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Kindle Nation Daily Free & Bargain Book Alert for Monday, March 15, 2010: A Passion Most Pure, A Rush of Wings, Male Call – Hot Zone Book 1 by Denise A. Agnew, and Millions More!



A Passion Most Pure (Daughters of Boston, Book 1) by Julie Lessman



A Rush of Wings (A Rush of Wings Series #1) by Kristen Heitzmann

and …

“Warning: Contains explicit sex, some graphic language, and mild violence.”

It’s no surprise that — in addition to all the other wonderful benefits of the Kindle — the ereader is bringing plenty of attention the Kindle Books>Fiction>Erotica category in the Kindle Store. This latest free title is currently #347 overall in the Kindle Store, but it will probably make the top 10 before the sun sets tonight. Two other titles, Carolyn Faulkner’s Kept and our own Rena Diane Walmsley’s literary erotica novel Girl on Fire, have recently cracked the top 100 in the Kindle Store with prices under $3.

For a while there we were concerned that religious titles were dominating the free book listings in the Kindle Store. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But apparently it’s no longer the case!

Here’s an excerpt from last week’s new release on the release of Girl on Fire:

Here She Is, a Miss America Contestant 
With a Sexy Kindle Bestseller That May Make You Blush! 

You may think that the latest erotic thriller to climb the bestseller list in Amazon’s Kindle ebook store has an unlikely author.

Girl on Fire, a cautionary, sexually explicit coming-of-age tale, was written right here in Massachusetts by Rena Diane Walmsley, who represented the state in the Miss America beauty pageant when she was 19.

“It would have made me blush in my contestant days, and I’m sure I would not have been alone,” says Walmsley today of her first novel. “The truth is that this novel might even have gotten me thrown out of the pageant, but more and more women are writing fiction that you might call ‘liberated,’ and the Kindle is the perfect place for an emerging novelist to break out whether she is writing in the erotica category or in some other genre.”

Indeed, the Kindle ebook reader is quickly becoming the digital equivalent of the “brown paper bag” for readers who prefer to play their reading choices close to the vest. With nearly half a million ebooks available in the Kindle Store, there are currently about 50 “erotica” titles among the top 2,000 Kindle bestsellers.

And Walmsley’s Girl on Fire is currently #3 on the Kindle’s “erotica” bestseller list, out of 11,987 titles in the category, as well as #6 on the “romantic suspense” list. Girl on Fire was released in the Kindle Store March 5, and will make its paperback debut with worldwide distribution, including Amazon.com, on March 26.

If Walmsley’s novel takes off, she would not be the first Miss America contestant from Massachusetts to make it as a novelist. Lisa Kleypas, who was Miss Massachusetts in 1985, has over two dozen novels in the Kindle Store.

Walmsley’s publisher for Girl on Fire, tiny Arlington-based Harvard Perspectives Press, provides this description for the novel in the copy that appears on the back cover of the forthcoming paperback:

Looking for love in all the right places? Not Alicia Wentworth, the enchantingly frisky teenaged heiress at the heart of Rena Diane Walmsley’s debut memoir-as-novel. Alicia escapes from her privileged, sheltered life at an elite Concord, Massachusetts boarding school and pulls a “visiting room switch” to break in to a nearby state prison so she can rendezvous with Teddy Hawk, an exquisitely chiseled 21-year-old Native American convict for whom she has fallen hard while volunteering in a creative writing class for inmates. But Alicia is left alone and vulnerable when Teddy is hauled off to solitary, and she must reach deep within herself to concoct a gritty and initially degrading scheme to blackmail the prison system into freeing them both.

This deliciously literate debut is framed by Alicia’s present-day perspective as “a respectable thirty-something Unitarian minister” in a suburb west of Boston: while she is cognizant of the scars she wears from her early experiences, she is also engaged by a sense of something sacred therein that informs her daily life years later.

Not all coming-of-age novels are alike, and not every thirty-something narrator is able to cast an unflinching eye on the choices she made and the chances she took at the cusp of adulthood. But Walmsley’s unique novel-as-memoir never blinks, and her stunning sexual description breaks new narrative ground on age-old but ever-engaging terrain. Women and men alike will be enchanted and enriched by their journeys through her ultimately cautionary web of words.

