My novella (about half the size of a novel) is free this week in the Amazon Kindle Store. This is the science fiction horror story of a military space vessel that discovers a new enemy, a creature that targets a civilization’s technology.
Read it free: Here.
My novella, All Roads Lead to Pine Bush, the story of a travel writer who discovers all of his articles keep leading him to the same place, is available for free on Amazon for the next five days. You can get it here.
My poetry collection, License to Quill, is also available for free for the next five days on Amazon. The collection, which includes the epic poem License to Quill, is written in the mind of a young teenage runaway who escapes an abusive childhood, only to end up on the mean streets of downtown San Francisco. You can get it here. It is also available in paperback as well, but obviously not for free.
So, please go to Amazon to get free copies of these for your e-reader. All I ask is that if you like them, please review them. It’s the only way people are going to know they exist.
Most people generally don’t give independent writers a lot of attention or thought. Oh, they think about the famous writers and the ones that are publishing with the big companies. But the struggling, independent writer, who everyone talks about as the new future of writing is really a very difficult person to be.
To begin with, getting people to buy my books is almost a ridiculous battle that has no positive resolution. Friends don’t buy them. Family don’t buy them. Strangers don’t buy them. Oh, every now and then one of those people will say “Oh, I’m going to pick up your book” and then months go by and they never do. I have a colleague I work with who looked at the cover of my latest book and said she was going to pick it up. I smiled and realized right then and there: Wasn’t ever going to happen.
One of the biggest parts of the struggle involves how a writer gets attention. Social networking is great if you’re willing to spam your friends to death with novel information. I don’t do that. Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t be my friends any longer. I’ll read all of their updates about baby pictures and all that stuff, but I get the impression they mostly ignore mine. A few don’t, but they are the exceptions.
But in order to make it as an independent writer, especially one writing ebooks as well as regular books, you have to garner lots of positive reviews. That has never happened for me. I don’t even get reviews at all. People read my books, buy them at Amazon and all that, but they NEVER leave a review, let alone a positive one. So, I languish in unknownability (if that was a word).
So, I pay for Facebook ads that people click and then ignore. I pay for Goodread ads that people click and ignore. Maybe it’s my ads. Maybe it’s the fact that people just don’t support independent writers. I don’t really know. All I know is that I keep trying, and it’s not moving forward. Three steps back and then one more step further backwards.
But for all those who promised, or just care a little, how about picking up one of my books, reading it and then giving me a review. It might actually help.
Well, one can dream, right?
For the following week, Monday through Friday, Amazon is offering my books Darkened Passages (a new dark fantasy short story collection released over the weekend) and the book that was previously published before it, Deadly Deceptions (a mystery/suspense novel published last year) for free if you have Amazon Prime. So, hopefully people take advantage of it.
If you do, please do me the courtesy of leaving a review. It’s amazing how many of my novels are bought but then no one leaves a review. Hopefully, no one thinks they suck. 🙁
I thought about it for a few weeks when it was first announced, and then I finally bought an Ipad Mini. Before buying this item, I owned an Ipad 2. The interesting thing is that the Ipad Mini is not that much different than the Ipad 2 (same resolution and such), but I had needed a larger storage space than my 16GB Ipad 2, so I went with a 32GB Ipad Mini.
After finding a case for the device, I’m pretty happy with it. My only concern is that some of the apps that I had on the Ipad 2 don’t seem to be available. It’s not because the Ipad Mini can’t run them, but for some reason some of the apps I originally installed on the Ipad 2 just don’t seem to be available any more. An example is Okcupid’s app, which I always liked. The app store can’t seem to find it. The same thing happens with my retirement fund app, which was on my previous Ipad and on my Iphone. The app store doesn’t think it exists.
Other than that, there’s really not that much different, other than it is a bit smaller than my Ipad 2 and a lot lighter. To be honest, I like the idea that it’s a lot lighter; the Ipad 2 was always a little bit too heavy for the kind of device that it was.
The resolution, the biggest complaint most reviews have, doesn’t really matter to me. It seems to be one of those complaints people have if they’ve already had a device that uses the retina diplay. My Ipad 2 didn’t have one, so I’ve not been swayed by how great such a display might be. I suspect if the Ipad Mini sells well enough, we’ll see a retina display in Ipad Mini 2. Until then, I’m quite fine with what it does.
My biggest desire for this device is to read my Kindle books. I have a Kindle Fire, but it constantly has problems downloading books that I buy. You’d think Amazon’s Class A product would be able to do everything it needs to do. I finally gave up on it when it wouldn’t download a copy of the book, The Hot Country by Robert Olan Butler, after I bought it directly from Amazon’s site. My Ipads did it just fine. The Kindle Fire just can’t see it in the cloud or on its device. Such a crappy product (the Kindle Fire).
So, I finally have the device I’ve been waiting for, and it wasn’t really that expensive. Not often you can say that.
For some bizarre, masochistic reason, I have bought practically every version of the Kindle that has been made. The last one I bought was the Kindle Fire when it first came out. And that device is the reason I have decided to pass on anything in the future made by Kindle.
My needs are pretty simple. What I wanted was a device that could allow me to read books (which it does), maybe listen to a bit of music (which it kind of does, as long as you put your entire music library on Amazon’s cloud), and can place certain documents I need to read onto it as well (that one completely fails). For days, I have been trying to get my Kindle Fire to recognize a pdf document that I need to refer to quite often at work. It can’t. Or it won’t. Not really sure if it has a mind of it’s own, but it won’t read the document, no matter how many times I have tried to make it do so. I sent it using the email address they gave me to upload documents. After establishing that the email account I sent it from was legit, it should have been a breeze. I mean, my old Kindles did it just fine.
But no, it doesn’t see it no matter what I do. The document shows up on my “Manage Your Kindle” page, but my Kindle Fire just pretends it’s a stupid rock whenever I try to upload it/download it/pray to the Gods of Shaniaism, or whatever. It just won’t do it.
The truly sad thing is that my Kindle app ON MY IPAD 2 reads it just fine. But I bought the Kindle Fire so I could use these documents that can’t be read.
And don’t get me started on wifi access. It has the ability to connect with wifi, but 9 out of 10 times, it can’t seem to do anything once it connects. It doesn’t matter if I’m at work, at home, at the Pentagon, in the front lobby of Amazon. When it comes to wifi, they need to stop using a ten year old child hacker to develop their infrastructure.
Which tells me that whatever NEW Kindle they created is as fubar as this one. I mean, this was the expensive baby that the Kindle was selling as the be all Kindle. If they can’t make their best model do something simple, then I’ve given up on them. I’ll still use a kindle app, but I’ll be doing it on other devices, because, to put it succintly, Amazon sucks big time when it comes to making products.
There’s an interesting case that’s making headlines right now about how Google was attempting to push the Author’s Guild out of the suit to sue Google for its Google Books initiative (where they would be the end all source for practically everyone’s book material with their all-inclusive Google Library). Yesterday, a judge determined that Google can’t push the Author’s Guild out of the picture. On the surface, this isn’t all that big a deal, but there are a couple of things that are probably important to point out.
First off, most of the critics have already addressed the fact that not every author really wants to be part of this lawsuit, as quite a few independent authors have zero problem with what Google is doing. However, unless they personally choose to opt out of the action, the Author’s Guild is going to go forward pretending it has a lot more power and influence than in really does. And most people tend to ignore these sorts of things, so they’re now going to be “included” in this action even if they’re not really interested in what’s happening. This is one of those things that always bothers me with class action lawsuits because in cases like those against Apple and their antenna for the 4G debacle, a lot of us who owned Apple iPhone 4s didn’t really care that much for taking action against Apple. We were kind of happy with our products. Yet, a class action lawsuit moves forward as if it is representing a lot of people who may never actually be a part of the settlement. There’s a lot of presumptuousness that takes place with class action lawsuits, but that’s a completely different story.
A more important issue to me is the one that isn’t getting any attention yet, and that’s the fact that the Author’s Guild, a writer’s advocacy group, is an extremely exclusive club that lets very few actual authors into its ranks. According to their guidelines for eligibility, if you want to be a member of the Author’s Guild, don’t even think about it unless you have been published by an established American publisher, and I mean VERY established. Using a subsidy publisher, Amazon Kindle direct services and such, or anything along those lines, and you’re guaranteed to be turned down by the Author’s Guild that keeps a tight hold on its allowance for membership. While their elitism has dwindled a bit over the last year (Matt Paust, who regularly publishes to Open Salon, updated us with an article on April 27, 2012, in which he pointed out that their new requirements indicate that you can gain membership if you’ve received at least $500 from publishing in the last year, although their web site is still heavily leaning towards pointing out its old archaic standards of exclusivity).
As a writer myself, I’ve been on the fence about the whole Google books thing. I sell books through Amazon Kindle as well as Barnes & Noble’s Nook, so I haven’t been all that focused on Google, as most things Google does tends to be overly complicated and often unusable (like their advertising service that I finally gave up trying to figure out one day after I ended up getting charged $5.00 to make a listing that could never be approved and then left me unable to even remove the ad that wouldn’t ever run). So, I’ll be interested to see what happens with this, as I’m sure a lot of others will as well.
