I should win some sort of award for being disorganized, but if I won it I'd forget where I put it.
That said, I just realized when I switched ISPs, my previous ISP never killed my old email account. So I've spent the last few days wading through a few hundred emails from people who assumed I was ignoring them. And in doing that, I've been ignoring people who have emailed me recently.
But I'm very close to catching up. If you've contacted me about trying the ebook experiment, you'll hear from me by September 18th. If you haven't heard from me by then, try emailing me again at joekonrath(at)comcast.net.
Here's how this is going to work.
I'll need a ready-to-go chapter or excerpt from you, no more than 2500 words, sent to me as an email attachment in either MS Word .doc format or .rtf format.
Included at the end of the exceprt, please list:
1. The Title and your Author Name
2. Date and places the title is available
3. Your website URL
4. A brief two or three sentence bio
Here's an example:
"AFRAID by Jack Kilborn is available as an ebook, audiobook, and paperback, wherever books are sold. Jack Kilborn is the pen name for Joe Konrath, author of Whiskey Sour, Bloody Mary, and several other thrillers. You can find information about Joe at www.JAKonrath.com, where you can download many free ebooks."
I'll also need to know which ebook of mine you'd like the excerpt to appear in, along with two back-ups in case the first one is already full.
My plan is to upload the ebooks to Amazon Kindle on on my website on September 26th. They will run through all of October. After that, we'll pow-wow and discuss if this is getting results for people.
I've gotten a lot of private response about this, most of it favorable. Most people beleive:
Ebooks are here to stay.
Excerpts are a good form of advertising.
This is a pretty cheap experiment.
Will ads in ebooks become the norm? I'm betting yes. Ads appear in magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, and all over the Internet. Ebooks, with their zero cost to copy and distribute, seem to be a perfect medium for advertising. Especially non-intrusive ads that feature content.
Time will tell if I'm right...