Print versus ebooks: it's still a debate

You might think that more than eight years after the Kindle launched*, the debate over print books versus ebooks would be settled, but it looks like it's not. CBS News recently weighed in with a post titled Books vs. e-books: The science behind the best way to read.

It gets some things right: it mentions that studies of e-reading interrupting sleep are about LCD screens, and that dedicated ereaders have non-light-emitting screens (although it never calls them e-ink screens). It talks about the advantages that controlling the appearance of the text can give to people with reading disabilities.  There's even link to a website where readers can try out that kind of feature to see if it helps.

Things the post gets wrong: The title implies one best way to read, and there isn't one! It also calls print books just "books." That's like saying "Cars vs. Electric Cars: Which Is Better?" They're all books! Way back when the codex replaced the scroll, it was just a new format for the same thing.

This post also sites a specific Australian study of students to make the claim that "avid readers also tend to prefer reading on paper." I find this bogus! I think if you made a point to include people who own dedicated e-ink ereaders, you would find they are some of the most voracious readers out there.  Furthermore, Australia doesn't have as mature an ereader market as the US.


* I know the Kindle was not the first ereader--not even the first e-ink ereader--but it was what launched the digital transition. The pre-Kindle market for ebooks was minuscule.

How is Saronna's Gift like the latest Mad Max?

I seem to be posting about movies lately. But this writer's post about Mad Max: Fury Road rang a bell with me.

The plot of the movie illustrates that an absolute matriarchy, where all men are seen as evil, can be just as toxic to humanity as an absolute patriarchy. And in Saronna's Gift, that is, in fact, the way Krueger's World is portrayed. I won't go into details, because that would spoil the unfolding of the plot, but the religiously-based colony on Kruger's World has both an absolute patriarchy and a hidden matriarchy. Neither is kind to its adherents.

There is a human tendency to  want to punish oppression with oppression—to oppress those who oppress you—but it's not a humane response. Nor is it healthy, because the act of oppressing someone else makes you less human as well as less humane.

The world is grim enough as it is. We all need to be kind to each other.

How hard can it be to give away a book?

Harder than you might think. I have been selling my books as ebooks since 2011. I have seven novels and one novella available as ebooks, and one of the novels is also available in print. I have yet to set the book world on fire. Some years were better than others. My best year for sales was in 2013 because that was the year I got a BookBub promotion.

Unlike print, selling ebooks happens entirely online, and some of the best ways to promote ebooks are also online. Several companies offer websites, social media posts, and/or email alerts to tell people about free or cheap books. The services are free to subscribers but usually, authors have to pay a fee to include their books.

Not how but why?

So, why would an author make a book free, let alone pay to advertise that its free? Well, for one thing, you can get reviews that way, and reviews sell books. But even better, if the book has at least one sequel, giving the first book away can make sense. The Sixth Discipline has been free for quite some time, but its number of downloads has been going down lately because it has so much competition.

In May of 2013,  paid $60 to include the listing for The Sixth Discipline in a Bookbub email. They included the links for the US Kindle store, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, Sony, and Diesel. I got the Kindle numbers right away, but since the other numbers all came through Smashwords, it took a lot longer to find out, but altogether I gave away about 20,000 copies of my book: about 14,000 Kindle copies and the rest split among the other platforms.

Bookbub promotions now start at $99 for books that are free, and go way up from there, depending on the price of the book and the genre. But price aside, the problem with using Bookbub now is that it's very difficult to get  a slot.

Bookbub is the premiere email promotion service and it's going great guns because they figured out that:

• New ebooks from major publishers are overpriced, so people are always looking for deals
• They can make money as an Amazon affiliate (if a customer clicks on a link to a non-free book from a Bookbub email, the link has a code embedded that tells Amazon to credit Bookbub a teeny-tiny percentage of that sale. Teeny-tiny adds up when multiplied by thousands.)
• Readers will use their service if it's free and they make sure the books they're telling readers about are well-written
• If you deliver high enough numbers, authors and even major publishers will pay a lot for your service

Of course, giving away 20,000 copies of a book doesn't do me a lot of good, except it's Book 1 of a two-book series.  In the months that followed the promotion, I sold about 1,200 copies of the sequel No Safe Haven. This points out one huge limitation of giving away a book. Not everyone who downloads it will read it. A lot of people see "Free" and click the button, but don't read the book. I've done it plenty of times myself, so I know. You figure "Get it now, while it's free, and read it later," but later might never come. Unlike books available through a subscription program that limits how many books you can have at a time, free downloaded ebooks have no expiration date. In fact, plenty of people download books without checking whether or not they would want to read it.

FreeBooksy Listing

And while The Sixth Discipline has mainly very good reviews, not every single person who reads it will want to read the sequel. This means for every hundred copies of Book 2 I sold, I had to give away well over a thousand copies of Book 1.

