My book The Teddy Bear Conspiracy is in its final day of its giveaway contest on Goodreads.
Giveaway ends December 09, 2013.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
The book goes on sale everywhere starting tomorrow.
Honestly, I never thought the day would come, and to be even more honest, it’s probably not the right time either. But my job hit a point where I realized I couldn’t keep working it any longer. So, on December 24th, the day before Christmas, I will be unemployed.
The job market is horrid these days, which means I don’t suspect I’m going to be finding anything else soon. I’ve got a few irons in the fire I’ve been trying to grab, but my belief is that they’re not going to work out, so I’m pretty sure that in a month from now, I’m going to be facing a new day without any means of survival behind me.
So, I’ve started thinking that perhaps this is the time to finally make a go at being a writer. I’ve been struggling at it for several decades now, and I know enough about the craft to know that my stuff is good. I just now need to figure out how to get readers to actually want to read what I have to write. Part of me has felt my whole life is a Van Gogh perspective, in that I really feel that I have monumental works, yet suspect that no one will ever discover me until long after I have left the planet.
My latest project is The Teddy Bear Conspiracy, which I’m finishing up for an early December release. Then I work on my triple play saga, The Tales of Reagul, a fantasy/science fiction epic based on the world of my book Destiny. I’m hoping to have the first of the series, A Season of Kings, out in early January and then follow up with the other two immediately after. I’ve never done a series before, so that should be interesting.
The next project I’m working on is a follow up to Thompson’s Bounty: A Ship Out of Time, which is a return to the time travel epic for the Coast Guard crew, except this time they’ll be traveling back to Roman times. The title is still kind of up in the air, although I’ll probably go with another “Thompson’s (something)”. I’ve had a lot of people asking for further adventures in this universe, so I decided after some years that perhaps there’s a lot of fun to be had there yet.
Two other projects are on the horizon as well. The first is a rewrite of a novel I wrote some years ago, called 72 Hours in August, which is an espionage, action thriller involving an Armageddon project that emerges during the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union, and it introduces my new character who goes by the code name of the Unicorn, because everyone who sees him is rarely believed. He was an idea of mine decades ago when I was working as a counterintelligence agent. He’s what I refer to as an economic hit man, a man who goes into countries and disrupts their economies on the orders of an illusive corporation that benefits.
The other project I’ll be completing is the first set of books in my Deck Const series. The Deck Const is a dystopian science fiction novel where a surviving soldier emerges from one of the last wars on a quest to find a rumored object, the Deck Const, which has been spoken of only in whispers, but may hold the key to rebuilding a very fractured world. The first set of novels takes place in California (from San Francisco to Los Angeles and then to Las Vegas) where communities have become fun house versions of their former selves as the soldier starts to build his army which will one day have to confront the dark one (the other person seeking the Deck Const). Anyway, it’s a huge epic that I’ve planned out, and I’m finishing off the first three novels, of which the series will be continuous sets of three books.
Either way, wish me luck, or wave to me as I pass you on the street with my shopping cart.
From September 21 to September 25, The Ameriad is available free on Amazon Kindle. This will be the last time it goes free as I will be removing it from Kindle Select after this promotion (so I can sell it on the Nook and other e-readers).
If you like it, please leave an Amazon review. It would be greatly appreciated as reviews seem to be really hard to come by these days.
Get it here: Amazon Kindle Version.
Unfortunately, it’s been predicted for some time that Barnes & Noble was going to distance itself from the Nook, and thus, the e-book market. So, it seems that moment is coming to pass. Speculators assume that Barnes & Noble will attempt to continue on as a brick and mortar (physical presence only) store and sell off all of its e-book stuff. Well, in case it’s not readily apparent, the problem with that is that without an actual device to continue to hype the market of products, the Nook is going to die out as people are going to see the Kindle as a continuing vehicle and the Nook as dead in the water. Sure, they can survive on apps for awhile, but eventually people are going to see the writing on the wall and choose to go with a platform that looks like it is going to survive the next wave of changes.
