Today I’m making time to get the Life of Death out through Smashwords and Drivethru. The KDP contract with Amazon has finally run out. Hoozah!

My feedback for the KDP program itself isn’t very good. First of all, I was forced to price The Life of Death at 2.99 or higher. I suppose if I were someone uber famous like Terry Pratchett that would have been alright. But I’m not, and that high of a price in this type of economy can’t have helped.

Secondly, if you plugged in the book’s name into their search engine it wouldn’t come up. Talk about a bum wrap. Even today after the book had time to get into their system, I couldn’t find it with a general search. Books with titles that weren’t even similar didn’t even come up. I had to put in the book’s title with my own name to have a chance of finding it – or simply go to my author page and look down the list. How can my book even sell if it isn’t going to come up in a search?

The only times my book sold or was downloaded was when I offered it for free through the KDP promotional program – in which I was only given about 3 days tops. It didn’t download that many, by the way. Less than 20.

So that in the end, Amazon held my book as a prisoner in their system for over 90 days while I champed at the bit waiting for the agreement to be up so that I could offer it somewhere else that might actually let it be seen by the general public.

My conclusion: KDP is not the great thing everyone thought it was and I’m very unlikely to do it again. Not even for Heavenly Bride, which will be releasing the next chapter soon and has an okay following over at Amazon. Mind you, most of the reviewers these days are people who don’t like it but I obviously can’t please anybody so won’t be trying too hard from here out. 🙂