Amazon

Archived Posts from this Category

January 8, 2012

Important IMMORTAL updates

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Hellenic Immortal, iBooks, Immortal, Internet, TWCS
Leave a Comment 

“Currently Unavailable”

As I previously announced, Immortal is switching publishers in 2011.  This is almost all entirely good news, especially since it means Hellenic Immortal will be arriving shortly.

But in order to list the new edition of Immortal the old edition has to go away first.  In a perfect world not ruled by computers and automation and people who steal copyrights, it would be possible for the current edition to continue to exist up until the day the new one is up for sale.  Since we don’t live in that world, as of right now Immortal is listed on Amazon as “currently unavailable”.  In the next week or two it will also be disappearing from the Nook and Apple, and everywhere else.

But it’s only for a month.

About that

Actually more like two.  The previously announced release dates have been bumped by a month each.  Immortal is now going to be re-released on March 8, 2012, and Hellenic Immortal is now scheduled for May 3, 2012.

The reason for this is simple: there isn’t enough time to promote the books properly.  And now that the book is disappearing from the Internet for a solid two months, this is even more important.

In other news

Copies of the ARC for Immortal will be going out to reviewers in the next week, and in a few days I should have a draft of the new cover to show you.  And the final edit is pending for Hellenic Immortal.  And in the next couple of weeks the cover for Hellenic will be all set the ARC for it shortly after THAT, and then we’re really rolling.  Stick around.

 

October 19, 2011

The Year of IMMORTAL: A book is released

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Barnes & Noble, E-Book, iBooks, Immortal, Release Party, Sony, Year of Immortal | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

This week we’re looking back at the first year in the life of the indie published book Immortal.  You should probably read it.

I’m not proud

Immortal was scheduled to debut on 10-1-10, and I’d love to say things went smoothly, and everything worked out okay, and I was cool about it all.

But…

There was Amazon.  The publisher’s initial plan was to use Amazon’s “fulfillment” plan which resulted in this spectacular blog entry in which I attempted to convince my readers to wish-list the book due to the impossibility of pre-purchasing anything in the fulfillment program.

I then convinced the publisher to use Amazon Advantage instead so the book looked like every other book on the retailer site.  (The fulfillment listing looked like it might if one were buying a used pair of off-brand shoes from a “retailer” that lives in an “apartment.”)  But switching didn’t exactly happen immediately, resulting in this panicked blog entry wherein I tried to cover for the possibility that the book would not actually be available on the much-publicized release date.

And then came the release date… and the book was available.

These are not, needless to say, exemplars of posterity.

And that was only for the print version

After a nice launch party (for which I neglected to take any pictures, because I’m smart like that) and a press release it was time to sit back and watch the sales figures go up…

…and answer awkward questions about where the ebook version was.

OK, I know this was only a year ago, but I’m not that bright.  I didn’t realize how important ebooks were to the current publishing model, and neither did my “this is only our second book” publisher.

It took another writer (the very nice Lorna Suzuki) to ask, “Gene, why don’t you just use Smashwords?”, which prompted me to ask my publisher, “Why don’t we just use Smashwords?” and then there I was formatting an ebook myself.  This was a process that required multiple revisitations, considerable anguish, and not an inconsiderable amount of weeping.  But it got done.  And thanks to Smashwords, it’s available not just on the Kindle, but in all the other formats you can name, and a few you’ve never heard of: Nook, iBooks, Sony, Kobo, Diesel.

Next week: More reviews roll in, we discuss whether Adam is an asshole, whether the book is structurally sound, and whether you’ve bought your copy yet.

 

February 10, 2011

The longest title you’ll ever own

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, E-Book, Humor, other worst case scenario, Publishing, Writing | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

The OTHER Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: A Parody (Anniversary Edition)

The big news first: you can now buy a brand-new Anniversary Edition of the funniest book since the invention of hyperbole: The OTHER Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook.  The new edition is in e-book only, for a perfectly modest sum of $4.99.  Why don’t you click right here first and download your copy and then we’ll talk some more.

