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A Special Christmas Gift

from Kindle Nation Daily to You:

Our 3 Most Recent and Up-to-Date Kindle Guides,

ABSOLUTELY FREE Dec. 25-26!

Every morning we publish a post to highlight several free books by authors who have already proven to be  favorites with Kindle Nation readers, but today we are devoting a special post to thanking our readers by sharing our three most recent and up-to-date Kindle guides absolutely free around the world December 25 and 26. Please grab them now if they look interesting to you, and please share this post with your Kindle-packing friends and loved ones while they are free!

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Updated December 2012: Covers All Current Kindle Fire Tablet Models Including the Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, Kindle Fire HD 8.9”, and Kindle Fire HD 8.9” 4G LTE

Finally, one user-friendly guide that covers every Kindle Fire tablet now on the market for 2013, including the Kindle Fire HD, in a single comprehensive volume chock full of tips, tricks, and links to unlock cool features, save you hundreds on Kindle content, and help you get the most out of your Kindle. Stephen Windwalker founded the popular Kindle Nation Daily community and has been helping Kindle owners get up to speed ever since his first Kindle guide was the #1 bestselling book in the entire Kindle store for 2008. Now he has teamed up with popular outdoors and travel author Bruce Grubbs to provide the most complete and up-to-date resource ever for Kindle owners.

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The Complete 2013 User’s Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle – E INK EDITION

by Bruce Grubbs, Stephen Windwalker
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Or currently FREE for Amazon Prime Members Via the Kindle Lending Library
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Updated December 2012: Covers All Current E Ink Kindles Including the Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Keyboard, and Kindle basic

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Kindle Fire Tips, Tricks and How-Tos

by April L. Hamilton, Stephen Windwalker
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Or currently FREE for Amazon Prime Members Via the Kindle Lending Library
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For Kindle Fire owners, here’s the perfect companion to your Kindle Fire, your user’s manual, and your copy of The Complete 2013 User’s Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle: Kindle Nation Daily’s Kindle Fire editor April Hamilton’s collection of her most helpful posts and articles to help you get the most out of your Kindle Fire tablet!

Today’s Kindle Daily Deal – Sunday, Nov. 6 – Save 75% on Maria Murnane’s romantic comedy that’s even better on Kindle, plus … the user-friendly guide that Kindle 3 and Kindle Keyboard owners have been waiting for! THE COMPLETE USER’S GUIDE TO THE AMAZING AMAZON KINDLE KEYBOARD by Bruce Grubbs and Stephen Windwalker – Just 99 Cents! (Today’s Sponsor)

But first, a word from today’s sponsor….

The Complete User’s Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle Keyboard

by Bruce Grubbs and Stephen Windwalker
by Bruce Grubbs and Stephen Windwalker
Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
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From popular outdoors author BruceGrubbs and bestselling Kindle author Stephen Windwalker, editor of the #1 blog and newsletter for Kindle owners at www.kindlenationdaily.com, the most complete and up-to-date resource yet on how to get the most out of your Kindle Keyboard (formerly known as the Kindle 3 or Kindle 3G). Published November 2011.

And now, for today only, the Kindle Daily Deal!

 

Maria Murnane’s romantic comedy reminds us that anything can look perfect on paper, but life doesn’t always turn out the way it was planned. Everyone has a bad date (or twelve), and eventually needs a best friend to tell them,”Honey, you are not alone.”
Yesterday’s Price: $7.99
Today’s Discount: $6.00
Kindle Daily Deal Price: $1.99 (75% off)

Windwalker Recovers

Greetings from Kindle Nation!

Just a quick note to let you know that I am at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, recovering from emergency surgery yesterday and about to be released. All is well and my hope is that within a few hours there will be little or no sign that I was ever away.

Cheers,

Steve Windwalker

When asking an author if her ebook has also been published as a "real" book will be like asking a musician if her album has been released in vinyl

I recently noticed an interesting Tweet that gets right to the heart of so many issues that authors are thinking about when we try to make decisions about publishing for the Kindle and other new technologies:

kaytee4ever: my gf thinks Kindle isn’t “realpublishing. Help! Know anyone who got a print deal after starting on Kindle?Any good arguments to tell her?

