Anonymity and Eneminity

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I participated in an interesting debate on Joe Konrath’s blog. Joe is a self-publishing evangelist and he was having a discussion on the way corporate publishing treats authors.

He called for a published author to come in and defend the industry.

An author signed in Anonymously and stated that the publishers treated her well and made her rich.

I don’t know the age or the gender of the writer, but I will refer to this person as she and I picture her to be in her late fifties to early sixties.

I have no way of verifying that she was telling the truth. But what she said “rang true” and therefore was true, even if she was not who she said she was.

She said that while mid-listers, like Joe, are better off self-publishing, if you wanted to “reach for the stars,” trade-pub was the only way and you had to go to the big publishing houses.

I’m not here to argue those points. There were over two hundred comments on the post, some of them were mine.

I wanted to talk about the public debate and about another sideeffect that might be coming out of the desintegration of the current publishing system.

Let’s assume that this writer is worth several dozen million dollars, has hundreds of thousands of books in print, and is published in many countries by fifty different publishers.

If true, this is a person of serious influence. This is a person who shaped thousands of lives, a person who changed the course of human culture.

This is a pilllar of society.

How come she is afraid to put her own name to her thoughts?

The reason is simple, she is a slave to those fifty publishers. She knows that a whiff of scandal and those publishers will start deserting her in throves.

She has to be politicaly correct all the time. Even a private word can be quickly turned into a sensation.

This must be very isolating. Watching your every move. Being terrified that the society will discover that you are…human.

One might say, “Wait, it’s not about the publishers. It’s about the reading public that will shun this writer and publishers will simply follow the readers.”

To that I say, “excrements of the male of Bos Taurus”, bullshit in other words.

Some people complain about the loss of civility, sensation seeking media, gossippy, celebrity driven culture we have become, yadda, yadda, yadda.

To that I say – we were always like that. It’s part of our nature. We love a good brawl. We love spirited debates. We love the scandal.

If we were always this way, why do we expect the leaders of our culture to be any different?

We don’t.

Our artists always spoke the truth, no matter what the consequences, and behaved badly too, if they wanted to. They couldn’t care less about what a bunch of suits thought of as “proper behavior.”

Corporations that took to running our culture have corrupted our cultural leaders. First, they manapolized access to the public, then they gave crumbs from their tables to the artists. Then they told them how to behave.

What I hope to see is that with gatekeeprs gone, more people like Anonymous will be saying what they really think and once again participate in the public debate.

Pricing

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I ran a ¢99 promotion for ten days.

Did I see an increase in sales? Yes. My Twitter account also became active during those days and I acquired about a hundred followers. While modest, this number is impressive to me. I actively blocked followers that were not relevant to my account.

The way I see it, two types of followers are useful:

Writers, publishers, and other content providers. While they will never buy your book – they establish credibility. I myself am susceptible to this. The first thing I do when someone follows me is to see who is following them. It is also important to see what other people are doing and imitate them if it sounds like something you want to do.

Potential readers. They don’t have to buy your book right away. They might not see or react to your posts. But they are there for you to reach. I think that the people with less than two hundred followers and following less than two hundred people are the most valuable followers. Not only your tweets will be noticed by them, they are also sitting on a tightly knit community that listens to what they say. If they retweet – it matters.

Going back to the pricing. There were two people yesterday that found me on Twitter and bought my books. It was a very clear pattern: four people followed in one hour and two Kindle books were bought.

I direct-messaged them and had a little chat spread over a few hours. Interestingly, all four said that they bought the book. :) But it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to ask them if the price was a decisive factor. All four said, “No.” One of them said, that price matters for him only if it’s greater than $3. I said, “Why this magic number?” He said, “Because eBooks shouldn’t cost more than that.”

This got me thinking about my own book purchasing. Can I swing ten bucks for a book I love? I sure can. I used to pay $20 or more for hard-covers. Why do I cringe and move on when I see an eBook for that amount? Because I believe that this a work of a greedy publisher and writer will get less than a dollar of that money. I believe that I’m being ripped off.

Clearly the price should be below three dollars unless I want to look greedy.

Then what should it be? Should it be ¢99 for a full novel, $1.99, or should it be $2.99? I didn’t get a clear answer. But one person said something like that, “If I worked instead of reading your book, I would probably make a thousand bucks.”

This got me thinking how true that was, even if the person who said it was making a jape. If we put our ideas of what is “fair price” and what is “unfair price” aside, the biggest price is the time we spend reading something. When I buy books, the most important factor that makes me decide is whether I want to spent ten to twenty hours reading the book!

