Written out of the Story

Tags

book launch, Iguana Books, media, misrepresentation, The Dragon Whisperer, Vanessa Ricci-Thode

I recently co-hosted a book launch with my friend Vanessa Ricci-Thode. Her book, the Dragon Whisperer recently came out, and since the timing was in proximity to the release of the print edition of Konstantin’s Gifts, we figured we’d pool resources and launch together.

It was a really fun event–I had a great time, lots of people came, and it was a fabulous night of celebration, featuring live music, readings and some really really delicious cake! Thanks so much to everyone who attended or was involved, for your help and support and for coming out, buying books and all that good stuff!

It was a fully co-operative event, in which Ness and I both participated fully: she contacted the venue; I contacted the media; she looked into catering; I looked into music; she invited her friends; I invited my friends etc. You get the idea.

So, imagine my surprise when her publisher wrote the following about the event:

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Hearts and Bones: 2012 in Review

Tags

adoption, Alhambra, articling, bar exam, erg chebbi, Font-de-Gaume, France, law school, Morocco, Paris, Spain, triple bypass surgery

The gorgeous walled city of Carcasonne: part of our 10 year anniversary trip through France, Spain and Morocco this past summer

Happy New Year, everyone! May you all have a wonderful and auspicious 2013.

It’s been a while since I’ve done my milestones column–I don’t know if I actually wrote one in 2012 at all!

And, while I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions (I figure, I don’t need to wait till the New Year to make changes–for me that’s just procrastination. If I want to change, then that’s the best time to make the change), I do think the clicking over of one calendar year to the next is a good point at which to look back and see what all has happened in the past year.

KDP Select Update: The Power of Free*

Tags

free promos, increased sales, kdp select

So, I obviously hadn’t been leveraging the synergies sufficiently when I posted my last KDP update. In the wake of reading a piece about the power of free and how it worked spectacularly well for the author, I thought I’d best give it a try.

Warning: this post is not necessarily all that engaging for most readers. It’s mainly aimed at fellow writers who are trying to decide whether or not to do the KDP Select program and drills down into the fairly dry details of my little experiments.

And, for those of you writers who have read many many of these KDP Select follow up posts, I’d say the three things that make these figures a little different, at least to the other reports that I’ve read on KDP Select results are:

1) I’ve got several books in multiple genres;

2) I’ve tried the promo on different days in different ways, with vastly differing results;

3) the improvement in sales has been palpable and gratifying, but not the kind of mind-blowing figures others seem to have experienced.

Interview: Siri Paulson from Turtleduck Press

Tags

publishing co-op, Siri Paulson, turtleduck press

Welcome all, to my first ever blog interview/guest post! My friend Siri is an editor, a writer, and a founding member of Turtleduck Press. Turtleduck is an indie publisher with an intriguing, co-operative publishing model. I figured that my fellow indie writers and publishers might be interested in reading about their particular approach and methodology. Enjoy!

Tell us about your latest release. (e.g. what are you most excited about; what inspired the collection; what is it themed around, etc.)
Our latest release is Winter’s Night, a winter-themed anthology that includes work from all four of the Turtleduck Press members. We had an empty slot in our schedule for December, so we initially thought of doing a Christmas anthology, but, well, Turtleduckers are all about the unconventional.

KDP Select: The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Tags

Amazon Prime, kdp select, prisoner's dilemma

UPDATE: as Catana points out in the comments, the analysis below is partly premised on a mistaken assumption that I made (and which Amazon is not in any rush to correct in their KDP Select Terms of Use). Namely, I’d assumed that the library consists of unlimited loans. But it doesn’t. It’s one per month. So, most users are likely to use their one “borrow” for books that are more expensive (~$6.50 or higher, to make it worth the $79 annual fee)–NOT books at indie pricing. This means that we’re still where we were before, but many indies (esp. people like me who aren’t in the US, and so are less likely to check the Amazon Prime Lending Library’s terms) won’t realise this, and will opt in under a false assumption. Tsk, Tsk, Amazon. No doubt it was just an oversight. I’ve left the rest of the post intact, because depending on your pricing and your popularity, this analysis might still be relevant in helping to determine whether you will opt in or not. /update

In Homer’s The Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis were fearsome sea monsters who existed in sufficient proximity to each other that any sailors who wished to brave those waters had to sail very carefully indeed, between the two horrors. More contemporary speculations posit Scylla as a rock shoal and Charybdis as a whirlpool.

And at the moment, I find myself to be caught between the two of them. To break it down: