Wondrous things in the CyberWorld leave Keegan scratching head

Curiouser and curiouser. Anyone who's "in the pipeline" knows that when you whack a book onto Amazon, you can either go with an outside printshop -- like Lulu.com, if you're in a "foreign" country (few other print on demand companies will work with us "foreigners" ... for instance, forget about Lightning Source and Booklocker) -- or you can go through Amazon's wholly owned subsidiary, CreateSpace, and the road to Amazon, though long and soporific, is also automatic.

So far, so good: here's where the plot thickens. And I'll tell you, you could stand a spoon up in this one!

If you use Lulu.com as your printer, you pay a very hefty whack of cash to get a global distribution package for your title, which gets you onto the Big A. It costs about A$140 (US$100) for this service -- which I never optioned, because I have no need of it, and (!!) because in any case it's only available to writers residing in the USA! Being downunder, I always curled my lip at this as yet another door closed in the face of "foreigners" ... even though I admit, it didn't want to go through it in any case. Ahem. (Suppose I'd wanted to.)

So, there is no way in any world that one of my books could show up on Amazon as PUBLISHED by DreamCraft, and SOLD by Lulu, right?

You'd think so. But something weird is going on -- click this image to get the full-size, readable one, and notice where it says, Seller: LULU PRESS.



And meanwhile, here's the listing from lower down the page in the details:

No mistake there. Published by DreamCraft.

Does anyone have the slightest inkling as to what what's going on? Lulu (the printer!) is out there selling at least one of my books, which is something that isn't supposed to happen, can't happen, couldn't happen until the day arrived when Satan skated to work --

Anyone looked outside lately?

As I began: curiouser and curiouser. Not that I'm complaining ... so long as I get paid, if they want to get on the stick and sell copies for me -- kids, go for it!

In fact, let's give them a little help. If you've been wanting the classic second edition cover but didn't want to order from Lulu direct, well, order from Amazon and Lulu can ship it (which is exactly what they'd do if you ordered from Lulu direct!

Here you go:

And speaking of things Amazon, take a squizz at this:
http://seattlest.com/2008/06/18/amazons_vanishing_buy_buttons.php

Goog golly.

Cheers,

MK

Gay vampires on the phone!

On your phone, specifically. On your iPhone, that is. And not any old gay vampires ... Mel Keegan's, uh, gay vampires.

In fact, NOCTURNE and TWILIGHT are at Smashwords as of this writing, which means these books are now available for Palm Pilot, Sony Reader, any device that can work with the Mobi Reader app, and of course -- Stanza, which your iPhone is going to love.

Gay vampires on your phone. Seriously!

This is something I have come to envy keenly: folks who have an ebook reader. I don't have one, because you could buy a used car for the price of the dadblasted things, in this country. I'm starting to look at a thingamajig called a netbook. They're about A$600 here, and all I want the thing to do is display ebooks and maybe YouTube videos, and possibly play music.

And if there were any remotest chance of getting gay vampires on said device --!

Anyway, if you're into the ebooks for iPhone, this one is for you:



US$10.95 for iPhone, Palm Pilot, Kindle, Mobi and more!

US$10.95 for iPhone, Palm Pilot, Kindle, Mobi and more!
So there you are -- and just to make sure the pea-brained Googlebot can make heads and tails of this page, I'm going to say it a couple more times (the next part is for pea-brained spiders, not humans, so feel free to ignore the following) ... gay vampire ebooks for your iPhone! Yes, at last, gay books in ebook format, featuring romance, adventure and vampires ... gay style, the way Keegan readers like it best!

There. All done!

Swordsman for visually impaired readers ... the proof arrives!

And then the doorbell rang, and it was the Aussie Post courier. With a box ... a bookbox, specifically. I've been waiting for this since before Easter (the four-day long weekend always busts up the mails), and at last, here it is ... the large print edition of The Swordsman, intended for visually impaired readers:

I have to say, this is absolutely beautiful. It's one of my mother's gifts for Mother's Day (in a few weeks), but I'll be delighted to work with this format and issue most or all of the Keegans -- stand by for a special page.

This is also my first experiment with the "publisher grade paper" which is now an option at Lulu.com ... and again, I'm impressed. It's a beautiful job. The paper is top-notch: whiter and smoother than the regular paper, and yet a lot more opaque, so there's no strike through. Lovely. The only downside is that the book is very slightly smaller than the fill-sized US trade size (6" x 9"). This is fine by me -- it's still larger in both axes than the old GMP editions. And, being large print, it's over 600pp ... which is impressive.

Nice!

I just went over to Lulu and gave the book the "nudge" to the public list, and you can now order this item:







The Swordsman, large print edition, 609pp. US$23.95.

In the coming weeks, I'll be getting together a good list for visually impaired glbt readers, and then we'll do a press release and a newsletter. If you're "blind and gay," or are supportive of someone who is ... and if you could spread the word ... this would be marvelous, and Keegan thanks you.

Cheers (again),
MK

Gay and visually impaired ... what are you reading, and how?!

It's only very recently that this question has hit me -- and it's hit me like a brick. No, Keegan isn't going blind! But my mother is. Life-long, my mother has been the most major supporter of whatever I wanted to be, do, and write. I'm one of the incredibly lucky ones. My mother was a professional musician with experience of performers from the legitimate stage to what, today, would be called "pub rock." (In her day it wasn't rock, of course, but the popular music of the era.) That breadth of experience makes a person wise, compassionate, tolerant. However your kids grow up, you know that they're bright, savvy, talented, as "normal" as any human being ever is (since there's no such thing as "normal" anyway), and if they're going to work hard, they deserve the best shot at success a person can have.

I had this fantastic lady behind me from Day One. Friends, partners, life partner and so on -- all that came along later, and some friends disappeared as smoothly as they appeared. There's been one constant, however -- yep. Your Mom isn't going to disappear on you. Mine calls herself "Mel's #1 fan," and although she hasn't read everything I've written (a few titles are too hot, too "down and dirty" for a lady of her years and refinement), she's read a hell of a lot of it. The Swordsman, Dangerous Moonlight, Lords of Harbendane, Nocture and Twilight, Tiger, Tiger and so on -- these are among her favorite reads...

Except, she can't read them any longer.

Just after Christmas, she was diagnosed with advanced glaucoma, and right now her specialists are struggling to stop the condition worsening (yes, it's the laser treatment, starting next week). We've gotten her every big magnifying glass and reading light you can name, but the fact is, small type is beyond her.

So naturally (Keegan being far from dumb even now, though I have no doubt a considerable number of brain cells have gone bye-bye), I went back to the software, reset the type in BIG fonts, and hit "print."

Joy. She can read again, so long as the type is up there around the 16 point mark. Problem solved ... I can also download loads of stuff from the web and do the big-type printouts.

But all this got me to thinking: If you're blind and gay, or visually impaired and gay, how many publishers out there are making books available in extra-large type? What are blind gay readers reading?

So I hit the web, and discovered a lot more than I'd imagined. There's a page at Writers' Services, for a start: http://www.writersservices.com/wps/s2_visually_impaired.htm ... and here is an outtake:

"Anybody who does not require glasses for reading by the age of 40 is a freak. A bit shocking perhaps but it makes the point that eyesight degrades with age for absolutely everybody. The little muscles and membranes in the eye are truly remarkable but they do wear out. Anybody who could design a modern material as durable as the components of the human eye would make a fortune.


So reading and seeing is a problem that everybody will have to deal with. The only question is the age and the severity. A few are blind from birth but a much larger group are not blind but have problems reading text. The ability to read was not, after all, a factor driving our evolution.

