Solstice ... and the symbiosis of storytelling

Well, the solstice has arrived. The northern hemisphere can now look forward to the return of the sun. So, I guess it is time to make my regular (1st) solstice report.

Okay. Not With A Whisper: Producers is up at Amazon. Has been for several days now, but I didn’t want to put out two posts on top of each other. NWAW:P went live 4 days ago, and I have 4 sales. Hard to not feel good about that. Someone, somewhere is reading what I wrote -- or at least intending to.

And that's what it is all about. I believe that for a story to be told, you need both someone to tell the story, and someone to receive it. It becomes a symbiosis. As such, each of us reads a different story, though the words remain the same. For one, the story can have great meaning, for another little or no meaning.

That this occurs -- and the way it occurs -- continues to surprise me. A reader once wrote me that one of my stories had affected his life and a relationship in a certain way. Now, of all the things I expected of the story, this came pretty far down the list. In fact, I didn't see it coming at all. But, together, we created a story that he could use to help himself. I felt both gratified and humbled.

Humbled because although the reader gave me credit, the credit belonged equally to him or even more to him than to me. He took my words and used them to his own benefit. We all do this, I know, and I owe debts to many other authors myself, taking from their words things to help myself.

What anyone may take from NWAW:Producers, I know not. I hope that those who do read enjoy the story. If not, well, they can always return it and get their money back from Amazon ... and perhaps leave a review warning others of like mind away. That's okay. I know that some will find the story wanting, for no author can please everyone.(If you happen to read and enjoy it, consider leaving a review as well -- and maybe even mention it to a friend.)

Anyway, with the returning of the sun I hope that I can return to writing. I still have stories I wish to tell, and until someone else reads them, they can’t achieve their full measure, become true stories.

I wish you all a happy Solstice (Winter up north, Summer down south). May the coming year bring all that we desire – and not necessarily all that we deserve.

Live well, my friends.

Damned if you do; Damned if you Dont: Kindle Unlimited

Amazon.com has this wonderful thing called “Kindle Unlimited”. It is a subscription plan whereby you pay $10 per month and can then borrow and read all you want of the e-books which are entered into what Amazon likes to call “Select”. "Select" gives the book extra visibility, and the author the ability to use a couple of different advertising devices – such as setting the book free for a limited time. In other words, it can be very financially advantageous.

It has its disadvantages, too. To be eligible for Select, the author must make his or her book available to Amazon exclusively for the duration of its time in the program (90-day increments). No selling it through any other distributor. Amazon has exclusive rights to sell it.

Originally, the authors were paid (about $1.35) every time someone read over 10% of their book. Short story writers loved that, novelists … not so much. And, of course, the scammers got involved. They put out very short books, such that if you even opened it, they’d get paid the $1.35 – even if the content was word salad, pure garbage.

Eventually, about a year later, Amazon changed the rules, to stop those scammers, and to make it more ‘fair’ for those who wrote longer works.

Amazon decided to pay the authors whose books got borrowed by the number of pages which the borrowers read. If you read 10 pages of my book, I got paid for 10 pages – or so they had us believe.

Authors are curious sorts. They study, and share what they discover. It seems that Amazon has no way of knowing how many pages you’ve read. Their program simply checks your kindle device or app each time you sync with Amazon. It then looks at the last page read. So, if you had jumped to page 150 in my book, Amazon would see it as 150 pages read, and pay me accordingly, even though you’ve only read one page (page 150).

Needless to say, scammers figured this out and went to town. They uploaded very large books (6000+ pages – sometimes of only the same paragraph repeated over and over) and then farmed out the ‘reading’ of them. So, if a ‘farm worker’ had 10 accounts with Amazon, he could ‘borrow’ that big book on each account, jump to the last page, and the ‘author’ would be paid for 60,000 pages read – about $280. If the ‘farmer’ had 10 such ‘workers’, he would quickly earn $2800. If he put up 10 such books, $28,000.

