There are times when an ebook makes more sense.

 

About five years ago I finished reading a hardback book I'd had since 2009. Stephen King's 'Under the Dome.'  Six years to read a book! Actually it took me six years to start reading it. I had not read it because it is a massive book, 1093 pages. It weighs 1.3 kilograms (2.3 pounds) - too heavy to read unsupported. (Enjoyable book if you want to read it.) I'd looked for it as an e-book but due to the Amazon/Hachette dispute couldn't find it. In the end I read it in bed before sleeping, with it supported on my knees.

The trouble with big books is that they are heavy and bulky They are certainly not the best choice when going mountain climbing. If you are an older reader then you may find reading a heavy book can be a painful experience.

Yet people seem to like longer books; especially if the book is science fiction or a thriller. People also like books in a series and are fond of those bargain 'box sets.' My co-author and I have produced such a collection. It contains the first three books of our 'A Vested Interest' book series and has over 1,400 pages. An average reader would take over 37 hours to read it - great for keeping you occupied while shut in at home during a pandemic. It's ONLY available as an ebook despite the picture. Your wrists will thank us.

What's it about?

It's a techno-thriller. We started writing it in 2007. The concept is that in 5,000 years the earth faces the ultimate apocalypse when a wandering planetoid will collide with it. The impact will be similar to the one which created the moon 4.5 billion years ago. Nothing on earth will survive. We can't destroy or stop this planetoid - it's too big. To survive we must move and we must take with us every living thing on earth. BUT it's five thousand years in the future and even though we know it will happen we do nothing since it's, "not my problem."

Book 1 of this collection is Immortality Gene. To save the world the solution is simple we must make everyone immortal so that it is their problem. It's normally free. It's been  #1 in technothrillers, #1 in Science Fiction genetic engineering, #1 in science fiction adventure. It's long and involved featuring lots of technology we are developing now - including the immortality. It has medical advances, romance, murder, mystery and conspiracy. And it's ending will leave you hanging so you really need the second book.

Book 2 in the collection is Dark Secrets. It features a pandemic spreading a virus. We wrote this back in 2010 and it's eerily similar to how the Covid-19 pandemic spreads. Our pandemic makes people immortal though. It fixes their DNA so that genetic damage - the sort that makes people old - can't occur. old senescent cells are destroyed and replaced with young cells. People start to get younger! Eventually they reach an optimal apparent age of about 25 and there they remain. Does this seem far fetched? The reality is that the first person to live to age 1,000 is probably alive now and is probably considered old now. But that title? There's a conspiracy governing the world that has been a dark secret since the crusades.

Book 3 in the collection is No Secrets. It reveals more of the dark secret governing the world and brings together people forced apart by it. It does the very opposite of book 2 where a protagonist turns out to be evil and makes an antagonist turn good.

Get the collection - It will keep you entertained for hours and it costs less than getting the books individually, even if one of them is free.

Be careful about what you post on social media

I've said many times that authors should take care not to offend anyone on social media since a vindictive person you offend can have a disastrous effect on your book sales with a bad review. There's another side to this though. Social media is getting flack from government over hate speech and fake news and has had to develop ways of combating this. Enter the social media algorithm.

Facebook is a classic example. As a social media platform it is huge. it has become more powerful than the traditional print, tv and radio media as a source of information. Unfortunately it's also a source of misinformation and hate speech.

To police Facebook would require an army of people constantly scanning posts and checking facts. That's simply not possible so an algorithm is used to seek out offending items and flag them for action. Even that is too much of a task and would still require an army of human checkers. Result? The algorithm takes action itself and inevitably it makes mistakes.

That happens quite often so Facebook gives those the algorithm has targeted to option of appealing the decision. Handling the appeals is less of a task and is more manageable - in theory. However it can still go wrong as happened to me over Christmas 2019. Here's what happened.

I made this post (You may notice the subtle use of an affiliate link to the film at Amazon):

Nothing too innocuous here and facebook didn't object - yet. here's the comments which followed:

I entered into a discussion about religion, something that along with politics is best for an author to avoid. However I've frequently discussed this with this Facebook user and we agree to disagree while remaining friends. Here was the killer follow-up though.

