Michael R. Hicks's Blog, page 13

How To Use Tweet Adder 4

I’ve written before about what a powerful tool Tweet Adder can be in building your following on Twitter. I use it, of course, to find and reach out to potential readers and develop tighter relationships with existing ones, but it can be applied to nearly any business application. However, Tweet Adder 4, the latest version, comes with some modifications demanded by Twitter that take some getting used to. I’ve put together a few tips here on how to use it that will, I hope, help you continue to get the most out of this great bit of software.

The most critical change in Tweet Adder 4 is that the software no longer automatically follows and unfollows accounts. This was mandated by Twitter in a legal filing last year, I believe, against Tweet Adder and several other companies with “Twitter adder” type software as a move against inveterate spammers. While you can continue to run searches largely as you did in version 3, you actually have to click on a button in the search results list for each person you want to follow (or, alternately, discard from your follow list). The same is true for unfollowing accounts, although Tweet Adder has added some filter options to make that function a bit easier.

The rest of the functionality, particularly sending out automated tweets, thank you messages, DMs, and following people back who follow you first, remains largely the same.

So, you’re probably thinking, “Hey, they’ve just gutted this thing! Tweet Adder is useless now!”

Not so, my friend. Using it just takes a bit more time and a different workflow. True, it’s not just going to chug away in the background like it used to, but I’ve found a couple ways to maximize your gains for minimal time.

Let’s first start with unfollowing. If you click on the Not Following Back link in the left nav bar, you’ll see a list of people who, well, aren’t following you back. I have mine on the default setting of hiding users that I’ve followed within the last three days. In other words, anyone I follow through Tweet Adder has three days to follow me back. If they don’t, I figure they’re not interested (which is fine), so I unfollow them and move right along. While this process is no longer automated, it’s still pretty darn easy: you just click on the unfollow button for everyone in the list. Bzzt. I can zap a hundred accounts in a minute or so. Sometimes I’ll do ten or twenty, write a bit on my latest novel, then come back and zap some more. No sweat.

Following accounts is really a two-step process. First you have to run a search of some kind, then you have to manually follow the accounts that show up.

As of the time of this writing, the only search type that seems to work well for me is the standard tweet search. The Followers of a User search, which I used to use fairly often, consistently times and out no longer seems to work, and the other searches were ones that I never really found all that useful. Hopefully Tweet Adder will get those sorted out, but that’s okay — you can still make this thing hum with just the basic tweet search.

So, click on the Tweet Search link in the left nav pane. The fields you’ll find are the same as in version 3, with one glaring exception: the save search function is gone. This is sort of annoying, as it would be nice to be able to save your favorite searches and maybe click on a button to manually run them, rather than having to type them in or cut and paste from a text file into the keywords field. It’s not a huge deal, but it would be nice.

Anyway, one super-duper critical thing to get the most out of Tweet Adder 4 is to have very tight, focused keyword searches. What you want, ideally, is for your search results to contain only (or as close as you can get) accounts of people who might actually be interested in following you. I know that sounds obvious, but in version 4 it’s extra important, because if your results are very tight, you won’t have to scan the account details before you click the follow button. With tight results, you just leave your pointer hovering over the follow button and click-click-click. Another tip: I usually set the search results limit to 100. You don’t really need any more than that coming up.

“Hey, you cheater! That’s no better than automated following! You should be reviewing every account that you follow before you click that button, you heartless schmuck!”

Well, I may be a heartless schmuck, but I’m an efficient heartless schmuck. I know the people who come up in my results are very likely interested in following me back, because I can see in the search results, which display the latest tweet that your search criteria hit on, that we’ve got something in common. Maybe you’ve got a roofing company and you’ve got a list of people in your local area dealing with leaks in their roofs after a bad storm. They have a need, and you might be able to help them out. Commonality. My searches are so refined at this point that I don’t have to read every single tweet to know that these folks are likely to follow back. How do I know that? From extensive trial and error when I was refining my searches and checking every account before following them. Now it’s to the point that clicking on the follow button is merely a mechanical function that I now have to do myself, rather than Tweet Adder doing it for me. Click-click-click.

