C.L.R. Dougherty's Blog, page 7

Life's a Ditch is available for Kindle!

Life's a Ditch is available from the Amazon Kindle Store.  I'm waiting on a paperback proof; the paperback should be released in about a week.

When my wife and I decided to run away to sea, we thought we knew what we were doing.  Our first few months on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, or “the Ditch,” disabused us of that notion.  Our seamanship was adequate, but our expectations weren't realistic.  Life's a Ditch isn't so much about where we went and what we saw during our time in the Ditch, but about how we reacted to it and how our lives were changed by our experiences.  Share the surprises we had and  the choices that we made as we discovered what we got ourselves into when we abandoned our comfortable life ashore to become seagoing wanderers.

If you enjoyed Dungda de Islan' , you'll like Life's a Ditch.  If you haven't read Dungda de Islan' yet, read Life's a Ditch first.  It describes our early life afloat, before we left on our Caribbean adventure.  If you would like to sample Life's a Ditch, just follow the link to the Amazon Kindle Store and click on the cover to look inside; you can read the first part of the book online.
 

The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing is that I’ve been tagged by the talented Elizabeth Amisu, the author of the young adult series, The Sacerdos Mysteries.  Thanks, Eliza!  If you haven’t encountered her before, be sure to visit her at http://elizabethamisu.com/.

How does The Next Big Thing work?  Remember chain letters?  For those who don’t remember, letters were words written on paper, enclosed in an envelope, and delivered by government employees.  People used them to communicate before email came into being.  A chain letter was a way to get lots of visibility for a project – perhaps raising money for a new bicycle.  That was before iPads had been invented.  If you were the lucky recipient of a chain letter, you sent money to the person who sent it to you (tagged you, in effect) and copied out the letter and sent it on to several friends, who would then send you money.  Everybody got rich without doing anything further, unless someone broke the chain.  Dire things would happen to someone who broke the chain.  This is the cyber equivalent of a chain letter.  Notice, I’ve sent the equivalent of money to Eliza, by including a plug for her blog in the first paragraph.

In this post, I’ll answer a few questions about my current work in progress and tag 5 more authors.  Then, on Wednesday, December 5,  those 5 authors will make posts on their blogs thanking me, answer the same questions on their own blogs, and tag 5 more authors to keep the chain going as long as possible.  If no one breaks the chain we’ll all have a shot at the number one spot on the Big Best Seller list.  If any writer breaks the chain, all of the electrons in that person’s eBooks will lose their charge.  Paperbacks probably won’t be affected, but who reads them anymore?  They’re like letters – an artifact of life before the web.


And now for the questions and answers:
1. What is the working title of your next book?I have two that I’m working on now.  The one which I expect to finish first is titled Life’s a Ditch.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book?The idea came from readers’ reactions to my nonfiction book, Dungda de Islan’.  The blog post immediately before this one goes into more detail.  Just click Life's a Ditch: How one review inspired a new book for more details.

3.  What genre does your book fall under?That’s always a tough question for me. I suppose that it belongs under nonfiction/travel/sailing, like Dungda de Islan’.
4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?My wife and I are the main characters.  Who could be better suited to play us than ourselves?

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?Life’s a Ditch tells the tale of the changes that my wife and I coped with when we abandoned our comfortable, upper middle-class existence in favor of exploring life from the deck of our sailboat twelve years ago.
6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?It will be self-published.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?It took a lifetime to do the research and about 4 weeks to produce the first draft.

8.  What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?The ready comparison is to my own best-selling Dungda de Islan’, which although I wrote it first, describes the phase of our evolution to seagoing vagabonds that came after we learned that Life’s a Ditch.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?A large share of the credit belongs to fellow writer Kathleen Patel, whose recent review of Dungda de Islan’ opened my eyes to what a number of the other reviewers were seeing in that book.  Again, my recent blog post Life's a Ditch: How one review inspired a new book covers that in more detail.
10. What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?At its core, the book tells the story of how one couple coped with abandoning their life of comfort and privilege to pursue a shared dream; we were married for a long time before, and we’ve been married for a long time since, even though our life today bears little semblance to our early years together.
It’s my pleasure to tag the following five talented writers, in no particular order, to carry this forward:

Kathleen Patel
Kathleen is the author of several fascinating books, and she wrote the review that inspired my current work.  She has a broad range of interests, and I encourage you to visit her blog at http://anirishpatel.blogspot.com/to learn more about her and her books.