-30-

And, for the rest of the freebies in the Kindle Store, is a reprise of yesterday’s free book alert:

  • Originally posted March 15, 2010 – © Kindle Nation Daily 2010 
  • “Free” in the Kindle Store refers, for now, to the price for download to US-based Kindles. Amazon adds various charges for Kindles based beyond US borders. However, you can scroll down to Free Book Collections for over 1.8 million titles that can be downloaded free from the internet to Kindles anywhere in the world (use USB connection to avoid wireless charges.)

Product Details
from Touchstone Pictures (Kindle Edition – Mar. 15, 2010)Kindle Book
Available for Pre-order. This item will be released on Mar. 15, 2010.

Dead Witch Walking (The Hollows, Book 1)


In addition to the several dozen free promotion books listed below, Amazon has just created a new direct gateway to over 2 million other free books that you can download easily to your Kindle. Here’s what you’ll find there:

With over 420,000 titles, the Kindle Store contains the largest selection of the books people want to read including New York Times® Best Sellers and most new releases at $9.99, unless otherwise marked. And Amazon provides thousands of the most popular classics for free including titles like The Adventures of Sherlock HolmesPride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island with more coming.
But of course, the Internet is huge and there are lots of older, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books online. We wanted to make it easier to find these collections, which today represent nearly 2 million titles. See the sites and instructions below to download free classic and other out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books and transfer via USB to your Kindle device or read on Kindle for PC.
Note that these large collections of older free books are typically created from scanned copies of physical books and can have variable quality.
Amazon Kindle Store – Thousands of the most popular classics for free
The Amazon Kindle Store lets you choose from thousands of popular classics all available for free wireless delivery in under 60 seconds with Whispernet.
  1. Visit Kindle Popular Classics
  2. Search or browse for a title just like a normal Kindle book.
Internet Archive – Over 1.8 million free titles
Internet Archive is a non-profit dedicated to offering permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format. Provides over 1.8 million free books to read, download, and enjoy.
  1. Visit archive.org 
  2. Search for a title or browse one of the sub-collections like ‘American Libraries’
  3. When viewing a title, click the link on the left labeled “Kindle (beta)” to download the file to your computer
  4. Attach your Kindle to your computer using your USB cable and drag the file to the “Documents” folder on your Kindle. You can also e-mail the file to your Kindle using Whispernet for wireless delivery (charges apply).
  5. Open the book from your Kindle’s home screen and enjoy.
Project Gutenberg – Over 30,000 free titles
Project Gutenberg, one of the original sources of free electronic books, is dedicated to the creation and distribution of eBooks.
  1. Visit gutenberg.org 
  2. Search for a title or browse the ‘Book shelves by topic’
  3. When viewing a title, scroll down to the ‘Download this ebook for free’ section and click the download link for ‘Mobipocket’ or ‘Mobipocket with images’ format.
  4. Attach your Kindle to your computer using your USB cable and drag the file to the “Documents” folder on your Kindle. You can also e-mail the file to your Kindle using Whispernet for wireless delivery (charges apply).
  5. Open the book from your Kindle’s home screen and enjoy.
Have you seen another great collection of free Kindle books on the web? Drop us a line.

Kindle Nation Daily Free & Bargain Book Alert for Monday, March 15, 2010: Male Call – Hot Zone Book 1, by Denise A. Agnew, and Millions More!

“Warning: Contains explicit sex, some graphic language, and mild violence.”

It’s no surprise that — in addition to all the other wonderful benefits of the Kindle — the ereader is bringing plenty of attention the Kindle Books>Fiction>Erotica category in the Kindle Store. This latest free title is currently #347 overall in the Kindle Store, but it will probably make the top 10 before the sun sets tonight. Two other titles, Carolyn Faulkner’s Kept and our own Rena Diane Walmsley’s literary erotica novel Girl on Fire, have recently cracked the top 100 in the Kindle Store with prices under $3.

For a while there we were concerned that religious titles were dominating the free book listings in the Kindle Store. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But apparently it’s no longer the case!