(BONUS: LIMITED TIME SAMPLE CHAPTER: How to Reach the Summit of Mount Everest)

Welcome back!

So!  Some time in the late 1990′s a book came out called The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook.  It was something of a success, spawning multiple follow-up books, and even a television show for  a short time.

I bought a copy, partly because it looked neat, partly because it was shelved in the humor section at the bookstore.

I was horrified.  Why?  Because it wasn’t funny.  Sure, the advice was probably right–although I don’t think I’m going to need to perform any battlefield tracheotomies any time soon– but I signed up for a humor book and got a fairly dry manual out of the deal.

As a humorist, I realized I could do better.  I just had to skip some of the things that made the original book such a drag. Like facts.

Writing a parody

At the time I was running a website called GenePoool on which I posted my regular humor columns, ran a little blog, and provided samples of my plays and so on.  After pitching my idea of a parody book with a number of sample chapters– and being told that publishing companies tend to write parodies in-house on the cheap (which is why most parodies suck, not incidentally)– I decided there is nothing worse than a humor piece in a vacuum.  So I created a new section for the handbook, and started posting the chapters there.

It was easily the most popular section on my site.  And after a year of creating new pieces on a semi-regular basis I decided to publish it myself.

Self-publishing in the days of the dinosaurs

Here is what self-publishing meant in the year 2000:

A: Print-on-Demand, or

B: vanity publishing.

There were no e-books, and a company like iUniverse– the publisher I went with– was just starting out and offering fire sale prices for their services.

So in 2001, The OTHER Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook– the website, became The OTHER Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: A Parody– a book.  (The words “A Parody” were added at the stringent recommendation of iUniverse, whose contract offered them legal cover in case of a lawsuit, but still didn’t like the idea of the book going out without “parody” on the cover somewhere.)

Meanwhile, I kept writing new chapters.

Anniversary edition

A new edition was needed, obviously, if only because I needed a place to put “How to Start Smoking” and “How to Find Weapons of Mass Destruction” and all of the other things that were written after the 2001-2002 publication of the print book.

And here we are!

Coming soon

Over the next few days I’ll roll out sample chapters, a page devoted to the new edition, and… maybe a better-designed cover.  It looks a little boxy right now, doesn’t it?

 

December 14, 2010

Immortal on Amazon Kindle

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Distribution, E-Book, Editing, Immortal, Sales | Tags: , , , , , , |
1 Comment 

Ebook challenges part two

Yesterday I dove back into the Ebook fray for two reasons: Immortal was still not set up on the Kindle; and we’d gotten back feedback from Smashwords on the ebook version we’d uploaded that required addressing.

As you know, I had issues reformatting Immortal to accommodate the Smashwords Style Guide, but the outcome was supposed to produce something that could be uploaded to both Amazon and Smashwords as-was.  It nearly turned out that way.

Kindle folderol

The problem with the Kindle availability was that each time the file I sent to the publisher was uploaded to Amazon, the resulting file still looked like hell.  After fiddling with this for a while, the publisher sent me the link and suggested I try it.  When I did, it looked considerably better.  Possible explanation: my file, which was emailed and then opened in another version of Word before being uploaded, had been altered by the program, which thought it was helping.

One of the first things one has to do before reformatting a document for epublishing is turn off all of the things in MS Word that are there to “help” you.  Auto-formatting, for instance.

But it still looked kind of crappy.  So I spent a good hour making adjustments to my Word file, uploading it to see what it looked like on Amazon, then making additional adjustments, and so on.  When I was happy, I finished the publishing process.

And: it is available now, directly from Amazon.

Shmashing

The Smashwords problem was much, much dumber.  In the style guide, it is “recommended” that specific language be included in the copyright information.  This “recommended” text is not “required” but “MIGHT” make it more difficult for the manuscript to be approved for their premium catalog.  

I didn’t include it.  And the premium catalog is what releases the book to all of the third party retailers, like Apple and Barnes & Noble.

So I had to fix that and send it back through their conversion meatgrinder, and wait for all of the War & Peace sized novels ahead of it in line to get done.  It’s available– again? Still?– from Smashwords.  And hopefully by the end of the month in a whole lot of other places.

The lesson. Don’t fuck with the Smashwords Style Guide or their abuse of the word “recommended.”

 

December 7, 2010

Promoting in a social media world

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, E-Book, Facebook, Fiction, Immortal, Internet, Promotion, Publishing, Sales, Social Media, Twitter, Writing | Tags: , , , , |
[12] Comments 

Leading horses to water

Promoting a novel can be extremely challenging, and in ways that are different from promoting a website or a toy or a machine that goes *ping* at regular intervals.  Novels are subjectively enjoyable, frequently disappointing, and an unavoidable commitment. Nobody wants to get stuck reading a bad one, or worse, having to tell the person who wrote it that they thought it was bad.

Despite that, if I know you, I will continue to expect you to buy my novel and read it.  Why?

  • From my perspective: it’s very good; you will be sharing something that came from me and is important to me; you will tell other people.
  • From your perspective: the odds that you know a novelist that is actually very good at novel-writing are small, while the odds that the person you know is overstating the quality because of an unavoidable bias are rather high; in buying it you’re being nice, but you’re not expecting much.

Here, then, is the Catch-22: I know what your perspective is because it’s my perspective with most of the people I know who are also writers, yet I have to continue to promote the book to you and to everyone else I know, because it’s all I have. Yet the more I promote it, the more I confirm your concerns, even if unconsciously: he’s selling it to his friends because nobody else is buying it. Because it isn’t good.

Creative ways to keep it in front of you

Since Immortal debuted I have spent a lot of time posting links to: my blog; the Amazon sales page; the Smashwords sales page; and various press releases and reviews, and I have been doing this on what I would call a highly regular basis.  These links go up on Twitter and are cross-posted to Facebook (when I don’t post them directly to Facebook) and are not without their detractors.  ”Stop spamming me, your links are taking up my whole page,” I have heard.  And that was from my wife.

At first, I just posted straightforward tweets, like “Read Immortal” which is dull, but essentially informative.  The problem is you post enough of those and you may as well be a spambot offering a thicker penis.  (Incidentally, if you read Immortal you will have a thicker penis.)  So I write creative tweets, or funny tweets, or odd tweets.  I have touted the book as a potential murder weapon; I have declared that not buying it means the terrorists win; I have implored buyers to get it because it simply doesn’t suck.  I wrote a hostage letter tweet once announcing that you had to buy it “or the kitten dies.”

You get the idea.  I am mindful that the people following my twitter feed and my facebook page are not just there to hear me repeatedly beg them to spend money on me all day, every day.  But I have to continue to promote the book, so I try to keep the promotional tweets as entertaining as I can.

Sometimes, I ask other people to help me promote, and their approach is much the same.  Which is how I ended up fielding an interesting complaint this morning about the scurrilous nature of some of the promotional tweets.  Because to catch someone’s eye and get a sales tweet re-tweeted, you have to write something interesting and retweet-able.  (Read comment and replies here.)

But why keep doing it?

You may argue that yes, you are aware of the book, and yes, you intend to buy it at some time but no, you really don’t want to keep hearing about it.  I understand.  But appreciate that to sell something effectively, the name of that something has to be introduced to someone more than once.  Especially with novels, where the “I’ve heard of that book; how was it?” factor is incredibly significant.

The buzz has to start somewhere.  I have to convince people I know to read something so that they can convince people I don’t know to read it.  And the only way I have to make sure the people I know get themselves a copy is to put it in front of their eyes on a semi-regular basis.  Both Twitter and Facebook have scrolling status/update screens, so sometimes making sure Immortal is in front of everyone means a new tweet/post a few times a day.

Is it annoying?  It can be.  That’s why the tweets are usually different, and usually tongue-in-cheek.

 

November 28, 2010

Immortal as eBook

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Distribution, E-Book, Editing, Immortal, Publishing, Twitter | Tags: , , , , |
[10] Comments 

The important news first

You can now purchase Immortal as an eBook in any format your heart desires thanks to the folks over at Smashwords.  Go there now to buy your copy: Immortal eBook.

EBook formatting is hell

The book was actually “available” on Kindle at the beginning of November, for about half a day.  What happened was, the publisher opened up the Amazon account, read the documentation, and foolishly assumed that the assurances Amazon posted about the quality of the product after conversion were modestly accurate.  And of course it isn’t.

At the very moment I heard it was available on the Kindle I happened to be near son Tim.  It was his birthday and I was driving him to Rhode Island to get a tattoo.  No, I did not make that up.  Tim has an iPad with a Kindle app, so while on the road I had him download a copy of the book and take a look at it.

It looked awful.  All of the headers and the footers were mashed into the text, the page numbers– which shouldn’t have been there– were mashed in with them, the title pages ran together with the chapters, which were in a funky upper-case-lower-case stew.

So, from the lobby of a tattoo parlor in another state, I emailed, texted, voice-mailed and carrier-pigeoned a message back to the publisher: “take the book down, before someone gets hurt.”

Smashwords

We looked into hiring someone to format it for us, but then there was the question of how to format it for other devices, and after lengthy back-and-forthing the question was posed to me by some Twitter friends, “why aren’t you using Smashwords?”

Why not indeed?  So an account was opened, and everything was right in the world.

Except the book still had to be formatted.

Hard returns and section breaks and bears. Oh my.

The absolute final proof version of Immortal was in PDF.  Here are the steps I had to take to get that file into something an ebook reader wouldn’t spit out distastefully:

1: Convert the pdf file to a doc file using one of the approximately twenty free sites online that do just this function.  They probably keep everything they convert on some file somewhere for a secret government plan, but whatever;

2: Look at the Smashwords Style Guide.  Look at the doc file.  Look at the style guide.  Look at the doc file.  Cry.

3: The converted file has frames and page breaks and sections breaks.  I do what the style guide says I have to do to get rid of the frames, but the breaks cannot be deleted.  I look at five pages of google search results on “how to remove breaks in MS Word”.  None of the suggestions work.

4: I choose the “nuclear option” from the style guide which means I convert the doc file to an rtf file and then back to a doc file again.  This works: the breaks are gone.  However, so is all the italicization and bold-face, nothing that should be centered is centered, and every single line of text has a hard return symbol at the end of it.

5: Cry.

6: Go through the entire document line-by-line, adding space where it needs to be added, deleting the hard returns for every line ending that isn’t a paragraph break, deleting the manual indents, adding italics and boldface and centering what needs to be centered.

7: Curse my Word program for crashing regularly while I’m formatting.

8: Cry some more.  Formatting takes five days and all of the time I would otherwise have spent polishing up Hellenic Immortal.

9: Once it’s done, email it to the publisher to be sent to Amazon and Smashwords.  I cannot check to see if the formatting looks good because to do so I have to download MobiPocket Creator and MobiPocket Reader, neither of which are available on a Mac.

10: Pray that the eBook look okay.

And?

It looks okay.  I expect tweaks will be uploaded periodically– for instance right now the legal text says the book was “printed in the United States” which is an unnecessary line for an ebook to have– but the downloadable manuscript is basically all set.  The Kindle version from Smashwords, incidentally, might be better looking than the one that will soon be available on Amazon.  I eventually used daughter Becky‘s PC while she was home for Thanksgiving to test the doc file in MobiPocket, and while the result was perfectly readable, it was missing some of the spacing between sections that make it a slightly easier read.  Those spaces are intact in the Smashwords copy.

 

November 12, 2010

In defense of Amazon

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Distribution, E-Book, History, Immortal, Internet, Publishing, Reading, Twitter, Writing | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
[34] Comments 

Outrage

You have, I am sure, heard at least a portion of the story: Amazon.com allowed an e-book that instructed pedophiles on how to be better pedophiles (I’m guessing) to go on sale through their vast retail empire.  When the book was discovered– and I’m sort of interested in figuring out what search parameters led to it– the Internet, and specifically Twitter, lost its collective mind.

Amazon defended the decision.  The outrage got more pronounced.  A boycott was declared.  Amazon pulled the book.  The crowd went wild.  End of story.

And I should probably let it go there.  Except I can’t; I think Amazon was right.

Take a step back

I think it’s inarguable that a pro-pedophilia book should be condemned as an evil and immoral thing, and I have no problem with declaring it to be so loudly and frequently.  What I do have a problem with is blaming Amazon for it.

It’s true that the company vets everything it sells beforehand, but the vetting is for defense against litigation, i.e., improper use.  For instance, if someone decided to publish one of my books without my permission, that would be improper use, and Amazon could get sued for it.  They aren’t making moral choices; they’re making legal ones.

But, the crowd shouted, they should be.

Please take a step back and think about that for a minute.  ”I would like the world’s largest online retailer to make decisions of morality for me.”  That is what you, large shouting crowd, just said.  And it’s an easy thing to say when the book in question is about molesting children.  What happens when it isn’t?  This would be a very different argument if Amazon decided not to publish Lolita, a novel widely acknowledged as one of the best English language books of the twentieth century, but one which happens to be about a pedophile.

Now, I’m not equating the pedophile guide with Nabokov.  I’m saying if you demand that a company make moral judgment calls, you can’t guarantee you’re going to agree with their decisions.

Common sense

Ah, the crowd counters: but this was a simple common-sense decision.

Beware, please.  Common sense is subjective.  I grant that you will be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks a pedophile guide is acceptable.  But there are a large number of people in this country who would agree with this statement: “of course man didn’t descend from an ape; it’s only common sense.”

Asking anyone– a large company or a person– to make common-sense decisions is no less dangerous than asking them to make a moral decision.

Not enough outrage to go around

The pedophile guide might not even be the most evil thing to be offered for sale by Amazon.  Go ahead and look up the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  This is a hoax that is supposed to be the minutes of a meeting between a secret Jewish cabal planning on taking over the world by starting wars, crashing economies, and so on.  It’s nearly a century old, and was definitively debunked at least eighty years ago. Despite that, it was a primary source for Hitler and a key justification for the Holocaust, meaning this little book was indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions.  And it’s still taken seriously today by many people (especially in certain Middle Eastern countries) as justification for continued violence against Jews.  It is probably the most evil and dangerous thing ever published.  And it is on sale at Amazon right now.  So are the books inspired by it, including Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Henry Ford‘s The International Jew.

If you want to be angry, vast hive mind, be angry that THIS book is on sale at Amazon.  But while you’re at it, be just as angry at the 22 other online retailers also selling it.

This is not to say I am happy with Amazon

Right now I would love nothing more than to be able to say “Immortal is now on sale at major online retailer X instead of Amazon”.  The percentage they keep from books sold by way of their Advantage Program is criminal, they are not at all kind to smaller publishers in general, and their customer service is horrifically bad.  I don’t like them, in other words, and would rather not deal with them, much less defend them.

But, and this is an important point: they are currently the only place to buy Immortal.  And when the Kindle version comes out that will be doubly so.  This is true because right now, they’re just about the only game in town.  And there are hundreds of thousands of writers out there in the exact same position.

Boycotting Amazon because they chose not to take a moral stance in circumstances in which they should not have been expected to doesn’t hurt them nearly as much as it hurts someone like me.  And all I’m trying to do is sell a harmless fantasy/sci-fi/adventure book through an online retailer.

My point: if you find a book for sale there that you don’t like, punish the author and the retailer by not buying the book.  That’s how commerce works.