That had to stop, so Amazon put new rules in place. Maximum size of a book: 3000 pages. That helped.

But everything Amazon does seems to have unintended consequences -- like the above. Now, several of us have noticed that we’ll occasionally get a 'one page read' report. It would seem that someone opened our book, and that was it: thus, one page read. Perhaps they didn’t like it; perhaps they opened it and then went off-line, and we’d get the rest of the pages when they next synced with Amazon … or maybe not. Naturally, some authors did some experimenting.

It now appears that if you read my 350 page book, page by page, all the way through and then return to page one (as many of us often do) before going on-line again and syncing with Amazon, Amazon will see it as One Page Read and pay me one-half of one cent (approx).

A lot of authors are kinda upset about this. Amazon uses our book to get subscriptions, and allows borrowers to read our books, but has no way to check how much they’ve read, and fail of paying us our due. (If you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, and use your kindle to read off-line, please, please, do not return to page one. Leave the book open to the last page read so that the author can get what is due. Please.)

Many of us, including me, have pulled our books out of Select – even though this hurts us visibility-wise (and thus monetarily, as well). If we’re not going to get paid for pages read, and if we’re prevented from trying to sell our books through other distributors, what’s the point?

It’s very depressing, as Amazon, through Kindle Unlimited and other means, seems to have a stranglehold on the market. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you don’t go in, you lose money. If you do go in, like as not you get cheated ... and Amazon's hold on the market becomes a little bit firmer. So, do you stay out as a matter of principle, or do you swallow your pride in order to be able to feed your family? Thanks, Amazon.

In my case, selling as little as I do, I can afford to stand on principle. Thus, my next book (due out very, very soon – within the next day or three), “Not With A Whimper: Producers” will NOT go into Kindle Unlimited.

I wonder if it will sell anything.

You Never Know

You never know what effect your words or actions will have on another.

The nights now grow longer, the darkness comes earlier, and the stars come out and shine coldly down, harbingers of the winter to come. And yet the darkness, along with the cooler temperatures, pulls my mind back to my younger days when I looked forward to the shortening of the days for a reason that many youth do – for Christmas comes during the darkest time of the year.

Back in the early 1960s I lived in a small town and Christmas, as a season, began on December 1st and pretty much ended on the 26th. You didn’t hear Christmas music playing in stores, didn’t see any Christmassy advertisements on either TV or in the papers, and didn’t hear anything about Christmas on the radio ... until the magical 1st of December.

Then, for a little over three short weeks, everything changed. Twenty-four days weren’t enough to make one weary of the festival, were just enough to keep the tension – good tension – building until released on the 25th. Peace on Earth and Goodwill To Men. Today, Christmas season seems to start in October. It's not the same.

Anyway, in my town, in early December, the two big (relatively) department stores (Simpson Sears and Eatons) would set a part of their floor-space aside for a ‘toyland’. They would make separate rooms of it – not just have a certain few aisles devoted to ‘Christmas things’. So, one would walk through the enchanted door and the ‘real world’ would disappear and a magical one – to the eyes of a child – would appear.

There in that small enclave, the imagination would run riot, and children’s eyes would grow large with the thoughts that some of this breath-taking array might find its way into their homes … and then, oh what fun would be had!

Ah, but I bring this up not to speak of Christmas, nor of the imagination (something without which we writers and readers would know a drearier world). No, I bring it up because of the man I saw in the ‘Toyland’ one day when I had come to feast my eyes on what might be.

With hindsight, he looked to be in his mid-twenties to early thirties. At the time, I only thought of him as ‘a grown-up’. And he had such a look of joy on his face as he looked around. And he smiled at me in passing. No more. Just a smile of recognition of a like soul in a magical place, perhaps. Or, perhaps, he thought of his own children when he saw me. I don’t know. I didn’t know him and never – to my knowledge – saw him again.

However, I remember his smile. And that smile, the look of quiet joy, has affected my life ever since. Perhaps more than anything else, it said, ‘This state of joy can exist’. This man – if he still lives – may be as old as 90, though I suspect something less. He will never know what he did for me in those few seconds, and how it lasted for 50 years.

