It’s the wild west in e-publishing, and everyone is striving to find a niche. I know this, yet I was surprised today when an e-mail arrived this morning from XinXii.com asking me to post my e-book with them for sale in Germany.
What the heck? This is the equivalent of a European indie bookstore tracking me down and asking me to put my self-published novel on their shelf. That would never happen in traditional publishing.
At first I wondered if this was some weird kind of spam, so I googled them and came across a number of bloggers who’ve checked them out and say they’re legit. I also contacted my friend and fellow writer, Rebecca M. Senese, and she also said that as far as she could tell they were legit. I’m guessing that it’s no coincidence that I loaded Vampire Road to Smashwords yesterday and got the e-mail this morning. I suspect they’ve got some smart program monitoring the new releases and somehow mining e-mail addresses out of author websites.
So I’ve got another platform on the list to add my books to. Who knows, maybe my novels will take off in Germany. Due South was successful there, and I worked on Due South. Okay, that’s a crazy stretch, but my point is that you can never tell where the sales might come from, and the more places I have my novels for sale, the greater the chance that they’ll sell.
So I’m adding it to the list of platforms where I still have to upload Vampire Road and Summer of Bridges. I like this new e-pub world. Book retailers come looking for me.
