FIVE DAY FREE KINDLE - America's Galactic Foreign Legion

All of the AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION series is now on the Kindle Select program, available for free borrowing by Kindle Prime members. In addition, we are offering for those of you who have not sampled this series yet, a continuous-run Five-Day FREE Kindle promotion schedule for the remaining books in the AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION series that have not already been offered free under this program. The schedule is as follows...

Monday, Feb. 20 - Friday, Feb. 24...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 3: SILENT INVASION
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

The saga of compulsive gambler turned legionnaire continues as Joey Czerinski deals with the clever machinations of the Arthropodan Empire trying to take control of planet New Colorado. It's not just a case of a spider that sits down beside her - Little Miss Muffet and the Galactic Foregin Legion have to deal with spiders, spiders everywhere, and the wolves are literally at the door. But with the usual politically-incorrect aplomb, Czerinski and his Legion pals struggle through more serendipitous surprises in this third installment of the miles-of-smiles military space opera.

Saturday, Feb. 25 - Wednesday, Feb. 29...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 4: DEMILITARIZED ZONE
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

The New Gobi Desert on planet New Colorado is hot-hot-hot, and when Major Joey Czerinski and his platoon are ordered there to check on Arthropodan spider military activity, Czerinski finds it hard to believe the spiders are just building a swimming pool. The spider commander is a royal pain in the rear, and Czerinski's cowboy diplomacy doesn't help the situation. Tit-for-tat one-upmanship escalates the conflict, making the DMZ explosive. A juvie militia leader rises from the dust to complicate things, and with Walmart, McDonald's, and chupacabra thrown into the mix, the absurdity never stops. Czerinski handles it all with his usual politically-incorrect aplomb in this fourth installment of the giggles-and-belly-laughs military space opera.

Thursday, March 1 - Monday, March 5...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 5: INSURGENCY
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

If dreams really do come true, then habitual-gambling legionnaire Joey R. Czerinski is stuck in a friggin' nightmare as his tour of duty in planet New Colorado's New Gobi Desert drags on. The alien Arthropodan Empire continues secretly supporting spider terrorists on New Colorado, and to fight back, the Legion also supplies the human rebel faction with armaments. But things get out of hand as independence from all rulers - Galactic Federation or Arthropodan Empire - starts looking better and better to a combined insurgency made up of both spider and human rebels. Czerinski finds himself teaming with unusal allies to try and keep things under control as the politically-incorrect humor explodes in this fifth installment of the military space opera.

Tuesday, March 6 - Saturday, March 10...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 6: CULTURE WAR
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

The conflict escalates as the Arthropodan Emperor declares war on American culture and orders all American merchandise and cultural influences banned north of the DMZ. Things get out of hand, as usual, when Colonel Joey R. Czerinski and his miscreant band of legionnaires fumble the ball. Czerinski overracts and alienates those closest to him, and through it all, the laughs keep coming.

Sunday, March 11 - Thursday, March 15...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 7: ENEMIES
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

Even the paranoid have enemies - as Colonel Joey R. Czerinski well knows, being paranoid and having many enemies. Some of those enemies he actually calls friends. Snipers on rooftops and scorpions from space - the source doesn't matter, they're still enemies that have to be dealt with. And Czerinski deals with it all in his usual way - by cheating and lying and alienating everyone around him - as the laughs continue.

Friday, March 16 - Tuesday, March 20...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 8: ALLIES
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

A treaty makes the humans and spiders allies, but before anyone can enjoy peace, the scorpions reappear with a vengeance. Col. Czerinski and his miscreant band of legionnaires help the spiders battle the scorpions. The Legion’s serendipitous screw-up convinces the scorpions to surrender. A new alien species makes an appearance, and a feared nemesis returns, putting everyone on alert as the laughs continue.

Wednesday, March 21 - Sunday, March 25...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 9: SCORPIONS
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

The Scorpion Queen takes a special diplomatic tour of planet New Colorado, with a secret recipe - er, plan - in mind for the surviving Mantidae. All she has to do is find them. Amid a buffalo drive, Czerinski falls victim to a mysterious illness with a nasty green rash that threatens his life. The Mantid matriarch makes a final bid for vengeance against the scorpions for decimating her race. And, in a strange turn of events, Czerinski gets a new CO as the laughs and absurdity continue in this ninth installment of the seriously screwy science fiction space saga.