Now, you can do your click-o-mania in a couple different ways. The first is to follow people directly from the search results pane. The second, which I prefer, is to take the search results and add them to the Follow All Later list by clicking the button of the same name at the bottom of the search screen. Why would you want to do that? So you can run all your searches at one sitting, then come back throughout the day and work your way through the Follow Later List. For me, it’s an easier work flow, as I usually run several different searches, and it’s easier for me to do that all in one go.

Then you just click on the Follow Later List in the left nav pane, where your latest saved search results are all stored, and just click-click-click through the list.

Note: I have to express one caution/consideration with the click-click-click business. Twitter still doesn’t like large or fast changes in accounts. So do your clicking in batches periodically through the day so you’ll avoid hitting the various limits Twitter imposes.

So how long does it take to do all that clicking? I typically get through a couple/few hundred follows and unfollows every day in maybe five minutes or so (again, spread throughout the day). Now, keep in mind when looking at those numbers that my main account has almost 70,000 followers now; most accounts aren’t going to have nearly that much coming and going each day, which means that you won’t have to spend nearly as much time as I do fiddling with Tweet Adder.

The bottom line is that Tweet Adder 4 is still a very effective tool for building your Twitter following. Yes, it takes a bit of work now, as opposed to being set-and-forget like version 3, but I still consider it an absolutely vital tool for reaching out to potential new readers. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I believe you can still download a trial version for free and play around with it before you decide to buy. Check it out and see what you think!

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Memorial Day Sale On IN HER NAME Novels

What’s Memorial Day weekend without a Memorial Day sale? I don’t know, but it’s a sale we’re having: starting today (Sunday, May 26) both and trilogies — normally priced from $7.99 to $9.99 — are on sale for only $2.99, while is on sale for a piddly $0.99, down from $3.99 to $4.99!

So, what the heck are you waiting for? If you haven’t read any of these books yet, now’s the time, because the sale will only be on for a few days!

Choose Retailer...
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
iTunes
Google Play
Kobo

Choose Retailer...
Amazon
iTunes
Barnes & Noble
Google Play
Kobo

Choose Retailer...
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
iTunes
Google Play
Kobo
Smashwords

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Win a Free Copy of The Season Of The Harvest Audiobook

It’s out. I’ve told you it’s out. Some of you know it’s out (and what’s wrong with the rest of you?). And to celebrate, ACX, the company through which I published it, has kindly sent me five promotional codes that will get you — if you’re lucky — a free copy of the SEASON OF THE HARVEST audiobook from Audible!

Why would you want a copy? Well, if you enjoy audiobooks in general, you’re going to enjoy this one for a) the story (which ain’t bad, if I do say so myself), and b) the great narration by Edward E. French. If you’ve never tried an audiobook before, this is a great way to dip your toes in the water, because the retail price of the audiobook, which is just over 14 hours long, is $21.95 on iTunes and Amazon and $24.95 on Audible. But through this giveaway you might be able to get it for free (only from Audible.com)!

If you haven’t listened to the demo sample yet, here ya go:

How To Win:

It’s easy, but since I’m offering you something, I want a little something from you in return: a vivid memory. Yes, a memory that makes you smile or laugh, or that gets you pumped up and your heart racing from excitement (note: all eligible memories must be rated PG-13! ). Alternatively, it could be something that scared the crap out of you. It’s entirely up to you. I’ll be closing the competition on Friday, 31 May, so don’t wait!

I’ll be choosing five of those precious memories to win, but you can help yourself (and have friends help you) by giving a thumbs-up to your favorite comment(s) (and no, I won’t count any thumbs-down). I’ll be taking those little votes into account when I make the winner selections. So having friends play along might make the difference between winning and losing. Maybe.

So, dredge the gray matter for some juicy recollections and post them in the comments (one per contestant, please)! 

Note: I can only guarantee the codes will work for Audible.com! I don’t know if they’ll work on Audible.co.uk, and they’re not valid on Amazon or iTunes. So if you aren’t able to use Audible.com, you’ll be out of luck (although if I choose you as a winner I’ll give you a non-monetary consolation prize!).

