Monthly Kindle Book Budget: May

Quite a few free reads last month (some of which I would not have purchased, otherwise, although now and then one of the free reads is one I have on my Wish List). Several books have gone up in price since I purchased them and I've started noticing that some of the books purchased this year have disappeared from the Kindle store entirely (Summer's Path by Scott Blum and all of Boyd Morrison's books, for example).

May

The Night Gardener	George Pelecanos		$1.99
Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #1: Precipice	JOHN JACKSON MILLER		$0.00
The Colorado Sequence	Stacey Cochran		$0.80
Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms	Chuck Austen		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold IX:. The Queen of the Abyss	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold VIII: The Silver Caduceus	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of GoldVII:. The Wisdom of Solomon	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold VI:. the Dragonslayer	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold V:. the Quinta Essentia	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold IV:. The Hesperian Dragon	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold III:. The Head of the Crow	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold II:. The King of Terrors	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold I:. The Knight of Death	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Grove	John Rector		$0.99
CLAWS	Stacey Cochran		$1.59
25 Language Phrasebook	MobileReference		$0.01
Irreconcilable Differences	James R. Strickland		$0.99
Looking Glass	James R. Strickland		$0.99
Migration of the Kamishi (The Feral World)	Gaddy Bergmann		$0.99
In Her Name: Empire	Michael R. Hicks		$1.59
Felonious Jazz	Bryan Gilmer		$1.99
Dragon Ring	Lettie Prell		$0.99
A Lifetime of Vengeance	P. J. Grondin		$0.99
The Network Imperative: Community or Contagion?	Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Paul R. Kleindorfer		$0.00
Master Of The Game	Sidney Sheldon		$0.99
Call Me (Joker's Wild Series)	Lena Matthews		$0.00
Living With Your Kids Is Murder	Mike Befeler		$3.99
The Merchant of Death	D.J. MacHale		$0.00
The Huntress	Shiloh Walker		$0.00
Crossroads: Navigating Your Calling and Career	Colin Creel		$0.00
Kiss of Midnight	Lara Adrian		$0.00
Once Bitten, Twice Shy	Jennifer Rardin		$0.00
Weapons of Choice (Axis of Time, Book 1)	John Birmingham		$0.00
Elric: The Stealer of Souls	Michael Moorcock		$0.00

For the month, that's 34 books, $34.79 in total, for $1.02 per book. Definitely within the monthly budget (but the TBR stack is getting quite high). Here's the break-down by month, for the year-to-date:

Month	No. Books	Total Cost	Per Book
January	59	$83.47	$1.41
February	43	$29.97	$0.70
March	32	$33.44	$1.05
April	22	$13.11	$0.60
May	34	$34.79	$1.02
Totals	190	$194.78	$1.03

Guest Blogger: Dawson Vosburg

I hope you will check out this post from guest blogger, Dawson Vosburg about his book, Double Life (The Adventures of Josiah Jones), and about using the Amazon Kindle, either as a reader or as an author. I've mentioned his book once before: he is a very young, new author and has just sold 300 copies of his book, almost all due to Kindle sales (over 100 this month, alone). You'd never guess that he is still too young to drive. Be sure to check out his book, especially if you have younger readers at home -- one of these days, you'll be saying that you were one of his earliest fans.

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Thanks for having me on the blog, Karen.

First I would like to introduce my book. The title is Double Life, and it's an exciting science-fiction young adult adventure that takes place in an imaginary secret government agency called the BLUE. It follows Josiah Jones on his mission to defeat the evil crime syndicate, the RED Agency. It's available in print and on the Kindle on Amazon.

Print: http://www.amazon.com/Double-Life-Dawson-Vosburg/dp/1435724283/

Kindle for 80 cents: http://www.amazon.com/Double-Adventures-Josiah-Jones-ebook/dp/B002BH4H3Q/

I think it's just absolutely wonderful to be an author. I think I have the best job in the world-I get to tell stories and people will HAND ME MONEY TO READ THEM. And that in itself is amazing...that people are willing to pay for something you crafted out of your imagination.

But the question for authors really is who will buy your book. Who will be the ones who will gladly hand over their hard-earned cash for your labor and toil for this book? That's the key to being a successful author-to find your audience and hook it.

How do you hook it? If you wrote your book for yourself (like you probably should, because that usually results in the best work) then you know who your audience is. It's you.

Think about it-where do you usually find out good reads? This should be your primary marketing tool or handle. If you find out about books from word-of-mouth, which you probably do, then you have to generate word of mouth. The problem most authors face is how to get the WOM started. Where do these big famous books get all the WOM that they do?

The answer is that the WOM was started with the author. They told people about it, those people read it and liked it, and they told more people. It spreads like a virus, thus it's called viral marketing.

So how to tell people? Here's a few options:

Twitter. This is why this site is popular for authors and publishers and marketers-because people follow you if you say you're an author. But really what it's for is to bring people to a more personal and less crowded place where they can hang out. That's called our second option, the blog.

The blog goes great with Twitter. Twitter can drive people to your blog, where they can feel more relaxed reading a conversational post. Post by post, you can draw them into your book and get them more and more interested in you and your book.

Realize that people won't usually buy your book at first pass. After several times, they will be familiar enough that when they see your book they will be genuinely interested. You must first draw them in, through your blog and your Twitter, before approaching for a sale.

And those are only generic things that work for almost every book-there are tons of options depending on your niche. Find your audience (you) and connect with your readers in thet way.

