So I’m giving away five copies of Can Job, print edition, on Goodreads.
And I’ve been monitoring how my giveaway has compared to the others by watching it in the site’s “Most Requested” list.
I check again this morning — and this is what I found. Totally cracked me up :-)
Hiya, neighbors!
UPDATE: contest over but you can purchase a copy of Can Job here.
UPDATE #2: Can Job got a new cover :)
Mama don’t take my e-reader away.E-readers like the Kindle and iPad are sweeping the nation … do you have one? Do you like it? Do you find it changes your reading/buying habits? If you don’t have one, do you plan to?
Yes, I do have one — I have a Kindle.
My dad gave it to me for Christmas. And to be honest, I was skeptical at first, but now I LOVE it.
I love the way I can carry an entire library around in a tiny little box. I’m something of a minimalist — I don’t like to collect a lot of “stuff” — books are an exception, but there are many books I want to read but not necessarily own in hard copy. My Kindle lets me do that.
I love that I can sample — or buy — a book within seconds of learning about it. No more having to keep lists of books I want to check out — and then having to hunt for them in traditional bookstores. Order them if they weren’t in stock . . .
And yes, my Kindle has changed my reading habits. I am reading more, because now I always have a book at arm’s length that I’m interested in continuing.
Of course, as a writer, I’m a bit giddy at the fact that I can now also publish novels myself for other people to read. But that’s a whole other story ;-)
Poor Taylor. Her mother got her a PR job at Diptych Corporation, and she’s definitely in over her head . . .
__________________________________
“Taylor.” Basil wet his lips. “We should probably get together right after this. Are you free?”
Taylor nodded.
“Good. Meet me in my office. We have a lot to do. If you need lunch, we’ll order up from the cafeteria. I don’t usually eat lunch.”
She nodded again.
The meeting dragged on.
Taylor’s notepad filled with scribbles. Hire photographer for press kit photos, check with corporate communications on list of press contacts, check with corporate communications on list of analysts, tradeshow back wall/customer quotes? She smiled at everyone and nodded her head until her neck ached. Fake it fake it fake it.
Finally it was over.
Everybody stood up.
“See you in a few minutes,” Basil reminded her as they were leaving.
“Sure thing.”
She turned toward her cubicle.
“Hey, protest girl.” It was Miles. He’d caught up with her and was speaking now just above a whisper, his lips close to her ear. “Blow him off.”
“I can’t blow him off. You heard Darryl.”
“Yeah. Darryl’s an idiot, too. But I’m telling you. Baz is going to dump his entire job onto you. He’s a lazy f**k and he’s spotted a sucker. That would be you.”
“Thanks, you’re a gem yourself. What are you even doing here? I didn’t think anarchists stooped to working for multi-national corporations.”
“This isn’t a job, it’s an infiltration.” He grinned at her. Ouch. He was very cute. His eyes were hazel in the middle and brown around the edges, and his hair curled out at the tops of his ears.
She looked away.
They were at her cubicle. She stepped inside and hesitated. She should be doing something, getting something, but what was there to get? Maybe . . . another pen.
Miles stood at the cubicle entrance, watching, seeing too much.
Taylor rounded her desk and opened the top drawer.
Miles stood aside to let her back out into the aisle. Aisle. Really a passageway, a beige fabric alley formed by the walls of her neighbor’s cubes.
She hesitated again.
“That way,” Miles pointed. “Turn left at the copier.”
“Thanks.”
“Yeah. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
She went on to meet her fate . . .
_______________________________________
Want to read more? Click here to buy a copy of Can Job.
Via the top-shelf blogger Passive Guy, here’s a top-shelf post by Mike Stackpole about Amazon and the book biz.
One of the points Stackpole makes is that as an online/digitally savvy company, Amazon has real time access to data about what its customers are buying — i.e., “statistics and analysis that tells them which authors are trending or about to trend.”
Amazon can act on those stats to “cherry pick talent and promote their ‘discoveries.'”
Amazon also has the ability to promote digital sales of books and later on produce a print compilation of digital novels, offering a unique print product. This is actually stated as a plan in their press release.
Good on Amazon. And I agree. This gives them a huge advantage over brick & mortar publishers/distributors.
But I do wish one thing: that Amazon would share more of its statistics with its writers.
As Passive Guy writes in his post, indie authors are in many respects Amazon’s partners in the e-publishing trend. He also writes:
Indie publishing has changed authors from helpless little children who cry and wait for their agent or publisher to come and wipe their noses into savvy and intelligent entrepreneurs, people who know how to do things for themselves.
To which I add: entrepreneurs need data.
I’d like to know how many clicks I get on my stuff on Amazon — my book pages, my author page.
I’d like to know how many book samples are being downloaded.
I’d like to know what percent of sample downloads convert to sales.
I’d like to know when/where people abandon my page or for that matter quit reading the sample.
And I’d like to know how all those stats compare to data about other authors’ Amazon activity.
I mean, think about it. For indie authors, Amazon pages and samples are marketing tools.
With the right kind of data, we’d better understand how well those tools are working — or how they can be tweaked.
