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Monday, April 28, 2008

You know you wanna

Press it.


It's harmless. Just really, really, evil.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

A writer's education in ....

Almost everything about finding, researching and informing yourself about publishers and presses

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2008/04/victoria-strauss-precautions-for-small.html

--
Diana Castilleja
Best Selling Author
http://www.DianaCastilleja.com
Romance that thrives in dark places
http://www.sweeterromanticnotions.com

Saturday, April 19, 2008

All's Fair in Love and War

http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2008/04/18/summary-post-of-rebas-amazon-fight/

Remember the Amazon battle between the reviewer and the author? No, it wasn't fictional. It was terribly real, and very terrifying when you read the above post.

I'm posting on behalf of fairness, freedom of speech, and for Amazon to take a stand for ethical treatment and and against illegal terrorizing of its reviewers. Think I'm kidding?

Read the post. There's a petition and a LOT of news organizations to contact. Freedom of speech is not conditional in this country.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Okay, I'm doing it

I'm finally culling the book herd.

The man has really been wanting me to do this for some time, and honestly with somewhere close to 800 books all over, I guess I can't blame him. I've pulled about 30 or so from the current R&D box (Read & Dead). I have several more boxes I can go through and I guess over the next day or two, I will.

There's some books I won't part with. Mostly books in series, or books that I really, really loved. If I can't remember it well enough then it can go. Some books will go because I hated them, or didn't like the storyline at all, but that's really a limited few. I'm a very lenient reader. I'm sure authors love that in a reader. Just make me happy.

I want to enjoy a good read. I enjoy it so much, I have a strong penchant for books. Better that than a really bad kind of addiction, don't you agree?

So far, a lot are category books, but several single title books that I've had for at least five years are getting tossed in the bag. I'm sure there will be more. This is the first time I've ever tried to thin the book herd so to speak. Don't worry Kathy, none of yours are in here. :)

I never really wanted to, but I can see his point. I'm over flowing at the gills with books. So they have to go. The good side of that coin: Trade them in at the UBS and get credit for more books! But I won't tell him that. LOL

How long do you wait to thin out the library? Do you?

ETA: I've pulled roughly 130 books (four bags worth) to go to the UBS. What's sad? I found three more boxes of books. :( So... I'm easily over a thousand books now. Just wowza.

Monday, April 7, 2008

TeleRead, Amazon and the Author Guild

http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/04/07/amazons-pod...-guild/

Glad to know it's not just the authors thinking we're getting screwed here.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

I've been interviewed!

The person who interviewed me is actually my Mentee in the Romance Divas Mentorship program. She made me sound pretty darned good, actually. :) Lucky she's doing the interview before the program starts. Heheheehee! LOL

http://stillunhinged.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Amazon analysis? Who wins in this???

From Angela Hoy's WriterWeekly.com site:

""They rationalize they can ship books faster. Our printer, Lightning Source, ships books to Amazon's customers directly, even using an Amazon.com return address sticker. They rationalize they can ship items together to save money, and that doing this saves transportation costs and fuel. What they don't tell you is that forcing a publisher to pay Amazon to print their book, plus setup fees for new books, plus 48% of each sale could and probably will mean higher list prices on books and, thus, less money in the customers' pockets, less money in the publishers' and authors' pockets...but more money in Amazon's pocket.""


""Notice they left out the setup fees ($50 for new titles), the printing costs, and the 48% they want from each sale. In fact, there's no mention of fees at all in the statement. They also don't mention that the average publishing package for authors at Booksurge is over $1,000.

Also, regarding the Advantage Program, they left out the fact that publishers/authors have to pay $29.95 per year, PLUS shipping costs to get the books to Amazon, PLUS 55% of each sale to Amazon. They don't seem too concerned with shipping and fuel expenses for this part of the statement, probably because the publisher has to pay for those.""

For the full article, please read it here.


What I'd like to know is what company is seeing the benefit of this charging system that will eat into any profit? It looks to me like they're charging the snot out of the Non-BS product. Why would they do that?


Easy. So they don't have to sell their competition on their own site. And that's fine with me, but come out and say it! Come out and say what you mean by this. Don't say it's for the environment, don't say it's to save fuel costs or time or anything but your bottom line.

ETA: This is very informative. Read the comments.