How I spent my Memorial Day Weekend

By now, we should all know that Memorial Day isn’t about barbeques, or hot dogs, or long weekends at the beach. It’s about the men and women who have given their lives so that you and I can disagree about things like Right-To-Life, Integration, and about whether or not the U.S. Department of Education should be dismantled. And so that we can have those long three-day weekends.

I’ve spent much of my working life overseas. No matter who is the President, no matter what the state of our economy (or who's fault it is), this is still the best country in the world. Because those men and women gave their lives to preserve the way of life we enjoy each and every day.

That said, I had a more or less great weekend. Saturday was spent on Amelia Island at a bookstore (that shall remain nameless for reasons that will become apparent). We’d arranged the signing two months before, and I’d driven to the store to meet the owner and deliver some promotional materials and advance copies for them to read and display. I was there with a load of my novels, a nice shirt and polished shoes and my smile for over three hours, between noon and 3:30. Lots and lots of people walk up and down Centre Street in Fernandina Beach on Memorial Day weekend. Lots of tourists and Islanders both. Lots of them walked into the bookstore. None of them bought any of my books. After I packed up to leave I asked the bookstore owner if she wanted any copies for the store and she said, “No”.

The store did no advertising, did not put the advance copies of my books in the window and did not put up even a small advertisement of my appearance in any of their windows. They did, however, promote a local author who was scheduled to appear later that same day, and lots of people came in to verify that he would be there.

I won’t be back any time soon. I’ve already burned up the gas to drive there and back, twice.

Sunday and Monday I was at the memorial Day Riverfest in Green Cove Springs. There is a very nice little park in Green Cove Springs between Highway 17 and the St. John’s River, including a spring fed swimming pool, a pier and boat dock and a nice bandstand. They had some great live music and a great crowd on both days. Of course, I had way more books than I could ever hope to sell (since the never-to-be-named bookstore on Amelia Island burned me as badly as they did) at an open-air event. But I did okay, and even met some folks who had already purchased one of my books.

Their encouraging comments, more than anything, have convinced me to forge ahead with “Lonesome Cove”. I will admit succumbing to despair over ever finishing #4, or even wanting to. But now I will, in spite of bookstore owners, rising costs and dreams becoming ever more distant.

But that’s selling, boys and girls. You have to put yourself out there, knowing up front that there will be disappointments right along with successes. Don’t give in to despair, and don’t allow disappointment to drag you down. One of those previous buyers purchased both of my novels at a winter event on Fleming Island in December, and sent me an email Saturday night to tell me she had just finished “The Big Bend” and loved it, and was now starting “Hog Valley”. Then she showed up at my booth at the Green Cove Springs event to tell me in person who much she enjoyed “Big Bend”.

So of course I’m going to finish “Lonesome Cove”. How could I not? So what if sales are slow. The whole economy sucks like a vacuum cleaner. That’s not my fault. But if my readers can’t look forward to reading another of my novels, that will be my fault. And that’s just not gonna happen.

eBook Sales Statistics, Kindle and Upcoming Events

 

If you follow these things you are probably aware that electronic publishing is here to stay. Even a few years ago, eBooks were more of a fad than a fact of life.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (http://idpf.org/about-us/industry-statistics), working with the Association of American Publishers (http://www.publishers.org), collects quarterly statistics on quarterly US trade retail eBook sales.

The first quarter of 2002 saw sales of eBooks in the United States hit $1,556,499. In the third quarter of 2010, sales reached $119,700,000. At the end of October, 2010 (the first month of the fourth quarter) sales were $40,700,000.

If you’re a writer and don’t publish in digital format, you are missing the boat.

Let’s take a brief look at the Kindle eBook reader sales. In January of this year, Ben Patterson, a technology blogger for Yahoo! News, wrote: “Barely six months after crowing that its Kindle e-books were outselling its selection of hardcover books, Amazon has announced that sales of Kindle titles are now outpacing paperbacks, as well.”