The price is back to $2.99. Let’s see if it’s going to change anything. I’ll keep you posted.

Non-Traditional Publishers

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By the way of disclaimer: I have never submitted and got rejected by a publisher – any publisher.

I live and work in New York, whose economy and people benefit from the publishing industry and I have friends who’s best interests coincide with survival and well-being of the publishing industry.

There’s been a lot of talk about the big six publishing houses. Some people have been calling them “the traditional publishing houses.” I think this is not accurate. There is nothing traditional about them. The traditional publishing house would be a struggling business operating on the thinnest of margins and filled with literature lovers who live and breathe putting good books into good people’s hands.

I sigh…

What we have now is six large corporations that as corporations often do, while full of nice, well-wishing people, developed minds of their own.

I’m not for corporate bashing. I work in a corporate world. My LinkedIn page is filled with CEOs, CTOs, and other officers of various corporations. They are good people. It’s just a corporation is considered a separate entity for a reason. It has it’s own agenda, often different from the people that run it. Trust me on this, I can see a lot of my corporate friends nodding their heads at this.

Six large corporations that run what I call non-traditional publishing houses are running scared. The times are changing and it means that someone will die and someone will emerge a victor. At the moment it feels like this victor is not going to be based in New York. In all likelihood it will be based in Seattle or possibly in Mountain View, or both.

Mind you, I’m not quite sure it’s a good thing. But it’s just the way it is. In the process, just like the empowering movements all over the world it will grudgingly empower the people, unless they allow the victor(s) put them in chains again, but that’s a separate topic to discuss.

Now back to the main topic at hand.

I originally wrote parts of this post as a message on Megan Lindholm’s website mixed with the celebratory comments dedicated to her launching her latest book.

If Madame Lindholm graces my site by reading, I apologize once more for the inappropriate venue I chose for my comments.

Here is the post: Live From University Book Store Seattle!!!

What I think Harper did to her is nothing short of criminal. I could be wrong and those were not choices made by Harper USA but by Megan herself. In this case they are still guilty, but the disservice they have done to her was listening to her…

But I don’t think she had much say in those matters.

Here is my list of grievances. It starts with the covers. Take a look at those two lineups:

The Rain Wild Chronicles:

Soldier Son Trilogy:

Do I need to say more?

Now compare it to the covers from the UK edition:

City of Dragons

Lovely isn’t it? And it fits perfectly with the other two:

Dragon Haven
Dragon Keeper

The Halloween-themed cover for the US edition is just sad… When the cover is displayed as a 70 by 70 pixel thumbnail – you cannot see much at all. To me it looks like a pair of snow peas in front of a pumpkin:

I hear you, my reader. You say, “So what? Those things happen.”

To that I say, “Not when you take 85% of the profits!” I say, “For that amount of money, you’d better be flawless!”

But they didn’t stop there, did they?

I have several eReader-phobic friends who buy paper only. But even they admit that they don’t buy a book unless they read the first chapter online and then they order online too. Where is the “look inside” feature for the new book? It’s not there! They had to purposefully disable it.

Now, the saddest part of the whole ordeal – the price of the eBook edition. They set the price at eye popping $27.99 – the same as the hard cover and then “discounted it” to $18.40…

Compare it to the £4.49 (about seven bucks) it goes for on Amazon.co.uk.

This just boggles the mind. This just sounds like Harper knows that they are going down, and Amazon is killing them, and the are trying to “punish Amazon” by doing this.

The only person they are punishing is Madame Lindholm!

Considered this: the mid-listed self published writer Joe Konrath made $100,000 in the three weeks around Christmas by selling his very popular books for $2.99.

Let’s calculate how much money Robin Hobb (I’m using the pen name here on purpose, as I’m referring to the brand here) would have made if she was selling her books by herself for let’s say $7 and earned %70 of it. If she sells 1 million  eBooks in the first year for $7 each – she’d get 4.9 millions. Then she can drop the price to $3.99 and sell another million in the second year earning another 2.793 millions. But most importantly a whole a lot more people will read the book and that’s what most authors want more than money.

What service does Robin Hobb gets from Harper?

Editing? Cover design? Copy-editing? Marketing? Formatting?

She can find people who would that for her for $40 an hour or even for free and they will say “Thank you!” and kiss her feet – is she enjoys that kind of thing…

There is a Roman expression that says, “You can sheer a sheep many times but you can skin it only once.”

