My short story, A Grave in cloudSpace, is now available on Smashwords for the low, low price of nothing. The price on Amazon remains $0.99, but it is possible that Amazon will “price match” the price down to free soon. You can help move this process along by clicking Amazon’s “tell us about a lower price” link and entering the Smashwords URL in their pop-up form.

Now, I don’t want to turn this blog into a series of treatises on e-book marketing (Lord knows there are enough of those already). But some may still be curious: why make a story free, with no intention of ever charging money for it again? To me it has to do with the current state of e-book pricing. The minimum price for any e-book on Amazon is $0.99, but for a story as short as Grave, I don’t believe that this is a good value for the consumer. This isn’t a knock on Amazon or anyone who posts their work there; it’s simply the reality of dealing with our entrenched, fee-based payment processing infrastructure that makes implementing true micro-transactions impossible.