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Publishing Perestroika: Indie Authors Blow Away Traditional Gatekeepers and Storm the Castle of Newspaper Bestseller Lists

July 7, 2019February 9, 2011 by Steve Windwalker

By Steve Windwalker

Call it the “Paper Curtain,” if you like.

But like the Berlin Wall, it’s coming down.

As a result of the Publishing Perestroika that has been unleashed by readers and writers connecting primarily around Kindle content in the short span of just 39 months, the walls that have kept self-published and ebook authors from being included in prestigious newspaper bestseller lists will come crashing down this week.

Tomorrow, USA TODAY will roll out its weekly list of the top 150 bestselling books in the U.S., just as it does every Thursday.

Amanda Hocking

But for the very first time, USA Today announced today, its list for the week ending February 6 will include bestselling self-published direct-to-Kindle authors like Amanda Hocking. Hocking’s books currently rank #3, #11, #12, #27, #37, #41, and #46 on the Kindle Store top 50 bestsellers, and “the three titles in her Trylle Trilogy (Switched, Torn and Ascend, the latest) will make their debuts in the top 50 of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list,” wrote USA Today’s Carol Memmott in an article entitled “Authors catch fire with self-published ebooks.”

Whether it happens this week or within a few more weeks, it’s also a good bet that Hocking will soon be accompanied by bestselling Kindle indie authors like John Locke, Victorine Lieske, and others.

And other, equally dramatic developments will follow:

One way or another, the fact that USA Today has opened its “bestseller list” gates to the great unwashed population of ebook and self-published authors will force the New York Times to do the same, lest its bestseller list be rendered irrelevant.
Once the Times and other rags allow self-published books on their bestseller lists, they will have to start publishing reviews of self-published books.
The prediction made here just a few weeks ago, that an indie author would be inducted by early 2012 into the “Kindle Million Club” alongside James Patterson, Stieg Larsson, and Nora Roberts, will prove to have been ridiculously conservative. Regardless of when Amazon makes the announcement, Hocking will pass the million-copy mark in Kindle books sold by the first day of Spring this year, and she will be joined by another dozen indie authors before the arrival of Spring in 2012.

All of these changes probably became inevitable, even though we didn’t know it then, when Amazon launched the Kindle on November 19, 2007.

But the barons of the book industry and the big New York publishers should make no mistake about the fact that these events have been hastened dramatically by their own tragically misguided launch of the agency model price-fixing plan early in 2010. Their tone-deaf move to try to protect their print publishing business model by insisting upon increases of 30 to 50 percent in ebook prices opened the doors wide to indie authors to lure readers with lower prices for what, in many cases, are better books.

During the last week before the agency model launch, in March 2010, there was not a single fiction title by an indie author along the top 50 bestselling titles in the Kindle Store.

This week, indie fiction authors have 18 of the top 50 spots. Those are 18 of the top 50 bestselling ebook spots in the land, worth well over a million copies sold during the month of February, and the agency model publishers might just as well have said “Here, come and take these, we don’t need them.”

The Real Story Behind Those Single-Digit Kindle Margins: Amazon Has Positioned Itself for a 50% Overall Market Share in the U.S. Book Business by the End of 2012

July 7, 2019February 2, 2011 by Steve Windwalker

Amazon’s report of quarterly earnings last Thursday was greeted widely as an indication that the company can’t generate sufficient margins with Kindle devices and content. That interpretation has been reasonably straightforward, with strong echoes of sentiments that characterized critics’ views of Amazon during its early pre-profitability years in late 1990s and into the 21st century:

Despite rapid growth in Kindle hardware and content sales [the thinking goes], the combination of competition and Amazon’s penchant for pursuing loss-leader strategies to capture market share have forced Kindle-associated margins so low that, as the Kindle portion of Amazon’s overall business grows, it will lead inevitably to erosion of profits.

Due in part to this interpretation, Amazon’s share price, which closed Thursday within 3 percent of its all-time trading high, dipped dramatically in after-hours trading that day and has gained back only a fraction of those losses since.

But the low-margins interpretation misses another, much more dramatic story:

The big story is that in just three years Amazon has positioned itself to triple its overall share of the U.S. book business for all formats. Before the end of 2012, Amazon could own more than half of the U.S. book business across all formats.