However, Bookbub is now so popular that they can be very, very choosy about the books they list. They make a lot less on free books (a lower author fee and no affiliate percentage), but they always include one or two freebies per email, to keep their readers happy. But even the free ebooks have to have lots of good reviews and a professional-looking cover. And with major publishers wanting to advertise sale prices of backlist books, and a gazillion self published authors trying to get some traction, it's very hard for a self-published author to get a slot with BookBub.

Where else can you go?

There are plenty of other services; none have the impact of BookBub, but they can be worth the time and money to use. I recently tried out a few of them: Book Gorilla (affiliated with Lendle), eBook Daily, Free Booksey, and eBookSoda.  All of them offer varying services at different prices. For example, Book Gorilla lets their subscribers choose how many books maximum to be included per email, with 12 as the smallest, so it costs more to be sure your book will be one of the first 12 in your genre.  They also vary as to range, in that not all of them will post all your buy links.  Book Gorilla and eBook Daily show only Amazon links, not iBooks or B&N.

My results (your mileage may vary)

Freebooksey: ($70) 1,187 Kindle copies (this overlaps eBookdaily.com. so it's hard to separate them), 102 on iBooks, 68 on Nook, and 1 on Kobo (note I also had one Kobo sale of the sequel shortly after, which suggests the Kobo folks don't have as many free books to choose from and actually read the ones they can get)

eBookDaily: (free) 267 Kindle copies (this one is a bit different as they rely on a Facebook page to get submissions from authors and they post the book they select to their website, and tweet it, as well as email it. There is no scheduling mechanism.)

Book Gorilla: ($150) 490 Kindle copies

eBookSoda:  ($27) 68 copies on Kindle, 3 on Google Books, 3 on Smashwords, 1 on iBooks, and 5 on Nook

eBookSoda Listing

So, Freebooksy won this round in total numbers with eBookDaily winning in terms of cost/benefit (hard to beat free).  Freebooksey has a version for sale/cheap books called BargainBooksy, and I might try that for another book if I decide to put one on sale.

Saronna's Gift makes a Barnes & Noble science fiction romance list!

How did I forget to post about this? Saronna's Gift made a list of 20 science fiction romance books on the Barnes & Noble sci-fi blog!

As the Brits say, I am chuffed to see my book on a list with the likes of books by Lois McMaster Bujold and Linnea Sinclair.

Interestingly, although the only links are to the print and Nook copies available from B&N, I had a much bigger sales bump from Amazon after the list came out than I did from B&N, which suggests readers are browsing the B&N blog but still buying the Kindle version.  

Big Brother knows what you don't know

Assuming the reason people look up a word in their Kindle dictionaries is because they don't know its meaning, Amazon knows what it's customers don't know. They recently released a list of the most-looked-up words. I knew a lot of them, but some (see yellow highlighting) were unknown.

The built-in dictionary is a great feature of ereaders, but it's kind of creepy to think Amazon is tracking which words are looked up.

MY List of the “Best” Movies

The thing about movies is, they're story telling that's different from books. In books, the author tries to give enough description that you can picture what's happening, without slowing down the story. In movies, you see the story as it happens, and the visual aspect is equal to the words. Arguably, movies have become more popular than books. Certainly, when a book becomes a movie, more people are exposed to that author's work than ever before.

Someone on my FB feed recently posted a list of the AFI's 100 best movies,  The list could be checked off, and it turned out I had seen only 57 out of that 100.  But the FB post generated an alternative list from Chicago film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. He had a lot of really old and somewhat artier movies, and I only got 5 on his list.

Why should film critics have all the fun? I decided to come up with my own list. I didn't exclude animated movies. My only requirement was that I had seen the movie and liked it for some reason (The Thin Man is on there for the relationship between Nick and Nora. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is there for the visual story telling, etc.). I put The Lord of the Rings as one entry because it was one story, but I listed the first three Star Wars movies by title because they can be viewed separately and I wanted to distinguish them from the second set of movies which were nowhere near as good.

One thing this kind of list points out is that awards are given by year. Plenty of great movies don't win awards because they come out in the same year as other great movies.

Feel free to nominate your own favorites in the comments. I might even add them, as I didn't stick to a specific number. Also, they are not in any particular order, by rank or chronology; they're just as I thought of them,

My top movies of all time

1. Groundhog Day
2. The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! 
3. Bringing Up Baby
4. Desk Set
5. It's a Wonderful Life
6. The Sound of Music
7. Mary Poppins
8. American Graffiti 
9. Notting Hill
10. It's About Time
11. Galaxy Quest
12. Lord of the Rings
13. Three Men and a Baby
14. The Green Mile
15. Forest Gump
16. The Sting
17. Up
18. Toy Story
19. Some Like It Hot
20. The Princess Bride
21. Jurassic Park
22. Auntie Mame
23. The Truman Show
24. The Matrix
25. Tootsie
26. The Graduate
27. Breaking Away
28. Sleepless in Seattle
29. Die Hard
30. Casablanca
31. Star Wars episode 4: A New Hope 
32. Star Wars episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back 
33. Star Wars episode 6: Return of the Jedi
34. Raiders of the Lost Ark
35. Pretty Woman
36. Aladdin (Disney animated version)
37. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
38. Psycho
39. Finding Nemo
40. The Thin Man
41. Heaven Can Wait
42. Miracle on 34th Street (original version)
43. In the Heat of the Night
44. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
45. Moonstruck
46. Shrek
47. The Incredibles
48. The King's Speech
49. Rain Man
50. Beauty and the Beast
51. Sense and Sensibility
52. The Sixth Sense
53. Little Miss Sunshine
54. The Blind Side
55. Argo
56. Erin Brockovich