This morning, I was following an email I received from Eddie Bauer, the clothing company. It stated: “Extra 30% off clearance”. It took me to their site, as expected. Once on their site, it took me to an identical page to the coupon offer, then instructing me to “Shop Now” with another link. So I pressed that. It took me to another page that said: Choose Categories. I’d tell you what the next page said, but I gave up right about there. I figure if they’re going to take me through a maze of pages to actually get to the first item of clothing, I’ll pass and try some other company.
If you go to Amazon’s page, and you follow the link to clothing, it IMMEDIATELY starts showing you clothing that you can buy. You might have to tell it to limit your choices, but you’re the one driving it, not them. And when a customer feels pushed further and further through window after window, and NEVER finding an actual page with products on it, you’ve lost the sale.
This lesson has been apparent since the early days of web sites. You can have a lead page, but then you need to get them to the content. If you don’t have content right in, then you’re going to lose a customer who is going to figure that if you don’t know how to build a web site, you don’t know how to sell products either. Simple as that.
Eddie Bauer’s site is a failure in every way possible. But it does give us information about what not to do if you want to drive sales. Unfortunately, they may never learn.
I received an email from Bed, Bath & Beyond this morning, announcing “Online Clearance: These deals won’t last forever.” Before that, I received one from Best Buy, indicating that I had only two days to come in and take advantage of their “special” sale on electronics. Newegg thinks that if I don’t respond by today that I’m going to miss out on great savings. Amazon sends me a message practically every day that tries to convince me, like Barnes & Noble does every other day, that I only have one day to take advantage of outrageous savings.
Look, I get it. You want to sell me shit. And you want me to buy it today, not tomorrow. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret here they probably didn’t teach you in your Overhyped Management 201 Class at Harvard: I don’t care. There is absolutely no priority for me to have to buy a Blu-Ray player by Thursday, or heaven forbid, I might miss out on unbelievable savings. I don’t really need a Blu-Ray player. I have one. And I bought it at a convenient time when I actually felt like I needed one. It happened to be on a day when I was in the mood to go to the store, look at the different choice, and then chose the one that fit me best. I didn’t buy it because some screaming sales pitch indicated that I was running out of time, like some episode of 24 where Jack Bauer has to torture his secretary for information about terrorist activities.
I understand the economy sucks, and you need to make money. But the more I keep being hit by hyped pitches to buy things, the less I want to buy. And no, I’m no fooled by the barrages of letters and emails that indicate that you are responding to my requests for information because I would remember if I was interested in buying a Kia car, which prompted you to send me an email as if you’re answering my inquiry instead of writing me out of the blue, hoping I might be stupid enough to think, “you know, I don’t remember ever thinking about buying a Kia vehicle, but if he says I stopped by and looked at one, it must be true.”
There’s a whole slough of literature written on the attempt to convince people to buy things they weren’t interested in to begin with. It’s the stuff often referred to as “foot in the door” techniques, and there’s an entire shunned practice that evolves from it called “bait and switch” where you advertise one thing and then try to sell us something we weren’t interested in. But this whole hurried approach to sales really needs to end because I’m getting really tired of opening mail and discovering I have twenty seconds to respond or the whole world will explode.
Part of the problem with a lot of marketing today is that there seems to be a lot less interest in matching people with the things they want to buy, rather than mass mailing everyone under the sun in hopes of finding someone who might want to buy something they weren’t interested in at all. But I’ll let you in on a bigger secret and that’s that if you’re really interested in selling to me, you’ll offer something really of good value at a good price and then convince me you’re the only one willing to do that. Don’t try to get me into your store in one day. Just convince me that your selection is better than your competition, and I’m probably going to make it to your business place. An example: I’m really interested in the new game Skyrim, made by Bethesda. But it’s overly expensive for a computer game. Offer it to me for a better price, and I’ll probably buy it. Offer it to me for the same price and add a lot of extra features to the sale, and I might still buy it. But sending me nonstop messages about how I need to buy it immediately or I will somehow miss out on the fun, and you’re not setting up a sale. At all. You see, I can wait you out. You, on the other hand, need the sale. It’s that simple. It is in YOUR best interest to get me to want to buy from you. Hype doesn’t do it. Expiration periods of pretend sales won’t do it. A good sale that seems pretty honest, well, that works wonders.
Businesses are constantly making the mistake of thinking most consumers are stupid, or easily fooled. We’re not. Some are, but they’re really a minority and not a sustainable business model. But smart consumers who will continue to buy your product if you offer value, service and consistency, well, those are the ones you should be going after. But your current model isn’t doing it.
So, take your time because I’m not going anywhere. You, a lot like Netflix that keeps trying to convince me I have a short time to “come back” to their “great deal”, might be. And it may not be where you want to end up.
I’m just saying.
