Planet iPad: iPad Nation Daily Free Book Alert for Monday, May 3: Six More Brand New iPad-Compatible Fiction Freebies -- Death of a Trophy Wife, The Killing Room, Mistress by Mistake, Secrets of the Tudor Court, Give Me Fever, Breach of Trust -- and Dozens More

Monday, May 3, 2010

iPad Nation Daily Free Book Alert for Monday, May 3: Six More Brand New iPad-Compatible Fiction Freebies -- Death of a Trophy Wife, The Killing Room, Mistress by Mistake, Secrets of the Tudor Court, Give Me Fever, Breach of Trust -- and Dozens More

The early May march of free iPad-compatible books for easy download continues with six new listings, most of them new releases, bringing the total for May to 11!

Meanwhile, check out our new listing of 30 months of month-by-month iPad-compatible ebook bestsellers here:

Kindle Store Bestsellers, Month-by-Month, for the First 30 Months

Death of a Trophy Wife, the eighth novel in Laura Levine's Jane Austen series, was released by Kensington Saturday as a $22 hardcover, discounted to $14.96 by Amazon, but it's free today in the Kindle Store.

The Killing Room by John Manning will be released as a $6.99 paperback tomorrow by Pinnacle Books, but it's free today in the Kindle Store.

Mistress By Mistake by Maggie Robinson was released by Kensington Saturday as a $14 paperback, discounted to $10.20 by Amazon, but it's free today in the Kindle Store.

D.L. Bogdan's Secrets of the Tudor Court was released by Kensington Saturday as a $15 paperback, discounted to $10.20 by Amazon, but it's free today in the Kindle Store.

Bestselling author Niobia Bryant's steamy novel Give Me Fever will be released as a $6.99 paperback tomorrow by Dafina Books, but it's free today in the Kindle Store.

Breach of Trust by DiAnn Mills, a popular 2009 release from Tyndale, is newly free in the Kindle Store.
Meanwhile....

"Free" in the Kindle Store refers, for now, to the price for download to US-based Kindles. Amazon adds charges for Kindles based beyond US borders.
Originally posted to iPad Nation Daily 5.3.2010.
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No Kindle Required: Whether you are a long-time Kindle owner or you've just acquired an iPad and are filling it with ebooks for the first time or you are reading Kindle books on a PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone or iPad Touch, you can get any and all of these titles absolutely free on your Kindle-compatible device of choice! Click here to download a free Kindle App for your device.

Here are our other free iPad-compatible promotional listings in the Kindle Store. updated as of May 3:

The Fence My Father Built by Linda S. Clare

Snow Melts in Spring by Deborah Vogts

Tender Graces by Kathryn Magendie

Forbidden: The Sacrifice (Book 1) by Samantha Sommers

Unlock the Hidden Job Market: 6 Steps to a Successful Job Search When Times Are Tough

by Martha I. Finney and Duncan Mathison

Swashbuckling Fantasy: 10 Thrilling Tales of Magical Adventure, a Sampler from Simon & Schuster

http://www.amazon.com/Swashbuckling-Fantasy-Thrilling-Adventure-ebook/dp/B003JTHWAK/?tag=ebest

Nothing's been ordinary in the world of ebooks lately, but ordinarily, lately, when you see the line "This price was set by the publisher" on a Kindle ebook's product page it is Amazon's way of letting us know that there's bad news adjacent to it in the form of one of those special "agency price-fixing model" prices. $12? $15? One never knows.

But here's a breath of fresh air! Big Six publisher Simon & Schuster has done some creative thinking about how to leverage the power of "free" in the Kindle Store and used the agency price-fixing model to try something new, with a substantial volume of freebies under the lusty title Swashbuckling Fantasy: 10 Thrilling Tales of Magical Adventure.

Just what do I mean by substantial?

First, these are 10 tales by 10 authors each with her own substantial oeuvre of fantasy titles already, so of course the authors and the publisher are hoping that this process will work for them and lead readers to their other work in the same way that we have seen work so effectively with our own Free Kindle Nation Shorts program. The authors represented are Jane Johnson, Linda BuckleyArcher, Scott Westerfeld, Kai Meyer, Alan Snow, Anne Ursu, Obert Skye, Margaret Peterson Haddix, D.J. MacHale and Holly Black.
Second, for those of you who, like me, take a look at file size and "number of locations" in an ebooks metadata and free sample before committing to a book, you'll recognize that the offering's file size of 1320 KB and its 3,936 "locations" spell a book of significant size and virtual weight.
Third, my quick perusal of the full text indicates that, unlike many "sampler" offerings, these 10 tales appear to be just that -- tales, self-contained short stories or novellas -- rather than frustrating tastes of an excerpted chapter or two.

So, bravo, Simon & Schuster! This is just the kind of thing that the big publishers should be doing to experiment with and begin to figure out the retail marketing power of distinctive pricing and free-to-paid linkages, so we've got your back if some of the other agency price-fixing model publishers whine that you are engaging in competitive and adversarial behavior.

Indeed, I am so pleased to see this little development that I am not going to make any snide cracks in which I wonder archly how you can afford to offer this sampler free of charge what with the storage and fulfillment costs of ebooks!