Herding dogs? A round-up of Puppygate posts

As well as my own post yesterday, there have been a lot of articles and blog posts about the Hugo voting results, and the Puppy slates. The roundup below includes a post from Puppy favorite, John C. Wright, who has no hesitation in calling himself “a skilled author, one of the finest writing today.” That level of hubris explains a lot. There is also a post from the Federalist, a right wing site that seems to think left-leaning folks cannot be nerds and compares them instead to ISIS.

N.B. I am adding to the list as I find things, so feel free to add links to a comment if you know of a good discussion.

Who Won Science Fiction's Hugo Awards and Why it Matters, Wired.com (best in-depth description I have seen)

The Link between Sad Puppies and Donald Trump, Slate

Hugos & Puppies: Peeling the Onion, Foz Meadows' blog

The Hugos, the Puppies, and why this is more important than just a rocketship, Mary Robinette Kowal's blog

Smeagol Nielson Hayden, John C Wright's blog

Bad puppies, no awards, Charlie Stross' blog

No ‘Puppy’ Love at Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards, Wall Street Journal

The Hugo Awards: Why the War on Nerds Is a War on Art, The Federalist

Hugo Awards Upset: Fans Say No to Sad Puppies, Alexandra Erin's blog

George RR Martin 'relieved' after Sad Puppies' Hugo awards defeat, The Guardian

The Hugo Awards 2015: Looking Back and Moving Forward, The Mary Sue blog

Hugo Awards: Rabid Puppies defeat reflects growing diversity in science fiction,  by Gary K Wolfe for the Chicago Tribune (I liked that this one makes it clear it was mostly a Rapid Puppy slate)

THE “NO” VOTE: HUGOS AND PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES, Lee Modesitt's blog

Final(ish) Notes on Hugos and Puppies, 2015 Edition, John Scalzi's Whatever blog

THE DIVERGENCE BETWEEN POPULARITY AND AWARDS IN FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, Eric Flint's blog (interesting analysis of sales/popularity versus awards)

And in conclusion

Next Year's Hugos, George RR Martin's blog

What the heck is a Hugo? My take on Puppygate, assuming you know nothing about it

Worldcon = World Science Fiction Convention

If you've never been to a Worldcon, you've missed out. They're a bit like a nation of nomads getting together for an annual reunion, a nation made up of tribes: the Gamer Tribe, the Costumer/Cosplay Tribe, the Writer (and Aspiring Writer) Tribe, the Avid Reader Tribe, and so on. Some people never go to the masquerade and some live for it. Some rush from panel to panel, trying not to miss anything, while others skip out on panels entirely and haunt the dealers' room (full of new and used books and craft items. for those who've never seen one).

And on Saturday night of the long weekend that is Worldcon, the convention holds the Hugo Awards ceremony, which rewards writers, editors, artists, and TV and movie producers, for work the fans judge to be the best of the previous year. In the past, a significant percentage of people who payed for attending memberships never bothered to vote for the Hugos, and even fewer bothered to nominate. And when they did nominate, people mostly listed one or two or maybe three works in each category, not the maximum of five, which is why this year there was a huge kerfuffle.

The Puppies, Sad and Rabid

I really think the root cause of most of this mess boils down to ego. A few authors (specifically Brad Torgersen and Larry Correia) felt that since their books were (they thought) really good, and were selling well, therefore, they should win a Hugo. When they didn't win one, they decided the only way to account for this was there must be a conspiracy against them. After all, they're political conservatives and many science fiction fans are more liberal. They were sure overtly literary work was being promoted by a secret cabal who despised them and thus prevented them or writers like them from ever winning. But to me, it looks like "we didn't win a Hugo, ergo the contest can't possibly be fair."

This allowed them to justify forming a group called the Sad Puppies, who promoted a slate of works and people that they thought should be nominated for a Hugo. And after these conservative but not evil people (mostly not evil, anyway. Not too sure about John C Wright since I read this.) put their slate out there, a guy named Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) jumped on their band wagon with his own slate, which he called Rabid Puppies. He dropped some items from their list, added others, and then he then ordered his minions (his word) to a) buy supporting memberships to Worldcon (which cost about $40 and confer nominating and voting rights for Hugos, but not attendance at the convention) and b) nominate that exact list of works and people on his slate. Interestingly, people talk more about the Sad Puppy slate, but really it was mostly the Rabid Puppy slate that made up the Worldcon ballot. John C. Wright appears on the Sad Puppy slate twice but on the Rabid Puppy slate six times; he "only" got five Hugo nominations, however, as one story was bumped for ineligibility.

