Today’s newest addition to the ranks of free promotional titles in the Kindle Store marks the first time, to my knowledge, when Amazon has offered a freebie on book published by AmazonEncore, their own in-house publishing imprint. And with Eric Kraft’s The Static of the Spheres, Amazon is living up to one of the most exciting and challenging promises of the Kindle platform and also of its AmazonEncore initiative by providing us with a delightful free introduction to a fiction writer who is new to many readers but will keep us coming back. I “discovered” this free promotion last night around 7 p.m. after walking up to my local indie coffee shop with my iPad. When I saw that it was only novella-length I decided to give it an immediate read, and I’ll just say that (1) I’ll be reading more by Kraft and his protagonist Peter Leroy today and tomorrow and all weekend; and (2) my initial notion that I was reading some quirky memoir about short-wave radio was quickly swept away. Bravo!

So, again, here are links to a dozen nicely priced Eric Kraft offerings, beginning with the the free Kindle edition of The Static of the Spheres:

The Static of the Spheres by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – July 5, 2009) – Kindle Book

Buy: $0.00

 

The Girl with the White Fur Muff by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – Feb. 18, 2010) – Kindle Book

Buy: $1.00

Take the Long Way Home by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – Mar. 14, 2010) – Kindle Book

Buy: $1.00

Call Me Larry by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – Mar. 4, 2010) – Kindle Book

Buy: $1.00

My Mother Takes a Tumble by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – June 14, 2009) – Kindle Book

Buy: $1.00

Do Clams Bite? by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – June 17, 2009) – Kindle Book

Buy: $1.00

Life on the Bolotomy by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – June 27, 2009) – Kindle Book

Buy: $1.00

The Young Tars by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – Mar. 4, 2010) – Kindle Book

Buy: $1.00

At Home with the Glynns by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – Mar. 15, 2010) – Kindle Book

Buy: $2.99

Where Do You Stop? by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – Mar. 23, 2010) – Kindle Book

Buy: $3.69

What a Piece of Work I Am by Eric Kraft (Kindle Edition – Apr. 29, 2010) – Kindle Book

Buy: $5.59

Meanwhile….

• “Free” in the Kindle Store refers, for now, to the price for download to US-based Kindles. Amazon adds charges for Kindles based beyond US borders.
• Originally posted to Kindle Nation Daily 5.12.2010.
• Click here (or type “kindle nation daily” in your Kindle’s Kindle Store search field) to have Free Book Alerts pushed directly to your Kindle 24/7 with a 14-day free trial to the Kindle edition of Kindle Nation Daily, the #1 bestselling blog in the Kindle Store.
• Click here to see RECENT KINDLE NATION DAILY FREE BOOK ALERTS
  The best way to find out about these free listings right away, when they occur, is to subscribe to the Kindle edition of Kindle Nation Daily, which pushes Kindle Nation Daily Free Book Alerts directly to your Kindle Home screen 24/7. And in the case of many free listings that disappear within a matter of hours or days, “right away” is often just in time. 

  No Kindle Required: Whether you are a long-time Kindle owner or you’ve just acquired an iPad and are filling it with ebooks for the first time or you are reading Kindle books on a PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone or iPad Touch, you can get any and all of these titles absolutely free on your Kindle-compatible device of choice! Click here to download a free Kindle App for your device.

  Click here for Kindle Nation’s archive page with links for over 2 million free books!

Check out our new listing of the first 30 months of month-by-month Kindle Store bestsellers here: Kindle Store Bestsellers, Month-by-Month for the First 30 Months

Here are our other updated free promotional listings in the Kindle Store as of May 12:

Tuesday: Steve Martini’s Shadow of Power Free Pre-Order with Bonus Material

by Steve Martini – Pre-order for May 25, 2010 Release

Text-to-Speech: Enabled

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 655 KB
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Up to 5 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books (May 25, 2010)
• Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers

Monday: Four new Christian titles hit that sweet zero-price promotional spot in the Kindle Store to begin the new week, and a couple of them look pretty interesting. All are text-to-speech enabled, which means that you have your Kindle read them aloud to you, or try out yesterday’s Kindle Nation Daily Tip to set up hands-free reading with automatic page turning.

