Star Time Book Trailer

Seeing Bill Crider's latest book trailer inspired me to go tackle making one myself.  This is for Star Time.  It's really in HD, but Blogger likes these narrow columns.  Feel free to try the Youtube link.

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Movie Comments: Paul

I had gotten a couple of comments from people wondering if my novel Roswell or Bust was like the movie Paul.  Since I had not seen the movie, I was curious to see, especially since ROB was published in 2008 and the movie was out in 2011, if someone had seen my book and made a movie of it without telling me.

Well, now that I've seen it, I don't think it's likely.  There are common features, especially personable gray aliens riding around the southwest in an RV chased by the MIB, but that's about it.  If they read my book first, they would have had to throw out all the plot and all the characters and pour in a ton of crude humor.  While the movie has its own charm, I really don't care to be associated with it.  Not my style at all.

However, reality being what it is, I'll probably get those comments forever.  There's enough similarity for a good lawyer to make some money, but that's not my style either.

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International Prices for My E-books

I had considered dropping support for some of the ebook marketplaces as I released my latest book. Amazon Kindle and B&N Pubit are easy to use and don't take much effort, once I have the ebook masters generated.  It's all over and done with in less than an hour.  The ebooks are available for sale in a day or so.  Easy, smooth, and satisfying.

But Apple's iBookstore has gotten even more difficult lately.  The restrictions are tighter and sometimes it requires a customized master file, just to make sure I don't accidentally mention the Kindle edition.  There is also the problem of setting prices internationally.  As Apple expands its marketplaces, there is more opportunity to find English readers across the world, but it also means I have to set the price for each and every one of those countries.

So, for each title, I have to fill out this screen for each of the (currently) 32 different countries.  And, since these markets have been added over time, I have to go back to each of my previous books, and add the markets that have come on-line since I released that book.

It's a chore, but it's an opportunity as well.  I've got writer buddies who are more popular in other countries than the US.  It could happen.  So I decided to work through the stack of books and add all those markets.  I learned a few things as well. I found a website http://www.exchangerate.com/ where I could find the exchange rates for all the countries I needed.  I made a spreadsheet where my paper-edition price and likely ebook prices were calculated, so I could have an idea just how much Euros, and Swiss francs, and the various kronas were worth.  Then it was just a matter of watching a TV show (old Lois and Clark episodes) while filling in the forms.

I was a little worried the first time I submitted the updated package for an older book, fearing the multi-day delay that is common before a book actually comes on-line in the Apple system.  I was very pleased to see that a simple meta-data change like this only takes about an hour before everything was live.  At the same time, my newest book hasn't been approved in nearly a week now. 

The same sort of task was waiting for me at Google Editions.  This time, there are nine countries to deal with, and Google lets you download a spreadsheet, where you can change all the prices in one operation.

In another couple of days, I'll have all my books available for sale in far flung places, as long as the reader is looking for English language books.  Maybe it'll be worth it, maybe not.  Time will tell.

UPDATE:  7/26/12 : I just received an email from Apple stating that 'based on your feedback', they had made changes in the software to allow quick population of all the international markets based on exchange rates.  The next time I add a book, I'll try that out.  Hmm.  I wonder if they read my blog or if that 'based on  your feedback' thing is boilerplate for all users.  I suspect they got quite a few official feedback messages.

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My Venus Transit Event

My older brother Roger had a telescope, a six-inch Newtonian he built himself.  I have fond memories of hauling it out and projecting the sun onto a screen on eclipse days.  So, when the Transit of Venus approached, I decided to do the same thing.

 I carried my telescope, a little 4-incher over to Hutto Lake Park and set up the projection screen where it would be shaded by stone pillar.  Then it was just a matter of aiming the eyepiece in the right direction and keeping the telescope tracking the sun.

I had many people come and look at the rare event.  Quite a few people had heard about it on the news but weren't aware that it was going on right then.  I waved at all the people who came by telling them to come see Venus and it was their last chance in 105 years.

 I also invited all everyone by Twitter and Facebook to come by.  Graham Perks came with his kids and his binoculars to set up a similar projection system.  It was a successful few hours until the sun moved behind a cloud bank in the west and it was time to pack it all up.