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Amazon Pilfered My Book Cover

Listen, I love Amazon. Really, I do. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them, but would still be back at the National Security Agency, banging my head against the literal cubicle wall and counting down the nanoseconds of the years ahead until my minimum retirement age. But something interesting happened the other day: Amazon pilfered my book cover.

I was notified first by one reader on Facebook, followed by several others on Twitter, that they’d received a promotional email from Amazon that morning (on 19 May) with the graphic you see here in the upper right. Looks pretty cool, eh?

The reason they brought it up is that the background bits with the sword and stars looked awfully familiar. Maybe a bit like the cover of ?

Well, maybe more than just a little bit. I overlaid Amazon’s graphic with a 300 pixel-high image of EMPIRE’s cover and it was a perfect match, as you can see here.

Now, it wouldn’t have been such a big harumph if Amazon had at least pointed the reader toward EMPIRE or one of my other books, but that wasn’t the case.

I reviewed the Kindle Direct Publishing Terms of Service (KDP TOS to those who enjoy acronyms), and I couldn’t find anything in there that led me to believe that Amazon could take copyrighted book covers, airbrush out the title, and use the resulting images for promotional purposes without crediting the author/publisher.

So I fired off an email to KDP customer service and got an interim response back from “Raghu M.” noting that he’d notified the concerned department (whichever one that was) about the issue, and would monitor things and follow up as soon as he could provide an answer.

That was all fine and good, although the one thing that irritated me was that it was one of those “you can’t reply to this message” messages. I believe that customer service should be a dialogue, and hate having no way to discuss the issue short of having to send yet another form message in which I’d have to explain everything over again, as there wasn’t even a case or ticket number to go with the original query. Gah.

I decided to write an email and sent it off to Amazon in hopes that it’ll reach someone in the executive echelons above reality, not so much that I expect more action from them, but because I don’t really trust things to get kicked around in the customer service mystery box. And, besides, someone in the corporate chain should probably be aware that their marketing people are engaged in copyright infringement, especially since Amazon comes down like a ton of bricks on people for even a hint of the same.

What did I tell them? After explaining (and showing) that the graphic was clearly derived from the cover of EMPIRE and was used without my permission and, so far as I can find, without being covered in the KDP TOS, I told them that as recompense I would be quite happy to have EMPIRE (or, better yet, one of my paid books like REDEMPTION) featured in a special promotion. That way everybody wins: Amazon and I get more royalties, and readers will get some sort of special something. I said that I was certainly open to other ideas, but tossed that out for consideration.

So, we’ll see what happens. It’s always something…

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Don’t Use Kickstarter Funds To Publish Through A Vanity Press

Fear The Penguin!

As I’ve discussed previously, among my biggest pet peeves are the predatory practices of vanity press companies like Author Solutions (which is part of the Penguin Group) and its subsidiaries, which take terrible advantage of authors by hoodwinking them into paying outrageous sums of money to get their books published. What’s even worse is the number of aspiring authors lately who are not only falling into this trap, but dragging other unwitting folks into the tar pit by asking them to pledge money to Kickstarter projects the authors set up to pay for their vanity press publishing packages. No. No, no, no!

If you haven’t heard of Kickstarter, it’s basically a way for people with project ideas who need funding to find financial backers, most of whom are just regular folks willing and able to contribute a small amount of money. But, like interest, small amounts add up.

I think Kickstarter is a fantastic idea. But I think raising Kickstarter money to publish through a vanity press like Author Solutions is lunacy (for a great rundown on Author Solutions and author exploitation in general, check out David Gaughran’s blog). The would-be author is asking people to fund a book project that is never going to get anywhere and will never make back what the author and his or her supporters have put into it. Why? Because these companies make their money from the authors, not by selling books. If you ask people to fund your project and then hand the money to a vanity press, you may as well have just thrown it out into the street. Actually, that would be better, because the people who snatch up the money could put it to better use.

