Jason Zandri's Blog: The GUNDERSTONE GOODREADS Review, page 5
February 15, 2016
The Old Woman I Will Be
I hate the terms “growing old gracefully” or “getting older”… I am not 65 nor a woman but I am “getting older” and feel some of this sentiment.
Hmmm… like I said, I hate those terms… perhaps I’ll come up with a better phrase.
In the meantime – this is a #MustRead (whether you are a boy or a girl) ;)
Another birthday.
A big one. 65.
Over the last few weeks, I have been preoccupied with the significance of 65.
Two thirds of my life is behind me. Maybe more. Do I have 30 years left? What if it is only 10?
I’ve wasted a lot of time in 65 years. John Lennon said, “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” But have I enjoyed it? It’s gone now… all those hours waiting for boys to call or vegging in front of TV or playing online games or shopping for shit that I hardly ever wear. I can’t get those hours back.
But I want to make the most of whatever time I have left – and to enjoy that time. Maybe that still means television and shopping. But maybe not.
I will soon (not quite yet) be an old woman.
I’ve been asking myself:
What kind of old…
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February 14, 2016
LEAP YEAR 2016 – RAFFLECOPTER AUTHOR GIVEAWAY – 19 Prizes from 9 authors.
I’ve really gotten into a promotion and contest groove with the Rafflecopter Giveaways this year, having done two already, but I’ve decided I need to get into a writing groove and step away from some of my promoting.
So, I’ve decided to do one more “for now” and then buckle down.
I figure I may come back for another one perhaps to kick off the summer or perhaps the 4th of July holidays… in the meantime, I give you (along with a little help from some of my author friends) the LEAP YEAR 2016 – RAFFLECOPTER AUTHOR GIVEAWAY
This give away starts on February 15th and end on leap day of leap year 2016. Each day here on the blog we’ll be outlining the prizes and sending the reminder to readers and page fans to enter.
We have 19 awesome prizes for you (laid out below). You can gain additional entries for doing more than one of the options, and the Tweeting the Message option CAN be done daily for two entries into the contest.
So without further ado – here are the prizes, links to a little additional information from the authors offering the prizes, and at the end another link to gain entries:
1) GRAND PRIZE – 7 Night Stay Star Island Kissimmee, Florida
GRAND PRIZE – SEVEN NIGHT STAY – Star Island Resort
2 Bedroom Lock-off
1,500 square feet of space (combined units)
Sleeps 8 in total; 6 privately
King, 2 double beds, Queen Sleeper sofa
A side has a partial kitchen
B side has full kitchen / Jetted Tub / Balcony / Deck
CHECK IN SATURDAY APRIL 9, 2016 after 4PM
CHECK OUT SATURDAY APRIL 16, 2016 before 10AM
2) Life Poetry by C. M. Krishack (e-book)
3) Unhinged Fences by Susan Bird (e-book)
4) Splinters by Susan Bird (e-book)
5) Marie’s Diary – The Introduction by G. R. Stone (e-book) 
6) Unsevered by Traci Sanders (e-book)
7) Tracking A Shadow: A Jarvis Mann Detective Novel by R Weir (e-book)
8) Twice as Fatal: A Jarvis Mann Detective Novel by R Weir (e-book)
9) Blood Brothers: A Jarvis Mann Detective Novel by R Weir (e-book)
10) Infinity (Xandrian Circle Book 1) by Allaina Daniels (e-book) 
12) The Best Girls Series – five books in total – by Tamie Dearen (e-books)
13) Before Another Sunset – Second Edition by Jason Zandri (e-book)
14) Another Sunset by Jason Zandri (e-book)
15) I Hero: The Beginning by Jason Zandri (e-book)
16) I Hero: Nathan Returns by Jason Zandri (e-book)
17) As Life Goes: Elementary by Jason Zandri (e-book)
18) As Life Goes: The End of the Innocence by Jason Zandri (e-book)
19) All six e-books from Jason Zandri
ENTER THE LEAP YEAR 2016 – RAFFLECOPTER AUTHOR GIVEAWAY
The KDP Delivery Fee for Large Books: Is it really worth trying to reduce the file size?
More great KDP reference information from Chris McMullen #MustRead
DELIVERY FEE MATH
If you price your Kindle e-book between $2.99 and $9.99, you’re eligible for the 70% royalty option.
However, Amazon charges a delivery fee of 15 cents per megabyte (Mb) for US sales. (It’s £0.10 per Mb for UK sales. I will focus on US sales in this article.)
The delivery fee is subtracted from the list price before multiplying by 70%.
Example: List price = $2.99, file size = 6 Mb
Delivery fee = $0.15 × 6 = $0.90
Royalty = ($2.99 – $0.90) × 0.70 = $2.09 × 0.70 = $1.46
The only file size that matters is the converted .mobi file size that you see on page 2 of the publishing process at Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). The size of the file that you upload isn’t the number to go by.
The delivery fee is most significant for books that include many pictures.
IS IT…
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February 13, 2016
REBLOG – Tamie Dearen – 25 Sites for Free Images
Fellow author Tamie Dearen put up a post on her blog outlining 25 Sites for Free Images; for my author followers, it is a must read so I am cross posting it here.
February 12, 2016
Self-Publishing – Your Fellow Authors are not Your Enemies – Let’s Help Each Other
Sound advice – pressing the message forward…
If you are like me, you are aware of the thousands of other authors that are in the self-publishing universe on social media platforms. We all belong to groups on Facebook and we promote our books, blogs, giveaways, and events. We start to see the same names over and over relentlessly touting our work.
As I first entered the self-publishing world, I viewed all of these authors as people that were competing for my readers. I wanted to out-promote and out-sell all of them. Over the past year or so, however, my view has changed. Instead of viewing my fellow authors as competitors, I have come to think of them as fellow pioneers. I selected the word pioneer purposely. Early American pioneers didn’t compete against each other. The amount of land and natural resources available were abundant. Pioneers worked together to build houses and cultivate crops so that they could…
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February 8, 2016
Only 40 Self-Published Authors are a Success, says Amazon
Wow…
“40 self-published authors “make money”, all the others, and they number in the hundreds of thousands, don’t.”
““Making money” here means selling more than one million e-book copies in the last five years. Yes, 40 authors have managed that…”
Not that I would sneeze at “selling more than one million e-book copies” over five years but for me, selling 100,000 over the same period would be “a success” to me.
Could I “retire” and write professionally? No, not at that level, but it beats where I am today (at 1,000 copies sold in 2015).
Claude Forthomme - Nougat's Blog
The cat is out of the bag, finally we know exactly how many self-published authors make it big: 40.
Yes, that’s not a typo.
40 self-published authors “make money”, all the others, and they number in the hundreds of thousands, don’t. This interesting statistic, recently revealed in a New York Times article, applies to the Kindle Store, but since Amazon is in fact the largest digital publishing platform in the world, it is a safe bet that self-published authors are not doing any better elsewhere.
“Making money” here means selling more than one million e-book copies in the last five years. Yes, 40 authors have managed that, and have even gone on to establishing their own publishing house, like Meredith Wild. Her story is fully reported in the New York Times, here, and well worth pondering over.
That story reveals some further nuggets about the current…
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February 6, 2016
THE BLOG TOUR – starring “SPOTLIGHT” Author, Jan Hawke #RRBC #RaveReviewsBookClub
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
Sea-fever by John Masefield
There’s a lot to be said for being self-sufficient, especially if you’re a solitary ‘seafaring’ author. 2015 was a terrific year for me in all its meanings, including the negative. For the first time in my life, and after 39 years of relatively calm marital waters, I found myself living on my own after my husband, Pete, did not survive major cardiac surgery.
We only had about 10 days to come to terms with the gravity of his condition, but, as he’d come through several other serious medical procedures in the past 5 years with flying colours, were fairly hopeful. Our luck ran out basically. The day Pete was in surgery, I was driving home from another hospital appointment, when I heard on the radio that my great literary hero, Terry Pratchett, had also died peacefully at home that morning, after a very public struggle with early onset posterior cortical atrophy dementia.
I lost both my heroes within 24 hours. I like to think that the day after, Pete and Terry met up on the newcomers’ orientation tour of the ‘better place’ I know they both went to, and had a little chinwag at the bar. They both loved a pint of ale and a good brandy. This whimsy, thankfully, set me off on a more positive terrific track, after I emerged from the usual state of numb shock that comes when the hub of your world is taken away. My family and friends were wonderful in helping me cope with the ‘arrangements’ – I know that Pete would have loved his funeral, and his final resting place, out in the garden beside the pipe fountain that he never quite found the time to move from the garage, where it had been gathering cobwebs since we bought it over 10 years ago.
