#227:  New sci-fi thriller goes into final editing.  The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, a novel starring DHS agent Ashley Scott, is in its final editing stages.  I hope to release it sometime in this first quarter of 2013.  Readers will recall that Agent Scott is a friend of NYPD detectives Chen and Castilblanco, but she has been hounding me to feature her in her very own novel.  As the title hints, this one is related to Boomers dealing with retirement.  I hope your retirements will be more peaceful and quiet than Virginia’s!

The story is set in the tri-state area, mostly eastern New Jersey.  I wrote most of the book before hurricane Sandy, so I had to make some fast changes to include references to that once-in-a-hundred-years event.  One of the subthemes is gun control.  Some of that material reflected a personal worry that became reality with the Newtown massacre.  How can I write about guns and death and be for gun control?  Ask a cop, especially first responders in Newtown.  They often live in real life events similar to what I write about in fiction.  Most cops are still for stricter gun controls.  Maybe they’ve seen too many innocent victims?

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How appropriate!  It snowed in the Middle East.  If that’s not symbolic of the Arab spring turning to the Arab winter, I don’t know what is.  Even if we don’t have confidence in nuclear power, solar energy, or natural gas (especially fracking), it’s imperative that the U.S. become energy independent in order to avoid all the turmoil in that part of the world.  The longer I live, the more I believe that the Middle East is a hopeless case, a patient who is terminally ill and better off dead.  If R.I.P. has a political meaning, we should apply it to these troubled lands.  The world needs to move on.

Ben Ghazi showed that Libyans can’t control their own people—or al Qaeda has corrupted the political process.  We now find out that Mohamed Morsi, current President of Egypt and wannabe dictator, is on record saying three years ago that Israelis are “blood-suckers, who attack Palestinians” and “warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”  Maybe he was just playing to his Islamic fundamentalist base, but this doesn’t bode well for future peace between Egypt and Israel.

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#224: Amazon’s new review policy.  I thought I’d see more action here.  Several writers have told me that they’ve lost reviews too—good legitimate reviews, not from family and friends.  My lost reviews correspond to writers reviewing and independent reviewers from online reviewing sites.  I guess Amazon can do what they want and the rest of the world caves.  I’ll have to admit—I don’t know what I can do about it either.

One irony here occurs when Amazon asks ME to review one of my OWN BOOKS.  I use Amazon’s easy gifting service to provide books for reviewers—and they count as book sales, of course.  But you’d think that they’d know enough not to ask the author of the book for a review.  Left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing?

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September 11, 1973, a tragic day for Chile.  A CIA-engineered coup brought Augusto Pinochet to power.  Following in the steps of Nazi-lover Stroessner in Paraguay and blazing trails for Argentina’s military junta, the Generalisimo was evil incarnate.  His and his evil twins’ fascism in southern South America set a new standard for torture and killing.  If there is a Catholic hell, he is probably the Devil’s right-hand man.  As in Argentina, everyone that crossed his regime was declared a communist or Jewish terrorist, brought up before a military tribunal, if they were lucky, tortured in jail, and dumped into mass graves with other bullet-riddled corpses.

During most of the second half of the 20^th century, anti-communist paranoia reigned supreme in Washington D.C.  Starting with McCarthy, many politicians made their names by jumping on the anti-communist bandwagon.  Nixon made his name in trumped-up proceedings in Congress, playing his anti-pinko cards just right to eventually become president.  The Dulles brothers ruined the Middle East for years to come.  Reagan became famous by running actors out of the country and nearly destroying the University of California.  If you questioned American foreign policy, you were declared a puppet of Moscow or Peking.  Many progressives, myself included, learned to keep mouths shut and eyes watchful.  Anyone to the left of the Rotary Club was a bleeding-heart pinko communist.

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There are serious book reviewers.  There are jerks who simply give a book a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, as if a book were something like a pair of boots from L. L. Bean.  There’s everything in between.  When I ask, who qualifies as a reviewer, I really mean, who qualifies as a serious reviewer?

I’m talking about reviewing fiction.  Memoirs (too often close to fiction?), history, biography, technical, scientific, etc. are less likely to be questionable as long as the author of the review is objective.  Recently, a history of Jefferson was questionable and reviewers said so—some of those reviews might have been a bit subjective.  On the other hand, it’s hard to see how a book on quantum mechanics can be controversial (surprise, surprise! it can be, due to the philosophical underpinnings).

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[Note from Steve: Readers and writers here have the opportunity to meet Jim Kukral.  He has written eight books and his Author Marketing Club (AMC)  is a free resource for authors and readers to learn about book marketing and discover new books. Over 7500 people have connected with the club. You can join for free.  There are many ways his website can help you find your way around the complicated landscape of digital publishing.  I don’t usually write posts that might be construed as commercial, but Jim is also an author, so he knows a lot about the writing business.  Enjoy!]