The minions (not nearly as cute as the animated versions) obeyed, and with about 400 ballots in lockstep, they were able to shut out anyone else in several categories of the ballot, and to numerically dominate the others.

The Fallout

There was shock and outrage, and it got nasty after that. There is a basic communication disconnect in the situation. Puppy supporters do not think promoting a slate was a bad thing to do, while Puppy opposers do not understand how anyone could expect them to vote for someone who got on the ballot by shutting out all other works not approved by them.  Now mind you, in the past, plenty of people have done some level of campaigning to get a specific work on the ballot. Bloggers publish "Recommended Reads" and writers make a point to say which of their works are eligible.  The difference is these slates were full ballots! That is, there were five entries in every category, so that if enough people nominated the slate, it would swamp the nominations and nothing else in that category would get in. A slate is not "Vote for me!" it's "All your nominations are belong to us!"

Keep in mind that readership is lower for shorter works, which are mostly published in magazines and online. Combined with general apathy about nominating, this means there are never that many nominations cast for the short fiction categories (short story, novella, and novelette), usually nowhere near as many as there are for novels. There were enough non-slate votes for novels that the RP slate could not totally swamp that category (remember Vox Day claims "390 sworn and numbered vile faceless minions"). But the ballot for the three short fiction categories was (at first) only  RP candidates. That changed when some people like Annie Bellet dropped out, preferring not to be used as pawns in politicising the Hugos, and in the novelette category there was thus one non-slate entry.

Unlike the Sad Puppies, I consider that VD (I'll just use his initials) is actively evil. Assuming he means what he says, he holds huge chucks of humanity (women, black people) in overt contempt. The Sad Puppies seemed to think that he was only riding their coattails, but it has become clear they are now riding his. Brad Torgensen says he's really just a "shock jock" who is jerking people's chains for the fun of it. That's Torgersen's excuse for not totally repudiating him, I guess, I happen to think that stirring people up to hatred is a horrible thing to do, regardless of motive. You could say it's worse if you don't believe what you say, because you're not acting from principle but from mischief. 

The Pre-K Analogy

So, imagine a whole roomful of 4-year-olds are playing a game. As time goes on, a few kids get mad because they haven't won, even though there are are lots of kids and only one chance to win per game. These kids decide to stir up the game pieces in the hopes of improving their chances--not against the rules, but no one has done it before. This gives the class bully his opportunity to stomp all over everything, and no one wins. This is pretty much the state of things at Worldcon.

The Hugo ballot is a bizarre thing, in a way, because voting is ranked. You don't just pick one choice per category, you rank each entry as 1st, 2nd, and so on. And there is an option for No Award. which you can use if you don't think any of the entries remaining after you have picked your choices should win.  This option was used a lot this year and in the categories where there were no choices not on the RP or SP slates, then the voters chose No Award and no one got a Hugo in that category.  The only exception was the dramatic presentations (TV show and movies) which were perceived as not Puppy-influenced because they were pretty much all things that would have been nominated anyway.

Outrage again, on the Puppy side, this time. How could those mean people deprive hardworking editors and writers of their chance to win a Hugo? I would ask them, who was really deprived? There were a lot of people who would have made the ballot if it had not been for the slates, so it seems to me that the real villain is Vox Day. First he pushed deserving people off the ballot, and then pushed other people onto it in a way that few people could support. Thus, he let them in for a huge disappointment when most people voted No Award. I'm not saying those people weren't deserving. Certainly, the long form editors (other than Vox Day) were all solid professionals. In a normal year, no one would have questioned their presence or hesitated to vote for one of them. But the person who made it not a normal year made it difficult for Worldcon members to condone the slate by letting anyone win that way. The surge in supporting memberships and percentage of votes cast shows how strong that sentiment was, and it won't go away.

A slate that dictates all possible choices is a bad thing. It is a tool of dictatorship, and I, for one, am not willing to cede that role to Vox Day, or anyone else.






  

Saronna's Gift is available on Barnes & Noble!

As of now, Saronna's Gift is no longer exclusively a Kindle ebook.  I loaded an epub version to the Nook Press platform and successfully published it to the Nook store. I had held off on leaving KDP Select for one additional 90-day cycle because the book was doing well with Kindle Unlimited (KU) borrows, but that was tapering off, and so I went ahead and launched it on B&N.

I plan to also load the book to Smashwords soon, so that I can make it available on iBooks and Kobo, and other vendors.  One reason I started with the Nook platform is that the print version is already available on Barnes & Noble, so with Amazon, this will make two retail stores that offer the book in both ebook and hard copy formats.

And there's one nice thing about KDP; Amazon is still reporting on (and thus presumably paying me for) pages of Saronna's Gift read by users who borrowed it while it was in KU. I'll be curious how long it takes for that to stop completely. I expect people borrow books but don't read them right away, so it might be weeks or even a month or two. 