ZAP - Facebook's algorithm kicked in and decided the meme of Hitler was hate speech. It removed the comment and gave me a three day ban on making further posts. Naturally I disagreed and made the appeal.

Someone at Facebook looked at the offending comment and decided it had been mistakenly identified as hate speech. They apologised nicely and restored the comment.

But here human error kicked in. Although they had restored my comment they forgot to remove the three day ban on posting which went with it awarded on 23rd December 2019. When I discovered this on Christmas eve I naturally clicked the 'This is a mistake' button.

TOO LATE! The Christmas holiday had kicked in and my 'This is a mistake' didn't get attention.

No big deal perhaps? Not to me. It meant I couldn't post to various author groups, especially author retweet groups, over Christmas and that will have cost me lost book sales.

So let me reiterate that warning.

Be careful what you post on social media - especially if you plan on promoting in the next few days.

If this post has helped you  will you help me? Download a FREE copy of books 'Immortality Gene' from http://smarturl.it/avi or/and Raging Storm http://smarturl.it/botr Even if you never read them (but I hope you will) - it will help our rankings. Want to comment?

Amazon - Should I choose the 35% or 70% royalty rate?

There seems such an obvious answer here. If you are selling an ebook for $2.99 then the 35% royalty rate would be $1.04 and the 70% royalty would appear to give you twice that - $2.08

Except it's not quite that simple because Amazon make a delivery charge if you use the 70% rate. They subtract that amount before calculating the 70% royalty.

This delivery charge is based on file size and for a normal book, file size is something like 2 megabytes. The download charge for that would be about 30 cents. That means your 70% royalty rate would give you ($2.99 - $0.30) x 0.7 or $1.88

But suppose you have a book with lots of images? Such a book could have a large download size.
Here's a book like that:

As you can see this book earns a higher royalty by selecting the 35% rate because you are not charged that delivery fee.

So the answer to the question posed is really - Not always.

Other retailers don't make this download charge. Most offer a 50% royalty and that can make a big difference if there is no download charge. Sixty percent of $2.99 is $1.74. That's much better than the $1.05 the above book would get at Amazon. best of the bunch appears to be Smashwords which offers up to 85% royalty rate.

Editing can be fun (especially if someone explains it for you)

Take a look at this text.

Now I'm pretty sure you will be able to spot a mistake. BUT did you spot all five of them? Have a go yourself but if you can't see them all scroll down for the answers.

1. Technically you shouldn't start a sentence with a number. That 70 should be seventy. Of course this isn't always bad because starting a tweet or Facebook meme with a number gets you more attention.
2. There's no proof of the accuracy of that number. If you are making such a statement then you really should provide some evidence that it's correct. Particularly so in any scientific document.
3. Repetition - I've used '% percent'
4. Repetition of the word 'the'. This is a common mistake where a word ending a line is repeated on the next line.
5. I said there were five so shouldn't 'mistake' read mistakes'?

There's no such thing as "free on Kindle Unlimited"

(or when does Kindle Unlimited become worthwhile)

Lets be a little silly today. I see lots of authors advertising their books as being 'FREE on Kindle Unlimited'

It's a LIE!

Readers pay a monthly fee to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited. £7.99 per month if you live in the UK. ($9.99 in the US)

So how much does that work out per book? Let's make some assumptions and I'll do some math/s for you. 

Assumptions

• You are a super-fast reader who reads at 400 words per minute. That's about twice normal speed.
• You read non-stop for 12 hours per day, 30 days per month. That leaves you 12 hours a day to sleep, eat and do anything else you need to do.
• We'll take an average book as being 305 pages and about 61,000 words. I actually measured 50 Kindle Unlimited books and got an average length of 400.7 pages - we will take the mean which is 305 though.
• We'll assume an average page has 200 words. (it actually varies between 200 and 250 words)

Based on that you would take 162.5 minutes to read a book. lets round that down to 2.5 hours.

Each day you would read 4.8 books. Each month that's 144 books.

So each book will cost you £7.99 / 144 or a little more than five pence per book (about $0.07 US) That may be a very small amount but it's NOT free.

Of course would you really read 144 books a month? How much time do you actually spend reading each day? Are you a much faster reader than normal?

