sarah_alone_in_jungleIn my alerts messages I came across a two year old article Kathryn Lively wrote titled “Can Book Giveaways Hurt Sales?”
(http://www.articlesbase.com/publishing-articles/can-book-giveaways-hurt-sales-86384.html) how about giveaways can hurt sales. It was a fairly amusing, almost quaint read and here are a few excerpts:

“That said, incentives are usually offered to fill the chat rooms with readers. Authors may give away a prize to one lucky reader, like a small gift or a free book. The question of whether or not it is prudent to distribute complimentary books as prizes has long been argued among authors, particularly in the eBook industry….Some authors condone the practice on the premise that a book in the hands of a reader may encourage that reader to buy more books.”

This is the amusing part…

“On the other hand, such generosity may backfire, according to other authors who condemn the practice. When you consider the tightly knit readership of eBooks, particularly in the romance genre, authors may tend to see the same Internet nicknames populating chats. If word gets around enough that free books are the prizes, an author might soon discover that he or she is giving away her entire catalog to the same readers without seeing any profits. An author can feel frustrated with the practice, and wonder if such regular contest winners will ever buy his/her book. …Should an author feel trapped, however? The answer is an emphatic no.”

“There are ways to successfully offer giveaways without giving away everything. While gifts like soaps, teas, and other trinkets can add up over time (though they are tax-deductible, authors, make notes!), there is one giveaway trick that can help stimulate sales. The next time you participate in a chat, write a one to two-thousand word story that reads as a supplement to your novel. It could be a sequel, a prequel, or a side story with supporting characters. Have it formatted as in eBook in HTML or PDF and offer it as an exclusive prize to one winner. Give it a try, and watch your readership grow.”

Not a bad idea but let’s be honest authors are a dime a dozen and we are more than willing to work as scabs to garner a reasonable readers base. It’s either that or go unread.  The article was only two years old but seemed like it was from another era. I replied to her with the following comment:

“I don’t know but with so many new electronic formats and delivery systems being created new authors kind of take it for granted that a giveaway is necessary to build a reader base. Basically, it is marketing 101 for the Internet. Of course, the same electronic revolution has created a flood of words that tends to overwhelm the limited pool of readers. The old self-publishing model is giving way to innovative sites such as Podiobooks.com that allow authors to give their work away as recorded audio podcasts while other sites such as Wattpad, Stanza and Scribd allow authors to giveaway select ebook works, all in hope of building a faithful audience. How authors can monetize their efforts is going to be an interesting challenge that I find myself wrestling with. My own novel, Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot became the inaugural featured novel at Wattpad and thousands are busily reading the novel on their iPhones. But to be honest with you reading novels on their iPhones, I mean who would have thunk it? It’s a brave new world in publishing and a giveaway is the least of the author’s and publisher’s problems!”

Cheers,
Erik John Bertel, Author Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot
floresgirl.com

Kathy wasn’t amused with my observations nor with my obvious efforts at self-promotion and she promptly deleted my comment. Still the point is valid; if you are worried about the couple of bucks you are going to miss with a giveaway then you have no clue about marketing in today’s Web 2.0. That’s why most books sell just a few thousand copies and why most authors go unread and unnoticed. If you are a new author, get the audience first and then worry about monetizing your writings. The days of the big advance and the old publishing machine are in the distant past. I’m not saying today is better and sure you will have to work two jobs for a while but hey, welcome to the machine. Nowadays, the Web 2.0 eats dinosaurs like the publishing and newspaper industry for breakfast!

Cheers Erik John Bertel

Speaking of Web 2.0 try these sites for the free Flores Girl novel download:
WWW.A-FREE-EBOOK.COM
WWW.SCIENCE-FICTION.MOBI
WWW.iPhone-Novel.com
Technorati Profile

wattpadlogo

http://www.wattpad.com/125445-Flores-Girl-The-Children-God-Forgot-Part-1

Flores Girl Wattpad Press Release
Flores Girl:The Chil..