The Kindle is at the forefront of technological change that opens all kinds of new doors for authors, publishers, and anyone who likes to make reading an interactive experience. As with every medium, channel, or form of communication or commerce, there will be dreck (as there is plenty of dreck available from mainstream publishers).

But yes.

First, there have been people who got print deals after starting on Kindle, and here’s one of the most thoughtful and interesting analyses of the most recent big deal: A Kindle Success Story: How to Promote a Kindle Ebook

Second, you may not see it coming yet, but we are approaching a time when a confluence of sea changes in reading habits, consumer practices, and technology will mean that asking a Kindle book author if her book has also been published as a “real” book will be like asking a musician if her album has been released in vinyl. Serious authors from Joe Konrath to, well, me are already making a decent living from the Kindle editions of our books.

Third, all of this will work best when it works as it often works with indie music and indie movies, with readers lighting the way for other readers so that the feedback becomes the filter.

Fourth, just to take it back to the totally understandable vanity issues that are implicit in the original tweet, I hope you will enjoy the bit of dialogue included in my post The Romance of Submission, a chapter excerpted from my book Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex.

Update: In case you were wondering if the Boyd Morrison book described in the above-referenced post really existed, here’s proof:

Between Morrison, Amazon, and his new publisher, they have endeavored to wipe out all traces of the Kindle edition, but entering the ASIN from Amazon’s main page still gets you this search result that links to a 404-page ghost.

It’s the Real Thing: A Meditation on Immortality and Commerce

It’s the Real Thing

A Meditation on Immortality and Commerce

We play at it. We work at it.

It makes us laugh or weep.

It reveals to us

Something divine deep within us,

And something diabolical.

It is sex,

And it is what we build in the absence of sex.

It is beauty,

And it is in the creations that we imagine

As we run in sheer terror from our demons.

It is built upon physics and fart jokes.

It is spoken and written and painted and sung,

And that is just the tip of the ice sculpture.

It is in the sweet smell of morning bakeries,

the tangy tumult of teargassed rebels,

the rhythmic challenges of bass-thumping football paraders.

It is in what we proclaim and what we hide,

In what we share and what we charge for.

Is it still there, we wonder,

When, as we begin to create,

We sometimes allow ourselves the risky freedom

Of using our creations

To seduce,

To intimidate,

To mystify,

To pay for groceries,

To promote ourselves?

There, when we sense

Fuzzy boundaries between our creative energies

And our economic lives,

Our natural self-preserving careerism,

It all becomes so confusing.

After all, we are not only creators

But critics as well.

We are audience too:

We read,

We listen,

We meditate.

We see ourselves

Not only in the brightest mirrors

And stillest waters

But also in the terrifying imponderables

Of Rachmaninoff

And Dostoyevsky

And Van Gogh

And Danielle Steel.

We are audience,

We are organisms,

We have taken drug-addled journeys beyond,

On which we have seen past the seams

That seem to organize the universe,

Water from stone,

Being from sky,

Puppy from Citgo sign,

Sonnet from soccershot from tonguebath,

Sand from breath,

Shadow from nipple.

Our ability to act and to create in the present moment

Is betrayed by our tendency

To be neurotic

About anything related to the questions

Of who and where we will be tomorrow,

Of who will carry our lines

(Our soliloquies and our DNA)

One hundred years from now,

Of how much loot we will take with us

Or pass on.

Trained to think

That our own physical lives are finite,

We speculate about our souls,

But we hedge our spiritual bets

With obsessions about what we might create

That might live, in some sense, another day:

Live to be seen,

To be heard,

To be read,

To be discussed,

Or even to be bought and sold.

Jealously guarding our energies,

And our projected reputations,

We look all around us,

And especially within ourselves,

To judge what in our culture is worthy

Of our time and our reflection.

We are biased

In favor of anything that we create ourselves,

Of anything that comes from a friend

Or lover

Or family member,

Anything that has been created by a member of our tribe,

Our neighborhood,

Our college class,

Anything that seems to be about us,

Or someone that we know,

Or would like to know.

Will we settle for vicarious immortality:

The immortality of a fellow traveler?

We know what we like

We resist what we are told that we should like,

But we don’t want to miss out on anything cool,

Anything that might give us pleasure,

Anything that might lead

To a pleasant sexual connection,

Anything that we believe

We should be the first one in our group

To tell the others about.

