Having just finished the long, sometimes difficult process of writing the Beta copy of They Came in Peace, and taken enough of a break…
Tag Archives: The Omniverse
The Cogs of the Machine
What is the meaning of life?
Life is that which serves the Machine.
What is the Machine?
The Machine is that which serves the Purpose.
What is the Purpose?
Life.
-The Unearthing
SQUEE!
Why KDP Select is Bad
Among my of-late all too infrequent posts, I have been giving loose updates about experimenting with Amazon’s KDP Select initiative.
According to Amazon’s too-good-to-be-true KDP Select promotional page, authors enrolled in the programme can “Earn higher royalties, Maximize your book’s sales potential”, and “Reach a new audience,”all in exchange for making your enrolled titles AMAZON KINDLE EXCLUSIVE for an “enrollment period” of 3 months, which renews automatically unless you go through the steps to make sure that the book is only re-enrolled at your behest. But that, like much of KDP Select, only becomes evident after you enroll.
Even going through their broad, devoid-of-details 3 Question Long FAQ’s at the bottom of the page, it becomes obvious that while Amazon are touting the supposed benefits of KDP Select, they most certainly aren’t giving you any real information:
Apparently, the least-asked question is, “How well does it pay?”
Clicking on the “For more FAQs” link leads to a page that just re-hashes everything in the image above, only in more elaborate detail and just enough doublespeak to obfuscate the fact that they ain’t giving you all the fucking facts.
However, having read many a blog article by many a successful author, I decided to have another go at KDP Select – after an early gamble years ago when I first published online.
I decided, as Kindle exclusivity would shut me out of 1/3 of the eBook market, not to cut my nose of to spite my face and make all my titles part of the KDP Select stable for a full quarter-year. That made the chapter books from Chronicles of the Aeons War the ideal test subject for the KDP Select Experiment.
Yet Another Reason I’m Leaving KDP Select
So I just got an email from Amazon about the upcoming “KDP Select” payout, and I am disgusted and astonished. Continue reading Yet Another Reason I’m Leaving KDP Select
Amazon: Bigger Bullies Than I Thought
It’s no shock to anyone involved in eBooks – buying, selling or writing them – that Amazon.com owns the lion’s share of the business.
Not content with market dominance, however, it does seem like they are doing their utmost to crush their competition by any means necessary. Continue reading Amazon: Bigger Bullies Than I Thought
THE OMNIVERSE: BACK TO BLOGGING
Okay, break (or mourning period for my civil liberties under Stephen Harper) is over. Back to the blahg.
So, what topic to cover for my return to my own damn website?
Well, as this is supposed to be where I blahg about my writing and stuff…let’s talk about my writing! Continue reading THE OMNIVERSE: BACK TO BLOGGING
Character Backstory and Why You Need It
I’m not in the habit of giving writing advice. But I would like to share with you what I think is an important fact about a story’s characters.
So, a little backstory on this post. When I was writing what I thought was going to be my masterpiece as an author, but turned out to be an extremely poorly-received disaster that I’ve left up only so it may serve as a warning to others, I would, before writing, literally imagine myself sitting down with the character whose perspective the story was being told from, and listen to them tell me what happened. Continue reading Character Backstory and Why You Need It
Liars and Cheats and Why I Hate Them
So…what kicked off this week’s blahg post, you might wonder? I had yet another (Blocked, reported for spam) Twitter follower today attempting to sell me multiple five star reviews of my eBooks.
This pisses me off, because “buying” reviews got the movie studios in trouble back in the 1990s, I think, and it was as despicably shitty then as it is now. Continue reading Liars and Cheats and Why I Hate Them
FUCK CENSORSHIP
Warning: this post contains naughty words; many, many naughty words. Reader discretion is advised. Continue reading FUCK CENSORSHIP