ICE, WIND AND FIRE ... the ebook is launching now!

At last! You might have wondered what the *&@! was going on behind the scenes, and you'd have been right to wonder. All hell has been busting loose, and several times "Mephistopheles skated to work" (as in, the day did arrive when hell actually froze over, and whatever wasn't supposed to happen before the great ice age down there ... happened).

However, we all survived, we've almost dug ourselves out from under, and we're launching the ebook version of the novel on the blog right here, right now.

It will eventually be at Kindle, but don't wait for that: it'll also be $2 more expensive at Kindle ... and *our* prices have NOT risen. Amazon whacked 20% on the price of Kindle books recently, at the same time as still paying the publishers only $3.50, and paying affiliates zip. Zero. Nada. However (and this should interest you strangely), they also have a free file conversion service. You can send a PDF to them, and they'll convert it the the Kindle format, and then you download it again, directly to your Kindle.

Whenever you do this with a book published by an indie press, the publisher gets the full price to divvy up between press, writer, editors, cover artist, advertising, review copies ...

On the other hand, whenever you buy an $11.99 direct from the Kindle store, the publisher receives just $3.50 to divvy up among the above.

Is it any wonder indie publishing is having a bloody rough time? Is it any wonder writers and artists have to work part time jobs to keep the lights on?

So do us all a favor, folks, next time you're thinking about downloading books for your Kindle: buy the PDF direct from the publisher, and use the free file conversion process --

And to get you started on this new habit, here are the buy-now buttons for ICE, WIND AND FIRE, as PDF:

EBOOK DESIGNED FOR PC & MAC: $9.99


EBOOK DESIGNED FOR SCREENREADER: $9.99

This mini-launch is actually intended for my newsletter members who know all about this book, and have known about it for a very, very long time indeed. The general book launch will be happening in a few weeks, when the paperback comes along.

The book is celebrating its own 20th Anniversary at this time! Here's the back cover material from the original edition:

"A raunchy gay adventure with a Caribbean setting..."

Alex Connor and Greg Farris are investigative journalists on holiday in Jamaica to escape their usual hectic schedule of worldwide assignments. But their tranquility is shattered by their discovery of a skeleton in the wreck of a light aircraft which went down in shallow waters just off the coast. Reporting the incident to local officials only marks the start of their troubles, and they are soon caught up in car chases, kidnapping, drug smuggling and murder, with events complicated by a hurricane and a bushfire raging across the island. Cover notes from the original printing: "Ice, Wind and Fire introduces the work of an exciting new Australian writer, in a fast-moving and colourful thriller set against the skillfully evoked background of the Caribbean."

REVIEWS: "This rip-roaring and colourful new gay thriller zooms along with a breathless enthusiasm that never flags" — Time Out.

Now, sample chapters are not available yet, but if you've been waiting to get your hands on the ebook for eons, you don't need to read the first 10% ... you've been hanging on for this moment!

If you're not a member of the above party -- bookmark this page and come back in about 48 hours. I'll be out of the office tomorrow, but on Tuesday I'll be making the pages on my own site and at the wiki, and the sample readings will be right there, in both places.

Suffice to say, the new cover looks fantastic ... this is what I imagined when I wrote the book 20 long years ago. Imagine my joy when I saw the new cover proof a few weeks ago. Jade has come to the rescue again. The book is absolutely the same, interior-wise, but the packaging (which left a lot to be desired in the original) is astonishing.

Incidentally, if you want ICE WIND AND FIRE for your Blackberry, iPhone, smartphone ... Tuesday. It's also going to Smashwords, where these formats are provided.

Cheers,
Mel

Ground Zero: five stars!

Lovely news to start off the day: GROUND ZERO has just been given a five-star review at Rainbow Reviews ... am "tickled pink" as you'd expect. Hence the blog post! So --

Here's the review;
and
Here's the book itself (which is available in about 20 ebook formats, and is due in paperback next month, via Amazon, Target OnLine and so forth).

