Pretzel Logic

TJPontz — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:04:33 +0000

The good news about taking a long time to complete a project like this is that it has time to mature, grow, and echo around in my head. The echoes of what I write stay with me, and I keep scribbling new stuff down. Hopefully I don’t get off into too many tangents when I do that.

The bad news is that while doing so, I’ve diverged at several key philosophical points with myself. I’m trying to resolve these quickly, while finalizing both books for submission. I’m glad I caught the problems, because it helps eliminate confusion and revisions down the road. I also wanted to get this out the door before the end of the year.

Illness, a death in the family, the holidays, and feeling a little overworked on the day job don’t help any. I think I’m back in the groove now, so hang on – more is on the way.

Why my POD outlet has a new, lower price

TJPontz — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:23:36 +0000

Or, why lulu.com is not really playing a good game.

My book is just under 80 pages. I've been trying to generate some interest for it on lulu.com (print on demand), as the main point of entry for the paperback version. I had originally wanted to get set up on lulu.com and then bridge into amazon.com, to see how far that mechanism would take me.

Not very far. The price point I had to put on the book in order to see the first dollar of revenue per sale via Amazon is nearly $12. That's a bit (way!) too much for an 80 page book, even if the pages are trimmed in sable and were blessed by the Pope. And that's before shipping charges, which are also absurdly high on lulu.com.

So, I thought to myself, Let's just get things rolling and see how it goes, mkay? We're off to the races now, eh?

But not so fast. I have purchased my own ISBN. In lulu-land, this means that I am not eligible to participate in their affiliate program with Amazon. Or at least that's what the help files are telling me – and they are fairly out of sync with the online application in general anyway. But I was too upset to really bother with checking any further.

To get rid of my template that allows the book to be marketed via Amazon, I had to delete the entire entry, and republish the book. This is nuts. I mean, it's wonderful. I enjoy wasting a half hour of my time uploading the files again and going through the wizard. But. Huzzah! I now have a far better price at $7.99, and I hope some of the curious who have visited will come back for the new lower price.

Next, I decided to jump in on the Google book marketing plan. This works by uploading you book to Google (do no Evil, you know) and then when a search string matches anything in the book, one of the links provided goes to your book's home page.

Nifty! Except now Google is telling me that they can't quite decide if I own the copyright or not. It's another kind of nuts.

So now I've configured a blog to market my book (jeffbible21.com) on WordPress (sorry, Typepad) and a twitter account to match. I can't configure the Twitter account until they get their denial of service attack figured out though, so I'm stuck again.

It's the full moon, isn't it. (checks) Yes, why yes it is! Lovely. I'll just chill a couple of days and try again.

Meanwhile if you want to follow my progress pushing my book on Twitter, look for @jeffbible21. I doubt it it will be a very chatty account, but I will be pushing sample bits out as I can. It's the unconfigured page that has no tweets yet. You can't miss it. I'll be there – promise!

Meanwhile, I have the PDF download set at $1 on Scribd (See the button to the left) and most other eBooks at $1 on Smashwords (also next to the button).

Barbarians in the age of technology

TJPontz — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:49:19 +0000

I am having some severe technical issues, and I am spending way too much time in the inner gutty-works of my computer. This post only proves that I have older, slower resources still kicking around. And frankly, the aggravation just isn't worth while.

With a little luck I will be back online soon.

outside the lines » Uncategorized

Pretzel Logic

Why my POD outlet has a new, lower price

Barbarians in the age of technology