I've bitten the bullet

I've made my farewell post in 5 of my blogs - ones that had only 1 subscriber each.

I hated to do it. If someone subscribes to my blog I feel they deserve to be rewarded.

But I had to be realistic.

It takes about 15 minutes to write a blog post. That 15 minutes actually equals 30 minutes, because it's 15 minutes that I could be using writing some other blog post, and instead I have to find another 15 minutes to do that.

So any blog I had that has 2 subscribers or less, I shall officially remove from the Kindle on Jan 2.

I'm pretty damn annoyed with the Amazon/Kindle folks, actually. They are really hyping the new Kindle Fire... but guess what - you can't subscribe to blogs on the Kindle fire! How stupid is that?

I'm currently working on a new book - more on that later.

Payday today...for at least one account

I know I'm always harping on what used to be... I used to get paid for my blogs and my books on the same day, with the UK blog payments coming a couple of days later.

Now...well, I got my book payment (and a sorry payment it was, I must say) - still waiting on the blog payment which is my major money earner. Two months ago they were extremely late with that payment - presumably because they were busy revamping their system, they never bothered to say - but ever since then any delay makes me nervous that they're screwing with me.

Time Goes By Fast

I just put on a Scrabble tournament yesterday here in Cheyenne - not as successful as I'd hoped. There are 8 people in my club - they showed up, and that was it. Despite the fact that we'd gotten a nice write up in our Wednesday paper - it generated no new people and no new spectators. Very disappointing.

But preparing for the tournament had taken up all my time, and that's why I've been lax here.

Regular posting starts tomorrow.

Has Amazon Finally Gotten Smart With Kindle Blog Prices?

I have a blog, The Kindle Blog Report, in which I review blogs available on the Kindle, as well as occassionally, just on the web.

Typically when you put a blog up for sale on the Kindle, it is priced at $1.99. Then, over a period of time the price is dropped down to .99 cents.

The rhyme or reason behind this stupid pricing policy has always escaped us bloggers (indeed, I still get angry each time I think how Amazon screwed me with my Rush Limbaugh blog. I had over 200 subscribers, at $1.99 per, and was getting new subscribers each day. But one day, about 6-8 months into it, I found that that blog had been decreased in price to 99 cents. I immediately emailed AMazon support and demanded the price on the blog be put back to where it belonged - no dice. "Amazon decides what to charge based on what we think is value to customers."

I didn't bother to pursue the matter - I am 99.9% sure that Amazon has outsourced its tech support to some country where the people are not native English speakers, so its hard to hold a dialog with them, but every time I get my monthly payment, cut in half from what it should be, I just burn.

But back to the point of this post. I reviewed a woman's blog - which was not on the Kindle. I suggested she put it on the Kindle and she did so. Not only had it gone live within about 12 hours or so, but it was already priced at 99 cents!


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I'm back...

Back from vacation, catching up on all my blogs, will post here with decent content shortly!

On travel til Wednesday

I'm visiting elderly relatives in Box Elder, SD who do not have internet.

Will try to sneak out now and again to an internet cafe to post, but more than likely will not be posting until Wedneday.

Blogs, Books or Both?

For the last couple of years, I have had both books and blogs available for the Kindle.

My original fiction hasn't sold - at all. It's not that nobody knows about it - a percentage of folks do. I have a book called The Lady and the Tiger...Moth about a girl pilot. I announced that at various aviation forums. No one cared.

I've got two original science fiction books - one a full-length book, the other an introductory novella that I had hoped to offer for free on the Kindle as a way to get people to want to buy the other book. No dice. If you're an established publisher you have the option to offer a book for free - if you are an indy publisher, you do not have that option. So damn infuriating.

In any event, I'd announced the book on various science fiction message boards - no interest.

The only book of mine that is selling is my annotation of Dorothy Sayers Whose Body. But that's because people do a search on Dorothy Sayers, and find my book. The Dorothy Sayers name is what does it.

What's the solution? Well...have your website, and I'll go into that more in future entries. Try to get book reviews. (My sci fi novels are in the queue to be read by the popular Red Adept blog... unfortunately she's swamped for several more months!!)

Try Create Space - Amazon's printing arm that allows you to have your books printed on demand. There's no cost to you up front - Amazon takes their cut from the cost of the book. But at least you can get some books printed, and introduce them into your local bookstores - offering to do readings - and point your audience toward the Kindle as well as Create Space editions.

For me...blogs are where I make my money. I've got a blog about the controversial talk show host Rush Limbaugh - and people love to read about him. My other successful blog is a BLog Review Blog. The rest of my blogs - and I have several - have a handful of subscribers, so it all ads up over time.

How To Advertise Your Books - Website

Getting your book noticed is the hardest thing in the world for the independent publisher. Amazon has recently made it harder still - now if you dare to try to advertise your Kindle book on one of their message boards - set up for discussing books on Kindle! - you can be banned because you dared to indulge in "shameless self-promotion." You can't even put a link to your book in your signature.

So what can you do?

Well, I'll make a series of posts on that.

First one - you need a website.

It costs about $100 a year to have a domain and website. I use GoDaddy for my domains, and Yahoo's small business hosting.

These days, there's software that enables practically anybody to create their own professional looking website - and your website must look professional.

What should be on it.

The cover of the book.