The reason I’m fired up about this particular issue is that it came up the other day with a relation of one of my wife’s friends, and I’ve also gotten several messages on Twitter asking me to support Kickstarter projects for authors going to publish with Author Solutions companies.

Maybe if I shout this here it’ll be loud and clear:

Handing over your book to companies like Author Solutions that demand a big wad of cash up front from you, the author, is not self-publishing, it is vanity press publishing. There is a huge difference, and it is a terrible thing for the author. Do not do it.

With true self-publishing, the amount of money you need up front ranges from absolutely zip to perhaps a couple/few thousand dollars to pay for specific things that many folks aren’t able to do themselves. The two most common examples that immediately come to mind of things that might be expensive enough to warrant a Kickstarter project are cover art, which can range anywhere from $50 to over $400, and professional editing, which can be as much as a few thousand dollars for a full-length novel (prices will vary, of course), although I’ve found that you can often find people to do a very creditable job of editing for free or very minimal cost. You could also come up with some other innovative Kickstarter projects, like funding the production of an audiobook or translating the book into other languages.

In my mind, all those would be very positive uses of Kickstarter funds for a novel that you self-publish. Because at the end of the day, the author remains in control of their work. You retain all the rights, other than the nonexclusive rights you grant to retailers like Amazon to sell your work on your behalf for a cut of the revenue. You remain in control, so if you want to change the price of your work to be more competitive or for a special promotion, you can. If you want to make it free as a loss leader (a book you give away to entice readers to buy your other books), you can. You can do whatever you want with it to help it grow and entertain or inform readers.

If you pay for a vanity press to take care of it, you won’t have all that. What’s more, at the prices they set on their books, you’ll never make back what you put into it. Not even close. Why? Because no one’s going to buy books at premium prices from an unknown author. And the vanity press company you paid to publish your book doesn’t care, because they already made their money from you. That’s how their business model is set up; proceeds from any book sales is just the icing on their cake. Yes, they have all kinds of fancy rhetoric up front about how they can “help” you, but once they have your money for one of their packages (that often range into the thousands of dollars), you’re just another sucker. I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, but that’s the truth. Just…don’t…do it.

So, if you’re going to use Kickstarter to help fund your book project for cover art, editing, etc., I think that’s great. Just please don’t give away that money to a vanity press company, because in the end it’s not just you getting screwed, it’s all the people who believed in you enough to give you their hard-earned money.

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IN HER NAME: THE LAST WAR is Now Available On iTunes

Okay, I confess that I haven’t been entirely fair to folks who do their shopping at Apple’s iTunes store, as some of my books haven’t been available there until now. However, I’m in the process of fixing those oversights, starting with the trilogy collection of In Her Name: The Last War, which you can !

Just as a reminder, this trilogy contains the three complete novels of  (which is available free), , and , and you’ll save about $5 off the cost of buying each of those books separately from iTunes.

As far as reading order goes, I generally recommend that people start with this part of the story, as it tells the beginning of the war between Humanity and the Kreelan Empire.

So, go check it out, and enjoy!

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REAPING THE HARVEST Teaser #1

Well, technically I guess this is Reaping The Harvest teaser #2, as I posted a blurb from the book on Facebook a week or so ago, but I never claimed to be a math genius!

Anyway, here’s a little something to whet your appetite (and remember, this is a rough draft and might have bloopers!)…

* * *

Kiran was gripped by a nightmare. It visited him every time he closed his eyes, and it was always the same.

It began with him blinking open his eyes to find himself aboard the Indian Air Force IL-76 transport that was supposed to carry them to the United States. It always took him a moment to remember that he had just escaped the horrors of Hyderabad, that his men had sacrificed themselves so that he and his cousin Vijay, who lay strapped in a gurney, could live. A nightmare within a nightmare.

The plane had stopped in New Delhi to take on more passengers. Government officials, members of high-ranking families, some scientists. They were faceless, fearful ghosts in his dream who poured into the plane and took their places around him and his cousin.