Update – 02/18/2012.

The “look inside” feature became available. The price for the eBook “dropped” to $14.99, which is still too high. Look at the tags customers slapped on the book:

greedy publisher(9)
outrageous kindle price(9)
overpriced-kind le-version(8)
publisher price ripoff(7)
too expensive for kindle(6)
9 99 boycott(4)
9 99 boycott outrageous price for a kind…(4)

The cutest part of this is the 9.99 boycott, the book isn’t even $9.99!

In my opinion, the print copy has a slightly more palatable shade of brown but still really weird and it clashes with the rest of the series. It almost sounds like they didn’t want to pay an artist and some intern photo shopped the UK cover. Why brown background? Why? Isn’t this supposed to be  a landscape of sorts? Where would you find a landscape of that color? But then again I just started listening to my audio copy (paid with one credit from Audible.com, I earn one by paying $15 every month.) Maybe there something in the novel that describes the golden-brown landscape… But then again why the UK edition has this lovely shade of green?

I have a theory why the eBook got pumpkin color. The printer works off the color scheme called CMYK – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (black) they represent the inks used. If you prepare an image for printing in CMYK and then just convert it to RGB (red, green, blue the screen uses) blindly – it will look all messed up.

You need to have control of the original image and actually specify two color values: one for the screen and another one for the print. Alternatively, you can convert blindly and then search and replace colors to make them look the same on the screen as it was in print. I’m sure there are filters that do this for you as well. I think some graphic designer didn’t do a professional job of converting the image. This is bad, whichever way you look at it.

Okay. The new thing I just noticed.

When you scroll down the listing, you read this editorial review, controlled by the publisher:

Review
“The Soldier Son [trilogy] can be read as a political satire on American military aggression, but on a more personal level it is profoundly perceptive about the challenge faced by the honorable, brave and good. Nevarre is a true hero.”

Pardon my French ladies and gentlemen. What the fuck? Somebody did a cut’n'paste job from the Soldier Son trilogy into this book and didn’t bother to change it?

WTF? WTF? WTF? WTF?

I don’t even want to mention how horrible this editorial review is. I personally know a fifth grader that writes better. What are you guys smoking? Seriously. I want some of that stuff.

This is just sad. I mean sad, sad, sad, sad…

Okay. Steam vented, I’m off to listen to my copy of the book.

 

What Marge Looks Like

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This is going to be a short post.

Several people asked me what I thought Marge looked like, given that the cover doesn’t quite match the description in the book.

I agree, some important details are different: the color of her hair, the color of her skin. But I loved the cover so much and I didn’t want to ruin the “spell” by asking for more changes from the artist who made it.

Well, folks, for those of you who are curious – a woman followed me on Twitter. She is a Canadian radio host. When I clicked on the link to her website I was shocked to discover how much she looked like Marge of my imagination.

Here is the link: Synchronicity

Follow it and compare it to your Marge.

After Marie Benard posted the link to this post on her Twitter account, someone tweeted me and asked me where the excerpt was.

There are links to it on the Books page, but here it is again: Cyclone of Truth on Amazon.

Twitterati

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I have to start from afar.

The year was 2001 and a friend’s husband approached me. The conversation went somewhere along those lines:

“You are a geek, right?”

“Hmm….” I said and followed it by lots of shrugging of shoulders, fiddling with my bottom-of-the-bottle glasses, and body language that firmly confirmed that I was a GEEK.

“I have this investor that wants to invest into something that has to do with mobile phones.”

“Like what?”

“Like anything.”

“Let me think about it.”

I went home and I came up with this idea: To have a website that will create SMS mailing lists. A user will setup a list of his/her friends and every time they wanted to text something to a bunch of friends – they sent it to a special number and it got re-distributed to all of their friends mobile phones and/or email addresses and display on their dashboard. I even came up with a name – Jawjam. Not only it sounded funny and easy to remember, it was easy to type on the mobile phone with numeric keypad only (do you remember those?) because the consecutive letters of the name are on the different number keys (bring up the key pad on your smartphone and double-check.)

Friend’s husband was impressed and even parked the domain right away (it still remains parked.) Well, needless to say, it didn’t work out because of quickly apparent personality clash. The idea died together with the partnership.

When Twitter came out and became an instant hit in 2006, I knew that it could have been me, only five years earlier. I was jealous and bitter.

I avoided joining Twitter till now.

I’m happy to report that I have seen the error of my ways and I’m twitting my head away.

