Writing
As those of you who've already checked out the pre-order for the Kindle Edition of "Shards" may have noticed, that book is going to be available to read for free via Kindle Unlimited upon its release. As part of that process, I've had to remove my novelette, "Academic Displacement," from the Google Play and Apple Books stores since it is part of the "Shards" collection and one of the big requirements for inclusion in Kindle Unlimited is the content being exclusive to Amazon.
I definitely have some mixed feelings about this as I'm a big fan and supporter of competition in the business world, and the choices and benefits that such competitions often create for consumers. That being said, it's no secret that the vast majority of my book sales over the past three years have been via Amazon, which would seem to indicate that readers in general, or at least my readers, tend to prefer that platform when it comes to eBook purchases. As a result, I'm hoping this change will end up being a net positive for all concerned, making the story more easily and inexpensively available via the most popular venue.
Along those lines, I'll be looking very closely at the sales numbers for my first two novels over the next few months to determine if a similar arrangement would make sense for them. As many of you know, I recently updated "The Big Men" as part of an effort to improve the printing and binding of the paperback edition to make it more compact and less expensive to print, which in turn allowed me to lower the price of all editions of the book. For that project and for the time being, I decided to keep the eBook editions available on all three stores but that could well change in the future if participating in Kindle Unlimited has the effect I suspect it might.
I should also mention that a similar printing/binding update for "309" will be available soon, which will allow me to reduce its price as well. I'm hoping to have this done in time for the release of "Shards" but it may occur a bit later as I'm not quite as far along with that process as I'd hoped to be at this point.
All things considered, I'm still very happy with where things stand at the moment regarding my efforts as an author and I am beyond excited for everyone to finally get the chance to experience "Shards" when it's released on October 2nd.
YouTube
I'm also excited to note that my YouTube channel has officially passed 200 subscribers! As you might expect, I'll soon be making a video about that and what I'm planning to do with the channel moving forward but for now, be sure to check out the two most recent "Why it's Awesome" episodes I've released since my last update if you haven't seen them yet.
Twitch
Sadly, I've once-again made the difficult decision to stop regularly streaming on my Twitch channel after completing the 25th episode of my "Sunday Funday" live show earlier this year. As much as I enjoy doing that sort of thing, the views, both of the streams themselves and the VoDs after the fact, just weren't consistent or high enough to justify continuing with the project.
Moving forward, my plan for Twitch is to use it exclusively for special, one-off live events such as musical performances, interviews, and coverage/commentary of other presentations. Basically, I want to refocus my efforts on that platform to really emphasize the things it does well and the things I do well on it but that's admittedly going to take some time, and likely some more trial and error, to suss out completely.
