Will it go round in circles?

Back in the day I bought a live LP by a guy called Billy Preston that included the title of this posting. The song itself has a blues and gospel history and was a decent reworking by Billy and his group, the God Squad if memory serves me correctly. The LP is up in the attic with other obsolete artefacts and I hadn't given it a thought in years until today.

Google looks like it is giving up its intentions to challenge Facebook with its Google + endeavour, the social medium that promoted Google Circles. The reality is I don't think many of us understood what Google+ was trying to do - to be fair, I'm not sure Google knew either. I'm fairly certain they wanted to take a chunk out of Facebook's market, but tried to do it in such a way that it didn't make much sense. I'm in a few Google Circles because I've been invited in by people I've never heard of - in itself an established practise on Twitter - but haven't felt any compunction to follow it up or generate other contacts. In truth it just seems that little too complicated.

Not that I'm necessarily the right person to review it. Sure, I've got a Twitter account that I use pretty much to promote my books, if a little half-arsed (although I do post my blog entries there), and I do have three FB accounts, but don't tell Facebook. If they find out that not all of their accounts are real and unique it could affect their share price, bless them. Why three? Well there's the mandatory one I can share personal stuff with family - a bit one way as I forget to look let alone post, one to promote my books (and perhaps the one that linked you to this entry, via that Twitter posting), and then there's the one I run on behalf of the criminal mastermind B L O'Feld, megalomaniac owner of B L O'Feld Megalomaniac Industries (BLOMI) as he's rather busy cooking up evil plans to destroy the planet. If you haven't met Barry Liam O'Feld then why not take a peek at his website (link at foot of this blog) or take a loom at Project: Evil, the nook of world domination gone wrong, all on sound project management principles.

Yet I never felt the compunction to utilise Google+ to promote my books. Maybe the failing was mine, apparently it's the second largest social network on the planet but largely so because you can't do anything on Google these days without pushing the 'oh go on, enrol me' button first. Google are saying goodbye to the guy who has made Google+ work, or actually hasn't, which I guess is why he's leaving, but maintain that they are stripping enough of our data from the technically defunct social network without it actually becoming popular - or even known about, come to that, anyway. So that's ok, as long as they're monetising my data, I don't mind.

Actually I do mind, a little bit, but realise I can't do much about it apart from setting my circles into a terminal spiral. It's not like I can try and 'monetise' my books through Google - according to Google Books I don't exist. So promoting my new book, Assassin, released on 1st May through Apple, B&N, maybe Amazon if I time it right, on Google is unlikely, unless you include Blogger. But who reads blogs?

I guess I'll consign Google+ to the attic, along with Billy Preston (who also played the organ on 'Let It Be' for the Beatles in an earlier phase of his career, BTW). The difference is that one day I'll get the Billy Preston LP down and give it a spin. That one will go around on circles.

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Heartbleed - two weeks (or two years) on

It almost felt like normality to discover that a fault in the IT security systems around the world had been found, not leaked by a 'whistleblower' or instigated by a government agency. To avoid getting too technical, what the programmers who wrote the code that forms the key cabinet to the main security keys that allow interaction between some servers did was use the best locks available and then placed the master key on a hook alongside. In theory anyone passing this point could unlock the door, copy all the keys inside and then lock the door again, leaving no trace. They didn't even need to bring a virtual bar of soap along (side issue - has any key cutter ever accepted an impression of a key embedded in soap, and if so is it really doable?)

Of course, if you've read my books or sat at the bar with me for an evening will know that I'm reasonably receptive to the odd conspiracy theory. I've also been around long enough to realise that people goof up often enough to make it normal behaviour to be ready to apply Occam's razor too. Here's my take: I don't believe the Heartbleed code to be the work of a criminal activity unless this is a very specialised criminal with very specific goals. Because many of us change passwords relatively frequently, but not as frequently perhaps as industry suggests, there remains a sizeable proportion of people who rarely change theirs. The longer you leave a password, the greater the chance it will be compromised would appear to be an intuitive rule, but of course it's wrong. It's how often you use it and what it protects that forms a greater rule regarding its potential to be hacked. Nonetheless Heartbleed has been around for two years and no major uptick in cyber crime reported. There's been an increase at attempts, sure, but these are from players who were clearly unaware that they simply had to take the key off the hook.