A sample chapter.

A description.

Links to where to purchase it. Don't just have your book on the Kindle. Put it into Nook and Smashwords as well.

I Can't Believe They Listened!

Went to Amazon.com today, to check my Kindle blogs, and I see that BLOGS has been put on the Kindle stripe.

They had taken it off for a few months.

Well, it's back...here's hoping it helps our blog revenues.

Amazon Customer Service Sucks...

My July report (due the last day of August), finally arrived, 7 days late. Now I just have to wonder when I'm going to get paid. When the report normally comes, about 3 days before the end of the month, the payment is only a day or 2 away.

I don't know when it will come this month.

I had sent in a question yesterday, the day after Labor Day, wanting to know the status - and recieved the answer today - they were still working on the problem. They didn't tell me what it was.

So now I'm wondering if they're going to email me and explain what the problem was, and assure me that it will never happen again, or if I'm going to have to email them again.

I'm hoping that things just went wonky because of the Labor Day holiday, although goodness knows why that should effect anything.

But customer service is definitely not based out of the US. Both times I emailed them, the response came from someone with an Indian name - I'd say their customer service is based out of India. Which would be fine if they spoke excellent English and knew what they were doing... but I wonder....



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There's always something...

It's 3 days in to September and I have yet to receive my August 31 payment (which covers monies earned in July.) Not only haven't I received the payment but I haven't received the report.

I emailed customer service and someone from India - where Customer service is located, of course, who confirmed I had $240 coming, and would try to find out why it had yet to arrive.

While $240 is a nice sum, it is a disappointing one. My blog subs have fallen off in the last two months. At one point I had climbed up to earning $300 a month, and thought I'd be going even higher...but instead I've been dropping.

Disappointing.

I also had a little contretemps with my Whose Body book... I blogged about this. I had tried to update the descriptive text to add in my two science fiction books (which aren't selling at all) and nothing ever happened, so I hit "republish" expecting that that would do the trick. But instead it flagged something and Amazon removed the book for a whole week while trying to determine if it was Public Domain or not.

Well, it was Public Domain - there are 6 other Whose Body books on offer on the Kindle - mine the only one that is annotated. But finally they put it back up, and then no one was buying it - although I didn't lose my place in the rankings of those books so I'm assuming it was because it was the week before school was supposed to start and everyone was busy with final vacations.

I now seem to be back up to snuff, getting at least one purchase a day - of Whose Body.

But as I have blogged before, Amazon has made it very difficult to sell blog subscriptions - there used to be a Blog Subscription label on the Kindle stripe - that is now gone. So no people new to Kindle will even know that blogs exist and can be subscribed to!

And as far as books - we can no longer post adverts about them on the message boards. Worse than that, we can't even put a URL in our signature pointing people toward our books. According to Amazon, this is "shameless self promotion." a phrase that irritates me no end.



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The Dangers of Publishing on the Kindle

I had a very irritating two weeks last month.

I had attempted to update the description of my annotated book, Whose Body, by Dorothy Sayers. I'd updated it once, just by adding something to the text and then saving it, but after two weeks that update had never come across to the Amazon page.

So I decided to republish the book....which I assumed would just republish the description. (Yes, I know, to assume means you make an Ass of U and Me.)

Next thing I know, Amazon has taken the book down until I confirm that its in the public domain. Which it is.

So I send them three emails pointing this out, over the course of the two weeks, and never get a personalized response, just the typical form letter, "We've received your email and we'll respond to it during business hours Mon thru Friday."

So after two weeks, which cost me at least 10 sales and probably more, the book is finally back for sale on Amazon. And the email I received? "Your book is for sale in our catalog. We have nothing else to say on the matter."

Just really, really irritated me.

Now, yes, I get 35 cents whole royalty per copy so I'm not that much out of pocket, but it's just the principal of the thing. If the Kindle folk take down a book, you should be informed (I was not informed. It was only after I'd gone 2 days without a sale and then checked the page, to find out that it was gone, that I found out it was gone!) and you should always get a personalized email telling you what's going on, so you can solve it in ten minutes instead of two weeks!

Indie Authors Get the Shaft Again

As you know, I've been writing a novella which I was going to offer for free on the Kindle, in an attept to publicize my book The Coldest Equations.

Well I finished it yesterday, and tried to offer iton the Kindle for free today.

Why would I want to offer it for free?

Because that was the only way an indie book gets any exposure whatsoever. We're not allowed to try to promote our books on the Kindle message boards any more. That would be shameless self-promotion.

So you offer a book forfree, putting "free science fiction book" and "best free science books" in as key words, and then there's a chance that someone will see it, and because it's free, look at it, like it, and then go on to spend a whole whopping $2.99 for your real book.

But it turns out Amazon doesn't let indie publishers do that. The least we can offer our books for is 99 cents.

Well, I published the damn novella anyway, for 99 cents, even thought my keywords, as above, had the word "free" in them. Even though my book description had the word "free" in it. Because I was just too damned pissed to change it.

Why do big publishers get to offer their books for free? Who fucking knows!

Hard to find good help these days

So popular is my annotated Whose Body (by Dorothy Sayers) on Kindle. that I had decided to do a CreateSpace edition.

