Real Writing For A Digital World

2012-02-13T04:10:00.000-08:00

What I forgot to mention is that ALL (I know it runs contrary to logic) the chapters will be designated as Heading 1. You think Chapter 1 is 1. Chapter 2 is 2. Chapter 3 is 3. No. It doesn't work like that for this purpose.

The instructions are pretty good in Word (surprisingly) so start there. Search for Table of Contents in the Help File. Then you will mark each by highlighting the chapter/whatever with the heading style. Click Heading 1. I had a hard time finding that. It's to the extreme right on the ribbon under the Home tab.

Once that's done you will go back and click create table of contents and it should happen.

**********

Got a nice little review on Smashwords today for Map of a Heart

Review by: Lindsey J Carden on Feb. 13, 2012 :
Lovely poetry with soulful pictures. One to load up and read again and again.
Well done.

Some people are happy and other people feel it's their duty to correct everyone.

This is one of my favorite movies scenes of all times. Not for it's artistic quality but for targeting a certain mindset. Mr. Mom

Life Is Just a Tea Cup of Truffles

2012-02-12T06:03:00.000-08:00

Well you think this will be easy to create a clickable Table of Contents but it's not. And I'm not sure why they're needed in a novel (are there tables of contents in tradpub novels--not the ones on my bookshelf) or a short booklette but as I said yesterday I got a complaint. So I took 8 hours out of my day and 2 hours out of my pal's day, to try to satisfy this Amazon crisis.

Here is a link that explains it the clearest of any for those of you using Word.
http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/word-2007-create-an-automatic-table-of-contents/

Don't get your hopes up, it's not close to automatic.

It's rare to have a problem with BN formatting, and that is now holding true at Smashwords--good on you, Mark.
I don't think I ever upload anything to Kindle that I don't have to immediately before I click publish, start trying to figure out why it doesn't look on screen the way it does in Word or Expression Web. Unfortunately I'm a writer not a computer geek, hidden buried codes, why things aren't perfectly aligned after you strip the formatting and reformat to center--I just don't have an answer for that.

And for free? This is what I mean. They're getting something for free and they want it full length, perfect, exactly what they expect, the characters to behave exactly how they want them to behave, the spelling and word choices to suit their own personal experience and if you don't do that for them, you're stupid and lazy and taking advantage of them.

It'll be interesting to see where this leads.

Okey Dokey

2012-02-11T05:39:00.000-08:00

Sweets For Your Sweet has been free for 5 hours. I got my first complaint about formatting and maybe kitchen techniques but I'm not sure. I know who this person is, too. Unbelievable. Dismaying.

I don't know what to say about the formatting. It looks fine in the emulator, it looks perfect in the kindle for PC, it looks fine as an epub in my Nook Color. No I didn't do a table of contents. There are 6 recipes. You can't scroll a little?

Map of a Heart is available for free on Smashwords in all the formats they offer so that's my Valentine's gift to you. http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/131810.

Time to get serious about the new book as I've been putting that off with all these Gimme Cap things and we can see how well that's worked!

Free Falling

2012-02-10T15:51:00.000-08:00

I love this song. I stayed for a while in Reseda. It's just all houses, there's no discernible town center. It's off of Ventura Blvd.

I'm not falling at the moment. Bad Apple is having a free day and doing quite nicely.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,158 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
- #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Children's Fiction > Arts & Music
- #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children's eBooks > Arts & Music > Music
- #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Children's Fiction > People & Places > Social Issues

I hope this time readers will connect with it and go on to the other 2 books.

I didn't work on my new YA today instead I took my own Gimme Cap advice and created a booklette called Map of a Heart. This is exactly what should be free. A small...oh, perfect phrase for it! Oh geez, it's French, I better not use it around any drunk trolls or they'll turn me in to the Kindle Spelling Police.

A freebie is an amuse bouche. It's like a starter, a tidbit to whet your appetite. You don't serve them the meal, you offer them a tidbit, an amuse bouche. That's what this booklette is. I had some vintage postcards and found some more in public domain and used Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese "How do I love thee, let me count the ways...". I used one line per page, 1 image per page. It came to about 14 pages.

It'll be free the day after Amazon gets around to publishing it. I hope they don't wonder if I wrote this one.

How does this have anything to do with anything else I've written? Well....um, I have a list of my "romance" novels at the end. It's publicity. It's about getting your name out there. It's about getting noticed.

Now I have something of a conundrum. I had Schtupid Cupid scheduled for a free day on the 14th. I wrote Sweets For Your Sweet for Valentine's Day. It's overkill.

Update: I don't have to worry about it. Amazon has this new book in review just like Sweets For Your Sweet and that took almost a week to get out of KDP jail, so I just threw away about 6 hours of work trying to finish something for Valentine's Day for Kindle Select.

And Joe Konrath keeps telling us how much Amazon loves authors.

Questions With No Answers

2012-02-09T06:30:00.000-08:00

Someone bought a copy of Sweets then immediately got a refund? Was it not worth 99 cents?

Since the cover change on Bad Apple 1, 3 copies sold. Does that mean guns sell better than apples?
That's a serious question regarding cover design. I usually look for an image that suggests the story. Schtupid Cupid--looks like an old Jewish woman to me. Nothing Serious--summer colors, summer hat, the breeze is blowing, beautiful girl with a flowing dress, nothing serious there. Sweets--a plate of candy. Blue Raja--"out of the north an evil shall break forth" there you have Khryza Zentral, on the water, Northern Lights, foreboding castle. NLM--lawsuit against Viva.

These are all central to the story. Gun? Yes, there are guns in the Bad Apple books.

Have you seen that movie with Jennifer Lopez? I haven't. I think it's called Enough. She's abused and then learns how to fight back. That's worthy of a gun. Neal doesn't spend 200 pages learning to fight back. She's trying to get away from Joe and the violence. Is the book about violence? Yes. Was violence done to Neal? It sure was. Was there a murder? You betcha.

I guess here's the bottom line for me. I'm sorry if a gun on the cover is what it takes to get people to find this series.

Now I'm going to spend the rest of the morning making the gun bigger.

Old

New

At least font wise, the newer one is better because the name shows up better. This was a problem with this image. Half was light, half was dark. It meant neither dark nor light would work across the image. I did what I tell you not to do--use an outline (stroke in layer styles) I used a barely darker color at 50 % opacity to make it as unobtrusive as possible while still defining the text against the background. Totally my fault when I took the photo and I probably should have just gone out to reshoot. But I was losing my light so I didn't and made the best of it. It's still a good image. A really good image. It's just got that issue if I insist on having my name on the cover.

Update: Amazon worked faster with this change. Good for them. The larger gun cover is the one on the page and it sold a copy. So I'm not going to look at the numbers (they're numbers, come on people) for Jan. but there were 2 free days so there is no way I can do the math. Let's just say it was freebie downloaded 500 times and sold 1 copy. In Feb. with the old cover it sold 1 copy. Since the gun cover, it's sold 4.

I find this sort of disheartening. Design-wise the apple cover is as strong a design as the gun. And there's more of it in focus. With the 40 mm lens, what is not directly precisely in focus falls off when you're that close. There's no depth of field. The barrel could be a pipe for all you can really tell. Luckily I actually had a gun because I didn't have a pipe. People are buying this because it's a gun on the cover.

I took a photo for my pal Chris and I was so close to the thing, it was actually under the lens hood. I LOVE that 40 mm lens. Way to go, Nikon!

Sweets Out of KDP Jail

2012-02-07T04:52:00.000-08:00

Yes, Sweets For Your Sweet was finally released AND without an ankle bracelet.

I asked on my serious blog, the BAM blog, if the image on the new Bad Apple cover was recognizable and Angela kindly wrote that it was a gun but she liked the apple better. I love being agreed with.

However. Within hours of the change, a copy sold. One might argue that 1 copy sold before the change. I think that was Feb. 1. But that 1 copy sold so soon after makes you feel that it was because of the cover. Or was it because I've talked about it here for days? No idea.

Flash of Light

2012-02-06T05:06:00.000-08:00

You thought I had a new cover for it. No, I like the 3-D cover and probably won't change that for a long time.
I did get a 5 star review on it over at BN and although you are anon, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to say such nice things about my work.

Anonymous

Posted February 3, 2012

Loved it.

Love the way the book was written. I love this series and also the bad apple series!

Thank you for your feedback. Report this review

Years ago when I was in college I had a creative writing teacher. It was in the days of Woodstock and everyone being stoned pretty much all the time--not me, I have a tenuous enough grip on reality, I don't need to take a bazooka to it--and he thought Tom H*&^#(*$@ was the best writer in the class. I remember a story of Tom's that was an analysis of pushing spaghetti down the drain in the shower with his toes. Yeah. Creative writing (stay away from it). But the teacher observed or cursed me saying that I was neither a commercial writer nor a literary writer, I was somewhere on the cusp. Since I was about 19, I had no idea what that meant. DA was wrong about so much but he was right about that.

I don't possess the mannerisms of literary writing but have more content or substance than commercial. My work is deceptive, it reads fast, and if you read it fast you miss all the subtext. (That's when the drunk trolls get mad at me. It looks like what they're familiar with but they don't understand it.) So whenever anyone reads my work and gets it, I'm thrilled.

I've been waiting my entire life for what turned out to be the digital revolution. I will never be an Amanda Hocking, but maybe my niche audience can find me.

They can find you, too.

Hey, I have another book in mind Kindle Desktop Publishing can doubt I wrote! Yay!
Yes, my little 6 recipe cookbook is still in KDP Jail. I mean "review" so that they "can improve the experience for readers." Got it. That makes mistreatment of authors A-OK.

Bad Apple 1 New Cover

2012-02-04T12:32:00.000-08:00

Windows

2012-02-04T06:26:00.000-08:00

You thought I meant Microscoff Windows. No.

For the 2nd time this week, I changed a cover on kindle, they congratulated me for achieving publishing success and yet the cover hadn't changed.

I was alerted to a site called All Romance Ebooks and actually they also sell nonfiction, so it's not set in stone. It's an interesting idea and well done. Of course you can go to Amazon and search for romances and find them. What these people are doing is drilling the categories down to a remarkable level as well as providing heat levels. Although I will say I'm a little dubious about a male/male erotica thing being in "inspiration" just because one of the guys is the son of a preacher man. But there are glitches in every system.

They provide books in whatever format the author/publisher wants to upload so goodbye issues with having to buy from Kobo or iBookstore or Kindle or BN.

If I was really into reading romance, I would go to this site because it's easier, it's concentrating on exactly what I want. So I'm thinking that in the future, why wouldn't there be sites just like this for other genres. They cater to their niche market, they can have contests, give away books, have activities, forums, be a community of like minded readers.

Amazon is MegaMart. It's cold, impersonal, and it helps if you know what you're looking for. If the book isn't in the top 100 or whatever, it's hard to be found. If you can be more specific about what you're looking for, you might actually find it.

We're going to see lots of experimentation in the digital world and it will be very exciting. OTOH, expect to see no experimentation in legacy publishing just a lot of press releases proclaiming their success, stability and the uselessness of digital.

Long View

2012-02-03T06:24:00.000-08:00

We like instant gratification. If results aren't immediate, we freak. Take the long view of this process. I guess I'm tempted to include a story by Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah from the Talmud here.

Once a child got the better of me. I was traveling and I met with a child at a crossroads. I asked him, “Which way to the city?” and he replied: “This way is short and long, and that way is long and short.”
I took the “short and long” way. I reached the city but found my approach obstructed by brambles and rocks. So I retraced my steps and said to the child: “My son, did you not tell me that this is the short way?” Answered the child: “Did I not tell you that it is also long?”

I don't know a lot about digital publishing. Other people have had different experiences, but this is all in flux. It changes with each new decision Amazon makes, with each new reader, with each new country that comes online. It's all changing.

What's not changing is that there are no shortcuts. You have to do your work. Your work. Tell your stories. Follow your path. Experiment. Try things. Find joy in it.

Finding joy is the important part.

Sweets For Your Sweet

2012-02-02T05:32:00.000-08:00

First off, the marshmallows are better the 2nd day. Still not something I would make again but yeah, I can see why if stored in a large jar and aged somewhat they'd be attractive to some people. A little firmer. Not crunchy, but concentrated. Not so fluffy. Dryer. They'd be more interesting with rose flavoring or something more pronounced than vanilla.

This was the first cover.

This was the second.

They both have their strengths and weaknesses. And I am 51% for the 2nd.

I won't name names but I've seen covers obviously designed by the writer (far more famous than I) that I didn't think were all that strong graphically and they still sell. So I say this to encourage you to give creating your own cover a whirl. Don't set the bar so high you pre-fail. You can buy a perfectly good image for a ridiculously small amount of money and use the basic design I've used with this cover. Split the cover in 3rds. Image in the middle. Name on top, title on bottom. Title on top, name on bottom. Use a common font. Don't be too creative. Don't do drop shadows or outline. Keep it simple. You might be more successful than you imagine.

Harshing My Hearts

2012-02-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

Okay Suzanne. I wound up being pretty specific in your instructions although not grimly serious.

Here's the recipe I tinkered together. Double it if you want more of these Michelin Man things. I'm leaving them for the mailman.

1.5 tablespoons gelatin (pack and a half)
1/6 cup water
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup corn syrup (preferrably not the kind with crap vanilla in it already but if that's what you can find, no one will be able to tell the difference)
1/4 cup water
1 egg white
1/4 teaspoon salt
vanilla to taste

In a small bowl add the gelatin and pour the 1/6 cup water over it. Give it about 15 min for gelatin to do what it does.
Meanwhile in a heavy saucepan, add the 1/4 cup water, corn syrup and sugar. Heat until melted. Raise the heat. Don't burn it. Using your required for this process candy thermometer, let the mixture reach 250 degrees. Careful. This stuff is hot.

Pour the gelatin and water into your stand mixer. Turn it on. Slowly down the side of the bowl, pour the flaming hot sugar. Beat Beat Beat. You can walk away.
And you have to.
Beat an egg white until stiff. I used a whisk. Add the salt.
When the sugar mixture is glossy and about doubled, add the egg white.
Combine well.
Add the vanilla. At this point add food coloring. I used red. It looked plenty pink. But by the time it was coated again and again with sugar, it lost its impact. So probably use a bit more than you think.
This stuff is sticky beyond belief.
You've put aluminum foil on a sheet pan and covered that with cornstarch or potato starch.
Quickly pour the goop onto the sheet pan.
With a spatula sprayed with non-stick spray, or possibly dipped in hot water, spread the glop out fast. It's going to start setting up.
It's like the Blob. It's got a life of its own. It moves to where you don't want it to go.
That's it. Let it sit out on the counter for 4 hours or overnight.
Tip it out onto a sheet of parchment paper or waxed paper covered with cornstarch or confectioner's sugar. This stuff wants to stick to everything.
Take you heart cookie cutter. Dip it in hot water.
Cut out heart shaped marshmallows.
Dredge in confectioner's sugar.
You will wash your hands about 75 times during this whole ordeal. But go ahead, make your day! ;-)

Don't Harsh My Mallow

2012-02-01T14:01:00.000-08:00

I made marshmallows today for the cookbook. Don't bother. People say they're so great, fresh and delicious. Apparently they sell them in France from tall jars. These tasted like Campfire Marshmallows to me. Fresh Campfire Marshmallows. So they won't be in the book. It was a lot of work for nothing very spectacular. I didn't want to write all the directions.

Is this booklette going on Kindle Select or not? I don't know. I thought it was. Now I'm not feeling it.

I wish BN would come up with some kind of program similar to Kindle Select, then I would do half and half. I wish they would do something to make it more attractive to stay there.

What else is new. Big surprise. First sale of the month was Pizza Princess. Why? It's been for sale for about 2 years and sold like 3 copies during that timeframe. What can we glean from this? Better cover? Better/snappier description?

I know there's some jumping around. There are a lot of moving pieces in this story. Because it was a script and I didn't ditch all the scenes that maybe I should have. Then there wouldn't have been information available the audience needs. So yeah, it could be called flawed in that regard. It costs 99 cents. It's cute. It's still well-written. Everything I said about the cheese is correct. Just read it without malice aforethought. People watch the dreckiest television shows and manage not to hurl tomatoes at the set, relax with the ebooks already.

Malicious Reviews

2012-02-01T06:46:00.000-08:00

I finally got back to Ms H at BN who helped me with removing ridiculous reviews last time.
I'm giving up with it. BN is not organized to address these issues. Amazon is. It's better than tradpub's slings and arrows, so just something to accept.

I rarely get ridiculous reviews at Amazon. I get mean ones, sure. I rarely get mean reviews at BN, but get a lot of kids who can't download the book/the sample/don't know how to type.

I don't feel like this is my job. Site maintenance and patrol is the province of the company who is selling my work. If you flag the review, someone should be there to find out why and determine if company policy thinks it should be removed. Flagging it and having no response is a waste of a click.

You're caught because there are readers who will say "I never buy a book with under 4 stars, I've been burned too many times". Then you have a couple drunk trolls drag you down to 3 stars and we know you are now out of the prime Amazon algorithm. This is not a joke, this is about sales. Bad/malicious reviews can impact the future of your book. This is reality, not me overreacting.