It’s not that people are fed up with carrying around paperbacks or hardbacks; Some few probably are. It’s a matter of cost. Print and publishing costs are rising and there is no end in sight. But readers love to read and if they can no longer afford to buy a hard copy of a book they can surely afford a Kindle, or Nook or whatever and then pay a lot less for their favorite genre.

Readers, people who cannot imagine not having book with them, are shocked and astonished at the incredible number of people who simply do not read. There are a lot of them in the Baby Boomer generation. Many young people in their twenties and thirties get their entertainment from from TV or magazines or the Web, and the upcoming generation are far more involved in PlayStations, X-Boxes and texting.With the current generation Physical books are quickly becoming a niche market.

Book sales just ain’t what they used to be. And as I mentioned earlier, they never will be. Paperbacks and hardbacks are costly to print, costly to store and ship and costly to stock on precious bookstore shelves. In an environment where discretionary spending is limited to the pocket change on your dresser, books take a back seat to orange juice and Kleenex.

Memorial Day weekend,  28, 29, & 30 May, is going to be a very busy one for me this year. On Saturday the 28th, I will be signing books at The Book Loft, 214 Centre Street, Fernandina Beach, Florida, between 1:00 and 4:00.

On Sunday and Monday I will be at the 23rd Annual Memorial Day Riverfest in Green Cove Springs, Florida. I don’t yet have the lot number for my booth, or even directions to where in the festival I will be located. But this is a great event with lots of entertainment and it’s a nice place to walk around. But do stop by and say hello.

Have a great week.

A very belated post indeed

Please accept my apologies. I had very good intentions of writing this post over the weekend. Really, I did, but I found myself travelling on a very smooth road just paved with all of those good intentions, and couldn’t find an exit.

I recently released a collection of essays and articles I’d had published in Israel back in 2001 in Kindle format, and never had any intention of printing a single copy. I didn’t see any demand for the material; but one never knows, does one? I figured two or three Kindle sales a month, maybe, if that. Which brings us back to those good intentions I mentioned earlier. someone mentioned that college students might find a use for such material , and two of the bookstores that carry my novels expressed an interest in carrying the material. so I had to reformat everything, add a bit of commentary to the introduction of each piece and I added an Afterward to each to bring the material up to date and a Postscript to wrap the whole thing up in a nice and tidy package.

So now, what started as a 57 page booklet of little or no interest to most people is now one hundred pages, spiral bound, printed on one face with plenty of room for notes and a nice *.jpg cover on glossy photo paper with a  clear plastic cover. Unfortunately, printing costs being what they are, it’s not gonna be anywhere near as inexpensive as the Kindle version. They will have to retail at $15.00 for anyone to make a penny on the sale.

Oddly enough, the material does have more than a little relevance. The articles deal with Israeli politics and Muslim terror groups, and I don’t pull any punches with either subject.

And then there’s Windows 7.

I like it. Sort of. But my big bugaboo with Win 7 is that it drops my ‘Always On’ internet connect whenever it wants to, and that really ticks me off. And it’s a resource hog of the first order.

Enough said. If you have any solution to the internet connection issue in Win 7, please post a  comment. And yes, I’ve already thought of dropping back to Win XP SP3.

I am somewhat confused about a few things

 

And I am a day late in posting this, too. Sorry about that. Part of that confusion I mentioned above, I suppose. Lately people have been telling me to focus more. My web site is way too diverse, and so are my blog posts.

Frankly, I know the web site needs a redo, and I have been putting it off since I am not a web site designer and absolutely refuse to pay someone who is to take the job on. I’m a writer with more than a passing acquaintance with computers and internet technology. Enough experience, in fact to have a pretty good idea of what I don’t know when it comes to designing web sites. And I don’t really want to take the time to learn all that stuff.

So I will be redesigning my web site some day real soon now. I promise.

