Why can't the "Help Desk" Give You Help?

I have several blogs offered on the Kindle. Whenever you publsih a blog, you have to upload a screencap - a picture of the screen, and a masthead - a title for the blog, as well.

Now, about half the time, when the blog is eventually published, the screencap and the masthead don't show up.

Questions on this had been asked at the Kindle Blog Publishing Help Boards, and we were told by someone there to send the images to a certain email address, and he (or someone at that email address) would upload them.

So, following that instruction, I sent the screencap and masthead for one blog to them, to see if it would work. The screencap was a PNG, the masthead a JPG. (They should have both been PNGs or JPGs, but for some reason I did one each.)

Anyway, just got back an email from the person who'd been handling my issue. This was his response:

On researching further, I see that the images were rejected as they did not meet the specifications.

Please make sure that your screenshot image follows the specifications listed in the URL given below:
https://kindlepublishing.amazon.com/vendor/members/kindle-blogs/static/blog_screenshot.html

Please make sure that your banner image follows the specifications listed in the URL given below:
https://kindlepublishing.amazon.com/vendor/members/kindle-blogs/static/blog_masthead.html

Okay, he's the help desk, and he's supposedly just researched my specific problem. So he must know *why* my images didn't meet specifications, why not just *tell me why* instead of making me go read these instructions which are probably two pages long and somewhere, buried in all the verbiage, is what I need to know.

This is a tendency of "help desks" and people who are supposed to help you that I've noticed more than once. They *know* the answer, but instead of saving you time and telling you what you need to know, they say, "Go read the answer here. " SO then you've got to waste twn to twenty minutes reading some manual, usually poorly written so you can't even find what you're looking for even though you've been told it's there.

I'm not going to bother to read the specifications, I think I do know the problem. Sometimes I've uploaded PNGs as opposed to JPGs, and I think the system doesn't like PNGs. But if that's the case, the images should be rejected right away, not uploaded, and shown on the screen, as if they were going to work! And you only find out they don't work when the blog is published and you find out they aren't there.

However, the last time I uploaded a blog, the PNG images were actually rejected, so it looks like they've got that problem fixed.

Well...we'll find out. ; )

Book publishing: Your Government in Action: July 2010

A few days ago I published a Pamphlet to Kindle, called Your Government in Action, July 2010.

In it, I took all the schedules from President Obama, VP Biden, and SoS Clinton and sorted them by date. Obama and Biden's schedules only started around July 15 or 16 or so.

I charge 99 cents for the pamphlet, and have sold no copies.



But I am not despairing, for I have a plan.

A pseudonym I have used for many years is Caroline Miniscule. My intent is to turn that into a brand. Specifically, Miniscule Guides.

This pamphlet, which I call Your Goverment in Action, will come out each month. (Well, I'll do it for three or four months at the most. If after four months no one is buying it, I'll stop.) The more of these I have on offer, the more confident I am that people will see them, and those who have an interest in politics will buy them.

(The schedules are from official government websites, and thus are public domain. When I published them, I chose the public domain option, which means I'll only get 30% royalites instead of 70%. And that's why I'm only charging 99 cents for them, also.

So, we'll see if this plan works.

Blog publishers were paid Aug 26, 2010

If you earned over $10 last month, and get paid via Direct Deposit, you should have received a payment on Thursday. I did!

"Daily" report is the report to watch

A few weeks ago I said, "Don't pay attention to the daily report. It's two months behind the times."

Of course I was very wrong. It is the daily report that tells you what you need to know, even if it isn't all that daily.

When I received my monthly report for July, a couple of days ago, I learned the sorry truth. My fiction blog, that in the report for the month of June had shown 20 past-two week subscribers and 128 free subscriptions, actually did not mean that I had 128 more subscribers who were just waiting to be folded over into my past-two week number. It meant that of the 148 people who had subscribed to my blog during the month of June, 120 had subscribed before their 2 week trial period was up.

