Happy Holidays and Kindle Rush in ONE WEEK!

Complete audio and Merriest of Holiday Wishes!

More info on the release is here!

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Super Kwanza, and let's have a dynamite New Year's Eve! In the process can right now is a Kindle experiment with A Long Way from Disney. Here's what it is:

Publishing Experiment 1: If we know anything for sure about publishing right now, it’s that it is changing. Authors, I believe, must become the scientists running experiments with new technology, new publicity strategies, marketing, you name it. There’s just too much money involved for the big (and some small) presses to carry out the kind of testing and idea-trying that needs to be done. That leaves us independent authors to try things out on our own.

In that spirit, I’m releasing a collection of short stories on the Kindle format just after Christmas. A Long Way from Disney is officially out now, but I'm "releasing it" on Sunday Dec. 27th, a day I'm calling Disney Commando Sunday! The thinking here is that by asking people to all buy the book on a single day, I can go after the top of Amazon's Kindle bestseller chart and garner more attention (sales) there, especially with the after XMas new Kindle owners!

I’ve priced the collection low ($.99). because I’m more interested in how many copies of the book I can get out there than in how much money I can make off sales. For those who’ll be counting, the $.99 price point will give me 35 cents and amazon a hefty 64 cents per book sold. They’ll win out regardless, but it’s their sandbox and I want to play.

You can buy this Kindle book on any computer once you've established a Kindle reader preference/Kindle account. You have three choices here. You can do this with:

1) An actual Kindle. 2) An iPhone running the Kindle App (download) or 3) Any PC running the new Amazon Kindle software for PC (download here).

You cannot buy the Kindle book for anyone else, and no one can buy more than one copy. It's certainly an interesting set of rules, isn't it? Well, this is what Amazon has set up. If you'd like to aid this experiment, please forward this blog post to other authors, readers, Kindle owners, and experimenters in the publishing field. It should be interesting to see what this can generate with a minimum of publicity and zero budget.

If you'd like to sample any of the short stories from this collection, you can hear any/all of them free online here (http://sethharwood.com/long_way_from_disney) and find out more about the Kindle experiment here. I hope you'll choose to come along and help make some waves with this idea. I do think that the more successes independent authors have with new means of getting things done, the better it will be for all of publishing. Perhaps that'll be our next debate.

I'll be back later this week with a few stories from the collection and then again next Sunday for the big sales kickoff! See you...