When I wrote Burning, I never intended to charge for it. It was an unplanned short story and my original goal was to just give it away. Well, Amazon doesn’t make having a book listed for free very easy. Unless you are in a particular program, the minimum price they allow is $0.99 (USD). If you are in the KDP Select program, you are allowed to post your book for free for 5 days and that’s it. The catch to the KDP Select program is if your book is part of the program, you can’t have it listed for sale anywhere else. And if you sign up for KDP Select, you’re in it for 90 days, minimum.
Well, I took a chance and did it. 5 days of being able to give it away free is better than no days. I spent that 90 days trying like hell to figure out how to make it free on Amazon once I was done with the KDP Select program. I was told by the lovely Amber Lynn Natusch that if I put it up on iBooks for free, Amazon would price match it and POOF! It would be FREE! Yeah, getting it onto iBooks is much easier said than done. The formatting alone was going to take much, much longer than I wanted to invest in something that I could get around much more simply. So, after twice failing to get iBooks to accept my file, I decided I would shelve it and go at it again another day.
As I got closer to my 90-Day mark for the KDP Select program, I started thinking about the iBooks thing again but decided to wait until after my vacation to do anything about it. This morning, I realized that my 90 days was up and I could put it back up on Kobo. Then it hit me…
KOBO!!!! I re-uploaded Burning to Kobo. I had removed it from Kobo to abide by the KDP Select guidelines of not having it for sale anywhere else. When I put it back up there this morning, Kobo allowed me to list it for free. So it is back to being live on Kobo…FOR FREE!!! My hope is that through Amazon’s price matching dealy-bob (which I have already submitted the Kobo link for), they will see that the fabulous folks at Kobo have it for free and will make it free on their site too. I will keep you all posted on whether or not that works out.
For now, if you’re a Kobo person – COME OVER TO THE KINDLY DARKSIDE!!! Just kidding. If you’re a Kobo person, you can CLICK HERE to get Burning for free on Kobo!!