K.M. Frontain's Blog, page 37
December 15, 2011
Redemption 1 back on Lulu
December 9, 2011
Behind on Redemption edits
All this conversion to ePUB and Kindle format and new covers have put me off schedule. I'm glad I have the ePUBs done. I'm very happy to have my books on Kindle too and that they all have better covers. So it's a trade off really. Lost time on Redemption but I feel really good about what I have available for readers.
Big apologies to my readers waiting for Redemption 3. I really, really, really, really.....reeeeeallly want to get the Redemptions edited right. I've taken them all off Lulu to go over again. Want to make sure the third novel of the set really goes where it's supposed to go without too many silly detours.
Now if I could only shake this cold, I shall be able to concentrate better.
Big apologies to my readers waiting for Redemption 3. I really, really, really, really.....reeeeeallly want to get the Redemptions edited right. I've taken them all off Lulu to go over again. Want to make sure the third novel of the set really goes where it's supposed to go without too many silly detours.
Now if I could only shake this cold, I shall be able to concentrate better.
December 8, 2011
Let's talk about KDP Select
Keep the word monopoly in mind.
This is a big concern to me, so I left a message on Amazon that they should make correction of mistakes possible, as in put that action button live instead of dead.
Now on to KDP Select. This morning, I go on to my bookshelf page and find the Action button (which lets you edit) replaced by Enroll. I see a banner about a new program for loaning your books to readers. I check the KDP Select legal crap and discover that Amazon wants you to remove all your books from all venues but theirs in exchange for a possibility you may get a percentage of a huge figure of money if your book is loaned to readers during 90 days. Remember that word monopoly.
So let's take a better look at this deal. Apparently, if you enroll, you enroll in a lending library. If your book is lent to someone, this adds to your percentage which will be taken out of this massively inspiring figure of $500 000, I assume U.S dollars. Yes, let your mind boggle.
And now think about it. Who does this offer really help?
Best case scenario, you agree to enroll, you get lots of loans, you get a bundle from your percentage. Meanwhile, your ePUB market no longer exists, because you can't legally sell anywhere but Kindle. Not even on your web page. Nowhere, no other formats. Monopoly anyone?
Again, who does the offer really help? The already popular authors of course. They'll make a killing off KDP Select. Provided Amazon lives up to it's claims... Yeah, forgot to mention a little clause there that says Amazon has the sole discretion to decide what constitutes a loan. Wow, what could they mean by that?
So let's say the popular authors get 75% of the loaning action for these 90 days. Let's say that's about a few hundred authors sharing that 75% of $500 000. Now the remaining 25% of loans are the unknown authors, like me. Yes, I don't consider myself a known author. These unknowns number in the thousands. They must share that 25% between them. How much do you see them getting compared to the authors already possessing reputation?
So what has Amazon really done here? Amazon has made a vague promise to give you a percentage if you manage to get your book loaned. You must scratch and claw through all the other free promotions those 90 days to get attention. In exchange for the vague promise of gaining your big dream to become a big name author, you agree to help Amazon establish a monopoly and cut out ePUB competitors. Let's overlook the fact that if you sell just one copy of your novel, your rank jumps from the lowly bottom of the pile, somewhere in the 700 thousands, up to 125 thousand. Think about that. The majority of books on Amazon don't sell much. This is true of even Lulu, btw. And now, for a vague promise, you cut out Lulu, iTunes, Nook, everyone else and give all the power to Amazon. There's no guarantee your book will be loaned. There's no guarantee you'll get any of that money. The only person guaranteeing anything is you when you agree to remove all your books from competitive dealers.
Oh, yeah. What if one of the competitors is an affiliate that placed your book on Amazon? What happens then? If you unpublish at your original Indie pub, doesn't your book disappear from Amazon too?
Granted Amazon provides for free the service of publishing your book on Kindle. This is very nice of Amazon. But did the company just cross the line of decency and start preying on your hopes and dreams?
Here's a forum thread you may want to follow.
This is a big concern to me, so I left a message on Amazon that they should make correction of mistakes possible, as in put that action button live instead of dead.
Now on to KDP Select. This morning, I go on to my bookshelf page and find the Action button (which lets you edit) replaced by Enroll. I see a banner about a new program for loaning your books to readers. I check the KDP Select legal crap and discover that Amazon wants you to remove all your books from all venues but theirs in exchange for a possibility you may get a percentage of a huge figure of money if your book is loaned to readers during 90 days. Remember that word monopoly.
So let's take a better look at this deal. Apparently, if you enroll, you enroll in a lending library. If your book is lent to someone, this adds to your percentage which will be taken out of this massively inspiring figure of $500 000, I assume U.S dollars. Yes, let your mind boggle.
And now think about it. Who does this offer really help?
