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

The Swordsman ... on your iPhone!

At last, some great news! If you've been following this saga, you're probably aware that the last time (which was the first time) we tried to get onto Smashwords, we had upload problems. The great news? Fixed. Mark Coker recently announced a new Meatgrinder -- which is the Smashwords proprietorial document converter -- and it functions like clockwork. You upload a .doc file, and nominate the file formats you prefer. Wait a few minutes (long enough to go get a coffee or tea), and when you return to the computer ... done.



The really good news is that you can now get The Swordsman formatted specifically for any Mobi Reader, Kindle (Mobi again), your Phone (Stanza), your Palm Pilot, your Sony reader ... and of course if you can an iLiad or a netbook, you can still get the PDFs to fit from my bookstore, plus the Kindle download from the Kindle store, the paperback from Amazon, and the hardcover from Lulu.

I'd say I've got this one covered. Next?!

Well ... The Deceivers appeared in the Amazon engine a few days ago, and The Lords of Harbendane is at Mobi, plus Dangerous Moonlight was formatted specifically for Smashwords, at the time we had upload woes. So I think I'll start with these three, plus maybe two more, and then -- a newsletter.

Keegan is smiling this morning.

Cheers,
MK

Amazon apologizes profusely ... hands up, anyone who believes any of this

Today, from SeattlePI.com...

Amazon calls mistake 'embarrassing and ham-fisted'

Amazon.com has offered a response to the AmazonFail fiasco.

Because there's so much attention to this, I'll offer spokesman Drew Herdener's comments unfiltered:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

and:

Former Amazonian Mike Daisey offers some insight.

"After hearing from people on the inside at Amazon, I am convinced it was in fact, a 'glitch,'" he says on his Web site. "Well, more like user error--some idiot editing code for one of the many international versions of Amazon mixed up the difference between 'adult' and 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' All the sites are tied together, so editing one affected all for blacklisting, and ta-da, you get the situation."

According to Daisey's inside sources, "A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up 'adult,' which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon."

[end of quote]

We have a term for this.

We call it damage control.

You blame a human, who can be fired ... this is sooooo convenient. I'd say it's far too convenient. It's the backdoor route onto the fire escape you leave yourself when you're going to try to censor anything to do with human sexuality, in the event you get caught.

They got caught and roasted, and they fled for the fire escape.

What really needles me is that people are genuinely going to believe it. I'm not usually into conspiracy theory, but to me this just looks blatant. Put it this way: I'm far from convinced. It'll take years of loyalty to the GLBT community before Amazon will woo me back into the truth faith worship of the 1,000lb gorilla.

I'm old enough by now to be a lot more suspicious. What I can see is that the attempt at censorship was made -- and didn't work; it was a ham-fisted attempt, along exactly the same lines as those navigated by Kevin bloody Rudd in his vain and moronic attempts to enforce Internet censorship on Australia. Amazon was caught red-handed, and had been "canny" enough to leave themselves an escape chute.

They're out and free today, having learned the hard way that K.Rudd-style Censorship doesn't work; therefore, switch to Plan B, which is "swift, slick damage control ... and whole new generation of brilliant, subtle code that'll sneak through the desired results in 2010 or '11.

Put it this way, guys: I'll believe it's NOT happening when we reach 2012 and it hasn't happened. In the meantime -- seriously! -- having seem the writing very clearly on the wall, I'm already exploring other avenues which will either not involve Amazon, or, if they do, they'll use the Big A merely as a checkout and drop-shipping service.

I don't have the trust today that I had back in March. Do I sound cynical? Well ... I guess I am. 25 years in this game has made me fairly cynical -- though I prefer the word pragmatical.

Got to get to work now...


UPDATED on April 16 with a couple of backlinks:

If you think I'm just being paranoid, you have GOT to see these:

http://blog.vromans.com/amazonfail-the-cost-of-freedom/
and
http://www.slate.com/id/2213037

Woah. Paranoia is the least of it, guys.

Ciao for now,
MK

Amazon headhunting in the GLBT community ...!

Hi, guys ... I'm back, and with something significant to say. The "bad news" is breaking across the GLBT writing community right now ...

Amazon under fire for perceived anti-gay policy

Here's an outtake in a thimble, to give you the gist:

The number one word being used over and over on Twitter at this moment is "AmazonFail."

Why?

Users are angry about a perceived anti-gay policy that removes lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender books from appearing in sales rankings.

Author Mark Probst writes on his blog that two days ago, "mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: 'Transgressions' by Erastes and 'False Colors' by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book 'The Filly.'"

Probst eventually got a response from Amazon.com Advantage member services, he says.

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn DMember ServicesAmazon.com Advantage

In other words, what about the children? Protect the children. Get gay content out of any area of the net that minors could possibly access.