I was only mildly chagrined to find out that someone else had done an annotated version - which is only available on Create Space. I dont' intend to buy it, but since it's pubication date is June 2011, and my annotated edition has been available on the Kindle since February, I know that if anyone was doing any copying, it was him copying me!

So I will be bringing the Create Space edition to life.

I didnt' have time to mess with it, so I advertised on Elance to find someone tro do it for me. I specified that they "must have" experience with Create Space. Well, I chose the cheapest possible bidder. I didn't bother to look at their portfolio - I'd made my requirement clear, I thought that would be enough.

So I sent the girl the file, a couple of hours later she sent it back to me. All she'd done was left justify it and add page numbers to the bottom.

I pointed out that I needed the file formatted to be published in a book - inner margins were needed of appropriate size, and there should be the author's name on every top left hand page and the name of the book on every right hand page.

I havne't yet looked at the new file she sent me...

But it's annoying.


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This blog is closing

This is a day's advance notice that I'm closing this blog and removing it from Amazon.

I have two other blogs, Miniscule Guide to Writing Science Fiction and The Coldest Equations, in which I talk about publishing on a periodic basis, but so infrequently that, it's not worth it to keep posting on that subject alone, here.

Thanks for trying this blog out, and good luck in your future endeavours.

Spam clogging Amazon's Kindle self-publishing

Reuters.com: Spam clogging Amazon's Kindle self-publishing
(Reuters) - Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc's publishing foray.

Thousands of digital books, called ebooks, are being published through Amazon's self-publishing system each month. Many are not written in the traditional sense.

Instead, they are built using something known as Private Label Rights, or PLR content, which is information that can be bought very cheaply online then reformatted into a digital book.

These ebooks are listed for sale -- often at 99 cents -- alongside more traditional books on Amazon's website, forcing readers to plow through many more titles to find what they want.

Aspiring spammers can even buy a DVD box set called Autopilot Kindle Cash that claims to teach people how to publish 10 to 20 new Kindle books a day without writing a word.

This new phenomenon represents the dark side of an online revolution that's turning the traditional publishing industry on its head by giving authors new ways to access readers directly.

BY THE NUMBERS

In 2010, almost 2.8 million nontraditional books, including ebooks, were published in the United States, while just more than 316,000 traditional books came out. That compares with 1.33 million nontraditional books and 302,000 conventional books in 2009, according to Albert Greco, a publishing-industry expert at Fordham University's business school.

In 2002, fewer than 33,000 nontraditional books were published, while over 215,000 traditional books came out in the United States, Greco noted.

"This is a staggering increase. It's mind boggling," Greco said. "On the positive side, this is helping an awful lot of people who wrote books and could not get them published in the traditional way through agents," Greco added.

But Greco listed downsides. One problem is that authors must compete for readers with a lot more books -- many of which "probably never should have seen the light of day," he said.

Some of these books appear to be outright copies of other work. Earlier this year, Shayne Parkinson, a New Zealander who writes historical novels, discovered her debut "Sentence of Marriage" was on sale on Amazon under another author's name.

The issue was initially spotted and then resolved by customers through Amazon's British online forum.

"How did I feel? Shocked and somewhat incredulous, but at the same time, because of the way I found out, very grateful that someone had taken the trouble to let me know," Parkinson said.

For Amazon, the wave of ebook spam crashing over the Kindle could undermine its push into self-publishing and tarnish the brand of the best-selling Kindle eReader, which is set to account for some 10 percent of the company's 2012 revenue, according to Barclays Capital estimates.

"It's getting to be a more widespread problem," said Susan Daffron, president of Logical Expressions, a book and software publishing company. "Once a few spammers find a new outlet like this, hoards of them follow."

Amazon pays authors 70 percent to 35 percent of revenue for ebooks, depending on the price. That gives spammers a financial incentive to focus on this new outlet.

"Amazon will definitely have to do more quality control, unless they want the integrity of their products to drop," she added.

"Amazon will work hard to snuff this out as it undermines many of its advantages in the space," said James McQuivey, an eReader analyst at Forrester Research.

Amazon is curating submissions to its new Kindle Singles business, which offers short stories, long-form journalism and opinion pieces, "after seeing how quickly the self-published side degenerated," McQuivey noted.

"Undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of the same book don't improve the customer experience," Amazon spokeswoman Sarah Gelman wrote in a June 14 email to Reuters. "We have processes to detect and remove undifferentiated versions of books with the goal of eliminating such content from our store." She did not respond further.

DO-IT-YOURSELF SPAM

Kindle spam has been growing fast in the last six months because several online courses and, ironically, ebooks have been released that teach people how to create a Kindle book per day, according to Paul Wolfe, an Internet marketing specialist.

One tactic involves copying an ebook that has started selling well and republishing it with new titles and covers to appeal to a slightly different demographic, Wolfe explained.

Spam has yet to flood the online bookstore of the Nook, a rival eReader sold by Barnes & Noble Inc.

The company may be managing ebook submissions more aggressively than Amazon, but it might just be that the Kindle's huge audience is more attractive to spammers, Forrester's McQuivey said. Barnes & Noble did not respond to requests for a comment.

Smashwords, an ebook publisher and distributor, has also struggled with spam, but not to the same degree as Amazon's Kindle, according to Founder Mark Coker.

