Those who completed National Novel Writing Month last November – wrote at least 50,000 words in 30 days – received the offer of a free proof copy from CreateSpace, an Amazon company. We had 6 months to take advantage of it. I looked at it early this year and was overwhelmed with all the terms [...]

I’m excited to announce that the eBook version of Lifeliner is now listed on the Barnes & Noble website for the Nook. According to Mashable.com, Barnes & Noble “has gained 20% of the e-book market in just the last year.” On top of that, to answer the competition, they’ve reduced the prices of their Nook [...]

There’s been much talk about Amazon, Macmillan, and Apple’s iPad in the last couple of weeks. Amazon has been increasingly aggressive towards publishers. First they forced companies that support self-publishing and that use POD (print on demand) technology to give them more piece of the pie — at the expense of the author. Second, Amazon [...]

I spread my presence across the bookstore Net and then realised I was overextended. I signed up for Amazon Connect awhile ago. It’s similar to chapters.indigo.ca Community; in fact the Community is probably a take-off of Connect. I tried to stay current with both, but in the end, especially after all of Amazon’s shenanigans, I’ve [...]

You may remember I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the lack of sales information from iUniverse. Well, today the sales reporting software worked, and I just about choked on my hot chocolate. I called up iUniverse to see if I’d misread the figures, but nope, they were right. To backtrack a bit, so [...]

Amazon.com has recently added a popular feature to my book page — “Search Inside.” With “Search Inside” a curious customer can click on the image of Lifeliner‘s front cover and get a peek at actual sections of my book. For some books, this feature allows a person to see the entire inside of the book, [...]

Being involved in the wrap-up of my own lawsuit during the last couple of months, I haven’t kept up to date with how small publishers are dealing with the Amazon Ultimatum. The last I heard was that the American Society of Journalists and Authors, among other organizations, had joined the fight to prevent Amazon from [...]

I’m starting to feel like a critically acclaimed movie: lots of good words, not the commensurate number of sales. Still, the review of Lifeliner I just stumbled across was a real upper. When I searched for “jeejeebhoy” on Amazon.com, I did a double take when I saw next to the title of my book “4 [...]

I wrote earlier about Amazon attempting to force print-on-demand publishers like iUniverse and Lulu and other small-press publishers to use BookSurge to print all books sold through Amazon. Essentially, the retailer is also the printer and wants deep discounts from publishers for the privilege of printing through them. The discounts will lead to lower royalties [...]