Tag Archives: books

A Reader Suggestion

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30 years ago, in Orlando, there was a Hu Hot restaurant nearby. Great concept. You start with a bowl, fill it with meats, veggies, noodles or rice, the move to the sauce bar. There, you have 24 sauces arranged from mild to hot. Hand it to the grill masters and they cook it on a Mongolian grill. Then I got a new job and Hu Hot wasn’t around.

We moved to Colorado, and Colorado Springs is an hour and a half away, but in one of our forays. I saw a Hu Hot! After 4 years, my wife finally decided to humor me, and we went today.

Wow! My first bowl I stuck to the mild/sweet sauces. Sublime. My second trip up, some Szechwan Sunburn sauce and a couple of other mollifying sauces. Simply amazing. I may even get my wife to go back with me some time.

What does this have to do with reading?

Sometimes going back to a favorite book or play is a whole new experience. The second time through, you may pick up a completely different vibe.

I reread Our Town by Thornton Wilder recently. I’d been in the play 45 years ago, found it interesting, but didn’t understand why it won awards. This time I completely understood. For one thing, I have a different maturity level now, a lot more theatrical training, and a refined love of language.

I reread Moby Dick not too long ago, the novel hailed as the first “modern” novel. Far richer than my first read through. Not an easy read even now, but a great book nonetheless.

In the other direction, I reread Dune on a long flight. It did not hold up to my teenage assessment of it. It’d be great with a very deep edit…

I have a passion for new reads, but don’t be afraid to dust off an old favorite. You may find new wonder in it.

Inefficiency and Inflated Prices Irks Me

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B&N Press, a good outlet for hardcovers, books you want for yourself but not publish, and… well, that’s about it, but IngramSpark has better hardcovers. I used to post books to B&N Press, but in 15 years of using them, I’ve made a grand total of 2 book sales, so I don’t bother anymore, but several of Prevail’s early books were posted there.

Today B&N Press notified me that ALL books need to be at least $14.99 retail price or they will go off sale. Supposedly due to higher printing costs and shipping costs (even though shipping is tacked on after you order). Printing cost have gone up, but some books just aren’t worth selling that high (when I get $10 royalty, it’s too high), and the cost of printing/royalty hasn’t changed.

Still, fine and good, you need to raise prices, I get it. BUT…

I have to change the price on each book individually. Again, not horrible, but the site takes a long time to respond, and that is horrible. I spent more than an hour changing prices of books that won’t sell, when they should have simply had an “Opt In” button that would change them all for you. As it is, when you open the price, it automatically changes it to $14.99, so you can’t tell me they can’t automatically adjust the prices wholesale.

I took my low-info book off sale (my personal book, not anyone else’s) because it seems a cheat at that inflated price.

The whole purpose of Prevail Press is to lower entry hurdles for authors and readers. We don’t overprice books, especially e-books. I know several indie authors who’s paperbacks are between $17 and $25 so they can get $8 to $15 royalties per book. That seems outlandish to me. I feel bad for the $12.99 books we charge. There’s a school of thought that says you can sell a thousand books to make two thousand dollars or you can you sell a book for two thousand dollars and just sell one. That only works to a point…

$3.99 Kindle versions keeps us off Over-Priced E-book sites, and we still get decent royalties per book.

Like I said, we try to make it easy for you to buy a book.

Vellas, I Knew You Well

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Sad news. Amazon just informed me that their experimental Kindle Vellas are being discontinued. Seems no one is buying them.

For those who don’t know, Amazon realized people love to read things on their phones, like Facebook, Quora, blogs, etc. So they came up with Vellas. Short, serialized stories that are easily digested on your phone. Rather than straight purchases, you buy credits and after the first few installments of a series, you use these credits to buy the next episode.

I suspect that it was the credits that were the issue, not the stories themselves. Some writers have tens of thousands of readers. I have 4.

Alas, no more.

The new year will be Vella-less. Stories will persists in presence for a while and then will be shut down.

That’s a shame, really. I used Vellas as a novel farm, developing the A plot for some future novel where I would add B and C plots, flesh out a few things… but, while I enjoy those stories, I’m not sure I will develop them as novels. Maybe. Eventually.