Here’s an excerpt from last week’s new release on the release of Girl on Fire:

Here She Is, a Miss America Contestant 
With a Sexy Kindle Bestseller That May Make You Blush! 

You may think that the latest erotic thriller to climb the bestseller list in Amazon’s Kindle ebook store has an unlikely author.

Girl on Fire, a cautionary, sexually explicit coming-of-age tale, was written right here in Massachusetts by Rena Diane Walmsley, who represented the state in the Miss America beauty pageant when she was 19.

“It would have made me blush in my contestant days, and I’m sure I would not have been alone,” says Walmsley today of her first novel. “The truth is that this novel might even have gotten me thrown out of the pageant, but more and more women are writing fiction that you might call ‘liberated,’ and the Kindle is the perfect place for an emerging novelist to break out whether she is writing in the erotica category or in some other genre.”

Indeed, the Kindle ebook reader is quickly becoming the digital equivalent of the “brown paper bag” for readers who prefer to play their reading choices close to the vest. With nearly half a million ebooks available in the Kindle Store, there are currently about 50 “erotica” titles among the top 2,000 Kindle bestsellers.

And Walmsley’s Girl on Fire is currently #3 on the Kindle’s “erotica” bestseller list, out of 11,987 titles in the category, as well as #6 on the “romantic suspense” list. Girl on Fire was released in the Kindle Store March 5, and will make its paperback debut with worldwide distribution, including Amazon.com, on March 26.

If Walmsley’s novel takes off, she would not be the first Miss America contestant from Massachusetts to make it as a novelist. Lisa Kleypas, who was Miss Massachusetts in 1985, has over two dozen novels in the Kindle Store.

Walmsley’s publisher for Girl on Fire, tiny Arlington-based Harvard Perspectives Press, provides this description for the novel in the copy that appears on the back cover of the forthcoming paperback:

Looking for love in all the right places? Not Alicia Wentworth, the enchantingly frisky teenaged heiress at the heart of Rena Diane Walmsley’s debut memoir-as-novel. Alicia escapes from her privileged, sheltered life at an elite Concord, Massachusetts boarding school and pulls a “visiting room switch” to break in to a nearby state prison so she can rendezvous with Teddy Hawk, an exquisitely chiseled 21-year-old Native American convict for whom she has fallen hard while volunteering in a creative writing class for inmates. But Alicia is left alone and vulnerable when Teddy is hauled off to solitary, and she must reach deep within herself to concoct a gritty and initially degrading scheme to blackmail the prison system into freeing them both.

This deliciously literate debut is framed by Alicia’s present-day perspective as “a respectable thirty-something Unitarian minister” in a suburb west of Boston: while she is cognizant of the scars she wears from her early experiences, she is also engaged by a sense of something sacred therein that informs her daily life years later.

Not all coming-of-age novels are alike, and not every thirty-something narrator is able to cast an unflinching eye on the choices she made and the chances she took at the cusp of adulthood. But Walmsley’s unique novel-as-memoir never blinks, and her stunning sexual description breaks new narrative ground on age-old but ever-engaging terrain. Women and men alike will be enchanted and enriched by their journeys through her ultimately cautionary web of words.

-30-

And, for the rest of the freebies in the Kindle Store, is a reprise of yesterday’s free book alert:

  • Originally posted March 15, 2010 – © Kindle Nation Daily 2010 
  • “Free” in the Kindle Store refers, for now, to the price for download to US-based Kindles. Amazon adds various charges for Kindles based beyond US borders. However, you can scroll down to Free Book Collections for over 1.8 million titles that can be downloaded free from the internet to Kindles anywhere in the world (use USB connection to avoid wireless charges.)

Product Details
from Touchstone Pictures (Kindle Edition – Mar. 15, 2010)Kindle Book
Available for Pre-order. This item will be released on Mar. 15, 2010.

