Kindle Blog Income Paid Monthly

It's June 20, the last day of the month, and I just got paid my income for last month (May).

As long as your income is over $10, you will be paid on a monthly basis. I your income is not above $10, the money will be accrued until you reach that amount.

It takes time to build up a readership. Don't despiar if it takes more than 3 months before you start getting a decent readership.

If you've got a blog that you'd like reviewed, email me.

Learning by bad example: The Clocks

Agatha Christie is one of my favorite authors, and 10 or so of her 60 books are masterpieces. But as she aged, her writing diminished. The Clocks is an example of a really bad book.

If you want to learn how to pad a novella into a book, this may be the template to use.

Christie weaves two plots together. Colin Lamb (actually the son of Superintendent Battle, although for some reason Christie never comes right out and says this) is a spy catcher, and he is walking along Wilbraham Crescent looking for the address of a possible spy for the Russians. (The 1960s were all the rage for such folk as Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, defecting to Russia and bringing secrets with them).

He's standing outside a house when a girl rushes out screaming - a man is lying dead in the sitting room and she found him.

So we have two mysteries - the spy mystery and the murder mystery. We have two narrators - an omniscient narrator when Detective Inspector Hardcastle is investigating, and Colin Lamb in the first person when he's working on his own case.

Surprisingly, of the 30 or so reviews on Amazon, 15 give it 5 stars, 14, 4 stars. Just goes to show that you can't trust those ratings, the book is abysmal and full of padding. And of course, while coincidences certainly happen in real life, they shouldn't happen in books, and this book has a humongous coincidence...which really leads me to believe that Christie had intended the story to end one way, and then was forced to add another 20,000 words or so and forgot to wind up that plot thread.

I'll go further into this tomorrow.

"This blog not available for sale"

I was very annoyed today, when I signed on at about 4 pm, to see that all my blogs were unavailable. I would have been very frightened as well, thinking Amazon had decided to end the Kindle blog program without bothering to tell anyone, except this had happened on June 8 at well.

(I know precisely when this happens because I'm a bit obsessive compulsive and I check the rankings of my blogs throughout the day. So if the system is down, I know about it, and this hadn't happened since June 8.)

No one at Amazon Blog Help ever answered my question, posted on June 8, as to why this had happened. I can only assume they are doing system wide maintainence and have to shut down the system for several hours.

Nevertheless it is extremely annoying, because of course that's 8 hours or so when no one is subscribing to my blogs!

Anyway, if you ever try to check the ranking of your blogs, and get a similar response, no need to panic.

Ranking of blogs
If you check your blog on an hourly basis, you'll find that its ranking changes, either up or down. It's hard to know how many blog subscriptions have been purchased, however my best estimate is that if someone subscribes to your blog, it will go down about 1,000 points.

Well...it really depends. If your ranking is 80,000 and 1 person subscribes, it will go down to 40,000. If another person subscribes, 20,000 or so, and if another does, 10,000. After that, when someone subscribes, it will drop on average only about a thousand points.

My post popular blog has been steady at varying between 3,000-6,000 for the last several months. So I think I must get 3 subscriptions a day. Another of my blogs goes from about 12,000 - 28,000. This one therefore, I think averages one subscription every couple of days.

How does this correlate with the number on your Blogs Report?

Well, when I first signed up and started creating blogs 3 months ago, I know - I know - that this report updated on a daily basis. But now, it only seens to update every two weeks. Very frustrating, especially when Amazon Affiliate updates daily. If they can do it (book sales) why can't blog sales also be daily? But for whatever reason, they're not.

However, I tell myself to not get too angry. I'm making money, and if Amazon didn't have this feature - I wouldn't be making any!

Amazon drops the price of the kindle

I see in the news today that Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle 2 by $70, to $189. Hopefully people who just bought one within the last few days will get a refund. Or they can just return it, then buy one at the new price.

Oh - and if you would like one now...



I also finally recieved KIndle operating system version 2.5.5, which has the ability to put your books into folders, which the previous versions did not have.

Those who buy a Kindle new might not have this system on their Kindles, but it will eventually be sent directly to your Kindle, you need do nothing.

The Importance of Titles on Amazon

Titles are all important.

The title itself
If you're not a well-established author, titles that are in-jokes are no good. For example, I could entitle a mystery blog, Le Cafe Singe Bleu, and that would make total sense to me, because I grew up in the decades when Charlie Chan movies were ubiquitous on TV, and lots of people would have seen Charlie Chan in Paris and known that Le Cafe Single Bleu was the name of the restaurant in the movie where we got to see a rather cool Apache dance, and then the murder of the female dancer.

But now that Charlie Chan movies can't be shown on TV anymore (thanks to a misplaced view of racism on the part of Asian activists, but that's a rant for another time), not enough people would get the reference.

How You Type it in Amazon
One of my other blogs is The Kindle Report, which is an example of a poor name, for a start. But then, I'd originally intended to review both books and blogs, and it was only after a week or so that I decided to focus only on blogs, and by then it was too late to change it.

But I just had to find a blog called BiblePlaces, and I typed in Bible Places in the search box on Amazon, and nothing came up. It was only when I actually typed BiblePlaces, without the space, that the blog appeared.

Most people I think separate the words when searching for a blog. So even though in your URL you have no spaces, when giving the title on Amazon - always provide spaces. In the keywords is the place to put the title all run together without spaces.

Tomorrow I'll discuss the importance of keywords.