In other news, ICE, WIND AND FIRE is virtually through the OCR process, and (this is where it gets exciting) the cover is being designed at this moment.

I'm also "in talks" with DreamCraft to become an editor with them in 2010. They're slowly, sloooooowly, making the changeover from multimedia studio to publisher -- apparently there's more money and less gray hair and stomach ulcers in online publishing than in multimedia (big "duh" factor there). Stay tuned for developments ...!

Cheers,
Mel

ICE, WIND AND FIRE heads for the scanner!

It's been out of print for eons, and it was published 20 years ago, in October. Its Twentieth Anniversary is coming up in a matter of weeks, and as you'd expect, it's been on my mind for a long time, to do a special edition. Especially as most people (2 out of 3) these days prefer an ebook over paper.

So ... I put the word around in my last newsletter: does anyone have an old copy of IWF that they would like to trade?? The deal was, you give us your old one ... we give you the brand new one, with a glorious new cover that you won't be embarrassed reading on the bus ... plus, we'd send the ebook version of it, which will be out virtually as soon as it's scanned and corrected ... plus, pick three other ebooks to receive right now.

Six people responded, and the first to reach us with an offer was a reader from Aus. The book has been received --

I took it over to DreamCraft, and they put it through the big paper cutter to whack the spine off it in one chop. Next: it goes onto the scanner, gets OCR'd, corrected, repackaged, rejacketed, and sent off to the ebook hosts, and Amazon itself.

The process is underway ... I'll keep you posted!

Cheers,
Mel

Keegan's Week: "proper" gay books. Uh huh.

I fielded a weird question the other day -- and the worst part of it was, the person was absolutely serious, and intended at least half of it as a sincere compliment. "Your work is so wonderfully written," she said, "why don't you write proper books?"

And I went blank. Utterly. For about ten seconds. You might have thought I was having a "senior moment," but in fact the processor was whirring, trying to make sense if the question, only to land back at the hurdle --

What the bloody hell is a "proper" book?

Of course, what she meant was, why don't I write heterosexual books? Or, to slightly rephrase the question so it'll make sense to the rest of us, "Your work is so wonderfully written, why do you write gay books instead of proper ones?"

Deep breath, now. Be calm. Count to ten. In Klingon.

Well ... who in the [expletive deleted] says that gay books aren't proper books? The next thing these people will be saying is, John Barrowman isn't a "proper" singer or actor. And Tchaikovsky wasn't a "proper" composer, and T.E. Lawrence wasn't a "proper" army officer, and Nijinsky wasn't a "proper" dancer. Or that gay people are not "proper" people. And I'm Not. Going. To. Go. There. Period.

Be happy: have a nice day, yes?

In fact, the properness of gay books is increasing greatly -- not exponentially, but nicely. It turns out that 10% of the male half of the population is gay anyway; and about another 15% on the male side of the fence is ac/dc by inclination, which makes 25% of the part of the population that shaves and dreams of power tools would enjoy a gay narrative ... and about 25% of folks on the female side of the fence like to read gay books, for boatloads of reasons. Some are themselves gay; some are straight enough to fancy the hell out of beautiful guys; some get a kick out of the homoerotic; some love a romance but don't like guy/gal romance, because it almost always seems like the gal is getting s/exploited. Some are "modern age" enough to see as far as the romance, and genuinely don't believe gender matters.

That's 25% of the population as a whole, folks.

So, for every million literate people who read, there's 250,000 who would enjoy a gay book, in the highly unlikely event they were ever in a position to see one, and have the opportunity to actuallt buy it.

That's eight times the population of Fairbanks, Alaska. It's about equivalent to the entire population of South Australia that lives outside the metropolitan area. It's about 8.5% of the entire population of New Zealand (I think; if I'm wrong on this one, it won't be by much -- and feel free to give me a kick).