There are about 2 million people in UK with sight problems. According to RNIB, ‘another 100 people will start to loose their sight’ each day within the UK. Figures from the American Foundation for the Blind, (ABF) ‘approximately 1.3 million Americans are legally blind’ of which 55,200 are children and a further ‘5.5 million are visually impaired’. The Blind people’s Association of India estimate that there are over a [m]illion people on the sub-continent are blind because of cataracts.

Demographics makes it likely that the problems people have reading are going to increase in spite of medical advances. It is important that publishers address the issue both on the grounds of social exclusion but increasingly for good market motives. In the UK 96 per cent of the books published cannot be accessed by those with sight loss or dyslexia. By 2030 the number of people with sight loss will have doubled, and eight out of ten people say that they would want to continue reading if their sight deteriorated."

I'm sitting here being shocked. Appalled. And I can imagine how much more difficult it must be to be blind or visually impaired, and gay, and wanting desperately to read a good gay book, and not having a damned thing available.

Now, ebooks are starting to make this easier. You can always use a PDF and go up to 200% or whatever you need on the text size. The little palm-top screenreaders will be a right royal pain though -- first, they're bloody damned expensive, and if you're on a budget ... well, I don't have one myself yet, because of the price of the things. And if you're seriously visually impaired, the screen will be displaying about six words at a time. Gak. So, to read an ebook you have to sit at a desk for many, many hours. Again -- gak.

And (fair go, here) you want the same reading comfort that a sighted person would have -- to be able to curl up in a lounge chair with your feet up. Can't do this when you're chained to a desk.

And there isn't a single publisher, not one, which caters to these needs.

Keegan is appalled. Again. Keegan is remembering a 79 year old lady hunched over with a big magnifying glass, trying to plow through The Lords of Harbendane -- and that problem got fixed in about an hour flat, as fast as the printer could run.

Blind, or visually impaired, and gay -- or know someone who is? Tag yourself onto my mailing list and watch your emails, because in the very near future I'm publishing a range of books in large type. I can't speak for other publishers, but I can certainly address this deficiency in the system myself.

The books will be produced by Lulu.com, and will be "the real deal," properly designed and laid out, with text around the average 16 point mark. (If my mother can read it, almost anyone can.)

Let me show you what I'm doing. Here's the first 10pp of The Swordsman as a PDF, as a sample. Download it, guys, and print it out. Find out if it suits you (or your friend, whoever needs the large print) ... http://www.box.net/shared/17ldr0d141

Give me some feedback here. Is this good for your vision? Can you read comfortably? This is what my mother is reading without a problem, but before I go ahead and hit "publish" I'd like to have feedback from a group of people. So -- let me know! Leave comments right here.

Need a little perspective? This is excellent: http://www.chanton.com/blindandgay.html

Thanks! Stay tuned.

Cheers,
MK

Writer beware: marketing deals? Be very, very cautious

I'm wondering how many other writers reading this blog (and there are about a dozen that I know of ... hi, guys!) received this rather outrageous piece of unsolicited advertising ... you want to call it spam, go ahead and call it spam ... and since they spammed me, I'll consider myself at liberty to paste the whole thing in here, verbatim -- and then talk about it below:










You've published a book. What's next?

The hard part about writing a book should be writing the book. You're not a digital marketing guru - you're an author.

So let AuthorWeb take care of the digital stuff. Here are some of the things we can do for you:

• Upload your manuscript to Google for Google Book Search
• Upload your manuscript to Amazon for sale on the Kindle
• Upload your manuscript to "Smashwords" for all other ebook distribution
• Make sure you are listed with Bowker's Books in Print program so your book is listed on all e-commerce sites
• Work with Barnes & Noble.com's Small Press division for web (and possible store) distribution
• Work with your POD service (Lightning Source, Lulu, Xlibris, etc.) to make sure you are getting the value you've paid forList you on author sites such as Filedby

Other services may include:
Enrolling you in AuthorsGlobe and other services, so you can get virtual speaking engagements
Setting up Facebook/MySpace/Twitter accounts so you can jump on that social networking thingSetting up a blog so you can tell the world what you're doing

How do we do this? We've been in this business for 22 years. We've watched it evolve from a print-and-paper world to a digital world - so fast that many authors are left hanging with no support. How do you navigate all the rules and forms? Why is an ISBN essential for selling your book? Once you've got your book listed on Amazon, how do you get the word out so people can buy it?

What we do

Basic Services - $1000 Upload files to Google for Google Book SearchNegotiating author's agreement with GoogleUpload files to Amazon for Kindle ebook sales Get listed (or enhance existing listing) on Amazon/B&N.com for print salesNegotiate the best distribution deal possible for both Amazon and B&NWork with your POD service for any further (independent) distribution - getting all those forms filled outEnhance your listing with Books in PrintEnhance your listing on FiledbyAuthor and other websites

Viral Marketing Services - $1500 Creation of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter pages
Creation of blogSocial networking tutorial, so you can maintain these pages yourself

We have helped authors for 22 years.

Contact us today to learn more about how AuthorWeb can help you.

Exclusive: I've negotiated a special deal with mediabistro.com to offer all of you a $10 discount on a premium AvantGuild membership. Members get access to a wealth of professional resources and information, including their "Pitching an Agent" series, health insurance options for freelancers, and discounts on mediabistro.com courses and instructional videos. Just make sure to click on this link in order to claim your discounted membership.


END OF SPAM

Now, I don't appreciate spam any more than the next person does, and the only reason these people are not getting a very annoyed email from me is that they dropped two names that are new to me. Author's Globe and MediaBistro have not yet crossed my path -- and that path has cut swathes all over the Internet. I'd have stumbled over them all on my lonesome sooner or later.

I'll trade: no stinging email from Mel in exchange for two dropped names by them.

The rest of this stuff? I've already done it. YOU've already done it. EVERY author who has the talent and courage to call him/herself a professional has already done it.

The only writers who haven't done this stuff are amateurs, whose books are (sorry guys; it's nothing personal -- it's just unavoidably truth) not yet up to snuff. Amateurs who have several years and another 250,000 words of writing, self-correcting and learning to go before they can work their way into the entry-level of the professional arena. (Notice that the above spiel begins, "You've published a book." A book. One. It had better be the 3rd or 5th or 10th book you've writtenbefore you tried publishing one, because 99.7% of first books are tripe -- this much is fact.)

Almost without exception, first outing writers are not ready to sell copies. They'll get stinking reviews, lose a lot of money, get a lousy reputation as artists, and very likely have the "heart" knocked out of them. They might never write again, even though the latent ability is very probably there inside them.

The only people making money out of this kind of deal are the shrewd manipulators at the controls.

For gods' sake, all genuine writers (even the upper ranks of the wannabe authors) already have blogs, and websites, and Amazon listings, and ISBNs, and a thorough knowledge of Bowker, and Lulu, and ... so on.

You and I -- having been there, done that -- would rate the above list of chores to be worth about $250, max. And some of the items on that list are professional suicide.

I just went through a wringer to get my books OUT of the Google Book Search program, and these jokers are advocating it! They actually recommend a system that would upload 20% of an Agatha Christie novel -- including the END. Get this straight: You want to beat your brains out writing something like Death on the Nile, and then have Google "tell the ending" to everyone who searches on your name or title ... for free?!

Other forms of slow suicide are FaceBook and similar. Chatchatchatchatchatchat... Amateur and wannabe writers, take note and beware: Very soon, you'll be spending the time you ought to be investing in learning your craft, and WRITING, in chatting. You won't be writing; at best you'll be blogging, and at worst you'll be babbling. Writing and studying time goes down the chute, and -- it happens routinely -- you can wind up with carpal tunnel syndrome, with nothing to show for it.

Every pro or semi-pro writer reading this has already filled the above list, and a lot more besides. Personally? I've got that list quadrupled in terms of initiatives I've undertaken. I also have 26 titles on my backlist ... and I still occasionally get "dead days," or days without sales.

Here's a fact you might not like: the average professional writer earns about US$3000 from writing, per annum. Some of us earn a hell of a lot more, and I'm privileged to be among them ... but it didn't happen overnight, or even swiftly. I've been in this game for 25 years.

If you're an aspiring writer, you cannot afford to shell out $2,500 for services you could perform yourself. A day arrives very soon in your career (long before you find a publisher or take the plunge and POD it yourself) when you must commit to what you're doing. LEARN. You'll have to be your own must ruthless editor, your own most ingenious publicist, your own dynamo of a marketing analyst, and your own demon accountant.

The first thing an accountant will tell you is to "plug the leaks: Look after the pennies and the dollars will look after themselves." Writing is your business. If you were a chef, you'd expect to work long, hard hours for nothing in the early days while building up your restaurant. If you didn't want to do this, you'd go work for someone else.

Writing is no different. You'll work for years to gather and hone your skills; then you'll work for months or years writing not one but several books. This is how you become good enough to charge money for your work, have people pay you, call it money well spent, and buy your next book.

My heart aches for aspiring writers who get drawn into deals like the one outlined in the above spam. I wish there were some regulatory body to stop these people, but alas, there isn't. It's down to folks like me -- us -- to speak up.

Uh ... pass it on.

Cheers,
MK

Death by Google

Well, I said I'd be back -- and I'm only a day late. Only. The wifi connection was "up," but there was no opportunity to blog ... as well as nothing significant to blog about. You certainly don't need to know about w.o.r.k, and how it totally screws up your life!

However, I'm back in a lull where I can transform myself from drone-for-hire to optimistic-and-opportunistic-writer. [short pause while Keegan puts on Writer's Hat]

You can probably tell from the relative brevity and occasional invisibility of recent posts, that life ain't what it used to be! The global economic downslide has hit everyone, everywhere -- physical bookstores are closing, publishers ain't publishing too much anymore, and writers are writing less and reading the employment ads more. And Keegan is no different. Middle of '08, we were screaming along and I was hoping to "give up the day job" by about May or June of '09. Not going to happen this year, guys --

In fact, in the immediate future, I'm going to have a good deal less time than usual to spend blogging and chatting: I have to get my priorities hammered out. I need time to write, and to do promotional activities, and blogging, alas, is going to be shuffled waaaaay down the list.

Add to this the fact that Google never did respond to my request to get my page rankings restored for this blog (they zeroed me out five months ago now, and apparently refuse to talk about it), and you have a blog with 350+ posts up, which is struggling to get 10 visitors per day ... which sadly (in fact, it's tragic) means that the time I invest in this blog is a dead loss, speaking in purely "business" terms.

Why did Big G zero out my page rankings? I'm clueless. I've read their rules. I've abided by all of them. I have been critical of their policies regarding Adsense on gay-friendly pages (where publishers are paid out in fractions of a penny per click on ads for which the advertiser paid to Google dollars, plural, for said click). I've begun to suspect there is a human monitor who reviews criticisms of The Goog, and when they recognize criticism, you get ... terminated. I can think of nothing else to account for what's going on.

So --

Time to shuffle my priorities. I need more time to write and do promotional work; I have less "spare" time to simply chat. I can certainly continue to post to this blog about book launches and special deals, and reviews, and webpage rebuilds. Hey, that's "promotion." But -- and I really am sad to be saying this -- I won't be able to write about every subject under the sun, as I have done for nine months!

Eventually, I'll be recutting this blog into two or three new blogs -- but again, this is a very time-consuming project. Put it this way: if we want Legends finished, and Hellgate finished, the time has to come from somewhere!

This is a very sad occasion for me: I've enjoyed blogging, and if there were any way to keep on doing it ... I would.

Blame the global recession if you like. Or blame Google (which is probably far closer to the mark!) for being a righteous, "true faith" prima dona who disapproves of gay-friendly sites and punishes criticism harshly.

To those readers (you know who you are!) who have been following this blog for months now: thank you! It's been a tremendous learning experience for me. Tune in occasionally, because when I get Hellgate finished (Christmas '09??) I'll have the time to cut The World According to Mel into Keegan's World, plus at least one other blog besides. And since those blogs won't have been "Googled to Death," theoretically I should be able to chat again. When you're chatting for a wide daily readership, you can rationalize the time invested as (!) promotional activities.

What's next, for me? Heavy-duty marketing. All titles available at Kindle, Mobi and Smashwords. All titles available as hardcovers. Press releases and review copies going in every direction; and ... so on.

Summer is winding down into fall ... the rain won't be far away now. Cool weather is good for getting some work done, and I do feel inspiration starting to bite. So --

Ciao for a while: I will be back, but not daily!
Thanks for reading, I appreciate it...
MK

Monday morning blues (and greens)

Regular readers couldn't have failed to notice ... no post yesterday. For the first time ever. I just spoiled my perfect record of posting every day since June 20th '08 ... well, rats. I had an extremely narrow "window of opportunity" through which to launch a blog post, and when it came around the wifi connection was jacking around. No Internet connection.

It's not till your connection goes down that you realize the extent to which we have become Internet dependent these days. No connection?? Count three, two, one, and we're ready to spit the dummy. I certainly was. No blog post? [screaming sound issuing from general Adelaide area]

Not that there was actually anything much worth blogging about yesterday -- but it's the principle of the thing.

Today, however, there's something quite nice to report: another title is up at Kindle, and also The Lords of Harbendane has been unstuck. So there are now four Kindle titles:





The next titles in the Kindle Store will be The Swordsman, Aquamarine, Twilight ... and then, the big news.

Next week we'll be having something of a launch, because the whole NARC series will be hitting Amazon, all of a piece. Now ... believe it or not, guys, they're actually there now, but to find them you'd have to go to Amazon and search on Mel Keegan. Next week, we'll be having a full-on launch, including a new webpage, a newsletter, a press release, and so on.

But for regular readers ... well, check this out, folks:



That's pretty cool. Right after we launch the paperback range, we'll organize the Kindle copies -- and Mobipocket, too.

So it's going to be busy in the next week or so.

Legends is coming along nicely, with getting close to 50 "episodes" online, and I have to admit that lately it's been getting some very nice traffic, with about 35-40% of visitors coming back to read the whole thing. The only thing that surprises and confounds me is that financial support in the way of Google patronage (those pesky swatches of text that you can never get away from, where the publisher gets about a dime when someone, somewhere, clicks one), Amazon shopping, and Paypal $1 donations, is ... weak. It takes (get this) 3,000 page impressions to get a single click on a Google ad, or a donation; and then Ma Goog pays in copper coins for said click.

Anyway -- the experiment continues, but for writers out there who are interested to see how this turns out, here's what we know so far: you'll be lucky to get about $5 in a week from the advertising parked on the site, but (!) the words DOWNLOAD FREE GAY FICTION bring in new readers by the swarms. Significant numbers of them go on to check out your web page, your blog, your landing page, and you'll notice a steep uptick in your sales figures. So ... the advertising is very close to a waste of time, but the volume of potential readers checking you out is quite large, and a number of them, uh, buy books or ebooks. And that is what it's all about.

Legends has been a lot of fun, and it currently maybe 20 posts away from hitting the spot where you're at "Here Ends the First Book of the Fall of the Atlantean Empire." I will be putting it onto hiatus there but the site will stay up perpetually. At that point, I'll properly format the book and put it into all the PDFs and so forth that people need for their gizmos. Also, there'll be artwork -- screensavers, desktops, cards, mugs, mousepads whatever --

And, as I do believe I've mentioned somewhere, my brain is switching gears already. I'm in HELLGATE mode. Seriously. It's Travers, Marin and Vidal going through my gray cells ... and three more delicious dudes never came alive off the page of one of my novels. I'm looking forward very much to finishing out the whole series in one haul -- two books, not three, and each of them about the size of Dangerous Moonlight. Yes, it's going to be a lot of work ... it's also going to be a load of fun.

Then, next year -- back to the Legends project, get that finished. Then ... we'll see.

Right now, I have to run: work. That other four letter word ending in K.

Ciao for now,
MK

POD Publishing: Mobipocket has made it so simple.

Regular readers of this blog will know that The Lords of Harbendane seemed to be under a cloud from the get-go. No matter what we did, things seldom went right, and often went wrong ... including javascript cockups at CreateSpace and other stuff that you just wouldn't believe.

The "jinx" continued when we tried to get Harbendane to the Kindle Store! We uploaded three books; two were published like greased lightning -- automatic. The third got "stuck" in the "publish process," and it's going to take customer support and a tech crew with a large screwdriver to get it unstuck, make it available to you --

And you guessed. It's The Lords of Harbendane that had to be the one to get stuck!

So, it was with a degree of healthy trepidation that we approached the Mobipocket store. And it's with the same degree of absolute relief that I can report ...

The process of publishing to Mobi is easy, simple, a breeze. Harbendane went through so easily, we were left looking at each other, waiting for the other shoe to drop! It never did. It's done.

Try this for size:
BUY THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE FROM MOBIPOCKET

Yep. You can go there right now, buy the book for your Kindle, PC or Mac, screenreader, Palm Pilot, iLiad, Blackberry, Pocket PC, smartphone, whatever ...! It was just that easy.

The Mobipocket publishing process, in a thimble, is this:

Have your book ready in HTML, DOC or PDF.
Open a Publisher account with Mobipocket.
Download the Mobipocket Creator, Publisher Edition.
"Build" your ebook on your own desktop.
Make a project, set the metadata, add your cover.
Click on "deploy," which logs you in.
Upload the file from Creator.
Set the price.
Activate the book
Get your affiliate link.

And you're done. And all the instructions for every last thing are right there on screen. You're listening to sighs of utter relief here.

And in the coming days you'll see a lot more Keegans appearing at Mobipocket ... and, end of next week, we'll have a launch. Get the champagne on ice.

Cheers,
MK

Among the 93,036 at Amazon Kindle...

Just a "service message" at the moment: you can actually go to the Kindle Store, search on "Mel Keegan," and have The Lords of Harbendane pop up. It's still in the "publishing" process, meaning it's starting to filter its way into the global engine, but you can already "sign up to be notified when the item becomes available" :

And as of a few days ago, you can get the Kindle reader application for your iPhone. Cool stuff, this. We'll keep you posted. (And yes, Harbendane is probably title number 93,036 at the Kindle Store ... that being the number of titles quotes as being inthe catalog, with Harbendane still working its way in.)

Cheers,
MK

Sneaking in via the backdoor

Some of you will have been waiting for this news for several weeks now, and I'm delighted to be able to deliver it! We did indeed find a way in through the back door, and we've snuck into Kindle. The Lords of Harbendane will be the first title to show up in the engine -- in "12 to 72 hours," according to the system. Could be later today, could be Wednesday, but certainly by the middle of the week you will be able to read Keegan on your Kindle.

Next books on their way: Dangerous Moonlight, Fortunes of War, Nocturne, Twilight and Swordsman. These ought to be showing up in the next ten days.

We've left the price the same as you'd pay over on Payloadz -- $9.99 -- which seems fair for the books. Amazon keeps 65% of that price, and DreamCraft and Keegan will split the rest. The theory is that you may earn less from the sale, but you get a lot more sales. So here's the grand experiment ... let's take this for a spin!

We're also working to get the same books up to Mobipocket, in the same time frame, and I only just discovered that if you need to read on a smartphone (though not YET yet iPhone), you can get a Mobipocker Reader (free download) for your device.

I have no idea if Mobi is going to be available for the iPhone anytime soon, but I know that Kindle is already available for the Apple gadget, and since (!) Amazon owns Mobipocket, one suspects that compatibility can't be far behind.

You might find this interesting and useful: http://www.teddypig.com/2008/10/stanza-mobipocket-on-mac-osx-and-so-much-more/ ... if you need to juggle formats. What won't they be doing next?!

And here is the homepage of the company behind the Stanza format which is about to put Keegan on your phone: http://www.lexcycle.com/.

But if you're into both Kindle and iPhone, it's as simple as this:
Amazon's Kindle for iPhone hits the App Store. "Sure, Amazon could pit the Kindle squarely against phone- and PDA-based e-book apps, but why not play both sides? The company had previously mentioned its desire to embrace non-Kindle devices in its digital delivery ecosystem, and the first fruits of that labor have now hit the iPhone App Store. The uncreatively-named Kindle for iPhone allows you access to all of your Kindle content right from the comfort of your iPhone or iPod touch ..."

...and so on, and so forth, and such like.

Meaning, any time around about now (that story started to run a few days ago), the iPhone fraternity and sorority will be looking to the Kindle Store for readable goodies.

Time to get on board before the bus leaves! Hence, we're working very hard to get popular titles online, and into the "global catalogs."

Speaking of popular titles, the proof of NARC: Aphelion should be in the mail, tomorrow or Wednesday, latest -- so look for a newsletter from us later in the week, when the whole series launches in paperback at Amazon. And yes, the Kindle launch will be about a week later.

Chapter Fourteen is up at Legends...

Otherwise the long weekend (Adelaide Cup Day -- a horseracing carnival) is all about work. I'll be taking a day off next week -- and if not, then I'll seize a couple of days the week following. By then, I'll need the break, big time.

And now, back to work.

Cheers,
MK

Ebooks ... and other seven-headed monsters

I can honestly say that I've learned a lot today ... about code; about myself; about persistence; about going cross-eyed in front of a monitor and not giving up; keeping a cool(er) head when all about me people were losing theirs and blaming it on me --

[And before you say, "Hey, that reminds me of something," it's a tangential misquotation (deliberate, damnit!) from Kipling's poem, "If." And yes, you can source it on the web -- wonderful poem; find it here: http://www.swarthmore.edu/~apreset1/docs/if.html]

--It's taken a couple of days to get the code right, but Dangerous Moonlight is now online at Smashwords, where you can download it for your iPhone, your Kindle, your Palm Pilot, your Sony Reader...!



Click on this image to, uh, "buy now from Smashwords"

We had wanted to launch with three books, but it's more of a wrestling match than we'd expected, to get really good results in all formats. Mind you, it's well worth the effort, because now Dangerous is going to perform properly on everything short of Microsoft Reader. I'm holding off on offering it in the LIT format for several reasons...

I've heard that the new Reader has "issues;" and also, there's no way short of paying too much money to be able to secure the file to prevent people just copying the text right out into a DTP program and printing it by the case. I don't like that.

Anyway, Keegan is on your smartphone, and on your Kindle (in Mobi format), via Smashwords -- at least with Dangerous Moonlight! The next up will be Lords of Harbendane, but Fortunes of War is being a little devil. A few days ago I rattled off the book's pedigree, which was received by howls of disbelief. To say that the manuscript is a mutt, a moggy, a mule, is too kind ... to call the finished book "moving and inspirational" is not helping me get it bashed into shape for a new edition.

However, we persist. The Smashwords interface is certainly easy. We did time-out a few times when trying to upload/convert files -- but hey, this is Australia, which has a backbone like like a pygmy shrew.

And -- well, that's where we are today. Want Dangerous Moonlight ... Harry and Nick ... on your iPhone or Kindle? Then (here are the magic words) BUY NOW FROM SMASHWORDS. And yes, that's a link, takes you right to the page where you can download the goods.