Examples of poor writing #1 - Excessive use of similes

Yesterday I commented on how poor a writer Cussler is.

Poor writing does not necessarily mean the book is unreadable. Cussler knows how to get the reader interested in the story. But, when a book is uninteresting as to plot and all you have our characters, and the writing is terrible, then you typically lose readers.

(Then there is the other side of the coin, people who read Cussler thinking he writes excellent prose, thus blunting their ability to recognize good writing. Much as people who listen to rap or heavy metal will probaby never be able to recognize actual music.)

Reaading through Cussler, it is not as if every sentence and paragraph is actually bad. It's more his use of conventions - in describing things he always compares them to something else, as in a metaphor - but usually a poorly chosen simile. And occasionally he uses the wrong word entirely.

First, some definitions:
Metaphor: a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in “A mighty fortress is our god.”

or:

A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in "a sea of troubles" or "All the world's a stage"

Simile:
A figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in “she is like a rose.”

or:
A figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as, as in "How like the winter hath my absence been" or "So are you to my thoughts as food to life"
Here are examples from Cussler:

From Polar Shift, a Dirk Pitt novel written with Paul Kemprecos:
First off, the first two paragraphs which show exactly how overboard the author goes with metaphors:

The Mercedes-Benz 770 W150 Grosser Tourenwagen weighed more than four tons and was armoured like a Panzer. But the seven-passenger limousine seemed to float like a ghost over the cushion of new fallen snow, gliding with unlit heeadlights paat slumbering cornfields that sparkled in the blue light of the moon.

As the car neared a darkened farmhouse that lay in a gentle hollow, the driver gently touched the brakes. The car slowed to the speed of a walk and, approached the low-slung, fieldstone structure with the stealth of a cat stalking a mouse.

I don't think a four ton car is going to float over a "cushion" of new fallen snow, to begin with. And "slumbering" cornfields?

More similes:
The ships lined up three miles apart and combed the area like a search party looking for a lost child in the woods.

The arrow-slim kayak flew across the sapphire of Puget Sound as if it had been shot from a bow.

Perhaps not so bad taken on their own, but when you read the books and every other description is of this nature, it simply becomes wearing on the nerves.

Clive Cussler - great formula trumps lousy writing

I have written a few times about how bad Clive Cussler's writing is, and that it hasn't improved since he's gotten ghost writers for each of his series (the Dirk Pitt, Oregon Files and Kurt Austin books.) (Well, technically they're not ghost writers since their names appear on the covers, but I think it's pretty obvious they do all the writing...Cussler probably just provides the ideas.)

And the ironic thing is of course that Cussler is a multi-millionaire because of his books, although it was his third book, Raise the Titanic, that set him on the patth to fame and fortune, because people in the 1970s were fascinated with the Titanic, and the thought of being able to find and raise her...everyone's dream! (Unfortunately in real life the ship broke apart as it sank...still, it would have been so cool...)

Which just goes to show that as far as guys are concenred...they'll read anything as long as there is a lot of specificity about the types of toys in use (the kinds of cars used and their history, the kinds of watches, the clothing....the vast attention to detail that Ian Fleming was so fond of for his James Bond character. Plus of course the guns, transport such as cars and tanks, aircraft and so on.)

ANd frankly, that's why I read the books. As a woman I prefer more nuanced writing, but I'm also into cars, planes, trains and automobiles, not to mention history. That's another part of Cussler's formula. Most of the books befin in times long past, with a certain artifact that will turn out to be of valuable use in the present day. For Raise the Titanic it was a type of fuel that would render the US energy-independent, for Night Probe it was a treaty signed during WWI that would cede Canada to the United States, and so on.

I'll share some examples of bad writing - and how they should have been written, tomorrow.

The Kindle Blog Publisher

Amazon has a variety of programs with which people can make money.

Amazon Advantage allows publishers of print books to sell their books on Amazon.

Create Space is their on-demand print publishing arm.

The easiest program of all to use is their Kindle ebook publishing system.

It's also possible to sell your used books or DVDs on Amazon. However, this costs $39 a month, and you can do it much cheaper on Ebay.

In this blog, I'm going to concentrate on the Kindle ebook publishing, and blog publishing programs.

However, if you want to check out all money making opportunties:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html?topic=200257910&ld=AZSOAMakeM

You must proofread your books, and edit them too

I read the blog of a man who writes and self-publishes his books through Authorhouse. His blog is actually about other stuff - his main employment is as a soundtrack producer - but when he's working on a book project he blogs about it.

And one thing he says is that he has three proofreaders who read each of his books. And yet, once the book is published, he always finds a typo or two that they - and he, in his own reviews, missed.

One reason for this may be that too many cooks spoil the broth. If you've got three different sets of corrections to make (he gives them print copies to read rather than electronic copies) whose to say that the person inputting the corrections doesn't miss one or two?

But the point is, he goes to the expense of having his book proofread not by one person, not by two, but by three of them. That may seem overkill, but really i's the professional way to do it. If you're going to self-publish your book, you have to do all the work that any publisher would do - what any professional publisher would do.

One thing this gentleman doesn't say is whether or not he uses an editor too. But he does have someone he calls a "muse" who reads his books and to whose suggestions he listens, so I suppose we can call her an editor.

Proofreaders and editors. If you don't employ them, then what you've got to do is set your book aside for at least a couple of weeks. Then, re-read it as if it were a new book, something you don't even remember. That allows you to look at it more dispassionately, to see any flaws, and be able to correct them.