The Never-ending FAQ: now on Kindle Unlimited

Welcome to this week’s installment of The Never-ending FAQ, the constantly evolving adjunct to our Submission Guidelines. If you have a question you’d like to ask about Stupefying Stories or Rampant Loon Press, feel free to post it as a comment here or to email it to our submissions address. I can’t guarantee we’ll post a public answer, but can promise every question we receive will be read and considered.

Before I delve into this week’s news, I want to comment on the above illustration. It’s a piece of stock art entitled, “soldier standing alone after the war in battlefield,” by the artist (studio?) Grandfailure, which I licensed from Adobe Stock for the glorious price of about two dollars. I’d originally bought it to use as the cover art for Mark Dreizig, an old novella of mine I keep meaning to re-release on Kindle, but that particular project keeps getting back-burnered.

Imagine my amusement, then, when I opened up Amazon Prime on my TV the other night and found this exact illustration, with a few other elements collaged in over the top, being used to promote some new “technology of war” program on Amazon Prime. Boy, the producers of that particular clip- and cheap CGI-show really went all out on producing expensive original content, didn’t they? I wonder if they used Amazon’s text-to-speech utility to produce the voice-over narration?

Well, I found it amusing, anyway…

The top news here this week is that, as laid out in the post “Doing the Mid-Year Pivot,” we have more of our books becoming FREE for Kindle Unlimited subscribers every day. As of this morning, the following titles are FREE for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. (Have I said FREE enough?)

• Stupefying Stories 23
  
  
• Stupefying Stories 24
  
  
• Stupefying Stories 25
  
  
• SHOWCASE #1
  
  
• Privateers of Mars
  
  
• The Book of Judith
  
  
• Jimi Plays Dead
  
  

If you haven’t been able to commit to buying any of these books, at least think about giving them a look, now that they’re FREE for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. If you like what you see, consider giving them a rating. A few comments in review would be even better, even if it’s only, “I liked this book.”

We don’t make much from Kindle Unlimited. As I’ve said many times before, being on KU cannibalizes the sales of short story collections. People tend to read only one or two stories in each book, and at the rate of slightly less than half a penny per page read, that does add up, but very slowly.

The entire objective in putting books out on KU, then, is to try to build awareness of Stupefying Stories as a brand, so that people will take a look at our new titles when they come out.

That’s why we’re here. To sell books. That’s our raison d'être in a nutshell. If we can’t get people interested in buying our books, nothing else we do matters.

And on that note, I have a bunch more questions about SHOWCASE and The Pete Wood Challenge in the mailbag, but I’m out of time to answer them right now. Back to work. On the next book.

Categories: The Never-ending FAQ