Authors Electric

Yes, nail-biting takes place in the run up to publication I never appreciated how frightening publishing book two in a series could be. If I thought the days and weeks leading up to the book birthday of In the Shadows was nerve-racking… No Safe Home has trumped it. It’s a strange feeling, because I know an author cannot please everyone, or cater to all reader’s tastes, or might miss a hook for a blogger. As a reader, I’m fully aware I’m not going to enjoy every book I read, or relate with every character I meet. Yet, despite this knowledge, I still found myself in author limbo – and it’s a scary place to be. I’m the kind of person who needs to know. I like answers and reasons and feedback (I was called nosey as a teenager, but I prefer the word inquisitive). I love to know why. I love hearing people’s thoughts and reactions to things and, no surprise, this includes my books. At the end of last year, In the Shadows received a one star review on Amazon.com, and ...

It seems that Amazon.com just can't help screwing over indie writers. I don't mean to imply that Amazon has it in for indie writers. It would be self-defeating to set out to undermine such a significant source of revenue for one of your important subsidiaries. After all, without indie folks, Amazon's CreateSpace program, one of the primary venues for self-publishers and many smaller independent presses, would essentially be dead in the water. No, the problem lies in Amazon's perhaps overzealous pursuit of quality control. More particularly, trying to ensure that its merchandise is not offensive, its book reviews are relatively unbiased, and royalties are obtained honestly. Maybe Amazon should consider this as a motto for its quality control. This is not a new thing, and we here at Authors Electric have certainly discussed Amazon's problematic relationship with independent authors ( and with traditional writers, too ) before. However, I'd like to...

On January 21 st  this year, I decided to take a peep at my Amazon Sales Dashboard, to see how many “page reads” I was getting on my borrowed/subscription ebooks. I saw that 65 pages of my short story collection, Storm Damage, had been read that day, in the UK. I found I couldn’t resist going back the next day to see if more pages had been read. None had. So I went back the next day. No more of Storm Damage had been read, but I saw that one page of my novel, Agency Woman, had been read, by someone in India. One page. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. The next day, January 24 th , I went back again. 7 more pages of Agency Woman had been read now, in India. Went back the next day, but nothing more. All went quiet for a while on borrows. Then, I noticed on February 8, in the sales dashboard, that 547 pages of my borrowed/subscription books had been read that day. I did a specific search for each title, and saw that none of The Survival of Thomas Ford or St...