Monday, March 26 - Friday, March 30...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 10: PEACEKEEPERS
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

With Colonel Manny Lopez now in charge, Captain Joey R. Czerinski and his ragtag band of legionnaires are sporting blue peacekeeper armbands and helmets to head off hostilities between the scorpions and the spiders on planet New Colorado. But with nukes and an old foe making a return appearance, America's Galactic Foreign Legion has a full plate - as long as Taco Bell and Pizza Hut keep their doors open, and Czerinski handles it all with his usual paranoid aplomb. The absurdity continues in the tenth installment of the seriously screwy science fiction space saga.

Saturday, March 31 - Wednesday, April 4...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 11: CEMETERY CITY
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

Colonel Lopez returns to planet New Colorado with an agenda - mining rare metals used in communications and weapons technology on which the USGF is so dependent. The only problem is, the ore vein is located across the border in Arthropodan territory. But Lopez has a plan to get around that little technicality, and it involves Major Joey R. Czerinski's chain of cemeteries. The spider commander takes offense at the Legion's claim-jumping, and Lopez gets caught in the middle of the fracas as the absurdity continues in the eleventh installment of the seriously screwy science fiction space saga. 

Thursday, April 5 - Monday, April 9...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 12: THE ARK
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

General Lopez returns once again to planet New Colorado with another top-secret mission for Colonel Joey R. Czerinki and his trusty (or not so trusty) legionnaires. A huge spaceship has been detected deep underground, right under the desert oasis of croc-infested Caldera Lake. Czerinski's task is to reach the ship and strip its technology before the Arthropodan Empire finds out what's going on. But as soon as the Legion arrives and starts digging around, the spiders come right behind to start their own tunneling. It's a race against absurdity and a battle of witlessness as the two teams squabble - while progress (Walmart, a couple casinos, Starbucks, and Taco Bell) pop up around them. Tourists, hearing of an ancient ark discovered deep beneath the sand, flock to Caldera Lake by the busloads, hoping to see this new wonder in the twelfth installment of the seriously silly science fiction space saga. Bonus story VAMPIRE IN THE OUTFIELD included at the end - first time in print!

Tuesday, April 10 - Saturday, April 14...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 13: SALESMAN FROM MARS
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

The zany humor continues with a new star in this thirteenth installment of the screwy military space saga. Born salesman Donald Crisp is down on his luck and short of money. When Crisp accepts a loan from the USGF recruitment ATM, he ends up - of course - enlisted in the United States Galactic Federation Foreign Legion. Oranges for scorpions, semi-sentient penguins, biting Blue Lizards, ghosts from the past, and cheating at cards make life interesting as Crisp chills at the South Pole, then makes a splash in Caldera Lake - all the while, watching out for the Grim Reaper!

Sunday, April 15 - Thursday, April 19...

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 14: EMBASSY WAR
Walter Knight
Humorous Military Science Fiction

The Butcher of New Colorado returns to the spotlight, assigned to protect the lavish new USGF Embassy while acting as a spy for General Lopez and the CIA on the spiders' home world of Arthropoda. Amid riots and sports betting on exhibition basketball games, Czerinski finds trouble has followed him across the galaxy. An old foe makes a surprise visit and wrecks his office. A war ensues over turkey dinner, leaving the scorpion embassy in shambles. Following that debacle, Czerinski and crew get a plum assignment back on New Colorado, guarding a volcano in desert-isle Quenaudenville as he tries to figure out what no-good mischief the spiders are up to now. And just when things couldn't be worse, his terrorist ex-girlfriend shows up with their delinquent son, Joey Jr. This time the loony legionnaires go off the reservation with a game-changing detour!

BOOK REVIEW CORNER – Starfire Angels Book 1

STARFIRE ANGELS (DARK ANGEL CHRONICLES BOOK 1)
Melanie Nilles, Prairie Star Publishing
Young Adult Paranormal Romance
Free Kindle edition
Reviewed by Willa Kaye Danes, author at Penumbra Publishing

I always begin a new book with great hope and expectation. The premise of this story – that angels are here on Earth, but they’re aliens, complete with impressive wings – is an interesting one that I hoped would be done well. However, the author delved into it with a heaping helping of teen angst – symptomatic of many young-adult novels that sacrifice story for the constant banter over ‘he loves me, he loves me not.’ That’s not to say the romantic aspects of the story weren’t engaging, because they were. But there were other issues with the story that caused me not to enjoy it nearly as much as I’d hoped.