Sarah AloneSpeculative fiction is not fantasy fiction, as it rules out the use of anything as material which violates established scientific fact, laws of nature, call it what you will, i.e., it must [be] possible to the universe as we know it. – Robert A. Heinlein

A little while back I wrote:

One of the worst aspects of publishing work in a Web 2.0 world is the myriad tasks the author must undertake. Besides writing the novel the writer must undertake numerous sleazy marketing efforts. In the past that been relegated to the obligatory series of interviews and book signing, assuming that is if the author was lucky enough in his career or her to get to that point.

Today the challenges are different and far more varied. Most of the work still revolves around the writing, editing and marketing of the work. However the marketing piece of the puzzle is a bit of a quandary and requires the greatest flexibility on the part of the fledgling writer. Worse, it is also damn time consuming.

If you go the route of podcasting, which has its myriad appeals and challenges, it requires the author to do production work and possibly the biggest challenge of all: narrating the actual work. The web work can involve a site or minimally a blog for the author’s various fans to turn into. Besides words, structures these endeavors typically require some type of graphics, Search engine optimization and knowledge of key words; all daunting challenges for the uninitiated. If you have money you could have somebody else do it but you still must manage the ongoing mess.

The biggest marketing challenge could be the designation of your work into one of the existing genres. Why? That’s because the genre designation ultimately determines your readers and finally your choices among agents and publishers.

My problem was what the hell do you call Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot? Scif-Fi? Adventure? Romance?  It has all of those elements but what is best for marketing?  An adventure story sort of describes it but there were some science fiction elements as well to the story. After all the core of the story is about the survival of Homo floresiensis on a small tropical island and that is speculative at best. In actuality these small three-foot tall hominids died out 12,000 years ago or maybe as recently as 400 years ago based on some early historical accounts. In any case, nobody expects them to be found alive and well today, at least not with the way China is clear cutting the forests of Southeast Asia. To call it science fiction would really disappoint the hardcore science fiction fans; you know not enough hardware and overall fantasy elements to keep them enthralled to be quite honest with you. I mean if you can’t have sex with an alien then why bother calling it science fiction?

Then I came across the term speculative fiction and the Robert Heinlein definition. The definition seems appropriate for my book but its usage and acceptance as part of the vernacular is no where near as universally accepted as science fiction. As a measure of popularity I did a search fro speculative fiction and turned up only a couple of million hits in Google. Compare that with science fiction with nearly 140 million hits and you have yourself a huge disparity in overall acceptance. So which sandbox do you want to play in, the larger one where you won’t get noticed or the smaller one with a much smaller audience? As I found out perhaps the genre designation is a bit old school and my recent experience with the good folks at Wattpad has drastically changed my perception of the marektplace. I’ll tell you more tomorrow.

Sarah hears strange voices

Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot is now a Featured Work on Wattpad.com. Flores Girl is a prehistoric science fiction-adventure-speculative fiction, oh before I forget romance eBook that is available for free on Wattpad, the World’s Most Popular EBook Sharing Community. Wattpad delivers free eBook novels to your iPhone, BlackBerry, SmartPhones and other mobile devices. Join the thousands of readers that are following the adventures of Sarah and Richard as they unwittingly introduce a small tribe of prehistoric people living in isolation for a half million years to the ultimate modern predator: humanity.  And you can do so right from your iPhone, BlackBerry or other SmartPhone! Flores Girl:The Children God Forgot is now available as a free ebook novel on the iPhone!

Wattpad

http://www.wattpad.com/125445-Flores-Girl-The-Children-God-Forgot-Part-1

Or try these sites for the free novel download:

WWW.A-FREE-EBOOK.COM

WWW.SCIENCE-FICTION.MOBI

WWW.iPhone-Novel.com

Get Flores Girl at Wattpadd

2009-04-27 07:55:48 -

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wattpad’s Got Talent!

