The Sixth Discipline just got X-Rayed!

The X-Ray feature on Kindle is really handy for epic books with a large cast of characters or those stories that span years, where a character can disappear for pages and pages and then pop back in again. X-Ray give you a idea how important the character is, and who they are, but it only works if the publisher has gone the extra step and provided Amazon with a file to use to generate the X-Ray.

In addition to the newly-purchased Goodreads, Amazon also owns social reader site Shelfari, and one of the things this means is that on Shelfari, the author or any reader can create lists of characters and places in the book. Those lists are then available to view on the bottom of the product page on Amazon.

It looks like Amazon might be planning to spin this function off into creating X-Ray files for KDP books, because my book just got a whole bunch of characters added by someone known as "X-Ray," who has also added characters to a boatload of books!

It would be cool if it's true!

Update:  I just downloaded this book again and it now has the X-Ray feature!  Yay!

Housekeeping

My first sales from Blio (online store with ebooks distributed by Baker & Taylor) came in! That means Smashwords now has another retail ebook outlet up and running.  For some reason, No Safe Haven is still not available in that store, even though The Sixth Discipline and Tribes are both for sale. I have not had any luck getting Smashwords to remedy that, either. I will have to try removing the book from the distribution list and then requesting it to ship again.

I spent the morning updating the Books tab on this site (click the tab above to see) and my Shelfari shelf (see the bottom of the home page).  Having thus taken care of some housekeeping chores, I am now going to reward myself with some reading time.

I'm now on Shelfari!

One of the social networking sites dedicated to readers and book-lovers is called Shelfari. I recently joined it, and added myself as a Shelfari author.  You can see my profile here.

I am already on Goodreads and LibraryThing, but one reason I bothered to join Shelfari is that it is owned by Amazon; when authors add info to their books (i.e., books they wrote)— like characters' names, story setting, and such— on Shelfari, Amazon creates a link to the Shelfari info on the book description page on Amazon.  This gives authors a chance to get more info about their books to potential readers. Plus, Shelfari is one more group of people who love to read, and I am all about readers.

Check out the Book Extras section on the Amazon page for The Sixth Discipline and you'll see the link to Shelfari.