The story opens with seventeen-year-old Raea Dahlrich, a senior in small-town North Dakota, trying to fit in with her friends and be ‘normal,’ despite the constant teasing she gets from bullying schoolmates who make fun of the bizarre turquoise gem-like shards imbedded in her hands. Amazingly (and I use this adverb to express my utter astonishment at how this whole aspect of the story is presented and accepted by all the characters without question), Raea has never had this disfigurement checked into by a doctor. In fact she has never seen the inside of a doctor’s office her whole life. Which begs the question ... how did she get the necessary inoculations to be admitted to public school?

Anyway, her aunt and uncle have raised her since her mother and stepdad mysteriously died in a tornado. Her geeky friend Josh is obsessed with reports of a ‘Dark Angel’ who, over the last several months, has been rescuing people in the area. Now a nosey reporter is on the story – just when Raea wakes up from a bizarre dream about her late mother flying – and finds that she herself has sprouted a huge set of wings during the night. Elis, the foreign-refugee(?) student that lives with the old lady next door creeps her out – until she realizes he’s really, really foreign and can sprout wings like hers. And her aunt is in on this secret the whole time, but (again, amazingly) never bothered to tell her any of this. Without giving away the whole story, suffice it to say there is a whole lot of stuff going on in this story. There’s an offworld war being waged to protect/steal the crystal shards that have a telepathic effect on the ‘keepers’ of the crystals. Raea must learn to use her powers as a keeper of the crystal to prevent the bad guys from stealing it.

One beef I had with the story was the peculiar formatting or sometimes lack thereof, that ran paragraphs together and didn’t differentiate between internal thoughts and regular narrative, making it extremely hard to follow – especially when Raea’s stream-of-consciousness arguments with herself over which boy she likes seemed a bit psychotic. Especially hard to reconcile was the peculiar way the author decided to denote conversations in the alien language of the Inari (winged people). Also confusing was why the Inari would have any conceivable reason to be able to retract their wings at will. Presumably that ability would have been an evolutionary development arising from some survival need. But on their home world, everyone has wings, so ... I am stumped for an answer. I can only assume that this ability arose by design because the author needed to invent a way for the main character and other Inari hiding out on Earth to ‘blend’ with the human population.

But these complaints are all minor when compared to the one detracting issue near the end that I found really disappointing. It stretched the believability factor to the breaking point and totally ruined the story for me.

WARNING – POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT

Bad things happen to people all the time in real life. And sometimes it’s necessary for an author to have bad things happen to characters, even main characters in a story, in order to have the characters deal with those issues. Sexual abuse is one of the issues I feel does not belong in a young adult novel unless that issue is a main component of the overall story with a necessity for it to be included in the story. To add a rape – or even the question of it – into a story as a device to provide an anger quotient high enough to prod another character into enacting violence against the perpetrator when the death of one’s parents wasn’t enough to enrage him ... well, what can I say? It was really hard to swallow. There was no ‘on-scene’ violence against the victim, but there was a lot of angsting about ‘did he or didn’t he.’ And that’s where the author totally lost me.

Okay, come on now. Really? A seventeen-year-old girl who presumably hasn’t ever had sex before, and is uneasy even holding hands with a boy, is sexually violated while unconscious and of course doesn’t remember any of the atrocity. But later on, when she regains consciousness, she has no idea anything has been done to her. Like ... immaculate consexion? Rape with no sexual side-effects is pretty unbelievable, especially when the victim was a virgin. Granted, she’s not exactly human. But she is close enough to pass as human, and her mother married a human. So it would be safe to assume that anatomically she is similar to human – at least as far as sexual activity is concerned. And yet she has no idea whether anything untoward happened. So, not only does she wonder if the boy she likes actually likes her, she wonders if the boy she used to like actually violated her. That just boggles the mind. My only assumption was that her rapist wasn’t exactly ‘up to the task.’

All snide kidding aside, this kind of treatment of a serious issue sends an unrealistic and confusing and inappropriate message to teen readers – that sex has no other side-effect but guilt and shame. What about the physical evidence? What happened to it? Sure, this is fiction, but since when is that an excuse to just ignore reality and pretend that readers won’t notice?

Adding this kind of cringing emotional issue to the end of a story that, up until that point, had no hint of sexual attraction beyond ‘oh, he’s so cute,’ just totally unbalanced the story and ruined it. All for the sake of giving someone the final justification for killing the bad guy. If the author had thought about it, I bet she could have come up with some other scenario that worked much better than pulling out the ol’ rape card. I was so disappointed in this story that, despite its okay beginning and some suspenseful moments and an enjoyable budding relationship, I gave it a ‘2’ for effort. It would have gotten a ‘3’ except for the last part that totally ruined it for me. Seriously, I would not recommend this book to anyone and won’t be reading the rest of the series. Read it if you want to waste your time and end up feeling uncomfortable and a bit angry afterward.