But screw it. I can't do anything about it.

Making marshmallows this morning. I was going to make shortbread too but I'll bet I won't. The book is essentially done. I want it to be done. Booklette.

What's A Short Book?

2012-01-30T10:23:00.000-08:00

A short novel is a novella. A single is a single. A short story is a short story. What's 10 recipes for a "cookbook"?

It's not a pamphlet. It's not a booklet. I'm calling it booklette but is there a new term for this? Suggestions, anyone? Mini-book? Micro-book? Bookling?

I bought a hardcover cookbook from France. It's short with about 25 recipes. This was the norm. All the ones I looked at seem much shorter than any American cookbook. Today I feel that American cookbooks are bloated. The publisher/editors in tradpub have been insisting on these encyclopedic tomes in order to justify the high price they "must" charge.

It's wonderful to have the freedom to once again be able to publish books at their real length but do we need to invent new categories/terms?

BN Support

2012-01-30T10:16:00.000-08:00

Barbara,

The PubIt! staff does not manage Customer Reviews. Please use the
following link to contact Barnes & Noble Customer Service with your
questions.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/help/customer_service/morehelp.asp

You can also call the Customer Service Center at 1-800-THE-BOOK
(1-800-843-2665).

Thanks!
The PubIt! Team

Original Message Follows:
------------------------
Hi.

I seem to have a very difficult time of getting any support so I'll
keep trying.

Please remove the ridiculous reviews from the Dream Horse page

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/dream-horse

Anonymous
Posted January 28, 2012
:(
It looks real good, but I CANT GET THE SAMPLE!!!!!

Gg
UxuxcugaaxahbAkHvchvcso ad
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

**************************************************************

Customer Service doesn't handle malicious reviews either if you click on that link. You get to live chat and Hina sent me back to PubIt. I called the number and have a compassionate woman who understands the issue but it's not her province either.

I guess you're pretty much on your own at BN. Sad.

Dona, Dona, The Pizza Princess

2012-01-29T06:28:00.000-08:00

(Note the reference to Zsa Zsa, too! And this song is mentioned in the book.)

This started as a script called The Godmother. I sent it to my agent at William Morris and he said "You really can write funny." Yay! Now I'm going to take Hollywood meetings! "Who's gonna play Dona," Leo asks. And I say "Um, an actress. Marisa Tomei. Fran Drescher. Any actress who grew up in New York City." But how it works in Hollywood is not that way, so it never went anywhere. :-(

Since I had already been a novelist, I felt confident that I could turn it into a novel. Years and incarnations later, we have this version. Which is still cute and I still love Dona.

I made the dough, then made the pizza, went out with the Nikon and 40 mm lens (which I love), took the photo then built the cover.

Great. We are so set. Go to BN to upload it and there's no previous version under sad Robin's name. WHAT? I never published it to BN. I never published it to BN?? How does that happen?

It took me a while to figure it out. Sure, this was one of the first books I published through Smashwords, but when PubIt opened, I deleted everything from Smashwords, and yes, somehow neglected to republish it to BN. I had a lot on my mind. I was working on Bad Apple 1 at the time.

Did I think about putting Dona into Kindle Select? Yes. For about the length of time it took to ask and say no.
Kindle Select/Jeff Bezos already has enough of my full length works. If at some point KS seems more viable than it seems now, I can always change my mind.

On to the cookbook today. Looks like I'll have some good light out there so it's more prep than writing.

Thanks For The Rubies, Please Pass The Moon

2012-01-28T04:38:00.000-08:00

Not my title, it was a book by Jill Schary. But that's how I'm starting to feel about Kindle Select and it's freebie days.

Don't talk about the outliers, they shouldn't figure into this. How much are we supposed to give? How much of our work should we gamble on readers who want the moon for free.

I'll say it again. Do Not Give Away Anything Valuable.

For The Drunk Troll Who Made Such A Fuss

2012-01-28T04:04:00.000-08:00

To Amazon. They threatened to pull Nothing Serious over the French word objets, which the troll insisted was missing a "c". And the quote from the movie, The Queen of Outer Space, where Zsa Zsa Gabor with her Hungarian accent can't pronounce the word queen.

For you, dear, the movie is running on Turner Classic Movies at 7:30 am EST Jan. 28, 2012. Knock yourself out. (No, literally)

"I hay dot qveen."

And for the KDP Support लड़की in Mumbai who believed the drunk troll over the author (that would be me), I'm sorry you're stuck with Bollywood and can't see this. It's a good one.

Sales at Amazon.de

2012-01-27T09:39:00.000-08:00

I thought this would be interesting and reinforcing the point I'm making again and again. These are my "sales" for January in Germany. I picked Germany because it's stark and easier to discern what I'm saying.

Every book on the list is in Kindle Select. The totals are all from the free days. There were no sales.
Let me point out I have 22 books for sale on Amazon. There's plenty to choose from.

Schtupid Cupid is a novella about the cousin of the main characters in Not Low Maintenance and Unspeakably Desirable. It should be a short hop to purchase those books after reading SC.

It's not happening.

Oh I Just Remembered This Part

2012-01-27T05:52:00.000-08:00

Kindle Select. That's where people BORROW books and then Amazon compensates the writers bountifully for being in the program. That's why they want your books the borrowing part.

Yeah.

Some people have had their books borrowed 1000's of times! Wow! Boy are they going to be compensated bountifully. For the rest of us, not so much.

I've had 5 borrows this month which totally shock me. I expected none given my off-genre books.

Here's the reality. You know by looking at your sales figures this morning if people are going to want to borrow your book. If the book's been out for a while and it's selling vibrantly, people will borrow it. If it's not selling, Kindle Select will not help people to want to borrow it. Sorry. That's the truth.

There are only a few categories that sell wildly. If you're not in those categories, Kindle Select probably won't help. This is not a program that is designed to help US sell books. It's a program that Amazon came up with to create a literary Netflix. Jeff sweetened the pot to get us to help him, but it's really not about us. Oh yeah it can be great for some, but if it was for all of us like with promo pages and ads and links and running billboards and featured items in rotation and bells and whistles and contests and cotton candy on a stick, more people would be reporting fabulous experiences. And they're just not.

I read a post yesterday by Cheryl Tardiff at her blog Cheryl K. Tardiff Go read all the numbers and she kept track. See what her experience was. Really, you should. Snipped from her note on a mailing list--

The grand total of free downloads was 42,886. Almost 43,000 readers have my ebooks and I have more titles for them to buy later.

After sales: not noticeable.

Let that sink in. 43,000 downloads and no spike in sales.

How much money did she lose? Let me ask another question. Cheryl worked hard to write those books. She lived life, she probably gave up a lot to do this existence as a writer. How many of those (adjectives and adverbs dropped) readers appreciate her effort enough to turn around and support her by buying her other books?

We don't know the answer to that do we. Except for After sales: not noticeable.

I will say I often download books for later so 42,000 people did not fire up their Kindles to read Cheryl's books that night. Some did, most didn't. Maybe this will be a big help.

What I think I know is that 42,000 people won't be buying those books because they got them for free. And that's a lot of money to kiss bye-bye to.

I'll repeat it again. Do not give anything valuable away.

Literary Gimme Caps

2012-01-26T06:30:00.000-08:00

A gimme cap is a freebie businesses give away with their logo on them. John Deere Tractors.

You get a promo pen all over the place, right? If you're lucky because you're always losing pens anyway.

And from stupid politicians in an election year, they'd rather give you a button than give you their honesty.

Promo. These are publicity items. A car dealer doesn't give you a free tune-up, he gives you a memo magnet with his phone number on it.

Kindle Select. The Alibaba of the bookselling world. (What's Alibaba? I don't know, some importer of cheap crap that turns up in my google searches every once in a while.)

Do not fall into the Amazon trap of giving anything valuable away! Let me repeat that. DO NOT GIVE ANYTHING VALUABLE AWAY.

This is the Jacob Javitts Center Trade Show. This is a souk full of carpet sellers. Haggling. Grabbing. Free is King!

Do Not Give Anything Valuable Away.

What's valuable? Uh, your whole book that took you months to write and you hold close to your heart like the treasure it is.

What's not "valuable"? A short story you wrote specifically AS A PROMOTIONAL ITEM.

Promotional items only are free! Do I need to repeat it? No. You're smart, you'll remember.

I can't make it more plain than this.

Of course this means rethinking the game plan you didn't have. You will have to create "business cards" in order to play Kindle Select Lotto. That means writing something specifically you will not make money on.

Don't listen to the people who say stuff like "My book was downloaded 10,000 times an hour and then sales skyrocketed". They hit the lottery. We don't care about them because we can't reproduce whatever they did. We can only have our own strategy to maximize our efforts.

Maybe you don't agree with me. Okay. Lots of stuff works. Lots of stuff doesn't. I'm saying this issue has become really clear over the past two weeks. I started to ask myself "What do I want from these cheesy 5 days?" 5 days a MONTH, Jeff, if you really wanted to help, but out of 90? Grinchly. So how to maximize these. What do I expect from them. Skip the great sales. What do you want. I want people to be exposed to my name so they will go to my books.

Okay. If I already gave them my books, there's no point in going to BUY my books. Ah, yes, that's not a feature in the system, it's a bug and it's not in my favor. Then I can't give away my books. And I can't give away cool memo magnets. Or can I? If I put up promotional items, it's like a billboard going down the highway. Burma Shave. Eat At McDonald's. Yeah I need a shave. Some fries would be good. Where's the exit ramp?

You need to flood the Kindle Select system with your memo magnets. If you had (don't make me do the math!) 5 promo/throwaway items on Select that's 25 days. It's also 25 weeks. You pick 1 day a week to run your "advertisement". ME! Here I am! Great Invisible Storyteller. Make me Visible!

Every week for your entire 90 day lockdown, you get to rise up out of the muck of a million other writers clammoring for attention. You give the reader the sizzle not the steak. You give them a taste of how good you are but you don't waste your best product on them. You don't throw pearls before swine. I'm only partially calling all those people in a feeding frenzy to get free books free books free books hahahahahaha like the guy in Frankenstein swine. Some will prove themselves to be drunk trolls. Shouldn't you at least get paid for it?

I'll probably say more later, but there you have the strategy and the reality.

Yeah that means you have to stop what you're doing and write some short pieces whatever they are. Sorry. So do I.

Get Yourself on a List

2012-01-26T01:29:00.000-08:00

About 18 months ago I met a man on the kindle board who was kindly trying to help me with the sig list of books after your name. Never did get it which was a big reason I stopped going. I wasn't enough in with the in crowd. But this man was nice and tried to help me. Sent me his book. I sent him Bad Apple which he critiqued and made lots of notes. That I still have. He thought I got the story all wrong..He thought it was a girl who had been abused who picks up a shotgun instead of a violin, and goes out for some vengeance. It isn't until the last chapter where Joe breaks into the house was this man happy. Everything up till that moment was a huge bore. He didn't like the covers. The bad apple? Girl with shotgun will sell the book. The book isn't about a girl with a shotgun it's about a girl resurrecting her life with the aid of a compassionate family and music. So I didn't take his suggestions and now he's one of Amazon's stars and a young woman from Canada for whom English doesn't seem to be her first language gets the point of the book.

What this guy told me was to get on a list. No matter what list you're on, you will sell better.

I think since Nothing Serious had been published it's been a top seller in home garden>antiques (yes it does have something to do with antiques) Not Low Maintence was on that Legal thriller list for 2 words I tagged it with--Lawyers, murder. It had no business in the legal thriller list but it was at #2 for about 10 weeks and made me a nice bit of money. If you don't know the way Amazon drills these categories down, go study for a while. Can you apply any of what you've seen to your book? Find an element, or topic that is in your book and on those lists and go to the metadata and change it. Because most of my adult novels are about Jews, it's not hard to mention Jewish women, it's a search term and it will put those books on that list if they start having any sales at all.

Obviously some people just go to the top ten overall, or top if romance whatever. Some people obviously type in search terms. I don't know what they're typing. Jewish women mystery. Could be. Then Amazon sorts thru the millions of books and if I've done my job with the cover title and description and of course book, I may make a sale.

Everytime I see a spike in sales, I say "I must have gotten on a list somewhere." It become so obvious. I don't go look, I usually find out by stumbling upon it.

Let's this be your homework for the next week or so. Try to learn about the lists and figure out how your descriptions and metadata can drill you down to the Amazonian Lode.

More Fun Than Anything Else

2012-01-25T18:42:00.000-08:00

For me!

Murder is Exhausting.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,678 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #11 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > World Literature > Jewish

How do I account for it? That's a question we shouldn't even ask. It got a new cover (which is cute, isn't it?), it got a new title, and it went for a 1 day freebie.

Sorry. I don't see how the freebie helps unless people thought it would be available for 2 days in a row and when they went back, it wasn't free anymore.

I love Umberto Eco. He's a marvelously intelligent man, a wonderful thinker. I've read Foucault's Pendulum many times, ditto Travels in Hyperrelativity (I think that's the name of it). In one article he said he liked writing for a newspaper (don't hold me to it) because he could think out loud but he reserved the right to change his mind.

In the next day or so I'll write about what I've been thinking and discussing but you have to know none of it is fully tested. It's a suspicion I have. I have been doing this writing thing for quite a while--books, screenplays and television--so maybe my instincts are good on this.

Writing a book is like being a monk.

Writing in the entertainment business is more like cage fighting.

Where we are now seems to fall someplace in the middle.

Oy! So Tired

2012-01-25T12:45:00.000-08:00

I went shopping. Got some items at the Dollar Store which were then stolen from my car in the Walmart parking lot. I found the coolest spatula, too. Oh well. I guess they needed the heart doily more than I did. (Did not, that was for a photo shoot!) This is why I don't take the camera with me. It would have to BE with me 100% of the time and I don't want the possibility of bumping it into something or dropping it. And yet I used to take the Nikon F with me everywhere always. How do you go pee with it? You don't put it on the floor in the stall. You try to hang it up on the little hook? I can't face it.

Murder is Exhausting. I've been saying all week that freebie Select hasn't resulted in sales. I have no idea what the actual sales figure is because Amazon makes it impossible for me to do the math but let's call it 10 sales since last weekend. And in the great way Amazon makes it possible for almost everyone to win a plastic trophy

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,946 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #19 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > World Literature > Jewish

While the Fiction>World Lit>Jewish is a very small category, gee #21,946 overall? That's darn good. That's better than the guy Konrath said was such a good writer.

Wait it just changed while I was there to close the page.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,619 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #15 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > World Literature > Jewish

#18,619. I'm starting to get impressed.

I've have thoughts all day because just getting to Walmart is a big trek. Let's talk about my Kate book. To get newcomers up to speed and to try to keep it brief. I went to ABC to try to get a job writing for a soap. And they didn't like me. So I decided to write a book about a soap instead. I was allowed to stay in the studio of All My Children all day, talking to everyone, seeing how soaps are made, blah blah. Came home and wrote the book. It was published by my publisher Atheneum, my editor was Jean Karl one of the foremost in the business ever, a lot of knowledgeable people read it. It got me a job with Proctor & Gamble, then I became one of the youngest headwriters in the history of daytime television when I took over The Doctors. It was optioned to be a television movie, it had a paperback version. If it was lousy, someone would have mentioned it instead of throwing money at me for it.

You would not believe the bad, mean-spirited reviews I get on this book. The characters are bland, I'm stupid, the movie is probably easier to understand (Huh? There's no movie.) I don't know how to write. That was at 99 cents. I haven't gotten a bad review since it went to $1.99 probably a year ago.

Bad reviews aren't a good thing to have on your book's page. But besides being part of the drunk troll thing, they are more about people being unable to read.

Digital books are very much plot driven. There's very little substance. I don't like roller coasters a lot, but I do like a lot of other amusement part rides. So riding a roller coaster or the Pirates of the Caribbean (not that freaky It's a Small World After All thing, that's really bad and creepier than the Haunted Mansion) is great fun.
I hope not the only thing. But some readers seem angered by content. They can't follow it. They can't detect nuance or subtlety or subtext.

I don't seek out reviews because they bother me. I saw Bad Apple 1 got a 5 star review so I had to go see what was said.

***

Soulfull, January 17, 2012

N. Drouin "tell me about books" (Canada) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Bad Apple (Kindle Edition)

The first thing you will notice is the font. Very dos computer circa 1990, I never got use to it but I did get lost in the story to be able to forget about it.

The story is surprising. The beginning is ruff. But after about 30 pages, the story develop fast enough to get hook. I am surprised to find that this story although somewhat sad is very touching. Neal is a teenager who has seen it all and turned out to be very mature. She does get a brake in life with Truly the musicien.

I like the fact that all the bad things that are very dramatic such as physical abuse, rape etc are not mention per say but you imagation make you understand what the character is taking about.

Must read, I have started the second one.

****

This is an excellent review from someone in Quebec maybe? French spelling of musicien, someone who is bi-lingual and French is their primary language? She read it for meaning. And I thank you, N. Drouin (sounds French to me). The Bad Apple series is not a romp, it's textured, about two kids who have seen trouble in their own ways, it's about violence and abuse and the repercussions of that, so that was a very accurate reading.

