Dale’s Comments (group member since Sep 15, 2017)

Dale’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

The phone trick works when sites attempt to prevent duplicate voting by examining the IP addresses from which votes come. By using different networks (e.g, your home WIFI and then the phone network) you can obtain different IP addresses and fool the system. The converse is that if five people in a household all want to vote and are all connected to the home WIFI, only one of them will be able to vote, because the others will all look like duplicates. Ah, the wonders of modern technology. ;-)

Denise wrote: "YES! YES!!!!! I finished the 5th revision of my book. YES!!!"

Congratulations!

My writer's group did a great job with the "Tamarack" photo. We got a diverse collection of stories from it. I've posted my effort for this week's competition.

https://www.indiesunlimited.com/2017/...

Anna Faversham wrote: "I increased the price of one of my books and has not affected sales at all. It also appears that Amazon are pushing that one more.
I only increased it from $2.99 to $3.25. I've kept the UK price at..."

A couple of years back I did some reading on ebook price points. We settled on three price points for the books we publish through One Voice Press and Serpent Cliff: $3.99 for children's books and other small volumes; $4.99 for the bulk of our books; $5.99 for longer books with lots of photographs. This was lower than our original pricing (I forget what that was). It doesn't seem to have affected sales too much, although we do get a few more sales now than we used to. Whenever I reduce ebook prices, I see no appreciable increase in sales. Of course, we are a small specialty publisher. The books that sell best for us are always the ones whose authors promote them like crazy. I don't think the above price points are too much, based on our experience.

Denise wrote: Hi Dale, I was going to leave a comment on your blog but I have to log into Wordpress and I don't know my logon or password. Just thought I'd let you know. "

You can create an account on my site. I don't use Wordpress hosting; I have my own hosting service and use Wordpress software on it.

I know a lot of people find this kind of thing confusing, but there is Wordpress the software and Wordpress the website (which uses Wordpress the software). I host it myself because I already have a business hosting plan for my publishing company, and it costs me nothing to add additional sites to it. Plus, that way I have my own URL and a support team that I know will pay attention when I have a problem . . . as they should, because I'm paying them for it. ;-)

Thank you again, everyone. The support we've received from all quarters is amazing.

You're quite welcome!

Carole wrote: "Congrats, Dale. Wishing your wife speedy recovery."

Thank you on both counts!

Thanks, Ted, on both counts. My wife is home now and very happy to be there!

I know what you mean about this week's photo. I'm not getting any great ideas yet, either. But I'm going to torture my creative writing workshop with it on Monday, anyway. ;-)

Thank you, Angel.

Kathy came home this afternoon. That's one goal down . . .

I won it this week. Thank you for your support!

https://www.indiesunlimited.com/2017/...

Denise,

That's funny, I couldn't find the friend request, so I set you as a favorite. :-P I don't like their interface very much.

To become a VIP blogger, you have to submit your blog to them. I can't find the page with the instructions now, but email general@authorsdb.com to request syndication of your blog and give them the URL to it. They'll check it to make sure you have at least "four recent high quality posts." They'll email you back in a few days to let you know if they've set it up.

Thanks, Denise. Don't know how I missed this. I gave you a like there and added you to my favorites.

If anyone else is on AuthorsDb, let me know and I'll do that same for you.

I've been "awarded" the status of semi-finalist in the cover contest. I'm not sure, but I think that means I got some votes.

Also, I'm now a "VIP Blogger" on AuthorsDb. My blog passed muster and they now use my RSS feed to feature my blog posts on their site. Which is good for me and also for the indie authors I'm featuring in my blog posts. See https://authorsdb.com/author-publicit....

Thank you, Erica and Anya.

Alex wrote: "And there was me thinking I keep myself busy. Now I feel positively lazy.
I hope you're able to keep up with all of it, especially the last part, there's no point in getting your wife home and fit ..."

I need more sleep, but once we're out of here I'll catch up on that. Fortunately, we have four daughters, all of whom have been with us through the "experience." They're keeping an eye on me. ;-)

As far as writing goals, I always have a number of irons in the fire. That doesn't mean I work on all of them every single day. Some days I don't get to any of them. But yeah, I usually do have a plate piled higher than I need . . .

I've posted this elsewhere, but I have featured two authors in the past two weeks and will be doing more. Whether or not they are in this group . . . well, my brain isn't at its best right now, so they might not be.

Shannon Heuston

John G. Stevens

When I get a chance, I'll try to get to someone who is in this group, if those two are not.

Thank you Carole and Sam. We had hoped we'd be going home today, but another cardiac blip last night made them decide to keep her here another 24 hours. She's actually doing well today (and was yesterday, too). The complaints that originally landed her here--fever and shortness of breath--have been resolved. The heart issues were discovered while we are here. So now it's a twofold matter: (1) Finding the best combination of heart meds for her (which apparently takes some trial and error), and (2) figuring out, if possible, what caused her issues in the first place so they can be dealt with appropriately. That part has been hard. For the most part, the tests have come back negative, and the one that came back positive is a bit of an anomaly given her overall condition.

Dale's Goals:

(1) Get Kathleen back home and keep an eye on her.

(2) Edit Space Operatic and start shopping it around to agents, with luck by the end of the year.

(3) Convince Kathleen she's well enough to finish editing Ice on the Bay so we can publish it, maybe by January.

(4) Continue writing Howard County Mystery #4 (so far untitled) and my new crime/humor novel, Weasel Words.

(5) Maintain a pace of at least two blog posts and one newsletter per week.

(6) Somehow reach people who might want to buy something I wrote. ;-)

Oh, and (7) get enough sleep to keep all this up, plus my "day job" and family responsibilities and . . . well, whatnot.

Here's my next post on John G. Stevens and his novel Echowake

Looks good to me!

Carole wrote: "Good luck- Dale- They will figure it out. My husband was cured of stage 3 B lung cancer 12 years ago. Medical science is amazing."

Thank you. We hope they will, although the more I deal with the medical profession, the more I realize there is still a great deal we don't know and that, because human beings are such complicated things, medicine is still as much art as it is science.

In any case, she's in for a the biopsy right now and word is she can probably be released tomorrow. The test results will take a bit longer, but at least we can start to get back to some semblance of normality.