If Amazon is steamrolling over you, why do you continue to let it?

Some weeks, I'm just chattier than others...

I should preface this post by saying that I only slightly care where Amazon ends up, as villain or hero. I own a Kindle and a Kindle Fire, so I'm hardly their worst critic. I'm only writing this post to provide some grounds for discussion.

There's been a lot of press about Amazon this week. Barnes & Noble won't stock their books because they don't play fair. Several states are suing them for back taxes, and they're fighting back. They might even win. They're taking over the world.

Waa, waa, waa.

Let's face it. Amazon is doing business from a business perspective. Making money is, at the very least, an amoral activity. It's not evil to want to make money. We need food and shelter and money can buy us that. But it's not altruistic to need to make enough of a profit from your goods and services in order to pay for your own room and board, not even if you keep your profits so low you have to live on five dollars a day.

If you want to keep Amazon from becoming the only game in town, what can you do? A couple of things, Ladies and Gents.

1. If you're a non-Kindle e-reader owner, buy more damn books. Some of you are already doing your part. I'm talking about the rest of you. Want authors to keep offering their books on Nook? Buy their books, help them make money, and make it lucrative to stay with Barnes & Noble. Want books available on iTunes? Buy them on iTunes, instead of getting the Kindle App for your iPad.

2. If you're a paper-book reader, buy your books from brick-and-mortar stores or non-Amazon e-tailers (Barnes & Noble, etc). No, B&N won't stock Amazon books, but they'll order them for you. If they order enough of them, they might change their tune about stocking...

3. If you're a big company, and YES, I'M TALKING TO YOU, BARNES & NOBLE, make friends with all authors and publishers. Give me an Author's page on your site where fans can come and see my latest trailer or hook up with my latest blog. Make it easy to find me. Give me some discussion boards to talk to people, not just for self-promotion, but to find out what everyone's reading and recommend other authors I think they'll enjoy.

4. If you're a big company who wants to institute a self-publishing service and YES, I'M TALKING TO YOU, APPLE, study Amazon's model, see what authors like (and don't like) and grow your model from there. Don't start out all hoity-toity with a bunch of exclusivity clauses. Amazon didn't start there, and its base model still isn't there. You have a choice, as an author, to be exclusive or not.

For consumers, merchants, authors, readers, Amazon will only take over the world if you lie down and let it. If you learn from it, you can give it a run for its money.

Amazon, schmamazon

In theory, I should despise Amazon. They are the Wal-Mart of the Internet, offering goods and services at such low prices, they decimate any mom-and-pop endeavors in the area, blighting towns and only hiring part-time employees so they don't have to offer any benefits. Amazon is out to rule the world, and so far, it seems that nothing will stop them.

And yet.

As an author, I'm damned happy they exist. I've uploaded my books on Kindle and created paperbacks on CreateSpace, and they are for sale in the Amazon store nearly immediately. Amazon lets me set up an Author's page, where people can come and see if I'm legit or just a fly-by-night, one-trick-writer, full of typos and horrid grammar. They make it easy for me to get my books to market, and they pay me monthly. Yes. Monthly.

Let's consider the rest of the industry: Barnes & Noble, Sony, Apple, Kobo, blah-blah-blah. At Barnes & Noble, we have the PubIt! feature, but I can't set up an author's page and they pay every 60 days. I can't figure out how to even load my own books on the rest, except to go through Smashwords. Don't misunderstand - Smashwords is a great vehicle for uploading to all e-readers, but I'm only paid a month after every quarter end.

Not as friendly as Amazon.

As much as I love people of all e-races and e-readers to have access to my books, I tallied last year's numbers and saw that I did less than 10% of my total sales on all non-Kindle devices put together.

So I'm trying an experiment. I've signed up for the Kindle Select Lending Program, for my newest book, "Are You There Erma? It's Me Gayle". For 90 days, this book will only be available on Kindle. For the next FIVE days, it is being offered as a free promotion.

This is day one, and it's at #1,093 in the Free Kindle Store, #3 in Humor, Essays and #4 in Humor, Parenting and Families. It feels a little icky to be handing out all these free copies, but we'll see how the free rankings help my sales once the free promotion shine wears off.

If it gives this book the boost I'm hoping for, I may have to go with nothing but Kindle for all my books. Sorry, Nook-folks, iReaders, Sony-ites. It's all Amazon's fault. They're treating me too nicely.