BOOK REVIEW CORNER – The Hunger Games

THE HUNGER GAMES

Suzanne Collins

Young Adult Futuristic Dystopian

Paperback version reviewed

Review by Willa Kaye Danes, author at Penumbra Publishing

I had heard many wonderful things about this book, but avoided for a long time reading it because of the subject matter, thinking that it certainly wouldn’t end well. When I finally did get the opportunity to read THE HUNGER GAMES, after having read many short and rather ho-hum, even disappointing novels billed as young-adult, I found it difficult to believe THE HUNGER GAMES is a young-adult novel. It certainly doesn’t fit in the category of ‘ho-hum,’ and it doesn’t rely on paranormal or supernatural bells and whistles as a crutch to build character and suspense. Told in first-person present tense through the female protagonist Katniss Everdeen, THE HUNGER GAMES made an immediate and lasting impression. Upon reading the first couple pages, I devoured this book (pun intended). And my eagerness to finish it in no way was diminished by the knowledge that it would have to end, because the ending held up to my best expectations, even though it certainly paved the way for the sequel.

In case you haven’t read the more than 4,000 customer reviews on Amazon (the majority of them glowing), I will briefly summarize the plot. However much I wish it to be true, this review can in no way give proper praise to this book.

In the not-too-distant future, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen lives with her mother and twelve-year-old sister Prim in District 12, what was once part of Appalachia in former United States of America, but is now one of the cordoned-off and policed areas of Panem, carved out after a quashed rebellion. In this future, people in outlying districts don’t fare too well. Food is rationed and scarce for the outlying districts, and only the relatively well-to-do can afford heat and food enough to ward off Mr. Death. People are afraid to speak their mind for fear of being overheard by those evil bastards in Capital City.

In Capital City, the streets might as well be paved with gold when compared to the living arrangements of Kat and her family and most others in the outer districts. But after her father dies in a coal mining accident, Kat carries on the illegal task of ‘poaching’ – hunting in the unfenced forest outside the district to bring game home for trade and to feed her family. She and her hunting partner, an eighteen-year-old boy named Gale, have forged an alliance that benefits almost everyone in the district with extra food, and profitable trading eases the rules that would otherwise be imposed by the resident Peacekeepers.

Once a year, Capital City ‘reminds’ the other districts of their transgression of failed rebellion with the hugely promoted fanfare of The Hunger Games. Each district is required to furnish one girl and one boy between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the survival game, which is to the death, with only one winner. That victory ensures the winner of an easy life and benefits of more food and other extras for the winner’s district. Kat has put in extra entries for herself in the lottery in exchange for extra portions of food and heating fuel for her family throughout the year. She waits tensely to see whose name is chosen for this year’s games. When her sister’s name is called, she immediately volunteers to go in her place.

Words fail me in trying to describe how absolutely perfect this story is. It is not simply the story itself, but the unique blend of plot, character development, and beautiful economy of words that all worked wonderfully together to make this an entirely believable and absorbing read. Many an author gets blinded by the light of a well-turned phrase, but Ms. Collins stays true to her writing task in that the writing skill remains invisible so the reading pleasure can be fully realized.

It has been, as I stated before, a very long time since I have read a young-adult novel-length story that was so emotionally moving without being over-dramatic or maudlin. Kat is the perfect heroine – tough and emotionally distant, yet in her own way caring and respectful of life. The way her attitudes and beliefs are pitted against the very fabric of the opulently excessive society that created the situation certain to cause her death is a stroke of writing genius. I am eager to see it repeated in the next installment of this trilogy, and can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of this series. Also I will be standing in line to see the movie version of this story and compare it to the graceful success of this book.

This is the kind of story that any author would be grateful and proud to have written, and it is an excellent example of superb writing. I have no idea how much careful and judicious editing was involved to create the final product, but for any author hoping to write well, no matter what the genre, I offer this book as a learning experience and enthusiastically recommend it to all readers. This is how it’s done!

Flawed Concepts in Fiction - IN TIME

“This couldn’t possibly happen!”

