Summer Shorts is only available on Amazon until (at least) March 8 2012.

I enrolled Summer Shorts in the new Kindle select program (KDP Select). The skinny on KDP Select is this: If you have Amazon Prime and you’re in the US, you can get Summer Shorts (as well as many other Kindle books) free. You have to enroll for 90 days at a time and your e-book can’t appear in any other store digital.

I wanted to see what I could do to increase sales and get the book in more people’s hands. Oddly enough, an exclusive deal with Amazon seems like the best choice. I sold over 2,000 books in December alone as a result of Amazon’s deals, which have all ended now. KDP Select uses an odd lottery system style of payments based on the number of people who borrow your book and the size of the kitty. Have to see if that price model makes any sense for Pilgrim’s Press, but here is the bigger carrot for aspiring publishers: KDP Select comes with 5 days of free promotion for each book in the program. I have never made as much money on any book as I did in the aftermath of Amazon’s free promotion. If you get your book into Amazon’s ranking system, you get it in front of millions of eyes. Once the free deal wore off, I coasted into more sales than ever before on all the platforms combined (B&N, Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, and Sony).

This seems like a good move for Pilgrim’s Press.

Instead of toying with prices on Smashwords and asking Amazon to price match, I can just give the book away for 5 days of my own choosing. I’m probably going to use the 5 days I have coming to me for Summer Shorts, to help me Summer Shorts 3, which I’m hard at work on.

I’m hoping you’ll like it, I think you will.