I know how much we all hate Amazon, boo, boo, boo! King of Refuse, King of Slime—King of Filth, Putrescence, Rubbish, and Muck, boo, boo!

Yes, boo, boo, but…

When Lamb came out, my nephew very sweetly mentioned that he’d bought it through Barnes and Noble (haha) because he wanted me to make some money on it (haHAha).

The truth, dear child (I said), is that Amazon actually does pay writers very competitively for their sales. Although we all want to support indie bookstores (or anyone who isn’t Amazon), in many cases, no one can produce, distribute, and sell books cheaper than the evil king of online retailing. It’s a shame, but there it is.

I get paid real money for print book sales through Amazon—but for every copy of Lamb sold through an indie bookstore, I actually lose a couple pennies.

This is partly my fault: I wanted to price the print book competitively at under $10, not knowing that with the steep 60% discount that indie bookstores get from my distributor, I am technically losing money after printing costs.

Also, bookstores have the option of returning unsold copies—I have to pay the cost of printing every book returned out of my own pocket, even though those books are destroyed rather than resold. Thankfully there have been very few of these, mainly because very few retailers will countenance purchasing and selling self-published books. My non-Amazon sales have been a bare fraction of the total.

Nevertheless, I get it. Despite a dollar/cents advantage to selling through Amazon, the damage they do to brick-and-mortar lives is immeasurable, and I’m very much looking forward to putting together a direct sales operation in the coming year.

In the meantime, however, I’m stuck with the beast, which includes their own “little” system of Amazon Best Sellers, a far cry from the New York Times or USA Today, but still something to talk about over dinner.

Which leads us to…

Free Books Tip #1

There’s a whole separate Best Seller list for free Amazon ebooks, and that’s where the secret to tons of great reads for ZERO $$ comes in.

Every Best Seller category has both the Top 100 Paid and the Top 100 Free, and you can download them all to your heart’s delight for absolutely nada, right here:

Amazon Top 100 Free Best Sellers

Check out the 31 categories on the left sidebar—each of these breaks down into even more categories, all with 100 Top Free Best Sellers. This amounts to thousands of free books you can read without paying Amazon a cent.

And you don’t have to own a Kindle to read Kindle ebooks—Download the Kindle app to your Mac, PC, phone, or tablet HERE, also completely free!

Free Books Tip #2

The other source of free ebooks is the BookBub Daily Deals newsletter.

If you’re not familiar, BookBub is the leading free service that helps readers discover new books by sending personalized, daily email newsletters featuring deals on discounted or free ebooks. Sign up, choose your preferred genres, and receive a daily email with a curated list of discounted and free ebooks from both mainstream and independent authors.

Sign up for yours and Follow MeFree Books Tip #3

You can win a Kindle to download all those free books, with 15 books already loaded (including Lamb), with this free Bargain Booksy Giveaway! Click to enter.

(Why not? Did I mention it’s FREE?)

Bargain Booksy is another newsletter with great eBook Deals all at or below $5.

PINK FRIDAY SALEThe ebook of Lamb is available for free today!

Now that Lamb can no longer be considered new, and sales have slowed, I’m taking advantage of Amazon’s Free Deals feature to refresh interest.

I would rather new people read it for free than not read it at all, especially since this is a long-game, and readers of future books will hopefully search my backlist and continue buying Lamb for years to come as my pipeline keeps pumping. It’s all about keeping momentum going, in all the ways we can.

And as of this morning, Lamb is the
#1 Free LGBTQ+ Literary Best Seller!

And #1 in Free Contemporary Literary Fiction, too! (Beating out George Elliot’s Middlemarch, no less…)

Yay! That’s hundreds of new readers for this bittersweet tale of gay boys trying to understand the world, themselves, and each other.

So if you haven’t already, now is a great time to grab it. Get it here:

FREE Lamb

And if you do pick it up to read *please* leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads.
It would also be super swell if you told a friend, and encouraged them to give it a try.

Thank you so much!