How stunning a development would that be? Prior to the launch of the Kindle in 2007, Amazon was widely considered to account, at most, for somewhere around 15 percent of all U.S. book sales in all formats by all retailers.

Amazon has not reached 50 per cent yet, and is still far from that range where all titles are concerned. But one of the most reliable crystal balls for determining future bookselling trends is to examine and parse developments as they play out with inpidual bestsellers in the overall book marketplace, when numbers are available.

Room author Emma Donoghue

Last week both Amazon and one of its most consistent publishing business critics, paid subscription site Publishers’ Marketplace, shined their respective spotlights on sale trends that have been playing out with a single bestselling novel, Emma Donoghue’s Room. (Room was published September 13, 2010 and became a breakthrough bestseller for the Dublin-born Canadian transplant Donoghue. Room currently stands at #26 among ebooks in the Kindle Store despite its agency-model price of $11.99. The hardcover, discounted by Amazon to $14.41 (20 percent higher than the Kindle edition), is #43 in the main Amazon store. It is #13 among far fewer available bestsellers listed in the iBooks store, and #35 on the Nook. Importantly for these discussions, the book has also been on the IndieBound bestseller list for independent brick-and-mortar booksellers for the past 20 weeks, and currently stands at #4.)

Helpfully, it turns out that we know a lot about Room sales, thanks to Amazon and Publisher’s Marketplace.

Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice-president for Kindle Content,told a Digital Book World conference last week that, for Room, “total Kindle sales are equal to 85 percent of Nielsen BookScan’s print sales number.” Publisher’s Marketplace then performed some very helpful extrapolations and further calculations arriving here:

If the BookScan number is 80 percent of the print sales total, then Kindle sales here would 68 percent of all print. More importantly, though, to calculate what percentage of the book’s total sale was on Kindle, you need to add Kindle + BookScan + that other 20 percent together and look at Kindle as a percentage of that sum. So it’s 68 over 168, meaning that Kindle sales were 40 percent of the total sale in all formats for ROOM.

But it doesn’t end there. Grandinetti and other Amazon spokespersons said repeatedly last week that Kindle editions were currently outselling Amazon sales of their hardcover counterparts by a 3-to-1 margin, which means that Amazon hardcovers equal about 25 per cent of combined sales for these titles. Even if hardcover sales of Room fell short of this and constituted only 20 percent of Amazon’s combined, this would mean that total Amazon sales of Room constitutes about 50 percent of the total sale in all formats for ROOM.

It’s just one title, but what we’ve been seeing quite often with Amazon and the Kindle over the past few years is that what happens first with one title happens subsequently with more titles and then, ultimately, with most titles. It was a big deal in 2009 when Kindle sales of The Lost Symbol outstripped Amazon’s hardcover sales right from the drop, and a little over a year later Amazon announced that all Kindle editions were outselling hardcover units for the same titles, across the board.

But there are other forces at play, and I’m not just talking about the fact that Room is one of the strongest sellers over the past five months for indie booksellers. Back on January 5 when USA Today reported that 19 of the top 50 titles on its bestseller list had sold more ebook than print copies for the previous week, publishing industry insiders blamed Santa Claus and downplayed the significance.

“What’s most interesting is what happens next week or over the next month. About 3 million to 5 million e-readers were activated last week. Will the people who got them keep downloading e-books, and at what rate?” asked Publisher’s Marketplace founder Michael Cader. Bowker’s Kelly Gallagher, too often a cheerleader for the status quo in publishing, was quoted saying that the surge in e-book sales “is not a sustainable trend.”

Right. Well, that was January 5. Now it’s February 2, and that trend, far from declining, has actually become stronger. On USA Today’s most recent bestseller list, for the week ended January 23, the number of titles with greater ebook sales than print sales had grown from the 18-19 range for the first three weeks after Christmas to 23 of the top 50.