 Diane Rapp
Diane has written nonfiction, a series of mystery / thrillers set on cruise ships, and a science fiction series that I’ve enjoyed reading over the last few months.  Take a look at Diane and her work at http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/208001.Diane_Rapp/blog.
Alethea WilliamsAlethea writes fiction that also portrays the interesting history of the western United States.  You’ll find more information on her and her work at http://www.actuallyalethea.blogspot.com.
Joan SzechtmanJoan, an engineer by education and inclination, writes time travel books featuring Richard III.  Visit with her at Random Thoughts of an Accidental Author.
Ann SwannAnn is a West Texas-based writer with several books and short stories to her credit.  You’ll find more information about Ann and her work at http://annswann.blogspot.com/.
So, that’s the Next Big Thing.  Please take a few minutes to visit Eliza and the 5 authors I’ve tagged; you might just find your next favorite book.  There are some good ones in this collection – I’ve read some of them, and my wife has read others.  Thanks for visiting.

Life's a Ditch: How one review inspired a new book

“I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”  I’ve always enjoyed that quote, attributed to Robert McCloskey, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department during the era of the Vietnam War.  It came to mind most recently in the context of one of my books.  Most of us who have written for publication have received reviews that surprised us.  I’m not alone there, but a recent review by fellow-writer Kathleen Patel of my non-fiction book, Dungda de Islan’ made me see my own book in a completely different light.
I wrote the book with the intention of sharing some of the experiences that my wife and I enjoyed (or endured, in a few cases) when we sailed off into the Atlantic from North Carolina headed for the Caribbean several years ago.  The book I wrote was a true-to-life sailing adventure story.   The book that Kathleen read and reviewed was something different.  I don’t mean that she misunderstood what I had written; she just saw beneath the surface, and read the story on a level that was meaningful to her.  I’m thankful for her review, because she said just enough in it to make me go back and look at some of the other reviews I’ve received for Dungda de Islan’.
There has been a lot of digital ink spilled on the topic of reviews recently, and I’m not going to weigh in on any of the questions that have been raised.  Reviews are useful to folks shopping for books and a source of pain or pleasure to writers, but to me, every review I’ve received has been interesting from the perspective that it gave me a clue as to what the reviewer saw in my book.  Often, there’s useful information to be gleaned from an unemotional reading of your own reviews.  In this case, I got a bolt of inspiration that sent me back to the other reviews for Dungda de Islan’ , and I realized that Kathleen’s reaction was mirrored by others.  I began to understand why the book was appealing to a non-sailing audience.
When I wrote Dungda de Islan’, I wrote it as a promotional giveaway; I wanted to make myself visible to readers in the hope that they would enjoy my writing and buy some of my other books.  I chose the topic because it was an easy one for me, and because I was planning to write a series of thrillers set in the yachting world of the Caribbean.  I hoped that I could give away enough copies of the ebook version of Dungda de Islan’ to establish a base of readers in the sailing community.  This was before the day of free promotions in the Kindle store; I published the book everywhere I could for free, and for 99 cents in the Kindle store.  In the first month, I managed to move a couple of hundred copies without any real marketing effort, so I raised the price to 99 cents everywhere and managed to stop the momentum.  That’s a digression from the topic at hand, but it illustrates my intentions for the book when I wrote it.
That was 18 months ago, and the book has become a consistent seller at $3.99.  Usually, it’s on the Amazon best seller list in two or three relevant categories, and that, while gratifying, has puzzled me.  Now, after reading Kathleen’s review and rereading some of the others, I’m beginning to see that there’s a hidden story in the book; a story that appeals to a broader audience, and a story that has only an incidental relationship to sailing.  In telling the story of our adventure, I shared our experiences as a couple coping with a dramatic change in our lives; a change that a lot of people contemplate, but that few of us actually make.  It’s the story of tossing aside the accumulations of a lifetime to pursue a shared dream.
Thanks again, Kathleen, for the review, and thanks to all of you who have read the book and reviewed it or written to me about it.  My next non-fiction book is for you all.  My working title is Life’s a Ditch.  It tells the tale of our experiences exploring the East Coast via the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, or “the Ditch,” as it’s known to sailors who have traversed it.  This book takes a similar approach to that of Dungda de Islan’ in describing our life in “the Ditch.”  It’s not so much about where we went and what we saw during our time in the Ditch, but about how we reacted to it and how our lives were changed by our experiences.  The personal choices are as endless in this arena as they are elsewhere, and trying to enumerate them is fruitless, but you might enjoy sharing the choices that we made as we discovered what we got ourselves into when we abandoned our comfortable life ashore to become seagoing wanderers.  Life’s a Ditch will be coming out in the next few months.
Click here to read Kathleen Patel's review of Dungda de Islan'

More information on Dungda de Islan'

Dungda de Islan' in the Kindle store

Bluewater Voodoo -- Zombies, Voodoo, and Yachting

Zombies, Voodoo, and Yachting...