Wattpad Launches Featured Work Section In Its Redesigned Website

Toronto, Canada, April 27, 2009 — Wattpad, the world’s most popular ebook community, today announced that it is introducing a new “Featured Work” section in its redesigned website. Each month the “Featured Work” section will feature a writer whose work the Wattpad editorial team find interesting. In addition, Wattpad editorial team takes suggestions from members at takes suggestions from members at editor@wattpad.com and is always on the lookout for works of interest.

Writer Erik John Bertel’s new ebook “Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot” has been selected as Wattpad’s inaugural “Featured Work”. “Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot” is about two scientists who unwittingly introduce a small tribe of prehistoric people living in isolation for a million years to the ultimate modern predator: humanity. The novel is about their adventure, combining a clash of cultures, religious ardor with the oldest stories of all: the meaning of friendship and true love.

“Wattpad is an innovative platform that eliminates traditional entry barriers to publishing,” said Erik John Bertel. “The worse fate that can befall an author is to go unnoticed and to never find an appropriate audience for their work. Wattpad enables writers like me to bring my work directly to millions of readers in a click of a button. ”

More information about Wattpad is available online at www.wattpad.com.

About Wattpad

Founded in 2006, Wattpad’s mission is to revolutionize the way people publish and read written works. The material on Wattpad is created by the community of users. Anyone can upload whatever they want to read – a romantic story, a fan fiction, poetry, an essay, a joke, a novel or their own work – and share with the community. All the content can be easily accessed on Wattpad’s website (www.wattpad.com), mobile site (m.wattpad.com) or through the Wattpad application on virtually all feature phones, such as Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Sharp, Sanyo, Panasonic, as well as smartphones such as Symbian, Blackberry and Apple iPhone / iPod Touch.

Wattpad has experienced explosive growth since its inception. Wattpad is now the world’s most popular destination to publish, read and share books. Wattpad has delivered billions of pages from its library of over 100,000 ebooks created by the community. With over 3 million downloads, Wattpad is the most popular mobile ebook application of all time.

For more information, please visit www.wattpad.com.
###

Press Contact
www.wattpad.com
press@wattpad.com

Wattpad

http://www.wattpad.com/125445-Flores-Girl-The-Children-God-Forgot-Part-1

In USA Today:

http://content.usatoday.com/topics/article/Places,+Geography/Towns,+Cities,+Counties/Toronto/0dUJeQLcW8bcs/1

Flores Girl:The Children God Forgot is now available as a free ebook novel on the iPhone

Sarah Alone

Rave reviews from the readers about Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot, which is now a Featured eBook at Wattpad!

From Rachelle: “I just read your Flores Girl eBook and I really loved the story very much. I just want to ask when you will release its sequel?”

From Dustin: “I really enjoyed reading your book and cant wait till the sequel is finished.”

From Freelancer79:  The Flores Girl is a very well written book that captures the imagination of its reader with current events and plausible outcomes. I have already recommended this book to all my family and friends. You will find it hard to put this one down or wait for the sequel!!!

From Leanne: I absolutely loved your novel and finished in a day and am now stuck with an emptiness within myself as I wonder when the sequel will be out?

From Rich: Very gripping adventure with Sarah and Richard on the tropical island. I am very much looking forward to reading the sequel when it comes out!

From Nidhi:  An amazing Book , Real Addictive & Wonderfully written!!   Absolute Masterpiece !!! Waiting anxiously for the sequel.. Keep the good work going!! Kudos..

From Arkie51: Really great free Ebook, can’t wait for the sequel!

Wattpad works on most phones from Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Apple, LG, BlackBerry, HTC, O2, Sagem, Alcatel, Sharp, Toshiba, BenQ-Siemens, Panasonic, Pantech, VK Mobile and others. Over 1,000 phone models supported.