Just a smile.

While working on the Distant Early Warning Line in the Arctic, I dove into the site’s ‘library’ during my off-time. We had collected lots of books – from various genres – that the Company had sent up on regular basis over the previous decades. Being a somewhat voracious reader – and having little else to occupy my off-time – I quickly went through those books of my own preferred genres (SF and History) and went on to other books including Mystery, Horror (not many), Westerns, and even Romance.

One day I sat in the ‘library’ reading a – to me – inconsequential book that had not much to offer other than a way to pass some time. I didn’t think overly much of the writing, the story, or anything else about the book. Within a week, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the name of the book or the author. However – and this is a big ‘however’ – one sentence in that book was just the sentence I needed to read at the time. It spoke to me in a way that it probably wouldn’t today, thirty years later. That author, whoever he or she is, presented me with a gift that s/he will never know was given. I no longer know the sentence, nor do I remember what it was about or why it had such an effect on me. But it did, and I am grateful to the author for writing it. It helped.

Just a simple sentence.

About fifteen years ago, my mother died, leaving me as executor of her will. One of my jobs as executor entailed the closing of her account at the local Credit Union. I presented my documents and one of the staff aided me in filling out the paperwork and tidying up my mother’s affairs at that institution. She (the staff member) treated me kindly and gently, helping to make it a painless, quiet closing of this aspect of my mother’s life. I appreciated it in a way that she probably didn’t realize.

Subsequently, whenever I went into that branch of the Credit Union to transact my own business, I would look around to see if she was there – and she often was – and I’d think of the kindness she had showed me and silently thank her. 

Just a simple kindness that cost her nothing. But I remembered, and she would never know this … no, wait, that’s not true.

About 10 years after my mother’s death, that woman was my teller once again. And I decided to act on the idea that had begun building in me over the previous six or so months: I should tell her.

Thus, after transacting my business, I explained how her kindness of that time had remained with me, how I remembered it – and her – over the last ten years. She looked at me and said, “You have no idea how much I needed to hear that today.”

Just a simple act of kindness that cost me nothing.

She retired shortly after that, and I’ve not seen her again. But at least I’ve consciously returned something for the smiles, for the words that others have written, for the acts which, unknown to their authors, have made a difference in my own life.

And I know it continues, for some few have informed me that things I’ve said or done in the past – mostly not even remembered by me – or words I’ve written have likewise affected them. A casual word, a smile, a small kindness, holding the door open for someone laden with parcels can mean (to that person at that time) much more than just a smile, a casual word, or a small kindness would normally do.

We don’t know the lives of others; we don’t know what may help them in a bad time; we often don't even know they are having a bad time. A small act of kindness, a simple smile of recognition of just another person sharing this world may help that person on their path. Who knows, it may literally save a life. And we’ll likely never know.

It Ain't the Money

It takes me roughly 400 hours to write, edit, proof, design and create a cover, and get a novel ready for publishing. That doesn’t count time thinking about the work when I’m not actively writing it – like when I’m at my job, driving, lying in bed, etc., and have a few minutes to consider what’s happening, what I want to happen. That’s a fair investment of time and effort.

It has now been a month since I published Book 2 of the Yrden Chronicles, “Trading for a Dream.” The first month of a book’s sales on Amazon is usually the best month. For those who are interested, I ‘sold’ 37 copies of it on Amazon in that month (it’s exclusive to Amazon for the first 3 months), and had the equivalent of about 10 copies read through Kindle Unlimited. Give or take, this means a ‘profit’ to me of about $90 – or about $0.23/hour’s work. I’ll need to sell another 1950 books to get me up to what I’d make in a minimum-wage job. Book 1, “Trading For the Stars”, has sold about 430 copies in the last 18 months, meaning I worked on it for about $2.25/hr. At its present rate of sales, it’ll take another 12 years before I ‘break even’ (in other words, before I’ve earned what I would have made if I’d used those 400 hrs to work a minimum wage job).