Let this review remind you that Kindle hates Courier so if you write in that as I do, change it to Times New Roman when you upload to Amazon. No one mentioned that to me starting out, and I'm systematically going back and reformatting everything.

I wanted that spatula!

Here's a lapel button to virtually wear.

Serious Thinking About a Digital World

2012-01-24T05:55:00.000-08:00

Stay with me. By the end of the process, I promise we'll be somewhere. But I live like I write a novel so there are a lot of elements that seem unconnected now that you'll be able to resolve later.

There's a writer I've come across in forums and...elsewhere. I think may even be a professor. Really well educated smart and all that. And writes novels like that. Which don't appeal to me at all so I have no idea if they're lovely or drecky. So a year ago this person had no regard for digital. Again the sort of Ivory Tower Elite and the nameless rabble paradigm. (Imagine a prole knowing that word!) Then this person's publisher dropped them. Then this person's agent dropped them. Now suddenly digital is The Brave New World. This writer can add content the publisher refused to add. Freedom is some fine awesome sauce, huh?

When the world changes for people like that, these are not cosmetic changes. They're sea changes. Did you know that phrase comes from Shakespeare?

From Shakespeare's The Tempest, 1610:

ARIEL [sings]:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Again, big mistake letting the rabble near the printing press output.

We had another week with traditional publishers saying digital is no big deal, one said ebooks aren't exciting, another said the sales were plateauing. It's all wishcasting. By the end of the decade, the paper book as we consumed them at the start of the century will be a rarity. Sure there will still be books--the coffee table books and what-not.

Here's something cool you might not have known about Gloria Stuart, the actress. (Yes, I tweaked the photo)

"Five years after husband's death, Stuart became reacquainted with California printer Ward Ritchie (Ward Ritchie Press), whom she had known during her college years. Both widowed, they fell in love. She was fascinated by his antique hand press and asked him to teach her how to run it. She bought her own hand press and established "Imprenta Glorias", and began creating artists' books (books hand-made, labor intensive, usually with a very limited run). Stuart wrote the text, designed the book, set the type, printed the pages, and finished pages with water colors or silk screen or decoupage. Books from Imprenta Glorias are in the Metropolitan Museum, Library of Congress, Huntington Library, J. Paul Getty Museum, Morgan Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and numerous private and university collections." (From Wikipedia)

People can have all the books they want to make. But when people go to read or be entertained, it'll be digital.
Ya want to smell paper? Make your own paper. It's easy enough.

So Yippee we're free. I started this blog 2 years ago with a Jack Bruce vid of I'm Free. Now what. The reality is we have to start being serious. The rest of us, those who didn't hit the Kindle lottery. We have a dragon to ride.

And I have Fed Ex showing up momentarily with my griottines. Your what? Diminutive French black cherries floating in a sea of kirsch. Yum yum triple yum. But you think this is unrelated to the discussion. It is exactly a part of where we're going. It's for my Valentine's cookbook.

Just spit it out! Gah! You're keeping us on the edge of our seats. I'm sorry. I'm still figuring it out. Like a novel, I know the end point (I think) I'm just not sure of how I'm going to wind up there. Soon.

Question on Pricing

2012-01-23T15:14:00.000-08:00

Hi, Suz. Welcome.

99 cents or not? Both!

If you go back in the archives, I've railed against the 99 cent price point. I don't love it and think it devalues our work. However, given the worldwide struggling economy, those of us not writing in sizzling hot genres may need to be more flexible than other writers. I would rather see fiddling with the price than putting the work on Kindle Select. Hold off on that till you run out of other options.

Yeah, wow. Big statement since some are enjoying so much success. I'm still not prepared to say what I'm thinking at the moment but I'll go some of the way. To first base. What heat rating is that??

If you're relatively new to writing as a career, what's your catalog like? What's your library? Do you have 1 book, 3, 5? Which projects are you most attached to/what do you value most? What projects do you want to protect, if any? Are these stand-alones or is it a series? One imagines that if you have a series, introducing readers to the first number will get them to read the following books. That's a different strategy than if you have a single book.

Ignoring length, what is the price of a middle reader book? A YA? A romance? A mystery? A police procedural? A literary work? Are they the same or different? Why? What's the profile of the audience for each of these? Who has money? What kind of money? Do they have to ask for permission to buy a book? Is it an impulse purchase or something considered?

We don't really know the answers to these questions without a focus group or Amazon getting generous with their research, but can try to intuit some kind of information by knowing who we're writing for. What I think might be quite different than what someone else thinks about this. They may feel this is a stupid discussion to be having, a real yawning waste of time.

So play around with the price of one book. If you have a couple books, do it with the one you care about least. If it's a series, play around with #1. You should know in a week or two if customers accept or reject the price you set. Readers will find you. I wish Amazon would tell us our page views but I suspect we never will get that info.

That's what I'm prepared to say at the moment. I hope it helps and am always glad to try to answer questions.

Price

2012-01-23T07:59:00.000-08:00

Again, you will hear everything about this. There are people who sell well who advise to keep the prices up. There are those who say price is flexible. There are those who say 99 cents. That's our side.

There are readers who say loudly, definitively, that any book under $2.99 is crap. A 99 cent book is by a wannabe and not worth the time. There are those who think 99 is right. There are a substantial number who think free is the perfect price and paying for books is stupid.

Let me say that those people insisting books should cost at least $2.99 did not support me in my decision to increase my prices at the beginning of the year.

You are looking to the wrong person to do the math of this but here's my sense of it not based on math. Your royalty is 70% on a book priced at >$2.99 at Amazon. You can sell 1 book instead of 5 (whatever, someone else can do the math and tell me how many 35 centses that works out to be). Isn't that great?!

Say you sell 10 books at $2.99 in the month. Say you sell enough 99 cent books to end up with the same royalty check. Which one leaves you better off? Tick tock. I'll give you a moment to think about it. That's right, the 99 cent sales because it means you've sold a bunch of books and your ranking will improve. You will be seen and at least have the chance for people to check out your other books.

At 99 cents, as I've said for months, the drunk trolls come out of their burrows and slam you mercilessly with their 1 star reviews--"I wish I had my money back! Bad writing! No character development!"

Or a real 1 star review for Dream Horse this past week at BN

Anonymous
Posted January 18, 2012
Gg
UxuxcugaaxahbAkHvchvcso ad
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Yeah I flagged it but there's no one home at BN to do anything about it.

So what do I say? Play around with your pricing. If you're not seeing sales, raise or drop. For how long? For as long as you're comfortable with it. I saw one woman say she was keeping the test price point for 3 months. Wow. That's a long time in the digital world. If you can't get a sense in a month, good for you. You're not obsessing about it.

I do know that over the weekend I lowered my prices and saw an improvement in sales at BN within hours making me sorry I had taken Bad Apple 1 away from the site to give Kindle Select a whirl. However, let me just say that it was free at BN in Nov. and downloaded 500 times with no bump in sales of 2 & 3. So I'm not feeling the love.

This is all leading somewhere. Trust me.

Select Promo

2012-01-22T06:34:00.000-08:00

I was going to wait for a little more feedback and the gather my thoughts on this but I'll start the discussion today.

I understand that some people get good results. Let's ignore them, we could even call them outliers. Konrath is an outlier. You can't duplicate what he does. There are so many moving parts to Konrath's success that there's no point in trying to rebuild it. What the takeaway from Joe is very much try anything.

So far I don't see that this 5 freebie days thing works to sell books. I've downloaded a few books. Generally, I don't read them immediately. Everyone likes something for free, I do, too. But to me this is something for later. When I don't have anything else to read. Unless it really strikes me as wonderful, then I open it. The University of Chicago Press gives away a free ebook a month. I think I've gotten 3 and haven't read any of them, altho I looked at one and wasn't compelled to read it. It wouldn't move me to spend money on anything else they offer.

I've been fortunate. My freebies haven't been downloaded in great quantities. Why do I say fortunate? Because if you give away 5000 books, that's 5000 sales you will never have. And if those people don't read the book immediately, or soonish or ever, you are nowhere, worse than where you started. If you gave away 5000 freebies and there was some record of that, so that new customers looked at your page and saw "Wow 5000 people downloaded this book, I'll give it a try!" that would make it worth giving it away. But it's like throwing a rock into a pond. There's a ripple and then the surface returns to normal.

Some people claim to get sales from this. Someone explain how that works. Did people see your name and remember it, then go to buy the book, or your other books?

Bad Apple 1 was downloaded 600 times. Bad Apple 2 has sold 5 copies this month. Bad Apple 3 has sold 4. So because all those people were introduced to the series, it had no effect whatsoever on sales. Schtupid Cupid was downloaded a couple hundred times. No sales after that. Not a 1. The verrine book is different. That was downloaded 100+ times and there have been about 4 sales after. But it was already ranked in cookbooks where it could be found. I can't attribute the sales to the freebie.

We can't make a business plan based on Dec. Christmas only comes once a year. Now we're in January. Are you better off shooting your 5 at once or spreading it out over the 90 days? If there was a record, a tally, for customers to see, yeah, I could believe that running 5 days and building up numbers in a lump would be good. There is no tally. The downside to running the 5 is that you have 11 weeks where you're paralyzed, you can't do anything. There are no "Amazon tools" to help you. Play with price all you want, knock yourself out.

My conclusion is that for most of us this model is not going to work.

There is something that might. It involves even more work. Sorry. Let me think a little bit more about it.

A treat from Porgy & Bess

George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, Ira Gershwin

Look Mom! No Power Lines

2012-01-21T07:52:00.000-08:00

Yes, my thrill of the day was learning how to remove power lines from a photo using Photoshop. Spot Healing Brush. These people are geniuses.

I downloaded a free book from Amazon. I'm just going to think out loud for a little bit and maybe it'll prompt you to think, too.

This book was far from entertaining and yet at one point I believe it was published by one of the Big Six. Didn't they notice there was no character development, too many characters, no real plot and it was just in general a big bore?

Most of us have had a run-in with tradpub either unhappily published or unhappily rejected or both. Lucky you who are neither. Let's just say--for the sake of one of those arguments again--that tradpub has expectations of what will be good for the reading public and if you don't fall within the parameters, you're not good enough to be published.

Now the gates at thrown open, the gatekeepers have been (rightfully) trampled, and readers can read from a vast menu of choices.

Here's the question. Do digital readers have different requirements than an agent/editor combo in NYC?

Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It...Wait, Don't Let it

2012-01-20T13:42:00.000-08:00

Big snowstorm predicted for overnight. That should be... wintery. Sweet Tarts and Murder Is Exhausting will have free days this weekend. I haven't seen the kind of results others have but then I'm not writing in the same genres. I guess. This is 1.5 months old in the history of the entire world, I sure don't have it figured out yet. I've had a couple thoughts that I'm not quite ready to discuss in public yet but I've run them by a couple others and they thought I was making sense. That's a rarity!

There's no magic bullet for this process. Publicity doesn't seem to work. Having traditionally published prior to digital doesn't seem to help unless you were hugely successful before. What works is the work, the hard stuff. Write a good book, a good description, eye-catching cover. Rinse and repeat. There are genres that are hotter than others. If you write in those genres, you have a better chance of catching the wave. If you don't, you wait until your niche audience arrives.

RIP Etta James

Such a Deal

2012-01-20T05:18:00.000-08:00

7" Android Tablet $59.99 free shipping

http://www.dailysteals.com/

No brand name is mentioned, but isn't this absolutely perfect for a student who might wind up leaving the thing on the bus?

Here's a Kobo Reader for $90.

http://www.buy.com/prod/kobo-wireless-reader-with-free-silicone-skin-black/227529178.html

Because Traditional Publishers Know So Much More Than We Do

2012-01-18T16:35:00.000-08:00

Dream Horse

Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,354 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Individual Sports > Horses > Equestrian
- #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children's eBooks > Animals > Horses
- #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Lifestyle & Home > Home & Garden > Animal Care & Pets > Horses > Riding

Love In the Air, by that sad Robin O'Neill, mispublished by Avalon a year ago

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,209,768 in Books

Let's just assume my literary skills are about equal in each novel. Just for the sake of argument.

If I'm so stupid (since that's how they perceive indie publishers), and they're so great, why is my self-published book with its homemade cover ranked about 3 million places above the professional traditionally published book?

Sweet Tarts and High Heels

2012-01-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

I didn't mention this project before, because it wasn't actually anything until this rousing blog post by Dean Wesley Smith this week exhorting everyone to put short stories up for sale. Since I'm not a short story writer, I didn't immediately think of this piece I had written a while back.

Then I remembered it and thought well, I liked it at the time and someone I respected really liked it, so maybe since it's complete, all I need is the fabulous formatting (which had me so nuts I was on the verge of buying a Kindle--maybe that's another one of Dr. Evil's plans!) and a cover and I'm there.

Wait. I have a Tween following. Do I want a story about a call girl under my name? No. I don't.
Read new blog post by Joe Konrath.
Wait. Second thoughts.
(See, with Libra Rising, I'm happy to let anyone else make up my mind for me when it doesn't count.)
I have some name recognition and Amazon does lump my books together. (You think this is all about me. It could be a decision you'll face in the future, too.) Maybe I'm better off extending my shelf space than protecting the wayward 12 year olds who happen upon this book from a little bit of language and intimations of sex more than actual sex. Geez, I hope they didn't stay up to see Justified last night. I was squirming over that. They can see more on Showtime than I could ever write.

I went with keeping the fake sociologist's name on the cover for now but used my name.

The cover I like a lot. $3 at a stock photo site. It was in color. I put it in Lightroom and had downloaded a bunch of free filters weeks ago. I was going through the list looking at the possibilities and there was a set that hangs onto 1 color and makes the rest of the image B&W. So what looks like a big deal was really 1 click. What was hard was to make the shadows around both breasts even. I guess the way the photog lit her, he didn't notice one side was lighter. It didn't look right. Darkening shadows must not be a common function or something because there was no quick way to do it without darkening everything and that wasn't the point.

The blurb:

Noel Adrian, Ph.D. wants to know how young and beautiful women become escorts in Beverly Hills. Of course, they meet Miss Doucette and are recruited. The money is great, the lifestyle moving among the rich, powerful and attractive is even better. But as sociologist, Dr. Adrian wants the backstory.

Tierney has no reluctance to sharing her story. She’s not proud of her life but she’s not embarrassed either. Her new world is much like her old one but now she’s not scraping by and she knows how to punch back. But the past is more difficult to shake off than it looks and under pressure, Tierney reverts to what she knows best. Will this time be any different.

Another day, Another Gasp

2012-01-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

More blog posts about why tradpub is a vibrant industry, the rest of us are stupid and the lawsuit to harass/steal the ebook rights from a 90 year old woman continues.

Is there anything worse in a society than seeing a senior citizen abused? This is what traditional publishing has devolved to? They need the money so badly they would turn Jean Craighead George's remaining years into a legal battle? Is there anything more unseemly and telling than this? I find it despicable.

This is how much tradpub cares about you. I actually prefer the anonymity of Amazon and even the dopey complaint about Nothing Serious and the whole objets/objects issue with the drunk troll. That's easy to resolve. Accede to their idiot demand or unpublish the book. Either way it's over in 5 minutes.

Be this

Today and Today and So Forth

2012-01-17T16:28:00.000-08:00

"Long-term there’s no future in printed books. They’ll be like vinyl: pricey and for collectors only. 95% of people will read digitally. Everybody in publishing knows this but most are in denial about it because moving to becoming a digital company means laying off like 40% of our staffs. And the barriers to entry fall, too. We simply don’t want to think about it."

So a publishing insider confesses in an email to Pandodaily. Well worth the time to read the post.

"Making the best of things is... a damn poor way of dealing with them." Rose Wilder Lane (Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter)

I'm glad to see tradpub is sticking to what they know best.

"Back up so we can hit it again!"--Captain Edward Smith of RMS Titantic.

Didn't I say paper books were like vinyl? Yes, I remember saying that. I said also coffee table books would hang around. Yes, and the collectors. Like the people who collect those funny salt and pepper shakers. The book sniffers.

It's hard to know what else to say. I'm growing concerned about BN. They're not servicing their content providers. Some people will say don't put all your eggs in one smiley basket. But if everyone knows where the best eggs are, where you get the lowest price on those eggs, and the basket and the heat gun to thaw frozen pipes, why go elsewhere?

Why buy paper books? They may smell great (eyeroll) but they take up so much room and the pages yellow practically as soon as you buy them these days. Why is that? Cheap paper?

Magic Yeast

2012-01-15T11:41:00.000-08:00

Vinny Gambini--Did you buy these magic grits from the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans?

It's probably illegal for me to quote that line from My Cousin Vinny. The movie studios are suing a couple sites that make movie scripts available for free download. $11 million bucks worth, I think it is. You can't embed videos. Now you can't transcribe a script because of why? Because you and your friends will say "Hey gang, let's put on a show" and then reenact the movie in the barn for the neighborhood kids? Because reading the script is so much better than watching the movie that you'll just download a 20 year old (or more) script and read it instead of paying 20th Century Fox $19.99 to watch the thing?