And for all you Kindlings, you've got til Friday to get Are You There Erma? It's Me Gayle. What are you waiting for?

What's the price point for an ebook?

When I got my Kindle, I was all atwitter with excitement about the thousands of books I could read for very little money. Then I started shopping. Bestsellers, books from the Big Six publishers, were rarely under $9.99.

Color me appalled.

There is no paper involved in producing an ebook. There is nothing that has to be generated or re-generated. An ebook is an electronic file that is uploaded ONCE to the e-distributor (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, etc), where it is sold over and over AND OVER again.

I might not mind if the author was getting the lion's share, or at least an increasing revenue, of their creation, but (correct me if I'm wrong) I think most authors in the Big Six houses rarely see more than 25% royalty on their ebooks. That's about $2.50 per book. The publisher gets to keep the rest. Why?

According to them, they have to keep the rest in order to keep the lights on, employ their staff, and look for new authors. Really? Perhaps they should find other ways to bankroll their operations, instead of trying to convince authors that being poor is for their own good.

When I published What Would Erma Do, I initially set the ebook price at $2.99. This is my own personal breaking point, so I thought it seemed fair. Within the first month, I dropped it down to 99 cents, for two important reasons:

1. It was a new book from a new author (of that genre), so I wanted to entice a quantity of readers. Who could refuse a book for a dollar?

2. I knew that if I sold enough books, sooner or later it would start to creep up the Amazon rankings and more people could find it. At that point, I could raise the price back up to $2.99.

I did the same thing for Hit or Missus. But now, the more I think about it, the more I think I'll keep my books at 99 cents, at least until the market changes. If the lowest priced book becomes $1.99, I'll probably follow the market. When you're thinking of buying an ebook or  selling one, consider the following: not only is an ebook uploaded once and sold multiple times, it's often not even "sold".

Welcome to DRM, Digital Rights Management, a system for keeping consumers from transferring a song or book or movie from one device to another an infinite number of times. (Yes, I know it's a little more complicated than that, but I only want to focus on one aspect today. Bear with me.) I'm not arguing for or against DRM. It is part of the landscape. I'm just saying that, unless an author has opted out of DRM, when you "purchase" a book, you are only purchasing the right to store it on your Kindle/Nook/whatever.

A year or so ago, there was a big brouhaha at Amazon. It seems there was a question about whether Amazon had the rights to sell George Orwell's books on Kindle. While the matter was being settled, Amazon pulled Orwell's books from their Kindle store and from anyone's Kindle who had purchased one. Yes, read that sentence as many times as you like, it will still mean the same thing. One day I had 1984 on my Kindle and the next day, I didn't have 1984 no more.

Everything got corrected and the books went back to everyone's Kindles and all was well. But you see my point?

Do you want to pay $9.99 to rent a book?

One more thing to think about: technology grows at an astounding pace. How many of your favorite albums have you re-purchased as 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, MP3s? How many of your favorite books will you end up re-purchasing when the next generation reader comes along?

It's just something to consider. Thoughts? Ideas? Jokes?

Save the women and children - Todd Russell's in the house

I offered my blog up for human sacrifice cross-posting and got a few more responses, one of them being Todd Russell, who loves all things scary. He's also got a sense of humor - a manly, scatological, bathroom-giggly, sense of humor. Todd's entry for today has to do with visiting an establishment that has two restrooms, one for men named Richard and one for everyone else.

Take it away, Todd.

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No Dicks vs. Dicks


Check this out, I'm in the women's room and Gayle's in the men's room. Yeah, yeah, we've all done this by accident, but we're doing this intentionally. I get to talk at her blog about Dicks and No Dicks while she is stuck at mine working through her deepest, darkest mind-numbing fears. Who has the lighter gig today?

It's refreshing to come out of the dark and into the light today and say hello to the fine folks following this blog. Please don't take this as being abrupt but I'm going to get right to the story.

Recently I was out with a friend and he wanted to go throw down a beer and we stumbled upon this ramshackle bar in the middle of a town neither of us knew. I mean this place might have been new forty years ago. The only thing fresh there was the grass growing on the leaning roof and the beer bottle caps stuck in the ceiling.

The writer in me was drawn to their curious bathroom labels.