Have you ever watched a movie or read a book, and the whole time you were viewing/reading, you kept telling yourself, “Oh, come on! How could that possibly happen?” A lot of ‘concept’ stories, especially science fiction or dystopian, are guilty of engendering exactly this reaction with an audience. I’m not talking about fantasy or supernatural effects, with possession by demons or ghosts walking through walls or vampires flying through the air without wings. I’m talking about the believability of the basic concept of the storyline. Many ‘concept’ stories get so hung up on demonstrating the extremes of societal flaws, they end up being flawed to the point that they are effective only as ‘think’ pieces. I happened to watch the movie In Time, starring Justin Timberlake, and that was exactly my reaction. “This couldn’t possibly happen.”

The movie itself was done well. The acting was pretty good. The script was certainly okay. The movie had enough action and suspense to keep viewers entertained. The futuristic dystopian society was laid out just fine. But one specific detail on which the entire storyline was predicated made me keep asking “Why would anyone agree to that? How could this situation have come about, and how could it continue?”

Let me explain enough about the movie to demonstrate without spoiling it for anyone who might want to watch it and hasn’t yet. In the near(?) future, it’s not “Your money or your life,” it’s “You’re money IS your life.” Literally. People live in different districts, based on their ‘wealth.’ No problem here. That’s the way things are now. The very wealthy live to excess in gated communities and have the cops in their back pocket. People from the ghettos are not welcome, and are sternly escorted out if not arrested and jailed. The problem comes with the concept of currency in this dystopian mirror reality. In this future, everyone has a ticking clock inside that counts down to the last second of time they have left to live. Everyone gets to live to the age of 25, but after that, if they don’t manage to earn more time, they die instantly the moment the time on their clock runs out.

Tick-tock, Tick-tock

The graphics of the bioclock were done very well in the movie, with a lighted string of numbers imbedded in one’s forearm counting down as every second ticks by. People work in factories or at other jobs for more time. Everything – food, shelter, bus rides – cost time. And the price of everything keeps going up. We all know how inflation works, but it’s much worse in this future. A simple bus ride across town could cost two hours of your hard-earned time. The concept is very clever because it actually does equate money and lifetime down to the last second. People can give away time to others, or it can be stolen – all with the twist of a wrist.

“How did things get this way?”

The problem with this interesting concept is that it was not explained in the movie WHY the whole of society would agree to this severe conversion from currency to time allowed to live. And I could not visualize any way that it would be possible. I kept asking myself, “How did things get this way?” and kept trying to come up with plausible answers the whole time I was watching the movie – which actually distracted my interest and focus from the movie. And still, after the movie was over, I kept trying to come up with some scenario that would explain how this way of life came to be, to a point that everyone would willingly submit their children at the time of birth to have a countdown clock imbedded in their arm and an instant heart-attack switch placed in their chest. I couldn’t. And so I finally realized that it was not my imagination that was flawed to the point that I couldn’t really enjoy the movie, it was a basic flaw in the logic that allowed the scriptwriters to base an entire movie on a clever concept that could not be explained in a believable and acceptable manner.

Because this one thing was missing from In Time, this background explanation of how people came to accept (or were forced to accept) the currency-to-time conversion, the movie left a nagging plot hole that detracted from the effectiveness of the storyline and the underlying concept.

The movie, The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon, was sort of like that as well, although there was more fantasy and allegory associated with that movie to help explain away the whole ‘magic door’ thing.

“Could this really happen?”

Because there is a limited number of story types available, writers are always looking for ways to put a new twist on that basic story, to make it innovatively different. Technology, fantasy, mythology, and history – and any mix of those – are all sources to use to add a bit of uniqueness to a story. And many writers draw from these sources hurriedly without thinking through just how they’ll make everything work together to demonstrate that major social issue they want their story demonstrate, or that moral they want to focus on and drive home to their audience. To make a story believable, it is extremely important to make everything work together – characterization, world-building, setting, plotline, and so forth – but especially the underlying theme or concept. It is the most important aspect.

The real test of whether a story can even be pulled off successfully is whether the concept is viable, and how it can be demonstrated believably. If a story loses believability somewhere along the line, the audience is lost. Maybe not everyone, but enough that there will be serious detractors for the story.

