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The Kindle Experiment

Out of curiosity, and/or in my capacity as a tech blogger, last month I decided to experiment with enrolling a couple of my previously published novels in Amazon's KDP Select program for 90 days. Books in KDP Select can be loaned for free to Amazon Prime members, and you can also make them free to purchase for 5 of those 90 days. The downside is that you agree to make your book digitally exclusive to the Kindle platform while it's part of KDP Select.

As is often the case, it's not clear how well this plays with the Creative Commons licensing for my novels; even if I agree to make my book exclusive to Kindle, other people can make it available for download for free. But I did remove the two books in question -- my thrillers Invisible Armies and Night of Knives -- from the other paid market where I've made them available, Apple's iBooks (where they've only sold a tiny handful anyway.)

Then, as an experiment, I made Invisible Armies free for a Wednesday-through-Friday period, and Night Of Knives free for Saturday-through-Monday. The results were striking. I thought each would maybe get 500 downloads. Instead, 9,108 copies of Invisible Armies were downloaded over that three-day period -- circa 1,000 on Wednesday, 3,000 on Thursday, and 5,000 on Friday. All that while just barely cracking the Top 40 of Amazon's Free On Kindle bestseller list. It turns out that people really like free stuff.

Well -- some people, and some free stuff. That's Amazon USA. Only 84 free copies of Invisible Armies were downloaded on Amazon UK over that time. Then, over the next three days, Night of Knives was downloaded a relatively-mere 1509 times in the USA, more than I expected but far fewer than Invisible Armies, and 75 times in the UK. (It's perhaps worth noting that the dead-tree version of Invisible Armies got far more of a publisher push and sold much better in the UK than in the US, while Night of Knives wasn't published in the US at all, so I would have expected both to do disproportionally well with the UK audience.)

Results? About 25 extra sales per book, relative to my usual monthly baseline, and about 40 library loans so far. Shrug. Still, it's always nice to have another 5,000 readers, assuming that approximately half the people who downloaded the free books will actually start to read them.

Conclusions?

• If you make your book available to Kindle readers for free, a surprising number of people will download it.
• However, that number is highly variable, even between similar books by the same author.
• Based on this very limited data set, a midweek release is better than a weekend release.
• Free downloads will enormously outnumber subsequent sales or loans.
  
• The Kindle ecosystem is vastly more popular in America than in the UK.

A theory of development

Start with the default state of humankind: poverty and insecurity¹. In the cities, this means slums: tin-roofed shacks jammed up against one another, sometimes for miles; shit-strewn streets; spaghetti tangles of pirated power or local generators, if any; sardine-packed minibus taxis; unemployment; gangs; hardly any health care.

Things don't seem so bad in rural areas, except you're easily victimized by disease, drought, politics, and, more insidiously, population growth: the land that fed your ancestors enough that they grew and multiplied isn't sufficient to feed your family, because you're more numerous than they were. This would be much less of an issue with better inputs - seeds, fertilizer, etc. - but we're talking subsistence farming here.

Development. Meaning what? Not GDP growth, necessarily. The short version is, things getting better. Real health care. Real education. Work that turns into a job that turns into a career. Things built to a higher standard than "shambles that barely work." Enterprises that pay for themselves and grow without external money.

Development starts with little droplets, scattered around the city. A government ministry. A good school funded with remittance money. A four-star hotel. A port. A power plant. When you pass through the gates and walls around these places - and they will be gated and walled - you immediately get a sense that you're in a better place. Maybe the paint isn't fresh, but at least the trash is collected, and the water runs. Most of the people here are working; they may not be middle-class by Western standards, but they have jobs, plans, prospects. These places are lonely little islands in a vast sea of grinding, hopeless poverty.

Over time, some new droplets appear, and the old ones slowly iterate, improve, rise higher above the sea. (Unless it's a failed state; in which case they sink. Fortunately such are rare.) The little islands become an archipelago. They cluster together like constellations, near tourist attractions, parliaments, hills with fresh air. A few of them may even merge together into a larger island.