But the point of this post isn’t to talk about the future of Barnes & Noble, because to be honest, I have no idea what is going to happen to that company. However, what I can do is talk about what happened to the company, specifically as to why the Nook didn’t become the all-winning vehicle they were hoping it would be. To understand this, we have to use our little go back in time feature and see what was happening when the Nook launched with all intentions of challenging the new kid on the block, the Kindle.
Back then, Barnes & Noble was the big kid on the block. He’d already beat up every brick and mortar store that existed before him, and he was rearing to go after the next challenge. Only, the next challenge wasn’t another physical store, but an online one that promised to lower prices and produce a better shopping experience. Now, I wish to harp on the latter of those intentions because Barnes & Noble stupidly focused only on the first: Lower prices. And unfortunately, Barnes & Noble didn’t handle that one well either.
The Kindle offered books at lower prices than you could buy them at retail stores. This was huge. When the Nook launched, it attempted to “discount” prices as well, but if you held up both side by side (and I used to do this a lot), what you discovered was that most of the time the Kindle price was exactly the same as, or cheaper, than the Nook price for a book. And then you started to see more and more choices being offered on the Kindle, which made having a Nook kind of a stupid purchase because if you couldn’t find everything, and couldn’t find it cheaper, you bought a pretty stupid device.
But the second point is the one I want to talk about the most because that’s where I truly feel that Barnes & Noble failed with its Nook. What Amazon offered with its Kindle was not only lower prices, but it offered a better customer experience, meaning that if you were looking for something, the Kindle actually cared about helping you find it. This meant that as you bought more books, the algorithms that worked within Amazon served to make recommendations to help you find things that you might want in the future. The more you bought and searched, the more likely the device was going to serve to help you find exactly what you might want, even if you didn’t realize you wanted it.
The Nook, on the other hand, basically offered you whatever the publishers were selling, and it put its placement completely determined by the legacy model of the highest bidder (or largest publisher with more prestige). After a few purchases on a Nook, if you were looking for a new book, every new search was like starting out from the very beginning again. In other words, you were screwed. If you didn’t want only the most popular book out there, you had to figure out what you wanted on your own.
The problem B&N made was that it assumed that cheaper prices (less than you’d pay for the hard copy of the book) was more than enough to produce decent profit. But they didn’t take into account that they had to be cheaper than the competition, not just cheaper than their own posted price for the retail version of the hard copy. And then they made the customer experience as bad as an Internet search could be back before Google was invented. You basically had to do a search with the intention of hoping to get lucky in order to find the thing you were looking for. This was great if you were looking for a copy of 50 Shades of Gray, but it wasn’t so great if you were looking for new, independent writers who might be making a splash in an obscure genre, but a genre of which you often spent a lot of money. The Kindle, however, did this extraordinarily well.
So, it shouldn’t come as any surprise which device, and which company, won the battle. The war isn’t over, but quite a few of the initial battles were quite decisive, so the outcome seems somewhat conclusive.
My novella, All Roads Lead to Pine Bush, will be free on Amazon for the next few days (until Friday). So visit Amazon and get the book free. The book goes free tomorrow morning and then on Saturday goes back to the regular price.
Let’s face it. There are a lot of writers out there. And with Amazon and the Nook making it that much easier for anyone to hang out a shingle and say he or she is a writer, that means we’re going to see more and more of them out there, even if they’re still struggling to string two sentences together. But that’s not the focus of this post. The focus of this post is that because there are so many of us out there, there are also a lot of people out there who are quite willing to rip us off and separate us from our hard earned dollars.
Of course, it’s always been this way, except in the past it was a lot easier to spot the ones trying to take advantage of us. In the old days, a writer mainly had to worry about a couple of different entities, such as:
1. Vanity Publishers. These guys would tell you your book was great and that they wanted to publish it. Then they’d send you a bill for their trouble. They took advantage of the fact that young writers (meaning ones who haven’t been writing in the business for long…age is irrelevant) didn’t know that legitimate writers got paid by the publisher, not the other way around.