Best case scenario, you agree to enroll, you get lots of loans, you get a bundle from your percentage. Meanwhile, your ePUB market no longer exists, because you can't legally sell anywhere but Kindle. Not even on your web page. Nowhere, no other formats. Monopoly anyone?
Again, who does the offer really help? The already popular authors of course. They'll make a killing off KDP Select. Provided Amazon lives up to it's claims... Yeah, forgot to mention a little clause there that says Amazon has the sole discretion to decide what constitutes a loan. Wow, what could they mean by that?
So let's say the popular authors get 75% of the loaning action for these 90 days. Let's say that's about a few hundred authors sharing that 75% of $500 000. Now the remaining 25% of loans are the unknown authors, like me. Yes, I don't consider myself a known author. These unknowns number in the thousands. They must share that 25% between them. How much do you see them getting compared to the authors already possessing reputation?
So what has Amazon really done here? Amazon has made a vague promise to give you a percentage if you manage to get your book loaned. You must scratch and claw through all the other free promotions those 90 days to get attention. In exchange for the vague promise of gaining your big dream to become a big name author, you agree to help Amazon establish a monopoly and cut out ePUB competitors. Let's overlook the fact that if you sell just one copy of your novel, your rank jumps from the lowly bottom of the pile, somewhere in the 700 thousands, up to 125 thousand. Think about that. The majority of books on Amazon don't sell much. This is true of even Lulu, btw. And now, for a vague promise, you cut out Lulu, iTunes, Nook, everyone else and give all the power to Amazon. There's no guarantee your book will be loaned. There's no guarantee you'll get any of that money. The only person guaranteeing anything is you when you agree to remove all your books from competitive dealers.
Oh, yeah. What if one of the competitors is an affiliate that placed your book on Amazon? What happens then? If you unpublish at your original Indie pub, doesn't your book disappear from Amazon too?
Granted Amazon provides for free the service of publishing your book on Kindle. This is very nice of Amazon. But did the company just cross the line of decency and start preying on your hopes and dreams?
Here's a forum thread you may want to follow.
December 6, 2011
New covers are done
Other than for the Bound set, no new images, just tweaking.
I'm very behind on my Redemption updates because of all the conversions to ePUB and Kindle, and now these new covers. Next job is to reload all books onto Lulu and Kindle with their updated covers. Then it's back to Redemption edits.
Here are the new covers:
The credits for the original image for the above cover go to: Luc Viatour/ www.Lucnix.be
I found the image originally on Wikimedia Commons. His permission to use the original image is not an endorsement of my work.
I'm very behind on my Redemption updates because of all the conversions to ePUB and Kindle, and now these new covers. Next job is to reload all books onto Lulu and Kindle with their updated covers. Then it's back to Redemption edits.
Here are the new covers:
The credits for the original image for the above cover go to: Luc Viatour/ www.Lucnix.be
I found the image originally on Wikimedia Commons. His permission to use the original image is not an endorsement of my work.
December 5, 2011
Delete, email and rewrite post
Yesterday I posted about wanting to create new cover images for my Soulstone Chronicle novels. I started with a new image for the Bound in Stone set, but then I re-read the Creative Commons license and had a major confuzzle. Oh, no! BFG attack! Shnozcumber sling shot! Ready! Fire!
Wait! Ok, settling down to normal again...
The thing about creative commons licenses, they're written in the most confusing manner you can imagine. I was concerned about a detail stating I needed to place the CC license in the vicinity of the image, which is impossible on the cover of a book,'cause that's jus' ugly. So I asked permission to place the CC license within the first few pages of the novels.
So I deleted yesterday's post and yesterday's uploads to Photobucket while I waited for the gentlemen who owned the images to get back to me about my use of his original pic to make the face on my new cover. He wrote back just now and gave permission. So all is well. I have a new cover for the Bound set after all.
So here again are the new prospective covers, skinny Kindle version and fat Lulu version:
I still have work to do on the skinny cover (matching size of face to fat cover, basically).
My son is irritated with the faint bits of green in the shaded areas. He's better at working images than I am, so he's offered to get rid of the green tints.
In case you're wondering, this is an image of the Lucifer de Liège statue.
Ha ha ha! My son thinks I'm one sarcastic old poo.
The credits for the original image go to: Luc Viatour/ www.Lucnix.be
I found the image originally on Wikimedia Commons. His permission to use the original image is not an endorsement of my work.
Wait! Ok, settling down to normal again...
The thing about creative commons licenses, they're written in the most confusing manner you can imagine. I was concerned about a detail stating I needed to place the CC license in the vicinity of the image, which is impossible on the cover of a book,'cause that's jus' ugly. So I asked permission to place the CC license within the first few pages of the novels.
