Authors Electric

A year ago I was here, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, very close to Alaska, on the islands of Haida Gwaii.  It was a trip that changed my life.  I was supposed to be studying the mythology of the First Nation people here for a new collection of poems, but I began writing a travel memoir instead and it turned out to be one of the most personal books I've ever written. Totems in abandoned villages, photo courtesy of Go HaidaGwaii I was made to face the realities of the growing environmental crisis, as well as the ‘cultural’ and actual genocide committed by the British Colonial government which was begun in the latter part of the 19th century but carried on through the 20th.  It seems horrific that children were still being taken from their families to have their ‘Indian’ identities stamped out of them as late as the eighties and nineties.  The last of the ‘Residential Schools’ only closed in 1996. What I found was a wild landscape of enormous beauty, fr...

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...