Hey Rupert, what I really want to do is read the script to Knocked Up instead of watching the movie. How about neither? How about you make better movies and then to slightly misquote Sam Goldwyn "The customers won't be staying away in droves".

Anyway, this is all about this yeast product which sounds way cool and I'd like some. And the image is in public domain. But I could watermark it and say that because I tweaked it, now some weird kind of rights make it MINE MINE MINE and I'll sue you if you use it. (I won't. Go. Use it. Enjoy it. Buy one of my books instead.)

Verrine Thoughts

2012-01-14T16:10:00.000-08:00

Grainy caramel. Don't let it happen in the first place. Follow the instructions in the book. ALWAYS use honey, Lyle's Golden Syrup or corn syrup in with the white sugar. Problem solved. But if you don't do that and if you do get graininess, try to slowly--SLOWLY--low heat--remelt the mixture. You have to be patient. Once sugar burns, you can't go back.

Here's the real solution. Start over. You probably won't get it right the first time. And sometimes you're distracted and even though you've done it correctly 10 times, 1 time it doesn't work. Don't waste time trying to fix it. It's not as though the ingredients are super expensive. Altho I do have to say the price of butter makes me cringe. Especially when I have one of the dogs getting up on the counter and helping herself to anything I'm not guarding.

I didn't know people were going to be this interested in verrines. I was attracted to the lovely, colorful layers but didn't realize other people were as well.

Rice Pudding with Summer Fruits

I made a cookie today and I attempted to color it red. It was so awful, so neon pink--although they tasted wonderful, they looked like a nightmare--I threw out the few of them I made. Usually when I'm experimenting, I start with a small batch so any catastrophes don't hurt too badly. This was just some flour, sugar and oil and 2 egg whites. The dogs get the yolks. They're excellent, yes, raw.

Question du Jour

2012-01-13T07:42:00.000-08:00

Well I really don't have 1. I'm in a quandary that some of you may have now and some may have later. Or maybe by later it will be so obvious that it won't present a dilemma.

In one corner, wrestling fans, we have that Dr. Evil, the Great Vacuum, the Astounding Absorber of all things reading--Amazon.com And in the other corner we have Barnes & Noble, the great pipe smokers, the professoriat wearing lather patches on their frayed herringbone jackets. Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding. Let the match begin!

The fake professor doesn't have a chance. It's not lean and mean, it's not moving and positioning for the attack, it's just sitting there expecting the fans to come out of the cheap seats and save them.

BN does nothing to help the author/publisher promote their indie books. Of course neither did Amazon and what they're doing now is no big deal either. But it's something. As the market is flooded with indie books, these companies must give us tools to promote our work. For criminey sake, it will sell more books. They're hardly doing us an altruistic favor by helping us sell more books. They're making money.

So do I stay or do I go.

What are the benefits to staying with BN? I only have a handful of books doing well there. It doesn't seem logical to keep the others there when I can get the measly 5 freebie days at Amazon.

So that's why I'm removing Blue Raja from BN this week and giving it a freebie weekend at Kindle. It won't be the last.

Fotoshop--A Health and Beauty Aid

2012-01-12T18:24:00.000-08:00

It does Windows, too!

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Here's a small hint about Kindlegen. Stay very far away from it. You need to go back to DOS to run it and it bollixed up my file. Calibre got it 100% correct. So time to get an output file from Kindlegen--5 hrs plus lengthy phone call to computer genius friend. Time to get output file in Calibre--about 2 min. while I was listening to lecture by computer genius friend on hidden codes.

Nook Update 1.4 something

2012-01-10T13:08:00.000-08:00

I had no idea it was available, if you didn't, you can go get it. I couldn't seem to get it via wifi so we'll see if the download works. I had to take the root chip out because the Nook device got totally confused by that. Now we can watch movies on Netflix. Except why should I pay for Netflix when I have Amazon Prime? That Jeff Bezos is Dr. Evil, he thinks of everything!

I started on the new cook book. I suspect it will be less comprehensive than the Verrines because I'm running out of time if I really want this done by Feb. 14. So it can cost less, no big deal, right? I'm a little confused about Kindle Singles or whatever it's called. Yes to cookbooks or no. Is a cook book a how-to book? No children's books. Does that include YA? Kiddie lit is not YA so again I'm confused.

Every few days there seem to be posts on the state of legacy publishing and what all they're going to do differently now, or what they could do differently. Most of the solutions seem to feature acquiring/keeping old rights from authors they have treated shabbily for years and then feeding at the trough without doing new work. What a great business plan. Why bother to publish new books at all in this case, just loot the vault for everything left and digitalize that. With each new crisis they have, my disdain for them grows. Now they think they've found a new way to stiff writers, so they can feed at the trough a little while longer. Properties that had no value to them 2 years ago, they will now sue 90 year old women for. And they're not embarrassed.

I'm glad to be done with tradpub. I suppose it's something of a tepid Housekeeping Seal of Approval to be published by one of the Big Six. And I suppose if they give you enough money, the abuse they'll dish out could be worth it sort of in a Bucket List kind of way. "I climbed Mt Kilamanjaro, I published with Random House, I got a tattoo..." If it's something you want to do before you kick the bucket, definitely go for it. Otherwise, the unpleasant aspects far outweigh the benefits to me. Sorry.

Things we can do with toffee we didn't think of last week.

Murder Is Exhausting

2012-01-09T07:31:00.000-08:00

I don't know that much about murder but the whole digital publishing thing is!

I changed Mr Mitnick to Some People Need Dying to hopefully the last stop on its journey Murder is Exhausting.
It's an Albert Camus quote. Then I was fortunate enough to find an illustration that worked really well for it.
And that's the whole story.

I suspect I will remove it from BN where it has done nothing ever and put it on Kindle Select for those measly 5 free days. After that if none of it works, and I somehow figure out another description, I will give up until the next possible fix comes to me. It's a cute book but fill in your generic explanation of why some things catch and others don't. If vampires flew out of the mission belfry, I'm sure it would do better. But that ain't happening.

Here's the revised blurb

The Mitnicks come from the clothing industry in New York City. It’s not exactly the high fashion trade, but close. Berry did go to Paris and work for some of the renowned couturiers to learn more but when she designs, the clothes tend to be a little off-market for anyone in the real world to wear. Who’s going to wear an evening gown with one wing sticking out of the back? No one, that’s right. So Berry packs up her sewing machine, at 27 sort of a failure at what she thought was her life, and comes to live with her father on a ranch in the beautiful central coast of California. Immediately there's a murder. And a handsome, irritable sheriff, a cute blacksmith and a group of older women Berry calls a harem chasing her father. If she hadn’t been involved in a murder before, maybe Berry could ignore it and let Sheriff Mark Fernandez do his job without input from her. But she knows what it’s like to never learn who killed someone she loves, and vows not to let it happen this time. As everyone knows, anyone who kills once, is willing to kill again to keep the truth buried and Berry is getting just too close for anyone’s comfort.

What can you learn from this? Don't be reluctant to change things around if they don't work. If you believe in the book, set aside some time from your new project and tinker. Give it time to work. Don't be impatient but do be realistic. Do the best you can with it and then let it go. Things will change in the future. More readers will come onboard. Maybe something you are writing now will bring readers to you and then this book will be discovered. Maybe it will never work. But maybe you'll find a niche audience for it. Don't despair. Don't dwell on it. Keep moving forward.

For The Right Price

2012-01-08T02:41:00.000-08:00

Say about $2500, I will be glad to do the work to get Dream Horse printed through CreateSpace. Actually, I'll just give Lightning Source $12 and tell them to turn it back on. Here's what a paperback copy is going for now at Amazon.

$4,715.53

+ $3.99shipping

Used - Like New

Seller: gb_book
Seller Rating:95% positive over the past 12 months. (2,881 total ratings)
In Stock. Ships from CA, United States. Expedited shipping available.
Domestic shipping rates and return policy.
In very fine condition, like new

I don't know where they're getting them from. I cancelled with Lightning Source so if gb book doesn't actually have a copy, there's no one to print one. So if you want one that bad you can't spend $199 for a Kindle Fire and 99 cents for the digital book, I can give you a bargain price. Or I can print it out on my printer and sign it for you. That's personalized service! For $5000, I'll bring it directly to your house and take you out for pizza, too.

The Accent Falls On The Accent

2012-01-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

They're having a Parent Trap marathon on the Hallmark Channel. This morning it seems to be Hayley Mills and this afternoon Lindsay Lohan. Here's the problem with both of them for me. Hayley Mills. Why does she speak with an English accent when she as Susan grew up in California and as Sharon who grew up in Boston? Doesn't make sense anymore than Sean Connery speaking with his Scot accent and playing a Lithuanian sub commander in whatever movie Alec Baldwin was in also. Lindsay Lohan. She was surprisingly good but who can look at her without thinking of the Lindsay Lohan of the last few years--very vivid. And of course that poor Richardson woman who died in the ski accident--very vivid.

I won't name another movie because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but I've seen most of it in parts now and when the 16 year old kid supporting player and the dog (I'm not kidding, the dog is really good) are the most talented actors in the cast, there's a genuine problem. Didn't anyone notice? Two words--acting coach.

Just get 'er done. Either the audience is too dumb to notice/care or there are other elements in the movie that will gloss over the insufficiencies. And there was a whole long article about a week ago why Hollywood can't figure out why ticket sales are way down.

I don't have premium channels. Waste of money. If there's a free weekend, I go look and see they're running about 50% movies from years past. I can see those on USA except of course with commercials but since I've seen them 16 times already am I really paying attention anyway? No.

So today while Hayley Mills was doing her cute thing--and I do watch this movie every blinking time it's on, I love Brian Keith,--I made frosting and took pictures of cupcakes for the cookbook. It was supposed to be an easy frosting. Actually I think it's harder the way it was written so of course I "fixed" it. It's still no less complicated or time consuming than real buttercream. And nothing in the world compares with real buttercream, besides it's so simple anyway, I don't know why people use that cornstarch frosting. You know what I'm talking about--the confectioner's sugar thing. Ugh. Can't you all taste the uncooked cornstarch in that??? I guess I have to make it my mission to convince 1 person at a time to give that up.

One Life To Live

2012-01-06T19:13:00.000-08:00

As I said, it got cancelled and there's probably 1 week of shows left to air. It's been so bad, I've been glad but tonight was just a little different.

When I was on the show, they managed to get Roscoe Born to sign on for a while. I named his character. Mitch Laurence. I wrote scenes. I talked to Roscoe. I used an incident in Sweeps that actually happened with him at the studio. He's terrific IRL.

It was strange to see him die. Sure Vicki was shot and is maybe dying, but that character was there when I got there. I had a hand in creating Mitch. I came up with his lapis lazuli watchband.

Weird.

New days. New tastes. New needs. New technology. But people still want a good story and still like beautiful images. Some things don't change.

*Books Are Units

2012-01-04T12:17:00.000-08:00

I read a book, Carnival Culture, years ago by James Twitchell concerning the state of our society. Very funny, very astute. It'll cost you possibly the best penny you ever spent on a book

http://www.amazon.com/Carnival-Culture-Trashing-Taste-America/dp/0231078315/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1325707279&sr=8-2

Twitchell had a quote from a speech by Oscar Dystel (yes, Jane Dystel the agent's father) the head of Bantam Books where he had been talking about units for an hour and there was an asterisk and footnote which was "*Units are books." Just so no one was confused by what this publisher at a speech about publishing was referring to.

(I gotta tell you how hard it was to find that in the book, digital really spoils you with the search function.)

These elitists talk a good story about how glorified and exalted their work is, but it's no such thing to them in reality.

"We sell books, other people sell shoes. What's the difference? Publishing isn't the highest art."--Michael Korda, (at the time) editor-in-chief, Simon & Schuster.

So today we have blog posts concerning legacy publishing and how it's big business that's about "acquiring" "properties" and let's not think of books as "books". And then I thought let's call them units because that's what you've been calling them for years. Or we can just call them "reads". Which I hate bigtime.

A little of these people goes a long, long way. I wish this is the last post of the year where I mention tradpub.

Got my new Nikon 40mm lens. Love it. I took it out of the box, let it warm up and the condensation clear, and took this. No preparation, no nothing. This is a raw image, no tweaks of any kind. That's a thing of beauty. Now I can do my next cookbook.

Mr. Mitnick's Harem or

2012-01-03T05:20:00.000-08:00

Something overcame me yesterday, unfortunately, and I decided to revamp Mr. Mitnick's Harem. Not rewrite it but change the title and cover and reformat. So instead of doing the YA novella all day, I wound up struggling with the cover. This is not to put you off of doing your own cover. I want to do my own and want you to be able to do a good job on yours.

The set piece in Act 3 is a fiesta at the mission. I thought okay cool, I'll quick get a photo of a fiesta. No. Okay, festival then. No. Okay, carnival? No. Okay. Flamenco dancers. No. Are you kidding me???? I'm good at finding stuff, I can find anything. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. But I was looking at places I could pay for the image, not liberate it.

So kind of unfortunately I wound up exactly where I started--with an image of the mission. Then I couldn't find a photo of the mission at night. WHAT? Fine. I'll Photoshop it to night. Then I couldn't get enough sky. Sheesh. It was overcast all day and I didn't want to search all my images from that delete incident a couple months back. Finally the clouds move around a little, I rush outside and point the camera to the sky. Solved.

I spend most of the afternoon turning day into night and trying to put lights on the mission--I'm sure Photoshop has a different/better way of doing it, but again, I couldn't find it even with a Google search. I lift the mission off the original image and place it on the new sky background. I'm going for dark, grim, foreboding and I start to realize, wait, this is a cozy. This is a humorous, I hope, book. I send it to Chris, the comedy writer. He goes Yikes! You have to lighten this up, put another element in it. I write back "What, a clown?"

This cover is destined to be changed again.

What we would also like to determine is what, if any, effect there has been from the freebie weekend. And surprisingly, there have been a few sales of Schtupid Cupid and Verrines. I can't honestly say if SC lead to the sales of Not Low Maintenance. It certainly wouldn't have lead to the sales of the Flashes but I sure was happy to see anything happening there. Maybe Bad Apple1 probably did lead to the sales for BA2, so I am hopeful that's a trend. Dream Horse is still going strong while the kids are home. It's selling about 60 copies a day which I think I great for a middle reader book. And got this terrific review on the Verrine book, thanks Serene.

5.0 out of 5 stars I can't wait to start making Verrines, January 2, 2012

Serene (Marina, CA, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Verrines: Sweet and Savory Parfaits Made Easy (Kindle Edition)

I picked this one up as a kindle freebie, and I really had no idea what a Verrine was- however this book soon educated me! And what an education! Verrines are actually tiny parfaits which can be made in a glass, and which contain different discernable layers. They can be sweet (such as chocolate and fruit), or savory such as salad. The writer did a great job of educating the reader, and including recipes that were both practical and easy to make.

Recipes look and sound good... And I really liked the inclusion of pastry cream which is something everyone is going to want to make.

This is hands down one of the better kindle books out there. Sample and see for yourself.

Freebie Weekend and What I Make of It

2012-01-02T05:32:00.000-08:00

Nothing.

The human mind does search for explanations. Maybe it's a safety feature and not a bug. If you don't understand how dangerous wooley mammoths are, you'll keep getting devoured by them.

Schtupid Cupid did well (for me) download numbers wise and rankings in some categories, I think the whole Jewish aspect narrows the audience. Bad Apple1--wonderful book no vampires, not a lot of life-threatening suspense being played out. If you want to be scared and thrilled and taken on a wild ride, this is not it. Verrines-- super narrow and I was thrilled at how many were downloaded. Cupid actually had more downloaded in the UK yesterday than US. I thought that was lovely.

A woman who wrote a historical mystery had 8000 copies downloaded. So all mine put together were about 10% of her number.

My pal Chris (no, I have a point, stay with me) published a couple of his books and had bigger things on his mind so ignored them. Until a couple days ago when he saw he had sold 18 copies. He had done nothing not even rewrite the description as I begged him to. (He says he will now.)

People will--repeat WILL--find you. Amazon makes it easy to navigate around and drill down. Yes, you're going to do better if your book is for the widest audience possible. But if not, you can still be found and read and gets some numbers going for you. It's your job to make them glad they did find you.

Yes!

2012-01-01T07:40:00.000-08:00

Sorry for my outburst re: Bad Apple 1 but

UK

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,197 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
- #1 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Children's Fiction > Arts & Music
- #1 in Kindle Store > Books > Children's eBooks > Arts & Music

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,263 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
- #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Children's Fiction > Arts & Music
- #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children's eBooks > Arts & Music > Music
- #7 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children's eBooks > People & Places > Girls & Women

Happy New Year's & Free Amazon Weekend

2012-01-01T05:12:00.000-08:00

All this moves pretty fast but as of 0 dark of morning, Schtupid Cupid
US-

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #710 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
- #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > World Literature > Jewish
- #63 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Romance > Contemporary

UK-

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #536 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
- #30 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Romance > Contemporary

Verrines--

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #894 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
- #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Cooking, Food & Wine > Meals > Appetizers
- #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Cooking, Food & Wine > Baking > Desserts

Bad Apple 1 is not on the radar yet but while I was watching about 10 copies were downloaded. The same activity is true at Amazon UK but less.

What lesson do we extract from this? That there is substantial visibility possible at Amazon. I can't say more than that. We don't know if freebies lead to sales of the same book when they're no longer free and we don't know if they lead to any sales of other books you've written. That's why it's an experiment.

Why did I take Bad Apple 1 off of BN? Two reasons. An intellectual one and an emotional one. The emotional one first. I was in a snit. I went there to check the sales and the site was down. I can't remember when that ever happened at Amazon. Amazon has a support staff. For about 8 months there was no one home at BN. I'm trying to conduct business and I can't get help and I can't see my numbers. Yes it's true there were more sales of BA1 at BN in Dec. than Amazon, but when you're talking under 10 copies for both sites, it's really not something to seriously consider. I want that series to be found. It's been out a year and languishing. I had to do something. Sorry BN, you weren't helping me.

Amazon Freebie Weekend

2011-12-31T05:32:00.000-08:00

I put Schtupid Cupid on Kindle Select because it wasn't selling on BN anyway. It had always been linked to Not Low Maintenance and Unspeakably Desirable because Lis is Viva and Bel's cousin, they're in the book/novella and Viva is doing her shadchan (Yiddish for matchmaker) thing. It was always heavy on the cross-promoing and when I decided to leave it as a novella, if I could have made it free forever as a gateway/intro to the other 2 books, that would have been fine.

The Verrine book was always about using the D7k for a food photography experiment. Sure I had to invent the recipes and go through the whole process legitimately but since I was assured cookbooks don't sell, and this is a pretty narrow topic, I didn't hold out much hope. After all, the Ice Cream Parlor has always been dead in the water. I saw it as a vacation from fiction and enjoyed doing it.

Not much thought was given to putting either of them up as free, except Cupid on Valentine's Day. I figured everyone would use the time between Christmas and New Year's to put their books up for free and mine would be lost but I decided to do a free weekend and use up 2 of my 5 free days. (Kinda stingy on that part, Amazon.)

I don't know if they're lost or not compared to others but the response has been excellent so far and it's just getting light here. I don't know how people are awake enough to be downloading books.

Do I want to put the Miller sister books on Kindle Select and remove them from BN? No, I don't want to but I could see that I might. The numbers are that I sell 3X more books at Amazon than BN but also the reality is also that the reviews are nicer at BN.

Quandary.

This is another effort at HDR photography. Nothing dramatic, I'm experimenting for the cookbook I may do next year. (That would be tomorrow.)

Me and food photography. Everyone else is just content to put down some discolored utensils and old linens and be done with it. I have to make an orange scream "I am not simply citrus fruit, I'm an orange" and all the lemons are groaning "just shut up".

Gives me an idea for what I'll do this afternoon instead of working on the novella.

Added Content

2011-12-29T08:22:00.000-08:00

Is this what digital has over paper? Yes. Probably. Maybe. I was reading Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children (got stalled) and that's illustrated with vintage photos. It's not unheard of that a paper book for adults has illustrations. Tolkien's books have maps.

But, come on, that's not really what we're talking about--a family tree or a map or even a recipe. We're talking about illustrations. I wish I was talking about video but that's beyond my capabilities. My multipli-talented friend, Michal Towber, wrote a wonderful novel called Witch and did the soundtrack for it. That should be in there. There should be a way to play the song/music at key points in the story. I don't have the programming knowledge to do that but someone surely does.

And don't say illustrations are reserved for children's digital books. Some of my adult books are illustrated. Yes, it's true they're romantic comedies. But my friend, Chris Westphal, wrote Inhuman, and created 150 illustrations to go with that and it's a police/psychiatrist forensic procedural.

As a thought for the New Year, think of ways to add content. Even if it's an author interview, or a short piece on some aspect of the story, consider including it.

I'm Calling This a Tri-Fecta

2011-12-28T15:31:00.000-08:00

Dream Horse on Amazon (and amazingly someone recognized it as Impossible Charlie on BN--good for you, you deserve a balloon)

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,265 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #1 in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Individual Sports > Horses > Equestrian
- #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Individual Sports > Horses > Equestrian
- #1 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Animal Care & Pets > Horses > Riding

Rights in the Known Universe

2011-12-28T09:54:00.000-08:00

Over at The Passive Voice, PG is having a multiple post discussion on contracts. New and unique ways publishers are trying to squeeze their writing "partners" for every dime. They're suing. Isn't that about the last resort--to throw a "legal" temper tantrum. Sue surviving families for rights that didn't exist when the contract was signed. Cool. That's inventive.

My pal Allen Atkinson was a wonderful illustrator and once signed away rights to his work in the known universe. The publisher figured we'd wind up in space and they wanted the rights to Allen's watercolors of Mother Goose when we got to Mars.

On one hand it's silly but at the heart it's evil. This well is poisoned.

Let's try to finish the year on a high note. I was searching for a tutorial on HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography and found a site with lots of stunning images. Trey Ratcliffe. Poke around and you'll find things like this

The Week After Christmas

2011-12-27T05:24:00.000-08:00

So many people are on vacation. It's kind of a by-week, isn't it? Nothing happens.

The way traditional publishing works is that nothing happens in December, because they're all doing Christmas parties. Certainly nothing happens this week because they're on vacation. Then they show up. The same goes for Summer except more so.

I'll tell you what happened to me with a book that didn't happen for me. I had an agent who is with a top boutique agency. I knew an authority in a certain field (okay stretching, call it a "field") and we all thought there could be a book there. Nonfic. So I moved in with this person to get the book done pronto. The contract was signed. Okay great, I thought. Now we have 3 months of summer to focus on the book and soon enough I can move to California. But this authority wouldn't start work until receiving part of the quite substantial advance. So I begged for 3 months. Please work because that's how it is in publishing. You sign the contract and start the book. Nothing doing. I go to the agent. I go to the editor. I'm begging. Pay This Person so I can get them to concentrate on the book. Meanwhile tick-tock, the book is due Dec. 6 I think it was. 360 pages. I'm getting no help but all the tape recordings this person had ever made were dumped on me while they continued to work at their "day job". The contract went from one desk to another. Each time it landed, that person was on vacation. For 3 months. Finally in September--this is one of the Big Six publishers, not Warm Cookies and Milk Ink in Clearwater Kansas--everyone is back in the office. By now I'm in a panic. Having written a number of books I'm thinking this is getting to be not humanly possible time-wise. I'm begging, please pay this person! Finally at the end of September the check arrives. I breathe a sigh of relief. It's going to be very hard but it can be done. The authority then goes to Greece for 2 weeks because the process thus far has been so stressful. I take this person aside and say "You can't do this. The book can't be done in 6 weeks." And I get yelled at. "Why are you so negative?" The agent is mad at me. The editor is mad at me. Of course the book cannot get done in 6 weeks because the authority used all the money to party in Greece and has to stay with this "day job". I was fired.

What's the moral of this story? Digital. Amazon isn't going on vacation. I'm not on vacation I'm still going to get my novella done very soon. I don't have to wait and I don't have to tolerate being abused. What's the downside. There isn't one.

Let me wish traditional publishing a happy and fulfilling 2012. And if they're still here for 2013, I'll repeat myself.

Post Christmas Post

2011-12-26T13:03:00.000-08:00

Last year it was Summer Horse that was a real star. This year it's Dream Horse. Everything else, not so much. I wonder if it's because there are so many books priced at 99 cents, or free, that people are scooping those up, or those with a pedigree--familiar names. It's very hard to make an analysis after 36 hours. At least for me. Especially when numbers are involved. Maybe next week we'll be able to tell what just happened. Sales have improved in the UK so I guess I should attribute that to more Kindles sold over there.

I'm sure some authors did spectacularly well yesterday. It'll take a while for the rest of us to see an increase in sales? Does anyone know? Let me quote William Goldman again "No one knows anything."

I love that Amazon is now publishing with the speed of BN. Thank you very much.

Then tweaked with a special program.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T07:33:00.000-08:00

Ukrainian Carol of the Bells

2011-12-24T09:18:00.001-08:00

New Fling Cover

2011-12-24T06:32:00.000-08:00

I woke up and a deep need to change the cover was upon me. I blame Joe Konrath. It was only days earlier that he stated he had changed some covers 40 times. What a slacker I am! I can't even remember what the original cover was to Fling. Then I got that cute vector art girl. What could be next? A nude guy. But it had to be a nude doctor guy because Jay is a doctor. Actually so is Jem's mother but I don't want to see Penny without her clothes. I found a workable image quite easily (and too expensively so I definitely will not recommend the site to you, but I bought 5 images last year and only used 2 so the money is gone and should be used) and put it together quickly because really how much is there to do with a nude torso. I did tweak it in Lightroom.

I know Lightroom is Photoshop real light. Anything PS can do, Lightroom can do. I don't know that there's anything Lightroom does that PS can't but the reverse is very true. LR only does the image itself, no layers no text no filters. The strength for me with LR is my lack of expertise in PS. Sure all these functions are there but where, how and can I understand them (no). LR just streamlines the processing of an image so beautifully.

I warmed up the skin tone because the original had a slight blue cast to it. The story takes place in the heat of the summer so I went with that.

Would Jay be happy on the cover? No! Would Jem mind? Not at all. Especially when there was a scene where he strips to his shorts, jumps in a pond and swims out to a dock to rescue a woman having overdosed on grass cookies (no, real grass, not "grass") while Jem and her psychiatrist mother discuss how Jay is so well built.

Am I happy with this semi-nude guy on my cover? Not particularly. Altho I did a good job of tweaking the image. That I'm happy with. But it's a test and with 6 million more kindles being fired up tomorrow morning, we'll see if that's eye catching at all. The problem I can't do anything about at the moment is the cover images inside NLM and probably Fling itself. They should be changed. I was busy on the cover for the novella yesterday--gorgeous--so I didn't do Fling. Sorry for the discordance.

It's The Most Wonderful Time of The Year

2011-12-23T07:01:00.001-08:00

Maybe. Maybe not. But it is great.

Remember several months ago I alerted you to Josh Krajcik's audition on X Factor. He came in #2 last night. Melanie Amaro was probably impossible to beat and I'm sure he's going to sign a recording contract by the end of the year. Well done, Josh.

I changed the cover for NLM yesterday then changed it back. This morning I changed the cover to Fling. If I don't change it back by the end of the day, I'll post it for you and try to rationalize my decisions.

Still working on my novella and found a nice photo at one of the stock sites that will work for it better than my attempt to reproduce a fountain.

Does This Work? 2

2011-12-22T05:18:00.000-08:00

I have no idea what these books are, they can be in the Top 10. All we're looking at is design elements.

The first thing I think is--can you explain this to me? I'm sure there's a reason why you would combine a curly font and a scriptish font but I don't know what it is. Then I don't understand why you would combine brown and black on white. I am being serious when I say I'm confused by this.

Normally I don't do black and white. Hey I have a blog. The background is white and the text is in dark blue. Black and white is stark and dramatic. It's serious. Look at the cover to Rise. 2 colors. Black and white. That is not a book filled with humor, light-hearted incidents and happy-go-lucky people. Neal is trying to avoid being killed. Yes, she's in love with Tru and Tru is in love with her. That is also very serious. It's not about teen puppy love.

Solution. Stick with 1 bold, easy-to-read font in a single color. I want to say stay away from white as a background but since I do it myself it's hard for me to say no. The drawback to white is that it is demanding and uncompromising. It gives you no place to hide. If you are off, boy, it's going to show. If you are confident that all your choices are spot-on, go with the white.

1914

The Ice Cream Parlor

2011-12-21T08:00:00.000-08:00

I can't remember why I had to change it about a month ago. Maybe I wanted it under my name not Silly Girl, Robin O'Neill's name. That meant I had to rebuild the cover because the original Photoshop file was lost in that incident a couple months ago. I didn't have the pieces anymore so I used what I had and went with that. This morning I decided I would use a cover I liked but a friend said "But there's no ice cream." Yeah but it was originally called The Soda Fountain and this is a beverage and it's colorful. BN isn't uploading at the moment for me. Maybe because it's raining or something.

Then I thought I'll just upload it to Kindle. When I got there I realized it's still a Robin O'Neill older version there and the amount of work needed to get that into html with all the images is too daunting for today.

This is all quite a long way of saying Amazon needs to make it easier to upload books with images. And here's a second thing that should be easier to do--create links to all the chapters. I don't do that, I should, but I can't face it. I looked at the instructions and it's like Photoshop. You really have to be in the mood to address yourself to something that complicated. Maybe it's something you can do with relative ease with Sigil but again, that's something you need to be prepared to learn.

Does This Work?

2011-12-20T04:50:00.000-08:00

This may be a series of posts reflecting on aspects of cover art I've seen in my travels. I'll point out what works or doesn't work about it for me and maybe that will get you thinking when you do your cover.

Obviously I'm not going to take someone's cover and post it here but I will take the element that caught my eye and attempt to reproduce it.

That pink (and it's color sampled so it's that color) is really really eye-catching. For me it's too eye-catching. It nearly vibrates like Pop Art. But it's not that it's practically a neon color--even for Pantone--, it's that there's a heavy black outline. It's very harsh to my eye. Trust me, I don't know what color background this could work against, but the beige doesn't do it for me and that's essentially the color used in the original.

The other problem was the font which was much more involved than this, resulting in still more black. It wasn't so much that it is hard to read--it's dark, it's bold, it's blocky, it's that it's too much. It's heavy and not simple/stylish enough.

There comes a point when you can over-design. You do too much. Less is often more.

Solution. Look at your image. If the background is dark choose a color for your text that is light. If you background is blue, don't choose orange for your text. Make text in the same or related family. If I had an image of a field of hay, that would be green. I would look for the darkest or lightest green in the image and try that. I would look at the sky. Can that be sampled and used. I wouldn't choose school bus yellow even if there is a school bus in the background.

Try to stay within the confines of the image. That's your best guide for the choice of fonts and of colors.

I Am Not A Number!!

2011-12-19T08:10:00.000-08:00

And I'm not--and by now, you know how I am with numbers. If I was one, I'd never be able to remember which one it was.

"Hi. What's your name?"
"Wait. I know the answer to that. Um. 12. No, 21. No, that's not it. Let me think. Um. Don't rush me on this! Can I buy a clue?"

Luckily John Smith didn't have that problem in I Am Number Four. Of course the threat of death might focus the mind. Or just repeating it endlessly. I am number 4, I am number 4, I am number 4.

I understand why it was a popular book (and an unfortunately poor movie). John is human. Actually not since he's Loric, but he has emotions we can relate to.

If the character shows no emotion, there are no stakes. Drama is heightened by how much there is to gain or lose. If James Bond is Mr Cool Cucumber, who really cares if he stops Spectre? Yeah let's save the world but we know either way, Jimbo is going to walk away to his next smooth babe.

So John fell in love and it's forever. Well, I like that. But I'm not a 14 year old boy. Why is this such a strong thread in this story? Because girls will read this, too? Okay. Fine with me. I liked the relationship between John and Sarah, well spun out, believable, realistic. I liked the book.

It's interesting to see how these destined-to-be-popular-series-with-a-movie-deal are constructed. I've read 3 of them and will get to Hunger Games eventually. Just as a clue--when I say these things, it's not about my narcissism, it's a suggestion for you to research and study what's popular in your genre, I'm just describing my process.

I imagine with the problems "Pittacus Lore" aka James Frey is having with the writing situation, this series may not be a long as intended, but maybe he'll get it together. Book 2 comes out in Aug.

Let me use that as a demonstration of the lag time in trad pub. You have a hot hot series and you're seeing 24 months between releases. If this was digital, how many days would between Book 1 and Book 2?

Here's a technique I've been working on in Photoshop. How to create ripples. Filter. Don't look in Ripple. Look at Zig-Zag. Seriously. That's where you find Pond Ripples.

Early New Year's Resolutions

2011-12-18T08:44:00.000-08:00

1) Be a better writer.
2) Create a new pen name because I want to get away from myself as Walker Percy suggested most writers do.

Put The Blame on Mame, Boys

2011-12-17T16:23:00.000-08:00

Tradpub is desperately seeking someone to blame for their current predicament. Since Amazon is doing so well, it's obviously Amazon's fault. After it stops being Amazon's fault, and no one is submitting books to the great stinking dinosaurs in quantity, they will blame the writers.

Some years ago I had an idea for a YA. Of course I submitted it and everyone reacted the way I did at the Nature Center when they said "Put your hand in this bag and tell your classmates if you can discern what it is." "Uh no." "It's a wasps' nest."

EWWWW!

That's how they reacted. And that's the reason why they need lots and lots of people to blame since they can't blame who rightfully deserves the blame--themselves.

I remembered those 6 chapters today and I think I'm halfway to a nice novella.

The camera works just fine. Did some preliminary shots for the cover of the novella this morning. Photoshop still has the capacity to make me nuts.