Creativity can be found in the strangest places, huh? But my mind wouldn't stop here, I started thinking about other labels they could have used. I mean, really, why stop at the Dicks thing. So I started making a list of her / him alternative bar bathroom labels:


1. In / Out

2. Hole / Moutain

3. Pink-green / Blue-green (for the eco-conscious)

4. Tidy / Messy

5. Sit / Stand

6. PMS / NFL or NBA or MLB (your choice)

7. Tampon / Temper

8. Romance / Sex

9. Wine / Beer

10. Earth / Wood

This was becoming so much fun that I flirted with asking my twitter friends to help me come up with more but thankfully common sense took over.

I'm going to leave Gayle's bathroom now. I am tidying up on the way out and yes, lifted the seat and washed my hands. I do appreciate the opportunity to come over here and say hello and at resist all temptation to pitch my book. A writer's promotional constipation: we want to promote and it is right there at the surface. But. We. Just. Can't.

Where is the paper towel dispenser, Gayle? No, no, not one of those hand dryers when we have to touch the germ-ridden door handles anyway?

I exit and try to leave behind those brain stealing alternative bathroom labels. It's not working, here's another: Hello / Goodbye.

Todd Russell started writing fiction immediately after he learned how to go to the bathroom on his own. Mental Shrillness, a collection of six twist ending horror stories, is his first book. An Amazon reviewer writes: “I was appalled … the stories are horrifying, disturbing and nauseating at times. I recommend Mental Shrillness to adult readers to challenge themselves on how strange a story they can handle.” You can follow Todd’s work at http://toddrwrite.com/

* * * * * *

Gayle here: Todd may not want to pitch his book, but here are ALLLLLL the sample and buy links to it, even those of you in Germany who are reading this now (Ach!) -

 Amazon US Kindle

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004U7FI6A/


Barnes & Noble NOOK
http://tinyurl.com/mentalshrillnessNOOK




Apple iBooks
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/mental-shrillness/id433814981?mt=11&uo=4


Smashwords (multiple e-formats)
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/49957



Amazon UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004U7FI6A/



Amazon DE (Germany)
http://www.amazon.de/dp/B004U7FI6A/

Thanks, Todd! Now, please just get out of my restroom. By the way, did you eat the potpourri?

TV is good for me

I was one of those kids who was raised in front of the TV set, so it never occurred to me to call it a "vast wasteland". It was my friend, my window to the world of other lands and people and beliefs and cultures and... well, you get the idea. My own family, God bless 'em, was littered with conservative, fundamentalist, racist views; if I'd grown up in only their company, who knows what a hot mess I'd be today? Yes, I also read plenty of books. But on TV, I got to see decent families of all colors, exotic countries, and cooking that didn't involve oil and flour.

So now I watch a lot of shows, mostly dramas these days, always mysteries. From Cold Case to NCIS, Medium, and the L&O and CSI franchises, I'm always trying to figure out whodunit. Lately, I've been trying to figure out more. I've been watching the story arcs and how they're set up. They all do it slightly differently, but I've learned a lot of interesting things I can apply to my own plot lines. For example:

CSI - I only watch the original and NY (I admit it, Caruso is too creepy for me), but I've noticed that the first person they interview is usually the killer, especially if they look benign and act helpful. Cold Case follows this formula also; the one person you discount as being innocent usually did it.

L&O - In this show, the first interviewee is usually NOT the killer, and their theories on the motive will shift at least three times during the hour.

NCIS - I don't notice as many red herrings in this show, altho I may be wrong. What I do notice is the chipping away, bit by bit, of the evidence until the killer is narrowed down. And I notice that I've got a crush on McGee(k), who wrote one thriller and is now a recognized bestseller, and buys expensive clothes and cars. Ah, the romance of the writer, through the eyes of the media (who should know better).

Medium - The fun part of this show is trying to figure out where Allison's dreams/visions are trying to lead me. Should I take them literally this week, or figuratively? If I was writing paranormal, I'd want to do it like this.

Recently, I've been conscious of the soundtrack. A sad moment may be well written (and have all the right camera angles), but if it didn't have that poignant music behind it, would I still be weeping at the TV screen? Which made me think...

What if e-books came with soundtracks? The Kindle, iPhone, eReader, etc are all getting more sophisticated. They know what page you're on - why couldn't a clever person program music to accompany the words? As your main character cradles their dying best friend, the music swells appropriately. Or perhaps, for the savvy and independent reader, they are allowed to program their own soundtrack? How cool would that be? I wonder if Amazon/Apple/Sony would be interested, and more importantly, would pay me for their interest. It could be the next great app!

See, TV didn't rot my brain at all.