Good luck, happy reading, and happy writing!

Dawson
http://dawsonvosburg.blogspot.com
http://thepodjournal.wordpress.com

Free Audiobook - Christ Plays in Ten-Thousand Places

Christian Audio has a free audiobook each month. This month, the free selection is Christ Plays in Ten-Thousand Places by Eugene H. Peterson. This book is also available in the Kindle store ($9.99), or in Paperback ($12.24) or Hardcover ($16.50), as is a Study Guide ($4.80 Kindle, $6.00 Paperback).

Book Description

Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places reunites spirituality and theology in a cultural context where these two vital facets of Christian faith have been rent asunder. Lamenting the vacuous, often pagan nature of contemporary American spirituality, Eugene Peterson here firmly grounds spirituality once more in Trinitarian theology and offers a clear, practical statement of what it means to actually live out the Christian life. Writing in the conversational style that he is well known for, Peterson boldly sweeps out the misunderstandings that clutter conversations on spiritual theology and refurnishes the subject only with what is essential. As Peterson shows, spiritual theology, in order to be at once biblical and meaningful, must remain sensitive to ordinary life, present the Christian gospel, follow the narrative of Scripture, and be rooted in the “fear of the Lord” — in short, spiritual theology must be about God and not about us. The foundational book in a five-volume series on spiritual theology emerging from Peterson’s pen, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places provides the conceptual and directional help we all need to live the Christian gospel well and maturely in the conditions that prevail in the church and world today.

Get your free audio download HERE (be sure to use the coupon code shown, so you won't get charged). After you finishing checking out, you will be asked which format you prefer - select MP3 if you want to be able to play the book on your Kindle.

Seven Free Novels (PDF)

Lowry Pei has placed seven novels (plus 11 short stories and several short memoir stories) up on his web site as free downloads. Of the seven posted, Family Resemblances (Random House, 1986) has been previously published. All are in PDF form, so will need conversion for the Kindle1 and Kindle2. I tested the first one on the DX (just in; I'll have pictures up soon) and it's a bit small in portrait mode (there are large margins on the printer's proof), but plenty big in landscape mode after tilting the screen.

Family Resemblances
On the hottest days, my Aunt Augusta would drive around New Franklin with the windows rolled up, so that people would think the air conditioning still worked in the Buick she had inherited along with the house. The clear plastic cornucopias on either side of the rear window, which should have poured coolness on the back of our necks, were still quite noticeably there, but the remainder of the apparatus had succumbed to a mysterious illness some time ago. Occasionally, when she got to an out-of-the-way place, she’d hit the four buttons by her left hand and all the windows would slide down at once to let in relief, but she may have done this only when I was with her, to accommodate my weakness and youth; alone, for all I know, she never let down her resolve. She almost managed not to sweat, as if a regal bearing would keep her cool. Once when we were all visiting—my parents and I—my mother, red and hot, told her to her face it was absurd. Augusta, beautiful as she was, looked stony. I could see her in profile from where I sat in the back seat, and I was glad the Buick was big and I didn’t have to be any closer to her. Whose side to be on? There was a silence for half a block, and then she finally looked at my mother and said, “What they don’t know won’t hurt me.”

Download your copies HERE.

Kindle Book for a Dime!

What you can buy for one slim dime, these days? Not much, it seems (and if you thought: "I could make a phone call for that or buy a hamburger", you're dating yourself quite a bit). But an author has figured out how to list his Kindle book for a dime, using Amazon's DTP. Other authors who have tried have said that 99 cents has been the lowest value they could set (although if they set the price at $1, Amazon would discount it to 80 cents), so I'm not sure how he managed this or how long it will last. The only real problem with pricing this low is that some credit card companies (actually, the banks issuing the credit cards) refuse to process extremely small transactions and can even block a card for suspected fraud if they see too many of them. The best solution is to get Kindle Gift Certificates and apply them to your account. This keeps the credit card company happy, cleans up your credit card statement so there aren't tons of tiny charges (the more charges on a statement, the easier it is for a fraudulent one to be missed, when you are reconciling) and lets you manage whatever budget you've set for Kindle/Amazon purchases.

So, for one thin dime, pick up The Caliphate by Jack Stewart. If the book is as imaginative as the posted author bio (listed as a "Review" in the product description), then the book can't miss.

Author Bio
Jack Stewart is a treasure hunter, a mountaineer, and a gun for hire. When not writing his next adventure, this father of twelve spends his days on the beaches of Thailand trading an eight figure fortune and helping orphaned children. Jack is the only South African national ever to win both summer and winter Olympic medals. Jack holds the world record for the time to disassemble and reassemble a Kalashnikov. His MBA is from Harvard University and his Doctorate from Oxford. At night he sings Karaoke while sipping very dirty martinis.

Book Description
When Trent Lambert, a New York hedge fund manager, takes a run at the Indonesian Rupiah, he needs more than just money to make the currency decline. Amidst the glory of his billionaire status, he loses the support of his long time friend and investor. Then his son is kidnapped. The ransom: The destruction of the U.S. dollar and the ruin of the fragile American economy. Trent knows he can do it. But the FBI are now investigating him, and he must flee to Indonesia to save his son. On the world's busiest shipping lane, in its pirate-infested waters, Trent, a pirate, and a grade-school teacher, must confront the planet's most dangerous religious leader whose vision of a new superpower Trent is fulfilling with American-style capitalism.