There is a wide range of factors that are likely to push the velocity of change even faster for ebook sales specifically and Amazon’s share of the overall bookselling market in general, but the fact that brick and mortar bookstores are closing at a faster rate than ever, from local indies to chains, is bound to contribute to a snowballing effect. The imminent bankruptcy of the Borders chain is this week’s headline, but it’s just the headline. And despite the recent fuss about the new partnership for ebook sales between Google and the American Booksellers Association, it is inevitable that as ebook sales rise, brick-and-mortar stores will decline and publishers will gradually lessen their investment both in the bookstore-based physical distribution network and in print editions.

Finally, there’s Amazon’s not-so-secret weapon for building retail market share for its Kindle and print content sales: direct publishing, Amazon exclusives, and indie authors. Recent developments in this area deserve a post all their own, but for now we’ll just note that 36 of the top 100 bestselling ebooks in the Kindle Store are published either by indie, direct-to-Kindle authors or by Amazon publishing subsidiary programs such as AmazonEncore, AmazonCrossing, or Kindle Singles. The vast majority of these titles are either not listed or not selling at any appreciable level on any other retail venue, and they are not yet included on any bestseller lists other than Amazon’s own, although their sales would in many cases justify such inclusion. But the sales are there, the profits are there, and once again Amazon has positioned itself to dominate the market share for this, the fastest growing sector of the fastest growing sector in bookselling.

Which brings us back to Amazon executive Grandinetti, and his summary point in last week’s discussions: “However fast you think this change is happening, its probably happening faster than you think.”

Whatever the rate of change, and whatever the velocity of change, most of the other players in the book business and many of Amazon’s market analysts and investors may be missing the point as to exactly where this change leads. AMZN is not a day-traders’ stock, but for investors who take a long view it may have just moved into a new and very positive category.

If Amazon has decided to accept single-digit margins during this Kindle “investment phase,” and the result is that the company has set itself up to own a 50 per cent market share of the entire U.S. book business by the end of 2012, there will be no shortage of happy investors — and devastated competitors — at that point in the relatively near future.

INCOMING! IDENTIFY! IDENTIFY! Yes, It’s the Kindle Revolution

July 7, 2019January 28, 2011 by Steve Windwalker

We have dispatches from all over this week, and they all bear the same identifying marks.

Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice-president for Kindle Content, addressed a Digital Book World panel yesterday and summed up the changes that are taking place in the world of publishing and reading like this:

“However fast you think this change is happening, it’s probably happening faster than you think.”

Grandinetti also said that, already, Kindle books are outselling their hardcover counterparts in Amazon’s store by a 3-to-1 ratio.

So, between Grandinetti’s statements and items we have reported here previously, we’ve had plenty of basis lately for concluding that:

Kindle content sales are dominating content sales for other ebook platforms; and
Kindle content sales are dominating Amazon’s print book sales.

But Grandinetti also provided some tantalizingly Amazonesque numbers that, if they spread across a range of titles, would demonstrate rather convincingly that the Kindle content delivery system is enabling Amazon to gain an unprecedently dominant position across the board in bookselling.

According to Publishers’ Marketplace (a paid subscription site serving, mainly, the traditional publishing industry), Grandinetti said, for Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel Room, “total Kindle sales are equal to 85 percent of Nielsen BookScan’s print sales number.” Extrapolating from that equation, Publisher’s Marketplace concluded that Kindle sales amounted to 40 per cent of all sales in all formats by all retailers for Room.

Room is published by agency model publisher Hachette, and the Kindle edition is currently priced by the publisher at $11.99, so it is likely that the Kindle sales of Room would have amounted to only 75 to 85 percent of Amazon’s total sales for the title. Thus, if we add Kindle editions and hardcover sales by Amazon, Amazon must be at or above 50 percent of all sales in all formats by all retailers for Room.

How stunning a development is that? Well, prior to the launch of the Kindle in 2007, Amazon was widely considered to account for somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of all sales of all books in all formats by all retailers. It now appears that the Kindle’s incredibly friction-free content delivery system has given Amazon a real chance to double, and perhaps triple, that share of the total bookselling market.

Not so fast, one might say. Amazon has nowhere near that 40 to 50 per cent market share when it comes to textbooks. Or children’s books. Or cookbooks. True enough, and it probably won’t get to those levels in those categories for a long time, if ever.