Wattpad

http://www.wattpad.com/125445-Flores-Girl-The-Children-God-Forgot-Part-1

Or try these sites for the free ebook download:

Check out: www.IPHONE-NOVEL.COM

Sarah hears strange voices

Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot is now a Featured Work on Wattpad.com. Flores Girl is a prehistoric adventure novel that is available for free on Wattpad, the World’s Most Popular EBook Sharing Community. Wattpad delivers free eBook novels to your iPhone, BlackBerry, SmartPhones and other mobile devices. Join the thousands of readers that are following the adventures of Sarah and Richard as they unwittingly introduce a small tribe of prehistoric people living in isolation for a half million years to the ultimate modern predator: humanity.

Wattpad

http://www.wattpad.com/125445-Flores-Girl-The-Children-God-Forgot-Part-1

Or try these sites for the free novel download:

WWW.A-FREE-EBOOK.COM

WWW.SCIENCE-FICTION.MOBI

This is actually pretty exciting news at least for fans of novels. Since adding Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot Part 1 to Wattpad I have had close to 600 downloads with 10 recommendations.  It’s number 2 on what is hot at Wattpad so this great news. Now its time to add Part2 and I promise to make the entire novel available. For the uninitiated and those not that enamored of their Smart Phone, Wattpad is a site that installs a free application on your iPhone and BlackBerry allowing you to download and read free novels.  I tried it myself and while this is not my preferred format for reading a book, afterall I’m old school so I’m still a fan of dead trees,  if you commute or are waiting forever at a doctor’s office this is a great diversion. Highly recommended to have one book saved on your smartphone just in case you face a dreaded hour of boredom and Flores Girl is just the novel to engage you.  I looked at some of the other offerings and the offering du jour  appears to be more vampire stories, a sad state of affairs but hey, you know what they say about imitation.  Jeez, they suck blood and are non-human, get over it people!

Anyway take a look and try Flores Girl on Wattpad.  For fans of my rants well I’ll think of something in a little while.  Right, now it’s Obama spending our money and the Republicans attacking him while in turn offering no real alternative plans to spending trillions.  Sad state of affairs and millions of Amercians out of work.

Tagged with:
 

I just made the Flores Girl:The Children God Forgot science fiction novel  available for free to read on your iPhone and BlackBerry.  On your smart phone just sign up at Wattpad (www.wattpad.com) to install the free app and add Wattcode 125445! There have been over 2 million downloads of Wattpad to date.

Let me know how the reading experience is for the iPhone and I am going to check it out on my own Blackberry. I tried to format it properly but you just never know. For example, I notice the paragraph breaks aren’t working.   For a long time I couldn’t imagine reading an entire novel on a mobile phone but if you got time to kill, such as a long tedious commute, it can be a real life saver.  Just don’t read it while driving!

For those with a Kindle my first novel in the Trilogy, Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot, is now available on Amazon at a very reasonable price: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UE6MDY

I would give it away for free for the Kindle but Amazon is funny about free giveaways!

Update:  A week later I have had over a thousand downloads!  Flores Girl is a big hit and Number 2 at Wattpad! Thanks!

WWW.iPhone-Novel.com

Tagged with:
 

Great News! The Flores Girl novel is available as a Free e-Book down loadable right from www.floresgirl.com. Just click here! You heard right, free and it is available in a number of popular e-Book formats such Adobe PDF, Mobi and Microsoft Reader. Amazon’s Kindle will be next and, of course, the free podcast is always available at podiobooks.com.

What? Has to be a gimmick, right? Perhaps the last chapter is missing, right? No gimmicks, I’m just trying to build an audience for the Flores Girl sequels. After 55,000 downloads of the podcast I figured it was time to up the ante. So I figure if you like the first novel a lot there is a good chance you may buy the sequels in the future, that’s all. So please download and enjoy guilt free or listen to the free podcast.

Cheers,

Erik John Bertel

The Zune 2K9 Bug Hits Home

Sometimes you deserve what you get. I got duped into buying a 30GB Microsoft Zune over a year ago. Why? Well, it was only $99 at Amazon and I was traveling more. Okay, it came in the ugliest shade of brown I have ever seen but, hey did  I say it only cost $99  for 30 gigabytes so how could I go wrong? I threw a skin on it and I was good to go.  I hate travel, I hate the movies on a plane and I hate engine noise. I figure a Zune combined with noise cancellation headphones would do the trick while flying. I don’t have a lot of bucks so I coupled the Zune with a pair of Audio-Technica noise cancellation headphones, remember I can’t afford the Bose cans and the pair has been great especially for red-eyes. That is until today.

