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!
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
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.
_______________
Subscribe to our other blogs on Kindle:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report
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.
_______________
Subscribe to our other blogs on Kindle:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report
Monday, June 20, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
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."
(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."
Friday, May 27, 2011
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...
_______________
Subscribe to our other blogs on Kindle:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report
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...
_______________
Subscribe to our other blogs on Kindle:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
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
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!
_______________
Subscribe to our other blogs on Kindle:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report
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!
_______________
Subscribe to our other blogs on Kindle:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