Chapter Thirteen has commenced at Legends, but otherwise the day has been devoted to CODE. And I have to give credit where it's due.

Jade can actually read this gibberish:


When all else failed (and it did), she loaded it into a progaming editor (Notebook++) and took the css gobbledygook apart. Rebuilt it. Make the gibberish actually work. Ye gods, there's something seriously wrong with the woman. It's not normal. (And Mel Keegan is going to prognosticate about normality?!)

I think this one is going to cost me a bottle of wine.

Ciao for now,
MK

Blogging in the rain -- really!

Can't blog ... I'm too busy watching the rain. Not that you guys would call it rain, of course, but hey -- this is the first time WATER has dropped willy-nilly out of the sky, since something like October! So even though it hasn't rained much (most of the time you could count the splashes as they hit the pavers) you just had to stop and stare.

Of course, its all over now. The radar map shows blue skies behind the current overcast, and since the wind just got up these clouds will be gone before long.

But it was nice while it lasted:
There you are ... WET and everything. Water on the sidewalk. Clouds in the sky. Makes a difference, I'll tell you.

The rain is one of a couple of Significant Happenings in the last 24 hours. The second is that the proof copies of Equinox and Scorpio have arrived, and they are superb. CreateSpace has done a marvelous job, as usual. Now, we're waiting on the proofs for Stopover and Aphelion, and then -- the book launch at Amazon for the whole NARC series, all of a piece. For which, expect a newsletter...

Otherwise, it's work as usual. The Kindle situation remains in limbo ... I'm working on the reformatting for Smashwords, but it's going to be slow, due to the fact that I'm converting some very old, eccentric documents --

For example, Fortunes of War. This one was typed in Juniper Computing's Softword program (circa 1985), and SAVED TO TAPE. Much later, the tape-memory files were recalled, it was printed out, scanned in, run through OCR software and fed one page at a time into Lotus AMI Pro; the final edit was done, and hard copies were sent to GMP for publication in the early 1990s. The files were then stored on single density 3.5" floppy disks. These were, much later, read back into Lotus Word Pro and stored on an IEEE Firewire external harddrive that, at 30MB, looked incalculably vast when it was new. The "new" lotus files on the Firewire drive were of the LWF type ... which, thank gods, Serif PagePlus 10 reads extremely well. So, the DreamCraft version is in a Serif DTP format, a PPP document. For Lulu.com, this was published to PDF.

There is no simple .doc file ... nor has there ever been! ... for Fortunes of War. However, you can (!) select-all/copy a Serif PPP file to the clipboard, and dump it into Microsoft Word 2003 (not later versions; the more clever Microsquash gets, the less it shakes hands with other formats). Then, you save back the Word document -- not as a .doc, but as a Web Page Unfiltered. This gets rid of most of the passenger trash. Now, use Word to reopen the HTML file, and you're ready to run it through the process required by Smashwords to get rid of all remaining formatting.

Now, it's true that the new(er) books will be easy by comparison. But I have several golden oldies that are reader favorites from yonks ago. For instance, Fortunes is among my February bestsellers! Would you believe this? A book that's been out for over 15 years and has been through more editions (with more stupid covers designed by moronic artists) than you can shake a stick at, is still out there, selling so well --

Put it like this: if GMP were still handling this book, I'd have had to sell about 115 copies of this oldie in the month of February, to make the income it generated for me at Amazon (paperbacks), Payloadz (ebooks) and Lulu (hardcovers). I'm amazed, and pleased.

So -- yep, we're heading for Smashwords, one step at a time. In fact, after I finish this post I'm going to run one of the very new books through the conversion process, and with any luck, in a couple of days I might be able to run up a flag and tell you, you can get Dangerous Moonlight and The Lords of Harbendane for your iPhone, and as Mobi, readable on your Kindle.

Bear with me.

Speaking of all this stuff -- the Keegan sales figures were just tallied up for February, and I can tell you that we did more than double the business in Feb that we did in January. Nice, that. About 50% was ebooks, 45% paperbacks, 5% hardcovers. Of the ebooks, 75% were the regular PC/Mac version, 25% were specifically for the screenreaders, though I have no idea what kind ... the ones that can read a properly designed PDF, is all I know!

The book launch for The Lords of Harbendane obviously put that title out in front, with decent sales ... not brilliant, but in fact better than I'd secretly hoped for. Don't underestimate 1) the global recession, 2) the length of the unemployment lines, 3) the price of gas, and 4) the idiotic price of importing a Keegan into Aus and New Zealand --

It costs US$38.04 to buy The Lords of Harbendane in paperback and have it shipped via Amazon to Aus or NZ. Run the exchange rate (at .63c, as of this morning) and you get a price of A$60.38, ppd. That's two tanks of gas for a small car, or a week's groceries for a frugal couple.

So, if you drop out the "lost" Aussie and Kiwi readers, and factor in an adjustment percentage for the global recession etc., the fact is, Harbendane is doing very nicely. There was a time (2002/3) when DreamCraft would organize a book launch and we'd ship about 250 copies of the new title in THE FIRST WEEK. That doesn't happen these days, and I don't expect it to; but I have high hopes for the future, when advertising, technology and economic recovery have conspired to change the way things currently are. For the moment, I'm extremely pleased with sales -- and looking forward to seeing how the books' availability for iPhone and Kindle, via Smashwords, will add to the numbers.

Interest in the Legends digital novel project could be higher, I'll admit -- fact: a lot of people just don't have a use for electronic files, or else have no interest in a serial! However, the emerging book has a strong core of about 50 - 75 readers who swing by either every day or once a week ... not bad going for a project that only launched three weeks ago and has had very, very limited promotional exposure.

Right now, I'm looking out for listings, directories, where Legends can be, uh, listed. There are loads of them, but almost all have a downside. Either they're owned and operated by people who have a problem with gay fiction (and that's okay, because where a directory is a personal project, the list-mom/dad has the right to decide what gets into their list) or else the automated systems are so vast, one will vanish into the primordial ooze --

For example, www.blogcatalog.com is an amazing directory, but it's the size of the Death Star. Searchable -- yes; but the tag "gay" pulls up 42,884 items. "Fiction" pulls up 28,272 items. "Books" = 130,260. "Gay fiction" = 1,746 ... getting warmer, but at 10 results per search page, you're still looking at 174 pages -- and if it's anything like Google (and it is) people don't look past Page One.

Legends needs a lot more of a shove to get it properly launched. I had hoped, initially, that "viral marketing" would take over, that people would email people who emailed people ... with the URL. This happened for the first few days, tapered off and stopped. Now, you and I both know the readership is vastly bigger than this! But it seems one can't look for much in the way of user participation -- which is fair enough, too. (It's an experiment, and this is one of the facts that just fell out of the data.)

Statistically? About 500 "unique" visitors checked out Legends in the first week; about 50 of those are still reading; 20 more have come on board in the last couple of weeks. So you had about 10% of the check-out crowd (those who like to read; like fantasy; like Keegan; have the fascination and/or patience to stick around; and like ebooks) who became regulars, plus 10 new readers per week finding the book and becoming followers of this serial.

This is actually pretty good. If the numbers remain stable, it means 250+ regulars by the time the book is finished, and 500 new readers finding it, and grabbing the whole thing, during any one year. That's a reader base which is quite vigorous enough to support the advertising with the occasional shopping spree at Amazon which started out on the Legends page, and so on.

Speaking of Legends -- two posts are up today:
A Bargain by the Jackal Throne (conclusion)
and
The Oracle Speaks

And now, I'm going to spend a fascinating hour or so shoving Dangerous Moonlight headfirst through what Smashwords terms as the "meatgrinder." If everything comes up Keegan, I'll let you know tomorrow!