Update: For some reason, there is no "obvious" easy way to center anything in Photoshop. You click the center icon and nothing Those are the instructions at Adobe.com. Okay. It's really easy. Select all. Click on the Move arrow. All the alignment choices will magically appear. Click on any one you want--like center. Presto-chango, the text or the image centers.

To Be or Not To Be Broccoli

2011-12-16T12:24:00.000-08:00

Or cauliflower as the case may be.

Do you want to be produce? Do you want tradpub to think of you as something past its sell-by date.

Speaking of which, I was told by a fill-in-the-blank agent that I was too old to write for kids, I didn't understand them. Class. What's my best selling book at the moment? Anyone? Bueller? That's right. Dream Horse. That's older than the beech telling me I stink as a writer. Do you have to be 9 to write for 9 year olds?

Writers are routinely mistreated and humiliated but here's the thing. The kind of money you make in television makes it worth your while. I am so uninterested in hearing about how it's business. There is nothing and SHOULD BE NOTHING that forces publishing houses to do the right thing and treat people better. And there's nothing to prevent us at this point that we finally have a choice to abandon those buzzards and go off on our own.

If there are hard feelings, "hurt writer feelings" to quote Laura Zigman from yesterday's animation, there's a reason for it based in fact and experience. If a writer chooses to go with trad pub that's fine with me but I don't want to hear the explanations and excuses for their bad behavior.

Writing is not "produce". A writer is not the manufacturer of hula hoops any more than a ballet dancer is the manufacturer of tap shoes. This is not a production line. You're dealing with a person, a human being with an emotional investment in their work. They deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.

Groucho Marx Nose Glasses

2011-12-15T08:14:00.000-08:00

hat tip The Passive Voice

Says it all.

Content Is King

2011-12-14T09:57:00.000-08:00

Publishers can't provide content. Editors can't provide content. Agents can't provide content.

Only writers provide content.

Isn't there something about killing the goose that lays the golden egg? Isn't that what they've been doing for decades? If writers "hate" agents, maybe that's the reason.

Well, gee, too bad. Writers and geese found someplace else to put their eggs and now Publishers, Editors and Agents are trying to pretend they are still relevant and there's a point to their existence. Good luck with that.

Have you been following this Jon Corzine/MF Global thing? Me neither. 1 billion dollars evaporated and Corzine, who was running the show, the former Democrat governor/windbag in chief of New Jersey sits there under oath and does a Sgt. Schultz "I know NOTHING!"

Reminds me of tradpub. Playing clueless. Tradpub knew they were screwing authors all along and now they act surprised when it caves in on them. More than surprised, annoyed and angry. Blaming everyone but themselves.

I hope Corzine shares a cell with Madoff.

Nikon. Probably not the final word but new settings and a front focus tweak improved image quality. So a public thank you to Joy N of Nikon Support.

Should You Pay For Reviews?

2011-12-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

Why ask me? I barely believe in reviews.

Dean Wesley Smith had a post about starting out as a writer and there was math in the piece so you know that was a big turn-off for me. (Break out the cross and the garlic, you can't fool me, I know a number when I see it!)

I think it comes back to the same 3 or 4 points which admittedly are time-consuming. I'm sorry about that.

1) Write the best book you can
2) Get the best cover you can
3) Write the best description you can
4) Repeat 1-3 until you take up a lot of shelf space and potential readers can't help but run into you.

I know this will take years. Too long? Okay. Come up with a really great book that will get everyone's attention without the shelf space part. What's a really great commercial book? Probably something that's a lot like a Hollywood movie. Go to Amazon and look for a book written by a guy who wrote a bunch of Hollywood movies and made lots of money doing it. Sorry I can't remember the title. Maybe something he says will give you a hint on how you should be thinking about it.

I'm not convinced posting on forums and being reviewed helps. But maybe if they love love loved me at Goodreads, I would be saying to do that.

There is a small uptick in sales at BN--the horse books. I knew I shouldn't put them in the Kindle Prime Lending (how many more words go with this program?).

Nikon. The support person is very convinced it's simply a matter of the correct settings. My feeling is this thing should work without so much working at it. But she's being very professional about it. After 300+ test shots, at least ONE should be in focus. Or am I crazy?

I had an idea for something in the new year. I'll have to think about it. When it comes down to the writing, I've never been a good writer-for-hire type person. I write what I want to write, and other alien ideas don't come to me like they do to other writers.

Linksmų Kalėdų

Nothing New To Say?

2011-12-12T07:13:00.000-08:00

There was a blog post somewhere this weekend that said it's all been said before. Everything's been said before, don't we all know that? I don't think anyone's coming here for my insights, they come here misdirected by google image searches.

Since my camera is broken big time I can't really provide images for the book I obviously cannot write before Christmas. Which means I just have to try to write a sequel to the horse books.

I'd like to say one thing about One Life To Live. Since you tape weeks in advance, they are done. The sets are all gone--they used to be stored downtown but maybe ABC ditched them--the studio is empty. The writing of these last few months is as bad as I've ever seen. Every time I see Clint, I think it's Ross Marler from Guiding Light. I hope Jerry Ver Dorn has a great life from here on.

A lot of people, maybe hundreds, are out of work now and maybe forever between the loss of AMC and OLTL. ABC came up with cheaper shows to produce. Couldn't everyone just accept a little less? Apparently not.

The Doctors last show aired on New Year's Eve Day. Very sad. NBC killed it. They wanted something cheaper to produce, too. Things change. Maybe more people are out of the house in the middle of the day and unable to watch television. Maybe soaps aren't relevant anymore in the way they once were. People don't watch television in the way they did. Don't you prefer to watch it when it's convenient for you rather than because a show airs at a certain time? I love to watch Pan Am but I don't have networks on my satellite and I like to watch it during lunch on the weekends. Hulu makes this possible.

You don't have to drag around a book anymore, you have a reader jammed full of books. You read when and where it's convenient. You find what you want not what a bookstore thinks you should want. You have access to books tradpub doesn't think you want.

I'm surprised there's not more experimentation going on either in television or publishing or even digital publishing. Maybe in the new year, we'll see people stepping away from the old pathways and trying something they want to do.

Maybe people don't even know what they want to do anymore. Freedom is like that. Confronted by the ability to do anything, people become paralyzed and do nothing.

Oopsies!

2011-12-11T04:34:00.000-08:00

I heard from Amazon. That's great, it was within 48 hours. (I'm still here all weekend not hearing from Nikon.)

Hello Barbara,

Thanks for letting us know about the pricing concern with your book. 

We'll look into this and update the price. You can expect to see it changed within the next couple business days. 

Thanks for your understanding.

Regards,

Kindle Direct Publishing

Wait.  I don't understand.  Please explain how this happened.  Was it a normal thing, part of a promotion, was it a computer mistake?  Intentional?  Evil?  Benign?  Do I deserve some insight into what happened or I should just accept that it's getting fixed and move on.

I took about 200 test shots with the camera yesterday.  See if you focus the lens on an old camera, the shutter opens, the light strikes the film and and image is created.  WYSIWYG.  With a digital camera you focus, the camera assures you it's in focus, you can see it's in focus and then when you look at it, something potentially evil has happened and it ain't in focus.  I don't know what of the thousands (it seems like) buttons and combos you can press to impact this result.  I'm too dumb.  I'm back at the you point the camera and focus and that's what you wind up with.  There is ZERO Depth of Field no matter what I do.  DOF is how much of the image is clear/in focus.  The faster the speed the larger the aperture the greater the DOF but also the greater the potential for noise or grain.

It's like the aperture doesn't work.  It doesn't matter what I set the thing at all the photo is out of focus.  This runs counter to anything we know about cameras, even expensive digital ones.

So maybe there will be a Christmas Breads Made Easy book this year or maybe not.

Maybe there will be a Christmas Horse or maybe not.  If I could write like that woman who does 10,000 wds a day, it could be finished by Wednesday!  Yay me.    I've never been that fast even when I knew what I wanted to say.

Today the cute plumber is coming here to fix some things before the really cold weather begins so that means more likely test bread than writing.

Should We Stay Or Should We Go

2011-12-08T14:04:00.000-08:00

with Kindle Lending?

It seemed so obvious it was worth a shot and then when I got there I said no. Since I am not writing in a popular genre--suspense, paranormal, predictable romance, I started to say "what's in this for me?" I tie up my books for 3 months and watch people borrow Joe Konrath, Karen McQuestion and fill in the blank. Some people are going to do great. More of us would do great if it wasn't restricted to 1 book per month.

The Fire comes with a month free of Amazon Prime which you need in order to borrow a book. So you have the 1 month and the 1 book. Why waste it on someone you've never heard of? Fling with 2 5 star reviews instead of John Locke with 250 5 star reviews (whatever). It doesn't make psychological sense.

So that's why I said no thank you for the moment. There's no point in tying up my books for 3 months when I don't have a good feeling about this. Amazon offers you a 5 day free promo over the course of 90 days? Like you're kidding me? What good is that? Am I missing what's great about it? You do it now and what about on St. Patrick's day. You have nothing in March. You have nothing in February. You have nothing in January.
You sit there with your hands tied 1 of a million books available. Is it still for sale? I'm lousy at reading contracts so I'm sure I missed a lot. Okay so if it's for sale then I guess as people are scrolling through all these other books they'll make note of you. So being in this program offers us greater visibility?

My crystal ball is cloudy at the moment so I have no idea how this is all going to shake-out. You can always sign up later.

Update-ish: I made a hash of my bookshelf at Amazon, enrolling then backing out of the lending deal. I was just checking up to see if everything was back to right and decided to go thru the foreign sites. This is so unbelievable to me. The verrine book sold a copy in France! I had to send for a book on verrines from France to research for this book. There are a ton of them there (none here). But apparently not digital. I hope she thinks I did a good job. It's more of an American take on verrines than a strictly French perspective.

Did It Again

2011-12-07T06:49:00.000-08:00

Last night I watched, partially rewatched, a movie on The Man Hating Channel aka Lifetime Movies.

I admit I'm confused as to why these stories are popular. That includes TV, books and movies. I don't tell these kind of stories and but for the anomaly of NLM earlier this year, my sales reflect how off-genre I am. So here's my advice--don't take my advice. But I'll talk about this story anyway.

It was a haircut on the actual Yorkshire true story about the WI (is that what it's called, Tina?) and their nude calendar. The book this movie was based on was a chicklit (?) by Phillipa Ashley. (No American women are named Phillipa altho they should be because then you can be called Flip.)

So tres diminuative Kristen Chenoweth who sounds when talking like Alvin of the chipmunks but when singing sounds like Beverly Sills--she's a star of Broadway musicals, great voice. She's a NYC bitch who loses her job (no, I didn't like the character, is that coming through?) and the ONLY gig she can get is in beautiful Kalispell Montana which requires many snide remarks from Miss Wonderful. She openly mocks, to the camera, all the residents. They're so provincial, so prosaic, so pathetic.

It brings to mind the also NYC bitch, real one, who wondered why the NYFD rushed into the WTCs on 9-11 to try to rescue people. Answer--some people care about other people and want to help because life is precious.

Just like that real bitch, this bitch can't understand concepts like volunteer fire department and volunteer rescue service. "You couldn't PAY me enough to do that." I'm sure that's true. Helping your neighbor is stupid and what do you get out of it. If she's in a burning building, let's consider leaving her there until she figures it out. 'K?

For some fantastical reason, or an extremely dysfunctional childhood, the guy she has demeaned the most takes a liking to her. She sleeps with him (this is...what, modern?) but apparently has no deep feelings for him. Then she goes back to her life in NYC where the real real action/life/thinkers are. When he's hurt, she can't get back to him quick enough. See?!?! She's a nice person after all! Her feelings are deeper than a saucer! Oh joy!

I do not understand this story and the 1000 others that are just like this. Didn't we just go through this with the Renee Zellweger movie that was EXACTLY the same except she was from Miami and went to Deep Freeze Minnesota.

That's all I have to say about this reeking movie. I will say the Hallmark Channel does a better job of programming away from such shallowness.

Amazon Makes Move In Kiddie Lit

2011-12-06T16:02:00.000-08:00

They acquired some 450 titles. Here's the press release.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1637030&highlight=

Good. That means they'll market those titles and increase awareness. Since that's where I started my career and where I've landed again, I'm not displeased. Other people are commencing with a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands and bemoaning Amazon taking over everything.

All Amazon is doing is making one good business decision after another. Why shouldn't it be praised and not faulted? Yet there are people who can't handle this. Go sniff a paper book, you luddites, maybe it will sustain you.

Schtupid Cupid sold its first copy--at Amazon.de. Yippee! The free version's been downloaded 70 times at Smashwords. Has it been live 28 hours? Maybe NLM will get a fire lit under it again. I'm not sure how any of this cross-promoting works for the rest of us. It kills for Konrath.

Schtupid Cupid

2011-12-05T10:13:00.000-08:00

It will be done today so technically I'm jumping the gun but it's either mention it now or tomorrow because I'll be working on it for the rest of the day, formatting and all.

This is the first novella I've done. It was something I started years ago and there was an editor or was it agent who found it tres amusant, but no one wanted it. I put it aside and aside and aside. As I've said, I'm giving up adult lit for the time being but there were good moments I didn't want to see lost. So I decided to just find an ending for it basically where it was. It did mean that the guy I thought she would be with turned out to not be the guy. Since it's about Viva and Bel's cousin, it's a "good" loss-leader for Not Low Maintenance and Unspeakably Desirable.
We'll see how long it takes Amazon to match the Smashwords price.

I hope in the new year Amazon makes it easier to upload documents with images.

Lis Miller isn’t looking for a man, a boyfriend, a husband or a companion but her cousin, Viva, the nationally known Mating Maven, can’t resist butting into her private life. The result? Duress Dating. In order to keep peace in the family, Lis is treated to, or is that tormented by, a series of attempted matches each one more hair-raising than the last. With the Jake, the pilot, Lis’s hair is literally raised as he turns the plane upside down on the way to Block Island and a gourmet meal of fried Mars Bars.

When Viva arranges for Lis to go to California to do the flower arrangements for a friend’s wedding, the flight makes national headlines. All she wants is some peace and quiet. And has it until she realizes it’s all a set-up to pair her with the owner of the ranch.

Cupid proves to be more unpredictable than expected because on her way to living a happy life as a singleton, Lis Miller falls in love. Running true to everything that’s happened in the past weeks, the match is crazy, insane and heart-thumpingly mad. Just how stupid is Cupid?

The Latest Word On Kindle Lending For Indies

2011-12-03T05:31:00.000-08:00

"Please know, work published through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) isn't currently eligible to be included in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. If this changes in the future, we'll communicate details about the program in the KDP Help pages and in our Community Forum."

They won't send us an email?  Okay.  Whatever.

The reason I wrote to KDP is that I had a stupid, no really it was stupid, review for Dream Horse at Amazon UK.  Dream Horse is a middle reader book.  And this adult bought it and was "cross" she had wasted .88 euros or whatever (99 cents) on a book that was not about adults and did not tell her what to do when she was so foolish to buy a horse and find herself overmounted.  So she left me a 1 star review.  Which according to the comment left by someone else, this person does all the time.

So there's Charlie, dead in the water, because of this drunk troll.  Then on Dec. 1 Amazon put all the US reviews over on the UK pages as a beta test.  I thought that was great because all my American reviews are from kids shouting "This is the best book ever!!!!"  I want them to keep this practice.

And BN after 11 months can't remove 2 malicious reviews written by kids who didn't even read the book.  Sheesh.

Amazon and BN need to do better at handling indies.  They both need strong support, which BN doesn't have at all.  We need to be able to publish at $0 without going through Smashwords.  We need some kind of recourse or defense against malicious reviews.  We need some kind of recourse or defense again the websites who may make whimsical and inappropriate judgments regarding content.  The time to publish and make the book live should be no more than 24 hours.

Everyone has just been so grateful and thrilled to have an option other than the hellhole of tradpub, that we've accepted whatever Amazon and BN offer.  The reality is they weren't ready for how big this became so fast.  They didn't think it through and now they're playing catch up.  They need to be aware they have to do better for us while they make everything so beautifully shiny for their customers.

Again.  Famous words-- Content is king.

Mocking Luddites Wherever I Go

2011-12-02T08:45:00.000-08:00

I lose track of time but wasn't it only a couple months ago that tradpub was insisting that ebooks posed no threat to them because it only represented 8% of the market? It seems today that all blog posts are about the enormous increases in ebook sales and the enormous drop in paper sales (they have to put more of that hmm hmm good book smell in them!) which some are rightfully seeing as no phase but permanent.

If you like your RenFaire life, you can keep your RenFaire life.

Here's a tidbit from the middle ages. They really ate with their fingers for the most part, it wasn't until later that forks showed up. But they only ate with one hand. The other was used to scratch flea bites. It was considered dirty to scratch your arse and eat with the same hand, so you have to admire them for figuring that much out even if they thought forks were stupid. You want to go back to that? Go back to that.

I wanted to do a book on menstruation some years ago. All the women editors in NYC, in their wisdom and wymyniess thought it was yucky. Perfectly natural female experience which assures the continuation of life on the planet and things called babies but ick! Still I did research it to some degree and I asked my pal what her mother used in place of sanitary napkins which they did not have in China. Folded brown paper bags. That wasn't 200 years ago. That was in the 20th century and probably very close to the 2nd half of it if not already past the 1950s.

