My original business plan was to put all of my books (so far, there are 8 – I’m sure I’ve got enough poems for #9, maybe 9 and 10, and I’ll put them together soon enough) on kindle at normal prices, and make two of the titles absolutely free. That way, I figured, people like me who are cheapskates and only downloading free books (because, let’s face it, there are enough free books on kindle to keep you in reading material until the day you die, unless you’re a lot younger than me and can read super fast) could still sample my material and maybe they would become fans and want to read more.
So, we contacted kindle (which, I guess, is actually part of Amazon) with that proposal and they responded quite quickly. I’ll give them that, they respond quickly. Sometimes their execution is a bit error prone, but they say they’ll get back to you within 24 hours and they do, usually in half that.
Anyway, the gist of their e-mail was “You don’t decide what gets offered for free and when. We decide what gets offered for free and when. So, suck it up, writer. Do you think you’re any different than the massive hordes of people who are writing down any old shit that pops into their head and calling it a book now that print is dead, computers have taken over, and there are no editors to enforce standards any more? You’re not.
And if you don’t care about the money, we do. So, go ahead and set the price at the minimum, but we’re not going any lower than that.”
They didn’t use exactly those words, but when a paranoid starts reading between the lines, they find all sorts of paranoid stuff.
So, we’ve shifted to business plan B. Everything (Poems from Prague, The Guru Kalehuru and Other Poems, The Alchemist’s Notebook, 4 Syllables on Water, The This of the That, Twoems, Uncle Willie’s Very Silly Animal Poems, and What Do Children Like To Do?*) is set now at the minimum kindle price of 3 dollars and 62 cents American. That’s about 70 kč. For those of you with credit cards and real jobs, that’s not much at all.
For those of you without credit cards and real jobs, you can still read the poems here at the blog. Just click where it says “Poetry.”
*They haven’t dropped the price yet on WDCLTD, but if they haven’t in a day or two, we’ll try again. Don’t order until the price drops!)
www.gurukalehuru.com 