Dead Witch Walking (The Hollows, Book 1)


In addition to the several dozen free promotion books listed below, Amazon has just created a new direct gateway to over 2 million other free books that you can download easily to your Kindle. Here’s what you’ll find there:

With over 420,000 titles, the Kindle Store contains the largest selection of the books people want to read including New York Times® Best Sellers and most new releases at $9.99, unless otherwise marked. And Amazon provides thousands of the most popular classics for free including titles like The Adventures of Sherlock HolmesPride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island with more coming.
But of course, the Internet is huge and there are lots of older, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books online. We wanted to make it easier to find these collections, which today represent nearly 2 million titles. See the sites and instructions below to download free classic and other out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books and transfer via USB to your Kindle device or read on Kindle for PC.
Note that these large collections of older free books are typically created from scanned copies of physical books and can have variable quality.
Amazon Kindle Store – Thousands of the most popular classics for free
The Amazon Kindle Store lets you choose from thousands of popular classics all available for free wireless delivery in under 60 seconds with Whispernet.
  1. Visit Kindle Popular Classics
  2. Search or browse for a title just like a normal Kindle book.
Internet Archive – Over 1.8 million free titles
Internet Archive is a non-profit dedicated to offering permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format. Provides over 1.8 million free books to read, download, and enjoy.
  1. Visit archive.org 
  2. Search for a title or browse one of the sub-collections like ‘American Libraries’
  3. When viewing a title, click the link on the left labeled “Kindle (beta)” to download the file to your computer
  4. Attach your Kindle to your computer using your USB cable and drag the file to the “Documents” folder on your Kindle. You can also e-mail the file to your Kindle using Whispernet for wireless delivery (charges apply).
  5. Open the book from your Kindle’s home screen and enjoy.
Project Gutenberg – Over 30,000 free titles
Project Gutenberg, one of the original sources of free electronic books, is dedicated to the creation and distribution of eBooks.
  1. Visit gutenberg.org 
  2. Search for a title or browse the ‘Book shelves by topic’
  3. When viewing a title, scroll down to the ‘Download this ebook for free’ section and click the download link for ‘Mobipocket’ or ‘Mobipocket with images’ format.
  4. Attach your Kindle to your computer using your USB cable and drag the file to the “Documents” folder on your Kindle. You can also e-mail the file to your Kindle using Whispernet for wireless delivery (charges apply).
  5. Open the book from your Kindle’s home screen and enjoy.
Have you seen another great collection of free Kindle books on the web? Drop us a line.

Around the Kindlesphere: Scanning in Kindle Purchases from Bookstores, and Giving the Bookstores a Cut

“When does Amazon create the iPhone/Android app and the programme that will allow bookstores to receive a cut of every Kindle edition they sell?” asks an interesting post entitled The Future of Book Publishing Business Models at the Once More unto the Breach blog. “I scan the book’s in-store barcode with my smartphone, and I get the Kindle edition delivered, and the store gets its cut. Why is this different in concept than Borders on-line store being run on Amazon, or any of the independent book sellers that front through Amazon? It’s not the normal book mark-up, but people already browse bookstores and buy on Amazon. This is better than no revenue.”

Reminds me a bit of the idea I’ve promoted in the past for co-operative in-store bundling of Kindle and hardcopy editions. But it strikes me that this one would not have to wait for Amazon. I have no doubt that O’Reilly Digital Distribution could accomodate authors, publishers and bookstores by creating an app that would circumvent Amazon but still send a Kindle-formatted edition (or, for that matter, an iPad-formatted edition) directly to your ereading device of choice. So Amazon should jump on it! Jump or be jumped!

These ideas generally do not take shape because the various players see each other as enemies and have a dug-in ideological horror at the notion of working together. That, of course, is a big mistake.

Read the whole post here:

The Future of Book Publishing Business Models 

And here are a few other recent tidbits from around the Kindlesphere:

NPR: No Ink, No Paper: What’s The Value Of An E-Book?  by Lynn Neary

MacMillan CEO John Sargent Tackles Some of the Questions Raised in Response to His Earlier Comments on the “Agency Model”

O’Reilly Digital Distribution Offers Multi-Venue eBook Publishing Service


“Crisis in Publishing” Series at Publetariat: People Who Publish Blog

This should last forever, no matter how many Kindles, iPads, etc: Books You Don’t Need in a Place U Can’t Find 

Readers Are Devouring Apple Book Apps

How Should Independent Authors and Publishers Price eBooks?

Just a brief but, I hope, worthwhile follow-up my post earlier today about ebooks from the author’s perspective….

In Friday night’s conversation, and in an increasing number of other forums and conversations, I find that I am being asked for advice about how to price books in the Kindle Store. I generally share my thoughts on this topic quite freely, which is probably a good indicator of what they are worth, as advice.

But here are a few general observations.

Authors deserve to be paid well for their work, but it is a big mistake to equate the price that is set for that work blindly or simplistically with an author’s compensation. Instead, an author’s compensation is based on the following formula:

A x B x C
where  
A=the book’s price (usually but not always the suggested retail list price), 
B=the royalty percentage paid to the author (as opposed to “to the publisher” on the book, and 
C=the number of copies sold.

I realize that many or most of us are English majors, but that really shouldn’t keep us from absorbing and understanding this formula and its significance.

In a highly discretionary market such as the ebook market, where consumers are showing signs of being increasingly savvy and price-conscious, pricing a book too high will impede its sales. Indeed, as a number of authors including J.A. Konrath have pointed out, price sensitivity in the Kindle Store is intense. Konrath and other authors, including my co-panelists on Friday evening’s BookChatter podcast, have been finding out pretty consistently that the lower they set the prices for their books, down to the current Kindle Store floor of 99 cents for most titles, the more money they end up with via the AxBxC formula noted above.

To illustrate the concept, let’s take a hypothetical, fairly popular book with the title The Value of Nothing. It doesn’t matter whether it is a Buddhist spiritual tome, an inquiry into the price elasticity of demand, or a steamy erotic novel. (I made up the title, but of course I found afterward that there are two other books out there now with the same title, so apologies to Raj Patel and Julian Roche). Assuming that the book gets sufficient marketing attention and that there are no special forces at play such as pent up demand or early-adopter frenzy or the kind of impatience premium that is activated, say, with some bestselling sequels, my experience and observations say that the price that is set for the same book will have a dramatic effect on sales and ultimate author receipts along lines like these over, say, the course of a month:

Price    Units Sold    Author Receipts
$14.99    60               $314.79
$12.99    90               $409.19
$9.99    150               $524.48
$6.99    300               $733.95
$4.99    600             $1,047.90
$2.99    1500            $1,569.75
$1.99    3000            $2,089.50
$0.99    7500            $2,598.75
$0.00    30000               $0.00

So, no promises that it will be replicated in any other author’s experience, but I just think it is important to share this rough model that I have seen work again and again. And I am sharing it in spite of the fact that I would rather, personally, see most author and publishers price Kindle books generally at $2.99 and up.

I’m sure there are plenty of other reasons why an author or publisher might wish to charge more for a book, and I am not going to extend this post unduly by trying to evaluate them. If you are concerned about saturating your market at too low a price, one thing that makes the Kindle Store — and the aggregate of all ebook venues — stand out right now is the rate at which the “installed base” of Kindles is growing. Even if an author has sold 50,000 copies of a Kindle book up to now, there are still 3 million other Kindle owners who have not bought that book yet, and that base is expected to grow by an average of a quarter of a million new Kindles a month this year, even before we count iPads, BlackBerry phones, and all the other devices that will be able to read Kindle books or other ebook formats.

One thing to keep in mind is that Amazon has promised that by June 30 it will double its Kindle royalties from 35 percent to 70 percent for authors and publishers who price their Kindle editions anywhere from $2.99 to $9.99 and participate in other Kindle feature offerings such as the text-to-speech offering. That’s a powerful lure: it would mean a per-unit royalty increase from 35 cents (on a 99-cent offering) to $1.99 (on a $2.99 offering). It could well be that, when this new royalty structure kicks in, Amazon will succeed as herding all the “cats” who currently have Kindle books priced from 99 cents up to $2.98 into the $2.99-$9.99 corral.

Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alert for Sunday, March 14, 2010: Exclusive Free Kindle Content for "The Last Song" from Touchstone Pictures, Take One (Above The Line Series #1), and Millions More!

  • Originally posted March 14, 2010 – © Kindle Nation Daily 2010 
  • “Free” in the Kindle Store refers, for now, to the price for download to US-based Kindles. Amazon adds various charges for Kindles based beyond US borders. However, you can scroll down to Free Book Collections for over 1.8 million titles that can be downloaded free from the internet to Kindles anywhere in the world (use USB connection to avoid wireless charges.)