Now everything is new and shiny and my eyes are as big as Obama’s…re-election pins (what did you think I was going to say? ears? something else?)

I followed a dozen or so people, blocked several extremely talented females (as in their extremities were very talented-looking) when a big name writer of the type of fiction I don’t read followed me. I got immediately star-struck and followed back. I got a message saying thanks and for a few minutes I was sitting impressed with myself.

Then I clicked on his name and something didn’t add up. Not only he was based out of my time zone, but there was a burst of tweets sixteen hours prior and then nothing. Then there was a huge number of people he followed – it was just slightly bigger than the number of people that followed him – 50 or so thousands.

“Doh!” I thought, “The whole thing is automated, even the thank you message.”

To you, my dear reader, who is wise of the ways of Twitter, this is probably a laughing matter, to me, it was a revelation.

I’m sorry to say that I un-followed the big name writer but I have been carefully playing with the software that does just this – searches for people who might be interested in my work, follows them, and then un-follows them if they didn’t reciprocate in 3 days.

I hope I’m not going to get banned from my newly found love – Twitter that I could have co-founded but did not.

 

eBooks vs Books debate

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After reading this and this I decided to write this vignette.

Corroding values

Mennek finished a brushstroke and a sunny smile spread over his face. He stepped away from the book to get a better look. Goosebumps crawled up his arms and into his robe. The drop cap was flawless. He felt the presence of God in his humble study. He crossed himself and said a short prayer.

Dinner bell chimed in the distance. Mennek carefully capped all of his inks and washed his brushes. He knew from the experience that when he was touched by the divine like this – there was no more work that day. He would spend the rest of the day in prayer and contemplation.

The dinner was trout with brazed turnips, Mennek’s favorite, and he succumbed to one of his sins and overindulged himself on the fish and the white wine from Mainz that he had a particular fondness for.

And just when he thought that the day couldn’t get any better the archbishop himself walked into their dining hall. He was followed by his assistant – father Curt – a pudgy prelate who walked curtly a few steps behind the archbishop, leather sack in his hands.

And if his presence wasn’t enough to install the fear of god into Mennek, the archbishop singled Mennek out of dozens of supping monks and motioned for him with his finger.

Mennek approached the bishop and lowered his bulk to the floor resting on his left knee.

The bishop blessed Mennek with his smile and allowed him to kiss a ring on archbishop’s right hand. He motioned for Mennek to get up and to follow him into the nearby alcove. He sat by the window overlooking the courtyard and said, “Please sit, brother Mennek.”.

Mennek sat down across from the bishop, his heavy bottom taking the entire window seat. He stared at the floor feeling anxious and queasy.

“How’s you work on the Bible Earl Grubenhouser commissioned going?” the archbishop said.

Mennek breathed a sigh of relief. “Splendid, Your Excellency, simply splendid! I finished another drop cap today. If God is willing, I’ll be done in six months’ time.”

The archbishop drummed his fingers encrusted with precious jewels on the window sill. “Could it be finished in one week’s time, per chance?”

Mennek reacted worse than if the archbishop had slapped him. No – being slapped by His Excellency’s hand would have been a blessing compared to this.

“God’s work cannot be rushed, Your Grace,” he whispered.

“I know, my son, I know,” the archbishop said. “It’s just the Earl is being most impatient. The new church he built stands without the Holy Book for a second year now.  He came to my study this morning and brought me this.” He motioned for father Curt to approach.

Upon coming closer father Curt untied his sack and pulled a large volume out of it.

“A layperson… What’s his name, father Curt?” the archbishop started.

“His parents named him Johannes Gutenberg,” father Curt said evenly.

“This layperson, this Johannes Gutenberg, he is selling those for 30 florins. And he claims that he can make ten of them in a week.”

Sweat and a moan escaped brother Mennek. He exclaimed, “30 florins! That’s not even one tenth of what a real Holy Book is worth!”

The archbishop motioned for father Curt to open the book.

The words were blurry for Mennek for a while and then it came to focus and he rejoiced at what he saw. He turned a few pages, smug smirk on his face, and said to the bishop, “Look at the penmanship. Look at the ink. This is the shoddiest imitation done by the most unscrupulous scribe I’ve ever seen!”

Something had caught his attention and he even turned a few pages further to make sure. He crossed himself and paled as if he had seen a ghost, “The drop cap, Your Excellency. This G is exactly the same as the one few lines back.”

