Bookselling Update and Giveaway

I missed this somehow when it first went up! My friend Megan (this is you, isn’t it, Megan?) did a very nice write-up of The Millennial Sword for her review blog:

This is, to a certain extent, one of Those Books, and reads like a debut indie novel in a popular subgenre. If you like that sort of thing—that is, if you enjoy an author riffing on a theme because she’s enjoying herself—then you are likely to enjoy yourself. Particularly since Phillips knows how to incorporate her research without resorting to the sort of extended infodumps that can temporarily transform fantasy novels into pages from the D&D Monster Manual.

That part made me smile because I tend to describe the book to people as “the sort of thing you might like if you like that sort of thing.”

Book-selling updates: the e-book version of The Millennial Sword is now available in all formats, for all devices. I’ve made a dedicated page here listing all the buying options. One discovery I made is that many independent bookstores have partnered with Kobo to sell books through their websites—and Kobo, it turns out, is something of a dream to work with, providing by far the nicest direct-publishing platform of any of the sites I worked with. I will seriously consider buying a Kobo-compatible device as my next e-reader simply in order to be able to support my local bookstore (the wonderful Laurel Book Store) when buying e-books.

Somewhat distressingly, though, after I finally succeeded in withdrawing the book from Amazon’s “Select” program, sales there have flatlined. Part of the draw of the Select program is that Amazon gives those titles more visibility in search results, and the effect, I can now say, is quite significant. It remains to be seen whether Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Apple’s iBooks store, and the other e-book channels will be able to compensate. I want to support a diverse bookselling ecosystem, so in the interests of fairness I’m running the same promotion for Kobo that I did for Amazon: the book will be free there till Monday. Barnes and Noble and Apple don’t allow you to give away books, or I’d make it free there too, but I’ve also generated a coupon code for Smashwords that will allow folks to download The Millennial Sword for free in any e-book format: that code is CM23R, and is applied at checkout. It will work through Monday, so feel free to share it around!


2 Responses to “Bookselling Update and Giveaway”

  • Megan Says:

    Ah, yes, that’s me. I set it to post, intended to ping you, then…didn’t exactly forget about it, but became somewhat distracted. 🙂

    I find myself falling back on those styles of recommendations a lot. A friend who reads SF but not very widely/deeply, with “space” and “enjoyed Old Man’s War” as parameters, sent me into “like Heinlein but not Heinlein” mode. I refrained from pulling 90s Asimov’s off the shelf (or even the more compact Sex and Violence in Zero G) and just stuck with Clark County, Space and am currently having fun deciding how to get him into John Varley before he realizes what he’s in for.

    • Shannon Phillips Says:

      “I set it to post, intended to ping you, then…didn’t exactly forget about it, but became somewhat distracted.”

      Ha hah! You have a pretty ironclad excuse, I must say.

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