Product Details
from Touchstone Pictures (Kindle Edition – Mar. 15, 2010)Kindle Book
Available for Pre-order. This item will be released on Mar. 15, 2010.

Dead Witch Walking (The Hollows, Book 1)


In addition to the several dozen free promotion books listed below, Amazon has just created a new direct gateway to over 2 million other free books that you can download easily to your Kindle. Here’s what you’ll find there:

With over 420,000 titles, the Kindle Store contains the largest selection of the books people want to read including New York Times® Best Sellers and most new releases at $9.99, unless otherwise marked. And Amazon provides thousands of the most popular classics for free including titles like The Adventures of Sherlock HolmesPride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island with more coming.
But of course, the Internet is huge and there are lots of older, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books online. We wanted to make it easier to find these collections, which today represent nearly 2 million titles. See the sites and instructions below to download free classic and other out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books and transfer via USB to your Kindle device or read on Kindle for PC.
Note that these large collections of older free books are typically created from scanned copies of physical books and can have variable quality.
Amazon Kindle Store – Thousands of the most popular classics for free
The Amazon Kindle Store lets you choose from thousands of popular classics all available for free wireless delivery in under 60 seconds with Whispernet.
  1. Visit Kindle Popular Classics
  2. Search or browse for a title just like a normal Kindle book.
Internet Archive – Over 1.8 million free titles
Internet Archive is a non-profit dedicated to offering permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format. Provides over 1.8 million free books to read, download, and enjoy.
  1. Visit archive.org 
  2. Search for a title or browse one of the sub-collections like ‘American Libraries’
  3. When viewing a title, click the link on the left labeled “Kindle (beta)” to download the file to your computer
  4. Attach your Kindle to your computer using your USB cable and drag the file to the “Documents” folder on your Kindle. You can also e-mail the file to your Kindle using Whispernet for wireless delivery (charges apply).
  5. Open the book from your Kindle’s home screen and enjoy.
Project Gutenberg – Over 30,000 free titles
Project Gutenberg, one of the original sources of free electronic books, is dedicated to the creation and distribution of eBooks.
  1. Visit gutenberg.org 
  2. Search for a title or browse the ‘Book shelves by topic’
  3. When viewing a title, scroll down to the ‘Download this ebook for free’ section and click the download link for ‘Mobipocket’ or ‘Mobipocket with images’ format.
  4. Attach your Kindle to your computer using your USB cable and drag the file to the “Documents” folder on your Kindle. You can also e-mail the file to your Kindle using Whispernet for wireless delivery (charges apply).
  5. Open the book from your Kindle’s home screen and enjoy.
Have you seen another great collection of free Kindle books on the web? Drop us a line.

The Ebook Revolution and the Indie Publishing Revolution: Readers and Writers Locking Arms with Comrade Bezos

It was my pleasure to sit in Friday evening with several other authors in a live panel discussion about books, ebooks, ebook prices and the Kindle Store on Stacey Cochran’s BookChatter podcast.

One thing that stood out about the panel was that it was populated by people who are doing very, very well as Kindle authors, and none of our books are the products of major publishers. The other participants were:

  • Elisa Lorello, the author of the novel Faking It and a sequel, Ordinary World, both of which are among the top 25 Contemporary Romance bestsellers on the Kindle;
  • Rob Kroese, whose humorous take on Armageddon, angels and the Anti-Christ, Mercury Falls, is currently #665 on the overall Kindle bestseller list;
  • Holly Christine, whose “chick lit with a twist” novel Tuesday Tells It Slant is a great read that is among the top 2% of all books in the Kindle Store now, and which, with a little more attention, I expect to see rise into the Kindle Store’s top 1,000 bestsellers within the next few weeks;
  • R.J. Keller, whose first novel Waiting for Spring is outselling over 455,000 of the 467,000 books in the Kindle Store despite having no marketing budget or big publisher muscle behind it; and
  • Stacey Cochran, the show’s host, who has several successful books in the Kindle Store including The Kiribati Test, which has spent time in the Kindle Store’s top 100 titles and is currently among the top 1% of all titles in the Kindle Store sales rankings.