Once I got home, I took one of the photos I took of the screen and dropped it into photoshop to enhance the contrast and make the Venus more visible, there beside the sunspots.

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Aperture 3.2.4 and swap space overflow

This is a just a technical note about the photo processing program Aperture, version 3.2.4, which at the time of this posting is the latest update.

I have been importing two large collections of photos into Aperture over the past few days.  The first one took a while, but eventually, everything was imported and all the background processing took place.

Then the update to version 3.2.4 happened, and my nature is to always keep software up to date, so I installed it.  Then I imported the second library.  The imports happened smoothly and all 102,000 masters imported.  Then the background tasks began, which were making preview files.  I had the faces recognition turned off.

After a few thousand images were processed, my Mac filled up.  The swap files were growing out of control and consuming all available space (over 60GB).  I had to reboot the computer.  It happened several times before I tracked the problem down to Aperture and its background processing.  Doing my research, I saw that the same thing had happened before back when Aperture 3.0 came out.  A later update fixed the problem, but now it's back.  Using advice from 2010, I turned on the "Open in 32-bit mode" option and ran it that way.  Now, all the background processing is happening smoothly, with hardly any swap space used.  It runs a little slower, but it runs.

Surely there will be another update which will fix the problem, but for now, there's this work-around.

UPDATE 20,000 photos later.
A different type of error occurred after processing about 20,000 photos in 32-bit mode.  This time Aperture crashed, with a crashlog that indicated various malloc errors.  Starting it up again caused another crash, the instant it started processing again.  The fix?  Switch back to 64-bit mode.  Now it's working fine, chugging away through the process queue.

I suspect there are two bugs, triggered by two different kinds of source files.  I'll just switch back and forth until the all the preview files are generated.

UPDATE 2: 10,000 photos later, a photoshop file crashed Aperture in 32-bit mode AND caused the swap-space inflation in 64-bit mode.  Restarting in 64-bit mode after a forced quit, I was able to watch the progress and learn the name of the file when the swap-space started growing rapidly.  Quitting Aperture and investigation with finder, I found that this particular file (200+ MB) didn't have a thumbnail and quicklook wouldn't show its content either.  Since the RAW file, another version of the photoshop file and a couple of JPG's were all there and appeared perfect, I moved the bad file and restarted Aperture.  Everything is working fine now.  I trashed the Aperture version.  It's pretty obvious some damaged or just odd image files can crash Aperture.

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The Topology of the Project Saga

I had always supposed that when I wrote a series of books, that they would be a series, that is, one book after the other in chronological order.  It hasn’t worked out that way for me.  In fact, it never has.

My most populated series, Small Towns, Big Ideas, is more a collection than a series.  Each book is independent and stand-alone.  STBI is more a marketing label than the name of a broader story.  The stories, all starting in the ‘current day’ are hardly in chronological order either.  Maybe some of them, someday, will have sequels, but only when a strong demand arises.

The Project Saga is chronological. It starts in the ‘current day’ and ends up some thousands of years in the future.  While a few of the characters appear in more than one book, you’re much more likely to see recurring family names. Time moves on and immortality isn’t very common.

However, the narrative splits.  Many of the books have a diverse cast.  The first of the books Star Time, tells the story of the collapse of the Techno civilization under the light of a supernova from the viewpoints of people in Texas and Australia, and in an alien space ship near the moon.  By the end of that story, the cast has split into two very isolated groups -- the humans on Earth, and the U’tanse on the Cerik home world.  This schism is highlighted with two add-on short stories in the pages after the official close of the Star Time novel.  

Thus we have this situation:

The Project Saga

|

Star Time

|

| --------------------------------------------- |

Tales of the U’tanse                 Post Techno-Age Earth

Now from a story-telling viewpoint, I happy with this.  Each branch has its own stories and themes, and they don’t interact for a long, long time.  From a marketing standpoint, it’s a nightmare.

Everything from Bowkers, where the ISBN numbers are logged, to Amazon, B&N, Google, and all the other book-selling marketplaces have software with a place for the book title, the series title, and the number of the book in the series.  Star Time is book 1 of The Project Saga.  I’m putting Kingdom of the Hill Country as book 2 of The Project Saga.