2. Charging Agents. When a writer was ready to get a “real” agent, he or she would query a whole bunch of them and hope something interested someone. Every now and then a lucky hit was made, except you’d then hear from some mid-level agent who you really didn’t know but figured they had to be legit to be in the Writer’s Digest Agent Book. And then they’d say that they’d either have to charge you to read your book (before becoming your agent) or charge you for their services (after becoming your agent). In the end, they’d never sell anything because they made their money fleecing young writers who didn’t know better.
3. Editors. Someone would invest in an ad in the back of Writer’s Digest, claiming to be an editor. They wouldn’t cheat you by not editing your work, but quite often you’d end up with an editor who knew less about grammar and spelling than you did.
So, fast forward a few years and now we’re in an era where writers are self-publishing their stuff, as the legacy publishers have practically imploded on themselves, trying to hold onto a business model that resembles the big music producers trying to hold onto the music industry. This has provided a whole bunch of new entrepreneurs to latch themselves onto the writing community. Here are some ones to keep in mind:
1. Book formatters. Formatting a book for an ebook venture is pretty easy. You just have to fail at it a few times first. These guys promise to do that work for you, and some of them are cheap enough to be worth it. But others charge hundreds of dollars and make it seem like your book will fail if you don’t use their services. Like I said, if you have done it a few times, you’re generally okay. For the lower charging ones, they might be completely worth it as it would save a writer a lot of time not having to worry about the packaging part of the paradigm.
2. Agents Who Pursue You. When you start to make it as a self-published writer, you start to experience these agents who claim they can do wonders for your sales. Yet, they know as much about sales as you do, or even less. Basically, they’re banking on you remembering that agents used to be important and hope you’ll buy into the fantasy that having an agent makes you somehow better off. An agent sells your work to a publisher. If you’ve already published it, chances are pretty good that they don’t have much to offer you. A marketing specialist might be worthwhile, but if that’s what you’re seeking and he calls himself an agent, chances are you’re wasting your time…and money.
3. Bad Cover Artists. I’m being very careful about how I address this one because there are some brilliant cover artists out there, and I have used a few of them because they’re just awesome. The ones to watch out for (and not use) are the ones who have just unwrapped their copy of Photoshop Professional (or Elements) and now thinks he or she can create great covers. A great cover artist works from concept, not from stock photos, which is how a lot of them operate. I use one cover creator who actually asks me a bunch of questions about the novel AND THEN starts to design concepts. She’s great at what she does. That’s what you seek, but they’re rare and hard to find.
4. People Who Claim to Know More Than They Know. This has been one of my pet peeves. There are some authors out there who attempt to gain sales by pretending to know information that they really don’t. A good example is the extremely best selling author Rob Eagar who wrote a book everyone kept recommending to me as “the book that will help you sell more books”. The book is titled, Sell Your Book Like Wildfire, and it is a great book if you write nonfiction. However, because of the realization that the larger market out there is the group of naïve people like me who are writers of fiction, he spends a great deal of time trying to give the impression that this book is JUST AS good for fiction writers. His premise is simple. You have to sell books that are worthwhile to people. In other words, that have value to them, so you have to find what makes your book valuable to them and sell that idea as your premise for your book. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with fiction. As a matter of fact, the more I read of his book, the more I realized he hasn’t a clue about anything that deals with fiction. He’s a marketer who knows nonfiction, and that’s it. Unfortunately, he’s convinced a lot of writers of fiction out there that his book is worthy, and in MANY conversations I’ve had with other fiction writers, we’ve all pretty much come to the same conclusion. Fiction books are about stories and storytelling, not about finding something useful for a reader. Sure, you can spin that in some way that might pretend to work, but in reality, you aren’t going to interest readers of fiction unless you have a really good story to tell, and you have an engaging way to do it. You’d get a lot more value from someone teaching you how to create a flashy cover for your book than you would from this book. Again, I was fooled by the desire to find an easy way to success.
That’s a general idea of some of the things to watch for in today’s writing environment. Drop me a line (or add a comment) if you come up with any yourself.
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.
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 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.