I had never spoken with any of the five before Friday evening, but we all have in common a passionate commitment to writing and to connecting with readers, and a willingness to look at the publishing process in new ways. Without the changes in technology that have occurred in book publishing in the past decade, all of these books might still be sitting in slush piles in the offices of literary agents and publishers, still waiting for their first real readers.

Now, thanks in large part to the Kindle and the passion that Kindle readers share for good reading, and of course to the hard work of the authors themselves, the authors on Friday evening’s panel have sold something on the order of a quarter of a million “copies” of their books already, and the future looks very bright for every one of them.

And they — or “we,” I should say, since I am proud to have participated in such an interesting discussion — are just the tip of the iceberg. Every day I connect with more authors who are experiencing astonishing success by publishing their books directly on the Kindle platform, and the result is that there are now thousands of books in the Kindle Store — selling millions of copies each month — that are enriching the reading experiences of Kindle owners while also enriching the bank accounts of the authors and of Amazon.

The Kindle will always be a great device for getting bestselling books into the hands of eager, waiting readers. But the Kindle is also the greatest device that has ever existed to get independently published books in front of the eyeballs and into the hands of engaged, interested, intelligent readers who then have the capacity to spread the word further about books that they value.

Amazon gets this, more and more authors get it, and the smartest and fastest independent publishers get it, too. Authors could not do it without the changes in technology that have revolutionized book “marketing” and taken the up-front capital costs out of ebook and print book publishing. Amazon could not do it without the efforts and courage of thousands of authors with an intense pent-up readiness to cast off the shackles of past subservience to the publishers-and-agents-as-literary-gatekeepers model.

In the Winter 2010 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey, 44 percent of the 1,892 respondents identified with the statement, “With higher bestseller prices, I’ll buy more backlist or indie titles.” It doesn’t matter that it was not a majority. (35% were neutral and 21% disagreed). What matters is that it is yet another evidence that, one and two and a hundred at a time, individual readers are moving dramatically toward a more independent approach to choosing and buying what they read, just as the audiences for music and movies evolved to embrace “indie music” and “indie films” over the past few decades. The stigma that used to cause readers and gatekeepers to sneer at “self-published” books is gradually vanishing, and it is being replaced inexorably by a more just kind of stigma and sneering: at books that lack quality. Some of those books come from independent or self publishers, to be sure, but even more of them, with a much larger footprint in our brick-and-mortar bookstores, come from the large mainstream publishers.

So the ebook revolution and the independent publishing revolution move forward together, with a growing number of authors and readers and publishers, and Comrade Bezos, all locking arms in common struggle. As these dramatic changes gain greater and greater force, other publishers, ebook manufacturers, authors, and petit-bourgeois shopkeepers will have to decide — as revolutions always force the great middle to decide — whether they are part of the problem or part of the solution.

Neither I, nor Kindle Nation Daily, nor my tiny publishing company Harvard Perspectives Press is an objective observer or neutral or innocent bystander here. I wear several hats — author, publisher, reader, reviewer, and chronicler — and while I take seriously the journalistic nature and responsibilities of much of what I do, I hope that it is self-evident that the journalism I practice is advocacy journalism. I hope that it is also self-evident that I would not allow Harvard Perspectives Press or Kindle Nation Daily to publish dreck, and that consequently it is as natural for me to let you know about these publications — whether they are by me or Rena Diane Walmsley or DL Rose or Sue Katz or some other author — as it is for me to share news about the books of other indie authors and publishers. And I may disagree with much of what is being said and done by the Big Six publishers, from their pricing and windowing tactics to their suppression of accessibility features like text-to-speech, but that will not keep me from sharing news about their books. We’re all grown-ups here, and if any of this gets out of balance I’m sure that you’ll vote with your feet.

After the revolution, we’ll all be like that little guy sitting under the tree in Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone graphic: reading and writing in paradise.

Meanwhile, I hope you’ll take a good look at the great reads among the Kindle Store offerings of authors like Elisa Lorello, Rob Kroese, Holly Christine, R.J. Keller, and Stacey Cochran. And, oh yeah, that other guy from the panel, too.