Now I read quite a lot. The last time I checked I read 55 books in a year. A little more than one book a week on average. If it's a really good book I might read more (I read all three of the Angriest Angel books at one book a day, 1589 pages) but would it be worthwhile for me to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited? The table at the right tells me that if you, as an individual, read less than four books a month then it's not worth it.

However if your family reads a lot and you share an Amazon Kindle account then yes - subscribe to it.

Of course there is one time when Kindle Unlimited is free. When you take up their offer of a 30 day free trial.

Asto all those 'FREE on Kindle Unlimited'  posts - What you really mean is 'Available on Kindle Unlimited.'

How to make a 'Look inside…' link for your book at Amazon

It's easy to create a book link that directs readers directly to the 'Look inside…' view at amazon.

1. Find your book's ASIN number. You'll see it in the 'Product details' section of the book's page at Amazon. Copy the ASIN number.
2.  Click this link - https://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/B004SP6N3Q/#reader-link Once you are at the page highlight the B004SP6N3Q part in the web page URL and past your ASIN over it.

You now have a look inside link to your book and simply need to press enter to go to that page.

Of course you can add any affiliate code you use. In my example that would make the link:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/B004SP6N3Q/#reader-link&tag=jaydax08
The &tag=jaydax08 is my affiliate code for Amazon.com - you would need to replace the 'jaydax08' part of it with your affiliate code.

You can also shorten the link using a link shortening service. For Amazon links I like to use smarturl.it links which allows you to use typing friendly links to direct readers to their local Amazon store:
smarturl.it/dseLook

Incidentally these Look Inside links have one other advantage - the Amazon page behind the 'Look inside' window won't scroll down from the top of the page to other parts of the page automatically.

Text to check your grammar checking software

Check your grammar checking software

This is a text document, full of errors, designed to test the capabilities of grammar checking programs of which there are a multitude of different versions such as Autocrit, Ginger, Grammarly, HemmingwayApp, PerfectIt, ProWritingAid and other programs available as both plugins for MS Word and as web applications to be used by pasting the text into a web page so that you can check the grammar of your documents and find examples for things like passive phrase use and run-on-sentences I suggest you copy and past this entire text into your grammar checking software to see how it performs.

Their are off cause many words witch can bee used wrongly. Does the grammar checker draw attention to this?

“Their over they’re with there coffee. Of course that should have been “they’re over there with their coffee". But does it spot the missing speech mark and comma? Dose it suggest the ‘Of course’ could have been eliminated and started the sentence with ‘That’?

Their have now been three paragraphs starting with the word ‘Their’. Each uses ‘their’ instead of ‘there’. Does the grammar checker program detect these as repetition? If you fix the problem in one case does it no longer see the repetition? If you fix all the errors does it re-appear?

What what about typos and repeated words? Doed hte gramar cheker cop welll width then? Word spelling and grammar checker auto-corrects every word in the last sentance and fixes the ‘a’ in ‘sentance.’

Hears a classic mistake which often appears on Facebook. Does the grammar checker find  the four errors? I would expect it to find no more than three but an AI grammar checker or a skilled editor would find four.

70% percent of the
the public cant
spot the mistake
in this text.

Underground would you find a led mime?

On a beech would you find a see shell?

Does the grammar checking software draw attention to idiom which may not be understood in a different country? For example, ‘pavement’ means different things in the US and UK. In the US you drive on the pavement but walk on the sidewalk. In the UK you drive on a road but walk on the pavement. There are many other examples of words or phrases with different meaning. In one bestseller book an English author has an American using the word ‘tarmac’ which an American would understand as ‘blacktop.’

Does the grammar checking software spot plagiarism? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. Does the grammar checking software detect plagiarism? (And repetition?)

Does the grammar checking software check for example missing punctuation such as commas semicolons apostrophe’s used incorrectly question marks over use of exclamation marks!!!! What about punctuation that was a question. Did the software find a missing question mark or semicolon? If; for example, a semicolon is used instead of a comma. does it draw attention, to non-capitalization and comma,s in the wrong place? Should it detect the Oxford comma and the none use of it? What about it’s ability to correct ‘its’ and “should punctuation fit inside or outside parenthesis”?