They’re all integral parts of the culture of the Caribbean.  I know yachting from intimate experience, but writing about the other two required some research.  Weaving these three elements into the third book of my Bluewater Thriller series was a challenge.  There were elements of Voodoo in the local culture of Savannah, where I grew up; it’s not surprising to find vestiges of Voodoo in the Deep South – references to Obeah, the plait-eye, and conjure women.  Most folks in the U.S. associate Voodoo to New Orleans, but its reach extends far beyond New Orleans.  Voodoo’s origins can be traced back to West Africa, and it moved to the New World aboard the slave ships.  Its presence is pervasive in the islands.
The common notion of Voodoo is that it’s black magic.  Although popular, that idea is incorrect.  Certain elements of Voodoo seem like magic to people without a grasp of the cultural context.  The same might be said of elements of Christianity, or indeed any other religion.  Voodoo is a religion, as much so as any other faith-based social structure, and its central focus is maintaining a balance between man and the forces around him; social, spiritual, and natural.  Because it evolved in cultures that depended more heavily on oral history than written history, Voodoo is a difficult subject for casual research.  The most comprehensive and credible reference that I found was Voodoos and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft, by Joseph J. Williams, S.J. (copyright 1932).  Although the title itself sounds prejudicial, Dr. Williams, a serious ethnologist, provided a thorough background on the evolution of the belief structure upon which Voodoo is based.
From Dr. Williams’s work, a number of brief but easily found references on the Internet, my own limited exposure, and my imagination, I developed a grasp of Voodoo sufficient to my purpose in writing Bluewater Voodoo.  Since publishing Bluewater Voodoo, I have read The Serpent and the Rainbow, written in 1985 by Wade Davis, which provides a more modern perspective on Voodoo and its role in the Haitian culture than Dr. Williams provided.  I read it with great interest and some anxiety, having been unable to lay hands on a copy before releasing my novel.  I was relieved to find nothing in Mr. Davis’s work that contradicted my own guesswork.  Writing as a novelist, I certainly had the latitude to present Voodoo as I wished in order to further my story, but I’m ever mindful of Mark Twain’s statement that “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
I wanted to write a thriller that presented a reasonably accurate view of the culture in which it was set, and I wanted to afford that culture the respect which it richly deserves.  So, what about zombies?  How are they related to Voodoo?  If Voodoo is a religion and a force for good, providing a framework for its practitioners to function constructively in society, how do zombies fit in?  Interestingly, Williams didn’t mention the word; Davis dwells on zombies obsessively.  Pop culture today makes monsters of them.  There is ample evidence that there are (or have been, in recent times) zombies; not the mindless, flesh-eating monsters of TV and the movies, but mindless, pliable creatures; victims of the darker elements within the culture that embraces Voodoo.  The case of Clairvius Narcisse, which I mentioned in Bluewater Voodoo, is well-documented and is not unique. 
The question of why someone would turn a fellow human into a zombie has many answers.  Based on my research, the motivation of the hounganwho created the zombie in Bluewater Voodoowas not far-fetched.  It appears that one of the less atrocious reasons for turning someone into a zombie was as a form of capital punishment.  Whether it’s more or less acceptable than the death penalty or life imprisonment depends on cultural norms.  
As to the question of how someone could make a zombie, the effects of tetrodotoxin and its use as a poison are no secret; it’s readily found in puffer fish and other natural sources.  The use of puffer fish as an exotic food in some Asian cultures results in a substantial number of people experiencing death-like states every year.  Some recover and some don’t.  The death-trance itself is the reason for its popularity there, along with the risk.   The sources and uses of tetrodotoxin to create a death-like state are covered in a number of published works related to the darker side of Voodoo, as is the use of other herbal concoctions to keep the victim docile and obedient afterward.
Could they be used to turn someone into a zombie?  Probably.  Children, don’t try this at home.

Review of Dragon Defense, by Diane Rapp

Buy Dragon Defense from Amazon's Kindle Store
I used to say that I wasn’t a big fan of science fiction, but Diane Rapp changed that with the first book of her Heirs to the Throne series.  I just finished Dragon Defense, the third book in her series, and I confess to being hooked on this story of an evolving civilization on the planet Drako, peopled by descendants of intergalactic travelers, telepathic wolves, and cooperative dragons who all work together to build a life outside the influence of the “Institute.”The Institute is a force of oppression, maintaining control through technological superiority.  The people of Drako reject technology until they are forced to embrace it to maintain their autonomy.  Ironically, the enabling technology of “Transfer” is fully understood only by Dr. Alexander, a physician on Drako.  Transfer technology allows a person to move to a new body periodically while accruing knowledge gained over multiple lifetimes, and it is critical to the Institute’s ability to retain governing power.  Dragon Defense is the story of the Institute’s effort to abduct Dr. Alexander and force him to work on their behalf.Many of the characters in Dragon Defense are familiar from the first two books, but in this book, we see their personalities evolve and grow, and watch their children mature into positions of leadership.  The drive of the people of Drako to achieve self government and the moderating influence of their burgeoning democracy are the core themes in Dragon Defense.  Read it and discover how a small group of determined people, wolves, and dragons can change the direction of a seemingly omnipotent malevolent government.Lest I have made Dragon Defense sound too serious, let me add that the story is told with humor and pathos.  It moves with the pace of a thriller, and the characters are personable – even the wolves and the dragons will engage the reader on a personal level.  It was great fun to read.  If you haven’t already read Howl of the Wolfand the Havenshire Resistance, buy all three books today.  You’ll want to read them straight through – they’re that good.

There's a character interview with a surprise visitor from Dragon Defense on Voyage of the Play Actor.

"Who was the real Mike Reilly?"

“Who was the real Mike Reilly?”

“I almost quit reading the book when he killed that dog.  Where did you get that character?”

When someone asks me if there really was a Mike Reilly, I know that Mike came to life in the reader’s mind.  When a reader expresses revulsion at Mike’s act of killing a dog, I know that they were repulsed as much by his sick mind as by the dog’s death, which was not described in any graphic, gruesome detail.  Mike, at least for a moment, was real, and the insight revealed by his act was upsetting because it was believable.

I listen carefully to comments like that, and probe the reader, if I can, in an effort to understand the reaction.  No writer wants to write something that is so repulsive that it causes the reader to abandon a story; every writer wants to create characters that seem real to the reader.  I take it as high praise when readers find a character so real that they believe I copied him from real life.  Mike Reilly was a product of my imagination, and I’m humbled, surprised, and gratified when a reader finds him so realistic that they can’t discount his actions as just part of a story.  Several people have insisted that I must have known someone like that.  That frightens me a bit; perhaps I did, but I didn’t recognize it at the time.  Reilly isn’t the kind of person I would want for company. 

It’s equally rewarding when readers identify so closely with a character that they express worry about what happened to the character after the story concludes.  In Reilly’s case, I hoped for that.  He was a central character in Bluewater Killer, and I put a lot of effort into developing him.  It’s also fun when readers unexpectedly identify with bit players in a story, and I always take note of which characters those are.  Two peripheral characters from Deception in Savannah keep coming up in conversations with readers.  Neither was central to the story, but clearly each one had some aspect that brought them to life.  I’m studying both of them – Dopey and Jonas Belk – to decipher what about them accounts for their appeal.  It may be that they have stories of their own that need to be told.

Having readers share such thoughts with me is a privilege.  It’s gratifying, and sometimes it’s a little scary, especially when I’m taken by surprise, as I was by the revulsion invoked by Reilly’s killing the dog.  I thought some of his other actions were far more disturbing, personally, but that’s the one that I hear about.    Having a character come to life in my mind is exciting and sometimes unsettling.  I know that a book is going to work out when the characters begin to populate my dreams; they are real for me, then.  They begin to interact with one another in ways that are consistent with their personalities, but their interactions are often unforeseen. 

When that begins to happen, my notion of the story has to change.  The more realistic the characters become, the less amenable they are to conforming to the structure required to make a good story.  They have their own agendas, and the story must be altered to accommodate them, or the characters cease to be realistic.   Sometimes the story changes significantly, and I have to argue with the characters until we reach some mutually acceptable accommodation.  The frustrations and rewards of this aspect of writing fiction are private, enjoyed in the solitude of my mind, and I can’t really communicate them.  I can share the results by publishing a book, and readers’ reactions are rewarding, satisfying, and sometimes puzzling, but always quite different from the internal satisfaction I get from writing and watching the characters evolve.

Tips for Editing Your Work

My wife and I have each read hundreds of books by Indie authors over the last 18 months or so, and there are three recurring problems.  These problems appear in some “professionally edited” works as well, and even the big publishers aren’t immune from them.    Improper use of the first person personal pronoun is common.  This one offends my wife and me every time.  If you think I made a mistake in the last sentence, you’re most likely an offender on this one.  “I” never serves as the object of a preposition.  If you think the sentence should have been, “This one offends my wife and I every time,” then you need to work on this.   If you have trouble with this, look it up in your favorite grammar reference.  Don’t depend on grammar check for this one.  Study it until you understand it.  You’ll be surprised at how often otherwise literate people mess this up in speech or in writing.  It’s easy to fix; there’s no excuse for it to appear in your written work if you want to be taken seriously.The use of dangling participles is a second common problem.  “Sitting on the porch, the bus went by,” was the grammar school example that stuck with me.  That one is obvious and comical, but less obvious ones often seem to slip past editors.   Writing this post, the answer to this problem is the use of a good reference.  There – that’s a less obvious example.  If you can’t see anything wrong with that sentence, you may be an offender.   Reach for that grammar reference and study it until it’s clear.  This is a problem that will make careful readers laugh at what was meant to be a serious passage in your work.  Again, there’s no excuse for a writer to do this.   Incorrect use of the lowly comma is a major problem for all writers, and it’s something over which we all should agonize.  There are actually only a few rules to learn about the use of commas.  One of my standard proofing routines is to look at every single comma in my work and justify it based on one of the rules.  If I can’t make it fit a rule, it comes out.  This exercise often points out flawed construction and leads to rewriting.  The result is always more concise and coherent.   I have a tendency to insert a comma in my writing whenever my thoughts pause, and apparently a lot of other people do this.  That almost always results in an improper use of a comma.  Get that grammar reference out and learn the rules.  Try the exercise on a paragraph or two of your own or on someone else’s writing.   You’ll produce better work for the effort.There are a number of other pitfalls for writers and editors, but if you avoid these three and scrupulously check for spelling errors and misused homonyms, you’ll be ahead of the rest.   If you’re in search of a concise reference that covers these and most other common problems, my own favorite is The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White.  It’s readily available and inexpensive.  I even have a Kindle version, so it’s easy for me to check things as I’m reading.  It doesn’t cover everything, but if you take it to heart, it will make you a better writer.
 Please post the errors that you catch most frequently, and let’s clean up our writing.

Bluewater Vengeance is Published!

Bluewater Vengeancehas been available in the Kindle Store since March 25, but I just approved the final proof of the paperback version.  It’s available now directly from Createspace, Amazon’s subsidiary, by following this link: Bluewater Vengeance.  It will be showing up in the Amazon store later this week, for those who prefer to order from the main store.  I'll post the Amazon link as soon as it's live. 

Why was the Kindle version out for almost two weeks before the print version?



It’s significantly more difficult to format the files for the print version.  What you see on the screen is often not quite what you get on paper.  Strange things happen to page layouts and graphics, like the maps in the front of the book.  The sequence of pages and insertion of blank pages to make things appear physically where your eye expects them to be can be a puzzle.  I guess I’ve been lucky with the other books.  I’ve usually gotten it right on the first try.  With Bluewater Vengeance, it took three proofs before it came out the way I wanted it, and each proof introduces a delay of up to a week.
It’s a relief to have it done; I’ve been ready to move on to Bluewater Voodoo ever since I released the Kindle version.  Now I can get started on it.  As soon as the paperback is in the Amazon store, I'll post a link on the Bluewater Vengeance page.  Thanks for your patience, and I hope you enjoy it.  It’s already scored a five star review in the Kindle Store.  Read the review by clicking on this link: Modern Pirates of the Caribbean.

Writing the next book in a series - surprises and pitfalls

I've done six rewrites of Bluewater Vengeance, the second book in the Bluewater Thriller series.  It's almost ready; I'm waiting to hear from two first readers to see if it needs another edit.  I'm hoping to publish it in the Kindle Store within the next two weeks.

