The Kindle Approach

If you are a writer/author type, you can't afford not to take notice of amazon.com's Kindle reader. Yes, there are other readers--Nook iPad Sony--but Kindle has something the others don't have right now: Captive Audience.

It's not captive in the Apple way, either. Some folks did some thinking on this one. There is a free lending library. You can sign up to have your book offered for free at their discretion. Hugh?

 Free?  They choose? What kinda **** is that? Yes, writers write because they love to write or have to write but royalties are nice. In some cases, very nice. But FREE?

Why would you sign up for free?  You have to be a bit of an advertising person to get the concept. The benefit is exposure. Yes, you will lose sales but in this day of high marketing cost, you may never have gotten the sale anyway if you don't have enough money to play the game.

There is downward price pressure on books today. Plus, half of the audience isn't reading books these days. That half is mostly men, of course. And people want to look "techie." People want to be "in."  That hasn't changed since Jack Mitchell took me to lunch in New York and taught me the advertising facts of life.

So, let's do the free Kindle thing. What can you expect?  First of all, you can't do any worse than you are doing in the marketplace and you just might do a lot better by developing "fans."  If you have other books, you can cross-sell those books in the back of your "free" Kindle book. "If you liked this book, you may also like yada..."  That's what sold me.

Plus, I want a chance and you don't often get that chance today. Book tours are expensive and, at least from my experience, don't generate a lot of sales anyway.

The big sellers today are books from conservative talk show hosts. Savage promotes himself all of the time on his show as one of the greatest writers of all time. He may be but he doesn't have to pay for the advertising time he takes on his show to make himself rich. (I don't think the stations get a piece of the action, either.)  Rush and Hannity did the same thing. After all, if your show goes..."as I said in my book (Title)...you are likely to sell some books.

They have a captive audience that is "tuned in" to what they are saying and are very likely to be "tuned in" to what they are writing. If a writer was to buy that amount of radio time, he or she might make the big time if the audience is right, but the cost would be out of sight.

If you are going to be a successful audience, you need a captive audience of your own. You can develop it through paid advertising and promotion or you can develop it for free.  That's why the Kindle model looks good to me. Screw paperback print-on-demand. Screw snooty agents and publishers. Write your book. Edit it. Edit it again. Then, publish it on Kindle.

You will see your book in hours, not months. Millions of others have an opportunity to also see it in hours. Some of the millions will bite on the free idea. Some will become your fans. Some of those fans will write reviews about your work that can attract people interested in buying your book. Some will buy. And slowly, but effectively, you just might become a successful writer for free.

Not a bad deal.