What Amazon Knows

Digital vs. Print

The experience of digital reading is not fundamentally different from reading on paper, especially if you read on an e-ink device.  But digital purchasing is different.  If you walk into your local bookstore and put cash on the counter for the latest best seller, the retailer has no way to track who you are. With ebooks, the retailer always knows the buyer, because the transaction happens online and involves a credit card.

I don't know much about other ebook readers, because I have had a Kindle since 2007 (that's my latest, the new Kindle Voyage in the photo below), but Amazon has been adding features ever since they came out with the original Kindle. After they created Kindle apps, which works on phones, tablets, PCs, Macs, etc., one of the things they did was to allow you to sync your books across your devices. That is, if you like to read on your phone with a Kindle app while you're on the bus to work, and then switch to reading on your Kindle when you get home, Amazon keeps your place for you. Even audiobook versions are supported by this function, if you buy them from Amazon.

Amazon as Big Brother

Of course, for syncing to work, you have to be connected to Amazon's cloud. When you turn on the wireless connection (or in the new Kindle parlance, you turn off airplane mode), the function of checking for new new items also syncs. As part of that, an enormous database tracks information on every Kindle title you ever bought. Amazon records what devices you sent the books to, where you are in every book or document on every Kindle or app, what text you have highlighted, and any notes you have made. 

Keep in mind that Amazon isn't actually psychic. They don't really know what you have read, only what you have looked at. If you were to open a brand new book and use the Go To menu to go to the last chapter, that would mark that page that as the "last page read." On the Home screen (in List mode), the little dots under the title that track your progress in the book would jump almost to the end, even though you haven't read a word. Likewise, if you finish reading a book and go back to chapter one before connecting, Amazon's database will be marked as if you have just started that book. Of course, a reader usually has no reason to do this, which is why I feel confident in saying Amazon doesn't bother tracking every keystroke.

Further, Amazon only knows the new information after your Kindle has connected. E-ink Kindles have great battery life, but only if wifi and/or 3G are not on, so most people read with in airplane mode. Of course, with tablets and phones, people are used to charging them often, so they're usually connected all the time.  However, even with e-ink Kindles, sooner or later, the reader will need to connect to get a new book, and at that point, the cloud will database will be updated. 

Borrowing ebooks

This need for connectivity means that ebooks can easily support borrowing. Amazon can loan you a book, and then take it back later. In fact, they have two separate borrowing programs. The Kindle Owners Lending Library is an added benefit for people who a) pay the annual Prime membership fee and b) own a Kindle or a Kindle Fire (not just an app on a phone or a tablet). These folks can borrow one book a month, but only books that participate,

The second program is Kindle Unlimited (KU), which is Amazon's ebooks subscription service. KU readers pay a flat fee per month. They can use any Kindle device or app to borrow as many KU-participating books as they like but they can have only 10 out at once. This program is especially popular with romance readers, many of whom go through books like winos go through Two Buck Chuck. In fact, Scribd just pulled most romance titles from their subscription program for being too popular.  They weren't charging enough to be able to pay the authors, and let the readers get all the books they want. I don't understand why they didn't create a second program for romance, or make the first program multi-level, with a higher tier price for voracious readers. Amazon probably has a similar situation, but they took a different approach. 

How the author gets paid for borrowed books

When Amazon started  Kindle Unlimited, they decided that they would pay participating authors a sort of royalty as soon as a borrower got through 10% of the book.  I say "sort of royalty" because the fee was unrelated to cover price or length, and was determined after the fact by dividing up the pot of money Amazon had set aside for that purpose.  These rules meant a novella of 100 pages paid the author the same after the borrower read 10 pages as a 1000-page novel paid after the borrower read 100 pages.  

Guess what? Amazon has changed the rules. They have announced they will pay a per-page fee, based on the actual number of "Kindle Edition Normalized Pages" (KENP).  This shifts the compensation paradigm on its head. Now longer works will make more for the author (still regardless of cover price).  Some people have pointed out that this rewards authors for writing page-turners, which I think is true, and is not a bad thing.

As someone whose only Kindle Unlimited book is a full-length novel, I am fine with the new model. I do wonder what the fee will be. Since the old system paid about $1.40 per borrow, it would have to be at least $0.0028 per page to reward the author of a 500-page book at about the same level as before. There is speculation that it could be higher, and pay out twice as much as before, when the entire book is actually finished. I also wish Amazon would tell us how many copies are being read at once. Right now the report shows only total page count per marketplace (US, UK, Germany, etc), without any indication of how many readers are being counted. 

Conclusion

Amazon knows way more than who is buying which books. They know which books are read immediately, and which wait to be opened; which books are read slowly, and which are devoured on the same day they're purchased; which are abandoned midway through and never finished at all. This is information that print books can never provide.

You can think of Amazon as Big Brother, if you like, but they are far from alone in the corporate world.  We needed a new toilet recently, so I used Google to find photos and info online, so I would know what models the plumber was talking about. I now have toilet ads all over my Facebook feed. Google is pretty much the ultimate Biggest Brother, but they don't seem to be that good at selling ebooks, at least not my ebooks. On the other hand, the commenters on this post seem to have had some luck with Google Play; I wish they had mentioned their genres. If anyone out there has any info on how Google Books is doing generally, I'd love to know.