“That’s the point, my son,” the archbishop said. “He has a machine in his shop that can produce books like this – one indistinguishable from another. Not only all Gs look the same in this book – all of them in every book look the same.”

Brother Mennek dropped the book to the floor and crossed himself again. “This is the work of the devil! You cannot trust a soulless machine to copy the words of God! They get corrupted by passing through the infernal machines borne of fires of hell!”

The archbishop cleared his throat and motioned for father Curt to pick up the book. Father Curt bent down with a groan and picked it up giving Mennek a mournful and reproachful look.

“The thing is, my son, Earl Grubenhouser doesn’t care. His church stood empty for too long.”

“This devil’s work must be banned and this heretic Gutenberg must burn!” brother Mennek exclaimed.

The archbishop gave brother Mennek a kind smile and said, “Let The Holy See worry about those things. We informed them of these tidings. But the justice works slowly at the Holy Court. Are you sure you couldn’t be done with your copy by week’s end?”

Mennek shook his head.

 

This is it

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It’s official. I’m starting to promote Cyclone of Truth. They say that every part of this journey is hard but this is the hardest. There are no recipes here except try to get mentioned in as many places as possible and wait. If the product is good, eventually it will take off… or not. If the book is rotten though, nothing will ever help. We shall see, will we not?

Almost There

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Well folks, it’s been a busy week on many fronts. Let me update you on some of the issues I’ve mentioned before. This is going to be a long post, full of technical details. Unless you are writer trying to get self-published, this will probably be of no interest to you.

  1. Apple had finally “reviewed” the book – it took about a month. As I suspected, nobody was actually reading the book. It was an automatic cool-off period Apple had instituted. How do I know, you may ask? I posted an update and it was on iTunes within four hours. It didn’t even go through a short review stage like Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) handles updates. As soon as the update went through and I was admiring my book’s page in iTunes, a bigger issue became apparent.

    The listing was showing Pat Anvil as the author and the publisher but my real name was showing in the Seller field. I thought, “Not a big deal, let me log in into my iTunes connect account and fix it.” After trying to change various names on the form it became apparent that what it shows as a seller is what Apple asked you to put in the tax section and made you solemnly swear that this information matched IRS records.  There was a little field I overlooked called DBA or “Doing Business As”. There was no way to change the field from the site since I accepted the contract, but there was a way to email customer support. I did so. I got a reply from iTunes legal department stating that I should scan and send them a PDF of my DBA certificate.

    After researching some more I found that a corporation or an individual can file a DBA in New York state for $150 and it will take about six weeks for my certificate to arrive. The DBA record will be available for everyone to see. That’s the idea behind the registration – so there is a public record. In other words, this is not what one wants to do to remain an anonymous writer.

    I emailed Apple telling them that all I want to do was to hide my identity. I told that I was fine “doing business as” my birth name but I didn’t want it to be mentioned anywhere on the listing. There was no reply. With a heavy heart I took the listing down.

    Kindle reader is available on all Apple products but iBooks is an ePub 3.0 reader. It supports embedded fonts, SVG, drop caps, and a whole bunch of other goodies. Amazon has finally announced their support for all of this in KF8, which is essentially ePub 3.0 packed into Palm database (.prc) Amazon is using since they bought Mobipocket… I’m getting distracted here. All you need to know is that, in my opinion, at this moment in time, iBooks is a superior reader.

  2. Amazon “fixed” the categories. This is what it now says: 
    Look for Similar Items by Category:
Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical
Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Arthurian
Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Magic & Wizards
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children's eBooks > Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror > Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Magic
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fantasy > Arthurian

Look for Similar Items by Subject:
Fantasy > Arthurian
Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror > Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Magic

    There is a “tiny problem” with this – Amazon doesn’t support > character in their searches. When you click on the Fantasy > Arthurian link. It shows this a page that says “Your search “Fantasy > Arthurian” did not match any products.” :) When I look at the books listed in those categories I see something like this in the “Look for Similar Items by Subject” field:

    Young Adult Fiction
Juvenile Fiction / General
Juvenile Fiction / Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magic
Juvenile Fiction / Historical, Arthurian
Fiction / Fantasy / General
Fiction / Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magic
Fiction / Historical, Arthurian

    I reported it back to Amazon – they are working on it.

    The other issue I had with Amazon is that when I clicked on “edit product details” from my Author Central page – it gave me an error. I got an update from Amazon on this. It came from Seattle and not from India this time. They had escalated this into a development ticket and engineers are looking into this.