 Sheet Music: Uncovering the Secrets of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage by Dr. Kevin Leman

 

Prayer by Philip Yancey

 Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) by Karen Hancock

  Colters’ Wife, an erotic western romance novella by Maya Banks. Banks is a good example of a prolific author who has hit the sweet spot and found her own connections with readers with her nicely priced Kindle offerings, including Amber Eyes, Stay With Me, Seducing Simon, Reckless: A Red Hot Summer Story, Sweet Seduction, Sweet Persuasion, Sweet Surrender, Love Me, Still, Brazen, Be With Me, The Tycoon’s Pregnant Mistress, and her Unbroken series (Understood (Unbroken Book 1), Overheard (Unbroken, Book 2), and Undenied (Unbroken, Book 3)).

 

Swashbuckling Fantasy: 10 Thrilling Tales of Magical Adventure, a Sampler from Simon & Schuster

Nothing’s been ordinary in the world of ebooks lately, but ordinarily, lately, when you see the line “This price was set by the publisher” on a Kindle ebook’s product page it is Amazon’s way of letting us know  that there’s bad news adjacent to it in the form of one of those special “agency price-fixing model” prices. $12? $15? One never knows.

But here’s a breath of fresh air! Big Six publisher Simon & Schuster has done some creative thinking about how to leverage the power of “free” in the Kindle Store and used the agency price-fixing model to try something new, with a substantial volume of freebies under the lusty title Swashbuckling Fantasy: 10 Thrilling Tales of Magical Adventure.

Just what do I mean by substantial? 

• First, these are 10 tales by 10 authors each with her own substantial oeuvre of fantasy titles already, so of course the authors and the publisher are hoping that this process will work for them and lead readers to their other work in the same way that we have seen work so effectively with our own Free Kindle Nation Shorts program. The authors represented are Jane Johnson, Linda BuckleyArcher, Scott Westerfeld, Kai Meyer, Alan Snow, Anne Ursu, Obert Skye, Margaret Peterson Haddix, D.J. MacHale and Holly Black.
• Second, for those of you who, like me, take a look at file size and “number of locations” in an ebooks metadata and free sample before committing to a book, you’ll recognize that the offering’s file size of 1320 KB and its 3,936 “locations” spell a book of significant size and virtual weight.
• Third, my quick perusal of the full text indicates that, unlike many “sampler” offerings, these 10 tales appear to be just that — tales, self-contained short stories or novellas — rather than frustrating tastes of an excerpted chapter or two.

So, bravo, Simon & Schuster! This is just the kind of thing that the big publishers should be doing to experiment with and begin to figure out the retail marketing power of distinctive pricing and free-to-paid linkages, so we’ve got your back if some of the other agency price-fixing model publishers whine that you are engaging in competitive and adversarial behavior.

And, of course, we still have dozens of other freebies in the Kindle Store, in case you’ve missed any of them.

• Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #4: Savior by John Jackson Miller 
• The Minister’s Wooing, a Penguin Classic by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• The Scent of Shadows, Free with Bonus Material (Pre-Order) by Vicki Pettersson (For release on May 11, 2010) 
• The First Drop of Rain by Leslie Parrott  bestselling author of Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions, and Others
• Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project  
• The Joy of Pregnancy: The Complete, Candid, and Reassuring Companion for Parents-to-Be  
• The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age 
• Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century 
• Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media: A Synthesis from the Good Play Project   
• New Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Area and “Worked Examples” as One Way Forward   
• Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2011  
• The Civic Potential of Video Games 
• Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #1: Precipice
• Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #3: Paragon
• The Wild’s Call
• The Hunters 
• The Reincarnationist Series  
• A Very Special Delivery  
• Baby Bonanza 
• Kiss Me Deadly  LINK
• Homespun Bride 
• Speed Dating  
• Healing For a Broken World: Christian Perspective on Public Policy 
• When Night Falls  
• Publish on Amazon Kindle with the Digital Text Platform 
• Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #2: Skyborn 
• Hide in Plain Sight
• Slow Hands
• Irresistible Forces  
• Dancing in the Moonlight 
• Crime Scene at Cardwell Ranch  
• His Lady Mistress 
• My Soul to Lose 
• The Bride’s Baby 
• Once a Cowboy 
• More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea