Books

Books
Books written by Ray Sullivan

Monday 27 August 2012

Launching My New Website

Biting the bullet, I've gone and done it.I've avoided the webmaster scenario quite deliberately for some time, but I guess there comes a point when an occasional blog isn't going to cut it, commercially.

 I don't have anything against running a website but I did have two issues. First and foremost is the time element. I have a perception that building a website that's worth visiting takes time; maintaining one takes more. I guess I can't get around those issues,  other than pay someone, but I don't sell enough books to make that option viable right now.

The second issue was to do with costs directly. I had a domain name in my head, guessing that raysullivan.com would be taken already, so I started to look at what one would cost. Well, those of you running a website will have been through this previously and will know that although the cost isn't great, it is variable. More importantly, everywhere I looked I saw sharks. If there was ever an industry capable of giving banking a good name, this is it.

So I canvassed friends who had websites, got some 'do not enter' warnings and some good steers. I followed the steers.

Anyway, the domain I wanted, www.raysullivanbooks.com was available - someone has the dot co dot UK version but doesn't appear to be using it, but I'm not that interested in the local variant anyway - so I bought the dot com variant, signed up for a hosting package, had a few nights' head scratching and it's up there. Not fully ready, but definitely good enough for looking at.

One of my aims is to host a page on there providing links to the more popular blog entries - some are clearly spinning wheels months after they've been posted - so if you want to revisit a blog entry and don't fancy trawling through the whole list on this site, then take a look.

I hope you find time to visit the website from time to time.

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Visit my website on www.raysullivanbooks.com
I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Visit my books on Amazon (for Kindle owners) and Smashwords (for access to all other formats and access to Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Sony, WH Smith, Kobo and many other good ebookstores.

Digital Life Form is available on Amazon.com in paperback for $7.99
The Last Simple is available on Amazon.com in paperback for $5.99
The Journeymen is available for $8.99
Skin is available for $9.99

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my books.

To View My books In....

Tuesday 7 August 2012

Ebook Debate in the UK

There's been a couple of articles in the UK in the Guardian newspaper, a tome favoured by slightly left leaning intelligentsia (not me then - I lean wherever the nearest wall  is built and as for intelligentsia...).  The first one I noticed was reporting on a speech made by Smashword's Mark Coker at the Romance Writer's of America conference.  Mark made an assertion that eBooks were turning the book industry upside down and that indie was the way to go.  To be fair to Mark, he is always careful not to dismiss the mainstream but he was pretty assertive in his article.  The Guardian picked up on it and bigged Smashwords up, Mark picked up on their article and the left leaning intelligentsia left an awful large amount of comments, not all supportive of Mark's views.

Yesterday the Guardian picked up on a press release by Amazon that stated eBooks outsell print books in the UK on Amazon by a healthy margin, while insisting it wouldn't state actual numbers or allow independent auditing.  It's not exactly a new press release - I'm sure I've seen similar reports emanating from Amazon over the last twelve months, but perhaps this is the first claim made about UK sales?  Anyway, the comments were pretty biting again, and to be fair the lack of transparency over numerical claims diminishes Amazon's claims automatically.

But it was the range of comments across both articles that interested me most, and this isn't a poke at Guardian readers who tend to be bright and successful people.  Exactly the type that should be leading what Amazon are now calling a reading renaissance in the UK - well, they can read and probably can afford to buy books.

The first point I picked up was the number who have dismissed eBooks out of turn while admitting they hadn't tried them (apart from, perhaps, on a PC).  I get this a lot in my daily life as I read my Kindle - I get told by work colleagues and perfect strangers alike that reading a print book is much better and that they couldn't read an eBook.  Perhaps that's true, but in recent months I've only actually met one person who has actually tried that process and come to the same decision - a nice guy in work who travels to Asia once a year to visit his daughter and sees the Kindle as a necessary convenience for the journey.