And then something else happens, something interesting and surprising; on the outskirts of the city, a much larger island rises. Untrammeled by history and existing claims and buildings, a semi-distant suburb almost invariably becomes the most agreeable and most progressive zone of a developing city. Miraflores in Lima, or Gurgaon in Delhi, or (I understand - haven't been myself) the Lekki Peninsula in Lagos.

Time passes. And then the inner-city islands begin to connect. Channels and corridors development reach out to one another, and form a network. Beijing was like this five years ago, with grand main boulevards but considerably more downscale neighbourhoods and hutongs behind them. (Think also of Baron Haussman's construction of Paris's boulevards.)

From there it's a not-so-simple matter of draining the sea. But the next step, I think, is the building of steps, ramps, and canals, so that those who live in the sea and those who live in the islands can begin to interpenetrate: because up to this stage, one of the hallmarks of almost all development are the walls, gates, and guards meant to keep the poor out. It's not until now that the rich and poor begin to mingle a little. On metro systems that get you there faster than a car will. In shopping areas and movie theatres where anyone and everyone goes. It's a long, slow process; but then, no one ever said that draining the sea would be easy.

¹You can argue that external forces eg colonialization/globalization perpetuate this - though recent evidence is pretty strongly against you re the latter - but it's pretty silly to claim, as some do, that they cause it. That may be true in some specific instances, but in general, it's just a basic zero-sum fallacy.

Official trip highlights

I maintain a Flickr set of all my very bestest pictures, and these are its entries from my latest wanderings. Click through to view large versions.

(Apologies for the repetition from previous posts, but it's handy to have 'em all in one place.) Spooky monk, Lalibela, Ethiopia. Wall, Axum, Ethiopia. Sign, Djibouti. Salt pearls, Djibouti. Salt field and volcanoes, Djibouti. Salt lake, Djibouti. Tree in lava field, Djibouti. Pigeons, Delhi. The Jantar Mantar, Delhi. Pines, Van Vihar, Manali, India. The Spiti Valley, India. Himalayan zoom, India. Himalayan desert, India. Stok La, Ladakh, India. Sunset, Ladakh, India. Marine Drive, Mumbai.

Return of the native

I am back! In Toronto. And full of the usual returned-traveller's appreciation of all the little things, such as Starbucks, air-conditioning, reliably heated & drinkable water, and especially, peace & quiet. India (outside of the Himalaya) is a very noisy place.

Meanwhile, I've been reaping some egoboo benefits of my TechCrunch gig: in the last few days I have popped up at The Times of India, The Atlantic, CNN, The Week, TC sister/mother publication The Huffington Post, Newsweek Polska, and the Spanish-language eNewspaper.

I leave you with a few photo highlights of this trip. 'Twas quite a good trip. I did not get to South Sudan, but that didn't seem fated to be, and Djibouti was a sufficiently weird substitute. I did not get to Srinagar, but between the monsoon and a pilgrimage of tens of thousands that was going on, all the transport links would have been flooded, so that's probably for the best. I did get to hike up to an ancient Ethiopian monastery carved out of raw stone, tour the station (and see the cable) that carries all of East Africa's Internet, dive in the Red Sea with the Special Forces, visit the world's third-deepest depression, ride the world's third-highest drivable road, drink where Watson & Crick drank, attend a wedding in a castle, and spend several days trekking in the Himalaya. There are worse ways to spend a couple of months.

Indiapix I

As threatened


In the pines.


India in miniature.


The last village.


The Jantar Mantar.


Jantar Mantar detail.


Gurgaon, from MG Road Metro.


They don't call it "weed" for nothin'.


The first snowcapped mountains.


In case you didn't notice.


Fallingwater.


Cobra temple.


Onwards and upwards.


