Category Archives: writing/blogging/publishing related

writing, blogging, publishing

Kindle Pro-Pedophilia?

writing/blogging/publishing related

Here’s a little test for those of us who mostly believe in free speech.  Amazon is selling a self-published Kindle book that’s a guide for pedophiles. I’m temporarily stumped.  First, I’m not so sure if this does fall within first amendment rights as child porn is illegal though I haven’t read the work and of course won’t.  Amazon has thus far defended the author’s right to publish and sell this masterpiece on Kindle.

Sometimes you know the right thing to do and maybe I’m just having a bad day, but this is a tough one.

Does one boycott Amazon for carrying this trash?  Complain to your state’s attorney general to find out if it’s illegal?  What about if you are also an independent  “Kindle author”?  Should you remove your book?  But what if it is a first amendment issue and other books start getting removed?  And what about print books or Kindle books through a publisher that Amazon sells as a retailer?  You can’t control what retailer buys your published book.  My paperback is also available on Amazon.  I can’t stop them from selling it.

So tell me readers, bloggers, lawyers, and other concerned citizens, what to do?

Living My Fear

true story, writing/blogging/publishing related

Yesterday I stop by Spoonbill & Sugarman, an independent bookstore in Williamsburg.  I had the idea that I was going to show them the novel I’ve written — a dark tale inspired by real events set in the East Village in the late 1980’s.  What better venue could there be for it (except possibly St. Mark’s Books?).  The 80’s — crime, drugs, disease — it’s all coming back.  As for gentrification, even when you’re paying $1,000 for less than 100 square feet in a share, gentrification is always “the next guy.”  While many of the hipsters frequenting Spoonbill will have been much too young to remember the history behind the fiction, some will know abouthe police riots in Tompkins Square, or will have heard of the  man with the rooster and the cautionary tale of the young woman whose bones were rendered and served to the homeless in a soup.

I get off at Bedford, a mere four blocks from 102 Bedford Avenue, between N11th and N12th where I used to live once for about nine years.  I walk south instead of north and enter the store. I’d visited an independent bookstore down there  in the old Downer’s Pharmacy shop once years ago. (No, I’m not so old I remember when it was Downer’s Pharmacy, but I do remember the sign in the window.)  That location was now an upscale bistro.

Had I actually been in Spoonbill?  Possibly,  that day a couple of summers ago, with my in-laws when we’d spotted a group of Hasidic men trying to play baseball in McCarren Park, feeding  every stereotype of Jewish non-athleticism in the process.

I walk into a bookshop  dazzling in hipster perfection, the platonic ideal of the Williamsburg bookstore.

I froze.

There I was with a copy of my book in my daypack, prepared with a little spiel and ready to offer my wares.  I had practiced talking about my willingness to sell on consignment and/or match Ingram’s price with no delivery fee, my willingness to sign books or have an event. But I could barely do more than pretend to browse. Even as the customers left and it was just me and one guy behind the counter, I was terrified.  It was a reptilian, irrational fear.

Will the man behind the counter look at the obvious flaws in the cover? Shout at me:  “It’s a POD and you, madam are a FRAUD.”   Will he laugh at my little tome and say, “Try selling it on the kindle.”

I was suddenly aware that it was not the too damn high rents that had forced me to leave Williamsburg those many years ago, but my own feeling of inadequacy.  The realization that the entire neighborhood had turned into a club, and not only wasn’t I a member, but no one would even discuss the criteria for application much less the secret handshake.  There was no refuge from an agoraphobia so pervasive that even my apartment had become part of the marketplace, and I had no choice but to flee.

It was of no importance whether the man behind the counter was a clerk or a proprietor.  Whomever he was, I was suddenly aware that he had the power to destroy me with a word.  Not even a word, a gesture, a raised eyebrow, even the most minute curling of the lip which I would easily be able to interpret as “Go back to the suburbs, old lady and take this self-published piece of crap with you.”

And so I took my wares and left.

Loisaida — The Novel — The Vlog

writing/blogging/publishing related

So here’s me talking about my book. Please be forgiving, this is my first vlog. And I couldn’t figure out how to put text on it, so if you want to know all about how/where you can buy my lousy book please just head over here.

And that part at the end about a free e-book, that was off the cuff, but if you took the time to read the sample and couldn’t afford the $2.99 for the download, sure I’d consider sending you a coupon if you could explain to me how you could afford the reading the device. But I do view the paperbacks as a promotional tool, so if you read a sample and really, really like it, but can’t afford it, then please write me and tell me what creative thing you’d do to promote it if you got a copy. Or make your own vlog about it or something. Comment here and maybe I’ll send you one.