Author’s bio: Jim Kukral is a 16-year Internet marketing professional who was recently named by Dun & Bradstreet as one of “The Most Influential Small Business People on Twitter.” Jim also serves as a Program Faculty Member for the University of San Francisco’s Internet Marketing Program where he teaches classes to students around the globe on the topics of internet marketing, web monetization and social media. In addition, SmallBizTrends.com chose Jim as one of 100 top small business influencers online.

Steve: Where do you think publishing is going?  Is traditional publishing doomed?  Are eBooks here to stay?

Jim: Traditional publishing will survive, but in a new form. The business model of “paper” is obviously going to go away. Not completely, but let’s be honest, the world is going digital. Yes, there will still be paper books, but far fewer than in the past. Traditional publishers will focus on books they know will sell and stop taking any chances on new authors. New authors will come from the indie crowd. They’ll prove themselves first, then the big publishers will try to swoop in and buy them up.

S: What about bookstores?  Libraries?  Can they keep up with the changing times?

J: I love the line from the Social Network movie. I’m paraphrasing here, where the character Shawn, played by Justin Timberlake, who was the Napster guy, says something like, “Are you interested in buying a Tower Records franchise today?” Same point here. Are you interested in buying a Barnes and Noble franchise today? Paper is on the way out. Libraries are already exploring e-lending programs and it’s great!

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Don’t get me wrong—I know Amazon is a business.  The management there has adopted policies they think will maximize their profits.  My complaint is that they also pretend they are helping indie publishers and indie authors.  I’m not saying that doesn’t happen some of the time, but they are certainly inconsistent.  They adapt policies and inconsistently apply them.  Reviews are a case in point, as we saw in Part One.

There is another aspect of their review policy—past, present, but hopefully not future—that is detrimental to all authors: treating books as just as another product, like shoes, clothing, appliances, toys, and so forth.  By doing so, a reviewer of a book becomes a reviewer of a product—all too often, a book reviewer also reviews other products, in fact, right on Amazon.  For product reviews, the buyer just looks at positives and negatives, perhaps disregarding the latter, if it seems to be just sour grapes or an isolated incident (yet, Amazon ranks that negative review higher than a positive one).

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If you’re looking for “Flight from the Mother World,” this is now a teaser.  The full novella can be found in my new anthology Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, available as an eBook on Amazon.

During my content editing of Sing a Samba Galactica, released last year, I concluded that the Old Storyteller’s tale of the Rangers’ flight from Mother World took away some of our ET friends’ aura of mystery, made the novel a wee bit too long, and would distract the reader from the main story arc.

The Old Storyteller’s original name was Deep Diver.  It turns out she had a very interesting life on Mother World.  This is an introduction to the story of how she came to lead the expedition to New Haven.  You will get to know the Rangers’ culture better in a very direct fashion—it had some problems.  You will also have another encounter with the Tali, albeit indirectly.  Please see the anthology to read more.

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[Note: This is the first post in a three-part series.  Enjoy!]

Amazon has gone over the top with their change in book review policy.  They have responded to the egregious practice where some authors ask family members and friends to write glowing reviews of their books.  These reviews often are little more than attempts to stuff the ballot box because Amazon’s algorithm counts positive reviews.  This practice, of course, offers no real service to readers and hurts authors who receive few but thoughtful reviews.  Amazon’s first attempt to correct this was to weigh negative reviews more than positive ones.  Now they’ve gone over the top.

Amazon, of course, caused its own problem.  It’s the biggest bookseller in the world, I suppose, so the ranking of a book on Amazon is a big deal.  It’s inevitable that some authors will try shenanigans to game the system.  There are two opinions here:  (1) That’s OK, because Amazon forces authors to do this; and (2) it’s morally ambiguous at best.  I suppose there’s a whole spectrum of thought between those extremes.  Joe Konrath, for example, one of the champions of self-publishing and now eBook publishing, has said he sees no problem with such chicanery (this is from the NY Times article mentioned below, so I won’t use quotes—I’m surprised Joe would say such a thing).  I tend to the second extreme.  You’ll find I don’t have many reviews (maybe a consequence of being too moral?).

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The massacre of twenty children and eight adults (teachers, the mother of the shooter, and the shooter) is a tragedy.  In other similar tragedies, gun enthusiasts have warned us about getting too emotional and tampering with a fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment…so they say.  The NRA, well-heeled lobbyist organization that it is, often leads the charge.  “Not over my dead body….”  Yes, I’m emotional.  This time the stats are against the NRA.  Twenty children.  I repeat: twenty little, helpless, and defenseless children.

The “fundamental right” these right-wing gun nuts talk about is the “right to bear arms.”  The Second Amendment says:  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  That opening phrase is key:  “A well regulated Militia….”  The whole amendment has become twisted to the point where certain states have returned to the days of Dodge City and allow concealed carry “for protection,” meaning that people like George Zimmerman can shoot an unarmed black kid and claim self-defense.  It has become twisted to the point where anyone can go to a gun show and arm themselves better than SWAT members on a police force, as seen a few years back in an armed robbery in LA (a recent news report on ABC news quoted an FBI statistic: they performed background checks and registered more than 150,000 guns that were sold on Black Friday this year—c’mon people, that’s paranoid, perverse, and obscene!).

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