But Amazon doubtless has even higher market shares when it comes to indie authors’ books, a huge percentage of which are published direct-to-Kindle. And we are seeing greater evidence every week that indie authors are the fastest growing segment of content producers in the ebook revolution, with the most recent stories of brilliant success surrounding bestselling Kindle Store author Amanda Hocking, whose $2.99 ebooks are currently #2, #9, and #12 among all books in the Kindle Store.

Likewise, Amazon certainly has higher market shares than 40 to 50 percent when it comes to books for which the company itself is the publisher, through AmazonEncore and AmazonCrossing. But that can’t be much, right? Because Amazon is a retailer, not a publisher, right?

Well, whatever you want to call it, that’s fine. But it’s worth noting here that The Hangman’s Daughter, the #1 book in the Kindle Store with well over 100,000 copies sold in less than two months, is published by AmazonEncore. And there will be more of these, many more.

Finally, the last bit of incoming information comes from our own Kindle Nation Survey. We’ll wait until the survey is closed at midnight Hawaii time January 31 before we begin to break it down. For now we’ll just say that more than any previous survey, this one makes it clear that readers are in charge, and that the meaning of the Kindle revolution in terms of our reading behavior lies predominantly in three dramatic developments:

Readers are deciding what they want to read, and factors like a traditional publisher’s imprimatur and new release status and the stigma of “self-published” are losing force.
The influence and recommendation systems that lead readers to specific books are changing dramatically so that influences like massive front-of-store placements and even bestseller rankings are giving way to informal recommendations and new sources of influence.
Readers have taken over much of the role of setting prices in the new book business by delaying purchases of books they want to read if the prices are, in their judgment, too high. The publishers who drew lines in the sand behind their right to set prices under the agency model won a Pyrrhic victory, because as Wall Street market makers know, an item’s price does not really become a price when a seller offers it; it becomes the real price when a buyer pays it. Publishers continue to set new release prices reflexively in the $12-$15 range, but only two of the top 20 bestselling ebooks in the Kindle Store are priced above $9.99.

For the agency model, and for brick and mortar bookstores, we are over halfway to “game over.” Whether the publishers who have stood behind the agency model can survive past mid-decade remains to be seen, but nothing about the way they are playing their hands should inspire confidence.

Just How Big is the Kindle Revolution? Our Estimates: Amazon Has Sold 12 Million Kindles, and There Were Over 10 Million Paid Kindle eBook Sales in the Last Week of 2010

July 7, 2019January 13, 2011 by Steve Windwalker

Amazon inducted bestselling author Nora Roberts as the third member of its Kindle Million Club yesterday with a press release stating that Roberts “has sold 1,170,539 Kindle books under her name and her pseudonym J.D. Robb.” So we now have the following members in the Kindle Million Club, and you can click on these links to fill your Kindles up with hundreds of their titles:

Come to think of it, when you look at the long lists of titles by Roberts and Patterson, it is all the more impressive that Larsson was able to storm the castle with a single trilogy. But there’s definitely a lesson here for emerging authors, and it is a lesson that many Kindle Nation faves like Imogen Rose, Scott Nicholson, Paul Levine and J.A. Konrath have learned well: trilogies, series, and multiple titles allows authors great efficiencies when it comes to building exposure for their books.

While the Kindle Million Club will always be an elite club, it is also very likely that membership in the club will expand geometrically in the next few years. By this time next year I would expect the club to have about 10 members, and to be very close to inducting its first “indie author” member. By mid-decade we’ll see a dozen members of the club who are operating, at least for current ebook purposes, without traditional publishers.

Which brings us back to a topic we’ve been discussing ever since the first month the Kindle came out back in late 2007: just how big is the Kindle revolution?

In last week’s Kindle Nation weekly digest we hinted that I would be back this week with some analysis to support my belief that:

first, Amazon recently passed the 12-million mark in total Kindles shipped since November 2007; and
second, readers downloaded about 15 million Kindle ebooks, including 10 million paid books, during the final week of 2010.

