Hola, España! Mi libro es gratuito!

The Sixth Discipline is now free in the Spanish Kindle store! I'm not sure why, but I suspect someone clicked the link to tell Amazon about a lower price— or in this case, un precio más bajo. So, there you go, España! Start clicking that “buy” link!

I was right! There is now a Kindle store for Mexico!

I knew it might be there, because a line for it showed up on my KDP report page again, and when I went to Amazon.com.mx, instead of getting redirected to plain old Amazon.com, I ended up at the page above.

Review: Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas

Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I am bemused. This book was very different from anything I have ever read. The characters in it don't just “break the fifth wall,” they cut a window, install drapes, and pull up a chair to enjoy the view.

It starts with people on some far-future starship noticing how many of them die on away missions. Eventually they figure out their fate is driven by something outside their universe. WARNING: Spoilers ahead!

These folks discover that for each of them there is a corresponding actor in a TV show, and if the plot calls for that character to die, then the starship crew member dies, too. So many layers of unreality end up layered together, it's like practicing archeology to read the narrative.

After seeing everything from the alternate future universe crew member's point-of-view, we move to our own earth and see things from the TV show scriptwriter's POV, and then from one of the actor's POV. And along the way, every character seems just as real as any other character. It's clever, it's well written, and it's entertaining. I'm just not sure it's actually a novel.

I liked it a lot, but I am bemused.



View all my reviews

Is Kindle going "South of the Border, Down Mexico Way"?

I am so showing my age by knowing the title of that song!  On the KDP platform, when you check your sales reports they are separated geographically, for the Kindle stores in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, India, Canada, and Brazil. When I checked it yesterday, I swear I saw an entry for "amazon.com.mx" which could only be Mexico. Right now there is no Kindle store in Mexico; if you type "amazon.com.mx" into a browser, it redirects you to the regular US-based amazon.com.

This morning the amazon.com.mx line is gone! Missing! I think someone goofed and released something early (or maybe they were testing, and it was deliberate) and this means Amazon will open a Kindle store in Mexico.  I wish I had thought to take a screen shot!

The good thing about self-publishing is you own worldwide rights to your own work, so you can publish worldwide from any platform that supports global sales. Olé!

iBooks sales versus Barnes & Noble Nook sales

In an earlier post about my use of a BookBub promotion  back in May, I mentioned that I was guessing that Apple didn't seem to report how many free books they give away any more, but actually, they do. It's just it takes a lot longer to get free book numbers from Apple than it does sales numbers. Interestingly, since my May and early June sales of No Safe Haven (the sequel to the free book) were higher for iBooks than for B&N, I was assuming that I had given away more free copies of The Sixth Discipline on that platform than on B&N. Not so! I actually gave away noticeably fewer (only a little over 2,500 in iBooks, versus 4,000 on B&N). So what does that mean?

I could hypothesize either that there are more free books on the iBooks platform, which makes it harder for an unknown author to stand out, or that there are simply fewer iBooks customers. But either way, iBooks readers have a higher follow-through on actually reading books they get for free. I know from my own experience and from anecdotal evidence that lots of books downloaded for free are never even opened, let alone read. You'll notice I'm assuming that sales of the sequel will be higher for folks who read the first book!

On the other hand, in July, I had higher sales numbers on Nook than on iBooks, so go figure.

Rankings and reviews

While the recent flap about JK Rowling writing a non-best-selling mystery as Robert Galbraith proves reviews aren't everything, Amazon reviews really do help! That's why I was happy to see that The Sixth Discipline reached the half-century mark on Amazon.com—50 reviews!

At the same time, I am also looking at its ranking, which has fallen a bit lately, after the huge rise in May.  In Italy though, where the book has just recently become free, it would look like it's doing really well.

That's 762 in all free Kindle books, and 8 in "Fantascienza" Kindle books in English.  I think Fantascienza is Italian for science fiction, except it looks like it could also come from the word for fantasy. Actually, that's probably a pretty good word for my books, as I make no claims that the science in them is plausible. Some folks would call my work science fantasy. I hope bambini e ragazzi doesn't mean Amazon has classified it as a kid's book!

But to return to the number, 762 sounds great, and 8 sounds even better, but remember that the Kindle store in Italy seems to consist almost entirely of books in English. All the top sellers and top free books are in English. And in fact, the number of books I have given away in Italy is still in the single digits, which means there are not a lot of people in Italy downloading free Kindle books!

I guess this means I can get in on the ground floor—or as they would say in Italy, the pianterreno.

Amazon adds a great new feature to Kindle: automatic delivery of corrections

I went to my "Manage Your Kindle" page on Amazon today, to send a copy of the J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith mystery novel The Cuckoo's Calling to my husband's iPad, and I noticed something new.  There was a notice above the section with the list of my books that said I could sign up for automatic updates when a corrected version of an ebook comes out. Naturally, I clicked OK!