The writer, as usual, gets left out in terms of information sharing, However, I do like the thrill of checking the new Amazon report and seeing that someone is reading my book!

More on Google Books

I now have 6 books for sale in Google Books/Google Play. I still think their interface can use some work, but when everything is exactly right (all the fields are filled in, the cover and book/epub file have been uploaded) it takes seconds for Google to process a book for sale. Amazon and Barnes and Noble both take hours.

Book 7 will be along shortly. My husband is home form the hospital, but he still needs a fair amount of help.

WFC Reminder!

If you have a membership in the World Fantasy Convention, you should have gotten an email with the nominating ballot, that allows you to propose people and works to be nominated for a World Fantasy Award. This weekend is the deadline for mailing (or emailing) your ballot!

I would post a photo of the award, but it's God-awful ugly, and it depicts HP Lovecraft, not my favorite person. I never understood why they used a horror writer's likeness in the first place, let alone that particular horror writer.

The Hugo Voter Packet Is Out

If you're a member of this year's Worldcon, you're entitled to vote in the Hugos. The voter packet (ebook versions of nominated works) is out and can be downloaded here. You need your membership number and Hugo PIN.

Voting is important every year but this year there is a firestorm about it, so make your choice while you can!

Mostly offline for a while

My husband's medical emergency is ongoing, so I won't be posting much in the near future. Watch this space for updates!

TRIBES is in Google Play!

I haven't posted much lately because of a family medical emergency, but I did find the time to investigate what it takes to load a book onto the Google Books/Google Play platform. Their interface is not nearly as easy to use as KDP, Nook Press, or Smashwords, but I managed to get Tribes loaded into their system.

Some early observations on the author interface are that it could really use some work. It requires an ISBN to even start the process, for one thing, as it uses that as an identifier for the book. Also, there are fields that need to be filled in that seem to rely on controlled lists, but the lists are not on a pull down menu; you have to type them. For example, the Book Industry Study Group (BISAC) subject/genre field. I had to find the online list to know exactly what to type. Also, the upload process is odd. It says basically "upload content" and you then upload the epub or PDF file and an image file for the cover, but there's not a specific place to do each. The first time I loaded the epub and the cover together and it only kept the cover file. I had to upload the epub again.

Finally, once the book is there, you can't see an online list of sales; instead you have to download a CSV file. That seems incredibly clunky to me.

I picked Tribes for this trial because it's standalone book, but when I have time, I plan to go back and add some more books, possibly the two Haven books. I got the idea to try Google Books from another author's posting on Facebook, so I will be curious to see how well the book does.

Correction:  Google Books doesn't require an ISBN, but it does use it as a file name identifier, so if you don't have one, it makes up its own identifier.

Borrow my book— please!

I hate the fact that Amazon requires exclusivity for a KDP book to be in Kindle Unlimited. Exclusivity means the ebook version of a book can only be for sale in the Kindle store. Amazon doesn't care about the print version, but the ebook can only be a Kindle book. Amazon calls this status being in Kindle Select, and they sweeten the deal by allowing a limited number of promotions for Kindle Select books: the author can make the book free or on sale. Of course, you can lower the price of your Kindle book to 99¢ anytime you want to, but that's not the same as displaying it as "Regular price, $3.99, on sale for 99¢, YOU SAVE $3.00!" which is what the Kindle store buyers see with a Kindle promotion. It eevn shows how long the sale will last, which is a good impetus for a browser to click the buy button.

To date, I've never kept a book in Kindle Select for more than a single 90 day cycle. In the past, being able to make the book free for a few days was a great way to get some reviews, and reviews sell books. But once that first 90-day period was over, I always loaded the book on other platforms. I still plan to do that for Saronna's Gift, but not for another 90 days. I've signed on for another cycle because Kindle Unlimited has been pretty good to this book.

As I said in my earlier post, the Kindle Unlimited per-borrow fee paid to the author is running about half of what the royalty is for a #3.99 book. However, that doesn't mean you always make less money with Kindle Unlimited. That's only true if people who would have bought the book borrow it instead. As a new author, I think the borrowers I'm getting are people who might otherwise never have seen or bought my book. Ergo, I'm going to give it another 90 days and we'll see where we are then.

Hopefully, by then that book will have more than 6 reviews. Honestly, people, would it kill you to post a review?  They make it really easy! There's a button right on the product page.

The Value of Kindle Unlimited

Well, Saronna's Gift has been out for about six weeks now, and it's been a different experience from the other seven books. This is the first book I have marketed as a romance. Some of the others are very romance-friendly, but in this book, the point of the story is the relationship. It's also the first book I put out since Kindle Unlimited was an option.

