Randy Stapilus's Blog, page 14

Which first: eBook or print?

What to do? Your book is finally ready to go. Now the question becomes what should you publish first—your eBook, your print book, or both at the same time?

Every time I help an author prepare for a book release, we bump up against this question. And, it turns out there is no perfect answer—no one-size-fits-all.

One theory suggests that releasing all versions together allows you to make more efficient use of your marketing efforts: Visibility lasts only so long, and if both versions of the bo...

Uncomfortable options

Idaho Republicans just can’t get comfortable with their primary situation.

And probably never will unless the national primary picture changes.

This month, the Idaho Republican Party said it will change once again its method of participating in the presidential nomination contest by holding a primary election on March 8. Last time, in 2012, the party held caucuses, which is what the Democrats have done for many years. While the Democrats have stuck with the caucuses for a while, largely beca...

Idaho on fire

The InciWeb site (inciweb.nwcg.gov) lists wildfires around the country, and as of late this week it showed 27 of them – or, to be more precise, 27 groups, in Idaho. Depending on how you count the number of Idaho fires probably could be listed well into three digits.

A number of them are listed as being fires in a “complex”, the Lawyer, Clearwater, Motorway, Middle Fork and others being among those. Several national forests, maybe lacking time for listing all the bits and pieces for Inciweb, j...

Highlighting the authors

When people read your book, they read you.

When I read a book, I seek out the “about the author” page. Many one-paragraph author bios are not especially enlightening or entertaining, and I don’t expect a full scale memoir, but even the briefest can tell me something about the author’s relationship to the book, and sometimes give me a reason to search out their other titles.

Consider offering the reader more than just the usual name, city of residence, occupation and when you started writing....

New codes

Of course, someone had to come up with “666.”

But there’s more than this to recent decisions that, at long last, Idaho will move out of its long-standing single area code and into the world of two of them.

The Public Utilities Commission, which oversees area codes, has faced the issue before and managed to kick it down the road. The need has been mentioned as far back as the 80s, but not really confronted head-on until 2001, when the national private company administering area codes figured t...

Piracy worries

E-books are all well and good, some new authors say, but what about piracy? Wouldn’t it be too easy for someone to steal my book if it’s out there in electronic form?

After all, you can look at the music and video industries and see the important commercial damage done by people illicitly copying and spreading songs and videos. The music industry is making a lot less money now than it was 20 years ago, partly because of copyright infringement. Why couldn’t the same happen to books?

It’s a fa...

Tom Boyd

In 1986, Idaho politics was not frozen in ice as it is today. It was fluid, and no better case for that could be made than Tom Boyd’s election that year to the speakership of the Idaho House.

It was still the Reagan Era in Idaho, but late Reagan Era, and the results of the 1986 election were all over the place. Democrat Cecil Andrus was returned to the governorship, but just barely, and Republicans did well among the rest of the statewide offices. Republicans won a serious U.S. Senate race, b...

First take

Seeking to escape the high-90s heat on the east side of the Coast Range, we took an afternoon-early evening drive to the oceanside, running around and checking out the Neskowin-Pacific City-Netarts area, places which were busy but less likely to be jammed than, say, the Newport-Lincoln City parking lot. And it worked. The temperatures were at 92 when we left the Willamette Valley and down to 67 at the coast. One data point we picked up was the spot at which temperature dropped, headed west, a...

Tom Boyd

In 1986, Idaho politics was not frozen in ice as it is today. It was fluid, and no better case for that could be made than Tom Boyd’s election that year to the speakership of the Idaho House.

It was still the Reagan Era in Idaho, but late Reagan Era, and the results of the 1986 election were all over the place. Democrat Cecil Andrus was returned to the governorship, but just barely, and Republicans did well among the rest of the statewide offices. Republicans won a serious U.S. Senate race,...

First take

As the debate continues (and of course will this next week with the Republican presidential debate) about the Affordable Care Act, ah, Obamacare, some actual review of results so far would seem to be in prder. A good one has just been released, by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been tracking results year by year and with special depth in California, which is where the new report is situated. California is just one marketplace, but since it includes a fifth of the national population,...