It takes a long time for the sales data to reach us here, but we see enough to proudly say that our eBooks are selling across iTunes, the Sony Readerstore, Smashwords, and for Nooks, and Kobos too. However, about 85% of our sales come through Amazon.
You might have read bloggers and press articles about Amazon’s restrictive practices, followed by B&N’s retaliation, and a big legal accusation being raised in the States about an alleged price-fixing cartel between Apple and major publishers. These are all signs of publishers and retailers fighting for the right to survive in the new world of digital eBooks.
Greyhart Press is flexible enough to adapt and survive through this exciting time, but right now it’s primarily Amazon who are paying our bills. And so we have experimented with the Amazon Select Program with a few titles. The bottom line is that for a temporary period when first published, the books in this program are only available through Amazon.
For us, these enrolments are temporary, and an experiment. One of the reasons I decided to do this was that if you’re a Greyhart reader, you can still get a copy of any of our books for your device even if the book is only available for sale through Amazon. All you need is to make use of our Read… Review… Repeat! promotion.
Here’s how to do it and the books that are affected.
For the sake of illustration, let’s suppose you have a Nook device, and want to buy a copy of The First Last Robot. If you go to that book’s webpage on our site, you won’t find a B&N link; if you go to the Barnes & Noble webstore, you won’t find the book there either (not yet… it will be available later in the year). What you could do instead, is “buy” another of our books from the Nook Store. I put “buy” in quotes because you could choose one of our free books and pay nothing. Let’s assume you “buy” Quest for Elena the Fair, which is free, and is a short YA story like First Last Robot.
Then, following our Read… Review… Repeat! promotion, all you need to do is post an online review for Quest for Elena the Fair at qualifying locations, such as B&N, amazon.com, and Goodreads. Then you can claim any one of our eBooks for free. If you want The First Last Robot in Nook format, then we’ll be happy to give you that book in Nook format, even though we can’t sell you it through Barnes & Noble, while it is still enrolled in the Amazon Select program.
Normally Read… Review… Repeat! has a limit: only the first 100 people to claim each eBook will get it for free. But we waive that limit for any eBook in the Amazon select program. Hence, even if one of our books is enrolled in the restrictive Amazon program, we guarantee you can still get that eBook for any major eReader device.
Greyhart Press 