Frankly, the details of triangulating in on how many Kindles there are in the world can get a little dull, but here are our estimated benchmarks for cumulative Kindle sales during the past three years and change:

Kindle Launch – November 19, 2007
100,000 Kindles – March 2008
750,000 Kindles – October 2008
1 Million Kindles – March 2009 (Kindle 2 Ships)
3 Million Kindles – December 2009
4 Million Kindles – July 2010
6 Million Kindles – August 2010 (Kindle 3 Ships)
8.5 Million Kindles – December 12, 2010
11 Million Kindles – December 24, 2010
12 Million Kindles – January 2011
22 Million Kindles – December 2011 (conservative projection)
35 Million Kindles – December 2012 (conservative projection)

All of the figures for 2008 and 2009 are consistent with figures we estimated contemporaneously, and of course others then claimed at each of those points that our estimates were far too aggressive. In each case, however, the sales arc on which my figures were based was eventually confirmed and became the consensus view.

Now we’re not trying to prove our case to a jury here, and of course Amazon doesn’t disclose these numbers. But a few things that Amazon has said in the past year or so help, nonetheless, with the triangulation:

Jeff Bezos announced at the end of 2009 that Amazon had sold “millions of Kindles.”
Amazon announced on December 13, 2010 that “in just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we’ve already sold millions of our all-new Kindles with the latest E Ink Pearl displays. In fact, in the last 73 days, readers have purchased more Kindles than we sold during all of 2009.”
Amazon announced on October 24, 2007 that it had sold 2.5 million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7), with the 2007 holiday season still to come and the July 2009 paperback edition yet to be released. The Potter book has continued to sell briskly in the past three years (hardcover #1 for the entire year 2007, and both hardcover and paperback editions remain in the top 1,000 even now, in January 2011).
Amazon announced on December 27, 2010 that in just 4 months since its launch the Kindle 3 had already become “the bestselling product in Amazon’s history, eclipsing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7).” That statement referred both to hardcover and paperback copies of the Potter book, for which I would estimate Amazon’s total cumulative worldwide print sales to be about 7.1 million copies.
Finally, Amazon said throughout the month of December that it would not be shipping Kindles outside the U.S. in time for Christmas delivery, and all of the indications available to us here at Kindle Nation are that international Kindle shipments in the three weeks since Christmas have been very, very brisk.

I will leave you to connect your own dots there, if you are interested. Call me unrigourous, but this is not graduate school. Of course it doesn’t really matter in the long run if Amazon has shipped 12 million Kindles to date or 11.75 million or 12.3 million, but if you come up with a figure of fewer than 11.5 million you haven’t connected all the dots. The technical term is that they have shipped an even gazillion, and the Kindle’s sales velocity is not slowing down. Au contraire.

So what about my claim that readers downloaded 15 million Kindle books, 10 million of them paid, in the last week of 2010? Actually, those figures are conservative, despite the fact that my friend and colleague Morris Rosenthal (who brings a lot to the table where statistical estimates of Amazon sales are concerned) puts the figure at 3 to 3.5 million.

There are some important numbers that I cannot share here because they involve confidential information concerning my own sales figures and figures that have been shared confidentially with me by other authors and publishers, so let’s take a different approach. We’ll call it “common sense,” and there are several different ways we can come at this. Let’s start with something we got from the world of the Nook:

Barnes and Noble issued a press release on December 30 saying both that it had sold “millions of Nooks” so far and that customers had downloaded “nearly one million NOOKbooks purchased and downloaded on Christmas Day alone.” So we can extrapolate that on Christmas Day alone there was at least one ebook sold for every three Nooks.
We begin with the expectation that there were 11 million Kindles by December 25, but let’s say that 1 million of those were secondary Kindles, defunct Kindles, etc. On the other 10 million Kindles, assuming that Kindle owners are every bit the active readers that Nook owners appear to be, that would lead us to conclude that they downloaded 3.3 million Kindle books on Christmas Day alone.
Amazon stated earlier that about 20 percent of Kindle books are downloaded to Kindle apps on other devices. While Kindle device sales were certainly brisk ahead of Christmas, so were sales of all the other devices that run the Kindle purchasing and reading app. Thus it makes sense to stick with the 20 percent figure for Kindle purchases on other devices, and if we do the math, that would come to 825,000 Kindle books downloaded on other devices. Let’s round it down to 4 million. Yep, that’s 4 million Kindle books purchased and downloaded on Christmas Day.
While the annual rush period for print book publishers, retailers, and authors runs from Black Friday to Christmas Eve, it’s a very different calendar in the ebook business. Sales peak on Christmas Day and hold at very high levels through the first week of January as people open new ebook readers. On December 25, 2009, I sold over 1,700 copies of my bestselling ebook, which was more than 3 times my sales on any previous day. But that ebook’s daily sales did not slip below 1,000 copies a day on any of the next 10 days. That experience runs parallel to what I have witnessed but cannot disclose about dozens of other ebooks by other authors, so that I am confident that if Amazon sold 4 million Kindle books on Christmas Day, its sales for the following 6 days did not slip below 2 million copies a day, for a total of over 16 million Kindle books sold during the final week of 2010, and the figure is probably higher still by a million or more. Even if a third of the downloaded Kindle books were free, that still comes to over 10.5 million paid Kindle books.