Uh huh. Fair enough. I suppose. But it's going to be a long, slow clean-up for the Big A, because protecting kids also means shielding them from violence, coarse language and heterosexual pornowhatsessz. Massive amounts of Amazon will have to VANISH, pronto, for Amazon to be able to support its claim that glbt writers are not being discriminated against. It ain't just glbt writers who're going to get slapped. Normal Mailer, Harold Robbins, Jilly Cooper, Ann Rice ... all vanishing into the A-search bye and bye...

In fact, the new Amazon censorship is a lot of "same old, same old." Google is very discriminatory too; in fact, discrimination against glbt writers is so common on the web, one learns to live and deal with it. (Example: I've heard of e-zines that sell ad space, and "guarantee" a review of any book for which advertising is bought ... but they don't review glbt titles, even though they'll take the advertising dollar. The scene goes downhill from there,
with glbt-friendly pages and blogs now getting paid out less than a penny for clicks on their Google Ads, though they used to earn up to 75c for a click on the same ad, before company policy changed.)

Amazon's policy shift is subtle ... they seem to be reading tags. If your book is user-tagged "gay," you lose your page rankings ... if your books are not tagged, you keep your rankings.

Say, what?!

My books still have their rankings (!) because I never bothered to go in and tag them for Amazon search ... I know they're called "user tags," but it's the writers and publishers who are far, far more likely to add the tags, not customers. (A customer bookmarks the page where the book lives -- why would they want to run around tagging books, when they've already found the damned book?!) I've been advised (!) to get in there and tag my books for Amazon Search. Uh huh. So, writers and publishers tag their books to make them visible and searchable ... hence, it's dead easy for Amazon to figure out whose page rankings to yank!

They haven't yanked my sales rankings (yet??) because I don't carry the tags. Never bothered to go and do it, because at least 70% of all my sales are driven via my own bookstore, which lives here: http://www.dream-craft.com/melkeegan/catalog.htm

Meanwhile, however ... something else is happening at Amazon, which has nothing to do with tags (I'm untagged) or sales ranking (rankings are still there), and for the life of me I can't figure it out. My Amazon sales are down 80% this month, so far. My sales switched off, as if someone had killed the power, at the end of March. I did great in February and March (actually super-great in March), and then very poorly indeed so far in April ... with the sales rankings still "on" and attached. Go figure

Fortunately Keegan ain't Amazon-centric; they can't hurt me very much. And I know this is going to sound self-centered, so let me hint, here and now before I say it -- behind the scenes, I'm thinking long and hard, and coming up with a way to turn this whole lousy situation not only to my own advantage, but to the advantage of all glbt writers. I think I have a terrific idea, but I need to thrash it out, think it through, research the costs involved, before I share it publicly. However -- hang on, because the light I'm seeing at the end of the tunnel is NOT the train; and it's a nice, bright light ... bear with me a while.

As I said, fortunately (for me; and I'm not being selfish here) Amazon/Kindle only ever accounted for about 30% of my sales overall, so I still have 3 out of 4 of my oars in the water. But I know that other writers absolutely rely on Amazon, and they're in dire straits.

My titles are also retailed via Payloadz, and 70% of all sales are driven via my own bookstore -- so, the violent drop in Amazon sales might smart, but it's not going to kill me stone dead. Other writers are not so lucky -- and I'm not talking, here, about self-publishers!

Most of the writers with whom I'm in touch (about a dozen full-professional) are publishing with
print-media companies in the US; a few are with ebook publishers. Amazon sales are a huge part of the income they get from writing. And this discrimination is going to hurt them badly. As I just said in a comment on the previous post, it's enough to make you weep tears of blood.

Now, as you probably know, my publisher went defunct about eight years ago, leaving me with a big backlist and two thumbs to twiddle! I got busy and have marketed my old stuff while writing new. Amazon was very kind to me, sales-wise, till the end of March '09. I still have no idea of what happened then; however, I'd only gotten around to putting 12 books there, out of 27 on my list -- and as for Kindle, there's only 6 there. So their ability to hurt me is limited.

The number of other venues for selling books online is growing all the time -- Smashwords comes to mind. (Speaking of which, Mark Coker tells me they just went online with a new "meatgrinder," which is their industrial strength, wide-scale document converter. You upload a .doc file or an .rtf, and tell it what formats to spit out. It does the whole thing. Should be easy ... we had problems with it last month, but I'm 95% sure it was all about time-out woes. Will be taking another crack at it shortly, and with luck it'll work just fine.)

Amazon doesn't have a monopoly -- it's important to realize this. I also acknowledge that they're the "1000lb gorilla" in this neck of the woods. For some weird reason, READERS trust Amazon over Lulu or anyone else. This is where Amazon can really hurt writers. Customers trust Amazon, and are more likely to buy a book from them than, for instance, Lulu.com or Smashwords.com, or whatever.

