Two out of three is a good start!

I checked over at the Blio ebookstore, and The Sixth Discipline is now for sale there!  So is Tribes, but No Safe Haven seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle, possibly because there's already a book with that exact title (although they don't seem to have any problem with Seth Godin's book also being named Tribes so maybe that's a red herring).

I bought a copy of my own book so that I can check it out on the Blio ereader, which I downloaded onto my smart phone. Blio works on Android, iOS, and Windows. I want to see how the book looks, but also I want to see how long it takes for Blio to send Smashwords the sales data.

Smashwords did just update both Sony and Apple's sales numbers, and again, I'm doing better in iBooks than in the Kindle store, especially in Australia. Go Aussies!

Virtual Reality Becomes Reality

A friend posted a link to this Huffington Post article on a Japanese virtual pop star named Hatsune Miku. If you watch the video, you'll see in her “live” concerts she appears three-dimensional. She's also kind of a walking, singing Barbie doll, as far as her appearance—incredibly long legs and a tiny waist. She's not as well endowed as Barbie, because she is, after all, Japanese. Aside from the technology that produces her, the interesting thing is that her songs are, in effect, crowd sourced, written an refined by her fans.

According to her Wikipedia page, she's supposed to be sixteen. She even wears her virtual hair in long pigtails. In a lot of ways, she creeps me out. I write science fiction novels, but I'm queasy at the idea of the image of a teenage girl as a saleable object. It's tad like the camel's nose in Paolo Bacigalupi's Windup Girl tent.

But I can see why Crypton Future Media, the company that created her, would see her as a good investment. She'll never get old, never get fat, and never die of a drug overdose. They call her a "vocaloid," and I'm sure they don't pay her overtime.

Here's the video on one of her concerts if you want to watch her.

A new retail outlet for self-published authors

It looks like Smashwords must have been working on the deal with Baker & Taylor for some time. I say that because I noticed that not only does my Smashwords Sales & Payment Report now hold a line for Baker & Taylor sales (mine says 0, naturally), but the Distribution Channel Manager (also accessible from the left panel of the Dashboard) shows that my three novels have already shipped to Baker & Taylor.

Baker & Taylor are the distributors for Blio, free ereader software that runs on many devices and supports many aspects of the typography of the printed page without locking in page layout, like PDF. A search for my name in the Blio ebookstore yields no results, however, so it might be a while yet before that zero changes to something more positive. I had never visited the Blio bookstore before.  Interestingly enough, it does not allow you to sort by price, only by popularity, title, author, and date. It does offer a genre filter, though, which is nice for those of use who read and/or write in a specific genre.

A related feature of the Baker & Taylor deal is that it will also make Smashwords books available to libraries. I think that's totally cool!  Kudos to Mark Coker for making it happen!

Fantastic review of Tribes!

The SFBook Reviews site gave Tribes a very flattering 4-star review! Reviewer Ant (short for Anthony) likes the setting and the plot, and he says:

"It's the characters that really make this novel shine though and each one has a wonderful personality that works perfectly within the confines of the story."

Thank you, Ant! Glad you enjoyed it.

Be sure to check out SFBook Reviews if you read spec fic. Ant has a pretty broad coverage and his site is well organized. He reads indie authors as well as traditionally published books.

Smashwords has updated their retailer sales figures

I complain when they don't do it, so I suppose I need to report that Smashwords is showing new sales data for Sony and Apple ebookstores.  Both Tribes and No Safe Haven continue to do better in Australia than Canada or the UK.

Censorship strikes again

The web has changed the way we communicate and the way we do business. A lot of sales happen online, and a lot of small businesses rely on the web. One of the tools they rely on is PayPal, an organization that exists only because of the web. After all, anyone can create a website, and register a URL. No one wants to enter their credit card info on a unknown site that could look like it's trying to sell you vitamins or handcrafted jewelry or used books, when really all they want is your credit card numbers so the can scam you. Hence, the creation of PayPal, a company that limits your risk. It's a godsend for small businesses, and in many ways, Smashwords is a small business.