So it's probable that the fault has lain dormant and unnoticed all along. The criminals attempting to break into our bank accounts have been using the equivalent of bricks, crowbars and TNT when the key was under the plant pot. The biggest risk was the period between the news breaking and the patches being applied, when the criminal fraternity would be scrabbling to take advantage of the problem. There remains a residual problem that the security certificates may have been copied, in that virtual bar of soap, so servers need new certificates to be sure. My take is that a lot of organisations are going to incur some cost over the next few months (although this precaution should be done now for high risk servers) and some certificate salespeople are going to get a really good bonus this year.

So much for the rational side of the brain, what about the conspiracy theory? Well the NSA and GCHQ agencies have come under a lot of stick lately for reading our emails etc. As I've said before, they can read mine anytime they like, I'll bcc them if it helps, but wouldn't something like Heartbleed be a cheaper and easier way of getting around encryption than developing super-powerful computers to decrypt our last minute shopping lists (milk, coffee, C4, timer, bread)? And maybe leaking a security breach before Snowden reveals it anyway, but after a more secure and harder to find backdoor has been developed, is a convenient way of diverting attention?

But don't mind me, I've just finished writing a book, Assassin, that deals with a future British government so paranoid about terrorism that it would do anything from curtailing civil liberties to reading every email of its subjects just to try and control events. I didn't put Heartbleed in - that story broke after I finalised the book and set it up for pre-order, but it would have fitted like a glove. If governments gone wrong is your bag, be sure to check out Assassin.

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Amazon KDP updates dashboard

One of the bugbears for me with all of the distribution channels available is the limited amount of data available. Blogger, for example, attempts to let the blog authors know where and when their entries have been read, providing numerical and graphical information. It also splits the entry sources of the data and the operating systems down. It sounds useful, especially when using a blog as an advertising window on your books, but in reality it isn't that helpful at all. For example, I might know that in the last twenty four hours that my blog has been accessed in maybe ten countries, with fifty two percent of hits originating in the US, and maybe just a couple of hits in Japan. I may also learn that Firefox accounted for thirty five percent of browsers used, with IE just behind, then Chrome. I appreciate that some blogs might embed media that works better in one browser than another, but most of us just blog words and the occasional picture. The biggest issue with all of this, though, is that the data is too coarse. The US is a big place and it would be helpful to know where you are being read - East Coast, West Coast, good old Midwest maybe.

But it's just a blog, right?  What about people looking at my books? Well the best information available is through the Smashwords dashboard. That tells me how many times each book has been viewed and perhaps more interestingly a twenty percent download has taken place. People can stumble across your book page by any number of ways, and even those stumbling across a book through a wrong turn could result in a new fan, but downloading a sample is a real declaration of interest. You have to be checking your dashboard on a regular basis to get a feel for when the downloads take place, otherwise it's just so many on such and such a date. Location? No luck there, unless you spot the download being registered you have no clues at all. Sales are different because Smashwords emails you automatically, but book sales isn't their main function, distribution is. However, once a sale is confirmed it usually comes with some country ID, however that's about it.

The Ebook stores Smashwords distributes to such as Apple and B&N are black boxes. You find out way after the event that you've accrued sales, sometimes months later, and sometimes you get more granularity. I can recall watching sales of Project: Evil move steadily around Canadian states over a two week period a while back, forming a mental image in my mind of a group of readers emailing each other about a book they had enjoyed. But generally, that's as good as the data gets.

Then you have the Big A. Amazon indicate on your dashboard immediately you have a book downloaded, but they don't inform you by email, so you have to check manually. When I first published on Amazon I was checking my dashboard daily, sometimes several times a day, and would spot sales pretty much as soon as they were registered. Nowadays I review a lot less often, in part because waiting for the post is such a boring endeavour but mainly because Amazon have made it a lot more time consuming. As they've rolled out Kindle stores in individual European countries and in Japan , Brazil, Australia etc, they have added these to a drop down box that you had to interrogate one a time to see where you had sold, how many copies of which books and roughly when. The country data is as crude as with Blogger, so although I know how many copies of The Journeymen I have sold in the US, I still don't know if it's across the board or just in certain parts.