I heard the Zune doom news at work and I immediately booted the trusty old Zune when I got home.  I was hoping this was just another online hoax but the sucker just froze at the splash screen. No combination of hitting buttons, prayers or curses would unfreeze it. I ran the battery down and now we will wait to see what happens. Some of the online fixes are downright nasty such as the ones calling for the removal of the battery.  Not for the squeamish and probably planted by Apple fanatics. My best guess is that the new 3.0 version of the Zune software isn’t playing well with the older Zune hardware and it makes you wonder what shoddy company in India does the QA for Microsoft?

Online the Mac fans boys are wetting their panties with glee over the latest Microsoft stumble and, frankly, I can’t blame them.  First, the Vista fiasco followed by those inscrutable Seinfeld commercials and now this Zune mess.  Let’s face it, Vista is a bloated mess.  It runs fine but frankly I find it  a bit like bringing a pretty but fat girl to a party. Doesn’t matter how smart or fun she is because  all everybody is thinking is “Wow, imagine if she lost some weight!” As for Macs, well I can’t see paying a 50% premium for Intel hardware so that I can feel smug and reassured.  iPods are okay, we have several for the kids but again they are way over priced.  That said, on the PC front I am slowing breaking the Microsoft habit.  I am using Mozilla Firefox with greater frequency and it has become my preferred browser.  Why?  Well, out of habit I opened Explorer to get into Word Press but I had problems writing this blog with it.  I guess the new Word Press dashboard is giving Explorer fits but Explorer has always marched to its own drummer.

However, my biggest heresy is my recent install of Ubuntu.  Ubuntu is a very hot flavor of Linux and originally came with some unique artsy photos on its desktop. By artsy I mean nudes by the way.  I had an old Dell Pentium 4 with USB 1.0 ports that was useless for Windows and I figured what the hell give it a shot since it ran okay.  I once ran Red Hat a few years ago but I found little use for it. I had an initial hiccup on the initial Ubuntu install; my fault frankly but since then I am in love with it.  It’s slick, much easier to use, the drivers worked well with the old hardware and is far less prone to hacker attack.  Plus, it runs fast on this old machine with less than a gig of memory and there is some great free software for Ubuntu including games.  We are talking geek heaven and it is far cooler than a Mac.  Hell, there’s only a few million of us using it, now that’s exclusivity baby! By the way the open source community has a sense of humor, I mean try hitting the windows minimize keystrokes and see  what I mean! I can’t find the nudes anywhere by the way.

Anyway back to the discharging Zune. Oh crappola, recharging the Zune after draining the battery just brings you back to the same frozen screen! Damn, I survive Y2K only to get bitten by this 2K9 bug. I guess I’ll have more time tomorrow to complete my free “Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot” e-book. In fact, that’s what the Ubuntu box is for; to deliver the Flores Girl e-books online.  It will first come out in PDF format and then I’ll bring out the remaining e-book flavors including Amazon Kindle.  Check out www.floregirl.com for the free e-book this weekend if you are into reading. I do mean free, no gimmicks and the complete novel by the way!

Oh, Happy New Year to all!  It has to get better in 2009, right?  My latest blog has the fix from Microsoft.

Tagged with:
 

It’s funny how life comes full circle to anybody who is paying attention. I started out writing this blog hoping to discuss some of the issues writers face trying in their efforts to get published. Frankly, writing can be a lonely and sometimes unrewarding task and book publishers don’t make the task any easier. A process that is inherently tied to communication can cause the individual to drown in their isolation and consequently I felt talking about such a task could at least ameliorate some of the pain. As I worked with my Flores Girl novel I found that the subject matter of my book was getting some unwarranted attention from a number of cranky creationists. Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot is a cautionary tale about the discovery of a prehistoric dwarf tribe by a pair of scientists and, of course, is a complete work of fiction. Well, that wasn’t good enough for some of my creationist detractors because the title contained the word “god” and made some implicit assumptions about mankind’s evolution and that was enough to illicit some seriously cranky email. And you know how the fundamentalists are all about the written word!

