Quacking Alone

In this corner, we have Mobipocket, a wiry French fighter. He’s got a lot of experience but it takes a whole team of folks to get him into the ring.

In the other corner, we have PayPal, a brawny little up and coming American pugilist.  He’s well financed but the set of his jaw speaks to a hidden agenda. 

But wait, sports fans, if we want to get a real handle on this battle, we can’t look at the boxers in the ring.  We’ve got to check out the training rooms in the back.  Wait a minute, they look a lot alike.  Full of skinny businessmen in dark suits with fire and dollar signs in their eyes.  Who are these guys? 

It’s not Mobi vs PayPal at all.  Why, it’s, it’s …………Amazon against Ebay!!

We don’t know whose gonna win, but we know whose most likely to lose – the writers who carry as much weight in this battle as the bait at the end of a fishing lure. 

Mobi has been having some trouble for a while.  Allegedly, it has a long, long list of e-tailers that carry the e-books of authors who offer them for sale through Mobi.  But in recent months, sales of writers have been drying up until they disappear altogether.  A read of Mobi’s chat boards features posts of a number of authors, including yours truly, saying that their sales had been going gangbusters until presto, chango, they came to a dead stop.  At that point, some enterprising authors – not me, but I wish it had been – commenced looking for a way to get their royalty money out of Mobi’s accounts and into their own.  See, Mobi has a policy.  It pays no royalties to writers until they total $150.00.  Funny, sales seems to stop about the time many writers would reach that threshold. 

Anyway, at least one enterprising chap figured out that if he canceled his Mobi account, that Mobi would have to pay him all accumulated royalties, whatever they totaled.  Great.  Since nobody seems to be selling enough to reach the magic number, why not pull out and wait for Mobi to suffer enough losses that it fixes the royalty structure.  Well, there’s just one problem with that.  It’s the little matter of getting the money to the writer.

Mobi has stated on its forum site that PayPal is not processing payments to writers from Mobi.  Other comments, from e-tailers, say that PayPal is also not processing payments to Mobi.  Why?  Mobi says PayPal objects to some of the content carried on Mobi. The Mobi site does carry a large erotic section that goes a lot further than sensual romance description in more mainstream books.  Mobi carries erotic tales that are more like a literary version of porn movies.  Essentially, Mobi carries what people post and leaves the filtering to the e-tailers and to the public’s power of the mouse.

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Fathers are a lot like movie stars.

They cast the biggest, the broadest, the most all-encompassing shadow in the house.  They inspire, motivate, de-motivate and terrorize.  And all too often, they do it all without ever trying.  The memory that sticks in my mind from my own family features my hubby and Zack, our eldest (now 18 and about to head off to UCF to college although Mommy isn’t sure how she’ll like the dorm room). 

Zack, as a combat crawler at the age when he should have been toddling, had a couple of challenges.  First, his Mom worried constantly that he might be hungry.  (She still does).  Today he can just give me the look, say he loves me, and leave the table.  As a creepy crawler, he didn’t have that option.  So he was a big butterball of a baby and toddling presented size challenges.  Second, his own mental make-up, even at that little age, meant he didn’t want to do anything until he could succeed.  He did his combat crawling while his peers held onto furniture and took lurching little steps. 

Then one day Zack’s dad was in the kitchen and Zack and Mom were in the den.  Dad started whistling and Zack jumped to his feet and ran into the kitchen, chasing the man making the merry noise.  Yeah, his Father inspired his first steps without even trying.

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Did you know that Golden and Faerie - my books now out in paperback – are about Arts & Photography? 

It was a shock to me too.  I can only imagine how much it surprises, and perhaps appalls the highbrow artsy browsers at Amazon.  I can hear them murmuring and muttering now, one of those books in our section?  Love and lust, sex and second chances, over the top head over wonder worm heroes in love – right here with books about art?  How dare the writer post such drivel in this section!

Well, this invasion wasn’t intentional.  I self published Golden and Faerie through the Amazon subsidiary, CreateSpace.  I chose that service after some research into pricing and retail channels.  With their pro plan, I can price my books reasonably, price them at numbers I’d pay for a book.  With some of the other services, by the time the initial publishers’ commission got added on, and then Amazon or the retail channel commission got added on, a paperback book would be priced at $25 to $30.  Lord knows, I’d never pay that for a  paperback and wouldn’t expect anyone else to either.  With CreateSpace and the pro plan, my books get automatically listed on Amazon.  I can price them well (now listed at $12.95) and everyone can still make a little money.  It’s that automatic part that’s caused me some trouble.

When I did the initial book listing, I paid a lot of attention to the category, genre and sub-genre. I debated pricing with my marketing-manager hubby.  What I overlooked was one small drop-down list.  It was the browse section, meaning, where books are listed for browsing on the Amazon site.  The first entry, where you’d get set if you don’t change it, is Arts & Photography.  It’s such a small little list compare to the rest of the data on the site.  Small and easy to overlook.  But sometimes, the small things are the big things.  Yes, I should have sweated the small stuff.

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A quick blog post from sometimes sunny and sometimes stormy Orlando, Florida. I know what you’re thinking, but no, we did not travel here to visit the mouse. My eldest, Zack – the braniac National Merit Finalist – was honored to receive a full scholarship to the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida. Their mascot is “The Knight.” He’ll be attending the school’s outstanding Honors College, Burnett Honors College.

We’ve been in Orlando for a two-day orientation called, “The Knighting.” It is now complete, and my son has registered for classes for the fall, pursuing an engineering major. He wants to go to Law School – like Mom. His Mom advised him to major in a “real” undergrad discipline where he could get a job. That was a ‘do as I say and not as I do’  bit of advice. I majored in English. Many of my Law School classmates majored in either history or poli sci. With engineering, my son will have a leg up on construction, products and other very technical litigation. He can also get a job as an engineer and right now that would be easier than finding a job as a lawyer.

Zack is a smart kid and I’m very proud of what he’s accomplished. I’m also very grateful to the outstanding educators at UCF who saw enough potential to give him a full scholarship. I’m confident he will achieve wondrous things and make UCF proud.

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