So that was pretty heart breaking. I was watching the "sales rank" on the Amazon page, which was always active and always between 2,000 to 4,000, and of course that turned out to be meaningless. Sure, people were subscribing, but they were then unsubscribing at about the same rate.

So, at the end of looking at my report for July, I learned that the daily report actually had the numbers correct.

So there again, even though sometimes that report is updated daily and sometimes it takes a week or more before it updates, that's the report to watch because that will tell you how much money you're going to make at the end of the month.

Kindle Blog Report For July has now arrived

and I am extremely disappointed, and a bit irritated, with the news it tells me.

I doubled my earnings for this month, but that is no big deal. Still less than $100, and I was expecting much more than that.

THe report gives you two pieces of info for each blog

Trial subscriptions
Active subscriptions.
A subset of the active subscriptions is how many people unsubscribed.

I had assumed that the trial subscriptions number were actual subscriptions of people who were still subscribed, but just hadn't gotten past that 14 day mark.

But that can't be possible. What it must mean, are that those are the amount of people who subscribed to the blog in one month, and unsubscribed during the two week trial period.

I say this because I was watching the "daily" report very closely, and for the 23 days that my Rush Limbaugh Report was available for subscription in July, I was getting subscriptions every day, and the report didn't show that anyone was unsubscribing. All the numbers were always going up, never down.

Come to see this report, and I had 7 active subscriptions, 73 trial subscriptions, and no unsubscriptions. There is no way that can be unless those 73 trial subscriptions weren't recorded as unscribers in the daily reports.

So, I am disappointed, not only by the lack of money I earned but also because I've just discovered that most of the people who subscribe to that blog over the last month and a half unsubscribe before their 2 weeks are up. And I just find out about it now.

So I'm not happy.

Still, it's income, so I've got to persevere. Thank god at any rate that I now earn 60 cents per subscription instead of 30 cents (although my blog review blog is still at 30 cents) because this wouldn't even be worth it if I was only makign 30 cents per subscription.

Disappointed, unhappy.

Guess I better go have a Dairy Queen.

Bye bye, under-producers

I've got a lot of blogs, only 3 of which sell very well, the rest of which, some 5 or 6, sell not at all. One, two, three, four subscriptions at most for each one.

Up until a couple of days ago, I had persevered with these blogs. If someone had done me the honor to subscribe to one of my blogs, I owed it to them to keep writing in it.

But I finally decided that I just didn't have time, to put in the amount of work needed to update these blogs, when they weren't bringing me any income.

So I bit the bullet. Two days ago I posted I was removing the blogs from Kindle - just to let my Kindle readers know in advance that that woudl happen, and the next day I removed the blogs from the system.

I certainly enjoyed writing the blogs, even if only 4 people were reading them, but I had to make myself realize that my time was better spent working on the 3 blogs that were selling well, to ensure that they would continue to sell well.

Each of these three blogs requires a lot of work in themselves, so it only made sense.

Now, I have the time to work on the book I'm writing, which I hope to publish next week, so that I can finally start giving book publishing tips here instead of just blog publishing tips!

Where's the &%%$#@( report???

I had expected to find the Kindle Blog Earnings report to be ready on August 11. It is now August 13, so it's two days late.

This has got me really annoyed.

I am an Amazon.com associate, which means I offer Amazon books for sale on my websites. That system is set up that I receive a report the very next day telling me what sold (if anything) how much commission I got for it, and so on.

I don't understand why they can't do the same things for blogs. After another month, for example, my daily blog report still has my Blog Review Blog at 69 subscriptions, when the Earnings Report I'd received, on July 11, had my subscriptions as double that -- for the month before. So the "daily" report is not two weeks behind the times, not a month behind the times, but two months behind the times. Very frustrating.

How To Make Sure Your Complete Blog Entry Feeds to Kindle

I've noticed that about 1 in 10 blog feeds at Kindle do not share the entire entry, but just the first bit of it. Some of them give you the option to "click more", others don't, all you get is a paragraph and that's it.