Story time: My writer’s group used to host Writer’s Cramp, where once a quarter, we’d come together in a beautiful house (thanks, Debi!), enjoy dinner, and then write from 6 to midnight. OK, some of us were getting older, so we didn’t make it to midnight most Cramps. I developed a story that I only wrote at Cramps. It was about 30% done when the Cramps stopped. So, now I have a novel that I do really like, but haven’t written anything more on. Mostly because the crime that motivated everyone’s actions hasn’t coalesced in my head yet. I’ve got four novels on the schedule going forward, and I should probably add that as a fifth. But something else always crops up first.

Our writers group, formerly the Writer’s Block (because most of us lived on the same block), is now the Writer’s Arc (because we’re national now, meeting on Zoom). I can’t help but think Vellas would have been great fodder for the Cramps. Ah, well.

If you’re interested in joining Writer’s Arc (most of us, if not all, are Christians, so beware), let me know.

Authors Beware!

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Goodreads has had a data breach. You may be getting flooded with emails offering reviews. Do NOT reply to them.

Goodreads has not confirmed this yet, but I have two emails associated with them and gotten duplicate emails to both addresses. At this point, more than a hundred and counting.

You may also get disturbing emails threatening your children unless you get off of Goodreads and social media. I don’t understand these, since they aren’t asking for money.

Best way to identify scam emails is by their email addresses. If it’s a series of numbers/letters with a gmail.com appendix, it’s a scam. If it has undisclosed recipients in the To: line, it’s a scam. If it sounds too good to be real, it’s a scam.

Most ask if you would like a ton of reviews. The followup is, “send me an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) for my 10,000 followers to read.”

Needless to say, your book would be pirated.

Some will charge you for this. Paying for reviews is unethical, even if it was a legitimate email, but this scam adds insult to injury; you’d be paying to have your book pirated.

There are proper places for ARC reviews, just not through gmails.

Why these losers try to steal your money or make you afraid, I have no idea. Twisted people.

There is no reason to delete your Goodreads account. The breach has been completed and you don’t have any dangerous info other than email on their site. You may want to change your password.

Be safe out there. To be a writer is to be a target for diseased people.

Publish Outside The Box!

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When Amazon democratized publishing, they did a lot more than just turning publishing on its ear, they threw out the box for anyone ready to put some thought into it.

The traditional publishing world created a box around books. They had to be this size, this number of pages, all text, and even limited formatting to ensure offset printing efficiency.

Today, your job is to figure out how your passion can be published.

I’m blessed to have many friends who are wizards with pens, brushes, and styluses. Others with cameras. Funny thing about fine artists, they all have some IP floating around in them. IP, for the uninitiated, is Intellectual Property. Ideas that are all their own. Maybe they are ideal for movies, cartoons, merchandising, radio shows, and other media channels, and I agree.

They are also grist for books.

Wait, wait, when you hear the word “books” are you thinking 200 pages of text? Maybe you’re thinking of traditional picture books.

The truth is, the medium is ripe for reinvention. I’ll be the first to admit that Amazon doesn’t enable 3D popups, but art and words have been going together in some form or another forever. Memes are a new form of words and graphics. Who says comic books have to be 6 – 9 panels per page? Who says they have to only use word balloons?

I’m not a graphic artist, I’m not the one to define what those new designs should be, but I’d ask my artistic friends not to limit themselves.

Amazing Art wallpaper | 1680x1050 | #15211
If they can create a lion with lasers, you can create something equally amazing!

I know a young woman who doodles the most amazing art while she listens to a sermon. The art is drawn from the sermon, which is drawn from the Bible. I’d love to see her share those doodles (you and I would call them high art) with a paragraph or two about what they mean. It isn’t narrative, it might be a wonderful twist on a devotional, or maybe an amazing snapshot of a young artist’s mind.

Do you love to cook? What’s your twist on a cookbook? Going on a trip? What’s your take on a craft book for the kids?

A last thought for my friends sitting on strong IP; there’s nothing new under the sun (hard to believe after I’m preaching on the new, but even that’s based on what’s come before, just without the same limits). It just takes one published media piece to cement your copyright on the IP. You need to do it before someone else is too close to your idea.

Prevail Press is your gateway to publishing!