But where do I put the first collection of the Tales of the U’tanse?  Is that book 3?  Or do I split it off as a companion series and number them independently? While I might be happy to have book 2A and 3B, the software in all those systems I mentioned last paragraph would not be happy about it.

I could arbitrarily stick a Tales of the U’tanse book in the stream of books building a new history of humanity on Earth, but these are very different books, with different kinds of characters.  If someone picked up a book off the shelf, they would get very confused.

If I set up two different series names, The Project Saga for close to home and Tales of the U’tanse for across the stars, then I run the risk of a reader only discovering one of the two branches.  I’ll need to make sure there are advertising sheets before and after the text to make sure people know where to find the whole story.  A separate problem for the U’tanse stories is the status of Star Time and any Project stories after the U’tanse rejoin the human race.  Will Star Time be book zero of the series, even though I can’t make it part of that series in the databases?

Ah, the trials of not following the rules!  I’ll just have to make do.  Having written this little exercise, I’m confident that two different series names is the way to go -- with lot’s of pointers back and forth.  Thanks for letting me work this out.

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Ebook Marketplaces from an Indie Publisher’s View

With the DOJ’s efforts to remake the ebook marketplace, I thought it would be a good idea for me to take a good look at the marketplaces I do business with and document how it’s going right now.  In a year or two, maybe I’ll take another look and see what, if anything, has changed.  These reviews are subjective, my opinions after having dealt with them for years now.

I’m Wire Rim Books, my own publisher, publishing my own books.  I do everything myself, from writing, to book design, to marketing -- with a couple of exceptions.  I often buy artwork for interior or cover purposes, and I have a wonderful set of friends who provide invaluable editing advice.  I produce trade paperbacks and ebooks in ePub and Kindle formats.

My workflow is designed around producing a good quality trade paperback, and then taking the same source files and generating customized ebook versions.  While that workflow may be interesting, it’s not the focus of this review.  Just consider that on publication day, I have paper books being shipped and master copies in Kindle and ePub formats.

Kindle - Amazon

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/dashboard

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing site is a high quality web site where I can upload my kindle-formatted ebook, a copy of the cover jpeg, and fill out all the metadata blanks, like ISBN number, the description, age range, BISAC categories (like fiction/adventure, etc.) and pricing. It is relatively easy to use.  You can easily request books free of DRM with a simple checkmark.

Disadvantages are Amazon’s constant advertisements of its extra features, like KDP Select, all of which are designed to lock you into an exclusive arrangement, forbidding you from dealing with any of the other marketplaces.  If you see anything in bold print with fancy graphics, be careful or you may find yourself locked into Amazon alone.  In fact, the very first checkmark, before you even think about uploading your book or title, is KDP select.  Watch out.

Amazon also claims price matching.  If it detects any other marketplace selling ebooks with the same title and author, but at a lower price, it will lower your price on the Kindle store.  There is a well-known example where Amazon’s automated price checkers made a mistake and reduced one author’s books to free.  You should also know that the contract you make with Amazon absolves them from any mistakes.  They won’t make it good if they mess up.

In my history with Amazon, it’s been simple and straightforward and I have had no problems with books I have entered on the KDP site.

There was a recurring problem when I was also selling mobi formatted books through Ebookbase.  Kindle was making their own Kindle versions from my mobi books contrary to my direction on the Ebookbase site.  I had to email them to get the bogus versions, which did have DRM, removed.  This is documented here.  However, Amazon has absorbed and shut down Ebookbase, so that is no longer an issue.

There doesn’t appear to be any direct customer service contacts.  It’s all web, with an occasional email when they had to double check that I had the rights to sell my own books.

Pubit - Barnes & Noble

http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/

Pubit is a very similar website to Amazon.  You upload your ePub version ebook and the cover art and all the meta data.  After a couple of days, the books appear on the B&N Pubit site.

For a number of months, there was a glitch in their website that rejected some of my books for no obvious reason -- it failed with a 'technical difficulties' message when I clicked the button.  With no customer service contacts, I had no way to make contact with them to request a resolution.  However, they did respond to my twitter complaint, but they didn’t fix the issue then.  Over time, the site has improved and all of my books are accepted fine.

I have no issues with Pubit at the current time.