In self-publishing ebooks, unknown authors have some tools (besides writing an engaging book) to get their work to readers. Two of the main ones are they can make books free (on some platforms), and they can price them very cheaply. Giving away a book works best as a marketing strategy if it's the first book in a series. But even that has limitations because there are so darn many free ebooks, that many of them are never read. People see “free” and click the button, but once they have the ebook, they don't feel any urge to read it right away. It might not even be a book they would want to read, but what the heck, it was free, right?

The Kindle Unlimited program is different. It's a subscription program, aimed at “heavy” readers, people who read a lot!  They pay a fixed price (I think it's $10 a month) and then they can download as many KU books as they want, but they can only have 10 KU books on their device at a time. Because they have already paid the fee, they feel a need to get their money's worth and read lots of books. They don't download as recklessly as they would totally freee books, but they are willing to take a chance on new (to them) authors.

Amazon pays KU authors for every time a book is borrowed and read to at least 10% of the book. Some authors are not happy because Amazon pays a flat rate, without regard to the book's price or length. Right now, the rate is approximately $1.40. That means if a book sells for 99¢, the author gets paid more for a borrow than a sale. But if the book sells for $3.99, the borrow pays only about half what the sale would pay.  Sounds like a terrible deal, right? I don't happen to think so.

Some people look at a borrow and see it as a lost sale. I don't. I see it as a reader gained. The thing is, if you're Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, anything you write will get a lot of attention. If you're Carmen Webster Buxton, your books have a ton of competition for readers' time and money. A program like Kindle Unlimited gets an unknown author over the barrier of the reader plunking down money to find out if they like a book or not. The free sample feature helps a lot, but I know a lot of people feel like it's not enough to really tell them if they'll like the book. With KU, there really isn't much of a barrier except the reader's time commitment, and they can stop reading any time, return the book, and go on to something else.

And I have to say, when it comes to “heavy” readers, romance readers have it all sewn up! They read more books than almost anyone. Which is fine with me!

Now if they would only write more reviews . . .

Addendum:  Adding a link here to an excellent discussion of this topic on Jane Friedman's blog.

The books are in the mail!

The Goodreads giveaway (see post below) is over, and the books are in the mail! If you were notified you won a paperback copy of Saronna's Gift, you should get it before the end of the week.

If you're not familiar with Goodreads, you should check it out. Lots of authors host giveaways. The cover all genres, and it doesn't cost anything to enter.

Saronna's Gift giveaway on GoodReads

I'm hosting a giveaway of three paperback copies of Saronna's Gift via Goodreads! You can enter to win using the link below.  Note that you do need a US mailing address.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Saronna's Gift

by Carmen Webster Buxton

Giveaway ends February 20, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

First US review of Saronna's Gift

At last, the US Kindle store has a review of Saronna's Gift. Reviewer M. Sutton gave it four stars. She wanted more sex (the reader has to wait a long time and nothing overt happens on the page) but she called it a good read and praised the lack of typos and grammatical errors, so I call that a good review.

She mentioned she borrowed the book through Kindle Unlimited. I checked and the review shows up on the paperback version, too, so they are fully linked.

Flat out bragging

I dedicated Saronna's Gift to readers who write and post reviews because reviews are what tells an author he or she has made a connection.  They also help sell more books, by the way.  The book actually got its first review on the Amazon UK site, rather than Amazon US, where it has sold a lot more copies, but in any event, here is the text of the review: "This review is in my husband s name ,but your book made me sad and made me smile, I wish every woman in the world. Was free . Keep writing."

It's short, but it gets the job done! That is what I call a connection! Thank you, wife of ericdavey!  You made my day.

What I Learned from Self Publishing: My Love/Hate Relationship with Amazon

Amazon is certainly not the only player in the self-publishing game, but it is dominant, and it does offer a print option, which is rare. Smashwords is a great way to get into ebook publishing on every platform except Kindle, but they don't deal with print. Barnes and Noble recently announced they would also offer print on demand via Nook Press. It will be interesting to see if that goes anywhere. Unlike CreateSpace, B&N offers a hardcover option as well as paperback.

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is pretty easy to use, and I have put out eight books with it. CreateSpace is the name of their print self-publishing platform, and I have used it only once for my latest book Saronna's Gift. CreateSpace is possible because of print on demand (POD) technology; the book is uploaded to a database, and when someone shopping on Amazon orders a copy, that copy is printed individually and mailed to the customer. Authors can also order multiple copies directly from CreateSpace to sell themselves, or to give to reviewers.

The two platforms have separate set-up requirements, although you can publish a CreateSpace book to Kindle, with no additional set-up, if you're willing to convert the PDF. I don't recommend that, by the way. PDFs are difficult to convert reliably. For one thing, you can end up with excess hyphenation. Also, using the print PDF doesn't allow for a a difference in the elements in the ebook. Because ebooks can't be flipped through in the same way print books are, it's important to offer a clickable table of contents as a navigation aid, whereas in print, it's not that big a deal for novels—especially if the chapters only have numbers and not titles. Also, because of the free sample feature, you might want acknowledgements, blurbs, and lists of your other books in the back of the ebook, instead of in the front.