In a country like Australia with something like 20 - 24 million souls, depending on who you talk to, and who's being counted into the complement, you probably have something in the order of about 16 million literate adults, and about 12 million who actually read --

So, three million Aussies would enjoy a gay narrative, if they were allowed to make the reading choice, at the store, or wherever they get their books.

But if you walk into a bookstore down here and look for gay books, you'll soon start to wonder if anyone's publishing them at all. And the reason is that every bookstore down here is an outlet for a chain. It's B&N, it Dymocks, it's A&N, it's the book department in Kmart or WalMart or Target or Myer, or whatever.

No gay books. Why? Because gay books do not sell enough copies, per title, to attract the attention of the distributor. Each individual title might sell 400 right across this country, IF they were shelved with the generosity or impunity with which het books are shelved. But they're not shelved with such catholic generosity...

Why? Many reasons. Management is terribly aware of minors and the elderly, who form a significant part of their customer base; they're equally aware of the religious minority, for whom the "god" books are shelved alongside yoga, holistic food and Relaxation for Uptight Dummies.

Not wanting to offend anyone, Management literally hides the gay books: top shelves, bottom shelves, dark corners, out of reach, out of sight. And -- what a surprise! -- the books sell poorly.

Gay books are seldom advertised on magazine pages or in windows where the average reader would see them. Same reason for not putting a nice, big ad in the window down at Dymocks. And as per magazine advertising --

Do you know what an ad in a major literary magazine costs?!! An ad to run in one issue would put about $2 on the checkout price of each copy of a gay title! Not going to happen, people. (Few mainstream, print media book reviewers will review a gay book ... saaaame reason. Minors, the elderly, and the God Squad.)

So ... gay books don't sell bigtime, and another reason for this is that they're double-marginalized. They're already in the "gay" category at any online bookstore. Then, they're ... what? Gay-SF, or gay-fantasy, or thriller, or western, or historical, or romance, or erotica, or ...

Uh huh. Double-marginalized. So you have someone saying, "Gee, I'd love a new gay book, but I don't want SF, and I've read enough breeches-rippers (the gay equivalent of the bodice-ripper) to last me a lifetime. Uh ... I don't like westerns. I'm not in the mood for a murder mystery..."

Double jeopardy. The gay writer has two hurdles to get over, not one, and if each hurdle is a "filter," then gay books get filtered twice, before any sale is made.

Meaning, a hell of a lot of gay books are sold, but not that many of any individual title.

Another thing that's killing gay book sales, at least in this country, is that books are so expensive. Small printruns make for expensive books, and few people can afford to buy many, when the damned things are $32 and upwards. A lot of readers are landing at the book exchanges, where you can trade something you've read and pay $2 to the store, and get something you haven't read before --

Guess what doesn't often get traded? Right. Gay books are seldom traded (for which the reasons are many), so you probably won't be able to pick up a new one at the book exchange ... and even if you could, the publisher and the writer wouldn't know a thing about it.

Here is where it gets mildly interesting. A few years ago, when readers were still in the habit of sending a few words of feedback, I used to hear that someone had picked up one of my books at a book exchange in, say, Madrid or Munich or Manchester -- Europe, where gay books are treated with a lot more generosity by booksellers. Secondhand dealers in Europe will trade in gay books, where many (most?) of our local dealers are still not quite "there" yet -- inordinately concerned about the minors and elders and religious bods ... which is no bad, thing, in reality. Taking care of kids, and not giving cardiac episodes to others is a laudable goal in itself.

Fact is, the Internet is a far better place to do business. The people who find you deliberately came a-hunting. One seldom has to deal with folks who arrived on a gay page by accident.

There's also a "book swap" subculture out there, where books are changing hands in every direction...

And a writer has to wonder how many sales he or she has actually achieved. Say, 5,000 or 10,000 when the book was new (depending on the printrun -- and they're all over the place, there's no "norm"), plus an extra 1,000 or 2,000 per reprint ... and then, the swaps, the trades, the book exchanges -- for decades.