Then there was the group who see eBooks as the last refuge for amateur writers who can't get a publishing contract.  And there is probably an element of truth in this, although as I've pointed out previously the methodologies deployed to select books by the mainstream are a tad arbitrary.  Plus, as many pointed out, apparently in support of their belief, when an eBook is successful it is generally picked up by the mainstream and published by them.  That only reinforces the concept that some self published eBooks are as suitable as the books identified by the print industry and when you consider that the exposure most eBook authors have to readers it suggests that there are probably quite a few undiscovered nuggets sinking without trace out there.

But let's be fair, there is some truth in the allegation.  There are a significant number of mediocre eBooks, badly edited and formatted being hawked.  Some of these, I've noticed over the last few months, actually come from the mainstream publishers, no doubt as a result of having to cut labour costs in reply to the eBook challenge.

So the comments see-sawed between the view that self publishing will destroy the mainstream and the view that self publishing is a fly in the mainstream ointment.  My view is that virtually every posting missed the real point.  It isn't eBooks that are self published (like mine) or mainstream books rising to the challenge that is the important future - I suspect there will be a modified version of today's reality in years to come where the mainstream will modify its marketing and pricing model to compete with self publishing and that the market will self adjust in some way.  I doubt self publishing will destroy all mainstream practises, nor will mainstream quell the self publishing industry.  So at least one playing field seems to be level.

The bit nobody seemed to recognise is that in five years time, probably less, the majority of books, magazines  newspapers and so on will be read on electronic devices.  My best guess today is that in five years dedicated devices such as the Kindle and Kobo will be marginalised by multi-functional devices such as the iPad and other devices like the Google Nexus that I'm starting to use.  Of course, if I'd written this blog five years ago I wouldn't have mentioned tablet computing as that was pretty much fantasy right then, so I'm happy to concede that in five years hence the tablets sweeping the world may well be replaced by an even more convenient family of devices not yet invented.  But print media will be well and truly in decline and multi-functionality will rule the roost.

By default eBooks will be the norm and people will get used to it.  They  just don't realise it yet.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

To find out more about my ancestors visit my sister’s website http://sullivanfamilyhistory.angelfire.com/

Visit my books on Amazon (for Kindle owners) and Smashwords (for access to all other formats and access to Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Sony, WH Smith, Kobo and many other good ebookstores.

Digital Life Form is available on Amazon.com in paperback for $7.99
The Last Simple is available on Amazon.com in paperback for $5.99

The Journeymen is available for $8.99

Skin is available for $9.99

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my books.

To View My books In....

Thursday 2 August 2012

Favour Requested

In my blog yesterday, The Wild, Weird and Wacky World of ePublishing I reported on the mad pricing adopted by Amazon for my eBooks.  I wrote to Kindle Direct Publishing to ask why the prices were bouncing all over the place and got this reply:

Hello Ray,

I can confirm your Kindle books are priced the same as you have chosen.

If you're browsing in the Kindle Store from a location outside of the United States, you may see a price higher than what you listed on the KDP website. 

All items available in the Amazon.com Kindle Store are listed in U.S. dollars (USD). The availability and pricing of titles in global Kindle Stores may vary by home country or region, including taxes and other operating costs.

We understand and share your concern about prices, and we will continue our efforts to reduce costs and offer the best possible prices to customers in every region. 

Thanks for using Amazon KDP.


So, it appears that the books are priced as I requested.  Or put it another way, as I'm resident in the UK, I can't prove otherwise.  Now I know I get a fair amount of traffic from the US whenever I post a blog.  So here's my request - could anyone over there check out Skin on Amazon please?  I have it listed at $3.99 on Amazon but according to this link:


http://www.amazon.com/Skin-ebook/dp/B004KABAH8/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1343938851&sr=1-5&keywords=ray+sullivan

it is priced at $6.42.  What would be even better is if you could search Amazon directly (search Kindle Store>Ray Sullivan) in case the URL above implies the request has come from outside of the US, just to remove any arguments.

If someone could do this and post the findings on the blog or by emailing me at ray dot sullivan @ rocketmail dot com I would really appreciate it.  There's a free copy of one of my eBooks (you choose) for the first person to let me know.  Thanks.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

To find out more about my ancestors visit my sister’s website http://sullivanfamilyhistory.angelfire.com/

Visit my books on Amazon (for Kindle owners) and Smashwords (for access to all other formats and access to Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Sony, WH Smith, Kobo and many other good ebookstores.