If you like your RenFaire life, please keep your RenFaire life to yourself and remember to recycle all used paper products. Someone else would like to use that paper.

I have to go finish my novella.

Death of the CD

2011-12-01T05:38:00.000-08:00

If you like your tradpub, keep it. The rest of the world is moving to a digital only format.
Here's another thing I don't understand. Why do people who seem reasonably intelligent want us to return to an era before modern technology was developed?

But anyway, if you really love those CDs stock up because after next year--morte.
http://www.side-line.com/news_comments.php?id=46980_0_2_0_C

Good luck with your RenFaire existence.
PS--It's not the higher moral ground.

I have a question.

Why is the style of food photography, and not only on the blogs, I've seen it in books, to use antique utensils that look like if you used them, you'd be poisoned?

The photos are always lovely, artfully designed, well lit and the "silverware" is always not stainless or not silver.
It looks like white metal from the 1930's, stained, corroding, peeling and absolutely unsafe for use. Sorry. I'm dense. I don't get it. Is the point to look like it came from Grandma Sadie's kitchen? If so, why? Grandma Sadie used lard in everything. She wasn't a chef. She maybe made fluffy biscuits but that's about it.

The mythology of the Amish is that they are such great cooks and so back to the earth. This is wrong. Their quilts are made with polyester fabric, they use margarine, food coloring, artificial flavors and everything else we stay away from because they're NOT GOOD FOR YOU.

Who knows what metal they used 50 years ago? This is nuts.

So how do we find out about Kindle Lending? I thought they would email us or send up flares. Something.
At midnight. Now it's well into morning and not a peep. Did Jeff change his mind?

If You Like Your Legacy Publishing

2011-11-30T06:08:00.000-08:00

You can keep your legacy publishing.

There was a post by someone yesterday somewhere--if you can find it good/bad for you, it wasn't that pleasant to read--that basically said "Indie writers suck!" AND AND AND "I am so much better than they are because I am a literary writer, an artist and I appeal to the elites of the world, not the stupid semi-literate peasants."

It's funny how Charles Dickens wrote for the masses and now he's considered one of the greats. Ditto Shakespeare. And double ditto Chaucer who actually WROTE in English when the language of the court in England was French. He wasn't writing for his royal pals, he was writing for the "underclass".

Here's another funny observation. The more people talk about classlessness, the more you know they believe they are in the elite upper class. Not to put too fine a point on it--the insufferable elite upper class.

Did you see where in Communist China the off-spring of the ruling class live like royalty driving around in Mercedes wearing tailored suits and going to the best restaurants? I thought the point of China was that EVERYONE rode a bicycle and ate maggoty rice.

Hypocrites.

I am such a prole. All I can think about...well is about my car getting fixed, but also that tomorrow Kindle Lending opens to indies.

When Bad Apple went free on BN, the sales of BA 2 and 3 (Burning Daylight & Rise) increased even though I upped the price of them. So yeah, I'm very interested in making BA 1 free on Amazon. Although my YA sales at Amazon are not anything to brag about. Different sort of readers at Amazon and BN. Different.

Speed--It's What's For Dinner

2011-11-29T05:48:00.000-08:00

Not that kind of speed.

When you're thinking about something it seems to find you. I do think about writing fast, or too fast, quite a bit. I was much faster when I started out than now. In order to write for television, you have to be fast so I fit right in. Television is an arena where you don't question if something really works, if it comes to you, it's good enough.

Then I had a long stretch where speed didn't matter, asked a lot of questions and massaged everything. Now I thought I was someplace in the middle of the two but yesterday a former sitcom writer told me how really fast I write. I'm not. He must be REALLY SLOW ;-) . There was a blog post somewhere about writing 10,000 words a day and how to achieve that. Wow. I'm encased in concrete compared to that.

I like to play computer games to think about nothing. I'm sure that's one reason why I don't do particularly well but then I found out the big scoring gamers do lines of coke before playing. This is nuts. So I just felt like well I'm not doing drugs to score an extra 50 points in Crescendo Catcher.

How your mind organizes information may have a lot to do with this speed issue. It's all about your brain, isn't it? I have a friend who is always telling me to write X or Y and I say "I don't have those ideas, where am I going to get them?" Because he's not a writer, he doesn't understand you are limited by the way your mind works. You're limited (Sorry! This may not be a popular thing to say but it's the truth) by your life experiences, your philosophies, your background, your upbringing. I could not write a police procedural well for $50,000. If the money dangled in front of me kept going up, obviously at some point I would give it my best shot. But it wouldn't be as good as someone who really thinks in that way. It would be mechanical for me, not organic. It would show.

Why are we writing so fast? Is it because it's so easy to be published now? Is it to make money? Is it excitement? Because we have so much to say it's like a mental dam burst? It's nice that there are so many readers, isn't it? Everyone kept saying no one would write letters anymore and then email showed up. Then it was people don't read and ebooks show up and people have 500 books on their To Be Read list.

If speed's for dinner, what's for dessert?

Kobo Touch e-Reader $70 at Buy.com until 11/29
http://www.buy.com/loc/holiday-superstore/16125.html?sku=226454717

My latest experiment with lighting effects in Photoshop.

Ice Cream Parlor

2011-11-28T14:19:00.000-08:00

Since I forgot to publish it on BN, I rectified that today and I'm not looking forward to doing that again anytime soon. There were a myriad of computer/programming type problems that stumped me and they weren't easily solved. My last resort was downloading Sigil which I struggled with the first times I tried it and I still don't have a clue but it did what I needed. I know I lost all my page breaks.

I also had to remake the cover since it was lost when all my pictures were wiped out a while back. Most of the psd (Photoshop) files weren't recoverable, so that was one of them. I simplified it and even still it took much longer than I wanted to invest.

At some point I may redo it but heck, I'm busy!

I had a good day yesterday at BN. I honestly can't tell what each day's sales are at Amazon since they're cumulative.

I saw where Amazon UK pulled some bestselling book without notifying the author and they lost thousands of dollars in sales. That's a very unfortunate story but as long as indie publishers have no recourse at all against the Kronos of Amazon, we'll keep hearing about these incidents.

Light Beams and Other Thoughts

2011-11-27T08:09:00.000-08:00

Currently making the round on the internet is a "sad" picture of a dog standing by his master's grave. The dog is in an incredibly heavenly beam of light and we're assured it isn't Photoshopped.

Some people really like these sentimental, heart-touching images. The story is plenty sad for me and I won't go into the details and I won't show the image. But the photo looks fake to me. In that it's not a beam from heaven it's either a crap camera doing what it does best--making a hash of things--or someone helped it with Photoshop and did a crap job. Why do I say this? Because if I tried to reproduce mist or a beam it would be less substantive. This is pretty dark/heavy handed. The beam is so thick the dog is almost obscured. Have I ever seen a beam of light from heaven, well, no, can't say that I have. So maybe this is real.

Remember a couple months ago there was a picture of a dog laying by his master's casket at the funeral? The family insists that the way the image was reported was completely incorrect. I'm not saying dogs have been known to not leave their human's side, I'm just saying in these 2 instances I'm a skeptic. OTOH, I think dogs are a blessing from G-d even if Caprice is sitting here expecting me to do something for her and I have no idea what. Criminey, if it was Lassie, she'd tell me! I suspect G-d works in more mysterious ways than this.

After what seems like forever The Ice Cream Parlor got a review on Amazon. And apparently I forgot to publish it on BN. How did that happen?

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars a nocalorie delight, November 5, 2011

Cat mom (LI NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ice Cream Parlor (Kindle Edition)

this is a delicious book.it is a well written history of ice cream.what surprises me is that i am the first reviewer.i love ice cream and i love this book.

Flash of Light

2011-11-26T11:12:00.000-08:00

Is live on BN and a copy already sold so thank you whoever you are. I just uploaded it to Amazon so who knows how long that will take.

I wanted an eye-catching light effect and there are a number of things you can do in Photoshop to get you there.
This time I chose 3D. I'm not sure when that became available but it's in CS4. My somewhat older computer has just enough power to manage 3D which I'm told puts a lot of demand on the system/video card.

While this looks complicated it's really pretty straight forward and simple to achieve. You create the text then go into 3D mode, create the ghost effect and then pull it forward thereby expanding it. You can make it any color you want with hue/saturation and you're done. I used a Photoshop filter to create the lens flare because, after all, Kip is a photographer. Again very simple. I don't think it takes more than 10 or 15 minutes.

I'm looking forward to Kindle Lending opening up to indies in 5 days and learning what the specifics are. I suspect as long as you can get out of it, I will give it a whirl

I "watched" the movie Country Strong this morning because of a free premium channels weekend. When you're rooting for the main character to die, something is really wrong. So what was Kelly's problem? I don't know. She was kind of a horrible person. If everyone else is okay with adultery, I'm actually not, so her sleeping with her husband and boyfriend at the same time seems kind of emotionally sleazy to me. I think instead of the spa she went to for rehab, she should have gone to the ranch that Gabe Milne went to in Flash. Anyway I see so few movies, I didn't know who any of the actors were except Mrs Coldplay. All the men seemed to have beards which made it hard for me to tell them apart. They were all quite furry. Is that the same Tim McGraw as is married to Faith Hill or some other Tim McGraw? That was very confusing and I spent a lot of time pondering that instead of trying to unravel the stupid plot.

Wow Amazon DE

2011-11-25T12:32:00.000-08:00

I don't make it a point to check the books very often here or any other country so I was quite surprised to see this for Mr Mitnick's Harem

Amazon Bestseller-Rang: #6.096 Bezahlt in Kindle-Shop (Siehe Top 100 Bezahlt in Kindle-Shop)
- Nr. 2 in Kindle-Shop > eBooks > Fremdsprachige eBooks > Englisch > Belletristik > Weltliteratur > Jüdisch
- Nr. 7 in Englische Bücher > Belletristik > Weltliteratur > Jüdisch

Fremdsprachige translates to foreign language according to the google translator. So maybe it's possible to sell in Germany without being in German. I'm sure it would help but I'm not convinced $3000 worth which was what the translator woman quoted me.

Mr Mitnick's Harem is a book that hasn't found its audience yet which is disappointing but probably predictable. It's not like other mysteries. A lot of lip service is paid to nonconformity but when it comes right down to it, people want the same thing but different. They don't want different. Some people do but most people find their comfort zone with everyone else. I didn't think this was that off-genre but apparently it is.

I included a number of illustrations in it. Why? Because I like to. Didn't books used to be illustrated? Not just children's books? I don't know.

Giving The Audience What They Want

2011-11-24T05:07:00.000-08:00

This would seem to be a no-brainer. It's perhaps not as simple in practice as it seems. Some people can tap into what people want and others don't quite hit the mark. Don't read further if you think I'm going to give you the solution but I can say a couple things.

Know your audience and be true to them. How do you know your audience? Decide who your audience is. Is the audience people like you? That's fine. Figure it out and then don't annoy them.

Longtime readers of this blog know I worked on the soap opera One Life To Live. I had been a fan of the show for years (with some interruptions) and knew it inside out. I think my favorite soap of all times was probably Days of Our Lives. What I really liked was the normalcy and goodness of the core characters Tom and Alice Horton. I liked how they celebrated the holidays. Today, Thanksgiving, there would be a big family feast. Iconic family. Tomorrow, the women would go shopping and come home to have turkey sandwiches. Not the stuff of drama but the stuff of life. Every year, same thing. I loved it. Since the show is still running, I was not in the minority.

Yesterday on One Life To Live Bo and what's her name... Nora (gee, I should remember since she's played by Hilary Bailey and I gave Hilary her first major role in TV on The Doctors when I was the headwriter there) spent all day with their comatose son. It was a semi- voice over narration with Matthew commenting on the various characters throughout the hour and the show ended something like "Everyone had a memorable day. I did, too. It was the day I died." Close-up of heart machine flatlined, cut to horrified parents.

Way to go OLTL! You just violated every rule in daytime. This is the reason you were cancelled. Good. Killing a child on a holiday. Is that supposed to be edgy? Thank you for that. The show has about 5 weeks left and you spoil it. Good going.

People watch Law & Order: SVU to see children raped, maimed and murdered. You don't do that on a soap. Or let me say you can, but few people are going to praise you for those kind of choices. If you'd like to argue that point with me just let me point out when I took over The Doctors it was the lowest rate soap. Even then I had 4,000,000 viewers a day. This year OLTL 2,500,000. There may be a lot of reasons why viewership is down over the years, and I'm going to say crappy writing by arrogant writers who don't know and respect their audience is right there at the top.

Be sincere. Write from your heart. Respect yourself, your characters and your audience. Do the best work you're capable of. Strive to do better. You may not be more successful but you will be a better person. One last thought--Be grateful and give back to the life that gave you so much.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Shorts and Pricing

2011-11-23T05:27:00.000-08:00

For anyone new to the blog, I'm not crazy about the 99 cents price point. I read somewhere that neither is Jeff Bezos who thinks the right price is $2.99 and up. As in most things there is some kind of equation between size and price. The bigger something is, the more expensive. If you're already at 99 cents, and you write something short, you can't price the thing lower so all you can do is raise the price of everything else.

I think this in an unfortunate time to be raising prices given the economy here and around the world but if someone just spend $200 on a Fire, maybe they're not hurting that much.

I've been collecting public domain images in a number of topics for the past couple years and thought I would compile them into a short book. It's less that I believe such a thing will sell and more the enjoyment of doing it as well as doing something other than fiction that won't be a huge investment in my time. I don't know what that's worth. $0? Free in the Kindle Lending Program? 99 cents because there's no other choice?

Do people want short? They should. There used to be magazines full of short stories. Given everyone's attenuated attention spans, this would seem like a good direction to go in. More choice is always better than less. Unless of course you are incapable of making up your mind and prefer no choice at all which is often me, sad to say.

Bleary Thoughts On Potentially Anything

2011-11-22T06:36:00.000-08:00

I got to the end of Flash 2 yesterday, I'm not done but I got to the end. The nice part, because I don't outline, is that while I generally know where I'm going, I don't know the details so I get to be surprised. The end is a nice moment. I doubt very much if there will be a Flash 3 but if I went back, the door is still open. It also can be thought of as closed. Winning! (I sorta miss Charlie Sheen being around to say that every 20 minutes.)

Kindle Lending Library, Overdrive, legacy publishing/agents as publishers. There must be some clever thing to say about there being 2 modes to live in-- fear or confidence. Probably would come from either an ex-Seal Team member, a motivational speaker or a rabbi. Hey that's a good start to a joke. An ex-Seal Team member, a motivational speaker and a rabbi go into a bar....

You know people are coming from fear when the level of passion used to attack something is in the meter's red zone. Amazon is taking over the world. How? Google has already taken over the world. They're spying on us, tracking us around the net, reading our email and few people say a word. My message to Sergy Brin "If you really think I'm worthy of that kind of attention, be my stalker, I don't give a flip." Ditto Jeff Bezos. Take over the book buying world. Find a niche and fill it. Provide a service people want and they'll show up. He's obviously doing something right, why attack him now? Overdrive? Seems to be another case of pigs at the trough. Legacy publishing/agents jumping from the sinking ship--nothing to do with me. Although I admit to enjoying some delicious schadenfreude mit schlage.

Publishing in the last 20 years did not treat me well. If they suffer, if agents lose their jobs and businesses, well that requires a tiny bit of brief, passing compassion. But it's really, to quote the movie Valley Girl, "Bad karma, dear". Maybe the taxpayers can bail them out, too. I mean like Bertlesmann surely needs more money. Sony is practically on the street corners in Santa suits, with a bento box collecting donations.

Back in the real world where people do stuff instead of whining, I'm going to do a book of winter photos now that I have the whole camera thing sorted out. I did some final test shots yesterday? the day before? and came to a conclusion. You can skip this if you're bored. Let me assume Nikon actually fixed the body and now the body is 100%. It comes home and it's not appreciably better. Now it has to be the lenses. Okay so the 55-200 for some reason is not as fantastic a lens as Ken Rockwell insists. That's why I spent so much to get the 85 mm 1.8 (reminding you the 1.4 costs 3 x the price and is really the same lens but for the extra f stop). I take test shots with the 85 and they're not sharp. I was practically beside myself. What is going on? It's a brand new lens and it's supposedly one of the best Nikon makes and it's crap, too? How is any of this possible? So I unscrew the old UV filter from an old lens that I put on the 85 just to protect it temporarily. I shoot with a naked lens. Beautiful. What? The Romor lens filter is crap? How did I never notice that before? (Other than the fact I never had a computer or Photoshop to study the images obsessively with film.) Yesterday with Amazon Prime, thank you Jeff Bezos, my Tiffen filter arrived in 2 days as promised. Screw that on. Take test shots. Everything is fine.

I will just say this again. I wish Nikon would make a camera and lens with the sole concentration on taking the finest images possible without the video capabilities, the bells and whistles and all the other high speed low light crap that I don't need. Think Nikon F again. Build the finest camera in the world, made in Japan with Japanese, not Chinese parts, with 1 purpose--take a great image. It could cost under $2000 and it would be a service to humanity.

