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From Publetariat comes this article by author M. Louisa Locke.  Here’s the beginning:

My two historical mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, have come to the end of their first 3 months as part of the KDP Select program, and I have decided to re-enroll them. I know that a good number of authors are facing the question to re-enroll or not, (or to enroll at all) so I thought I would discuss why I have come to that decision, particularly in light of the persistent argument made by a number of self-publishing authors that KDP Select is a bad strategy for authors.

Just this week, as I was making the decision to re-enroll my books in the KDP Select Program, I read a post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, where she made the following argument.

“The key to developing an audience is to stop searching for one audience. The key to developing a lot of readers for your books—audiences plural—is to do what musicians do: play a lot of venues.

“Yet writers make all kinds of bad decisions in search of the biggest audience they can get. And writers think of that audience in singular terms. These writers give their books away for free, hoping to hit some bestseller list and gain readers. They only sell in one marketplace because it’s the biggest one in its genre or its category.”

While I disagree with her conclusions, Rusch does pretty accurately describe two of my reasons for enrolling my books in the KDP Select Program. I entered Maids of Misfortuneand Uneasy Spirits into the KDP Select program and used the free promotion days in the hope that my books would, at the very least, regain their position at the top of the historical mystery category (which they had lost because of a change in that category that increased the number of books from below 100 books to nearly 2000 books). I was also willing to accept the KDP Select requirement that I sell my ebooks exclusively on Amazon because Amazon had proven to be the biggest market for my books.

What I disagree with is Rusch’s characterization of these actions as “bad decisions,” or that they only represent a short-term versus long-term business strategy.

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