That was us really – mañana; pole, pole (slowly, slowly); smell the roses… So, facing life without Pete has been a terrific challenge. For the most part I’ve come through pretty well, but of course I’ve had to make some changes. Most have been towards getting practical matters in order so I don’t have to worry about them, which includes some major changes to the house. That hopefully will be finished this summer with the installation of a new extension that will incorporate my ‘dream’ study and library.
Which is why I’m facing 2016 with lots of positive terrific feelings, because I’m so proud and confident of doing more than just surviving the last 11 months. My health isn’t great, but I’m gradually making improvements, and some of the building work will help towards that as well. I’ve kept my mind busy too – RRBC was been at the forefront in that respect, with all the different new activities that have been introduced this year, not to mention my joining the governing board, having a MoW and a BoM slot and getting my act together on my blog (janhawke.me) and on the social networks. As an author, I’ve grown my platform, my audience and been getting great reviews; have a solo anthology-memoir to be published in the Spring, and generally ‘got myself out there’. The one thing I haven’t done is much original writing (the anthology’s a collation of previous work) – but this is about to change! Having been beavering away at all these facets of my life, I’ve finally got to the place where I can draw a deep breath, having cleared all the decks, and walk onto my terrific new vessel to set out on an awfully big adventure. The work in progress beckons mightily, and I couldn’t be happier as I slip my moorings and set out to sea, following a star of my own making!
You’ll find out more about that later in the week!
Author Bio: I live near Launceston in Cornwall, UK with Toby and Benji the Springer Spaniels – it’s a tie between us all as to who’s maddest, but as I outrank them in being weird anyway it’s not open to debate really. I’m physically lazy with things that don’t hold much interest for me (so that’s mostly housework and, increasingly, cooking…), but I love where we live, mainly because I chose it for being so quiet and off the beaten track, very close to the moors and quite near to the sea. I also love books, both to write and to read, the latter of which can be very eclectic (I enjoy Julian Barnes, Kate Atkinson, Jeanette Winterson and will happily admit to Jilly Cooper too) but in the main I’m heavily into SF&F, particularly Tolkien, Terry Pratchett and Julian May, although I can pass on Zombie Apocalypses fairly easily… …how I’ve chosen to write about Africa for my first novel may be something of a surprise to my friends, but if you read it you may find that all of the above information manifests in there somehow!
Book Blurb: Milele Safari back blurb – Milele Safari – An Eternal Journey …twines around a single day, in an unremarkable border village that snuffs out the lives of four people and shatters many others, only to draw the survivors back to a different time and, perhaps, a hope of atonement and peace. Step out on the journey and discover an Africa that could have been, is and might one day come to be.
Book links – Amazon (print & eBook) – http://www.amazon.com/dp/0992747201/
Barnes & Noble (print only) – http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/milele-safari-an-eternal-journey-janette-mary-hawke/1117529970?ean=9780992747206
Milele Safari blog – http://milelesafari.blogspot.co.uk/p/taster-1.html
Social Media links
Twitter – @JanHawke
Facebook Author page – https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jan-Hawke/386239624841750
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=254177051
Author blog – Jan Hawke INKorporated http://janhawke.me/
Aaron Shepard’s Sales Rank Express
Aaron Shepard’s Sales Rank Express is a great tool (mainly for) authors to check the ranking’s of their titles. I checked the current stats to all my books by simply entering my name (only), flipping for format to KINDLE, and selecting “Get Amazon Sales Ranks”
Here is that page output, which you can share on social media.
It’s nice to have a little dashboard to use for yourself.
At the same time, you can also enter in other author information to compare their book rankings if you’re interested in which title to choose to read or, perhaps, if they write comparably to you and in your genre, it is a way for you to see how you do compared to them.
Sorting out your Amazon 1099-MISC forms from KDP and CreateSpace (Tax Year 2015)
AMAZON KDP & CREATESPACE 1099-MISC TAX FORMS (YEAR 2015)
I received 12 different 1099-MISC forms for tax year 2015 from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), and 3 more 1099-MISC forms from CreateSpace. I obtained my KDP tax forms online, but received my CreateSpace forms in the mail (on February 5).
Check yours against my list below to see if you’ve received them all.
Also, my list below will help you check which international marketplace each form corresponds to.
Verify that the amounts are correct. Occasionally, a mistake is made. (One year, they issued replacements a few weeks after mailing the originals.)
Note that, contrary to rumor, there is NO limit of $600 for book royalties. For book royalties, the limit is $10, meaning that if you earned at least $10 in royalties, you should account for this in your tax return. Amazon will have sent the information to the IRS. Most…
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