 

November 3, 2010

International and electronic Immortal

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Distribution, E-Book, GoodReads, Immortal, International, Internet, Poll, Publishing, Reading, Sales, Twitter | Tags: , , , , , |
[4] Comments 

Death of the “local” customer

As I have discussed before, the e-book revolution sort of took me by surprise.  I still like paper books, but I’m coming to realize that every day I cling to them is another day for me to look like a guy on horseback on a freeway.

And I’m still trying to get a grip on who the demographic is for Immortal. So far I’ve settled on: people who read sci-fi, fantasy, urban fantasy, historical fiction, or any combination thereof; people who like vampires; dudes.  I am now adding “People who do all of their reading on the Kindle” to the list.

Then there are the international buyers.  Since I’ve done nearly all of my promoting online– on Twitter and Facebook and Goodreads, mainly– it’s only reasonable to expect that some of the people I interest in the novel are going to be people outside of the United States.

So it would have been awesome if I had expected it.

Poll

What would be great is if I could go to the Powers That Be with numbers, rather than anecdotes.  I would also be deeply curious to see how embedded the Kindle has become to the reading world, and whether I really am a horseman on a highway.  Plus, I found this really cool poll option in my WordPress toolbar, and I couldn’t resist trying it out.

[Note: I know not everyone will be buying the book, and I'm okay with that.  Should you be struck with the urge to vote "Other" and fill in the box with some variant of "You Suck"... I understand.  I was young once too.]

 

October 29, 2010

Promoting Immortal

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Distribution, Facebook, GoodReads, Immortal, Networking, Publishing, Reviews, Sales | Tags: , , , , |
[11] Comments 

The month in summary

It has been quite a good month for Immortal, the little novel that could, but only after six years of couldn’t.  On penalty of death, I can’t mention specific sales numbers, but if you count both the books bought through Amazon and from my personal supply… well, we did okay.

And now we’re in the dead zone.

The dead zone

I was expecting this.  Once the friends, family, acquaintances, launch party attendees, fellow writers and coworkers all got their copies, sales would have to rely on the terrifying Everyone Else.  People, in other words, that I don’t know, have never spoken to, and don’t know me.  Some of the Everyone Else certainly DID buy a copy this month, just as there are many friends, fellow writers and coworkers that did NOT buy a copy in October.  Nonetheless, for Immortal to make that leap it’s going to have to find its way into the hands of people that found out about it from other people, or read a review, or found it on Goodreads, or saw the press release, or discovered it some other way entirely.

This will take some time.  At least, that’s what I keep telling myself when I pathologically refresh the Amazon page to see what the sales ranking is.

How can you help?

You can pull me away from Amazon and remind me I have to finish editing Hellenic Immortal.

Also, if you have read Immortal by now– and you liked it (which I’m not assuming)– tell people about it.  Like, until you become annoying.  Here’s an example:

Christmas is coming!  Wouldn’t Immortal make a good gift?  Of course it would!  Buy ten copies!

See?  That was obnoxious, but it got the point out.

Amazon and Goodreads reviews

Also, Amazon and Goodreads reviews are an easy way to help.  Both allow customers/users to post reviews of any length and a ratings system.  The more reviews, the more likely it is to help someone coming to the page for the first time.

And you can say anything you want.  Just maybe don’t say I told you to do it.  That might look bad.

And now I’m off to check the sales ranking again.  There should be a rehab program for this.

 

October 21, 2010

Immortal press release

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Fiction, Immortal, Internet, Launch Party, Release Party, Twitter | Tags: , , , , |
1 Comment 

Immortal press release

I’d like to say I finally got around to writing and releasing a press release for Immortal, but the truth is, between freaking out about the launch party (tomorrow) and getting sick with some manner of death flu, it never crossed my mind.  Fortunately, the Twitter community is paying attention, and in many cases very generous with their collective time.  The link below is to a press release that went out today, written by @mattdelman (do follow him).

IMMORTAL PRESS RELEASE

 

Next Page »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,334 other followers