Before a writer can even begin writing a single word of a story, there has to be that nugget of what the story is about. Oh, sure, some writers get the inspiration nudge to start a story simply from a flash of a scene in their mind, or some snatch of a conversation between sketchy characters, but at some point the writer needs to think the story through logically from beginning to end and ask, “Could this really happen?” If the answer is, “No,” then the writer must either figure out some way that it could believably happen, or move on to another story idea. A writer who chooses, after some deliberation, to scrap a seemingly unworkable storyline concept, probably is doing himself and a lot of readers a huge favor. But even if he decides, against his better judgment, to pursue writing a story wherein he hasn’t quite figured out how it could happen believably, at some point he’ll have to figure that out or suffer the consequences. So, it’s better just to figure out the basics of the concept first, before wasting time writing scenes and building characters to carry the story forward. The writer who plans her writing journey ahead of time will get there eventually. Go forward without a clue, and who knows where a story will end up?

Do YOU have a pet-peeve movie or book you'd like to share? Or a story concept in general you think is lame? Let us know!

Pat Morrison, Penumbra Publishing

THE DAY THE WRITING DIED

If Amanda Hocking jumped off a cliff, would you?

Independent authors are all excited about the latest marketing magic of 99-cent ebooks. 99-cent ebooks made Amanda Hocking a star. Amanda Hocking’s a multi-million-dollar author now, all because she innovated the 99-cent ebook.

We cannot argue with Amanda Hocking’s success, but hers was not due simply to a 99-cent book strategy. What many authors fail to realize, she never sold ALL her books at 99-cents, only the first one in a series. And all her series installments were shorter in comparison to a typical novel of 80,000 words. Most were probably not more that 40,000. So, her deal was to get readers hooked on the first installment of the series, then pay more for the rest. And with a dedicated social networking effort, she made success happen.

Many authors have tried to repeat her efforts, but have not met with similar success. And the reason for the lack of duplicate success can be attributed to many things – personality, lack of repeated concerted marketing effort, quality and content of books, targeted readership ... and the list goes on. The truth is, no two authors, no two books are exactly alike, so naturally success is relative and not exactly reproduceable.

How's that 99-cent ebook strategy working out?

The real issue here is the focus on 99-cent ebooks as the key to success. While many authors want to delude themselves into believing this is the only real key to success that matters, in truth it is only a small part of a larger spectrum of strategies to be employed. Yet many authors believe all they have to do is price their book at 99-cents, and success will roll in like a warm summer breeze to invigorate their book sales to the stupendous success of bestsellerdom.

Here are some thoughts on this from a couple authors who, though skeptical, tried this approach, and some opinions from others in the book industry...

http://www.baekdal.com/insights/busted-the-99-cents-book-failed-miserably/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-dionne/why-99cent-ebooks-are-a-b_b_850053.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/20/ebooks-cheap-price_n_1160383.html

http://thebacklight.com/amazon-tablet-kindles-bloggers-infopreneurs/

Here’s a quote from that last blog link...

“I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few dollars on a book or ebook since I got my Kindle several months ago. It’s changed what I read and how much I’m willing to spend. Now I just read whatever’s super cheap and looks interesting.”

Authors, if you missed the import of that quote, here it is again...

“I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few dollars on a book or ebook since I got my Kindle several months ago. It’s changed what I read and how much I’m willing to spend. Now I just read whatever’s super cheap and looks interesting.”

Let’s look at what’s really going on here.

A few years ago, when Apple came on the scene with iTunes, and music downloads became all the rage, something sad happened. This was...

The day the music died.

And so did the music industry. Now it is a former ghost of itself. The days of the big music promoters like Columbia, and later Sony, went by the wayside. Music promoters are still in business, but not like they used to be. And musical artists still make music. Most, like authors, can’t help themselves. It’s in their nature. But many of them have lost the dream of making it big. Now all that’s left is uploading their ‘albums’ to iTunes and hoping for some sales.

And who’s the big winner in this scenario? Apple. Certainly not the big corporations that used to make or break a music star or group. And not the music stars. Only the ones who have the chutzpah to self-promote and finance their own tours and pay for their own recording studio time seem to make it these days. Musicians can still manage to make their albums somehow, but now the only real place to sell their music is on iTunes and other copycat online stores.

The real focus is the technological rite of passage defined by iTunes. Gone are 45s, LPs, eight-tracks, cassettes, transistor radios, boom-boxes, Walkmans ... and CDs are already waving goodbye. Gone are the music stores and media stores and retail aisles selling music CONTENT. The focus is on selling music TECHNOLOGY. Now it’s MP3s making way for MP4s playing on iPods, iPads, iPhones ... i-yi-yi-yi-yi. Technology’s always going to continue to change, but the real issue here is what happens to the content when a technology leader takes control.

Apple ate everyone’s lunch by funneling music CONTENT and DELIVERY through a technology coups. In that way...