Or here’s another way to look at it, and we start again with the 11 million Kindles figure as of Christmas morning:

That figure includes 4 million previous-generation Kindles that were shipped by July 2010 and another 2 million Kindle 3s that were shipped prior to Labor Day. Let’s say that no paid ebooks at all were purchased on a million of those units during the last week of 2010, and that only an average of 0.5 ebooks were purchased that week on the other 5 million units. So there’s a very conservative start, with 2.5 million paid ebooks sold on those ancient Kindles.
Then let’s take the 5 million new Kindles shipped since August. Let’s say, again, that a million of those weren’t used to download a single ebook for the final week of 2010. On the other 4 million, let’s hypothesize something like this:

1 million units downloaded 0.5 books each (0.5)

1 million units downloaded 1.0 books each (1.0)

1 million units downloaded 2.0 books each (2.0)

1 million units downloaded 3.0 books each (3.0)

That comes to 9 million paid ebooks loaded directly to Kindles, and that would suggest 2.25 million ebooks loaded to Kindle apps on other devices, for a total of 11.25 million.
Again, I believe these models and the results of 10.5 to 11.25 million paid Kindle ebook sales for the last week of 2010 are conservative, because, for one thing, I believe that about 3 million Kindles were opened for the first time on or about Christmas Day and it would confound my understanding of human nature to think that, in the hands of people who love to read, those newly unwrapped Kindles led to only 6 million ebooks downloaded. I just don’t see many of those folks saying, “I can’t wait until Monday morning so I can go to the public library to find something to read.”

We could go on and on, but I sense that your eyes have already long since glazed over. Again, it doesn’t really matter if there were 11.25 million paid Kindle books sold during the last week of 2010 or 9.7 million, but we can be quite sure that the figure was far north of 3.5 million.

I have no doubt that there will be a few publishing industry insiders who read this post and conclude once again that I’ve been drinking that Kindle Kool-Aid again, and that I am totally caught up in the hype of the so-called “Kindle revolution.” They will point out that everyone knows that ebook sales are really only 8 or 10 percent of the trade book market.

To which I say, yep, it’s apple-flavored Kool-Aid and, well, how do you like these apples? … as reported today by Bob Minzesheimer and Craig Wilson in their USA TODAY Book Buzz column:

E-books surge: Egads, as cartoon heroes would say. E-books had another great week after up to 5 million digital reading devices were unwrapped for the holidays. Last week, the e-book outsold the print version for 18 of the top 50 books on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list, including all three Stieg Larsson novels. The week before, 19 had higher e-book than print sales. That was the first time the top 50 list has had more than two titles in which the e-version outsold print.

Fighting Breast Cancer: A Special Edition of Beyond the Pink Moon, and a Commitment

July 7, 2019January 12, 2011 by Steve Windwalker

For those who remember Kindle Nation’s observance of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October — we published a Free Kindle Nation Shorts excerpt of Nikki Durlester’s memoir Beyond the Pink Moon on October 21 — we have an update. Nikki wrote in recently to express once again her gratitude to the citizens of Kindle Nation for their support, and to let us know that “On January 3rd a Special Edition of my book was released on Amazon including an Afterword by yours truly.” Here’s the link to the new edition:

Beyond the Pink Moon: A Memoir of Legacy, Loss and Survival (Special Edition)

by Nicki Boscia Durlester

Kindle Edition

List Price: $2.99

Buy Now

Hi Steve,

Hope all is well with you. Back on October 21, 2010 in observance of National Breast Cancer month you included an excerpt of my book, Beyond the Pink Moon, A Memoir of Legacy, Loss and Survival on Kindle Nation Daily. I am deeply grateful for your support.