My Amazon wish list:

• Add a way to connect KDP and CreateSpace so that the author can specify that the two books are the same thing. This would not have to be automated. It could just notify Amazon to do whatever linking up they do, but at least it would save having to send an email, and hopefully it could happen faster than it does now. Alternatively, the CreateSpace set-up could let you load the digital file that KDP currently uses, instead of using the PDF.
• Stop requiring ebook exclusivity for almost every marketing benefit (making a Kindle book free or on sale, participating in Kindle Unlimited, etc.)
• Add a button to the CreateSpace set-up pages to include the “Look Inside the Book” feature; Amazon already gets the PDF, so this should be easy to do
• Change the set-up protocol for CreateSpace so that you can switch between glossy and matte covers without having to upload the PDF again. 
• Add X-Ray to KDP. I know from having had it happen to The Sixth Discipline that Amazon can create the file needed for the X-Ray feature to work by using the Book Extras information (lists of characters names and descriptions, places, etc). Currently, this info is entered via Shelfari (accessible from each author's Author Central pages). It would be nice if the author could create the X-Ray file info this way and click a button to submit it. The X-Ray feature is something only Kindle has, so it would make sense to do this.

What I liked about Amazon:

Conversion: In the past, when I had a day job, and time was more of an issue than money, I relied on paying a conversion house to create the ebook digital file, and didn't bother with print at all. Now that the time/money equation is reversed, I decided to try print, and to experiment with creating my own ebook file. I tried using Scrivener and Calibre to convert the MS Word file, and was not happy with either result. Scrivner offers the advantage of being able to keep the book elements (title page, contents, dedication, chapters, etc) as separate things and assemble them different ways, but I didn't like the look of the resulting ebook file. Calibre creates valid files, but it doesn't translate any of the print style features. Imagine my suprise when I tried loading the MS Word file directly to KDP, and found that their conversion had radically improved! 

Kindle Bookmatch: Finally, a feature that doesn't require Kindle exclusivity! If you publish your print book via CreateSpace and have the same book in the Kindle store, you can opt to have the Kindle version be free or very, very cheap to anyone who buys a print copy.  As soon as they order the print, they get a button to download the ebook.

No DRM: Some people seem to think that all Kindle books have DRM because Amazon requires it, but in fact, they don't all have DRM. It's a publisher's option, not a requirement. All KDP authors have the option to leave the DRM off. 

So you see, I love that Amazon makes it possible to publish my books, and to reach readers, I just don't like everything about Amazon. 

Just released!

Now for sale at Amazon, Saronna's Gift, is available in both papaperback and ebook formats. If you buy the paperback, the Kindle Matchbook feature will let you "buy" the ebook for free! The ebook is also available to borrow for free from both Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. KU is a subscription service Amazon offers. The KOLLis a benefit for people who have Amazon Prime and also own an actual Kindle or Kindle Fire device.

This has been a long time coming, and I have learned a lot from the process. In a few days I will post about the it. Meanwhile, here's the opening of the new book:

A warm summer breeze caught Saronna’s veil and almost pulled it loose. She stopped to tuck the folds around her face, to ensure nothing showed except her eyes. By the time she had picked up her valise, her father had almost disappeared into the crowd. She hurried to catch up, darting in and out among the throng as fast as she could without attracting notice.

Where were they going? Her father had told her to pack her belongings. That had to mean he planned another attempt to sell her, but he had given her no clue whom he planned to visit today. 

Even after their earlier trips to New Jerusalem, the city still disconcerted Saronna. Vendors’ cries, chattering voices, ground cars rolling past, and countless footfalls were enough to distract her, let alone the sight of so many strangers. Faces flashed past, some veiled, some bearded, and disappeared into the mass of humanity, never to be seen again.
She caught up to her father just as he turned suddenly, moving through the tall steel supports of the Strangers’ Gate, into the off-world quarter. Saronna had never been there. She gripped her valise tighter as a shiver of apprehension ran through her. Would her talent work as well on an off-world man?

Almost there!

I finally finished the corrections on the proof copy of Saronna's Gift, and uploaded new files to both CreateSpace and KDP. I decided to get the next proof copy with a glossy cover, though, because I am not entirely happy with the look of the matte version.

I am getting excited!  Here's the blurb and front cover:

Saronna Maynard never expected to be sold into an off-world household. She and Duncan Trushenko, her new protector, have very little in common, except for living in the same house. Saronna grew up in a small village outside of New Jerusalem, the largest city on Krueger’s World. Duncan grew up on many worlds, and has traveled the galaxy. He is dumbstruck to return from a business trip and find that his father has purchased a companion for him.

Saronna is terrified by the strangeness of the house and her sense of powerlessness, but in a very short time she realizes she might be better off—and safer—in Duncan’s house than in her father’s. For one thing, Duncan doesn’t believe in witches. Also, the more she’s with Duncan, the harder it is for her to believe all men are as evil as her mother taught her. But safer or not, Saronna is still intent on keeping her secrets. After all, she’s still on Krueger’s World.