If you've been waiting for it, thanks for your patience.  If you enjoyed Bluewater Killer, you should enjoy this one, as well.  Many of the characters will be familiar, and you'll see some different aspects of their personalities as they grow and interact with new people in different situations.
This is my first effort at writing a series, and it's been interesting.  When I wrote Bluewater Killer, I was planning to follow it with a second book.  I laid the groundwork for Bluewater Vengeance, or so I thought, anyway.  As I started writing the second book, I realized that I had a whole new set of constraints related to the characters and the plot.
In the planning stage, before I wrote the first book of the series, I thought only of the positive aspects of carrying the same characters forward.  I was right about that; there are a lot of positives, but there are also some problems.  The characters have to stay true to themselves from one book to the next, or if they don't, their evolution has to be explained.  That made for some interesting work, and constant re-reading of the previous book as I wrote the second one.
The same was true for facts from the first book.  I was constantly checking back and forth to make sure that what was black and white in Bluewater Killer didn't become green and red in Bluewater Vengeance.
Those two things made for some tedious work as I spun out the story, but, for me at least, the hardest thing was making sure that Bluewater Vengeance was self-sufficient.  I've read a number of books that were part of a series, and I have often started in the middle.  Sometimes that happened because I didn't realize I was buying a book that was in a series, and other times it happened because I couldn't lay my hands on the previous book and I was strongly attracted to the one which was near at hand.
The best of those series were perfectly coherent when read out of order; it 's always frustrating when I find myself lost because I'm missing references to the previous work that I haven't read.  Patrick O'Bryan's Aubrey-Maturin books were outstanding, because they could be read out of order without any sense of confusion, and each book still built on the collected experience from the others.
I now have a better appreciation of what a fine writer he was.  The challenge of carrying the characters forward into a new story that builds on their experiences in the previous book without continually summarizing the previous book (boring and condescending) or leaving the reader confused and annoyed was new for me.  I should have seen it coming, but I didn't.  A lot of the re-writing dealt with this issue.
Now that I've been through the learning curve, will I do it again?  I've always been stubborn, and not always bright, so the answer is yes.  On the balance, it was fun to develop the characters further.  I've already started sketching out the next book, which I'm calling Bluewater Voodoo for now.

Changing Channels

With some trepidation, I've decided to sell my books in eBook format through Amazon only.  There are several reasons behind my decision, but the most compelling is that, as a self-published author, I find it much easier to work with Amazon than with their competitors.  Given their size and market position, that's surprising to me, but they got to where they are by offering superb customer service, along with their keen marketing skills.  That superb customer service carries over into their dealings with self-published authors, even people like me.  I account for an insignificant amount of their eBook business, but I still find them far more responsive than their competitors.

Over 90% of my sales have been through Amazon, both for eBooks and paperbacks.  Most of the rest of my eBook sales have come from Barnes & Noble, and it's clear that they aren't committed to independent authors.  I'm not even sure they're committed to eBooks.  It's not that I don't value the sales through Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Smashwords, and the others.  I'm still at the stage where every book counts.  Aside from the customer service issue, having the books in other channels adds significant complexity to pricing and price changes, and makes it impossible for me to take advantage of Amazon's Kindle Select program.  I still haven't decided whether I want to do that, but, by pulling my eBooks from the other channels, I have that option at my fingertips.  I like the idea of being able to offer free promotional copies in the Kindle store, and the option of being able to change prices without weeks of advance planning.  I'd rather spend my time working on the next book.
I'm an avid reader of eBooks, as is my wife, and we've both found that over the past year, all of our eBooks have come from the Kindle store.  Interestingly, neither of us owns nor wants a Kindle; we use the Kindle app on iPod Touches.  We spend virtually all of our time outside the U.S., and our interactions with Amazon are seamless: no matter where we are, we have full access to the Kindle store and our library.  That's not so with Barnes & Noble.  Even though we have a U.S. account, paid with U.S. credit cards, we can't buy eBooks from outside the U.S.  They've told us it's an issue of territory rights with the publishers, and it may be, in their view, but I'm a publisher, and they have had the right to distribute my eBooks globally for the last year, but they chose not to.  So, I'm moving on.
If you came to read this because you wanted to buy one of my eBooks from somewhere besides Amazon, please let me know via a comment here.  I'll do my best to accommodate you.  Readers are important to me.
If you are a fellow writer, I'd welcome your comments and opinions as well. 
Thanks for visiting.