However Amazon have now added a new graphical tool that automatically indicates how many books you have sold over the last thirty days (if any) across all regions and your entire canon. You still have to drill down if you want more data, but as an overview it makes checking daily easier again. The graphics are straight out of the eighties, which is a little disappointing from such a big company but at least it is a step in the right direction.

But what is the big deal on data? Well curiosity apart, it would be helpful to know where in the world I am appreciated, and where I'm making zero impact. Such information could help me to reward the areas that follow me, to work with those that are unaware of my books, which may result in more sales that would benefit Amazon, Smashwords, Apple and B&N. It would also help me target promotional activities for my new book, Assassin, ahead of its release on May 1st. I'm fairly certain all of the above companies could provide better data easily, to their mutual benefit. But at least Amazon have tried to close the gap a little.
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Visit my Book Website here

 

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Don't share your PC - say PayPal

Most of us have a PayPal account.  In the last two years especially the internet money transfer system - I'm reluctant to call them a bank - has really come of age.  They have become the payment of choice for a lot of mainstream shopping sites and I have to admit it is really more convenient to click on the 'pay with PayPal' button than wade through a page of registration fields and commit to sharing my credit card details with yet another database.

The world has changed a lot since PayPal came to be.  Not so long ago we did all our online transactions using the 'house computer', the one that everybody jumped on to check email, surf the web etc.  Then laptops became affordable and households suddenly had choices about which computer to use.  Then along came tablets and smart phones, so more choice.  In essence, we all seem to have multiple devices we can use to do our online tasks. 

But with the explosion of devices comes the familiarity, so that we think nothing of jumping onto a friend's smartphone or tablet and checking our email, perhaps looking at the bidding for the gizmo we're hoping to 'win' on eBay, making that overdue payment with PayPal for yesterday's winning bid.  Well, PayPal aren't so keen on that last bit, it seems.  Probably not on the bits that preceded it either.  They've just emailed everyone who has a PayPal account, so that'll be everybody on the planet with an email address, to say that they are changing the terms and conditions. That seems routine, we get this all the time these days.  But embedded in the multipage document they've sent us all is a statement that effectively says we are not to share our computer, not even with our family.  Probably especially with our family.

I expect they've detected an uptick in fraud associated with shared computers. Being a global company, used ubiquitously for any number of transactions across the planet, they are likely to spot such trends much sooner than you or me.  In fact their exposure to this risk may well distort their perception, but to be fair, if it is fraud they probably end up picking up the tab.  That would make me a tad hypersensitive too, I guess.  So they are banning us from sharing our computers, tablets and smartphones, at least while we wish to remain customers of theirs.

On one level this is reasonable, on another it is outrageous.  The problem, I'm guessing, is that most of these devices have the capability of storing the username and passwords needed to access a PayPal account.  If an unscrupulous family member of friend was allowed access to the device they could use your PayPal account to buy something fraudulently I guess.  Assuming all the usual security protocols were in place, though, they would need to know your PayPal password and I'm guessing that only the registered billing address would be acceptable - I've never tried alternatives so maybe I'm wrong.  PayPal say that if you don't like the new terms then leave, your choice, because if you suffer a loss and have allowed anyone else to use your device then you could be on your own.  It's a little unclear if we're forgiven for not anticipating this message, because I reckon a lot of devices have been shared already. Well fair enough, but it would have helped if they flagged this openly instead of embedding it in a long complex electronic document.  I'm guessing most people won't know that by not writing to PayPal to terminate their contract they are implicitly agreeing with the terms.

I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect that PayPal will have to ride roughshod over a slew of UK and European laws to absolve themselves of responsibility, regardless of what they write in their Ts and Cs, even if they were able to convince people to actually signify overt agreement.  They may be able to do this in the US, at least in some states, but not so this side of the pond.  My guess is that if you take reasonable steps to protect your passwords they will struggle to penalise you for letting your mum use your iPad and you were to subsequently suffer a loss through PayPal.  If they are feeling a little vulnerable perhaps they should beef up their security, which is in their control, instead of dictating who you are allowed to share your electronic devices with instead.

Meanwhile, while you still have a PayPal account (the changes don't kick in for a month or so) why not browse over to my website to take a look at my books, or perhaps pop into Apple's iBook store, Barnes & Noble's website and, if they've got over their current problems, Kobo's bookstore to take a gander at Assassin.  If you pre-order it before PayPal introduce their new terms it should go through, even if you've borrowed the device you order it on!

