Sandy Nathan's YOUR SHELF LIFE

Those of you who’ve following my Plucky Grandmother series, here and here, will know that I’ve scheduled promotional days where two of my KIndle eBooks will be offered free. The promotion is this weekend, October 12, 13, & 14th.

Except that my book, The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy, was/is listed on Apple’s iBookstore. I didn’t know it until Amazon told me about it. If you’re in Amazon’s KDP program, which allows you to give away your Kindle eBooks, you can’t distribute anywhere else.

After a series of supremely unhelpful emails between Amazon and me, I assumed I lost the argument. Then I received the following email from Amazon.
The letter congratulates me on getting my eBook into the KDP Select program. But it’s been in the program since May or something. It’s already had one KDP Free Promotion. Is this Amazon’s way of saying, “We hear you, Sandy, here’s a few more days to get The Angel exclusive to Amazon.”

The only way I’ll know is to wait and see if The Angel is free tomorrow. What surprises on the morn!

To me, visionary fiction rests on a core moral principle. St. Thomas Aquinas’ famous maxim, “Do good and avoid evil,” spells it out about as clearly as it gets. Visionary fiction contains a moral core and a belief in the ability of individuals and society to evolve in a positive fashion, overcoming evil and generally setting the world right.

Does this mean that visionary fiction is by nature a Polly-Anna-ish or The Secret-ish exercise in “Keep up a cheery front and everything will be groovy in the sweet by and by, if not sooner”?

Some visionary fiction fits that mold and has been very well received by readers (if not critics). This includes some of the best-known examples of the genre and I think it probably fits the experience and expectations of many readers of visionary fiction.

But! What if you aren’t the typical reader? What if you want a message with a wallop? A message with teeth, that bites?

I’m like that. I hate anything easy, simpering, obvious, trite, and watered-down. My writing reflects my preferences. It contains violence, sexual situations, strong language, and doesn’t give away it’s ending until it ends. Happy endings are not guaranteed. I’d give my books an R rating if they were movies. (Though they’re way, way less violent than stuff I’ve seen on TV and in the movies. Like the TV series “24” and the smash hit book and move, The Hunger Games.

When I wrote my last post on Your Shelf Life, I was preparing to launch my first “free day” campaign with Amazon’s KDP program. Since my track record on such promotions has been miserable (check out this article in which I explain how my Amazon bestseller day yielded sales of thirteen books), I was concerned about how the days would go.
How I Made Over $42,000 in One Month Selling my Kindle eBooks (known at $42K hereafter). Making $42K in a month is good enough for me. This is a really good guidebook outlining what Cheryl did to make a small fortune doing exactly what I’m going to be doing. It’s all there, step by step.

The major, major leaning I gleaned from $42K, is that while Cheryl is a marketing whiz and really loves doing it, I am not. I am a writer. I love to write and produce highly imaginative fantasy, sci-fi, visionary fiction, and even nonfiction about horses and spirituality. I’m not a marketer.

What happened when I applied Cheryl’s techniques in $42K to my ineptitude?

Holy macaroni! The Angel SOARED. Let’s see if I can find some screen shots. (Always take screen shots. My book Numenon once was #1 in 3 categories of mysticism and flew at about the 1,000 in paid sales level on Amazon for, oh, a year or so. I didn’t realize that this was good. Didn’t think it would ever change, either. I didn’t take any screen shots. Now all I have is a memory.)