Smashwords, which competes with Amazon, manually checks the formatting and other basic characteristics of the submissions it receives, before publishing. Obvious signs of spam include poorly designed covers, the lack of an author's name on the cover and bad formatting, Coker explained.

Smashwords pays authors quarterly, while Amazon pays monthly, Coker added. The longer payment period means Smashwords has more time to track down spammers and close accounts before money changes hands, he said.

Amazon does not offer many free ebooks, while Smashwords does. So there is more of an incentive to publish lots of books via the Kindle, according to Coker.

Coker said his company has found five or six instances when free ebooks published on Smashwords were copied and republished on Amazon's Kindle store for at least 99 cents each.

Forrester's McQuivey said Amazon will have to craft a social-network solution to the problem. If the company can let readers see book recommendations from people they know, or people whose reviews they liked in the past, that would help them track down the content they want and avoid misleading recommendations, he explained.

Daffron of Logical Expressions said Amazon should charge for uploads to the Kindle publishing system because that would remove a lot of the financial incentive for spammers.

"This is why email spam has become such a problem -- it costs nothing," she said. "If people can put out 12 versions of a single book under different titles and authors, and at different prices, even if they sell just one or two books, they can make money. They win and the loser is Amazon."

Should You Launch Your New Book Over a Long Weekend?

My book, The Coldest Equations, became live at Kindle three days ago. (I'm still waiting for it to come live at the Nook - I'll be giving them until Tuesday and if it isn't live, I'll email 'em and ask what's the deal! - they may well have all their folks on vacation, too!)

Anyway, initially I was going to do one marketing thing a day, to judge how effective each website/resource was. But then I grew impatient, and started doing 2 or 3 a day. So now of course if I do get a sale, I won't know which particular piece of advertising did the deed.

I do have 3 sales so far. One I knew was going to happen, the other two, I don't know where they came from.

I've announced the book on all my blogs, and at the KindleBoards, and that's it.

I would have liked to have announced it on the Amazon message boards, but Amazon in their infinite wisdom has decided that indy publishers are the scum of the earth, and not only can we no longer post announcements of our books in various threads, we also can't even have a link to a book in our sig line! No "shameless self-promotion" they tell us - and that phrase alone has got me furious. Amazon pushes its print authors relentlessly - the best -sellers who dont' need such pushing, and who have publishers who have the bucks to pay for advertising, and they begrudge us a measly sig line link? Bastards!

Anyway - 3 book purchases yesterday, none today. I'm hoping its because everyone is out and about for Memorial Day long weekend. Guess I'll find out on Tuesday...

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The Coldest Equations, by Caroline Miniscule

My latest book published for the Kindle is now available for purchase. (And within a couple of days, should be available for Barnes&Nobles Nook as well.)

It's science fiction.

Tracy Karlovassi, actress, is the star of the science fiction TV series The Coldest Equations, in which she plays Miranda Rainbird, security team leader for a corporation that deals in space travel. It is the near future, and these civilian corporations devoted to space travel have become little worlds of their own, with security agents protecting their own engineers and scientists from kidnap or spying, while at the same time spying on other corporations and attempting to kidnap their scientists and engineers.

Whenever a TV series on our earth is committed to celluloid, it is immediately created as an alternate earth, that exists just as much as our own does. And there are watchers -out there- who have devised a way to transport the actors from the TV series to their real life counterparts on the alternate earth, and vice versa.

In the TV series (and on the alternate earth) Miranda Rainbird has been framed for a crime she did not commit, and is on the run from both friend and foe. If it *were* Miranda Rainbird on the run, she could doubtless solve all her problems, skilled agent that she is. But Tracy Karlovassi has been transferred into her body...and what can a mere actress do?

It's fun, it's suspenseful, if you like classic science fiction TV and books, you'll like it. And best of all, it's only $2.99!

Available now. Go to the Kindle store via your kindle and search for The Coldest Equations, or follow this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Coldest-Equations-People-There-ebook/dp/B0052NSRKK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1306369228&sr=1-1

Exploring the Nook

I had not been keeping track of Barnes& Nobles' Nook... now it turns out that they have the same kind of independent publishing program that Amazon does - except whereas Amazon gives you 70% as your top royalty, they only give you 65%. But, on a 99 cent book, they give you a 40% royalty, which is 10% better than what Amazon does.

Unfortunately, you are not allowed to price your book differently. I'd uploaded my Whose Body annotated to the Nook, and wanted to charge $1.99 instead of the 99 cents I'm charging on Amazon, just to see if people were willing to pay more for an annotated version. But after reading the TOS, I learned I couldn't do that. Prices had to be the same on any platform where the book was offered for sale.

Bummer!

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Neither a borrow nor a lender be

I wish that I could follow that advice, but Amazon Kindle does not allow me to do so. Last night, I uploaded my new book The Coldest Equations to Amazon.com. I'd intended to charge $3.99 for it. I think that's a fair price.

Prior to that, though, I had wanted to explore the permutations of the lending feature. So I posted a thread in the Amazon Kindle forums, asking people if they purchased books they'd been leant. Most of them did not.

So, I did not want my book to be made available for lending.

Unfortunately, I did not have that choice. If you price your book at $1.99 or more, it is automatically made lendable, you can't opt out of it.

