I am not impacted either way, at least for this. That said, here's my take on the matter.

I consider works that are written and put forth on the site to be the property of the author, free for them to modify, remove, add, or whatever floats their boat. They wrote it, they own it.

The dichotomy comes about when you look at _why_ the writing was published. Writing fiction requires an audience to be more than a form of mental masturabation. It feels good, but not as good as having participation. Once you've provided your work to someone else, they now have a stake in the work - at least as far as ego goes. Just look at the explosions that came about when Lucas decided to rework the special effects (and cuts) from the original Star Wars! Yes, it was his work, but millions of people had invested part of themselves into the existing story; for many, it was almost a mental rape of their childhood.

I see things as two sets of stories. You have the stories you give away, and the stories you sell. There _should_ be a difference between the two. (Value added). Some authors give part of the stories away, then the rest is only available online. Others give the first away for free, but the rest cost. Another group leaves the ones they originally wrote online, but publish heavily edited versions for pay. Yet one more group is pay first, then publishes for free later.

I don't spend much money on e-books, mainly because I see them as vastly overpriced. Before you gasp and scream about it, it's a reasonable complaint. There are four main costs to publishing a novel through a major publishing company (DAW, Baen, etc). That's Editing, Printing, Distribution, and Author. The Author is probably the smallest of that group. Ebooks remove the Printing and Distribution cost, so all you have left it Editing and Author. (It's not a complete removal, of course, but for the purposes of this discussion, I would say that a reduction of 95%+ is 'removed')

So, why should I _still_ pay $6.99 for a book that now has half the overhead that it used to? In fact, it has even -less- overhead, because in the SF/F publishing industry, the common sell through rate was 50%. (For those who aren't familiar with the term, because of the Great Depression, publishers allowed book stores to return unsold books. It's the only industry that works like that. So, if Michael's Books orders 4 books from the publisher, and sells two, then returns two to the publisher, that's a 50% sell through rate. Baen, through their Free Library, had doubled their sales, and halved their returns.)

Okay - so, with a sell through of 50%, that means that out of four books they printed, two would be sold, and they'd eat the other two. So those two $6.99 books had to absorb the cost of printing and distributing four. With electronic distribution and publishing (e-books), -That doesn't exist-. There's nothing other than greed that has been keeping them from selling the E-Books at 25% or 40% less than the cost of the dead tree edition.

Skipping over to the self-published, we (mostly) even remove the Editing cost out of that. So now the entire _cost_ for publishing is Author. Yes, you get charged a fee for every sale, but I haven't seen that Amazon, Smashwords, or Lulu _charge_ you for putting the book up on their site to sell. It's not an up front cost, but rather a recurring expense. (or even simply a difference between Gross and Net income.) I can't tell you how many times I've glanced at a self-published e-book, and simply turned it down because I'm not going to hand $5 to someone who isn't paying an editor or distributor, especially if I can't tell how well it's written. (I _hate_ those .99 prices. I loathe, despise, and detest them. Sell it at a dollar. It's a nice round number. If it's $19.99, it's $20. Period. I also wish the taxes were inside the price, so that what I see on the tag is what I pay)

Wow, quite a digression, but oh well.

Back to the issue at hand. If you decide that you MUST remove your works from the site, I would rather you/the author give a reasonable warning (a week, perhaps) to allow people to pull a copy for their own personal use. Not one of those "I'm removing it tomorrow, so grab it tonight" posts.(usually posted on a thursday afternoon, when people might not see it until Saturday or Monday)

What that does is say "Hey, if you really liked the work, but can't afford to go to Amazon and buy a copy to read four the fifth time, I'm not going to yank the rug out from under you."

Another option, and I'm not going to take the time to read the Amazon wording to see if it would pass, would be to hide those stories behind a paywall for donators only. If you're not actually paying for _that story_, it shouldn't hit the 'you provide it elsewhere for less', or the 'available elsewhere for free'.

Absolutely, however, do _not_ remove the story from your list! Just make an empty post that has the story name that explains that it's available elsewhere! Otherwise, people will be sitting in the corner gibbering, thinking that their mind is going. (Or, in my case, knowing that it's gone)

So, despite the incoherency, I hope this helps at least a little bit with your thinking. It's not to discourage removing from the site, it's to say pros and cons, and what people might think.

BW

You could take a look here, at my analysis of my first year of selling ebooks, for some data. The book I have available for free here has sold about as many copies as its sequel which is available only on Amazon and Smashwords, for instance. There would be nothing *wrong* with taking down books from BC to sell them on Amazon, but I'm not convinced it will really boost sales.

Also, whether you get double the royalties from being in Kindle Select depends on the territory where the book is sold and the price you're offering it at. In the territories where I've sold the most books, for books sold at $2.99, Amazon pays 70% whether you're in KS or not. (And Smashwords pays 74% or sometimes more, and doesn't require any exclusivity agreement.)

It would help if some authors who have tried selling their books both with Kindle Select and without it would share some comparative sales figures, so we'd know how much KS really boosts a book's sales. I'd be surprised if it's really enough to compensate for not being able to sell the book through other retailers.

I'd suggest that you take down one or more of your titles here, after giving readers fair warning (a week or more), and put those titles in KS, while offering others with the non-exclusive agreement. Then wait six months or a year and compare their sales, and decide what to do then. Maybe in the meanwhile you could offer those others in value-added form for sale on Smashwords as well as in basic form here and the same value-added form on the non-Select Kindle Store, and see how many you sell there. (Be sure to let your readers know that Smashwords pays higher royalties.)