The trick will be to find a way to get around the discrimination ... without taking on Amazon in a stand-up fight. Because one does not trade blows with King Kong and expect to come out of it with one's nose in the same place where nature intended. Picture Daffy Duck with his bear on top of his head.

Our mission (and we'd better damned choose to accept it!) is to either persuade readers that it's safe, and good, to buy books elsewhere ... or, to find other ways to bend the existing Amazon model (discriminatory tactics and all) to our advantage.

Stay tuned.

Cheers,
MK

From the depths of the Easter long weekend

'Tis a season of chocolate rabbits and eggs you could never make an omelet with; days prompting that old classic joke about "Save me a hot cross bun, I'll be back on Monday." A four-day weekend where the country is closed, Thursday to Tuesday, and if you happen to have forgotten to get a printer cartridge or a spindle of DVD blanks, tough luck.

It's Easter. That time of picnic horse races and the aroma of Aztec mild hallucinogens wafting out of the malls, and blazing-eyed zealots actually, physically, in reality, having themselves nailed (with real nails and real hammers) to big wooden crosses on the beach in major cities, while the crowd looks on in aghast awe, wondering at their sanity, and perhaps asking themselves the inevitable question. Think about it. Or, don't. It's a subject that'll cost you sleep.

Anyway --

Keegan is still alive, still working! Just not blogging here as much as I used to -- Google having buried me in the page rankings! In fact --

I've been blogging elsewhere in the last week:

I've been contributing to this blog, which lives over at http://write-edit-publish.blogspot.com/ ... and it's a lot of fun, actually. It's interesting to quantify the subjects of writing, editing, publishing. It's also a great blog, and growing like a mushroom. From here on, when readers ask questions about the trade of the writer, editor, publisher, this is where I'll be answering them -- I'll just post briefly here and give the link.

And I've been on Digital Kosmos too:

The dome of the sky

Focus and contrast: red hot pokers imitate art

Cafe culture goes way upmarket

In the time warp ... Adelaide, of course!

Fossils, front and center!

Reflections teasing eyes and brain

...and in the background I'm working on the ebook/paperback version of the first of the LEGENDS novels; and if I can ever get a spare afternoon or two, I'll be rereading the Hellgate novels, ready to start writing. I hope to get a start in May. If I get get a start then, and nothing too bad happens, I can be done by Christmas -- both books. Personally, I can't wait to have them finished. This project has been "on" for about 20 years, at least for me. I wrote the first version of The Rabelais Alliance in 1989, about the same time as Ice, Wind and Fire came out with GMP. Naturally, I had high hopes of being able to sell a gay SF series to them ... and/but the rest is history. Rabelais has a longer pedigree than the British Royal Family, and having the whole story told will be a dream come true.

Little else is happening in the Mel-o-Sphere. Life is mostly about work, right now. Family is okay, if you stretch a point. Some are limping around waiting to heal, some are being deployed in the military, some are waiting for eye surgery! Me? Oh, surviving. Wishing I could crack some code and crank up sales, so I could tell the day job to go buzz off (and that's a euphemism).

Look for updates, tweaks, additions and rebuilds in the main website in the next few weeks, too. The work has been mapped and planned, just has to be done. I think LEGENDS goes to press first, and then the website gets its work next. April or May.

In short, life is a yawn, so --

Ciao for now,
MK

Gay book covers and the "wow" factor

Being gobmacked is coming more and more naturally to me; it happens quite often. I just got the first mockup design from DreamCraft, for the cover that's about to be slapped on the paperback of Legends. Get a load of this:

Click on the sample to see the image at 800 pixels wide ... woah.

This is the "rough" which is done at 100dpi, where elements are pushed around, recolored, resized, swapped over, dropped completely ... fonts get changed, colors are corrected. ((n other words, the final printed cover could be very different, but this gives us a starting place.)

This is the first generation of the "rough," and I'm (yet again) struck speechless.

I'm TRYING to take a day off today, but it's not happening. Too many problems -- it would be afternoon before I even got out of here, and the sky seems to want to drop weird little globules of water. I'd been thinking ... a long hike in one of the national parks. Scott Creek or whatever. Not going happen today -- try again next week.

So, in the background here, the first book of Legends is being reassembled, turning from a blog to a manuscript. It's literally being copied and pasted out of Blogger into Word. This is a little weird and wonderful ... first time I've done a novel this way.

I'm also being asked by several younger writers if I would produce something -- book or blog -- like a "hand holding" exercise, where I talk folks through the process, from the initial stages of getting a book onto paper, right through to marketing the finished book. Sure -- but not on this blog! Google has me dead and buried. With page rankings set to "0" ... well, the only people inside the USA (and that's 90% of one's audience!) who can find anything I write on this page are folks who already know it's here. Shades of Pirates of the Caribbean.

