Everything changes

Every time you think you've got this indie publishing thing figured out, something changes. This article suggests that Amazon recently changed its algorithms, so although books used to get a big jump in sales after going free, that's no longer the case (and that's supported by a lot of tales of woe heard around Kindleboards). This makes Amazon's Select program significantly less useful than it was just a few months ago.

Meanwhile, iTunes has slowed down significantly in processing books. It used to be that when a book was approved for Smashword's premium program, it would hit iTunes a week or so later. No longer. It seems to be taking a month or more (and this is apparently true even if you upload directly to iTunes, so presumably the problem is not on Smashword's end). I've been waiting for iTunes to raise my prices for a month now so I can raise them on Amazon. But so far, no luck. I have two books I'm waiting on to be uploaded over there, too. It's unfortunate, because my other books were doing very well on iTunes for a while, and I wanted to keep my momentum going by getting a couple of new titles up. But I'll just have to wait on iTunes.