This makes no sense to me. Amazon has got to be losing money on this too, and in any event, they have no right to make such a draconian decision. It should be my choice whether or not I want somebody to be able to lend my book, not Amazons!

In the thread, a lot of people were telling me they'd probably buy a book from an unknown quantity for 99 cents, no more than that. And I refuse to price my book that low, and get a measly 30 cents per copy. Not after the amount of work I've put into it.

So I've priced it at $2.99.

Of course, Amazon is working to hamper independent publishers still further. It used to be that you could go to any Kindle message group and put in a plug for your book, and failing that, you could at least put a link to your book in your sig line.

No longer - now that's not allowed. There's only 1 place in these message boards where you're allowed to announce your book. That's ridiculous.



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Blog reports now available

Actually they've been available since last night.

It's kind of frustrating. I'll be receiving a relativley nice sum on the 29th (the day the payments are usually made), but that nice sum hasn't increased in 3 months - it's been the same each time.

Which means I'm not getting any new subscribers for my blogs...

And for one at least, I find that very difficult to believe. My Rush Limbaugh blog stays in the 4,000s every day. Occasionally it's gotten up as high as 12,000, meaning no one has subscribed to it for several hours, but within a couple more hours its down to 4,000.

Which means people are subscribing!

And while its perfectly possible that they subscribe, take a look at the blog and unsubscribe immediately, I find it difficult to believe that eveyrone does this. Yet the blog has been stuck on 470 subscribers (with 23 or so newbies) for over 3 months. So every new person who subscribes, immediately unsubscribes?

I just don't believe that.

But of course, there's no way to prove otherwise...

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Selling your books in Germany

The German market has recently opened up for us, and I'm still researching it. Will report here sometime this week on how to take advantage of this new market. (Germans are typically bi-lingual, and will buy English books, more often than an American will!)

Welcome new subscribers

If you have a blog published on the Kindle, don't forget to email me at Nocturne_CVS@yahoo.com (I don't hotlink it, in an effort to deter spammerse) and have me review it for you.


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Blocked and Pending Deactivate

About a week ago I submitted a blog for publication - Ayn Rand Annotated. I'm starting with Atlas Shrugged.

For over a week there was no action, it was just "Pending."

Yesterday I submitted two new blogs, one on classic cars and the other on classic sports.

When I checked back later that same day, the Ayn Rand blog was BLOCKED in red letters, and the two new blogs wee "Pending Deactivate".

I requeste to know what the heck was going on on the message boards - no answer.

But today, all three blogs are published.

So I guess it was just another glitch in their system.

And there's another. A handful of my blogs now have more subs than would seem possible, considering there was no intervening "trial" period for them. Yesterday I had 0/7 subs on one blog, today there's 0/14.

Last time this happened, it happened to all my blogs, where everyone doubled in sub numbers. This has only affected a few blogs, so I'm not sure if the numbers are real or not.

So annoying!

On the other hand, got my payment from Amazon for my blogs yesterday, and it was a nice chunk of change. Not as big as it should be if they hadn't messed with my blog prices, but not too bad.


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I knew it!

It's taken them 3 days, but the Kindle Daily Blog report is updating right now (12.06 bloody am!) and all my blogs that had doubled in subscription size have now returned to their previous numbers. I guess I should have been more suspicious than I already was by the fact that they had all exactly doubled.

So now, I'm watching half my blog subs disappear (I'm refreshing it every 5 minutes to watch the toll of doom.)

Just heartbreaking.


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Do Not Make This Mistake In Your Marketing!

I read the FilmScore Monthly message boards on a regular basis. (http://filmscoremonthly.com/board/threads.cfm?forumID=1)

In addition to talk on film scores, people "in the business" post their new sound track releases.

One such individual is the producer of soundtracks and cast albums, called Kritzerland. Normally when he makes an advertising post on the board (or indeed, when anyone does) he references the name of the movie or show, or at the very least the name of the composer. He makes his post early, and by even 3 hours later, there are a dozen people saying, "Gonna order this," and so on.

Today, his post title was "New Kritzerland to Give Your Wallet a Rest"

The rest of the post was an advertisement for the new CD release.

There were only a handful of replies, each one puzzled at the title. "What a lousy way to promote a title!" was the gist.

Kritzerland has just responded, saying that the post title was a joke - since most people on the boards buy soundtracks rather than cast albums. Still seems kind of stupid, the more so because on his blog (which I also read, for my sins, as he's a 60 year old, straight man who writes in the most pretentious way possible) he said that this title really had to do well.

It's not going to do well from the FSM board, and he seems to have deliberately gone out of his way to assure that by using the most bland and un-eye-catching title imaginable.

(Kritzerland being an old hand at this, I think he's moving to repair the damage. He'll be emailing various of his friends on the board, asking them to make posts on a regular basis to ensure that the thread stays at the top of the message board, as indeed, it had been in danger of disappearing off the front page of the message board because no one was interested in it - thanks to the post title.

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Whose Body A Success!

My annotated version of the Dorothy Sayers book Whose Body? (which is in the public domain) has sold better than any other work I've published.

Through 18 days in March, it's sold 19 copies.

In a sense...no big deal.

The price is 99 cents, all I thought I could ask considering that there are 6 other Kindle versions of the book, all at 99 cents. Even though I was providing annotations of practically every paragraph, a substantial amount of work in itself, and I had toyed with at least giving myself an extra 25 cents, I didn't.