Apple dismantled and rebuilt the music industry in its own image. Now, Amazon’s hell-bent on doing the same to the publishing industry.

Amazon is making its content DELIVERY-SPECIFIC so that you can only get Amazon content from Amazon and use it on Amazon technology – while everyone else (except Apple, of course, that has its own proprietary standard) is screaming for technological standards available to everyone in the industry.

In an effort to speed the demise of the publishing industry and take it over before Apple can, Amazon has made ITSELF a publisher as well as a publishing portal for every Tom, Dick, and Jane that ever dreamed of writing a book. The focus here is not on quality, but quantity. Oh, sure, Amazon is hand-picking authors to put in its publishing stable, but the rest of you authors out there, you’re on your own. If you make it, great. If not, oh well, Amazon isn’t going to shed a tear.

Of course, Amazon’s also doing some other sneaky things to try and weed out competitors who are seeing what Amazon’s doing and trying to get a ride on that gravy train. Barnes & Noble, who was once the king of book retaildom, has been scrambling the last few years to establish an online presence to challenge Amazon. Too little too late. So, to fight back, B&N has announced it will not shelve Amazon Publishing books. So what? Amazon’s doing a circle-about and positioning itself to build some retail stores of its own, thumbing its nose at B&N.

Additionally, Amazon is trying to keep its ebook content delivery-specific by tying the content to its brand of technology through not only a unique proprietary format used by no other ebook company, but also by rewarding purchasers of its high-end reader, Kindle Fire, with perks not available to other customers.

Another thing Amazon’s been doing since last November is to invite authors to make their ebook content AMAZON-SPECIFIC, meaning it is available only on Amazon and nowhere else. They have been uproariously successful at this by tantalizing authors with the lure of $700,000 dividends split among the participants, based on the percentage of customer purchases and borrows of their ebook content. The deal is ‘sweetened’ by the offer of allowing authors to GIVE AWAY (that’s right, give away) their content in this program to all Amazon customers on selected days, and all the time for Amazon Prime (paid subscription) customers. And authors are jumping on that like hungry swallows on a cloud of mosquitoes. Why? Because of the PERCEIVED jump in sales ranking on Amazon. The more books people snap up for free, the higher on the ‘desirable’ list an author’s title climbs, giving the impression that it is a ‘bestseller’ when in fact it is a ‘bestfreebie.’ But, to an author who is looking at maybe 100 sales TOPS for the lifetime of his title, this sales ranking may be the only plus in his writing career. A sad but true fact – not simply a conjecture.

What's the point?

So, you authors out there are probably wondering, What’s the point. If I want to see my work published, if I want sales, I pretty much have to toe the line and do whatever it takes – whatever Amazon dictates, because they’re the only real game in town.

Maybe. Maybe not. It’s true that they are trying to take over the playing field as previously described. But if everyone jumps on the bandwagon without knowing where that wagon is headed, when the dust settles, the only one who will finish the trip and still be on the wagon will be ... Amazon.

Why? Because all that’s going to result from Amazon’s latest market ploy is akin to WalMart’s world-wide domination strategy. It is a known fact that when WalMart moves into a community, it brings a homogenized and expanded content at cheaper prices to areas where it was formerly not available, but it also KILLS all other stores in the area, making WalMart the only game in town. Is this a bad thing? It is when WalMart squeezes out other retailers who provide jobs for the community so that WalMart is the only employer in town. Amazon is attempting to do the exact same thing in publishing by becoming the only content distributor in town. They do this by encouraging the following events:

1. Authors will remove their ebook content from other ebook retailers like Barnes & Noble and Smashwords, in effect shriveling the content base these retail distributors have to offer their remaining customers. This will erode the content base of these competitors.

2. Amazon will continue to work against standardization of ebook content delivery, ensuring that any customer who bought a Nook or other ereader will experience enough difficulty finding suitable content that this will further erode the customer base of these competitors.

3. Amazon will continue to dictate pricing in favor of quantity so that very few content providers will benefit greatly, but Amazon will benefit across the board from every content provider.

4. Amazon will continue to favor authors who’ve been previously favored by successful publishers, and ignore other potentially worthy authors who, for whatever reason, cannot get their books to sell like hotcakes at a pancake breakfast fundraiser. That means lesser known authors will not enjoy any of the automated promotion mechanisms in place to reward and promote bestselling books that don’t actually need these promotion mechanisms to achieve sales success (in the same way that publishers promoted successful authors with TV and magazine/newspapers ads and other promotions to keep them on the bestseller list while virtually ignoring midlist and newcomer authors).