Digital Life Form is available on Amazon.com in paperback for $7.99
The Last Simple is available on Amazon.com in paperback for $5.99

The Journeymen is available for $8.99

Skin is available for $9.99

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my books.

To View My books In....

Wednesday 1 August 2012

The Wild, Weird, Wacky World of ePublishing

I guess a few of you have noticed that Project: Evil had been launched as an eBook, as within minutes of it going live on Smashwords I saw the downloads clock up.  Within a day, more copies of Project: Evil had been downloaded on Smashwords than any other book I've listed there, including my other free to download book, The Last Simple (AKA Da Dan Brown Code).

I noticed that all my other books were being looked at a little bit more than they had recently, so it appears that listing the book for free had the effect of opening up my other work to new eyes, which is a nice way of marketing, I think.  I was pleasantly pleased to see The Last Simple being downloaded as well, initially at about one tenth of the rate Project: Evil was being downloaded.  Now, The Last Simple didn't get much attention from the Smashwords community from when I listed it on Christmas Day, so a slow uptick was pleasant enough.  In fact, the only place where The Last Simple had seemed to generate any real interest up until now was on Barnes & Noble, where they frequently report largish monthly downloads of the book - it must be something about Nook readers that it tickles, I guess.

But then suddenly I noticed The Last Simple downloads increasing and in the last 36 hours three times as many copies have been downloaded from Smashwords as had been downloaded in the previous seven months.  Now it's Project: Evil that's running at ten percent of The Last Simple download rate!

Right now I'm waiting for Smashwords to approve Project: Evil for their Premium Catalogue - once that happens it'll ship to Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Sony, WH Smith and many other good eBookstores.  Hopefully the reaction on Smashwords is an indication of what the consumers at these stores will have.

And then there's Amazon.

Regular visitors to this blog will know I've been experiencing some issues with the paperback versions of my books being listed correctly outside of the US with the exception of the German Amazon organisation.  It's been going on for months now, but in the UK and most EU Amazon stores there's no blurb attached to two of my paperback versions, Skin and The Journeymen.  I can't for the life of me understand why anyone should want to buy a book without a description of the content unless it was so famous that the blurb was irrelevant.  Amazon seem to think it might work, it would seem.  Incredibly I actually sold a paperback copy of The Journeymen in the UK despite the lack of blurb, so some reader obviously had a lot of faith in the product.  I hope he or she enjoyed the book and if that person is reading this I can confirm absolutely that it is the only production paperback version sold, so if you want me to validate it as such (in case I become famous) then drop me a line!

Anyway, I've been periodically checking Amazon UK to see if the blurb had turned up and tonight I noticed that Digital Life Form, Skin and The Journeymen paperbacks have been discounted by Amazon, approximately by the amount of royalty I'm supposed to get after one is sold.  I've asked the inevitable question as to who bears the discount and await their reply.  I was checking the US site to see if they were discounting my paperbacks only to notice something even more disturbing - they've jacked up the price of my eBooks taking Skin, for example, up to $6.42.  I list it at $3.99 everywhere else and that's the price I instructed Amazon to list it at.  It's no wonder I'm not getting a lot of sales from Amazon over the pond!


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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

To find out more about my ancestors visit my sister’s website http://sullivanfamilyhistory.angelfire.com/

Visit my books on Amazon (for Kindle owners) and Smashwords (for access to all other formats and access to Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Sony, WH Smith, Kobo and many other good ebookstores.

Digital Life Form is available on Amazon.com in paperback for $7.99 and Amazon.co.uk for £5.99
The Last Simple is available on Amazon.com in paperback for $5.99 and Amazon.co.uk for £4.99

The Journeymen is available for $8.99 or £6.99 in the UK

Skin is available for $9.99 or £6.99 in the UK

For quick access to the various Kindle, Kobo, WH Smith and Smashword links please use the table below to view my books.

To View My books In....