So if I sell one copy of Whose Body? a day for a year, that will be 365 copies. My royalty per copy is 33% - 35 cents. So I'll make $127.75 a year.

Not a lot of money.

But I'm looking at quantity. I'll shortly be publishing other annotated books, and charging just 99 cents for those as well. Eventually I'll have enough so that, in the aggregate, I'll earn a resasonable sum of money each year.

And the annotation process also teaches me stuff I can use in my blogging empire, so there's no wasted effort.

So yes, I have to say that Whose Body is a success.

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KIndle Blog Reports

The monthly blog reports for February are out. I was pleased to see that once again I'll get almost $300.

(Not as pleased as I would be if I'd be getting $600, which I would if they hadn't reduced my blog prices arbitrarily from $1.99 to .99, but I suppose I've beat that dead horse enough.)

It was just interesting to see, though, how many blog subscriptons I'm being credited with for February, as opposed to how many blog subs my daily report tells me I have. My Limbaugh blog, for example, as I told you a week or so ago, had jumped up - on the daily repot - in the space of a day from 500 subs to 1,000 subs, without benefit of intervening trial subscritpons.

I doubt if I had 500 subs in the course of 15 days from the end of Feb to Mar 15...I must always have had most of those subs during Feb as well, and probably Jan, too.

But, so I'm getting credit for them for March, presumably. I look forward to seeing just how many subs I'll be credited with in the next monthly report.


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System "latency" - or just an Incompetent Software Design?

Yesterday my Rush Limbaugh Report blog jumped up by 300 subscriptons - all in the paid column, without benefit of an intervening "trial subscription."

Today, it's up by 200 more subscriptons.

Apparently this is what's called "system latency." THese are subscriptions I must have had for several months..and they're only being credited to my account now?

My Kindle Blog Report has jumped up by 100 subscriptions, my Weight Loss Without Tears blog has also jumped up by 100 subscriptions (give or take one or two), all again without benefit of that intervening trial subscription.

I had blogged a couple of months ago about how half my subs vanished - when it came time to pay me for them, but not on the "daily report" - but had returned by the next reporting period.

Now I'm being given anywhere from 500 to 200 extra subscriptions that I must have had all along.

But...what can you do?

It's the uncertainty I don't like. For all I know they can take these subs away from me tomorrow and say, "Oh, it was just a glitch in the program" = which it may well be. I wouldn't be surprised.

I won't know until i get the actual monthy report, for Feb, anyway. If these sub numbers are correct for March, I should get a healthy piece of change in April...

But the amount of money I should have been paid and wasn't for the last two months at least...kind of annoying.

On the other hand (I have so many hands) it's money I wouldn't be making if Amazon wasn't offering this service, so I always have to temper my complaints - because these blogs make nothing on the "outside" = it's all due to kindle income.

Just How Trustworrthy Are the Kindle Blog Reports?

The daily blog report didn't update at all yesterday. Today, it's updated, and the numbers are very strange.

I know they've got the fine print at the bottom of the report "Subscription activity shown is based on snapshot of past data and may not match the final monthly subscriptions report against which payments are made due to factors such as system latency, cancellations and billing issues."

But that doesn't explain how the numbers could have changed as they've done.

Two days ago my Encyclopedia Asimova subscriptions were 0 - 8. Today, they are 0 -13. Where did those extra 5 subscriptions come from since there was no intermediate subscriber step? My Seaborn oceanography blog now is at 6-47, instead of 7-31 just two days ago.

Well, I just hope I can trust the numbers that are there today.

Why is this so puzzling? Because the Kindle books you sell on Amazon - that report is updated instantaneously. And if you're an associate - as I am - and someone buys a book from your site using that link- that report is updated daily and never misses.

So I don't really understand why the Kindle reports are different, except they must be all sorted from a different place - somewhere in India, I have no doubt, and they were cheap on the software so everything has to be inititated by hand or something. Otherwise why would reports be a whole day late, and then show such skewed data? (In particular since if you go to each blog's subscription page, most of 'em haven't moved at all.)

But again, that's a change, too. It used to be that if you put up a new blog, as soon as it became active, and you subscribed to it just to make sure the feed worked, etc., within two hours that subscription would show up on your subscription page.

But the last few times I've done it (for blogs I thought were failures...but then, I was trusting the reports to be accurate...now I regret having abandoned them so soon!) that subscription never shows up.

As a blog reviewer of other blogs, I subscribe to three or four blogs every other day, and I've gone back to a few of those two weeks later and the fact that they had at least one subscription has not registered, there are no numbers at all.

Well, I've ranted about this probably at least once or twice a month for the last two months...but today the discrepancy between two days worth of reports over three days is really shocking. My subscriptions are up, up, up according to today's report, so I hope this is the one that's accurate.

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Trying to Get Ahead of the Game

When you're trying to make you're living as a writer...particularly as a writer of Kindle blogs and books, you've got to do everything you can to get ahead of the game.

I have 31 blogs - of which 23 have less than 10 subscriptions. Now, when my blogs cost $1.99, it was worth it to keep them going, even if I had 1 to 9 subscirptions. Those 60 cents per subscription added up.

