My novel THE WALK, originally published by Five Star in the early 2000s, was a critical success but a commercial failure that went quickly out of print. I republished it on the Kindle in 2009 and it has become a bestseller, selling over a hundred thousand copies. As recently as last month, it was #1 again on Amazon. Today, Amazon is featuring the book in their announcement of the new Amazon Matchbook program.
Today, Amazon launched Kindle MatchBook, a new benefit that gives customers the option to buy—for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free—the Kindle edition of print books they have purchased new from Amazon. Over 70,000 books are enrolled in Kindle MatchBook, with more being added every day. Now customers can visit www.amazon.com/kindlematchbook to see all of their print books that are eligible for the Kindle MatchBook edition. Customers can also see when a book is eligible for Kindle MatchBook on the book’s detail page.
The program was announced on September 3 with over 10,000 titles. Since then, thousands of popular books likeHeaven is for Real, The Things They Carried and The Way of Kings have been added from major publishers such as HarperCollins, Macmillan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Amazon Publishing, Wiley, Chronicle Books, and Marvel, as well as thousands of titles from Kindle Direct Publishing authors like The Walk by Lee Goldberg and Falling Into You byJasinda Wilder.
“It’s been great to see the positive response to MatchBook from both readers and publishers,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. “MatchBook enrollment has grown from 10,000 to 70,000 titles in just a few weeks and we expect it will keep expanding rapidly in the months ahead.”
Wow, that’s great. Out of the books I’ve read of yours, Lee, the three that stick with me the most are “My Gun Has Bullets,” “King City” and “The Walk.” They seem the ‘most real’ as contrasted with ‘the most fully realized.’ Your Monk books are ‘fully realized’ but these three seem to come from a deeper place, somehow. Of these three, “The Walk” has the simplest premise, the most straight-forward plot and the clearest stakes in each episode. It also has an ending that satisfies the most just by being simple. “King City” was just that much more complicated. And “My Gun Has Bullets” was a bit more complicated, although all three had simple, obvious conflicts which worked. Maybe simple is what you do best.