5. The end result is that all this flurry to offer books for free and exclusively on Amazon won’t amount to any more success than the author might have seen otherwise, once the dust settles.

From our own experience.

From our own experience with experimentation in Amazon’s program, it is apparent that whatever momentary sales spike certain featured titles have experienced when offered for free, the benefits disappear entirely once the title is no longer offered for free. What this tells us is that, once customers find out they can get something for free, they will no longer pay for it. Not even 99-cents. The only reason they would ever pay $9.99 for any ebook is if they really, really want the book and couldn’t get it for free at a library. And let’s face it, no indie author fits into that category of ‘really, really want it’ enough for anyone to pay mass-market paperback price for an ebook.

The only way authors have found they can fight this trend is to split their books into smaller segments and sell them piecemeal. That means totally revamping ebook content to fit this new segmented sales mentality. Now, instead of a book being 80,000 words, it may only be 30,000. And maybe it will still sell at 99-cents ... modestly. But that 80,000-word book will never again see sales at $2.99 or higher, thanks to a lot of super-desperate indie authors and Amazon. Now nobody has any hope of making decent money off their books unless they can pull an Amanda-Hocking blitz. And we don’t see that happening. Do you? Not at 99-cents, and not for free, certainly.

At 99 cents, a title would have to sell more than eight times as many copies.

At 99 cents, making 35% per sale on Amazon, a title would have to sell more than EIGHT TIMES as many books as it would at $2.99 and 70% per sale. That means if an author is lucky enough to sell 100 copies, the take from a 99-cent price would be a mere $34.65, as opposed to $209.30 at $2.99 – neither of which seems worth all the work it takes to write a book and get a decent cover. Amanda Hocking’s game was to have several different series and several books in each series, for 15 or more titles. Clearly her goal was to sell more than 100 books. But if your only content happens to be one book, then giving it away or selling it for 99 cents isn’t going to make success happen.

What are your thoughts, your strategies?

So, authors, what are your thoughts on this? What are you selling strategies? Does anyone have a plan that seems to be working? Or do you see this as the end of another era...

The day the writing died.

Send us a comment and let us know what you think!

Monday's Mistress FREE Kindle - Dominatrix-Online.com

Apparently Wednesdays are a terrible day to give away free books. So scratch the Wild Wednesday's promotion and focus instead on MONDAY'S MISTRESS ... Mistress Blackheart, that is. She'll be free for the taking this coming Monday, February 6.

Dominique Milhaus is the penultimate pithy slacker looking for a way to make a few extra bucks by shaking her bodacious booty on the internet while instructing her 'slaves' to do naughty things to themselves. But she gets more than she bargained for when she gets arrested for internet prostitution - a charge she totally isn't guilty of. (Caution: explicit sexual references and language)

DOMINATRIX-ONLINE.COM
MISTRESS BLACKHEART: POLICEMAN'S PREROGATIVE
Dallas White
Erotic romance

When snarky über-slacker Dominique Milhaus gets arrested and hauled to jail on her twenty-fifth birthday and is charged with Internet prostitution, her nights as a video-streaming dominatrix come to an abrupt halt. But Gwinnet County motorcycle patrolman Richard Carlyle, subbing as booking officer at the station that night, has something else in mind for recently out-of-work Mistress Blackheart.

A little afternoon delight complicates things in a hurry, and the ex-dominatrix who can’t commit quickly finds herself at odds with the irritating cop used to getting everything his own way. Add a pair of handcuffs to the mix, and there’s no telling who will end up on top!

FOREIGN LEGION Friday Five-Day FREE Kindle

On Friday, February 10, AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION BOOK 2 REENLISTMENT will start five days of FREE on Amazon Kindle. Let the political incorrectness begin!

AMERICA'S GALACTIC FOREIGN LEGION
BOOK 2: REENLISTMENT
Walter Knight
Military Science Fiction Satire

The saga of compulsive gambler turned legionnaire continues as Joey Czerinski's string of profitable casinos fall victim to continued spider insurgency. Suddenly destitute, Czerinski and his business partner Manny Lopez accept an emergency loan from their old friend, the shady Galactic Foreign Legion ATM. Reenlisted in America's Galactic Foreign Legion amid continuing guerilla warfare and cultural contamination involving the spider-like alien species on planet New Colorado, Czerinski and his Foreign Legion pals struggle through more serendipitous surprises in the next installment of this politically incorrect military space opera.