Then of course a couple of months ago now Amazon decided to arbitrarily drop all the prices of my blogs from $1.99 to 99 cents, and that was a bit of a blow. Took me severalweeks to recover, frankly, as I'd just seen my income, which was starting to look quite promising, chopped in half.

Nevertheless, 30 cents also helps, which is why I'm still doing all my blogs even though most of them don't seem to be worth it.

The reason I'm continuing these blogs is because they serve multiple purposes. I'm an annotator of books, and most of my blogs deal with history or the sciences, and the information I learn in researching blog posts can also be used for my annotations.

I do experiment with a few blogs, and if they don't prove popular I remove them quickly - I tried a football and a golf blog, and neither one took off. I thought a ghost hunting blog might be popular, but that isn't going anywhere, either.

I also thought that, with the popularity of Sarah Palin, that blog would be popular, but that subscription base remains steady at about 15. So I maintain it, even though it's very disappointing. 15 subscribers a month = $4.50 a month. Not much, but enough to go on with.


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I think I've cracked it this time...

Uploaded my Annotated Whose Body by Dorothy Sayers and its been available for sale for 2 weeks now. Had 3 purchases in the last reporting period, 10 so far this month.

That's by far and away the best I've ever had any of my offerings do (which has been pretty damn disappointing, I can tell you.)

Of course there's one problem. I'm only charging 99 cents for the book, so even if I sell 365 copies a year, that will only earn me a 35 cent royalty on each book, so $127.35 per year.

That's because the book itself is in the public domain, there are already 6 copies available on the Kindle, and they're also only 99 cents. Although my book is worth more, because t's annotated, I didn't dare charge more.

I'm currently annotating another public domain mystery, which I hope to have up for sale in another couple of weeks.

So what have I cracked? Well, quantity. There are a few classic mysteries in public domain, I shall annotate each and every one, and charge only 99 cents for the result. I won't make a fortune off them, but at least I'll make a steady income.

And get my name known as an annotator.



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It's a puzzlement

edited...


Whose Body, the Annotated Edition
About a week ago, I had uploaded Dorothy Sayers book Whose Body, the Annotated Edition, for which I charge only 99 cents. This book is in the public domain, and there are already 5 99-cent books available. Mine of course is annotated.

I'd thought about charging $1.99, because I put a lot of work into those annotations, but had then decided that I couldn't charge that much. The book is perfectly understandable even if you don't know the subtle nuances that my annotations reveal...so I figured the only way to ensure sales was to charge what everyone else was charging.

And, of course, I haven't gotten the results I hoped for. I seem to sell one book a day - that's 33 cents. Well, if I keep selling one book a day I'll be happy, but of course you never know! I've got three or four pamphlets published for several months, that haven't sold anything!

Anyway, the book looks very professional, because I did convert it from text to an html file using Mobipocket creator (which you can download for free.)

So now, I've got paragraph indentations, whereas before, I just had double-space gaps in between each paragraph. So it looks a lot nicer.

Of course I still can't figure out how to get photos to show up in Mobipocket, but I'll be persevering with that. And as for a linked table of contents! Ha!


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A mixture of delight and annoyance

Last month, I got the shock of my life (well, relatively speaking) when I downloaded my December blog report and saw that my income had been cut in half - not because of them arbitrarily cutting the price of my blogs in half, they'd done that several months ago - but half of my blog subscriptions were missing.

Just downloaded the January report, and all of my blogs are back to previous levels, so I'll be getting a $300 payment next month (as opposed to $100 this month).

I'd really like to know how I could get 400 subscriptions to my Rush Limbaugh report in one month? Obviously they're something fishy going on here, considering that the "daily" report has shown my Limbaugh blog going up and up steadily...and no way in hell that I dropped 200-400 subscriptions in any month.

On the other hand, I don't want to complain too much. Of all my income streams, Kindle blogs are giving me the best return.

I had spoken about my Science Fiction quiz book a couple of weeks ago - that's been a bust. 2 purchases. For a book that only cost $1.99!

I'm working on another book, which I should have published tomorrow. When it goes live I'll talk more about it...I, again, have high hopes for it, and again, my hopes are temporized by the fact that I know they'll probably be dashed....

But that doens't matter. You've got to keep keepin' on, until you can't keep on any more.


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Someone has bought "The College of Sci Fi Knowledge Quiz Book!"

Just one person so far, so while it has made me happy...I'd be happier if more people bought it.

The book has been available for about 3 days, the description info just showed up today. I find that so annoying. The same thing happens with blogs, and it just makes no sense. Once it's avaiable for sale, why isn't the description there automatically. What is it about the submission system that makes half of the info show up 2 days later than the first half of the info?

Anyway, more on its publication.

This is actually the second version of The College of Sci Fi Knowledge that I had published. When I uploaded the first version, I went entirely by what the book looked like on my computer screen, and it was fine. When I uploaded it and checked the preview, it was all hosed up. But I didn't believe my eyes. I thought that the preview version was hosed up. So I published it.

Then, a couple of days later, when it became avaiable for sale, I bought it and looked at it and the problems were there. There were blank pages, and questions showed up after photos, when I'd put page breaks between photos and questions just so that wouldn't happen.

So I went back to the master in word. It looked fine. So I figured, well, maybe if I convert it using MobiPocket, that will take care of the problem.