So -- sure, I can do this, and I'll float an appropriate blog, perhaps as early as this afternoon (since my day off ain't gonna be happenin' ... again).

Ciao for now,
MK

Here ends the first book of the Fall of the Atlantean Empire

Good news from the Mel-o-Sphere: LEGENDS is complete, up to the "End of Book One" marker, which is where I'm going onto hiatus with it, in order to turn my attention to Hellgate.

Rather than string it out into next week, I put the last half dozen posts up at the same time:
65. The Winds of Chance (part one)
66. The Winds of Chance (part two)
67. The Winds of Chance (part three)
68. The Winds of Chance (part four)
69. The Winds of Chance (part five)
70. The Oracle Dreams
71. Afterword
72. The art gallery

Please do note the art gallery on the tag-end of that list! A couple of new pieces have been done recently, and one of them blows me away. Click on this piece to see it at full size -- the shrunk-to-fit version pasted in by Blogger doesn't do it justice ... this piece has the quality of classical art, and I'm still in the "wow" stage:

The feedback on the format in which this novel was published as been varied indeed:

• 25% of people were blissfully happy to swing by every day or few days, and get a free hit.


• 25% of readers said, "I can't read this in bits -- tell me when it's finished, I'll download it all together."


• 10% of readers said, "I can't read this much on screen. Tell me when a paperback comes out, I'd be happy to buy it."


• 10% said, "I don't have the time to deal with little bits of reading. I want a properly formatted ebook, even if you charge for it."


• 15% of readers said, "I like the concept of a free serial novel, but I don't care for fantasy. Tell me when you bring out an SF or thriller novel."


• 10% of readers said, "I like ebooks, but I can't stand serials (I hate cliffhangers). Tell me when the whole thing's finished.


• 5% of readers said, "I like fantasy, and serials are okay. but I like my gay fantasy red-hot sexy. Can I get an uncut version of Legends? Would be happy to pay for an ebook.

This seems to cover everything, and leaves everyone happy.

It's great to have some firm data. So we're doing a newsletter this afternoon, informing people that (drum roll)... the first book of the trilogy is finished (download it all of a piece, if this is what you needed); and a properly structured ebook is being prepared; there can also be a Legends Uncut version, for those who wanted this; and a stunning cover is being put around this novel; it'll be available as a paperback in a few weeks.

I might vanish for a couple of days now ... I have the priceless opportunity to take a couple off, and I think I'm going to grab the opportunity. Might pack the HELLGATE books, start reading them while I kick back and unwind.

Reading the whole thing properly is the first thing I must do ... these characters have to "talk" to me in their own unique voices. Mick Vidal doesn't sound like Harry Shapiro, who doesn't sound like Neil Travers, who doesn't sound like Barb Jazinsky. And so on. These characters are never far from "in my head," but I need to really, seriously get back into their world. Then, two BIG books by Christmas, and the series is finished. Woah.

Hence -- a couple of days off while I have the chance!

Ciao for now,
MK

Updates from the Mel-o-Sphere

Not much doing in the Mel-o-sphere lately, but other blogs have been updated, and rather than repeat the whole lot here, let me give you the links:

This will bring you up to date with LEGENDS:
54. Zeheft is Burning (part one)
55. Zeheft is Burning (part two)
56. Zeheft is Burning (part three)
57. The Tomb of Knowledge (part one)
58. The Tomb of Knowledge (part two)
59. The Tomb of Knowledge (part three)
60. Red Sails (part one)
61. Red Sails (part two)
62. Red Sails (part three)
63. Red Sails (part four)
64. Red Sails (part five)

I finally found a spare few minutes to post to DIGITAL KOSMOS:
Reflections teasing eyes and brain
(Will be posting more very soon; work is about to hit a lull ... if it didn't, I'd be out there looking for a high building with some inviting-looking concrete at the bottom.)

And I've been over Live Journal...
Cool way to spend a morning
Good gods, they want HOW MUCH to ship it???
Google Book Search is OFF, thank gods
King Kong 5, Keegan 0

I also stumbled into something fairly interesting -- or at least potentially interesting for folks who're promoting their self-administered backlists, or who are with publishers who expect you to go out and promote your own books. Visit this: http://www.freepublicitygroup.com/ ... and/but be prepared to do a lot of reading. It's all free, meaning there's an epic to read in the form of PDFs.

My kingdom for a netbook or something similar. I long for the old days when you kicked back on the couch with a cup of tea and a cat and a book.

Lastly, many thanks to AG for running a news item on one of her blogs:
Blind and gay ... looking for a good read? At last, a Large Print Edition of Mel Keegan!
...thanks, kiddo. It all helps!

Ciao for now,
MK