Authors Electric

Here's Aunty Debbie trying out her mother-of-the-bride headwear! What’s new on the internet Problem Pages? Aunty Debbie’s been seeing a lot of posts recently about the great God Amazon blocking or pulling books and terminating accounts. It seems the bots are on the rise and the use of AI isn’t helping.  So why would Amazon want to terminate your account? After all, when you sell books, you make money. And when you make money, Amazon makes money. Not much on each transaction – a commission on the sale, maybe a delivery charge for the ebook, a profit on the cost of printing and shipping physical books – but if you multiple that for every one of your sales and then every account on KDP, and it all adds up to a significant amount of money in Amazon’s coffers.  So there is no reason for Amazon to rain on your parade, is there?  Is there?  Well yes. You see when you set up your Amazon account, there are pages and pages of those pesky little terms & conditions . You kno...

So I’m browsing around on Facebook – as you do – looking for something more interesting than writing a blog post for this month. As usual, time has run away with me and somehow we are already at the start of a new month. And I come across this post:   www.facebook.com/groups/20Booksto50k/posts/7481634218609644/   Now this is 20BooksTo50K® – a group dedicated to the business of self-publishing and I expect many of you have heard of it and/or are already members. Posts in this group are usually fact-checked, accurate and relevant. I say usually , because nothing is infallible and there’s no point encouraging people who just want to argue, and there are gazillions of other wannabe writers’ groups on Facebook that are probably not worth the screentime.  Anyway, this post struck me as something of a watershed for indie writers using KDP. To summarise – it appears that Amazon is going down the route of Identity Verification. Like I said, I generally trust posts in this group an...

I've been self-publishing for over eleven years now. 😲 For most of that time, most of my books have been exclusive to Amazon, first as ebooks, and then as paperbacks too. I did try one or two books on Nook, but never seemed to sell much and, frankly, couldn't be bothered to put in the amount of work necessary to publish across the board, even with the help of Draft2Digital. But this year, I decided to give it a go. And it has been just as much hard graft as I feared. Although I don't suppose I'm telling most of you anything you don't already know. Sorry, Grandma. Sorry, Grandad.  D2D ebooks aren't too bad. After some experimentation and the usual hiccups, I find that transforming a book already published as a ebook with Amazon is fairly straightforward. You make the whole book a long, uninterrupted stream of text, except for chapter ends, where you insert nothing more fancy than a page-break. Draft2Digital advise you to use Word's 'Heading 1' for a...

  Hello everyone, it’s so great to be given the opportunity to blog with the Authors Electric!    As this is my first blog, I’ll give you a rundown of what makes me tick.   I’m a mother to three grown ups, and two enormous dogs named Bear and Baloo, they’re Black Russian Terriers and weigh 65 kg and 44 kg respectively. I spend a great deal of time wiping up dribble, from the dogs, not the grown up kids! Baloo the baby! Bear the big boy! Nearly three years ago now, my husband and I decided that we had really had enough of our jobs, the state of the country and the weather, so we upped sticks from the UK and moved to central France. As such our Great French Adventure began! We bought a rundown granite stone farmhouse and embarked on restoring and renovating it. When we arrived we couldn’t speak French and didn’t know the area but the kindness of strangers is real and our French neighbours have been fantastic.  This was how the house looked when we moved in! The mo...

Sometimes Ridiculous , a new collection of my short fiction in softcover, has hit the stands (as we used to say in the newspaper biz). I won't feign humility. I'm pretty proud of it, and hope that I will be in years to come. The title reflects the squirrelyness of the stories, which flit among the branches of the improbable. It also describes how I feel when I read my own writing, and even when at the task of writing itself. My wry friend and colleague John Blades, the fiction editor of Chicago Quarterly Review and editor emeritus of the Sunday Chicago Tribune 's Book World, and author of the surreal, darkly comic, Small Game , did me the honor of writing a foreword. "Reading Tosi, ' El Mago '," he wrote, "is like a vertiginous trip on a combination magic carpet and time machine, the passengers generously fuelled with complimentary loco weed." I blushed under my beard at reading his amusing and generous observations. I've never gone f...

Recently Amazon informed me, and you, and everyone who self-publishes, that they were closing their paperback arm, CreateSpace and shifting everything to Kindle Desktop Publishing (KDP) their original self-publishing operation, which, when it began, published only e-books. We were given the option of waiting for Amazon to move all our paperback books over to KDP for us or moving them ourselves. I opted to move my books myself. Since they were going to be moved anyway, why wait? The move was easy enough, unlike most moves, and it's quite convenient to have the paperback and e-book files for each book side by side on the same site but I can't say that I'm entirely happy about this development. I know a lot of others aren't either. Of course, everyone always grumbles about change but is there more to it than that? I feel that, okay, the whole site is Amazon's toy and they allow us to play with it at very little cost and are -- I've found -- enormously helpfu...

Slippery stuff, Time.  Aarrgghh it’s my time of the month again! No not that one, shame really as I rather like waterskiiing, being towed on skates by dogs, parachuting and all the other pastimes enabled by the purchase of a box of Tampax. I mean my monthly Authors Electric blog post day, viz and to whit, today. It’s frankly terrifying how quickly that day comes around, and it’s speeding up all the time. Tampax are wonderful - you can do stuff like this! Time is funny stuff, infinitely flexible – unlike most things, it speeds up as we age. On Christmas night, as a child, it seems like a lifetime until Christmas day will come again, but now, it hardly seems worth putting the decos back in the attic before they’ll have to be lugged down again. Weeks fly by. It always seems to be Thursday. Time sprints when we have a lot to do and a tight deadline, or something fabulous happening, but then it drags, such as when you are waiting in Accident and Emergency. Note to sel...

One of the advantages of being an independent author or micro-publisher is you get to choose and control your sales channels. One of the disadvantages of being an independent author or micro-publisher is you get to choose and control your sales channels. If you have an e-book to sell then the obvious place to go and tout your wares is Amazon. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing has an easy upload platform, good opportunities for testing the product before finally clicking Publish, global storefronts and facilities for tweaking the book page via Amazon Author Central. Happy days. Amazon even offers a couple of promotional schemes if you give them 90 days exclusivity and join KDP Select. Up to 5 days of Free Book Promotion (would you want to do that? Debate is never-ending on the subject) or the Kindle Countdown which gives a time-based promotional discount for your title. Why does Amazon offer these benefits in return for exclusivity? Because other channels do sell e-books. If yo...