Is Google serious about its ebook platform?

Almost a year ago, I blogged about starting to load my books onto Google Play/Google Books.  I just got Saronna's Gift loaded yesterday. I've had very few sales on Google Books, but I figured it couldn't hurt to expand. For a while there was a major hold-up in loading new books because Google Books had no filter to stop people from pirating other people's work. I'm not sure when that was resolved, because they're not good at communicating. When the new book would not load all the way, I didn't get any message as to why; it turned out there was an epub problem, but I had never gotten a notice about it.

I have to say, Google has not made a lot of (or maybe even any!) improvements in the "Books Partner Center" in the last year. The interface is still clunky, and seems to be designed by geeks, for geeks. I guess you could call it the UNIX of book platforms; but unlike UNIX, there's no graphical interface available to make it easier.  One of the things that takes up a lot of room on the report screen is the pie chart it draws to show you the percentage of books that are live and for sale.

That's a lot of screen real estate for something that will usually be 100%. 

Features that are still clunky or problematic:

• You have to download a new CSV file every time you want to see your sales figures. There is no way to generate a report on screen.  This is my single biggest complaint. What a pain! Even Barnes & Noble is better than this.
• Reporting is erratic. I checked every day after I ran my last promotion, and it took a full week for the books I had given away to show up in the sales transaction report. On the other hand, I often see sales and giveaways the next day.
• If you want to run a Google Books promotion, you have create a CSV file and upload it. For every book, you need to provide the following info:  Identifier, Title, Currency, Amount, and Countries. Except that their program doesn't actually use the title column, so you can leave it blank. And you can say WORLD for country if you want it everywhere. 

The message you see on loading a book is the reason it's still worth it.

This book is live in the Google Play store in the following regions: AR, AS, AT, AU, BE, BG, BO, BR, BY, CA, CH, CL, CO, CR, CZ, DE, DK, DO, EC, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, GT, GU, HK, HN, HR, HU, ID, IE, IL, IN, IT, JP, KG, KR, KZ, LT, LU, LV, MH, MP, MX, MY, NI, NL, NO, NZ, PA, PE, PH, PL, PR, PT, PW, PY, RO, RU, SE, SG, SI, SK, SV, TH, TR, TT, TW, UA, US, UY, UZ, VE, VI, VN, ZA. It is also listed on Google Books.

Of course, if you need all those country codes explained, you'll need to look it up elsewhere. Google is a huge company. I expected better from them, so this makes me wonder if they really care about Google Books or not. 

Promotion Smackdown: The Fussy Librarian vs eReader News Today

I ran two more promotions recently, to advertise The Sixth Discipline being free. That book is always free, but the Amazon numbers for it were dropping; I wanted to get more copies out there, because it drives sales of No Safe Haven (the direct sequel, which is not free, but is reasonably priced at $2.99). I blogged about my earlier promotion efforts back in October.

The first service I used this time is called The Fussy Librarian. A friend had recommended them, and the fee for my options (science fiction for the genre, and free for the price) was only $25, so I went with it. The Fussy Librarian (TFL) sends email to their subscribers (free to readers, of course), and also maintains a searchable database of free books, which contains all the books that have been included in emails for the last 30 days. I'll be interested to see if The Sixth Discipline gets any lift from this. It's an added benefit for the same price.

Of course, it might be hard to separate, because I did do back-to-back promotions again. I had a second promo on eReader News Today (ERNT) the day after the one on TFL. Interestingly, promoting a free science fiction book was also $25 with ERNT.

Well, it as been a few days now, and ERNT won hands down. TFL did okay; I gave away 189 Kindle copies, 20 Nook (B&N), and 11 iBooks. The ERNT promo was the very next day, and that one was huge! Not BookBub huge, but almost as good as my earlier FreeBooksy promot, which cost more than twice as much. I gave away 755 Kindle copies, 23 Nook copies, and 11 on iBooks! Now, a dozen or two could well be hold overs from the TFL site/email, but I can't believe it would be more than that when the intial number topped out at 189. The virtue of those kinds of number is they jump your book up in the Amazon sales rankings.

Amazon has links for the 100 most popular free Kindle books, and also the most popular 100 by genre, e.g., 100 top free science fiction and fantasy. These appear at the bottom of the product page, where the book's ranking is, but you only see the genre links if the book ranks in the top 1,000 of a genre or subgenre. Before these promotions, The Sixth Discipline was hovering around the 25,000 mark for overall free Kindle books.

This was the ranking for T6thD on the day of the Fussy Librarian promo:

4:00 pm

10:00 pm

This was during the ERNT promo:

7:00 pm

11:00 pm

So, what that means is the giveaway numbers stay higher for several days after the promo. In the three days after my book ran on ERNT, its Kindle "sales" per day were 116, 36, and 39.

I think I will try another promotion for a book that's not free, to compare. My Freebooksey promo did much better than when I used Bargain Booksy. That might be purely because there are more people looking for free books than bargain books, which would mean no promo for a sale book is going to do anywhere near as well, not even BookBub.

Act now to win a Kindle copy of Saronna's Gift

Amazon lets anyone host a giveaway of any print book sold by Amazon. If you look on the product page of a book, you'll see the icon right below the "Create a review" button.

Interestingly, you don't have to be the author or publisher to set up a giveaway. The link appears for everyone. Once you click it, you have to commit to paying for the books you're going to give away, select the number of copies, the odds of winning (e.g. one in 100), and provide the wording for win and lose messages. You can also specify a single requirement, such as making people follow you on Twitter or watch a short video or follow the author on Amazon. You can even control whether the link can be shared or not, which controls who can see it.

If you wanted to find a way to gain more Twitter followers, for example, you could pick a popular book and host a giveaway of it.  This is more feasible now, because Amazon now allows folks to host a giveaway of a Kindle book. This is much less expensive (cheaper price and no shipping costs), so it's easier to give away more copies.

I did some print giveaways a while ago, and now I've started one for the Kindle version of Saronna's Gift. Click here to enter!

nb:  The link above will only work until the giveaway runs it course and all five copies are claimed, or March 16, 2016, whichever comes first.

Story-telling versus writing

I consider myself primarily a storyteller. I've chosen the written word as a way to tell my stories. Or perhaps I mean the written word chose me, as I never envisioned another method.

But there are plenty of other ways of telling a story.

Some people use songs. I have a tin ear myself, so that was never an option. Some people use dance. Hawaiian hula dances always tells a story, as do classic ballets like Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty. Musical theater combines songs, dances, and spoken words, as in the traditional The Music Man and more recently in the edgy new Broadway hit Hamilton.

Interestingly, the modern era has produced some excellent story telling in television commercials. One of my all time favorites is this Tullamore Dew whiskey commercial; it packs a huge amount of story telling into a small amount of time, and pulls off a surprise ending, too.  In spite of my tin ear, I love the song in it.

A Toronto artist found a unique, visual way to tell a story. He makes dioramas out of vintage ring boxes, in an effort to make the viewer feel transported to another world. Each of his creations is a complete scene, and each viewer can interpret it in his or her own way.

Dance, music, songs, movies, TV. commercials, visual art, books, they're all good. What works for you?

Technology is changing at an incredibly rapid pace!

I was browsing the web the other day, when I saw a set of photos of events in history. Image #17 is of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States.  He helped negotiate the treaty that ended the War of 1812. His father John Adams was the second US president. JQA was nine years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

I had no idea a photograph of this man existed! It just shows you how new our country is, and also how the pace of change is accelerating. JQA's image was captured in his mid-70's by a technology that didn't exist when he was born, or even when he was president, although daguerreotypes were being made a decade or so after he left office. Photographic technology improved over the decades, but it took a long time until it looked radically different.

On the other hand, look at two famous entertainers, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. In addition to being in many “Road” movies together, they also shared a birthday month and year. They were both born in May of 1903. In December of that year, the Wright brothers made the first manned heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, NC. Both Hope and Crosby were 66 years old when humans first landed on the moon. The jump in technology from the Wright Flyer to Apollo 11 was enormous, and yet it took only 66 years.

