News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #89…
Item. 99 Cent Sale! These will occur periodically through the rest of 2015, even though you almost have to be a member of the Bolshoi to dance through the 90-day Kindle Select periods. (Don’t retain that image of me in a tutu, please! Probably not quite as bad as me in a speedo, because there’s music associated, but people receive enough bad images for a lifetime from reality shows.) The first deal occurs for Angels Need Not Apply, #2 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series”; it will be on sale for $0.99 on Amazon June 1-7. The elevator pitch: Al Qaeda, a drug cartel, and neo-Nazis combine forces to create mayhem!
Item. Bookbub. Many authors recommend it, including Joe Konrath. I’m setting up some Kindle Countdown deals (see above), so I thought I’d try it. Yeah, I know that was illogical. I’d be reducing my ebook’s price and paying Bookbub dearly to tell readers about it. I guess those recommending authors are one-percenters who have the money to burn? Bookbub’s business model also charges more for popular genres too. Between paying Bookbub for advertising and Kirkus for reviews, most indies with my number of ebooks would go broke. $20K isn’t chump change! Pox on Bookbub’s house. Besides this newsletter, I’ll stick with Goodreads, thank you—it’ free, and I can directly reach out to readers.
Item. Goodreads. Lord knows if I’m using it correctly, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. The basic problem I see, beyond an interface that’s far from user friendly, is that it’s primarily for readers with author services tacked on. Being primarily for readers is good, by the way: First, that makes it a better social media site than Facebook. FB purposely limits your author fan page posts to 1 to 5% of FB members, and too many of those people aren’t readers. Second, I read a lot more than I write, so I want to hang online with readers. Third, as an author, I want to reach out to people who are readers and are potentially interested in my ebooks. There are millions of readers on Goodreads.
The tacked-on author services are challenging and a problem, though. I have yet to see a website with a higher learning curve, and that curve is steeper for authors. I’ve learned to pay attention to the fine print (it might point to a link I really could use); to accept that Goodreads doesn’t know about all my ebooks even though they’re on Amazon; and to be willing to commit to things before I even know what they are. It’s fun, though, and beats FB and Twitter any day.
Item. Pricing. Recently I saw the Swedish movie The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Jumped out the Window and Disappeared (see the review today in a separate post), so I thought I’d check out the ebook again to see if the price was lowered. Maybe. I couldn’t remember the original price when I first looked, but $9.99 still seems too expensive. Traditionally published authors just can’t compete with indie authors who publish great ebooks at reasonable prices. Am I missing out on ebooks from those Big Five authors like Baldacci, Preston and Child, Deaver, etc? Nope. I can catch them when their ebooks go on sale. If they don’t, no problem. I have plenty of great indie ebooks to read, most priced from $0.99 to $4.99. My rule now is NEVER pay more than $5 for an ebook.
Item. Ebook formats. People have asked me for PDFs. I don’t like to give those out because they can be copied and/or hacked. The first doesn’t bother me so much as the second. Presumably anyone copying the PDF file wants to give it to another reader, so I will have found another reader of my ebooks. (Same goes for any ebook file, of course.) However, both first and second readers in that case might not like the experience—you can read PDFs OK on a laptop, but they don’t display well on e-reading devices.
I worry about potential hacking more. I work hard to guarantee a professional product for my readers. Someone who hacks into a PDF to change things has malicious intent. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I can see some hacker going in and adding porn pics to the PDF file. Irate people would then blame me. So, please, ask for a PDF only if you really have no other way to read my ebooks.
On a related note, it’s useful to remind you that you can download a free app from Amazon that works on almost any device and allows you to read mobi files. Of course, my ebooks on Smashwords and their distributors (about half of my ebook catalog) are available in just about any standard format. I just don’t have the means to put all ebooks there because it doubles the formatting costs. Let’s face it: Amazon is the biggest online ebook retailer right now, so my first priority is to publish ebooks there.
Item. Reviewers wanted. I’m not going to beg, but I’ll offer you a deal: Review one, get two free. Of course, one ebook will be in exchange for your honest review of the same. The second will be a freebie. Choose any ebook from my catalog for both. Please query me using the contact page of this website. (I’ll use your return email to gift you the ebooks via Amazon and then erase it from my computer.) Please don’t query if you can’t make the commitment to a review—I don’t operate a charity. If I start getting swamped, I might have to curtail this offer—I don’t have a secretary, you know. The way things are going, I won’t be swamped. You can’t even give ebooks away now. Nevertheless, I just keep writing, because I want to entertain readers with my stories. I have a lot of them (stories, not readers, at least yet), and I intend to put more out there for your enjoyment.
Item. Classic sci-fi anyone? I was browsing around Amazon last week. I had this idea about putting my classic sci-fi paperbacks onto my Kindle and filling in some gaps in some famous sci-fi series. Forget about Amazon for that, folks! Not really their fault, I guess; traditional publishers (back then that’s all we had) might still print paperbacks (still lots of airport and train station bookstands to fill) but just haven’t bothered to format them as ebooks. You can stick to the old paperbacks, of course, and look beyond Amazon to used bookstores. Find one in your neck of the woods by googling “used books” or “used bookstores.” (My avatar runs one in Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By).
Item. More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. Speaking of sci-fi…. One beta-reader compared it to Andy Weir’s The Martian, liking the technical aspects without being pedantic in my prose. She also compared it to Michael Crichton’s best. She’s biased, of course, but I’ll take compliments when they come my way and relish them. Lots of research on this one, but I hope the human stories show through (well, more-than-human stories!). Anyway, it’s getting there. These sci-fi sagas aren’t easy to write. I hope you like this one. Coming soon!
Item. Other ebook projects planned for this year. The second edition of The Midas Bomb (Chen and Castilblanco #1) and Family Affairs (C & C #6) are both in copy editing mode. They’ll both be released sometime this fall—I just don’t know in what order.
[99 Cent Promo for readers of this blog: Angels Need Not Apply, #2 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” is on sale for $0.99 on Amazon, June 1-7. Al Qaeda, a drug cartel, and neo-Nazis combine forces to create mayhem!]
In elibris libertas….