The Naughty List

Design--Let's Talk About Fonts

2011-11-21T09:16:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting vid with much food for thought. Designing Book Covers 101 sorta

So, yes, I agree with everything on the surface. There are always exceptions and this is of course his opinion.
But let's talk about the whole font thing.

I think that's one of the most problematic elements of designing a cover and over the past 19 months I've tried numerous fonts and passed on most because I didn't think they worked. I'm not sure I agree that a font like Times New Roman or Arial screams homemade but I am sure that weird fonts do. Something like Curlz which is cute is just too cute PLUS it's very difficult to read in thumbnail size. Arial is easy to read in thumbnail. So score one for Arial.

One of my favorite--love it!--fonts is the very elegant cursive font I use to watermark my photos. It doesn't work on a cover. I tried it with Fling. It doesn't work. And I'm willing to go so far as to say cursive does not work in 99% of the attempts. The scrollier something is, the more curls, the more bends or angles, the harder to read. That's reality.

When I was looking to do housekeeping on my hard drive I realized I had way too many fonts stored for any rational non graphic designer. There are a couple I use and go back to them every time after trying 25 others.
What fonts? A couple are marking pen types like I used for Summer Horse. I want to fall in love with a san serif font but I haven't yet. I used Trajan Pro for Flash and used it again for Flash 2 (yes, the cover is done). I tried a couple others but with the lighting effect, they weren't substantial enough.

Finding the right font is an investment in time. I can't imagine how many hours I've spent looking at fonts--it's that important.

As for the vid's point #1 that the author's name should be large. It depends. I've said before I don't like text cluttering up the design. For me, as a photographer, I generally don't like to see text on the image so I don't do it. Should your name be bigger? Maybe your name should be as big as your ego. I don't know.

I invite you to scroll through the cover images on the right. The ones on top are my design. When you get to the Gingerbread thing, the Wish You Were Here books, the Idiot book--those are all Big Six books. Can you see my name on any of them?

What offends my sense of design more than how large an author's name is, is how crappy the color choices are.
Blue or black text on a yellow background doesn't work for me. Outlining the text in black with the idea that it will stand out more effectively doesn't work for me. Amateurish artwork on the cover is really bad and there's no excuse when you can get a stock photo or vector graphic for $3.

So for me the simpler the font the better. Make it readable. What I do is get up from the computer and walk a couple steps away from the computer to see what the design looks like from a distance. If I can read it and understand it, I'm fine. If not, I make it more readable.

The less confident in your abilities as a designer--and you know I want you to do your own covers--the simpler they should be. Look at covers on Amazon . Learn from them. Mimic the techniques. You can do it.

What I Want For Christmas (Bookwise)

2011-11-20T05:46:00.000-08:00

For Charlie (Dream Horse) to be where he is today

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,105 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children's eBooks > Animals > Horses
- #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Lifestyle & Home > Home & Garden > Animal Care & Pets > Horses > Riding
- #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Individual Sports > Horses > Equestrian

Charlie was a real horse, most of the events in the book actually happened. I bought him from a lovely young woman, Sindy, who was going to college to be a vet.

Horses, sorry to say, aren't like dogs. I'm not even sure dogs are like dogs. But horses don't care about people. Any movie that portrays affection between horse and human is a load of horse manure. Some horses will treat you like another horse which is great and all you should expect.

What a horse is very capable of is preference. A horse will prefer one human to another because they've come to trust they will not treat them in a way that makes them uncomfortable.

The horse on the cover of Dream Horse is my horse, Sparky. He definitely preferred me above all humans but he didn't like humans, that included me. Charlie had a very similar relationship with Sindy. He really preferred her and no one else could get the same results or cooperation from him that she did.

Rumor has it that Amazon will open up the Kindle lending program to indie publishers the first week of Dec. The specifics are unknown but Joe Konrath hinted they are very good. The stumbling block might be that you must be exclusive to Kindle. Pull your book from all other sites. If you were selling well elsewhere this could be a major hit. I remember seeing Amanda Hocking's sales figures from last year. She was selling thousands of books a month at BN. How is Amazon going to compensate for that loss? Of course, few of us sell the way she does.

I have a Nook. The reviews at BN have generally been very nice for my books unlike Amazon where I've had my share of drunk trolls. Do I want to abandon those readers? What is Amazon going to do for me? What if 50,000 writers sign up the first week. A very small marketplace is flooded with a whole lot of material.

The lending library is only for Amazon Prime members. That's great for everyone who gets a Kindle Fire for Christmas since it comes with a free trial. That's great for Amazon since they will have a ton of books to lure more people in and more people to stay after the free trial. How is it good for a book like Dream Horse? We know it's good for Konrath and his circle of friends. They're all self-referencing at this point. Others of us not so much, I suspect.

If you can decide what to make available to the program, I'm good with it. If you have to make all your books available, it's a more difficult decision to make. YMMV.

Books Wondrous and Boring

2011-11-19T10:48:00.000-08:00

I came across a novel Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children. This is marvelous, inventive and not published by one of the Big Six. Before it was published, the movie rights were snatched. As should have been.

Not everyone has a mind that can conceive of the truly strange. But what we can all aspire to is to think more deeply, more fully, commit ourselves to the process of writing instead of churning out the same boring, expected dreck. Of course, some people want the expected. They will pay good money for the expected and be very cross if they don't get what they expected. So if that's your goal, then pull out all the stops and do that. But if there's something inside you that keeps annoying you like a tiny pebble in your shoe that there is more to be said and in a different way, do that.

On one blog or another this week someone will put forth an argument that legacy publishing is dead. No it's not, someone else will say. Indie writing sucks. Not more than legacy, someone (usually me) will reply.

What's the name of this blog? Real Writing For A Digital World.

If you're going to do this, don't phone it in. Really write. Make it count. Make everything you do count. Do less but do everything more fully, more completely. Everything can be published. There are no agents or editors standing in your way. You can be the writer you always thought you could be. The only one getting in your way now is you.

Nikon D7k

2011-11-18T11:40:00.000-08:00

I sent the body in for servicing and have been checking everyday for status. "In shop" was what it was designated all week. So was I very surprised to come home from a quick trip to the anabaptist market to find it was now "shipping". Yay. Imagine my further surprise when I clicked on the tracking link that it was on the UPS truck and would arrive in under 2 hours.

What did they do? Replaced the Autofocus gear shaft. Adjusted the Autofocus. Upgraded the firmware. Cleaned it so well it looks like it's never been touched by human hands.

I ran some test shots. Color me disappointed with the 55-200 zoom. It's a cheap lens and looks like it. The 85 mm is about 3X the $ and looks like it. I know which lens I'll be using from now on.

I was using the Nook Color this morning to check my non-sales at BN and I wanted to see what the new Sweeps cover looks like on a tab and I wound up unpublishing it. Some idiot computer genius said a couple months ago there is no need for desktops anymore now that tablets have been invented. Fill in the blank with whatever swear words appeal to you. Are you nuts? Adults fingers are too big for a tablet unless you keep pinching or whatever the reverse is called--spreading, embiggening? And just tell me how in all that is holy you would write an entire book with 1 finger on the fake keyboard. Or does that much work require a portable keyboard to go along with the tablet? AFAIC that just destroyed the point of the tab. A tablet is perfect for reading. It's okay for some other things but probably the older you are, the less patience you have with its limitations.

New Cover For Sweeps

2011-11-17T11:19:00.000-08:00

I don't remember what my initial idea was. Probably it was the version with a girl in a bathtub. I contacted a very competent artist in Holland to do the drawing but I guess language was a barrier. I couldn't find a photo nor a vector graphic. I came up with one with bubbles. That didn't work. Then I found a stock illustration. Settled. Not thrilled with it but these things are only temporary anyway. For me. Geez, if I paid $300 I'd keep the thing forever.

Then I was going through some old postcards and found a girl in a bathtub. It doesn't scream vintage to me even if it is so I thought I'd give it a whirl for a couple weeks or until the end of the year. I'm going to put it on BN for now, Amazon later or never. I don't have to make up my mind this afternoon.

Technical explanation--

I had a vintage postage image. I tweaked it in Lightroom, brightened it, clarified it and hit it with the luminance function to remove all the noise that had accumulated in the last 100 years. I suppose I could have attempted to tint her pink or something. It always looks so phony.

In Photoshop, I lifted the girl and tub off the original background and turned it into a PNG file (no background).

For the background I used a gradient fill I had made for something else, then hit that with a mild Gaussian blur.

I made a new layer and placed the PNG on that.

I made new layer for the background bubbles. (Best not to work on the original image. Use layers in case you screw up.) The bubbles are a Photoshop brush I got from somewhere on the net. Google Photoshop bubbles brushes. You'll find them. Download the file then click to open. Photoshop will do the rest for you.

I made a new layer for the title. In Blending Options, I hit that with a small stroke using a gradient I had made for something else. This is how you get the bubbles behind the text.

I made a new layer for the foreground bubbles. This is how you get the bubbles on top of the text.

I made a new layer for my name.

Easy, huh?

How To Fail

2011-11-16T07:16:00.000-08:00

1) Don't do anything.
2) If you do make the mistake of starting to do something, don't finish.
3) If you persist in the mistake of doing something, make sure you get bogged down in extraneous details. Worry about things that don't matter. That will insure #2.
4) Never read the FAQ.
5) Don't take advice from anyone with experience.
6) Find something better/more pressing to do.
7) Make inventive excuses for not doing what you said you wanted to do.
8) Understand that forces larger than you are working against you so you will fail anyway.
9) Everyone who is doing what you want to do has an unspecified advantage.
10) You don't really want to do this anyway, it was all just a mistake.

Early Adopters

2011-11-15T16:39:00.000-08:00

What has surprised me today is the fight some people are putting up against digital publishing. Not content to let the rest of us get on with it (and fail abysmally according to them) these people have to loudly point out where we're wrong and they're correct. Digital publishing is a passing phase or something.

It's not a passing phase anymore than the printing press was. And because there must be a villain, that would be Amazon. As I said, this stance has to be considered a psychological problem and I don't know how to respond to it by now.

Let me say it again, because I'm not ready to get to work on Flash 2 for the day yet. I don't understand why today you would be trying to get an agent for your book. This is an arc that will take approx. 5 years of your life if everything works perfectly and at the end of the 5 years when you finally have a published paper book in your hands, legacy publishing will be a shadow of what it is today and that's a shadow of what it used to be. Borders no longer exists. Where are you going to sell this book? What readers are going to drive to a bookstore and find you when an alternative already exists? The trend of bookstores closing is not recent. Do you think that's going to change? Why would it? What can a bookstore offer readers that Amazon doesn't?

When I lived in California, there was a lovely little bookstore on State Street in Santa Barbara. It was very cute. They moved across the street into a larger space. They had comfy chairs, tables and a wood burning fireplace in the middle. They had a ton of books and neat things for sale. Then Barnes & Noble moved in further down the street. Earthling Books no longer is there. It's no longer anywhere.

Santa Barbara's Independent Bookstores

I'm sorry about this, too. I'm sorry there are no malt shops either. But just because I like cherry cokes doesn't mean you can't get the syrup and pour it into a coke at home. People are staying home for lots of reasons. Convenience, price, selection among them. You have to deal with the reality as it exists, not as you wish it to be.

Fortune Favors The Bold

2011-11-14T11:49:00.000-08:00

Some writers still show varying degrees of reluctance to embrace digital publishing. This must be recognized as a personal psychological issue and nothing to do with digital publishing.

Does that sound mean? It shouldn't. There is nothing mean spirited about the truth anymore than digital is anything other than what it is. If you don't want to publish digitally, here's a simple solution--don't.

There is no point in talking about all the crap books being published. There are crap books being published and some of them are doing very well. Readers respond to them for a reason. I can remember reading a book by someone who is now quite famous and rich and one of this writer's first works was terrible. Unbelievably bad, to me. That person got better as a writer over the years but what didn't change was that this person always came up with very inventive stories. Readers were willing to forgive the amateurish writing for the pretty good story.

I don't worry about the competition. I'm very clear on what I do and only I do what I do. Only you do what you do. I make a great Barbara Morgenroth and a really crappy Amanda Hocking.

There's always competition. You are always in the middle of the field whoever you are. You are good at one thing and never good at everything. It doesn't matter who you are.

Put blinders on and do your work without looking around to see what everyone else is doing. Or if it makes you that uncomfortable--do something else. Life is too short to make yourself miserable.

Louise Brooks

What Did You Buy

2011-11-12T12:38:00.000-08:00

Say you buy a book to download from Barnes and Noble for your Nook and then you decide to get a Kindle Fire because of all the goodies Amazon throws in. Then you realize you want to read NOT LOW MAINTENANCE on your Kindle but oops it's in epub not mobi. Here's the question. Should it be a felony for you to convert the intellectual property you paid for into another format even if it involves copying it?

What are we buying? Are we buying a 1 time use? Is it ours to use on whatever device we have, or can they specify how we're to use it? Then are we renting it? What exactly are we buying?

Music has been through this already with iTunes and their proprietary format. It was an annoyance. It's reassuring to see that publishing learned nothing from the music business, at least they're consistent in the not-learning by experience mode.

But I'm sure the lobbyists and politicians who make up the laws are thrilled with the money exchanging hands. Pigs at the trough.

The Big Gamble

2011-11-10T10:04:00.000-08:00

I watched X Factor last night. I wasn't so impressed by any of it except Drew. She's 14 but that's really a footnote since she's probably the "best" of the lot. There are a lot of ways to be good and there are a number of good singers/performers in this group of contestants. I like Josh Kracjik but not last night. I think Melanie Amaro has a very fine voice and is as good as any current singer but so what. I think Rachel Crow is very good and can deliver, is amazing for a 13 year old but still, what is it about Drew?

She's different. She's good AND she's not like everyone else. (I still don't get how you learn to do that by the time you're 14.)

It's easy to copy what's already successful. Oh geez, when they announced Melanie was going to sing something from The Bodyguard, I cringed. "Oh no, please not I Will Always Love You" I said to Caprice. (Caprice who I'm still talking to because she didn't kill the cat and Dinky did last night.). Not that I don't love that song, under certain circumstances I do. Like this

It's probably not going to get better than that, so I think it's skipable.

So Melanie sung something that Simon loved but I can't even remember what it was and it didn't have that much of a tune. I'm sure if Melanie had done IWALY it would have been as good as Leona Lewis' version. Apparently once you are that good, it's not that hard to copy Whitney Houston.

The point being Drew didn't copy anyone. She actually is herself and references herself. This of course is dangerous because most of the time the public doesn't want you, they want Whitney or Stephen King or Nora Roberts/whoever.

(I just want to say to LA Reid--How is that little rapper kid different every week?)

So you can try to copy someone who is successful and can get on the gravy train while it's still rolling, or you can be yourself. Do you trust yourself that much?

Robert Muchamore Tells Us How To Write a Book

2011-11-09T13:08:00.000-08:00

A while back I read two different book series for teen boys. Since I don't have a lot good to say about them, I won't name them. They were, I suppose, relatively entertaining and certainly popular. So I'm not the target audience, not even close. Last week I heard about Robert Muchamore, who has published a wildly popular and multi-volume series in England. I think Simon & Schuster brought them out here but a couple of the early ones are out of print already so it didn't click in the US and it's not digital. I ordered the first one used from Amazon and it arrived on Monday. I will be honest and say I didn't expect much.

How wrong I was. This guy can really tell a rousing story. The other two series were deadly boring with all their action sequences. How's that possible? I don't know. This is the opposite. I felt caught up in the action, felt a connection to the characters and their situation. Muchamore knows what to tell the reader, just how much background or information they need. He knows the right things to say.

It's not polished, it's not elegant, it's not literary but it's believable. I understand who James Adams is and why he acts the way he does. The other series--I saw the explanations but didn't care. Those characters can live or die. Okay. What's it to me.

There's a lesson to be learned in how to draw the reader in and obviously his vast success proves that even boys who only want to play video games and watch football respond to well-crafted characters.

I haven't finished watching this video. I'm sure he has the air about him of not taking it seriously but that's probably as deceptive as his book.

New Cover For Summer Horse

2011-11-09T07:18:00.000-08:00

For a couple months I've felt some level of discontent with the cover for Summer Horse. The background was a scan of an old shipping label and it began to seem too much of a mustard color for me.

So this morning I replaced it at BN with this

It's not more perfect, it's different. I liked the sense that the other cover was a picture of a real scrapbook page, probably created by Wynne because originally there were ink splatters and it's pretty messy. She emptied her pockets and treasure drawer and threw things down thinking she would come back later. Unfortunately, Wynne doesn't come back later, she's already onto the next thing. If she'd given the task to Nicki, the new image is what we would have. It's brighter and cleaner--Wynne didn't get near this one.

I think this is the right time for face lifts because Christmas is coming. Not that all the lovely people who don't have readers yet have seen the covers, but bumping up the visual excitement is a good idea. Maybe changing the cover every 6 months or so is a good idea.