Jeffrey’s Game — Funny Business in the Kindle Store

book reviews, Politics and Culture, writing/blogging/publishing related, , , , ,

Self-publishing was once a punch line. Now all the cool kids are doing it. Much ink virtual and real has spilled on the topic with even The New York Times declaring it almost respectable.

For the small minority of people reading this who haven’t actually written a book and put it on Kindle themselves, it’s so easy a chimp could do it. And yes I actually expect to see an ad someday where one of our well-mannered primate-cousins will be shown finishing a manuscript and following the prompts to upload it onto Amazon’s Digital Platform. Or maybe that will be a competitor’s ad, Steve Jobs taking a swipe at the deluge of titles on Amazon, priced between 99 cents and $2.99, written by everyone from formerly mid-list authors to high school students to retirees with too much time on their hands.

Meantime in the present, Jeff Bezos’ plan for world domination and beating the Big Five Publishers who are fighting his desire to cap e-book prices moves forward. He’s using the self-uploaders or “indies” as they prefer to be known for his own purposes.

I should know. I’m one of his two-bit whores, hawking my wares on the Amazon “community” forums, like some worn-out chippy.

“Mr. I was published once, legit. I got me one of them degrees. I was a Sarah Lawrence, girl. And my prose is clean, Mr. C’mon take a chance. Give a girl a break. It’s only 99 cents!”

As Bogey said in Casablanca, patter like this is usually accompanied by the sound of tinny piano playing in the parlor.

And now it’s time for the screen to go fuzzy while we go to flashback.

What led me to make the plunge? The usual frustration over not selling my novel, plus meeting up with enough other frustrated writers to become convinced that we weren’t all hacks, and maybe there was a real problem. In fact, some of the best novels I’ve read in the past couple of years have been self-published or as-yet-unpublished, books agents balked at for reasons of perceived marketability. One involving heroin addiction in 1960’s London was deemed too difficult for Americans. Another had a plot revolving around a woman who physically abuses her husband. It didn’t end in love conquers all, as it wouldn’t, but editors wanted a happy ending which the writer couldn’t provide.

My own unpublished opus is hardly worth discussing here. Let’s just say it’s not beach reading or chic-lit. Nobody buys expensive shoes, though there is one scene where a teenage stripper steals a pair of Doc Martens from a dead girl whose chopped-up body is being rendered into soup.

But as usual I’ve meandered far from the tale I’m trying to tell.

In the beginning there was Createspace and Createspace begot The Kindle Store and Jeff Bezos said it was good.

For those people living in a cave who still remember the old tombstone ads for Vantage Press — “ye olde timey vanity press” — you’ve got some catching up to do. Through the use of print-on-demand technology, people can now publish themselves “independently” without giving thousands to some gonif who promises to make them famous. The costs of using Amazon’s Createspace to produce and publish a book are negligible, unless you buy extras like help with formatting or cover design or editing or proofreading services. What you don’t pay for is warehouse fees or printing costs. People can order the books online at Amazon or Createspace and they print to order. The reality is, however, most of these books are bought by the people who wrote them or their friends. The books cost more to produce then offset books, and are often priced higher than books by known writers. There is little chance of these books ever being sold in “real stores.” After Amazon’s cut, the writers may make very little in royalties.

Kindle, which doesn’t charge for uploading books, is an even less pricey way for writers to get their work out. Amazon offers a hefty 35% in royalties for books priced under $2.99 and a fat 70% for those at or above $2.99. You can actually make money having your book on the Kindle, though most people who do, spend a lot of time “promoting” their work, and would probably do better working part-time at Wal-Mart. Promotion consists of cajoling people on the Amazon forums to buy your e-book. I’ve got two books up. One is a novella, going for 99 cents, which took me very little time to write. The other is the novel described earlier that took years and is priced at $2.39 (reduced by Amazon). Guess which one sells more? The novella, I’ll admit is probably more accessible, but my guess is it’s the price that draws them in.

Now, here’s where things get really strange. At the beginning of October, for some never fully explained reason, Amazon went and reduced the price of several of its 99-cent “indies” to FREE. There was no special notice given to the writers. No permission sought. They apparently have the right to do this. What I didn’t realize immediately is that they were still paying the royalties as if the price hadn’t changed. This is something that they are apparently obliged to do if the royalty is set at 35%. The book took off and almost made the top 100 in “free” books. If you click to see the “bestseller” list for Kindle, you’ll see two lists side by side. One is “paid” and the other is “free.” There are also various genre and subgenre list. For a while, my little novella was the number one “medical technical thriller” in “free.”

Within a few days, just as mysteriously, the book was back at 99 cents. Suddenly, it was listed in the “paid” content, but the way the numbers were cooking it was still benefitting from all those “sales” back when it was free. Plus because it was now showing up on so many “people who bought this, also bought that” lists, it kept selling and is still doing well.

