Val Tobin's Blog, page 16
December 12, 2017
‘It is easy for a woman to forget that no-one owns her.’
It’s also easy to forget that women’s liberation is a relatively recent concept. It wasn’t so long ago that women in the UK couldn’t vote and that rape in marriage was legal until as late as 1991. To the modern woman this must seem incredible, but for her grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and even her mother, being seen as a second-class citizen, her husband’s property, was par for the course.
It’s no wonder then, with this background, that women today rebel against things like sexual harassment and inequality in the workplace. Even in my own working life, in a high street bank in the 1960s, women did most of the work in branch but were paid half of what the men got. To say that it rankled among the female employees was putting it mildly.
Life today holds challenges our mothers and grandmothers often didn’t face, given that most were stay-at-home…
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November 23, 2017
Facebook Tests Split News Feed
Photo by http://offers.hubspot.com/science-of-facebook-marketing
As many of you have realized, Facebook has been making it progressively harder to share non-paid content. Usually, only a tiny percentage of your friends and followers (around 2 to 5%) sees whatever it is you’re posting–unless you pay a small fee to have it appear on people’s timelines. Now, Facebook is considering splitting its News Feed in two, as The Independent reports.
The company has confirmed that it is trying out the idea of dividing the site in order to separate commercial posts and pages from personal news.
Normally, Facebook’s News Feed wraps up a host of information from different sources, putting posts from pages with millions of followers alongside those from people’s friends and relatives. Under the test, these will now be split apart, meaning that pages will be put into a separate feed that people will have to actively click through
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November 22, 2017
Smorgasbord Posts from Your Archives – Strongbow – the Invader by Frank Parker
Everything you ever wanted to know about the illustrious Frank Parker–oh, and some stuff about Strongbow.
November 18, 2017
Earthbound Shortlisted for 50 Best Indie Books
Earthbound by Val Tobin has been shortlisted on Readfree.ly for their 50 Best Indie Books of 2017 awards in the Paranormal category.
It’s a huge honour just to be nominated. Making the shortlist is an even greater achievement. According to the message I received from ReadFree.ly, “over 2,000 book lovers have been nominating what they consider The 50 Best Indie Books of 2017.”
I’m so thrilled to have one of my novels be a part of this. Thank you, everyone, for all your support and encouragement.
To help Earthbound become one of the top 50, please go to the ReadFree.ly site and vote for it here.
November 15, 2017
From Page to Print
Fascinating new book by Frank Parker.
Take a look at the menu above and, if you have been here before, you will notice something missing. A Purgatory of Misery has gone. That is because it is now a print and digital book. The digital version is available to pre-order right now. Print and digital will be released on 20th November. Click the link above to go to Amazon.
Here are a few of the things you will discover by reading the book:
How a request for help from an Irish King led to 800 years of enmity and distrust between Ireland and her larger neighbour
How subsequent contests for land and power on the British mainland spilled over into Ireland with terrible consequences for that nation’s inhabitants
How religious fanaticism, following the Reformation, resulted in the massacre of Irish people and the banning of religious observance
How Irish Catholics were forbidden to practice certain professions
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November 6, 2017
Urban Fantasy
Back when my son was still wildly into dinosaurs, I found a book called Dinopix by Teruhisha Tajima. It was a bunch of photo edits that posited what the world would be like if dinosaurs had lived into the current day. It didn’t concern itself with the struggles early humans would have had to deal with when encountering a hungry T. rex or a pack of Deinonychus, nor did it deal with what evolution would have done with those creatures over the past 65 million year. Dinopix dropped dinosaurs, as they were before they went extinct, straight into the modern world.
Please clean up after your diplodocus. Carry a very large bag and a shovel.
The result was brilliant and enchanting. Although, as I recall, my son was less than impressed with it than he was with Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs, which melded two kiddo favorites into…
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October 26, 2017
Rejection Is Not Feedback
For when you need a 1300-calorie dessert with a view
I need a sweater. So I go to the mall. (The mall is a temple of consumerism with an indoor ski slope overlooked by The Cheesecake Factory, because I live in Dubai.)
The first store specializes in argyle sweaters. Argyle is just not my thing. Do I:
A) Assume this brand is garbage and everything they will ever make is argyle.
B) Say “no thank you,” and head for another store, dismissing argyle from my mind because it’s not that big a deal, I’m shopping all day anyway and hey, someone else is going to love diamond plaids.
In the second store, I see a terrific red sweater. It’s got sleeves of exactly the right length and those cool little thumbholes so you can pull the wristbands over your hands, and it’s super soft. Then I look at the tag…
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October 24, 2017
The Deception of Franklin Pierce
Some marriages are mismatches.
The Pierces
Young Franklin Pierce D-NH
Franklin Pierce was 30 years old when he married in 1834. Good looking, genial and personable, he waited until he was established in his law practice, and was a sitting New Hampshire Democratic Congressman.
His bride, Jane Appleton, was twenty-eight, considered a spinster, synonymous with “old maid” at the time. She was petite, pretty with finely chiseled features, bookish and very religious. She was also of a melancholy disposition. Geniality and pleasure-loving traits had eluded her.
Newly elected to Congress in 1833, Pierce brought his bride to honeymoon in Washington, DC – a place she quickly grew to loathe. Always frail in health, possibly due to early tuberculosis, she believed the climate was unhealthy. More importantly, she disliked the social and political atmosphere of the nation’s capital. Declining most invitations, she chose to remain in her rooms, except for regular…
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October 21, 2017
Amazon’s Hall of Spinning Knives
Phoenix Sullivan is well-known in the indie community – I’ve known her myself since 2009 or 2010 and consider her a close friend.
Aside from being exceptionally generous with her time and knowledge, tirelessly sharing her insights on marketing and algorithms, Phoenix is also well known as a vocal campaigner against scammers and cheaters – particularly on the current big issues of book stuffing and clickfarming.
And now she is being targeted.
Phoenix made a box set free for a few days back in September, advertising on Freebooksy, KND/BookGorilla, and Digital Book World – all legitimate sites – and there was no other promotion involved with this title. No BookBub CPM ads, no Facebook campaign, no tweets, no newsletter swaps, no mailing lists.
On the third day of her free run, Phoenix’s box set was rank-stripped by Amazon, a punishment normally reserved for those who have used clickfarms or bots…
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October 13, 2017
CreateSpace eStore is Closing Effective October 31, 2017
Image from ShutterStock.
CREATESPACE ESTORE IS CLOSING
Beginning October 31, 2017, customers will no longer be able to purchase paperbacks directly from the CreateSpace eStore.
If you have a link to your CreateSpace eStore and a customer clicks on it, the customer will be redirected to the corresponding page at Amazon.com.
According to CreateSpace, the reasons behind the change include:
It’s much easier to search for books across Amazon’s site than it is to search for books on CreateSpace.
Amazon offers a much better checkout process than CreateSpace does.
Amazon offers better shipping options, including Amazon Prime.
Amazon sends out tracking notifications for orders placed through Amazon.
Amazon’s storefront is a much more familiar interface for customers.
Several customers have requested the features described above.
Unfortunately, when a customer clicks on a link to a CreateSpace eStore and is redirected to Amazon, authors will earn Amazon.com royalties (not eStore…
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