A big advantage of ebooks over print is they can be corrected if errors (typos as well as formatting errors) are found. Newer Kindles even offer a way to report these kinds of mistakes (in the More menu that comes up when you highlight a phrase).  But once the publisher has fixed the mistakes, someone who has already bought that book won't see that fix unless they download the book again.  Amazon will email buyers if the mistake is significant, but then they buyer has to request a new copy. This new feature is a "sign up once, and it's automatic from then on" thing, which is much better.

The number of errors in ebooks from self-publishers is widely variable, depending on the author's attention to detail. The number of errors in traditional books used to be just awful, mostly because of workflow issues, but they have (mostly) gotten better. I have found a couple of typos in The Cuckoo's Calling, though (an excellent book, by the way!). I will have to report them and see how well this new feature works!

Finally! The Nostalgia Gambit is now available in iBooks!

Such a time I have had, getting my sixth book into the iBooks store! Finally, it's there! And it only took me over two months of trying.

That was sarcasm, by the way. My experience with this book was a good illustration of the difficulties in dealing with one retailer via another retailer. The folks at Apple don't make self-publishing easy, so I use Smashwords to get my books into the iBooks store.

In the past, Smashwords only accepted MS Word documents formatted with their specific styles. They had a program called the meat grinder that they used to create all the various formats they support (epub, Kindle, PDF, txt, etc). You uploaded your cover image and the Word file, and it took it from there. The books came out kind of vanilla, as far as style, but you got a valid epub file, and that was what made it possible to sell that book on the other retailer platforms. All the major online bookstores except Kindle rely on epub format.

If the epub book had an ISBN and made it into the Smashwords premium catalog (which meant it was well formatted) then it could be sent to iBooks. It sometimes took a week or two to show up but it arrived. Smashwords tries to be responsive to their authors, and when people asked to be able to upload epub directly, they made that possible as of the last day of of 2012.  You can now upload an epub copy and an MS Word copy to Smashwords, and they will use the epub for all the non-Amazon online vendors. The book still has to say “Smashwords Edition” in the front matter, but otherwise it doesn't need to be different from any standard epub file.

Now iBooks has gotten pickier about their book covers. The cover image appears inside the book, as part of the epub file, and it gets uploaded as a separate file for use as on the store's web pages. Apple appears to have changed the rules about what resolution the image can be; too low or too high a resolution, and iBooks won't accept it. Smashwords must have realized this because when I uploaded an epub copy of my seventh book King of Trees, it told me right away that the cover image with the file was too low res. I got that cover artist to supply a different version and the book was delivered soon after and showed up in the iBooks store in a few days.

With  TNG, though, it had passed epub review and gotten into the premium catalog with no trouble, and had shipped to Apple right away, but it never showed up in the iBooks store. I tried emailing Smashwords and they just tried to redeliver it for me.  Still no TNG in iBooks. Eventually, I clicked the link to pull it from Apple, which makes Smashwords send a takedown notice, and once that was sent, I clicked Distribute again, but it would not ship to Apple!  I emailed again, and this time the person investigated and told me the problem was the cover image inside the book was too high a resolution! I got the artist (different artist from KoT) to give me a lower res image and then had that re-inserted into the epub file. Once it was all straight, the book was there in a matter of days.

Victory at last!

How do you say “free” in Italian?

It turns out it's gratuito. I looked it up because Amazon has made The Sixth Discipline free in the Italian Kindle store! I'm not quite sure why the book is free in the US, UK, Canadian, and now Italian Kindle stores, and not the others, but I suspect it's because someone in those countries clicked on the “tell us about a cheaper price” link. Brazil, Japan, Spain, Germany, France, and India, it's your turn. Demand my book to be livre, 自由に, libre, kostenlos, librement, and मुक्त!

Catching up

Is it really July already? How did that happen? I am deep into the revisions stage of Saronna's Gift. When I give a manuscript to my writing group, I always have to weigh their comments against my own sense of what the story is about and what tone I am going for. As you can tell by looking at almost any book's Amazon reviews, people have varied taste. What one person finds edgy, someone else will see as too dark. What one reader admires in a character will sometimes make other readers dislike him intensely. This is why Baskin-Robbins makes 31 flavors!

The group has been in existence for about 20 years, although the membership has varied during that time. One “new” member just rejoined the group because she retired and finally has time to write again. Another is new-new, as he had only attended a few meetings.  The folks who have been in the group for years do have some predictability in their critiques of stories submitted. One guy always wants more physical description of the characters. One woman always loves the character everyone else hates. And one bloodthirsty guy always wants the writer to kill off one or more characters.

When I review the comments my fellow writers have made, I look for two things. First is consensus. Is there something everyone hated or thought didn't work?  Because if so, that is something I need to change. The second thing is harder to pin down. Does a suggestion resonate with me, with what I want the story to be? Because it's my story, and no matter how interesting an idea sounds, of it doesn't make the book into the story I want to tell, then it's a suggestion I won't use.

At least not with this book. But I save everything. A writer is really a kind of idea vampire. He or she feeds off chance observations, friends' life struggles, newspaper items, and anything else that comes his way. It's what we do!