Under construction.

kullu valley blues

Uh-oh. I fear I'm out of shape. Well, I'm not as out of shape as I first feared I was, but I'm still out of shape. We went on a day hike today, and after a mere half an hour of steep ascents, I was seriously dogging it. (M., being ferociously fit, barely even broke a sweat.) We're only 2000m up, and it's our third day here, so it shouldn't be altitude. Fortunately, I seemed to kick it up another gear for the rest of the day, and/or the ascents were lower-grade. I think basically my aerobic fitness is OK, but my anaerobic fitness has gone all to hell. I hope Phil-my-Montreal-boxing-coach never reads this. He'd be so disappointed.

So where was I? Oh yes. Leaving Chandigarh, and ascending into the mountains. We felt them long before we saw them, swaying back and forth with every switchback, as we passed Tata and Ashok Leyland trucks - some driving by night, many more parked beside the road. The only road to Manali and thence Leh, National Highway 21, is not a route for the faint of heart or the low of skill. It climbs and climbs, paralleling and traversing many a sheer precipice and roaring river, and at its best it's two unmarked lanes. Plus there are all the more usual problems of driving in India - the endless traffic, and the endless chaos, and the endless noise as everyone leans on their horn to survive.

Eventually the dark turned to light, though more slowly in normal, as we were driving along a steep gorge with 500-foot walls on either side. The road wound past roadside diners and through fair-size towns overlooking the river whose course we were following (and whose name I never got, though it wouldn't be hard to look up.) Scattered houses and a few temples somehow perched on the other side of the gorge, reached by bridges that were sometimes real bridges and sometimes little more than a pole and two ropes to hang on to while you walk across it. The gorge was lush, overgrown, intensely green. At first a few palm trees still hung on, down at its base, but as we climbed they vanished.

Then, suddenly, a tunnel - a tunnel a full three kilometres long, no less, vast and cavernous - and we emerged into the wide Kullu Valley, at the other end of which I sit and type. It too is a green and fertile land. Apple trees grow everywhere, surrounded by corn. Enormous pines reach a hundred feet or more towards the sky. The road up the valley is bleak and unattractive, and even the attempts at pleasantry by the many hotels and motels (the Kullu Valley received 2 million tourists lat year, 80% of them domestic) do little to leaven its oppressive industrial feel; but everywhere else is green and glorious.

And then, finally, Manali; which is to say, its mud-pit of a bus stand, and overpopulated, overtrafficked streets. The first impression is not exactly welcoming. But the touts weren't too bad, and while my overall impression of the town itself has remained stuck at "dungheap", there are many consolations. There's an absolutely wonderful park on one end of town, a huge and downright mystical cathedral of pines; there's only one official entrance, but I have discovered various other unofficial ones, some of which lead through fields of wild marijuana. Our hotel is a little bit away from the worst of the noise and the chaos. The people here are, by and large, very nice. And Old Manali, on the other end of the park, is a classic hippie-backpacker-oasis a la Yangshuo in China, or Caye Caulker in Belize, or (once upon a time) the Vumba in Zimbabwe, albeit largely populated by that distinctly Indian mix of gorgeous Israeli girls and sketchy Israeli guys. (Apparently spending a few months in India after completing one's Israeli military service is Israel's gap-year equivalent, so the Israelis here tend to be young, extremely fit, and more than a little surly.)

Also, did I mention that there are mountains? There are mountains, green and stark in the foreground, snow-capped in the distance. Today we hiked to an enormous and beautiful waterfall - the "holy place" sign next to it was really quite unnecessary - and (once I caught my breath) back down, and across the Beas River, and through three small villages, all of which are booming: new houses, new cars, new construction, new satellite dishes, the works. Between the cash crops, the tourism, the overall development of the region, and India's more generalized economic boom, Manali seems to be doing quite well.

As further evidence, I give you the ski resort we came across at the very end of today's trek, which in summer is a paragliding / quad-bike / pony-ride / various-other-amusements park, densely populated with domestic tourists. Near it is a sign that proudly proclaims the US$365 million tunnel that will replace the Rohtang Pass we intend to traverse on Tuesday, which will open up an entire new region to year-round access. I'm kinda glad I got here early enough to do it the old-fashioned altitude-sickness way. Kids today. Sheesh.

Pictures to come -