Vijay spoke to him, but Kiran couldn’t remember the words now. Vijay, too, had become a ghost, his dark skin having faded to a pale, translucent shroud over his skull as the big four-engine jet took off and turned northeast, heading toward Turkey, the first refueling stop on their way to America.

But they never made it. Kiran thrashed and murmured as the dream exploded in fire and metal shrapnel that swept the huge cargo bay, chopping the ghosts there to bits (he had never thought that ghosts could bleed, but their blood was always bright red in the dream) before they were sucked out the gaping hole torn in the side of the plane, just aft of the wing. The ghosts of men, women and children, nearly a third of those on the plane who’d been unfortunate enough to be sitting in the wrong place, or had foolishly been up and moving about the hold, had been taken as the cabin suffered explosive decompression. He could see through the tear in the side of the fuselage, could see the right inboard engine streaming flames that turned the bodies sucked from the plane into torches, fluttering like burning moths through the night sky.

Beside him, Vijay screamed. Kiran remembered hanging on to his cousin’s hand and the gurney, which had been strapped down. The plane dove and twisted, and Kiran was sure that they must have rolled upside down, but perhaps that was only part of the dream, too. Other ghosts, free of their restraints, tumbled about the hold. Some followed the others out the hole. Some fell to the deck plates when the plane began to level out, where they lay very still.

The plane’s fall from the sky seemed to take a long time, far longer than Kiran would have imagined had he not been dreaming it all. He knew that in the end he would wake up, cursing himself for a fool, before donning his uniform for another day that duty to his country had set before him. He knew he would wake up. He had to.

Yet the plane still spiraled down and down. The fire from the engine had died, but it still glowed from the heat, and thick dark smoke streamed from it, and he could see now that the trailing edge of the wing was a tattered mess. Beyond was only darkness, no sky, no stars, only darkness that rushed up to meet them…

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The Monsanto Protection Act: Be Afraid, Very Afraid

Sometimes I think I should poke my head out of my cave more often. But when I do, I usually find things that scare me back into the blissful ignorance of mental hibernation, or goofing around on Twitter, which is often the same thing. Take this morning, for example. I happened to poke around in the news feeds and (somewhat belatedly) found out about the so-called Monsanto Protection Act, which sent me running back into my cave.

As you may (or may not) know, I wrote Season Of The Harvest out of a sense of disbelief that the shenanigans of the agricultural biotechnology industry, led by companies like the infamous Monsanto, were driven merely by corporate greed. While most readers have enjoyed the book as a sort of sci-fi thriller, it’s really based largely on science fact. All the places are real. Most of the technology is real. The depiction of people in key positions in the government who are indebted to (or simply vassals of) the biotech companies is real, although modified, of course, to fit the story. The whole thing, seen together, seemed to outrageous, too sinister, for mere profit.

Then we leave sanity behind completely with things like the Monsanto Protection Act, which is the unofficial name given to Section 735 of the “Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013,” or H.R. 933, an appropriations bill that President Obama signed into law in late March. This was one of those sneaky little inserts that lawmakers stick into larger bills hoping that either no one will catch it before it’s signed into law, or the bill is too important to quibble over for long without dire consequences to the nation at large. Such was the case with H.R. 933, which essentially was a continuing resolution funding bill to keep the government running for a while longer until a more permanent budget can get sorted out in Congress (good luck with that, too, right?).

So, what’s so awful about poor little Section 735? As the International Business Times reports:

The “Monsanto Protection Act” effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of controversial genetically modified (aka GMO) or genetically engineered (GE) seeds, no matter what health issues may arise concerning GMOs in the future.

Yes, you read that right. Someone could come up with irrefutable proof today that GMOs cause cancer or some other threat to public health, and the courts wouldn’t be able to say boo to Monsanto or the other agricultural biotech companies. They could keep on planting and selling their seeds and dusting the resulting crops with Roundup until the mutated cows come home.

The only good news about this farce is that the law is only in force until September, when the resolution ends, and that it raised a stink across a wide spectrum, from environmental groups to the Tea Party. Unfortunately, President Obama signed H.R. 933 into law (not that he had much choice, I suppose, other than shutting down the government), so we’re stuck with it through the end of the fiscal year.

But the really bad news is that, despite the sneaky manner in which the legislation was introduced, a frightening precedent has been set. Considering the hundreds of millions that Monsanto alone spends on lobbying Congress, how many of its former employees occupy key positions in the government agencies responsible for food safety, and that even one of the Supreme Court Justices (Clarence Thomas) was a former attorney for Monsanto, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we could see a “real” law giving the biotech companies a blank check.

And if that happens, what you read in Season Of The Harvest and other books like it won’t be nearly as terrifying as reality.

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Now Get Google Play Apps on Nook HD

Get Google Play Apps On Your Nook HD/HD+

Hot on the heels of the recent announcement that prices for Nooks in the UK were slashed (update: I noticed on the Barnes & Noble site that US prices for Nook have been cut, too), Barnes & Noble announced that you can now get Google Play apps on Nook HD and HD+, which may help breathe a bit of life into the Nook.

While I’m a Kindle man myself, I’m always rooting for its competitors, particularly the Nook, because competition is good for the consumer and, in the end, good for me as an author. Unfortunately, Barnes & Noble has consistently shot itself in the foot in the digital arena with things like poor web site search and indexing, poor cross-product and direct promotional tools, and, for authors, the introduction of Nook Press, which took the clean and simple PubIt! interface and, well, screwed up a bunch of things.

However, with the introduction of access to the bazillion Google Play apps on Nook HD and HD+, they got something right, and it only made sense for an Android-based platform. The best part (for me as an author, at least), is that now Nook users aren’t limited to the Barnes & Noble online bookstore: you can get books (and movies, etc.) from Google Play. Since I don’t use either of those myself, I can’t tell you if that’s better, worse, or indifferent, but if nothing else it gives you more choices.

And, if you’re a Nook HD/HD+ user (or have any other Android-based gadget), here are a few books on Google Play you might want to check out. Enjoy!

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A Sneak Peek At My Upcoming Project List

A boy and his cat contemplate the future…

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what my plans are for the In Her Name series and what ideas I have for other books, so I thought I’d answer those questions here (keeping in mind, of course, that they may change without notice).

If you’re an In Her Name fan, you have quite a bit of story to look forward to yet. To begin with, the First Empress saga will definitely be longer than the trilogy I had initially planned. There’s just far too much of Keel-Tath’s story left to tell in a single book, and I expect the set will span five or possibly six novels altogether.

For those who have beaten me up about how much you miss Reza and Esah-Zhurah from the Redemption trilogy, I have some good news: you will be seeing them again. While I don’t have any details sorted out yet, I plan to fill in some of the missing years in that trilogy, as well as tell more about what happened with Esah-Zhurah during the period covered by Confederation and Final Battle, which largely focused on Reza. I’ve gotten a lot of requests to tell of what happened after the end of Final Battle, but for now I don’t have a good answer; my muse remains moot on that topic. That’s not to say I’ll never write anything past that point in the story line, but I don’t have anything rattling around in my head right now.

On top of that, I have plans for a trilogy set right before the Redemption trilogy begins (i.e., Empire) that tells the story of some of the key human supporting characters in Redemption. I believe there are some…interesting…relationships there that are worth exploring. And yes, before anyone yells at me, you will find out what happens with one of the main Kreelan characters from Legend Of The Sword (guess who that might be?).

Once the Harvest trilogy is completed with the release of Reaping The Harvest this coming summer, I’ll be intermixing other story ideas among the various In Her Name books. I’m not going to give you any hints or spoilers because I’m a big meanie, but I hope to publish the first one, which is already underway but has been sitting in my virtual desk for a while, in late summer or early fall.

In parallel with all that, I hope to get all the books out in audiobook format, while poking around for someone to start producing the movies. Where’s a good producer with a few million dollars handy when you need one?

Anyway, feel free to let me know in a comment what your preferences are. You’re the one who puts bread on my table by buying my books, so I’ll try as best I can to write things that will make you happy!

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