Cheers,
MK

PayPal off the rails, the Gay Gal and Microsoft, and ebooks run amok

Sometimes, you have to wonder. I was sent a link, and followed it to this story which I'm going to share with you here:

Identifying Yourself As A Lesbian Gets You Banned On XBOX Live

Read it and weep. I'll give you the short version, but you have GOT to read the whole thing -- and scan down the comments, too: they get crazy. Makes you take another look at your fellow human being...

"Teresa says that she was harassed by other players and later suspended from XBOX Live because she identified herself as a lesbian in her profile. When she appealed to Microsoft, she says they told her that other gamers found her sexual orientation "offensive."

The whole story leaves you scratching your head, not least about Microsquash. Anybody who knows the slightest thing about XBox Live knows that it's a place where sexism, racism, homophobia, ill-feeling toward women, runaway violence, crass behavior, the most extreme of non-stop coarse language, the whole gamut of social nasties, run rampant.

And they're all bent out of shape because some gal says, "Hey, I'm gay, you got a problem with that?"

Apparently Microsoft has a major problem with that. The rest of the twaddle that abounds on XBox Live is, it seems, fine and dandy. Say what you like, in any terms you like, as poisonously as you like --

Just don't say you're gay.

O...kay. And this is legal? And, if it's legal, this is desirable because...?

While I was over there at The Consumerist (dot com) reading that piece, I couldn't help being whapped between the eyeballs by a couple of their other headlines. Stay with me, guys, because this one is chin-hit-knees time:

PayPal Charges $81,400,836,908 For $26 Tank Of Gas
Juan Zamora fed his 1994 Chevy Camaro $26 worth of gas, a transaction for which PayPal charged his debit card $81,400,836,908. Unsurprisingly, PayPal saw nothing wrong with the charge and demanded that Juan prove that he didn't actually buy $81.4 billion worth of gas.

He only learned of the astounding figure when he received an email later that afternoon informing him that his debit card, which started out with $90 on it, was maxed out.

Initially, Mr. Zamora thought it must've been a joke. But after contacting PayPal customer service he was surprised to see that the company treated it as anything but a laughing matter.

"Somebody from a foreign country who spoke in broken English argued with me for 10 to 15 minutes," Zamora said. " ‘Did you get the gas?' he asked. Like I had to prove that I didn't pump $81,400,836,908 in gas!"
He would have needed more than 3 billion fill-ups of the amount he actually pumped into his tank in order to reach that outrageous sum.

Eventually, Zamora said, he was finally able to convince the representative that he didn't deserve to be in the same position as General Motors, who has lost roughly 80 billion dollars since 2005.

When Zamora returned to the Conoco gas station, he said, the attendant would not believe him until he showed her the printout of the PayPal receipt.

What moral is Juan taking away from the story? "Pay cash."

!!!!!!!!!! There's no answer to that. Here it is again, on another news service -- this is so delicious, you have to read it twice:
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2009/02/27/driver-fills-up-gas-tank-receives-bill-for-86-billion/

And there's one more story at The Consumer you really have to look at while you're there (in fact, this is such a great page, I'm going to bookmark it and go back often ... they get the absolutely choice stories):

Outcry Prompts Amazon To Stop Overcharging For Digital Edition
Wait for it: "Kevin couldn't understand why Amazon charged $29.95 for the digital version of Confessions of a Butcher when the paperback cost only $11.95. Amazon tried to gussy up the Kindle edition by offering what looked like a steep 45% discount, but the digital edition still cost $5 more than the print edition. Even the author's wife chimed in to Amazon's discussion forum to pan the discrepancy, adding, "what's really ridiculous is that we sell more ebooks at $20 than we do new paperbacks for $11.95."

And that's far from all, guys. You might have thought I was over-reacting the other day when I broke the news that Amazon Kindle is an Americans-only club. Turns out, I didn't know the full shock-horror stuff when I wrote The road to Amazon.com is land-mined...

Here's the rub:
Amazon is heavily discounting the price of eBooks to spur Kindle sales, but eBooks won't always be so cheap. Writing over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo warns that if the Kindle becomes as ubiquitous as the iPod, eBooks, which can't be shared, traded, or resold, may soon cost more than their print counterparts. "As the master of the e-book universe," Manjoo claims, "Amazon will eventually call the shots on pricing, marketing, and everything else associated with the new medium." Can you see yourself paying $30 for an eBook anytime soon?
http://consumerist.com/5161348/outcry-prompts-amazon-to-stop-overcharging-for-digital-edition?skyline=true&s=x

Now, there's actually an upside to this ... from Keegan's admittedly skewed perspective. The damned Kindle also reads Mobi, and HTML, and a bunch of other stuff. They're even fiddling around, trying to get it to read a PDF. The third incarnation of Kindle will almost certainly be tweaked to read PDFs properly.

Now, given that Amazon has the desire to dominate the entire ebook field, bet your bottom dollar they'll make their gadget read everything. Then, they'll be charging US$30/A$40 for an ebook ????

Actually, they're welcome to go ahead and see what the audience will tolerate. Because you'll still be able to get a 450pp Keegan for $10, and download it cleanly to your PC, and feed it to your shiny new Kindle via the smartcard slot (!) and read to your heart's content.

Nostrakeeganus, he seeing huge marketplace of desperate people looking for affordable books after they saddled themselves with a Kindle and found out they can't afford to use it...

The greed behind a $30 pricetag for an ebook edition is nothing less than gobsmacking. And who in this world would contest the fact that it will serve the greedy buggers right to engineer an absolutely fantastic, peerless device and then have customers feed it with an SD card, with all kinds of goodies from all over the web -- and never touch down at the Kindle Store, where the same item costs three times the price ... besides which, you can only get American authors anyway!

Is it me, or is this getting just plain bizarre?

Oh -- and speaking of ebooks, the next segment of Legends is up, too...

Ciao for now,
Mel

The road to Amazon.com is land-mined

Puffs of steam are coming out of my ears: I'm going to have a RANT today, so -- bear with me.

Good gods, they make it hard. I'm within eight seconds of saying, "stuff Kindle." And this, after I've blown off two days formatting documents to suit them.

What goes on --? Amazon.com just slammed the door in Keegan's face, is what's wrong.

In order to sell my books to Kindle readers -- and bear in mind, Amazon is out there, hyper-marketing their platform in order to command an ever-growing market share! -- I have to have the following:

American TIN number for tax purposes (done: got one).
American bank account access (done: no problem).
American mailing address (how the hell do they expect me to have this?)
American phone number (ditto).

To all intents and purposes, Amazon Kindle is open ONLY to American writers and authors ... at the same time as the American marketplace is 90% of everything, and Amazon is actively at war with all other ebook platforms, to command the lion's share of the market.

Does this sound kosher to you? Point one: non-American writers are being shut out of the market -- at the same time as Amazon.com makes a ton of money dumping cheap goods on the rest of the world (books for 10c, for instance!) ... and Point two: American readers are soon going to have vastly limited access to foreign works --

Foreign works which, for example, express the global point of view, the cosmopolitan concept of humanity, in which the thoughts, dreams and dreads of people living in -- oh, Paris, Rome, London, Tokyo, Beijing, the centers where culture was born many centuries before America was even dreamed of! -- are reckoned, in the wider scheme of the cosmos, to be just as important as those of people who are curiously gifted enough to live between the borders of Canada and Mexico.

Moreover, there is one additional thing that carbonizes my noodles:

The simple statement: "Non-Americans need not apply" is not posted until you get five layers deep into the publication process.

There is no easily accessible FAQ. There is a labyrinthine forum with all the welcoming characteristics of an asylum, filled with abusive inmates who seem to believe one has nothing better to do with one's time than to read "threads" which have run 11 months, and are now forty yards long -- filled with poison-pen retorts for non-Americans, blatantly WRONG answers, hapless misinformation, helpful responses to questions that were NOT ASKED, and --!!

The situation regarding Keegan on your Kindle right now is this: I'm going to try negotiating with family in the States, to use an acceptable address and phone number. If for any reason the other half of the family has a problem with this, you won't be reading Keegan on you Kindle. Before that happens, Amazon.com will have to come out of this self-imposed shell of isolation, drop the parochial behavior, join the global community (which it has ambitions to dominate) and play nice.

Till then, my Kindle ambitions are snookered. Which, as I said above, burns my noodles ... because Kindle is already a millions-strong marketplace. When people change over to Kindle they cease to buy paperbacks --

Meaning, there is a millions-strong sector of the reading community that's a dead zone for any writer or publisher who does not have a physical foothold, complete with phone number, between the borders of Mexico and Canada.

Now, Amazon has made squeaking noises about trying to get Kindle to work in Europe and Australia, but so far they haven't even been able to swing a reliable deal with wireless providers in the UK. Down here in Aus and NZ? Forget it. The infrastructure doesn't exist. Not going to happen.

Here's the bottom line: If Amazon wins the marketing battle (as it intends to), if Kindle becomes The Platform of the future ... if enormous numbers of readers change over and don't want paperbacks any longer ... and if only American writers and publishers are allowed to sell on Kindle ...

There's going to be a whole lot of professional writers, globally (myself being one of them) who will just jack it in and get a proper job. Literature itself will suffer, because the only people publishing on the massive platform will be a small nucleus of real professional writers who are just geographically lucky ... plus about fifty million semi-literate wannabe authors, none of whom would know good grammar if they tripped over it in the street, who are not just allowed to publish -- they're invited. They're exhorted. They're marketed alongside the giants of literature, as if they belong there; and why?

The privilege of geography. No matter that Amazon's marketplace is global and vast amounts of its profits are raked in from overseas customers.

You bet, I'm PO'd. Wasting my time (or, having my time wasted for me) tends to do that to me.

Now I have to take on the challenge of Smashwords. Go back and reformat all the documents over again. But at least Smashwords is playing nice -- I can put my books there. If you were asking me, Amazon could learn a thing or two from Smashwords.

Mark Coker's new company at the very least lives in the right century, with both feet planted firmly in the global community. Meanwhile, whoever designed and built the apology for the architecture supporting Kindle appears to live in some parochial cyber territory, temporally and psychologically analogous to the 1950s.

Message to Amazon.com: get real people. There's a world out here, and if you want to dump cheap goods into it for your own profit, you have to wake up to the fact the conduit must run both ways. Or are you actually trying to shut out the global voice, lock in the all-American point of view, raise a generation of Kindle-users who couldn't find Belgium on a map? This might result in a generation of more American Americans, but I ask you, does this kind of intellectual isolationism have any place in the twenty first century?

Okay: I'm done ranting for now.

Yeah, yeah ... I posted the next segment of Legends before I threw away the rest of my time. Find out what happens when Soran wakes up...

And people, email the Legends URL to your friends, please!!! At this point, according to Statcounter, I have loads of people coming in to collect only Chapter Ten, folks who have never touched down on Legends before -- which says clearly, the files are being emailed, not the URL. Remember, to make this work we need people on the page, taking advantage of the advertising: sending the files to your mate won't help! Thanks for your help here.

And, uh, I imagine I'll be in a better mood tomorrow! Meanwhile, the ebooks are available at PayLoads, and will be appearing at Smashwords when I've had the chance to thrash through the conversion process.

Ciao for,
ML

Patience, Keegan, patience! (My kingdom for a bloody ebook gizmo ... revisited)

Okay, Keegan, be patient. Hold your horses. It's already the end of February ... it's going to be 2010 before you can turn around and spit: you DON'T want to spend a grand on something that's going to be virtually obsolete before it's paid for itself --

Like an ebook screenreader (fingers itch to make grab for credit card and order something like Bebook or Omnia). Because look what's coming out next year:

It's called epaper. It's from a company called Plastic Logic, and get a load of this:

...and here's the a-b-c right off the company's own webpage:
"Our foray into the market will begin in the second half of 2009 with pilots, and trials with key partners. We expect to accelerate the momentum of our sales in 2010.

Differentiated by a stunning form factor (the size of 8.5 x 11-inch paper), the Plastic Logic reader features a big readable display. Yet it's thinner than a pad of paper, lighter than many business periodicals, and offers a high-quality reading experience - better than alternatives of paper or other electronic readers on the market today.

The Plastic Logic reader supports a full range of business document formats, such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and Adobe PDFs, as well as newspapers, periodicals and books. It has an easy gesture-based user interface and powerful software tools that will help business users to organize and manage their information. Users can connect to their information either wired or wirelessly and store thousands of documents on the device. The reader incorporates E Ink technology for great readability and features low power consumption and long battery life.
http://www.plasticlogic.com/product.html

How much the thing will cost is another question, of course. These guys have to know they're up against Kindle (about US$350) and what have you, so if the Plastic Logic thingamajig cost about US$550, that's about as high as they would dare go; you can get the iPhone from Walmart for about US$100 just now, and the Omnia is tickling US$200, reducing in price all the time.

Also, it's a new, proprietary technology: "Traditional displays consist of millions of transistors that are etched onto silicon using photolithographic techniques. Plastic Logic displays use polymer (plastic) transistors that are sprayed and painted onto a sheet of plastic and an E Ink sheet (the same technology used in the Kindle)."
http://www.examiner.com/x-1652-Gadgets-Examiner~y2009m2d26-Move-over-Kindle-a-plastic-ereader-is-coming

So long as they don't price it way out the consumer's reach ... and if they wise up and make them in colors instead of the funeral-shroud white plastic as the Henry Ford option ("You can have any color you like, as long as it's black") I, for one, will be at the head of the queue with the magic plastic in hand. I just want a black one.

In fact ... Nostrakeeganus, he going to make prediction. He see price war coming. He see big, big undercutting fight, where Plastic Logic tries to kill Kindle, and Kindle then Plastic Logic gang up and try to kill Sony, and then all three gang up on Apple and beat the iPhone's brains out.

Frankly ... I've waited this long to get an ebook reader, I can suffer a little longer. 2010 sounds just right as the Great Purchase Date; wt which point it'll be all about who's got the best price for the best service. But I have to admit --

The lure of having a full-sized screen is powerful. It also places formatting, nice design, illustration and all, squarely back into the hands of publishers, rather than having to drop out everything except the italic, boldface and justification! For instance, Legends might be ebooked complete with the full suite of artwork.

One wonders if the Plastic Logic device will offer a color display version?

Speaking of Legends, Chapter Ten concluded today ...

Cheers,
MK

Writing and publishing for a technological explosion

Today I'm working on the files for the titles I want to send to Amazon Kindle by the end of the week. We're doing Nocturne and Twilight, The Deceivers, and two (or three) others where I'm not absolutely sure what they'll be. Could be White Rose, or Swordsman, or ... whatever. Depends what I feel like when I get down to the brass-tacks conversion work in the morning.

This morning, I blew off an hour (the only hour I had to invest in this ... work was calling. Loudly; demandingly) to figure out the process of how to get the book out of the DTP software (Serif) and into stripped HTML, without any loss of italics, chapter formatting, paragraph indents, and so on.

Done: process figured out. Now, I ought to be able to fix the other books in a couple of hours in the morning ... and, since they're digital, they ought to pop up in the Amazon engine more or less in real time. I hope. If so, we'll be having our Kindle launch at the weekend.