Of course Amazon has reason to keep its data inside its kimono: competitors. But there’s a workaround, too: just release it in the form of trends and percentages rather than raw numbers.
So how about it Amazon? Please? Pretty please?
Via Should Be Reading, another game, w00t!
To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?
My answers . . .
What are you currently reading? This is a bit of a dupe from yesterday of course — Charterhouse of Parma, a 19th century French novel by Stendhal.
What did you recently finish reading? Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and An Absence of Angels
What do you think you’ll read next? I just found out this morning that Wickedly Charming, a novel by Kristine Grayson, a.k.a. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is available for free this week on Kindle. Rusch’s husband Dean Wesley Smith writes that the book is “about publishing. It is wonderful fun and even has Sheldon McArthur the book dealer as a character.”
I downloaded a copy and I bet that’s what I read next :-)
Earlier this year I posted about a capability Amazon added to Kindle, that allows readers to rate Kindle books.
At the time I imagined that the new functionality would be fairly straightforward — i.e. there would be a little button you could click to submit a rating.
It turns out to require a bit more doing.
Here’s what I’ve figured out so far. (Mind you, this is from my Kindle, version 3.0.2 — maybe newer models support different ways to rate books.)
Also, this may go without saying but your kindle has to be connected to a WiFi network for either of these methods to work.
To use this method:
One way to rate a Kindle is via the Book Description. The last page displays a hotlink “Write a Review,” as pictured here on the Can Job book description.
If you try to rate the book without reviewing it, you’ll find out (like I did!) that Amazon won’t let you.
You have to write a review to rate a book.
Not sure whether this is a bug or a feature. It makes it rating e-books more trouble, obviously. But maybe it helps prevent overly frivolous rating. Maybe, if people have to take the time to write down at least a few simple thoughts, they’ll be more thoughtful about how many stars they give . . .
I haven’t tried this method yet, but I found this in the Kindle documentation on Amazon:
On the final page of your book, you’ll be given the opportunity to share your thoughts via Twitter or Facebook.
Use the 5-way controller to select “Rate this book.”
Select the number of stars you’d use to rate the book, then select “save & share.”You can rate the book at any time just by going to the final page. Press the “Menu” button, select “Go to” and select the “End” button.
You can also select “Tweet/share that you’ve finished this book” to let everyone know you’ve read it.
I’m going to try that method, too, and post an update when I have.
Please drop a note in the comments if you have anything to add about rating Kindle books — positive, negative, or questions.
And please stop by my Amazon author page to peek at my Kindle novels :) Thanks!
That sound you hear is another old taboo exploding.
It used to be that authors with book contracts pretty much had to do what publishers told them to do. Right?
If you got big enough you might be able to throw your weight around. But most authors had little if any power.
So this is definitely another milestone moment in 21st Century publishing trends:
Novelist Polly Courtney has dropped her publisher HarperCollins for giving her books “condescending and fluffy” covers aimed at the chick lit market.
There was a time when Courtney would have had to accept whatever covers/marketing decisions her publisher made.
Not any more — because now she has options.
[T]he writer’s imagination, that magical entity from which ideas arise, has other principles besides ars gratia artis. It’s more apt to come up with ideas if there’s a use for them.
In a post about short story as a literary form–and how epublishing may revive it.
So this cracks me up.
One of my characters in Can Job
Mind you, the book is not really political, unless you count poking fun at politicians as “political.” The particular pol that figures in this scene is Bo Valgus, whose biggest mistake was not his position no the issue necessarily but that he wasn’t quick enough to voice support for it during a local radio interview. This being fiction, I also couldn’t miss a chance to take a dig at a certain former state governor :-)
The DJ had asked his opinion about same-sex marriage and he’d answered “I haven’t had a chance to think about it, to tell the truth.” The idiot. Everyone knew that a same sex marriage would have come to the floor if ex-Governor Eminent Flipzer’s ungovernable hetero sex drives hadn’t led him to disgrace and ruin. Well, if not ruin, then a brief time-out to think about what a bad boy he’d been.
Overnight, the legislature had become suddenly paranoid about any issue associated with the letters s-e-x.
And so here they were, to express their chagrin with Bo Valgus.
Anyway, I’m laughing today because only a couple months after self-pubbing the novel, a same-sex marriage bill has now passed in our state.
My book is already dated!
lol
But I really couldn’t be more pleased :-)
As one of my FB friends posted, it’s a great day to be a New York Stater.
Dani Amore, writing on technorati.com [UPDATE: link no longer good…], weighs in on the “how to price an ebook” debate by attempting a comparison between songs and novels. This cracked me up:
A song that sells for 99 cents that just happens to be a masterpiece of beauty, timelessness and meaning and can change a person’s life, is much more valuable than a $2.99 novel that the minute it’s downloaded immediately causes your Kindle to smell like a rest stop toilet.
But it’s a little sad, too, because the fact is people don’t think of novels as beautiful, timeless, and life-changing. For good reason — they’re generally not.
But should they be?
Have you ever read a novel that took your breath away, that gripped you the way a song can? What was it, and how long ago?
And what would you pay to experience such a novel again?