Is there any chance of getting an honorable mention on your site again? Doing my best to sell one book/kindle at a time to make a small difference on the war against breast cancer.

Wishing you a New Year overflowing with good health and happiness.

All the best,

Nicki Boscia Durlester

www.beyondthepinkmoon.com

At Kindle Nation, we are committing to donate $100 to Susan G. Komen for the Cure plus an additional dollar for each reader who purchases Beyond the Pink Moon by clicking on this link. Here’s the set-up:

In this touching, frank and informative memoir, Nicki Boscia Durlester intimately chronicles her transformational journey after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Her story begins with her mother, who was diagnosed with the disease in 1962: a time when breast cancer was only discussed behind closed doors, and long before women took an active role in their diagnosis and treatment.

Nicki provides unique insight into being part of a large Italian-American family afflicted with the BRCA2 gene, and shares poignant stories about her mother and aunts who faced breast and ovarian cancer with extraordinary grace and courage.

Nicki writes candidly about her frustration in finding the right team of doctors as well as the highs and lows of her journey, sharing humor and heart along the way. She puts a human face on statistics ranking breast cancer as the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women in the United States.

This deeply moving story of legacy, loss and ultimately survival is told through the eyes of a daughter who shared an unbreakable bond with her mother. As she travels the scary, unpredictable road through her own diagnosis, treatment and recovery, Nicki discovers the most difficult challenge she faces becomes the most spiritually transcendent experience of her life.

This Special Edition of Beyond the Pink Moon includes an Afterword by the author.

A portion of the proceeds from sales of this book will be donated to breast cancer research.

About the Author

Nicki Boscia Durlester is originally from Easton, Pennsylvania. After graduating from college, she moved to Manhattan where she worked in banking. In 1995, she founded Durlester Consulting, an executive search practice. Headhunter by day, writer by night, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. She is a breast cancer survivor. This is her first book. http://www.beyondthepinkmoon.com/

Kindle Nation Daily Readers’ Alert for Saturday, May 22: The Editor’s Pick of the Week from Paul K. Biba at Teleread

August 17, 2011May 22, 2010 by KND

For all who enjoy keeping up with the Kindle revolution and its various offshoots and tributaries, here’s our weekly portion of the top posts and insights as chosen by colleague Paul K. Biba, editor over at Teleread:

Why should I provide my email address?

It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Magic Hour: A Novel by Kristin Hannah

Charlie Magus enters a fantastical world hidden deep in the forest… Do You Believe in Monsters? (Dark Circles Trilogy Book 2) by award-winning author Jim Melvin

A heart-wrenching story of a family torn apart because of a moment in time… The Ones We Leave Behind by Deanna Lynn Sletten

Dark family secrets have a way of finding their way to the light… She’s My Sister Complete Series Box Set, Books 1-10 by Jacie Middlemann

A thrilling private club romance that explores the limits of dominance and submission… The Dominant: A Brother’s Best Friend Complete Series by Sienna Snow

It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out Lakeside Cottage by Susan Wiggs

Samantha Whiskey has done it again! Don’t miss her steamy new #1 release! Gareth: A Billionaire’s Game Novel (Billionaire’s Game series Book 5) by Samantha Whiskey

Life isn’t easy for any eleven-year-old… Chloe the “Military Brat” (Cul-de-sac Kids Book 1) by A. L. Zeine

Think The West Wing done as an episode of The Twilight Zone… IMP: A Political Fantasia (Revised Edition) by Steven Paul Leiva

It’s Giveaway time! Get a free bonus entry into our monthly raffle and check out The Doctor’s Devotion (Eagle Point Emergency) by Cheryl Wyatt

Read the book that inspired the classic coming-of-age film: The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

Fans of Craig Johnson and CJ Box will love this outstanding first novel…. Frontier Justice: A Coogan Mystery by Michael Cardwell