So, actual "sales" might be way ahead of anything the publisher knows about. Think about that. Nice. I mean, we don't earn royalties on the swaps and trades, but it's so nice to know that new people are buying the old books.

The last thing that makes it tough for gay writers is the sheer volume of the competition. It's astonishing. There are so many gay titles being published these days -- it's a a lit-fest. Heaven on a stick for anyone who has an ebook reader gizmo -- most of these books are available digitally, thank heavens. Makes them reachable for Aussies and Kiwis, because there's no shipping to pay. Postage across the Pacific. Yee-ouch!

Speaking of ebooks and gizmos, I'm still looking for just the right deal on a bit of hardware to do the job, and my hunt has brought me to this quarry:

The Acer Aspire One netbook. It's at least as functional as even the most advanced dedicated ebook reader, with a color crystal brite screen, and a keyboard that some reviewers say is a joy to use ... and it's less than half the price of a good, dedicated ebook reader. On sale, you can get the thing for A$350, which is just about right for my budget. So my fingers are itching to reach for the credit cards... 8" screen, weighs under a kilo, like handling a hardcover book. Boots up in 8 seconds, loads a browser in another 10, wireless, 2 card readers, 3 USB ports and VGA out. And you have GOT to like that. Yes, I know, the battery life is about 2.5 hours, running the browser and modem with the screen at 60% brightness. Now, turn the screen down to 30% and run just the Mobipocket reader on the local system -- no connectivity, no graphics. Ebook reader. Check. Should go about 4 hours between recharges, even with the silly little 3-cell battery that ships with the machine; and that'll do fine.

Still on the subject of ebooks -- I've been busy in the last week, making more available at Smashwords:


$10.95, for iPhone, Mobipocket, Palm Pilot, and more...


$10.95, for iPhone, Mobipocket, Palm Pilot, and more...

...so, there you are. Proper books for your proper ebook reader. Proper gay books, at that. Somebody try telling John Barrowman that he isn't a "proper singer," and his albums are not "proper" albums, because when he sings a lovesong, he's singing about a guy he adores not a gal. I'm not saying JB would bestow a black eye; but if he did, I do believe Scott and Mel would be standing there shaking hands, patting backs and saying, "Well done, mate."

I mean -- seriously!

Cheers,
MK

Gay ebooks galore ... and loving it!

New titles at Smashwords -- if you've been hankering after your favorite Keegans in a format to suit your iPhone, you've come to the right place!


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


US$10.95 for iPhone, Palm Pilot, Kindle, Mobi and more!
The intention is to have 12 or so titles at Smashwords by the end of April ... and then, a major newsletter. I the same time frame, there NARC and HELLGATE series will be going up to Kindle, and the whole shebang will be online at Mobipocket. Then --

We'll be launching a new bookstore. This is the exciting part, and I don't want to say too much about it at this point, because it's very, VERY complicated. But I will add this: it's the most exciting thing that's happened in a rather long time.

Oh -- there are five Keegans at Smashwords now (a good glbt book haul for your smartphone), and the next titles planned to go up are Aquamarine; Fortunes of War; The Deceivers; Storm Tide; Windrage; Tiger, Tiger; The Winds of Chance ... and then I'll catch my breath.

Seriously -- it's easy. This generation of the "Meatgrinder" is like clockwork. Books slide into the Smashwords catalog without a hiccup -- it's easier than Mobi, and I thought that was simple.

One more thing that should be of interest to both writers and readers:



Jim and Tim Hutchinson have a fine idea: One Chapter Challenge, wherein authors park an attractive sample of their work on a new website that's being robustly marketed. For writers, this looks like an excellent opportunity. For readers too -- the theory is, you'll get saddled with a lot less dross if you can read a swatch of the book before you lay down your plastic! Most writers are offering a chapter or five online on their webpages ... but in its infinite wisdom, Amazon has no such facility. You have to buy "cold." Bad idea, that. So I was in at One Chapter Challenge with The Swordsman, Nocturne and Twilight, and am wishing the brothers Hutchinson all the best in the project. It deserves to succeed. How about a little support, guys? Check it out!

