My Amazon Free July - Day 8 - A Test of Willpower

Today I had a test of willpower.

See, I'm writing a short story for two characters from my Stronghold Doms series and I wanted to re-read their book, Breaking the Chain, to make sure that I get them right. Well, when I went to read it on my kindle... it wasn't there.

Yeah, I know I'm the author and I have it on word, but I find things easier to read on my Kindle. I have all my books on there - or so I thought.

I did not have Breaking the Chain. I'm actually missing several of my Stronghold books on my Kindle.

My plan had been to read some of it during my lunch break.

I didn't bring my new Kobo to work, which *I thought* meant I wouldn't be able to read the book if I bought it anywhere other than Amazon.

I was so tempted to just buy it on Amazon. I even went to the page. Had my mouse hovering over the "one click" button.

It would be so easy to just buy it, boom it's on my Kindle, boom I can read it during lunch... and it's for my writing, right? Totally doesn't count... except that it does.

Literally the only thing that kept me from clicking the buy button was the fact that I'm documenting this journey on this blog. If I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would have just bought it on Amazon today and told myself that it was a 'one time cheat' because I needed to work on my story today and I wanted to be in the right head space.

Instead I made myself go to Smashwords and purchase it there. Which is when I remembered that Smashwords is having a July summer sale and it's cheaper there than anywhere else right now anyway. So I saved myself some money by going there.

The process to buy on Smashwords is a little more complicated than on Amazon or Kobo. It doesn't just magically show up on my device. But they do send a nice, handy email when a purchase is made with instructions on how to read the book on your computer or download it to your reading device. Is it as convenient as buying through Amazon or Kobo? No. but it was cheaper and means I'm not purchasing from Amazon or Walmart.

I didn't get to read it during lunch, but that's okay. It just set me back by a day.

Interestingly, it was actually easier to download the mobi file and email it to my Kindle than it was to use Kobo, which would have required me to find a USB cord.

So far I haven't used my Kobo much. And I still need to order a replacement cover for it. But I might wait on that because if I can keep ordering through Smashwords, etc and just put it all on my Kindle, I may end up returning the Kobo. I have until October to decide if I want to keep it or not, per the return policy, so I'm going to keep experimenting.

It might be far easier to not use Amazon with my Kindle than I thought possible.