#314: New books, old books….  This week you were able to read a pre-release excerpt from my new sci-fi thriller No Amber Waves of Grain, closing the “Clones and Mutants Series.”  My other new book out this fall is the speculative fiction anthology Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape—no excerpts here because you’ll find some of the stories in the “Steve’s Shorts” category of this blog (they’re re-edited and reformatted for you in the new ebook).  All my other books are still available as ebooks except Soldiers of God (someday I’ll get around to releasing a second edition of that because it’s the sequel of No Amber Waves of Grain and prequel to Survivors of the Chaos).  You can check out all the “old books” here.

#315: Interview preview.  For sci-fi fans, look for my interview of prolific sci-fi writer Sabrina Chase next Wednesday.  She gives candid answers to my interview questions.  If you’re an author who wants to be interviewed here, use my contact page and I’ll send you a list of questions.  Like my reviewing activity, these interviews are examples of my efforts to give something back to the community of indie writers and readers.  Of course, as readers, you can help indie writers by simply buying, reading, and reviewing our books.  I can’t over-emphasize this.  The DIY indie movement in writing needs your support!

#316: And you wonder why I don’t use Goodreads?  For readers, Goodreads seems to serve some mysterious purpose—maybe chest-thumping about how many books are read?  Long lists of books a reader “wants to read” are also found there.  C’mon!  Either these readers read faster than lightspeed or they think they’re going to live forever—neither of these seems very probable.  Maybe we should just chalk it up to wishful thinking, but I find the grandstanding a bit of a turn-off.

For reviewers and authors, Goodreads seems to serve no real purpose.  The site is now owned by Amazon.  Even before Amazon bought it, I never posted reviews there.  If you want to see my reviews, go to Bookpleasures (or Amazon or here, if the author gives his OK).  Why should I re-post somewhere else?  It smacks of academics who change a few sentences in a paper and send it off to another publication.  Maybe those googlebots count links to a book, but it all seems redundant and a waste of time.

For my books that are linked to my author profile (yes, I do have one there, because I could RSS my blog), there’s only one place that I can click on to post a new book, and I often forget where it is.  Completely user-unfriendly.  I wanted to add my 2013 books to my list.  It took me over an hour because I was trying to figure out how to make a correction: For some reason, if you only release ebooks and you list the ISBN, Goodreads can’t find the cover images.  Maybe that’s a “new feature” due to the Amazon buyout.  Who knows?  The Goodreads’ help desk, as usual, was worthless.*  At any rate, if you want to see my cover images, go to my website and/or the book’s page on Amazon.  Forget about Goodreads.

*Update: the Goodreads help desk woman was nice enough to point out a tactic that might work.  I’m trying to motivate myself to try it.  I received her message after venting by giving the help desk a one out of ten in a survey—well, they sent me the survey!  I was also informed that the nexus between Goodreads and Amazon hasn’t really solidified yet, but why not?  I think she means well, and the unfriendliness of the software is not her fault, of course—it’s the fault of the original programmers.  Like Facebook programmers and those for other social internet sites, they have no clue about how to make a user interface that doesn’t fall on its face with the addition of more and more patches to the old inner tube.  In the case of Goodreads, they only have to please readers and writers, but that includes most people I deal with.  ‘Nough venting for now….

In libris libertas….

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 6th, 2013 at 4:00 am and is filed under News and Notices from the Writing Trenches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.