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!

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

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

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

Live from somewhere near Seattle...

This has to be worth a swift post before I run out the door (duty calls)...



The first title we uploaded to the Kindle Store was The Lords of Harbendane, swiftly followed by Dangerous Moonlight and Fortunes of War ... in fact, Harbendane is still waiting to publish while the other two have gone "live" --!



...and what's more, Amazon.com is having a mark-down special for some kind, so you can get these books for $7.99 ... gotta like that. I do believe that's the cheapest price we've ever seen on these novels.

We'll keep you posted as the list goes up -- and also, as they go up to Mobipocket, which is essentially the same service, but available globally.

More later,

Cheers,
MK

The Flat Calm Follies

It would be wonderful to bounce back at the end of the day's work with a colossal post, rich in valuable thematic material. Unfortunately, nothing is happening. At all. Zip. Nada.

No lottery win, no desperate email from Steven Spielberg saying he's dying to buy that script I wrote and will US$8m be acceptable? No card inviting me to Frankfurt to participate in a high-six-figure deal at the book fair. Nicholas Cage and Orlando Bloom didn't pull up on the driveway demanding that Keegan autograph their copies of some vampire book I may or may not have written --

Incidentally the casual reader should not get my novel, Twilight, mixed up with the PG-rated chick flick of the same name. Guys the globe over are calling the movie one of the most boring things ever filmed ... I wouldn't know, I ain't seen it! My novel is a gay vampire story which is ... anything but boring, I promise you!

Um ... steak for dinner. It's been a bright, beautiful day but I've been stuck inside working. Got quite a lot done ... modems running in the background, three books up at the Kindle Store, slogging their way through the publication process. Do a couple more tomorrow, with luck ... feeling like a beer, right now!

Two posts at Legends today:
40. Fear (part three)
41. Thus Spake Iridan

And a couple of links of interest, in the event that anyone is still interested in ebooks after I've been talking your ear off about them for the last week:
http://www.itexaminer.com/two-million-germans-want-to-buy-ebooks.aspx
http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech/63812/salacious-content-driving-adoption-ebooks

And so, from the uninterrupted flat calm of the Mel-o-Sphere on this Tuesday arvo, whilst hoping that something, anything, will actually HAPPEN tomorrow (work doesn't count) --

Ciao for now,
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

Mobipocket adventures ... and a Very Good Mystery

In answer to the four people who got in touch, asking why the heck they can't find Dangerous Moonlight at Smashwords today ... bear with me, guys: we're not out of the woods.

To begin with, Smashwords is having server issues which is slowing everything down -- and no one is immune, in this area. There were problems at Amazon last week, and CreateSpace is prone to difficulties. Be a little bit patient here, and thou shalt be rewarded...

Dangerous Moonlight was uploaded, and IS at Smashwords even as we speak, but you won't be finding it until a tiny bit of fine-tuning is done in the book's "order me" page. The system (which Smashwords calls the Meatgrinder, with excellent reason!) performs the word count on auto ... problem is, right now it's only firing on four out of five cylinders.

For the iPhone (Stanza) edition of Dangerous, it gives a word count of just under 20,000 words (which is 10% shorter than Callisto Switch), and for the Kindle (Mobi) edition it gives a count of about 40,000 -- 10% shorter than Windrage ... so you know something is way off the beam, because Dangerous Moonlight is 208,000, according to every word processor and DTP program I have! We "unpublished" the book, making it disappear temporarily, because to the casual browser who doesn't know it, an $11 pricetag on 20,000 words looks outrageous -- not the first impression we want to make. Then the server started to jack around, and it'll be tomorrow, earliest, before we can get back in and make adjustments.

Patience, guys: I'm in touch with Support at Smashwords, and they are both knowledgeable and helpful. It's just a minor hiccup that will be straightened out before you know it.