Kobo

http://www.kobobooks.com/

Kobo is a different animal.  Once the account is set up, you have an FTP site to upload the ebook, optional cover art, and an Excel spreadsheet template which you fill in all the meta-data.  When a new book is uploaded, you can’t even see it ( a write-only FTP site) and only recently have they added an email notification that the files have been received.  While I do have real people at real email addresses to query about problems, I may be too small a publisher to get much attention.  There is a chronic problem with DRM that I can’t seem to get resolved.  In spite of always requesting DRM-free in the spreadsheet, and emails confirming that I want all my ebooks to be DRM-free, some of them consistently show up with DRM added.  I have also had problems in the past with the cover art not showing up on the marketplace site.

Apple iBookstore

Apple does not use a website either.  You download a Mac application called  iTunes Producer which collects the same data -- ebook, cover art, metadata and pricing.  The application does a number of pre-flight checks to insure that the ePub file matches both the technical specs of the ePub format and makes sure your pricing fits Apple’s tier levels.  It also handles the uploading of the data and saves the ‘package’ so that you can revisit it to change pricing or other data.

While some complain about having to have a Mac to run the application, I had the same problem with eBookbase, which only ran on Windows.

Apple is very strict about adherence to their guidelines and the specs.  They are also not very forthcoming when a rejection happens.  I currently have one book that I cannot get uploaded, and I still don’t know what is causing the rejection.  Although Pubit, Kobo, Google, and Apple all take ePub, I frequently have to create a customized ePub just for the Apple site to get it through their rules.  One problem I have recently run up against was the rejection because there were URL’s to places to buy other titles.

There does not appear to be any customer service contacts.  I will get a reject email, but those appear automated.

Google

https://books.google.com/partner

There are two layers to the Google book site, the books sampling part, and the ebook part.  At the beginning, I was uploading the PDF of my trade paperback books so that Google would serve as a way for people to sample my books before they made a purchase.  The Google website allows the author/publisher to set limits what percentage of the book will be made available.  While I wasn’t really looking for more work to do, keeping this site updated, I found that if I didn’t supply a PDF of the book, Google would just go scan a copy anyway, and I might not like either the quality or the available percentage of the book made public.

After a while, Google got into the ePub book selling business as well, and was going to blithely sell copies of ePubs that they auto-generated from my PDFs, regardless of the quality.  When I signed up to supply the ePubs myself, and make sure that I got paid, some money showed up in my account -- I guess from sales they had made without prior permission.

That’s the story with Google.  You have to stay on top of everything, or they’ll just go ahead without you.  If I’m late getting official copies of my books on their site, they’ll have poor ones there already.  If they add a new ‘feature’, the default choice may not be what you want.  I always have to double-check all the options on my books, and have to go back and clear some of the permission grabs that have occurred.

When adding a new book, I have to add the PDF first, and then once they process it, I have to go back and add the ePub some random number of days later.  When mistakes happen, there is no customer service to handle the issue.  For some time now, Google has displayed the back cover of one of my novels as the front, and even with re-uploads, nothing has changed, and I’ve given up on it.  The Google Books site is also morphing into the Android Marketplace for books, trying to become something like Apple's iBookstore.  They were also offering to be an ebook marketplace for indie bookstores, but I have recently heard that they are dropping that service.

Ebookbase

This is obsolete, but I ought to mention it.  They were bought out by Amazon when Amazon acquired the mobi ebook format and made it into the Kindle format.  I had problems with Amazon grabbing mobi format copies of my books and making their own Kindle versions, but that’s all shut down now.

In summary, I am feeding my ebooks out through a number of marketplaces, this means that I’m left out of the Kindle Select program, but I’d rather serve more of the customer base.  None of the sites is perfect, but none of them has quite reached the point where I’ve given up in disgust either.  Because of Amazon’s and Apple’s price policies, I list the prices identically to all the marketplaces (some discount, some don't), although I wonder of that will change in the future.

On the worst of days, I wonder if I should have gone with Smashwords which feed most or all of these marketplaces from a single input, but I’m too picky with my formatting to put up with their automated process.  I could hope for some cheap assistant to enter all that metadata over and over again, but I can live with that as well.  On the best of days, I see all those direct deposits showing up in my bank account.  I hope that keeps happening!

That’s it for now, my 2012 review of ebook marketplaces.  I hope it’s helpful to someone out there.

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