Amazon acts like a corporation

As a follow-up to my Print On Demand Publishers Compared post, there are three things that are starting to make me rethink my conclusion of "Next time, I'd forget about Lulu and just go with CreateSpace".

First is further unresponsiveness from CreateSpace's support. They put my book into Amazon's Search Inside the Book program, eventually. I had submitted it myself in the meantime because I wasn't sure if they were going to do it or if I had to, but it got knocked back because something was illegible (I don't know what, Amazon didn't tell me).

The version they submitted, and the version currently on Amazon at time of posting, has the same error that I had to get them to correct twice on the printed proof - all the ligatures and apostrophes have dropped out. (Click the Excerpt link on the left to see the issue.) I logged it with their support, they took what was apparently a cursory look and told me that it looked to them like the issue was fixed. I clicked the "No, this didn't resolve my problem" link and gave fuller instructions. The last I heard from them was over a week ago saying they'd sent the issue to a support specialist.

The second thing is that I have sold no copies from CreateSpace or Amazon, but I have sold some from Lulu.

And the third thing, the most disturbing, is that Amazon appears to be using its market dominance as a retailer to strongarm small publishers and self-publishers into using its print-on-demand service BookSurge, and no other print-on-demand (POD) publisher. I'm pretty unhappy about that; I'll be watching the situation and if they continue to do this (and especially if they continue not to be upfront about discussing it), I will be joining the growing boycott and pulling my listings, plus removing my Amazon Associates links here and on my other blog. Not that my tiny action will hurt Amazon, especially since they're not getting any sales of my book, but it's the principle of the thing.

Free press releases

I spent quite a bit of Friday submitting press releases to a number of sites, a process which is often more fiddly than it needs to be. A couple of the sites I simply couldn't get to work at all; their CAPTCHA tech was faulty or the forms wouldn't post.

The easiest to submit to is NZ's own Scoop; you just email the editor, rather than having to register and fill out an online form which asks for the same information as all the other websites, but in a different order.

Here's Scoop's version of my press release about City of Masks. They changed the headline from "Book Promotion, New Style: Novelist Makes Maximum Use of Internet Technology" to the more clickbaiting, if slightly deceptive, "Renaissance Hits the Internet".

Anyway, for your reference and mine here is my collection of sites tagged "freepressreleases" at Del.icio.us.

Incidentally, I also found a nice site which you can use to submit a web page to multiple social bookmarking sites: Haliboo.

You can put a button like this on your site:



(That's functional, by the way - when you click it it will submit this site. It'll submit whatever the URL showing in the browser is, so if you want to bookmark this particular post rather than my whole blog, click the post's permalink first. That's the title of the post, for those unfamiliar with how Blogger does things.)

Print-on-demand suppliers compared: Lulu, CreateSpace, Zenith

I've just written my promised article comparing and contrasting print-on-demand suppliers (pdf). I included the local printer I used, Zenith, for a third point of comparison with Lulu and CreateSpace. Quick summary:

• CreateSpace is overall the best for my purposes: simple but functional website, free access to Amazon, price per unit comparable to Lulu. However, the only printing fault I had was from them, and their customer service isn't as good as the other two, mainly because it's so indirect.
• Zenith gave excellent customer service and were cost-effective for bulk orders for me, because they're local. Their website needs serious work, though.
• Lulu, for my purposes, weren't worthwhile because the high cost of shipping to New Zealand negated the advantage of their excellent bulk discounts. If they print locally to you, though, it would be worth using them as well as CreateSpace.
  

Rachel Caine: Another good author for Jim Butcher fans

I've been reading the Weather Warden series by Rachel Caine recently, having discovered her through the short story collection My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding (which is worth reading, and not only for the Jim Butcher story).

They're good. They're the kind of story I like. They have an endorsement from Jim Butcher on the cover. The protagonist is the kind of person (like Harry Dresden) who will die doing the right thing, and in her case actually does, several times. I thought for a little while it was going to happen in every book, actually, but the author may have decided that was too South Park.

The first book is Ill Wind (I had trouble remembering that; the titles are all unmemorable cliches which, unlike Jim Butcher's titles, don't bear any particularly clear relationship to the specific book).

They are, apparently, chick lit, though I wouldn't know, having come in through the door marked "urban fantasy". This is an original take on urban fantasy, too, with no vampires or werewolves this time; the mysterious shadowy organization is the Wardens, who battle natural disasters supernaturally, with the help of the Djinn (yes, the slave-in-the-bottle kind, which is a major plot point). Joanne Baldwin, the protagonist, is one of the strongest Wardens and also has a conscience; despite her obsessions with shoes, clothes and fast cars, she's not bribable, especially when the safety of other people (or the world in general) is at stake. Which it generally is; they're fast-paced, high-octane thrillrides with lots of damage to scenery, vehicles, buildings, bystanders, Jo, and - eventually - anyone who pisses Jo off.

Are they as good as Jim Butcher? I would say not quite, but if I identified more with someone who's into fast cars and designer clothes and shoes and less with someone who lives in a basement with a collection of comic books* my answer might change. They're well-written, pacy, funny and have a strong moral thread and a tough-but-vulnerable protagonist. I recommend them.

* I don't live in a basement or have a collection of comic books. But I am a geek, and so is Harry Dresden.

Phone Spam

I got phone spammed for the first time this morning.

Some guy claiming to be a stockbroker rang from New York chasing business. Things on Wall Street are clearly worse than I thought if they're resorting to randomly calling people halfway round the world. Of course, it could just have been a scam, which is only one of the reasons I wouldn't have even considered doing business with him.

As soon as I'd figured out what he was about (after his cheesy attempts at geniality had fizzled), I told him that if I wanted goods or services I went looking for them and that I didn't appreciate being called. The smart thing for him to do would have been to apologise, get of the phone and leave me merely irritated rather than actually angry, but he started arguing back, wasting more of my time. Eventually I had to talk over him, saying "Thank you, sorry, goodbye" (the first two of which I didn't mean) and hang up.

Stupid, stupid rat creatures!

City of Masks - NZ Printing

I just received my printing - hopefully the first of several - of 50 copies of City of Masks from Zenith.

It's been a drawn-out process, made two weeks longer by the fact that my email with the cover art never reached them and I didn't realize until I eventually asked why I hadn't heard back from them. They have much, much less functionality on their website than Lulu or CreateSpace - practically none at all, actually, it's just a brochure, and not even a particularly informative one. It doesn't even give their prices or any templates or sizes. This makes everything a lot more manual than dealing with Lulu or CreateSpace. On the other hand, you get personal service - their sales guy, Ocean Reeve, has been very helpful through the proofing process and gave me a second proof for free when the first one had an issue with the page numbers being cut off at the bottom. He also put the ISBN barcode on at no extra charge. In gratitude, I plan to write a layout guide for authors that they can put on their website, and which may help others to avoid some of the issues I had.

This is one of two events that I've been waiting for before launching Phase 2 of Operation Promote Novel. The other, which is entirely dependent on me and I should have done by now, is getting five episodes of my podcast of City of Masks together so that I can launch it on Podiobooks. I'll then put out press releases, send out review copies, and generally toot my own horn.

Speaking of which, I'm now on goodreads, which is a kind of social networking site for readers and authors. I'm thinking of putting one of their widgets in the sidebar here to show what I'm currently reading, once I get the time.

Three Books on Business Blogging

I recently read three books on business blogging, two of which I recommend highly. They are Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, and Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos.

The third, which doesn't offer anything the other two don't and which I found a bit lightweight, was Blogwild!: A Guide for Small Business Blogging by Andy Wibbels. (Clearly, his mistake was in not getting a bearded coauthor named Shel.) His book might work for you if you want a real once-over-lightly introduction to blogging, including detailed (and probably, by now, outdated) instructions on using TypePad. I skipped those, since I already know how to use the blogging platforms I have (none of which is TypePad), and finished it in an evening. (I do read fast - but it's a short book, is my point, with not much in it.)

The other two books, although of course they cover a lot of the same ground, give you a kind of stereoscopic view of business blogging, and it's worth reading both of them. To draw on the subtitle of the Holtz/Demopoulos book, it focuses more on "everything you need to know", while Scoble/Israel are more interested in "why you should care". Both cover both aspects very well, though.

Things move fast online, and Scoble/Israel (published 2005) is describing a somewhat different business blogging landscape even than Holtz/Demopoulos (published 2006), one in which there is considerable doubt in some quarters that blogs are even important or will last. I think that's well established now, though doubtless there are people still in business who are out of touch with that reality. Of course, some of the websites that the books refer to (notably Feedster) have either changed or disappeared in the interim, too. But because they talk about principles of blogging, this doesn't render them much less useful.

Going in, I knew how to blog - I've been blogging here and elsewhere for a while now, and reading other people's blogs for several years. What I didn't know, and what these books taught me, were how to optimize my posts, how to promote my blogs, and how to measure the effectiveness of doing so. Also, they taught me that just by being myself - an honest, straightforward guy who can write - I can promote my business more effectively than by trying to be an extroverted, annoying pushy sales guy full of marketing nonsense. And, not incidentally, I can do so for little or no money.

It's fairly early days of promoting my blogs. I don't really promote this one; it's my "cat blog", my personal ramblings about whatever interests me, and it's too diverse to gain much of a following in any case. But I've taken on the lessons of these two books in promoting the blog for my novel City of Masks, and I'm seeing subscriptions gradually rising.

I've also, as a direct result of reading these books, started a third blog (which is scary), Living Skillfully: Hypnotherapy and Health Science, in large part to give my hypnotherapy practice more "Google juice". It's not just a cynical marketing exercise, though; in finding material to post about, I'm learning a lot and becoming a better-informed therapist. (The books taught me how to find more material on my interests and subscribe to it in easily digested form, too.)

It's very early days there, as it's been up just over a month, so I've yet to see a big boost in traffic - but I am starting to appear on Google blog searches for "hypnotherapy", and I'm seeing people arrive at my site via my blog. Perhaps the important thing is that, while I may not get a lot more traffic - at least initially - the traffic I get will be more likely to be the traffic I want.

A closing anecdote. I got the Holtz/Demopoulos book out of the library when I already had the other two books out. I almost didn't get it, since I had two books already, but... Ted Demopoulos left a comment on my blog within 8 hours of my post about his other book, What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting: Real-Life Advice from 101 People Who Successfully Leverage the Power of the Blogosphere. I knew his books were good, from having read the earlier one, but that probably wouldn't have been enough for me to get a third book if I hadn't felt a sense of personal connection through that comment, which took him maybe a minute. (Of course, since I'm a cheap Scottish-descended person he didn't actually make any money out of me because I got his book from the library, but here I am giving him a glowing review.)

All of which goes to show that what these guys are saying is true: People who feel like they have a connection with you will be more likely to do business with you, and one of the best ways to create that sense of connection is by blogging.