad that you can’t really own those damn Amazon digital books, lol.
[...] Dear Author has links to free Kindle books and the Alice Hoffman Twitter kerfuffle. [...]
Huh. Not sure what the thinking is on offering Mary Jo Putney’s first straight historical in seven years for free (although I certainly took advantage of it, thanks for posting!) since surely there’s enough buzz about it to push sales. The Lara Adrian thing is smart, though; I’ve never read her, but I’ll give the series a shot when I can read the first book for nothing!
Lara Adrian’s book is available for free through the Sony bookstore, as are the Harlequins, and I think the Novik as well…if not, the Naomi Novik book is available through suvudu (Random House) http://www.suvudu.com/freelibrary/
There’s also a bunch of books available through the Baen free library…not sure how many are romance. http://www.baen.com/library/
The Novik is part of the free promo on Sony, because that’s where I downloaded it.
I’m really getting annoyed at all the free book Kindle love. Grumble, mumble, mumble… I love my Sony… grumble, mumble, mumble…