A couple of news items crossed my desk this morning, and for a change it's not bad news ... it's good. For a start, Amazon just announced that it intends to make its Kindle range available for smartphones:

Amazon has unveiled a new version of its Kindle reader, with a company spokesman having also announced that Amazon plans to offer Kindle books on cellphones.

This news countered Google's announcement that the 1.5 million public domain books available on its Google Book Search offering will soon be available (free, of course) via a new cellphone application.

I believe that cellphones will quickly outpace the dedicated e-book readers, including the Kindle, as the platform of choice for e-book readers. Leading the pack? The iPhone, ironically.

When asked by The New York Times a year ago about the quality of the Amazon Kindle, Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously said, that "it doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore".

(It was an ironic statement, because one heard it by reading — all the more so for me, as I first read it on a Kindle.)

It's worth noting that Amazon.com sold more Kindles (at least 500,000) in its first year of sales than the number of iPods that Apple sold in its first year (378,000).

Apple may not understand the value of e-books, but iPhone users will embrace them anyway. The reason is simple: The iPhone has a decent sized, high-quality screen. And its user base includes millions of people who love to do everything on their iPhones, including reading, which they're already doing with online content.
http://reseller.co.nz/reseller.nsf/feat/936AAD17BF9EDEC0CC2575660012FD28

(Incidentally, the above article, on Reseller News, is extremely good. There's a lot in it for writers, publishers, readers and technologists to mull over. I urge you to read it: Here comes the e-book revolution)

Ebooks are almost certainly where the future is ... they cost a hell of a lot less; they weigh nothing; they save trees; they let writers say what they what they want to say, and say it FAST. Going through the channels of traditional publishing, what you write/say today won't be read/heard for YEARS. What you said in 2003 might no longer be relevant in 2005.

I've been saying this for eons, and it was great to see the point validated here:

The book publishing industry is one of the most backward, musty, obsolete businesses in our economy. While every other kind of information moves at the speed of light, the process of publishing a book is like something from the Middle Ages.

For authors, it can take months to even find a literary agent willing to represent their work. Then the agent takes months to find a publisher. Then it takes ages for the publishing company to get the book out there.

People are already circumventing all this by self-publishing. The self-publishing industry is the only area of paper-book publishing that's thriving right now. Soon enough, a huge number of authors are finally going to get fed up with the publishing industry and just self-publish electronically. They'll hire their own freelance editors and do the marketing themselves. The publication of a finished manuscript will take minutes, rather than months.

Old-school thinkers in the publishing industry will lament the slap-dash nature of self-published e-books, and sniff that books are no longer published with the quality and care that they used to achieve. (Never mind that book publishers abandoned high standards years ago in previous cost-cutting initiatives.) The world will pass them by as the book industry undergoes the same transition that happened with the media and blogs.
http://reseller.co.nz/reseller.nsf/feat/936AAD17BF9EDEC0CC2575660012FD28

There's actually more good news, if you "look past what's on the screen," or as they used to say, read between the lines.

View the industry, for a moment, from the perspective of the person (the buyer) who decides what books are going to make it into the physical, streetfront store:

Every month I meet with publishing reps who arrive with information sheets on all the books they’ll be releasing in the next month or two.

We go through them, one at a time, talking about what makes each of them “right” — or not — for our clientele. I look at the cover image, read the blurb , consider the title, the author, the price, the number of pages, whether or not it has a hard or soft cover, and how many other similar/better titles we may already have on the shelves. Then I listen to my gut. If it says okay, I think about how many copies we’re likely to sell and how long it could take to do so. I order anything from 0 to 10 copies; by far, the majority are refused.

But even to appear on the form means they have gone through the agony of being submitted to a publisher, assessed for the sales and marketing potential, been accepted, edited and printed. Thousands of manuscripts never make it that far. Publishers make mistakes, but their expertise offers some assurance that a book has a market. When it is presented to buyers , it has already succeeded way beyond anything the author could have dreamed .

The process of getting a book into the hands of a reader via the traditional method is so arduous that many writers consider self-publishing to be an easier route to literary glory. A few have done so successfully. It may be easier to get a book into print this way, but these writers face more obstacles to actually being read by anyone other than immediate family .
http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Lifestyle/Article.aspx?id=941494

Speaking as a writer, I don't want to deal with all that stuff anymore. I don't want to go through the years-long hunt for agents, and then the years-long period when the agent shops the book around and sends you bills for postage and phonecalls, and comes up dry at the end of a two year stretch.

There's a line that troubles me deeply in the above feature: Publishers make mistakes, but their expertise offers some assurance that a book has a market. And she says this literally cheek-by-jowl with the remark, by far, the majority are refused. (In other words, the store buyer doesn't reject authors and books ... s/he rejects publishers. Yeeeouch! That smarts.)

If the publishers were smart enough to know which books would bear fruit and which were dross ... why are the vast, vast majority dumped by the buyers at wide-spectrum book stores?

The reason is that everyone has a different perspective on what's good, what's great, what's commercial, and what's garbage. We're all human. We disagree. Frequently. This is what makes horse races.

But traditional publishing is an area in which one's subjectivity is going to come expensive, in the event that one is dead wrong. And this is what has happened to the publishing industry. They placed their faith in the few percent of writers who can sell millions; they pruned back the tens of thousands of writers who play to smaller audiences. This was done to maximize profits, but the net effect is that the human voice is getting strangled out of existence.

The solution? Digital publishing: ebooks. Anyone can publish a book, right NOW. And yes, I know that 99% of them will be the most unutterable rubbish! However, if only 1% of books published between now and 2100, using emerging "sunrise" technologies, were fine works...

That's 10,000 fine pieces of work in every million self-published. And the way POD is going, by 2012, that would represent a year's creativity. If half a percent are great, it's 5,000 new, fantastic books, per year. That's 100 great new books per week.

People might just start to read again, if they can get novels for a price they can afford ... save trees, and so forth. Or maybe the speculations I made the other day are closer to the truth:

What I'm saying is this: publishers -- whether New York or DIY -- shoot for the mass market. The big-time publishers have their market pegged: extremely literate people who demand high standards in their reading. But the mass of the public is increasingly illiterate; the readers who demand high standards, and have $40 to spend on a hardcover, are an ever-shrinking group, while the millions of readers who wouldn't know good grammar if it jumped up and bit them ... well, these people have pockets full of smartphones. And a lot of smartphones take SD cards. You can read stories on smartphones, kill time on the bus, train, plane, whatever.

Here's the bottom line: For every highly literate lady or gent with a credit card, standing in line for the hardcover of the New York Times bestseller, there could be a thousand, or ten thousand, semi-literate readers with smartphones, willing to pay $2, or $1, for an entertaining little read to pass the time on the commute.

Short version: there is an incredible fortune out there, reapable in the next few years ... and I have the sneakiest feeling that the writer's literary merit will be just about the last quality looked for by the mass of "common" readers who are, by the millions, daily, paying tiny fees for quick, cute reads.

Adult literacy is an increasingly lost cause, at the same time as the technology is racing to put video phones on our wrists, video wallpaper in our living rooms, and the electronic equivalent of the old "penny dreadful" in our laps, to while away that train ride, after we've all put the car up on blocks in a concerted effort to save the planet from our carbon emissions.
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2009/02/literary-history-repeats-itself-for-2.html

There's a heck of a lot more to talk about (I wanted to tackle the question of competition ... how one survives in a world where 100 great new books are published every single week, year in, year out, via technological freedom), and also to read -- but I just ran out of time.

I'll give you a couple of links, and with a tad bit of luck I'll be able to pick up the thread of this tomorrow of the day after!

See these:
Book publishers, R.I.P.? In this bad economy, it's tougher than ever to sell books
and
Self-publishing is not a last resort for authors

...and like the man said in the movie, "I'll be back."

Oh -- the next segment of Legends is up: enjoy!

Cheers,
MK