Good News on The Kindle Front!

It turns out that:

1. The Preview popup on the Kindle page does not work correctly (like Kindle) with footnotes.  You have to download the Kindle Previewer to actually make that work.

2. The reason that the Mobipocket Creator PRC output was not working with Kindle for PC is that I was setting the DRM encryption option (as you would use for something that you were going to send to the Kindle store).  This meant that Kindle for PC could not read the local PRC file, because it was encrypted.  (A better message for why it could not read it would have helped on this.)

I am now going to start working on another set of minor revisions to the book--updating the list of insane mass murderers, putting more recommendations for public policy changes in the last chapter, and generally looking over the text that I have not looked at for many months.  This will probably take a few weeks.

I need to contact my agent and see if there is anything on the horizon with a conventional book publisher, but my guess is that there is not.  I also need to locate some people with impressive affiliations to read the book and give me blurb material--a necessary item when marketing a book.

I also need to figure out the appropriate price point.  Some authors are finding that popular fiction at $0.99 sells extremely well in Kindle format--like hundreds of thousands of sales.  I do not expect this book to be anywhere that successful, so perhaps $1.99 might be a better choice.  I also need to figure out what other e-publishing formats are worth doing.

The goal was never to get rich off this book (although that isn't a bad thing, if it happens, of course), but to restart public debate about deinstitutionalization.  If I sell a thousand copies, and make a few hundred dollars--well, I would be very disappointed.  But I would rather have people read it and be influenced by it.