This blog started out with the goal of writing about writing, and to me that includes writing about the software I use and the problems I face in using it and the solutions (if any) to those problems. And I’ve heard from several people over the last few weeks that I have to focus like a laser on writing – maybe included excerpts from the novel I’m writing and invite comments and suggestions. That sort of thing.

But I should stick to writing about writing and avoid computer stuff and furniture and restoration and stuff.

Well, maybe, but then again, maybe not. I am a writer with a very broad background, and all of that experience – in computers, and furniture making and restoration and silver and gold smithing and grounds maintenance and half a dozen other lines of work are all a part of yours truly, and that experience influences my novels no end.

I’m not going to start a blog just about furniture making for the same reasons I’m not going to start a blog about gold smithing or stone setting. Simply put, I don’t make a penny from these posts, but I do make a living (well, sort of) from my novels. So I spend much of my valuable (to me) time writing those novels and put in about an hour a week on this blog and checking out FaceBook and LinkedIn and the other social media sites where I have a presence.

And I will probably continue to write about computers and software and the problems they give me because I know good and well those same problems are ticking other folks off just as much as the do me. And some of those folks are writers and a lot of them are readers, too.

About the only things I will promise you I will never, ever cover in these blog posts are religion and politics. There are a few other subjects, but they’re not worth mentioning. In any case I’ll never discuss them, so who cares.

About a week ago I released “Collected Essays & Articles Written in Israel During 2001”, in Kindle format on Amazon.  I moved to Israel in 1981 and left to return to the States at the end of 2003, so I had some familiarity with Israel, Israelis and Israeli politics in the year 2001. In fact I knew a few of the Movers and Shakers in those days.  I admired many of them and couldn’t stand to be in the same room with the rest.

Everything in the collection has been published.

Here’s the link to the collection:

http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Essays-Articles-Written-ebook/dp/B004ZGOKVA/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1305063089&sr=1-4

The articles in this collection cover cover Israeli politics and Muslim terror, and I don’t pull any punches with either subject. Some of the material is valuable for its historical value but most of it is still relevant to the world we find ourselves in today.

These articles are not the “I’ve got the answers to the world’s problems!” sort of things. They are a very direct, no-holds-barred, concise explanation of the who, what, when where, why and how of many of the problems Israel faces today and what American should expe4ct to face tomorrow and next year and the year after that.

Let me know what you think.

I am somewhat confused about a few things

 

And I am a day late in posting this, too. Sorry about that. Part of that confusion I mentioned above, I suppose. Lately people have been telling me to focus more. My web site is way too diverse, and so are my blog posts.

Frankly, I know the web site needs a redo, and I have been putting it off since I am not a web site designer and absolutely refuse to pay someone who is to take the job on. I’m a writer with more than a passing acquaintance with computers and internet technology. Enough experience, in fact to have a pretty good idea of what I don’t know when it comes to designing web sites. And I don’t really want to take the time to learn all that stuff.

So I will be redesigning my web site some day real soon now. I promise.

This blog started out with the goal of writing about writing, and to me that includes writing about the software I use and the problems I face in using it and the solutions (if any) to those problems. And I’ve heard from several people over the last few weeks that I have to focus like a laser on writing – maybe included excerpts from the novel I’m writing and invite comments and suggestions. That sort of thing.

But I should stick to writing about writing and avoid computer stuff and furniture and restoration and stuff.

Well, maybe, but then again, maybe not. I am a writer with a very broad background, and all of that experience – in computers, and furniture making and restoration and silver and gold smithing and grounds maintenance and half a dozen other lines of work are all a part of yours truly, and that experience influences my novels no end.

I’m not going to start a blog just about furniture making for the same reasons I’m not going to start a blog about gold smithing or stone setting. Simply put, I don’t make a penny from these posts, but I do make a living (well, sort of) from my novels. So I spend much of my valuable (to me) time writing those novels and put in about an hour a week on this blog and checking out FaceBook and LinkedIn and the other social media sites where I have a presence.

And I will probably continue to write about computers and software and the problems they give me because I know good and well those same problems are ticking other folks off just as much as the do me. And some of those folks are writers and a lot of them are readers, too.