So, seeking revenge and some personal amusement, I decided to go off on that craptacular movie called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” from Ben Stein. After a while, I became less amused with the blog and tired of the pointless arguments with people who read exactly two books in their lives: the bible and the instruction manual to their trailer home. So after failing to find an Expelled bootleg, I boldly pointed out that nobody cared about ID and creationism since there was a presidential election going on and that a crappy Bush-inspired war economy had everybody more worried about foreclosure. Furthermore, the creationist creeps were going to have a tough time choosing between Obama or McCain since neither one was particularly accommodating to their simplistic world bible views.

Boy, was I wrong on that prognostication! Nostradamus I am not! No sooner did I make that stupid forecast McCain goes out and adds some Alaskan Creationist- Secessionist- Pro-Life-Pro-Gun-MILF to his ticket as his VP, all after an incredibly long vetting process that must have transpired during the duration of a single bowel movement. And I should add that I am a McCain supporter!

So what of Sarah Palin and her religious beliefs? Well, five to six years ago she was a member of a Pentecostal church, the Assembly of God to be exact. Now these rocket scientists believe in a literal bible, talking in tongues, faith healing and, how can we forget, the ever popular end-of-times. We have had so many end of times I don’t were to begin. This type of inspired lunacy leads to such clear thinking as “it’s God’s will that is being done in Iraq.” Funny, I thought that was the work of a mediocre son looking to clear his daddy’s historical record but, hey, what the hell do I know? I mean we went in there to separate those heathens from the WMD’s right? Eh, okay the weapons weren’t there but we did bring freedom to the Iraqis, right? You know freedom from boredom as the local militia executes the men in your family but hey that’s God’s plan and you can’t argue about the big picture, right?

The good news is that God’s plans are not just relegated to simple matters of war. No way! Did you know that a new pipe line is a task from God? Me, I was thinking Exxon-Mobil but I guess I think way too small. Really, Palin said this. God’s will is to be done developing our natural resources, never mind all we are doing is feeding a nasty oil habit and that the sooner we can move to something alternative the sooner we can tell the idiots in the Middle East what they can do with their oil.  Ask Sarah about Creationism and she’ll reply sure Creationism should be taught in school!  We don’t have a lick of proof that it can’t stand up to rigorous scientific review but hell proof didn’t stop us from invading Iraq.

That said, Sarah Palin is not stupid. Unlike Obama, she had the good sense to realize that once she became a mainstream Republican she had to leave behind the small town church that inspired a thousand tongues. In fact, she does not does not consider herself Pentecostal anymore but I do wonder if she feels that God can still be accessed? And what about the view that Alaska is the preferred shelter for Christians in the end-of-times? There has been some talk that she is also anti-Israel but really has she ever met a Jew? Ben Stein for example? I mean really, has she?

All I know is the Expelled crowd is really charged up again and we have McCain to thank for this madness. Soon we’ll get all sorts of new home school and ID initiatives coursing through the mediocre halls of Congress. I’m thinking of voting for Obama now just for spite but damn I don’t want my taxes to go up again! What’s a thinking evolutionist to do? And where is Hillary in all this mess? Can’t she remind women not to cast their vote based on their chromosomes but to vote instead on the issues? After all, who do they think they are? Men? Someday, perhaps after the election, I hope to get back to writing about writing rather than about politics and fundamentalists. And to think, if they had just left me alone this all could have been avoided!

More on Hillary: No Political Catifght with Palin

More on Palin “Governor Palin You’re No Hillary Clinton!”

More on Palin with this story,“Apparently-Bristol-Palin-is-no-Chelsea-Clinton-Either”