Who knows what a baby born in 2016 will see! I'n guessing that when he or she grows up and has a child, they may well come home from the hospital in a self-driving car to a house where all the appliances can be given verbal orders. The really interesting question is what will he or she do for a living when robots cans do so much?

Reading aloud — Is Alexa a better reader than the Kindle?

I love my new Kindle Voyage! It's very like the Paperwhite, except screen resolution is a tad better, and it has two spots in the bezel that you can depress to page forward and page backward, if you prefer that to swiping or tapping the screen (actually four spots, two each on the left and right sides, so it works whether you're left or right-handed).  But like the Paperwhite and unlike earlier Kindles, one limitation of the Voyage is that it cannot read aloud to you. I blogged about this when I was thinking about getting a Paperwhite, because I liked to use the read aloud feature for proofing manuscripts.

I assumed that Amazon killed this feature in the newer Kindles because their data showed that not many people were using it. Certainly, other e-ink readers never bothered with it.  Now, however, Amazon had enhanced their voice-activated personal assistant Echo, so that it can read your Kindle books to you.

If Alexa (the voice of the Echo) has the same limitations as the Kindle robot voice, this feature may not be that big a deal. The Kindle voice was not great at pausing in certain situations, like between paragraphs of dialog if the first one ended with a question mark. Also there was the problem of homographs. The robot voice could not tell from the context whether the word "bow" was pronounced with a long o, as in "bow and arrow," or a short o as in "take a bow."

Possibly, newer, more sophisticated programming has improved both pacing and assessing meaning from context. Or possibly not, depending on how much research and effort Amazon put into this. The reviews I have seen don't mention either problem, so it's possible it's much better. I don't know anyone who has an Echo, but if you do, please post a comment with any insight you might have. 

A mystery about a mystery: How can two books have the same set of reviews?

I am quite fond of murder mysteries, especially British ones. One of my favorite authors is Dorothy L. Sayers, author of a series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, the younger son of a duke, and an amateur detective. I've read all of them, some of them many times,  When we renovated our house, I donated 18 cartons of books, including all my Sayers copies to the local thrift shop. However, when Open Road Media started reissuing them as ebooks, I bought some of them, so I could reread them when I felt like it. I loved what a fantastic job OR did on them. I even wrote a post about it.

Now, however, someone else is publishing Dorthy L Sayers (presumably, it's out of copyright) and they are no Open Road. You can tell it's a different version because it not only has a different cover, it has a different ASIN (Amazon's unique stock number). The Open Road cover is shown above.

I got an email promotion for Clouds of Witness for only 99¢ (ASIN = B00LDSUTMC). There was no warning on the Amazon page saying "You bought this book on [date]" so I didn't realize I already had the Open Road version (ASIN = B008JVJKXK). I bought the 99¢ version and it was terrible. I have never seen an ebook with so damn many errors!  Most obviously, there were 25 instances of [garbled] and 26 of [missing] they had not bothered to clean up.

They looks like this:

“[Garbled] least--not [garbled] see him. But there was poor Denis's body,

“My lords, it is your happy privilege [missing] his grace the Duke of Denver these [missing] of his exalted rank. When the clerk [missing] address to you severally the solemn [missing] find Gerald, Duke of Denver, [missing] guilty or not guilty of the dreadful [missing] every one of you may, with a confidence [missing] any shadow of doubt, lay his hand and say, 'Not guilty, upon my honour.'“

There were also plenty of plain old typos:

“What did you say you found on that skin Bunter?” (this should say "skirt," not skin)
. . .and bunked Silly-ass thing to do . . . * (missing the period at the end of the sentence)
“The position of the fingers being towards the house appears, does it not, to negative the suggestion of dragging?” (should be "negate")

But because it turns out Amazon lumps the various editions together, there is one set of reviews. You see the same reviews for the Open Road version, the crappy, cheapo version, and the print version. People are giving the book one star because this version looks so bad!

 I didn't write a review, but I did email Amazon and ask for my money back. It had been more than the 7-day limit, but they credited me anyway. I wish they would make the seller take down the new version.  Formatting that could make me feel cheated after paying 99¢ is truly terrible formatting.

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.