Some days we rise in the morning

And wish that the world were limited

To our neighborhood:

That the only players

Were the garage band down the street

And the folksinger on the subway platform.

Then we log on

And connect

With a billion other provincials.

But time and again

We break through the barriers of parochialism and prejudice

And we find the most wondrous works of art,

The most compelling visual and textual and sensual meditations

On our nature,

On our plight,

On something mutually recognizable

In our common capacity for hallucination.

These moments of epiphany drive us

To play, to create,

To hunt down something archetypal

That we acknowledge but cannot quite remember in our past,

To set ourselves aflame

With the intensity of our intentions and our nightmares.

Out of all this comes drivel and dreck,

But also something more,

Something hopeful,

Something that once in a great while

We sense is the real thing.

How do we find the real thing?

How do we know when we have found it?

How do we know when we have made it?

There is no handbook for this moment,

Any more than there is a handbook for love.

(And yet there are so many for love!

Are they all impostors?)

Indeed it is a lot like love,

Or a lot like lust:

Who cares what the difference is,

Or if there is a difference?

Don’t we know it when we know it?

Can’t the quest for love or art,

In its purist moments,

Be polymorphously perverse,

Free of any hierarchy or compulsion to rate,

Yet still and all fixed only on what is beautiful,

On what is beautifully grotesque,

On what may give rise to beauty?

Looking for love,

Do we confine ourselves

To top ten lists of others’ favorites,

Or are we hotly vulnerable

To the taboo thrill

Of looking in all the wrong places?

The answer need not even be spoken,

Neither with love nor lust nor art,

Neither with what others create

Nor with what we make ourselves.

What we love,

What stirs us

To our highest and lowest moments,

Whether it involves

Sound or sight or words or ideas

Or the touch of another body,

Whether it is ornamented and accessorized

Or narrative or naked

Or humorous or monstrous,

Is nobody else’s call.

Can the entire process

Be reduced and distilled

To the synesthesia

That has been engineered in our genes

By generations of aromatic aphrodisiacs,

Cool, syncopated movie trailer themes,

And gender-transcendent, bare-bellied,

Masturbation-miming rockers?

We will love where they lead us,

What they make us think or feel,

Who they make us into,

Who they bring into our bedrooms:

What are you wearing?

What are you reading?

What’s on your night table next to the Chivas?

Wanna screw?

Maybe you will when I tell you my last book read!

Are you you, or “The Brand Called You?”

Is that a swoosh on your manuscript

Or are you just happy to see me?

We are the Indie Nation:

You and me and Bukowski and Eggers and Robert Redford.

I’ll tag your novel if you’ll buzz about my poem,

And Google will send us both a micro-payment.

Stephen Windwalker

Following a Successful Author’s Experience with New Publishing Technologies

Sunday afternoon

He calls it “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing“, but don’t think for a moment that Joe Konrath hasn’t been to Night School. As I have already discussed in the Kindle Nation newsletter, Joe is my eye idea of an author who is working hard at connecting with his base of readers. As a direct consequence, that base is expanding by leaps and bounds.

Most recently, due in part to some nice symbiosis between Joe and Kindle Nation, “his” novel Serial has soared to the #1 bestseller position, among 290,000 Kindle books, in the Kindle Store. (Why the quotation marks around the word “his”? Because Joe’s the human behind the Jack Kilborn pen name.)

Joe is also the successful author of the Jack Daniels suspense-with-an-edge series, hold the garnish and the little umbrella, that began with the 2004 publication of Whiskey Sour.

If you are an author or independent publisher who wants to learn how to work the new technologies to find your readers, here are two suggestions:

Try This! The Most Simple Way to Set and Keep a Monthly Budget for Your Kindle Purchases

If you are challenged by the need to keep your Kindle purchases on a monthly budget (or to do the same for a family member), why not try a Kindle Gift Certificate each month? Just click here to purchase your Kindle Gift Certificate in whatever amount suits your monthly budget amount, and you’ll know how much you have left to spend just by checking the amount that is open on your gift certificate account at any time during the month. And be sure to reward your frugality by allowing yourself roll-over Kindle dollars!