    I wanted to mention that Amazon had been very professional about those issues. Things like those happen. As long as it gets fixed eventually – I don’t mind.

    I imagine that dealing with an obsessive writer who is learning the ropes of the publishing business and has a compulsion of getting things “just perfect” according to his/her warped point of view – must not be easy.

  3. One of my readers had finished reading and reported five problems. Looking at them left me speechless. How’s this possible? I mean, I had read the book many times, but I don’t count. Many people read the book after me and found corrections. But… Come on! How is this possible that instead of “of art” it said “or art” and nobody noticed? How’s that instead of “lets” it said “let’s” and everyone’s eyes glazed over those things? Makes me wonder if there is more… I posted an emergency update and it’s mostly live everywhere. The only thing that didn’t update yet is the “Look inside” feature on Amazon. Judging from prior experiences, it might update today or it might update in a week. It has a life of it’s own and there is no point in waiting for it or opening another ticket with Amazon. It will be there eventually, that’s all that matters.
  4. I removed paperback from being distributed through B&N and other “extended distribution” channels CreateSpace allows you to select. This was not an easy decision and is worth an entire post. I might post it as some point soon. This took care of the missing cover problem. :)

I think I’m ready to start “marketing” my book. And by this I simply mean trying to get it mentioned everywhere I can and getting as many people as possible to take a look at it.

Countdown

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Alright, folks. You are imaginary at this point – nobody is reading this. But hopefully, there will be someone in the future, scrolling back to the beginning, and reading those hectic posts. I wrote a short story about this a great many years ago. At some point into the story a scientist, who realized that his discovery will eventually result in the creation of a time machine, is standing in the middle of nowhere talking to the future generations, knowing that someone will be curious about this moment.

Where was I? It’s Sunday, around midnight, and I’m seeing double. A mental note to myself: “Stop seeing Double – you don’t have time to date.”

As far as building the site. I hacked wordpress social plugin to work with Goodreads. Coincidentally, they approved me as a librarian, then after I added my book, they approved me as an author. Not only they were prompt and courteous, they did it on Saturday and Sunday. Wow! I’m in love! This site is now a living shrine to Goodreads. There is “Follow me on Goodreads” in the sidebar, their icon on the login screen, and a big juicy button next to the book description.

Among other tweaks is the “Contact Us” screen that you can get to by clicking an envelope button on the right.

I also styled the login and “forgot my password” screens to match the rest of the site. The whole site is as dark as a polar night now.

Now, the reason I started this post was to keep you abreast of what is keeping the hard launch of the book. Right now I’m considering this stage a soft launch. I’m not actively looking for readers. Here are the remaining issues:

  1. Amazon updated the categories but the “find similar items” is messed up. Here is what it looks like right now:

    Look for Similar Items by Category

    Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical
    Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Arthurian
    Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children’s eBooks > Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror > Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Magic
    Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fantasy > Arthurian

    Look for Similar Items by Subject
    NON-CLASSIFIABLE

    To me this is embarrassing. There is a ticket with Amazon. Almost five business days ago the rep emailed me and said that it was going to be “resolved shortly.”

  2. Barnes&Noble paperback edition is missing a cover. I emailed the rep – got a very informal, prompt reply. It went like this, “Hi Pat, we’ll upload the cover soon. Thanks, Mike.” Loved it! Amazon’s emails are very formal, long, and flawlessly written. They are also on IST, that’s Indian Standard Time, for the uninitiated and “Mike” was on PST. Anyway, it’s been a couple of business days and the cover is still missing…
  3. A minor issue but annoying nevertheless. When I click on Kindle edition “update product details” in Author Central – it gives me an error message, advising me to contact technical support. I have contacted them twice and haven’t gotten any responses. When I do the same on the paperback – no issues.
  4. iTunes is still reviewing book “to ensure quality.” It’s been over three weeks since I submitted the ePub file. A friend said that they are probably “reading the book” and it’s pretty cool how serious they are about quality. BullPoop! It’s Apple being Apple. Nobody is looking at it at all. It’s far cheaper to create a public image than actually do things of this nature. I’m sure when the time comes they will spend 15 minutes looking at the book, an hour tops. One thing this does though – it ensures quality as in, “if you want to submit to us – you better make good damn sure you have the final version.” “Normally” self-published writers rush too soon to publish, then discover problems, panic (The public is reading!), publish too soon again. Rinse and repeat. Apple is saving some money and establishes an air of superior quality at the same time. I could be wrong, of course.

I think this is it for the moment. I’ll keep you posted.