Rest assured, I'll update you on the blog here when we're up and running. In fact, if you want to be in on the launch, just make sure you're on the mailing list, and watch your mailbox!

Next piece of good news: the proof for STOPOVER was delivered and looks fantastic. CreateSpace has done another great job. We're now just waiting on the proof for APHELION, and the NARC books will be launching at Amazon ... next week, I hope.

The Mobipocket experience has also begun, behind the scenes. In fact, DreamCraft has gone in and set up the account as the publisher.

The way it works is this: I'm the writer, DreamCraft is the publisher, Mobi is the distributor, and virtually thousands of affiliate sites all over the web correspond to the bookstores. I'm almost a passenger on this one, just sitting back and watching. The way the financial aspect works out is interesting. Mobi pays 35% of the gross, meaning, $3.50 from a $10.00 book will come back here, to be divvied up between writer and publisher. There is also another 10% fee up for grabs -- the affiliate fee, in the event that someone passing through my websites and blogs buys a Keegan for his or her Kindle or smartphone as they jet through. Say it's a sale from the bookstore on my website -- that's another dollar that lands in the account here, helping to cover the expenses of running this show ... and bolstering Keegan's daydreams of quitting the day job to write full time!

So that's how the Mobipocket thing works. My understanding at this time is that they have affiliate members left and right, all over the globe, who will be on the lookout for books to sell off their sites. Each sale, no matter how or where it's generated, brings 35% back to base. And you know what my backlist looks like right now:

(The Hellgate series will be done by Christmas, adding two; unless there's a miracle, the LEGENDS project will be curtailing online at Book One, leaving the whole project to be released in various formats ... and so on. And yes, the haunted house book and Dead of Winter are still on my list of to-do jobs.)

Tomorrow, with the Mobipocket account set up and operational, and the conversion software downloaded, we'll see about running Fortunes of War, Dangerous Moonlight and The Lords of Harbendane through their publishing process ... and I'll let you know how it goes. The sheer size and complexity of Mobipocket is a little intimidating, but it seems simple -- they just have the loose ends tied off, legally, in French braids and sheepshanks, half-hitches and granny knots. The legal-beagle jargon is dense, but the interface is simple.

We downloaded the Mobipocket Reader, and I like the interface a lot: dead easy, and it works offline. If/when I get myself a screenreader (and right now I'm examining netbooks), I would be able to download direct to the gadget.

The other place where the Mobipocket publishing process is very different is in the file conversion system. Basically, with Amazon, Smashwords, CreateSpace, Lulu, whatnot, you upload your files to them and the conversion happens at their end. This is neat and tidy -- so long as you're inside the US. If you're not, you time out a lot, and when a file isn't quite right and has to be uploaded again, you can have hours to sweat through, to get a usable version.

Now, Mobipocket does it ... backwards. You download the free conversion software, do the work at your end, get it perfect and (hopefully) upload the little bugger ONCE. It's simple by comparison, because Mobipocket offers ONE file format, whereas Smashwords offers a whole range. With Mobi, you just make sure you download and install the correct reader for your device -- PC, Mac, desktop, netbook, screenreader, phone, whatever.

It's ... ludicrously complicated. Reminds you of the days of VHS and Beta. Of PC and Mac, before the advent of the PDF. Of SD and XD. (One longs to say, of Ford and Holden...)

Today, I leave you with a mystery. As you know if you're a regular reader here, I submitted the LEGENDS blog/site/novel to a directory called BlogCatalog and got it chucked back, rejected. Now, Aricia, being Aricia, was both incensed about that and curious as to the process. So she submitted her celebrity gossip blog, Aricia's Album, to the same venue. And something unspeakably weird went on.

Get this ... and explain it, if you can. We're still trying. After the submission, AG turns off the computer and leaves it for maybe 14 hours. Next day, checks her Gmail, and the are (count them) THREE messages from BlogCatalog.