About the only things I will promise you I will never, ever cover in these blog posts are religion and politics. There are a few other subjects, but they’re not worth mentioning. In any case I’ll never discuss them, so who cares.

About a week ago I released “Collected Essays & Articles Written in Israel During 2001”, in Kindle format on Amazon.  I moved to Israel in 1981 and left to return to the States at the end of 2003, so I had some familiarity with Israel, Israelis and Israeli politics in the year 2001. In fact I knew a few of the Movers and Shakers in those days.  I admired many of them and couldn’t stand to be in the same room with the rest.

Everything in the collection has been published.

Here’s the link to the collection:

http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Essays-Articles-Written-ebook/dp/B004ZGOKVA/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1305063089&sr=1-4

The articles in this collection cover cover Israeli politics and Muslim terror, and I don’t pull any punches with either subject. Some of the material is valuable for its historical value but most of it is still relevant to the world we find ourselves in today.

These articles are not the “I’ve got the answers to the world’s problems!” sort of things. They are a very direct, no-holds-barred, concise explanation of the who, what, when where, why and how of many of the problems Israel faces today and what American should expe4ct to face tomorrow and next year and the year after that.

Let me know what you think.

New Non-fiction Kindle project completed

Way back in 2001, while I was living and working in Israel, I published several essays and articles in local newspapers and a few PoliSci web sites. These pieces ran from a thousand to ten thousand words and covered such diverse subjects as the structure of the Israeli government,  the political machinations of Shimon Peres, Clauswitz on war, asymmetrical warfare, the history and structure of terror groups and tactical and strategic targets of terror attacks in the U.S..

I just gave them a review last week and was astonished to find how much relevance they still held for today. So I have published them in a collection and added an introduction and an afterward to each piece, and then bookended the whole thing with a proper Introduction and Postscript to wrap things up.

All in all the work is less than 60 pages, and will only be available for the Kindle.  You can take a look at it by clicking on this link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZGOKVA

I am working on a book-length review of the history and structure of Muslim terror groups, but it will not be available until some time next year. I still have to complete “Lonesome Cove” and see to the publishing of “Twisted Key”.

Have a good weekend.

“Hog Valley” has been nominated for the Dan Poynter Global eBook Award

 

 

This is a very big deal, friends and neighbors. Dan Poynter is a mover and shaker in the world of ePublishing, and he has set up this contest for eBooks to ensure national and international recognition for the best of the best in electronic books. “Hog Valley” has been nominated for this award.

If you have read the novel in either paperback or in Kindle format, please click on the link below and give the novel a rating (preferably the highest), and leave a brief comment on your opinion of the story:

http://awardsforebooks.com/book-writing-contest/fiction-mystery-suspense-thriller/hog-valley/

Just below the book title “Hog Valley”, on the top left of the page, you will see 5 ‘E’s. Click on the right hand ‘E’ to give the novel the highest possible rating. Further down the page is a Comment box. Please leave a brief comment about your response to the story.

I cannot promise to name my first-born child after you. He’s 25, much larger and meaner than I am, and he would probably object to having his name changed. But I would still be very grateful to you.

Awards mean a great deal to the commercial success of any novel. Not only does the author get a pretty sticker to put on his book covers, but major publishing houses, literary agents, book reviewers and readers all pay attention to these awards and the author whose work grabbed that particular brass ring.

“The Big Bend” and “Hog Valley” are both available in paperback and  the Kindle eBook format, and my third novel, “Twisted Key” has recently been released in Kindle format. It should also be available in paperback some time in July or early August.

Right now, the Kindle versions of my books are on a par with the paperback sales. As awareness of Terry Rankin stories grows I fully expect Kindle sales to outpace paperback sales. That is the way the publishing industry is moving. eBooks have all sorts of advantages over paperbacks – price is only the most obvious of those differences.

I’ll get my regular post out in another few days.

Have a good week.