I asked a techno-head blogger to explain why this happens and how to fix it, and she put together a video that explains what you need to do.

(The author also offers web writing services, so check that out if you're a mind too: http://www.guerreroink.com/2010/07/26/how-to-fix-your-blog-syndication-on-kindle-video/)



Here's an explanation that a Kindle rep provided at the Kindle forums, specifically for those who use Feedburner. (It's in the video above, but since my Kindle subscribers can't watch it, you need text!) I do suggest that you go to the above website and watch the video there, if you're having problems and aren't using feedburner. She explains how to fix that, too.

1. Log into feedburner.com
2. Click on the feed title in the "Feed Title" list
3. In the page that comes up, click on "Optimize" tab
4. In the left panel, "Summary Burner" will be listed as the last option. Check if there is a tick mark beside it.
5. If so, click on summary burner option. In the right panel, there will be a "deactivate" button. Clicking on that will turn off summary only feed option.

Blog Publishing: Now Available in the UK

I got an email a few days telling me that I could now offer my ebooks at Amazon's UK website...and that my blogs would be available also.

The blogs became available 2 days ago, on August 6.

So, I just checked the numbers today, August 8, and 2 of my blogs are already doing quite well, in the 3,000 sale range. The numbers aren't connected to the American numbers, they stand on their own.

So, the numbers for UK blog sales won't show up in the July report, which I hope will be sent to me on Aug 10. So that'll give me 30 more days to wait until I find out how much money I'll be earning from the UK. The costs are the same, 1.99 and 99, but that is pounds and pence, not dollars. So the income should be a third higher, 39 cents instead of 30 cents, 90 cents instead of 60 cents.

Of course, since the UK blog store has just opened, the sales numbers might not necessarily be as rosy as they appear. The numbers are probably coming from a much smaller sample size.

Interestingly, the Rush Limbaugh blog hasn't sold yet, but my blog review blog is doing very well,as is one of my fiction blogs.

So, I'm quite pleased....

Blog Publishing: Now Available in the UK

Apologies For Sporadic Postings

Up until a week or so ago, I thought I was moving from York County, VA to Cheyenne Wyoming sometime next year. I found out a week ago that the schedule has been speeded up, and I'll be moving within the next two months. And since I've got five rooms, each one filled to the rim with books, I'm doing my packing now to get it out of the way.

I'm a bit obsessive compulsive that way. Now that I'm supposed to be packing, I have to devote all my energy to it, which doesn't leave enough energy for my real work - which is of course these blogs - and my publishing soon-to-be-empire.

I should be done packing in another few days, and then I can get back to work on this blog.

So, please hang in there!

My Remittance Advice Has Arrived

I've never bothered to check, but I wonder if Amazon, or whoever handles the payouts for the blogger section of their business, are located in England? I mean..."Remittance Advice" indeed.

I got my June payment from my blogs today. I'm expecting to get my July blog report around August 10th or so. In fact I'm looking forward to that a great deal. For the past few months my blog income has been so low as to hardly be worth talking about, but with the introduction of my Kindle Blog Report, I started getting some decent subscriptions. (Albeit, it took three months for that one to build its audience.) I expect to have at least 200 subscribers to my Rush Limbaugh report after only a month (on the other hand, my Barack Obama Report and Sarah Palin report have utterly tanked.) I also have a fiction blog that should have over 100 subscriptions, as well.

So, as you can perhaps tell, I am extremely excited, but of course a little apprehensive, to see that August 10 report. By keeping track of the numbers on each blog's Amazon page, I can tell that the blogs are being subscribed to in great numbers. But of course it's impossible to tell if they are being unsubscribed to, just as rapidly.

On the other hand, the "daily" report that I receive has each of these blogs in positive numbers, even though it is a couple of months behind the times. For example it still has my Kindle Blog Report at 11 new subscriptions / 80 total subscriptions, when in last month's monthly report, the one with the "real" numbers on which you get paid, I had over 128 subscribers.

So, 7 more days to go. Ah, I must possess my soul in patience.