#369: Titles don’t have copyrights.  That’s fortunate for Nora Roberts.  Her new book, The Collector, was released 4/15/2014.  An excerpt from my new book, The Collector, appeared in Aristocrats and Assassins, released 3/9/2014.  I imagine that such a short title has been used before, though, so both Nora and I would be in trouble if titles had copyrights.  Writers shouldn’t get the idea that it’s clever to reuse some famous author’s title just to come up in a search with them.  In my case, The Collector doubly matches what goes on in this mystery—I don’t know about Nora’s—and that’s what a writer should strive for.  A title should be a short blurb reflecting the content of the book.

#370: GoodBadBizarre review.  There’s a new review website, GoodBadBizarre.com.  The reviewer there just wrote an extensive in-depth review of my new thriller Aristocrats and Assassins.  As a reviewer, I can only admire the thoroughness.  This is the epitome of what we mean by an honest review, and I’m not saying that only because it was a positive review.  The condensed version posted on Amazon has five stars, but the reviewer still found negatives—the bad and bizarre.  More than anything else, though, I’m pleased with the way the reviewer got inside my head to determine what I was trying to do with A&A.  Eerie….

#371: Pseudonyms.  The person that runs GBB above uses a pen name.  I respect that.  In fact, I often wish I had used one from the get-go.  There are too many Steve Moores out there—just Google Steve Moore, Steven Moore, or Steven M. Moore (yeah, that’s one of my old math papers—really old!—from one of my previous lives). I should have picked something less common, like Deaver or Baldacci.  What’s your opinion on pseudonyms?  If you’re a reader, do you mind if an author uses one?  If you’re a writer, do you use one?

#372: Ebook lending.  I never have figured out how to donate ebooks to a public library.  The Big Five seem to have that all tied up, Joe Konrath’s initiative notwithstanding.  But would-be borrowers of ebooks, especially speed readers, don’t have to limit themselves to what the Big Five offers their public libraries—they certainly won’t find many new authors that way.  KDP Select’s Prime service allows lending for an annual fee and something modest for the author.

And now, if you distribute ebooks via Smashwords, a writer can lend books via the Scribd service (with similar financial constraints, as far as I can tell).  The latter also has an annual fee.  But think of it this way: instead of your public library paying for books and/or fees to the Big Five, you’re paying Amazon or Scribd and something to the author to borrow his books.  This would make Konrath’s plan a moot point except for the fact that it doesn’t support public libraries, a big negative.  It’s a partial solution, though, that will allow readers to read many more ebooks for the same amount of money.

#373: More about Amazon.  The bookseller also offers something new for authors—the ability to list series.  While I never sit down to write a series, they happen.  And, for some reason, readers love them, although they often suffer from “sequelitis” (a term I learned from the GBB reviewer noted above)—that is, either the reader is left hanging until the next installment, or the one he is reading requires too much background from previous installments.  (I dislike both situations.  FYI: All my books can stand alone.)  So, Amazon isn’t really helping authors; they’re bowing to readers’ preferences.  Readers want to know if a book is part of a series (FYI: I have three).  Now Amazon and the author can provide that information.

#374: My review policies.  They’re stated on my website, but I’ll restate them here.  If you want to read one of my ebooks for free, I can oblige if you write an honest review—on Amazon, Goodreads, wherever on the internet.  I fix a budget for each book for PR and marketing.  Obtaining reviews is just part of that because they let other readers know what’s good, bad, and, yes, bizarre about my book.  That budget is limited, of course, so first come, first serve.

#375: Want comments for your blog posts?  I had several computer problems recently.  Two were associated with WordPress, the software guts behind this blog and website.  Both seem solved, although not completely to my satisfaction.  Recent upgrades to WP did away with the icon that allowed the direct insertion from an MS Word file, for example.  Before that, even with older versions, I was having problems with disappearing comments, even my own (and I’m the administrator!).  Turns out those new upgrades had a stingier spam folder!

So, if you want comments to your blog posts, first make sure you check those comments labeled as spam.  All my lost comments were there, along with the usual junk corresponding to a wide variety of internet offers—some of them X-rated, I might add.  I always check the spam folder on my email; it never occurred to me to do it with WP because I never had problems before.

Another problem you might have is using those doodle things that prove the wannabe commenter is human.  Some are OK, but others require perfect vision.  You might be losing good comments that way.  Same for those websites that require a WP, Google+, or other account.  I no longer comment on Konrath’s blog, for example, because he eliminated the name/website-URL option.  Your potential commenters will probably think as I do: if it’s too hard for me to comment, I won’t even visit your website!

[My third problem, by the way, was the general one of learning to live with Win 8.1.  I wrote an entire blog post about that, I think.]

#376: What do big-time legacy authors have in common?  You might think the answer is full-page ads in the New York Times.  Or, commercial spots on major TV networks.  While some of the biggies enjoy those perks, those answers are trumped by ebook prices.  Big-time legacy authors have inflated ebook prices that are at almost the same level as their hardbound books.  If you see a legacy ebook for $5 or less, it’s because the book is an old one that has been reissued as an ebook (often with poor editing and formatting, I might add).  This isn’t the authors’ fault, of course, only the greedy legacy publishers’.  And they are greedy—they offer lower royalties to authors and terrible treatment to public libraries with respect to ebooks, among other sins, for example.

#377: Wasting time….  Writers often complain about how other activities steal their writing time.  Over the last two months, my major nemesis has been computers and the internet.  Adapting and rearranging Win 8.1 to suit my needs was a major hurdle.  WordPress did its part too to make my life miserable (see above).  But, before all that, my router started to take me offline, leaving me hanging with an unsent email or comment to someone’s blog post.  I’ve done some sleuthing since then.

First conclusion, Comcast doesn’t like me to be connected all the time if I’m not explicitly using their service—they have other local LANs to service and they’ve overextended—so they just cut me off, although I like to attend emails as they come in.  Nothing wrong with the router, you see.  This occurs more frequently when stay-at-home soccer moms or their children start their social networking, downloading and uploading graphics-intensive crap, or when whoever starts playing online video games, also with graphics-intensive junk.  By the way, I tested the upload/download speeds yesterday again.  SOS: about 1.5 Mbits/s on the upload and 5 on the download—and they advertise 50!

But that’s not all.  I visited a thread on the Comcast help forum yesterday to see if others had this same problem.  One woman was having a problem similar to mine.  In the forum thread corresponding to her complaint, one knowledgeable geek implied that Comcast is trying to beat the competition by increasing its number of WiFi hot spots…and they’re using unused spigots on customers’ routers to do this.  Please say it isn’t so, Comcast!  Besides sounding illegal as hell, doesn’t what’s mentioned above and this questionable practice (I guess I should say “alleged”?) throw a dash of cold water on their planned merger with TWC.  I’m ready to switch to FIOs, but I’ve heard they’re just as bad.

Any suggestions from my readers?  I don’t want to call Comcast.  Last time I did that, the customer service person (from Thailand, I think), took over the computer and did things to it that took me a week to undo.  The common denominator with all these ISPs is that the customer has no real recourse.  It’s like when you buy a new car and it turns out to be a lemon.  You still need the car to go to work!

In libris libertas….  

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2014 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.