And Here's What the Gorilla Will Do for Us

FOR CUSTOMERS

To order books on Amazon, you must, of course, open an account and provide a credit card number. Beyond that, you can simply order one book at a time for your permanent electronic library, just as you have always done. But if you are looking for "deals" you may want to try one of these options:

1. Amazon Prime costs $99.00 a year, but it carries valuable benefits. You get free two-day shipping on anything  you order from Amazon, and that includes everything from appliances to groceries. You also get unlimited access to music, unlimited cloud storage for your photos, and access to over 800,000 Kindle books. Through KOLL (Kindle Owners Lending Library), you can borrow one book a month with no due dates. If you are a Prime member, seven of my books will now be available in KOLL.

2. Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service that costs $9.99 a month. You can subscribe one month at a time, or for various longer periods depending on how much you want to lay out in advance. This gives you free access to over a million books and thousands of audiobooks. And as explained above, seven of my books will now be available in Kindle Unlimited. You can download up to ten at a time, and once again there are no due dates. You keep them as long as you like. 

In both these options, the Kindle editions remain the property of Amazon, and you are expected to return them when you no longer want them. I get paid based on the number of pages you actually read, so long as you read at least 10% of the book.  (Of course, you won't be able to put mine down, so that limitation does not bother me.)  And you don't have to read the book all at once.  You can start it, put it down for a month or more, and then go back and read some more.  I get paid for the total you read, no matter how long it takes you to do it.

FREE PROMOTIONS

Here's the other part of the deal that I get for entering my books in KDP Select and giving Amazon exclusive rights to distribute the electronic editions. For each book, I can run a five-day free promotion offer in every ninety-day period. (That's something that is not allowed if the book is available on other distribution channels.) That's obviously a great deal for readers. But what do I get out of it? Well, it puts my books in the hands of more readers, it encourages Amazon to do separate promotions of books that do well when offered for free, and, with luck, the increased readership will produce more loyal followers and more reviews on Amazon -- which in turn brings in more readers.

Here's the Free Promotion schedule for this cycle.

In March, my history books will be available:

• "The Dilemma of Arnulf of Lisieux" from March 14 through March 18.
• "A Scratch with the Rebels" from March 28 to April 1.

In April we'll do the creative biographies:

• "Beyond All Price" from April 11 to April 15
• "The Road to Frogmore" from  April 25 to April 29

And in May the historical novels will be on offer:

• "Damned Yankee" from May 9 to May 13
• "Yankee Reconstructed" from May 23 to May 27"

Happy reading!