No one’s arguing that these discounts shouldn’t exist – only about the effect these discounts have on other retailers. If there’s a discount on an item at K-Mart that’s cheaper than the discount at Wal-Mart, it’s not like Wal-Mart will remove the item entirely. This is an entirely different business model. The problem is that [...]

Yeah, the moral here is that you need to set your book on Smashwords in the $4.00 range to ensure that any discount does not dip below the $2.99 threshold on Amazon to get the 70% royalty.

I’m not totally opposed to this – but people have been opposed to the idea of any money changing hands for reviews, as it has the whiff of this program. I’m not as much of a stickler. Reviewers should be paid something – everything can’t be free. The trouble wouldn’t be finding authors willing to pay [...]

Guessing not. Like other newspapers/magazines, the cost of getting reviewed for publishers is the cost of sending out a book. Advertising is another issue, but this is mixing together advertising and reviewing.

That’s true. But unless you’re a designer, you should be hiring someone. I’ve heard people say that the whole upload process is confusing, and I just didn’t see it.

I want to debunk the idea that LSI is hard to work with. It may be for certain books, but the way I did it was format my PDF via Lulu’s converter. My book designer designed the cover to LSI specs. But once I had the interior PDF in hand and the cover file, it [...]

Manhattan’s the heart of the city.

I’ve won a few awards – Hollywood Book Festival, DIY Book Festival, IPPY Award. They don’t do a whole lot for sales, but they’re good for promo materials – it’s easier to get higher-profile reviews if you say: This won that. Also might sell more copies of lower-priced ebooks on the Kindle and elsewhere. Finally, [...]

Yesterday I got a review that was three sentences long on a book blog. I don’t mind a bad review, but condensing 80,000 words and 5 years of work to 3 sentences is sort of offensive.

I don’t mind if people read quickly though. Shows they’re enjoying it.

Hmmn, that’s too bad, but thanks for checking back.

Real readers are buying Kindle books. Take a look at RJ Keller on this list, who’s selling thousands of books, and she writes non-pulp literary fiction, so it can be done:

http://rjkeller.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/sales-and-crap/

Nice counter-post at The New Republic (which has so many parallels to this one, I wonder if she read it – but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself). She says,

The real trouble with Amazon, it seems, is that nobody truly believes we were better off without it. This is where the often-made comparison of Amazon [...]

The Self-Publishing Piggy Bank of Sadness was an alternate title for this site. True story.

Fixed. I didn’t see it either.