Did it make me rich? Hardly. Because here’s another dirty little secret of The Kindle Store — it’s one store, a sub-section of a very large retail outlet, but still just one store, selling e-books primarily for one device. The title could have a sales rank of 200,000, but one sale could bring it up to under 50,000, and several over a few hours might put it into the top 1,000.

While I don’t have the October final figures yet, and can’t tell you the greatest sales day, I can tell you that it had around 2,300 “sales” in the four days or so when it was free. This is about 10 times the amount it had gotten on Kindle at 99 cents in the previous ten months. Given the one-click buying and the “free” part, it’s no wonder so many people downloaded it. How many will actually read it is another matter, and the number is not impressive when compared to the sales of “real” bestsellers. Nor at 35 cents a pop is it very lucrative. It also does not appear that the sales on the novella had much impact on the sales of the novel.

I did very little to influence any of this. Amazon didn’t publicize it beyond having the free titles show up on automated lists. There are boards and blogs started and ready by Kindle users and someone had posted a listing of the “newly” free books on one of the more popular ones which brought a lot of readers in quickly.

The question: What is Amazon’s strategy in reducing the price to nothing especially when they still pay author royalties? Amazon might protest that there’s less here than meets the eye. The prices may simply be reduced automatically when it’s found that the book or e-book is available somewhere else for less. The novella had been listed in other e-book formats through a different distributor for free. It’s possible this showed up, and Amazon reduced the price with no human intervention. It was even suggested on a link somewhere that they might not in the end pay the resulting royalties because having it up for less could be a violation of the contract, though so far, the money is still listed in my reports.

But it makes more sense to believe that Jeff Bezos knows what he’s doing. Amazon is developing it’s own cheap content for Kindle. Unlike expensive to produce Createspace titles, cheap Kindle “indies” sell. Tons of books recognized in “customer” reviews and a few blogs that look at “indies” are creating a unique bestseller list in the Kindle store and even bleeding onto Amazon itself. Take a look and you’ll see titles you’ll never see in a bookstore — straight to Kindle specials that may or may not even exist in print-on-demand.

This is not to suggest that Bezos doesn’t want to sell “real” books. Amazon probably earns more in a day on sales of the Millennium Trilogy than it will in a year on any of it’s 99 cent titles, yet they are able to use the “indies” to offer frustrated Kindle buyers loads of cheap content that’s oh so easy to buy with the one-click button. Unlike a publisher, they spend nothing on vetting, editing, proofreading, or even promotion. Amazon makes money whether a consumer buys one authentic bestseller or loads up on 5 bogus Kindle ones. By having all those titles show up in their store, they dilute the sales of the “real” books, weakening the hand of the publishers.

Next Time: Funny Business in the Kindle Store: Part II: The “making” of a Kindle Mega-Seller or How One Author Stole from Jackie Susann’s Playbook.

(Pssst, if you liked this post, think you could maybe check out my books here?)

I’m Not on Vacation, I’m Just Blocked

writing/blogging/publishing related

No recent posts because I’m working on an epic post about Kindle, self-publishing and so much more.  The problem is I don’t even know where to start or finish.  In the meantime, here are some things for you to read and do:

  • By all means, read this article in The New Yorker about  Glenn Beck’s extremist roots..  It’s sobering and scary.
  • Check out The Year 0 Collective page because resistance is futile.
  • Then go to The Eight Cuts Gallery and read an interview with the frighteningly talented Cody James.
  • Take a look at  my novella The Death Trip and take advantage of the freebie coupon offer (CF23W).  It’s short enough that even if you don’t like reading on a computer, you can get through it.  I guarantee that reading it is a more constructive use of your time than aimlessly browsing the internet.
  • Check in again next week when I’ll be making an announcement about the print version of Loisaida — A New York Story, which I’m also giving away electronically this week only with coupon — BA97J.
  • Both these books, by the way,  are allegedly available in the i-book store, but I don’t know for sure because not owning the i-pad or i-phone, I can’t actually get in there which makes me want to slam this effing Mac against a wall.  So if you are one of the hip elect who has access to the magical store, can you go there and buy the books because Steve Jobs could use a new pair of shoes, and then  could you write a nice review or something because that would help put more money in Steve Jobs’s pockets.
  • Watch this fun video from the youbube which should give you a laugh and has nothing to do with me and is not related in any way to my annoying self-promotional schemes.  It made me smile and being the cockeyed optimist that I am I just wanted to share.  Either that or I think it’s all going to shit very fast, and this will be our last collective smile before darkness descends, forever: