Here we are: new year, new adven­tures, and I’ve just enrolled May 5 & The Assas­sin into Amazon’s Kin­dle Direct Pub­lish­ing Select, or KDP Select if you pre­fer, which I do — cer­tainly catch­ier. Why? What? Who, how and so on..?

If you’re not famil­iar with KDP Select, it goes pretty much like this:

• When you enroll a book into the pro­gram, you’re enter­ing it into the Kin­dle Own­ers Lend­ing Library, which itself is a col­lec­tion of eBooks acces­si­ble by mem­bers of Ama­zon Prime (US), who can bor­row 1 book a month, with no due dates.
• Every­time a Prime mem­ber bor­rows your book, you get a piece of the pie as it were, the pie being at least $6 mil­lion for 2012, with a cur­rent fund of $700,000 for Jan­u­ary. The math breaks down as such:

“If the monthly fund amount is $500,000, the total qual­i­fied bor­rows of all par­tic­i­pat­ing KDP titles is 100,000, and your book was bor­rowed 1,500 times, you will earn 1.5% (1,500/100,000 = 1.5%), or $7,500 for that month.” — FAQ

• You have to sell exclu­sively through Ama­zon for 90 days, 5 of which can be pro­mo­tional ‘free book’ days. You con­trol this all through a new ‘Pro­mo­tions Man­ager’ tool.
• You can con­tinue to sell you books on Ama­zon, and you can sell phys­i­cal copies. You just have to axe the Smash­words etc.

For me, as a new Indie author still try­ing to make his way in the world, I’m not going to be suc­cess­ful off the bat. I have to do my best to sell my books, be patient, and still try to hold onto some mod­icum of respectabil­ity… ::waves::

Well, I’ve done these things, and now with the intro­duc­tion of KDP Select, I think it’s a good time to try it out. My num­bers from Smash­words, iBooks, and B&N haven’t knocked me over, so I really have noth­ing to lose. For me, this could be the per­fect answer — I’m not an estab­lished name, my book is an unknown quan­tity and I don’t have a ‘Me-movement’ that’s cap­tur­ing new fans every­day, so the con­cept of allow­ing my book to be bor­rowed — and if bor­rowed a decent amount of times, earn­ing me some roy­al­ties — is great.

Obvi­ously the big kicker is that you’re sell­ing your eBook through Ama­zon exclu­sively for three-months, but as men­tioned, that isn’t a big denial for me from other elec­tronic book sell­ers. As an Ama­zon Prime mem­ber also, and a Kin­dle owner, I have already used the Lend­ing Library and found it quite use­ful. There are thou­sands of titles to bor­row, and though it has a ways to go before I’d call it a com­peti­tor to the tra­di­tional library sys­tem (the essen­tially ‘free’ one), it’s got promise.

I’ll keep the weblog informed of my KDP progress. May is still wait­ing to go into PUBLISHED sta­tus once again, but when that’s done, I’ll have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of all the new toys at my disposal.