dduane

For quite a long while now, the sold-but-never-published novel A Wind from the South has been available for free on its site at http://raetiantales.blogspot.com, and has done... okay. It's also recently become available, again for free, at the DianeDuane.com bookstore, and again, has done... okay, but no more than that. It hasn't been terribly visible to the outside world in either of those venues, perhaps.

So I've decided to try an experiment to see if the book's profile can be raised a little bit. I'm going to move the Kindle / .mobi version of AWFTS over to Amazon.com. Its price there will still be quite low, but not free. This means that I've got to match the Amazon.com price for the book locally -- otherwise the savage and merciless Amazon PriceBot will note the difference, and discount the book over there to undercut the DD.com price.

ETA:  Between February 28th and the evening of March 2, we offered free ebook downloads of A Wind from the South to all comers. Hundreds of you signed up at the DianeDuane.com online bookshop to download the free ebooks, and a significant portion of those hundreds signed up for our store newsletter -- so we'll be in touch with those of you who did, from time to time, to let you know what's new. To all of you who participated -- thanks very much! The book is now on sale at the DD.com store at $1.99 -- and at the Amazon.com Kindle store for $2.34 (I guess because they have to finance Whispernet somehow, and we don't).

.Epub versions of the book will only be available from the DianeDuane.com shop, mostly because B&N won't allow Amazon-style author self-publishing without a US bank account. (The minute they change this policy I'll be only too happy to sell .epubs out of BN.com.) The price of the epubs, too, will be rising... so if you're a Nook or other user of ePub-friendly readers, and you feel so inclined, please nip over to this page at the shop today and grab a copy before the price change.

The print version of the book remains available for the moment at Lulu.com, but this will be changing, as I get a sense that Amazon's print side will allow a significantly lower price for paperback versions. I'm investigating this and will do something about it one way or another when we start converting the ebook versions of the Young Wizards international editions to print versions for publication and sale via Amazon.

Thanks, everybody!

PS: Important for those who’ve ordered the book at the store: You may have had problems downloading your files. This was due to a bad setting in Zen Cart which caused the order processor to mark all free orders “pending”. Don’t ask me why it did this… Anyway, all orders have now been remarked as "processing”, which releases the files for download. Please log in to your store account and check your order history: it should show your file as available for download. If there are any further problems, please contact our Tech Lady using the store’s contact link. Also: check your confirmation email from the store to see if it shows an alternate download link that you can use — some of the later orders had this. (And sorry for the inconvenience, everybody. Zen Cart… argh. Just argh.)

*AWFTS was bought once in the UK, by Corgi -- where it was set aside after the editors who had championed it departed for greener fields -- and twice in Germany, for publishers which each time were bought by larger ones, and had their lists of books-to-be-published completely reorganized by new incoming staff who wanted to set their own marks on the reorganized houses' lists. It happens...