It turns out that Smashwords is using PayPal as their billing and payment system. They even use it to pay their authors. I had noticed that it has been a long time since Smashwords updated their other retailer info (February 2 for Barnes and Noble is still the most recent reported other retailer sales; Sony is still stuck at January 28 and Apple at December 31). I was wondering whether the holdup was on the retailer end or at Smashwords. I think it must be Smashwords because the news has broken that PayPal is forcing Smashwords to remove any books that violate their standards. Specifically, they're targeting erotica books that contain instances of sex with underage kids, rape "for titillation," bestiality, incest, and similar sorts of plot lines.  Here's the email Smashwords sent to authors affected by this, and here's their revised  terms of service as posted on  Smashwords

Since I don't write erotica, it's tempting to think I'm not affected, but of course, I am, because anything that affects Smashwords affects authors who publish on Smashwords. Besides, there is also the question of is this the censorship camel's nose in the self-publishing world's tent? It's interesting that this has gotten a lot of attention on author, reader, and reviewer blogs but there is not a word about it on the Washington Post site. Besides, who's to say PayPal won't decide they don't like science fiction or fantasy? All in all, it's a really scary development, and not just because it's making Smashwords too preoccupied to post more current sales information.

Addendum: some additional background info was posted here on the Dear Author blog.

Another excellent post about ebook production!

Book production expert Emma Wright has done it again! The FutureBook blog has a post by her that gives some specific tips for designing an ebook. This is nice to have because Wright knows a lot about print book design, and she has noted those things that need to be different in an ebook.

For example, in a print book, with a (potentially) larger page, the design can rely on white space more than in an ebook where the screen is often very limited in size. The scene break style in a print book might include several lines of white space, but only one or two lines in en ebook. That means you need something—a rule or a different font size—to distinguish the new scene from the old.

It isn't enough to produce an ebook with no typos. If you want your book to be readable, you have make sure it's easy to navigate as well as an engrossing read.

p.s.  Smashwords seems to be stable for now, but they haven't had an update of other retailer info in quite a while. Apple, Diesel, and Kobo are still showing sales data only through December 31, and Sony though January 28.  Barnes & Noble is still in the lead with data from February 2.

Reader alert! Smashwords is down! — looks OK now, if they can stay up

This is a good example of why you never want to put all your ebook eggs in one online basket. Smashwords is down and has been down since yesterday afternoon. The tweet from Mark Coker (above) says the site is down because their hosting service Slicehost is down. Some research on Google tells me that Slicehost is now owned by Rackspace and they planned to shut it down by May.  Looks like it might have happened sooner.

Fortunately, the books Smashwords pushed to iBooks, Sony, Kobo, etc. are still available because those ebookstores are up. Many baskets rule!

How do you find (e)books?

One thing that's differnt about ebooks (when compared to print) is how you find the books. I follow a couple of blogs that list free and cheap ebooks. A Kindle World Blog is only for Kindle books, as you might expect from the name, but Books on the Knob (don't ask me what the name means!) covers all the major ebook retailers. She has a wonderful post on managing your Kindle library on there, too.

But even if a book is really cheap, if I don't know the author I usually get the free sample. I love that feature for ebooks! I wish authors and/or publishers paid more attention to it. The other day I got a free sample of a book I had heard good things about, and discovered the author had added a sort of lesson on writing at the front of the book. When I tried to jump to Chapter 1, it wasn't included in the sample! If I want a book about how to write, I will buy one! Needless to say, that was one book I didn't get.

I love bookstores, but I certainly don't plan to visit one to browse if I know I'll buy the ebook version. That's hardly fair to the bookseller, and besides, I think it's better to learn to browse digitally. I see mentions of books on Twitter sometimes, and on other folks' blogs. But if anyone out there has some good suggestions for digital browsing, I'd be happy to hear them.  I'm always on the lookout for a good read.

Shades of Empire is ready for the copy editor!

Most of my fiction is far-future science fiction that takes place in imagined worlds. Sometime in May I hope to publish a true space opera. The universe is the same one found in Tribes, but none of those characters appear in Shades of Empire, in which much of the plot takes place on an interstellar cargo ship. As the title suggests, the novel also includes an emperor (and an empress, too). It's a multi-threaded story with many characters and subplots, and I'm hoping folks find it an interesting read.

I'm adding a photo of  the Eta Carinae nebula to this post, in celebration of my story. NASA has some great photos of space if you're looking for one.