Those are the realities for a lot of us independent self-publishers. What makes us do it? Well, for me, right now, it’s Mr Telford.

I conceived of him as an intermediary between Colleen Yrden and Alan McLean in "Pelgraff". He was just there to provide a link – after all, a woman in Colleen’s position wouldn’t go visiting Mr McLean on her own. No, she’d send somebody. That somebody was Telford. He had a bit part at the beginning of the book, and I had no intention of him ever being seen again. Then, at the end of Pelgraff, I had a thought – something to tie him and McLean together. They both loved Colleen, and they both had no chance. So, Telford got a few paragraphs at the end of Pelgraff.

When I went to write “Trading for the Stars,” Telford didn’t occupy a thought. That was Clay and Colleen’s story. But when it came time for the sequel, I knew that somehow, somewhere, I’d have to introduce Mr Telford. So, recalling that McLean had seen him as a dangerous man, I decided to introduce him to Colleen early on. Thus, he got a good deal of time in “Trading for a Dream”. And now, suddenly, he wasn’t just a bit character on the side, he had become a driving force in the story – something I hadn’t expected at all.

And that’s part of the joy of writing the way I write – seat of the pants. I don’t outline, and have every detail down before I start; I just start and see how I get to the end. I know how and where the story will basically finish, but not where the journey in-between will take me – and you, the reader.

So, now, Mr Telford has become a major character, and I’ve a lot of ideas for him. I also know where he will end up, but not how he’ll get there – and, of course, there’s always the possibility of a change, should the story warrant it. But, I’m pretty sure I know the end of his story in this series.

At present, I’m working on Book 3, “One Trade too Many”, which will take us to within a stone’s throw of Pelgraff. And I’m enjoying Mr Telford’s place in that book. I’ve come to quite like the man – and I had no idea he’d even have a role when I first came up with the idea of the Colleen Yrden story. But it’s fun.

So, as long as I have my health and imagination, I’ll get to see the story take shape, develop and end. I hope that I’ll have others who will take the journey with me and read the words I write. It doesn’t look like there will be too many of them.

I’m not a great (heck not even a good) marketer. Even this blog is really more than I’m comfortable with. But, if I write well enough, those who need to find my books will find them and enjoy them, as I’ve found and enjoyed books and authors I’ve needed to find.

What keeps me going? The joyful surprises that I get by writing keeps me going. It’s certainly not the money. I admit, that I’d enjoy a little greater remuneration, but I’m stuck in the story and I want to see how it plays out.

PS: You might check the 'news' page to see where I am. I'll try to better keep it updated.

New Book Out

Been a long time since I looked at this blog. Don’t know if anyone is following it – has ever followed it. Had no comments at all and few hits on the pages.

Anyway, if anyone does happen by, I might as well tell you that I have a new book out. It’s the sequel to “Trading For The Stars”, taking place shortly after it ends.

It’s book 2 of The Yrden Chronicles, and now for sale at Amazon.com.

"Trading for a Dream"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FPJ0IMK

Book 2 of The Yrden Chronicles takes over where "Trading For The Stars" left off.

Newly married and just getting used to her position in a space-based trading family, Colleen Yrden looks forward to her honeymoon on Liberty Station before she and husband, Clay, join their new ship and start their new life. Her plans don’t include getting on the wrong side of the station’s crime boss, but an inadvertent good deed puts her in his crosshairs. She should take Clay's advice to distance herself from the man she helped, but something about him resonates with her and, for better or for worse, she cannot.

Adrian Telford has the reputation of a man you don’t want to get annoyed at you. A hired killer who has killed once too often, Telford wants to leave the life, but his boss has other plans that don’t include letting Telford go. A kindness given by a woman who sees the man and not the reputation has Telford dreaming of a different life – but the woman already has a husband. He should walk away, but he owes; paying off the debt might cost his very life.

read the sample here