So I spent a couple of hours working with MobiPocket, with no luck. MobiPocket converts your document into HTML, and you're supposed to be able to have photos in there as well, but for the life of me I could not get those photos to show up.

So I went back to my master in Word and started pressing the "delete" key before and after various photos and questions where, in the book, it showed blank pages or no page breaks. And sure enough, the delete key got rid of the extra spaces (I could tell this because even though I hit delete, the page text didnt' go up to the previous page. So after I putzed around, I got out all the extra spaces that weren't visible but were there!, and then re-uploaded the text.

MobiPocket is therefore no good for using photos - as far as I can see, but when it comes to text, it does make the text look better. So when I do books that are strictly text, I'll be using it.

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Pause Before You Publish

Up until about 5 days ago, I'd spent the last two weeks working on a Quiz Book - the College of Sci Fi Knowledge Quiz Book.

I finished it...as in finished writing it... and was so pleased at having done so that I immedately published it.

The book is full of illustrations, so when the book had uploaded I "previewed" it and immediately saw that it was not formatting properly.

But I didn't believe the evidence of my own eyes. I'd been so careful with the formatting - I'd thought. And the Preview wasn't really wiziwig...the published book would have much smaller text.

So I ignored the evidence of the Preview and published the book.

As soon as it became available for sale I purchased a copy. (You don't get royalties for this, by the way. They know!)

And to my horror the whole book was formatted wrong.

So I went into my word file and did some work on it - which I'll detail in my next post because it was such a pain - and in the pocess of fixing the formatting also noticed quite a few mistakes in the text and fixed those - and reuploaded it.

All this extra work would have been unneccessary if I'd just controlled my exciitement and enthusiasm and given the book a cooling off period of a couple days, then looked at it with fresh eyes to catch the typos.

I still might have made the mistake of uploading it even though the preview showwed the wrong formatting, though, but I've learned my lesson there and will deail that, as I say, in my next post.

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Yet another body blow/heart breaker

In the 6 months or so that I've been selling my blog subscriptions for the Amazon kindle, blog subscrition - of those blogs of mine that were popular - had continued to go up. The daily report said so - even during those times when you'd have to wait 6 days or more before the "daily" report was updated, and this would be reflected in the monthly report that would tell me how much money I was going to earn.

This month, it was different.

This month, the numbers didn't match. According to the daily report, I should have had well over 400 subscriptions for my Rush Limbaugh blog... on the monthly report, I only had 200. ALl my other blogs had been cut in half as well.

So while I was confidently expecting that next month I'd top the 1000 subscription mark, total, and start getting $300 a month from Amazon, with things only getting better...my income has been cut in half again. (The first time of course when they arbitrarily changed all my blog fees from $1.99 to .99 without even telling me they were going to do it.)

I simply don't trust Amazon's numbers any more. It used to be, up until this month, that if someone purchased a subscription to your blog, it would show up in about an hour - on the Amazon subscription page. But I've got at least 2 new blogs that have, supposedly, a couple of subscribers, and they still don;t show any numbers.

Long story short, I'm heart broken and fed up.

Working as hard as I do for $300 a month was just barely worth it. Working as hard as I do for $100 a month...or however much Amazon will arbitrarily decide to give me in future...just isn't worth it.

So I'm going back to concentrating on books for the Kindle instead. To date, those at least record purchases the day they happen, and you can tell if the ungrateful creeps have returned the book the same day too. (Something I dont think should be allowed, by the way.)

But there you have it.

Quiz Books

Quiz books are a quick and easy way to publish a book on the Kindle - assuming you know your subject.

I've been working on a science fiction quizbook which is almost ready to go into production.

These books are simple. You ask a question on one page, and on the next page, provide the answer. Divide the quiz into ten topics, asking ten questions about each topic, and a final question so you can say, "101 questions within!"

Be professional about it. Provide a bibliography and any sources you use to come up with your questions. Phrase the questions in a humorous or some unique way, so that your readers will always recognize your quiz books.

Also, have an umbrella title for the quiz books, so that you can produce a series of them, and if someone buys one, they can search easily for the others.


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Will Amazon ever get its act together?

It used to be that you could kind of guauge the numbers on your blog's subscription page to see if you were getting any subscriptions. But it does not seem like that any longer.

A few days ago, the blog report didn't update for about 4 days. When it did update, one of my blogs all of a sudden had 10 more subscriptions than it had before, despite the fact that, on the subscription page, there was no movement of the numbers. I started several new blogs, and each of these doesn't show that I have any subscriptions at all. (It used to be, whenever the first person subscribed to your blog, you'd get a number around 12,000 as your ranking. This would gradually go up as no one else subscribed to your blog. But if people did, then the number would continue to go down.) So I've got 4 blogs, that according to my "daily" blog report, have a handful of subscriptons, but which show no numbers at all. So for whatever reasons, those subscription pages can no longer be used for anything.

Meantime, I got my payment for November blogs a couple of days ago...exactly half of what it should have been and I dn't mind saying I swore a few times. Still I know other people are in the same point (although some blogs, as old as mine, continue to cost $1.99, which really frosts me...)

Meantime, I think a lot of people must have gotten Kindles as Christmas presents, because one of my books has started selling. Only 3 copies so far in the last 2 days, but that's a heckuva lot better than nothing!


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