Finally!

Smashwords has updated their Apple sales figures. For the first time, my US iBooks sales beat my Commonwealth (Canadian, UK, and Australian) sales. Oh, and Smashwords updated Barnes & Noble sales figures a while ago, but I never have as many sales there, so I don't stress about that.

Review: The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I would have given this 5 stars if Atwood had not made so much use of present tense. I understand she was playing with tense, and much of the novel is a series of flashbacks, but even in the flashbacks she sometimes used present tense and I hate that.

It's a brilliant book, but too literary for my taste. Atwood can spend three paragraphs on the metaphorical aspects of the act of sex and pages and pages on exactly how things look and feel for the narrator. She also leaves the reader with a highly ambiguous ending. Between that and her insistence that this isn't science fiction, she's lucky I didn't give her three stars.

But it is a chilling read, more so now than when it was written. Talk about a war on women! In this book, women lost the war. Offred, the title character, relates being virtually brainwashed and physically abused by religious zealots who feel compelled to make her accept her place as a man's chattel. And many of her abusers are women. All this is done in the name of God.

The one thing that bothered me in plot of the book is that Offred (for Of Fred, her protector; no other name is given for her, except in the notes at the end where it says she might have been called June) recalls her past of less than a decade before as if it were completely normal (i.e. much as life is now). And yet in the Republic of Gilead the birth rate is terrifyingly low because of pollution causing birth defects and sterility. It seems to me that kind of problem wouldn't happen overnight; it would have had a major impact on life even in a free society.

Still, a compelling story.




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My books as world travelers

I've blogged before about international sales. Of course, language is an issue. To some extent, iBooks has an edge over Kindle in terms of international presence. I see iBooks sales from Australia, Canada, and the UK, as well as in the US-- the larger English-speaking countries, in other words. Amazon has a Kindle store for the UK, but that's the only one in an English-speaking nation besides the US. There are Kindle stores in Germany, Spain, Italy, and France, but those folks are mostly not looking for books in English, so that doesn't help me a lot. I really wish there was a Kindle store in Canada! I do not know what the hold-up is.

iBooks also sells in non-English-speaking countries, but I only know which countries if I get a sale. I know they sell in the Netherlands, because I did get a sale from there (my first sale listed in euros). I think the giveaway of Shades of Empire must have helped make it more visible, because I also now have a few sales from the Kindle stores in Germany and Italy as well as the UK. More euros!

Shades of Empire goes Continental

On this latest round of giveaways of Shades of Empire, I had the usual amount of takers in the UK, and another small handful in Germany, but I also gave away a copy to someone in Spain and someone in Italy. Still zero in France, though. Oh, well! C'est la vie!

Shades of Empire is free this weekend!

In honor of nothing in particular, I have made Shades of Empire free in the Kindle store today and tomorrow, June 2 and June 3, 2012.  I just checked, and Amazon came through this time. The price is $0.00.

Get it now folks! Read it for free, and if you enjoy the story, consider posting a review on Amazon and telling people what you liked.

My books are back on Diesel!

Actually, I don't know if they were ever gone;  I think Diesel simply changed their search syntax as far as author names. When I searched for "Carmen Webster Buxton" in quotes I got nothing, but when I searched for the books by title there were there.  Next I tried searching on my name without the quotes and all three books showed up!

Now if I can just get No Safe Haven to go to Blio I will be happy.

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.

London calling?

I get email from Amazon on a regular basis, both as an author and as a customer. But recently I got email from the UK version of Amazon recommending some books to me, and one of them was my own Shades of Empire, which I had been checking out on that site.  I wanted to see if any UK customers had reviewed it yet (none had, although my lovely US review does show up), but while I was there I noticed that because I had opted to let Amazon use the US Kindle store price to set the UK price, the book costs £1.91 in the UK, which is a nice change from everything ending in “99.”

It was fun seeing my own book in the email.  Hopefully, other Amazon UK customers are seeing it, too!

It gets better, ebook edition

There used to be so many error in ebooks! I can't tell you how frustrated I was, especially when the errors would be totally obvious things like diacritical marks becoming garbage characters, so that any word with a tilde or an accent became unreadable. I recall being overjoyed to find out a book I had loved in high school (Rebel Spurs, by Andre Norton,long out of print, but it appears to be free in the Kindle store, although possibly it's a different edition) was on Kindle, and crushed when I read it and discovered just how badly a careless publisher could mess up a scanned book. I also enjoy the novels of Georgette Heyer, the historical ones more than the mysteries. Often those had errors, too, but recently I read The Toll Gate on my Kindle and was pleased there was exactly one typo (or possibly scanning error). The word “too” followed by an exclamation mark had been rendered as “tool” (with no punctuation to end the sentence). I used the spiffy new feature I mentioned in my post on the new Kindle Touch upgrade to report the error to Amazon. I will post about the results, and what feedback I get. But still, one typo in an entire novel is not bad, not bad at all! It did get better!

Sometimes content DOESN'T want to be free

A favorite slogan of folks who pirate other people's work is that content wants to be free (as if books were zoo animals or something!). I don't agree with that; if I wrote it, I want to decide when it's free. Nevertheless, there are times when giving away content is a good idea. When you are an unknown writer without a publishing house behind you, being able to give away your work is actually a useful tool.

The trick is to give it away in such a way that readers a) know it's there and b) can get it easily. Thus, many more established writers rely on giving away their books directly. Their readers are already trolling their websites, so announcing that a DRM-free copy is available will get them lots of takers.

Those of us who don't have eager hordes of fans need an more direct channel. Amazon has a program called KPD Select that requires writers to make their ebooks available exclusively on Kindle for at least 90 days. Amazon then allows every participating writer to make their book free for 5 days during that 90-day period. They have an easy-to-use interface that lets you schedule the free days, one or more days at a time. The free period is supposed to start and end at midnight, Pacific time, but the KDP site warns you it can sometimes take a few hours to kick in.

The free day worked flawlessly for Where Magic Rules when I scheduled it to be free the first Friday in May. When I checked online, first thing in the morning, I had already given away 20 copies for WMR. For Shades of Empire, which was scheduled for yesterday, not one copy had been given away when I checked, even though the promotion showed as "ongoing" in my KDP author dashboard. When I went to the product page for SoE, I was shocked to see that the buy button still said $2.99 and there was still a "give as a gift" button (free books don't have that button). On the other hand, the book didn't have a sales rank, or a rank for "free in Kindle store," either. Having announced the freebie was coming on the eBook giveaways page on Goodreads (a useful site if you're a Goodreads member!), I was a tad annoyed.

Amazingly, Amazon had someone working on Saturday, and they advised me there had been a glitch. They promised to provide an extra free day to make up for it. Shades of Empire did finally become free at 5:00 pm, but of course, it didn't do nearly as well in its 7 hours as Where Magic Rules did in 24, except in the UK and Germany where the numbers were almost identical.

But, at some point in the future I will try again. If I weren't stubborn as hell, I wouldn't be a writer.