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Visit my Book Website here

 

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Pre-order Assassin and get another (maybe two) books free

* I've just been alerted to a fault with the email link below - now fixed. If you have tried using it and received a failure delivery notice, please resubmit. Apologies for any inconvenience*

As part of my pre-order promotion I'm offering anyone who can prove they have pre-ordered Assassin from an eBook store the opportunity to download one of my other books via Smashwords for free.  And when I say one of my books, I'm letting you choose which one.  If you have already pre-ordered the book or do so between now and release date (1 May), then just forward the confirmation email to me at contact@raysullivanbooks.com stating which of my other books you would like to obtain for free then I will generate and email you back a code for Smashwords that will allow you to access your chosen book for free in any eBook format you wish.  As an added incentive, I'm offering the first one hundred such pre-orders the chance to download any two of my books in this way.

My reasons for this promotion are to try and sell more books (obviously) but also to try and raise more awareness of my books in general.  Both my website and my Smashwords pages are showing that I've picked up a fair amount of interest in the last two months or so but there's a lot of readers out there who will be unaware of my books at all.  By setting Assassin up for pre-order it allows all pre-ordered book sales to be accrued on the same day.  If there are enough sales in one go, the book rises up the rankings, enhancing visibility.  It's a one-off opportunity to sell my name through a book.

So, for $0.99 (or the £ or Euro equivalent) you can obtain up to two of my other books for free.  That's an average of $0.33 a book, which has to be a bargain.

The books you can choose from are:

Parallel Lives
The Journeymen
Journeymen II: Day of Reckoning
Skin
Digital Life Form
The Last Simple
Project: Evil

To read up the blurb on any or all of these, please follow the link below to my book website, or visit your favourite eBook seller and read about them there.

I look forward to hearing from you.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                         
Visit my Book Website here

 

        Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Assassin Avalable For Pre-order Now

 

As mentioned in a recent posting, I intend to use the pre-order process for my latest book 'Assassin'. For those of you completing a book for publication I can assure you that the process is fuss-free. The Smashwords forms guide you effortlessly to the point where you can release the book instantly, which historically has been the normal route for Smashwords, or you can set up a deferred date. All of the component parts - book, cover, blurb, etc need to be in place but you can go back and make edits before the release date if you need to. Personally I would recommend getting the book as right as you can before starting this step.

Irritatingly the pre-order only works on the stores Smashwords distributes to - Apple and Barnes & Noble being the most influential, but not at Smashwords itself.  What this means is that you can accrue pre-orders at the main bookstores, but not at Smashwords itself.

Once you have submitted your work you will probably need to do the customary dance with Smashwords - I had to do a little reformatting again and the auto-Vetter kept telling me I hadn't uploaded a cover when I had, but all in all it was quite painless. As I've mentioned before, it's worth importing the whole novel into WordPad, then back into Word. This removes all formatting from your manuscript, including the odds and sods that Word inevitably introduces over the gestation of the book. As Assassin has been written over a seven year period it is likely that the original file was quite buggy. An hour reformatting sorted out the remaining issues. Be prepared for a delay in the book appearing, though.  Assassin took about two days to appear at Barnes & Noble but a week to appear at the Apple store.  Due to a backlog all new books are taking a lot longer at Kobe, perhaps due to the transfer of the Sony store. If a link appears before release I'll add it.  The following links are to just one of the stores - you may need to search your own region to find the book locally.

Assassin is available to pre order at Barnes and Noble on this link

And Assassin is available to pre-order on iTunes at this link

What about Amazon? I hear you say.  Good question, it seems that Amazon don't support 'self-service' pre-orders.  If they want to set a book for pre-order they can, and I guess they do this for the bigger authors all the time, but for those of us hopefully on the way up, it's a no, I'm afraid.  What this means is that I will have to wait until Assassin is released on the 1 May then upload the files to Amazon and CreateSpace - that may not happen until the weekend following the launch I'm afraid.  If you want a Kindle version sooner, then I would recommend you pop along to my Smashwords page and buy a copy direct from them.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                         
Visit my Book Website here

 

        Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me