1) Your blog is unacceptable. Here are the problems ... fix them, resubmit, and we'll reconsider your application.
2) Changes approved!
3) Welcome to BlogCatalog.

Hunh?! She did NOTHING, the computer was turned off. Also, the original message outlining whatever the problems were had vanished from the dashboard when the situation was rectified, so AG never will know what the perceived problems were. And then it was "welcome to BlogCatalog," without a line of text being changed, a picture deleted, or an ad moved.

Does this make any sense to anyone?

No, me neither. So --

Chapter Thirteen concluded at Legends today...

Ciao for now!
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

Gay books gone gaga at Google

Is it just me, or does Google seem to be "all over the shop" lately?

I'm still thinking along similar lines to my post yesterday, which was about getting seen, recognized, and plucked out of the ocean by the Searchbot. It used to be about keywords and relevance. Now? I have no idea.

Looking for blog venues where one could reasonably expect "free online gay fiction" to be listed, I search on (wait for it -- this is going to astonish you) "free online gay fiction."

Woah. Have you picked yourself up off the floor, where you collapsed in shock? Then, let us continue:

Now, you couldn't be much more pellucid in your keywords. And the results? Curious, to say the least.

My own post from yesterday was top of the list, but only because I'm searching from an address NOT inside the US. Remember, Google has my page rankings zeroed out, so anyone searching from an US address won't be seing me in any search results.

Next: a rather nice personal book blog with a handful of posts looking at gay novels, none of them free or online.

Next: an article repository, where features are FREE, and stored ONLINED, and *one* of them talks about a GAY individual who was busted for perving on minors.

Next: a personal blog with a post asking, "Why did President Lincoln FREE the slaves," and considering ONLINE resources. The words "gay" and "fiction" do not appear anywhere.

Next: at last, a real one. "Finding Free Ebooks" at blogger -- where (shockingly) free ebooks are listed. Good range of titles -- bit difficult to navigate the blog due to the slightly odd template design, but there's some gay ebooks there, and they're free. (Won't do me any good to pursue a listing there, because "serial" fiction is not listed.)

Next: personal book blog featuring ... books. Handful of gay topics, none free or online.

Next: political blog with a post having a (justified) rant about anti-gay sentiment, featuring the terms "free advice" and "online newsletters." The term "fiction" was never mentioned.

Next: personal blog with a post talking about an SF party to be held at an address on Gay Street -- inquiries online.

Next: Canadian radio station talks about pulp fiction, one character in which is "nerdy and gay."

Next: personal blog with a post giving the blogger's top ten recommendations for published gay fiction. Not online, not free.

Then you get onto page two, and it really goes haywire, getting worse and worse with each horrific shot in the dark. At the top of the page Google proudly announces, "Results 1 - 10 of about 80,664 for free online gay fiction," and "Sorted by relevance."

Out of the first page, the Bot was right in 2 instances: me (yesterday's post -- I was absolutely, bloody determined to get through to the Bot what I was talking about, if you recall!) and the Finding Free Ebooks blog which would be difficult to miss because it's CALLED "Finding Free Ebooks." Missing that one would be a lot like missing "Aricia's Gay Book Blog."

(If you Google the term "gay book", so long as you're OUTSIDE America, you should find yours truly at #5 with http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2009/02/gay-book-making-news-for-all-wrong.html, and Aricia at #8 with http://ariciasgaybookblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/gay-mystery-and-ancient-chinese-magic.html. If you Google "gay book" from INSIDE America, you won't find me at all -- Google killed my page rankings, if you recall, so it doesn't matter what I write about, what keywords I use, or what I entitle the post!)

So here's the question: WTF is going on with Google? They're just so wrong, they're hardly useful anymore! Thoughts, anyone??

In other news --

Chapter Twelve concluded at Legends today,
and
AG has uploaded the interview we did a few days ago, to her book blog...

Otherwise, the Mel-o-Sphere is a vacuum. Which is kind of restful, in a way.

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