So I deleted yesterday's post and yesterday's uploads to Photobucket while I waited for the gentlemen who owned the images to get back to me about my use of his original pic to make the face on my new cover. He wrote back just now and gave permission. So all is well. I have a new cover for the Bound set after all.
So here again are the new prospective covers, skinny Kindle version and fat Lulu version:
I still have work to do on the skinny cover (matching size of face to fat cover, basically).
My son is irritated with the faint bits of green in the shaded areas. He's better at working images than I am, so he's offered to get rid of the green tints.
In case you're wondering, this is an image of the Lucifer de Liège statue.
Ha ha ha! My son thinks I'm one sarcastic old poo.
The credits for the original image go to: Luc Viatour/ www.Lucnix.be
I found the image originally on Wikimedia Commons. His permission to use the original image is not an endorsement of my work.
December 1, 2011
I don't write gay novels!
So as I mentioned earlier on my Livejournal blog, I started submitting Kindle versions of my epic a few days ago. I now have the first nine novels live on Amazon and have had a few sales, which is nice. But then I thought, how do people find my novels on Amazon? So I attempted to search for them as a customer might and that's when I realized how very limited the Amazon search engine is.
When asked to categorize my novels, I was given exactly two choices of category. Naturally, I chose epic fantasy or as close to it as I could get, but what to choose next? Romance didn't warn a reader that I had homosexual, bisexual or lesbian content. I was stuck with Gay as my second option.
Second, most of my male characters aren't gay. Well, yeah, I start the series with two characters who are absolutely gay, prefer men, do men, want men..., but the others are not actually gay. Most of my characters, some not yet introduced, are MSM: men who have sex with men.
Yeah, I know. Some people call that bisexual. Some people call it bi-curious. But when the men in my novels don't consider themselves gay, what does that make them in modern terminology? The closest thing out there is MSM. I think I have one truly bisexual character in there and that's Nicky. She really likes men, but she really likes women too.
But getting back to MSM characters, they aren't necessarily going to be sympathetic to gays. They might get irritated when they're accused of being gay. They might even take offense when approached at the wrong moment by someone who is gay. My characters might not be that pleasing to gay readers (actually, I've had comments to that effect). So yeah, not a good thing to have my book categorized as gay solely based on the fact two penises may have touched.
So that left me with tags. But I'm only allowed seven. Oh, what to enter? It's a big dilemma. I know I need fantasy and epic and soulstone (for those searching specifically for my series), but then I'm again stuck with gay because it's common, bisexual for the same reason, and then maybe gryphon and romance (I think it's romance between men, bromance: is bromance a good tag? Not sure.) And of course I shove in Frontain so people can find me, the author. It just doesn't feel like enough tags.
Truly it would be nice to have a category in Amazon that covers original slash. But...darn it, why does it have to have the word slash in it? Those not clued in might think blood and guts.
Here's hoping that someday original slash fiction will become so mainstream it is recognized in these popular venues and perhaps earns a better name.
When asked to categorize my novels, I was given exactly two choices of category. Naturally, I chose epic fantasy or as close to it as I could get, but what to choose next? Romance didn't warn a reader that I had homosexual, bisexual or lesbian content. I was stuck with Gay as my second option.
Second, most of my male characters aren't gay. Well, yeah, I start the series with two characters who are absolutely gay, prefer men, do men, want men..., but the others are not actually gay. Most of my characters, some not yet introduced, are MSM: men who have sex with men.
Yeah, I know. Some people call that bisexual. Some people call it bi-curious. But when the men in my novels don't consider themselves gay, what does that make them in modern terminology? The closest thing out there is MSM. I think I have one truly bisexual character in there and that's Nicky. She really likes men, but she really likes women too.
But getting back to MSM characters, they aren't necessarily going to be sympathetic to gays. They might get irritated when they're accused of being gay. They might even take offense when approached at the wrong moment by someone who is gay. My characters might not be that pleasing to gay readers (actually, I've had comments to that effect). So yeah, not a good thing to have my book categorized as gay solely based on the fact two penises may have touched.
So that left me with tags. But I'm only allowed seven. Oh, what to enter? It's a big dilemma. I know I need fantasy and epic and soulstone (for those searching specifically for my series), but then I'm again stuck with gay because it's common, bisexual for the same reason, and then maybe gryphon and romance (I think it's romance between men, bromance: is bromance a good tag? Not sure.) And of course I shove in Frontain so people can find me, the author. It just doesn't feel like enough tags.
Truly it would be nice to have a category in Amazon that covers original slash. But...darn it, why does it have to have the word slash in it? Those not clued in might think blood and guts.
Here's hoping that someday original slash fiction will become so mainstream it is recognized in these popular venues and perhaps earns a better name.
