KDP on Amazon! Warning:Opinion Alert

By now everyone in the Indie publishing world has formed an opinion about KDP Select, Amazon's program to promote ebooks on an exclusive basis. Arguments rage, pro and con. You can't have your ebook on any other platform. Should you give those exclusive rights away?

The short answer is yes, unless you are selling a bunch of books on B&N, Kobo, Sony, Apple, etc. etc., or on your own author website (you can't do that in the KDP program). So the short answer is absolutely dependent on what kind of success you are having elsewhere.

The program only applies to ebooks, not paper editions. For me, it was a no-brainer. I had my digital books on those other sites. Sales were flatter than a three day old birthday balloon. Wasn't doing a whole lot on Amazon, either. I write action adventure thrillers. That means I'm competing with superstars like Steve Berry or Lee Child or Clive Cussler. I'm not well known, yet. How was I going to gain exposure to the potentially millions of readers of my books?

The main argument against KDP Select seems to be the exclusivity clause. Hey, folks, it's only for 90 days at a time. You can always take any book out of the program. There isn't any long term obligation. What you get in return for enrollment is the attention of Amazon's mighty marketing machine.

Warning: Opinion Alert

Amazon is the major leagues of ebook marketing and exposure. Why play for an AA or AAA team if you can step into the majors?

A successful free promotion does a couple of things. It gains you X number of readers. It punches you into the "popularity" list in your genre. You could be #1 in free, #20 in the sub set of action/adventure or whatever, and still be nowhere near the top 100 paid, the golden hill we all want to scale. Top 100 paid means you are selling mucho copies. You get there, you're thinking about that new Mercedes. In the meantime you can get your book somewhere on that top 100 popularity list for your genre. White Jade is currently #20 on the Action/Adventure list on Kindle devices, #68 on the PC. I haven't a clue why it's different. Possibly it depends on where a reader buys the book. It can stay on the list for weeks and readers see it. Those popularity lists are driven by the number of free downloads.

I got more than 10,000 downloads when I promoted White Jade. That stimulated sales of the other books in the series. Enough to pay the light bill, not enough for the Mercedes. That's okay. Patience is everything. I'm happy to see royalties waiting. I'm happy to see any royalties at all. And I'm really happy knowing all those potential readers have my book waiting on their Kindles. Eventually they'll get to it and when they read it, many of them will want to buy the other books in the series. I can already see that happening.

Thank you, everyone who picked up White Jade.

A great feature of KDP Select is the tracking. You can see sales numbers by the hour, day, month, year. You have an exact record of royalties, updated regularly. Amazon pays directly to your account. You can see how many loaners there are and you get a royalty for those. Distribution cost, deducted from royalties, is only $0.15 per 1 Megabyte. You get 70% royalty on a book for $2.99 or more.

You have a behemoth marketing and distribution machine working for you, but you still have to self promote. You need good reviews, a 4+ star rating. You need to list your promotion on sites like Pixel of Ink, along with all of the usual social media stuff you might be doing. If you can tell me a better way to reach 10,000 plus readers in three days with no advertising budget, I'd love to know.

Amazon is in business to make a lot of money. They're willing to help self published writers succeed. If you're looking for a way to get the attention of readers who never heard of you, KDP Select is a good program.

Alex Lukeman 

Author of WHITE JADE, THE LANCE, THE SEVENTH PILLAR, BLACK HARVEST
http://www.alexlukeman.com

Tax Exemptions

Do you contemplate free speech and churches?  Do you think the benefits and restrictions of a 501(c) (3) organization are beneficial to society?

There are two tax advantages for organizations that agree to meet the criteria for 501(c) (3) organizations:

1.    Donations to the organization are tax deductible by the donors as charitable donations

2.    Income (related to their tax exempt status) is not taxable

In order to get those benefits, certain rules need to be followed. At this IRS link is a summary of the rules:

http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable-Organizations/Exemption-Requirements---Section-501(c)(3)-Organizations

Please note that some nonprofits choose to NOT meet all the criteria and therefore do NOT get both benefits. You will be able to note the verbiage on your receipt. If the organization chose not to qualify, the receipt will say that your donation is not tax deductible. 

I posit that the restrictions are beneficial to society. The restrictions give us at least some confidence that our donations are going for activities for which the organization received its 501(c) (3) status. For example: if the charitable purpose is to feed the poor, the organization will lose its exempt status if all the money goes to enrich the founder. Of course, we would have to do our own research to see if we're happy with the percentage going to overhead vs. to the "good works.” But at least the rules give us a bit of confidence that our money is going for the "good works" which qualified the organization as a 501(c) (3).

Does the tax deduction encourage people to donate to 501(c) (3) organizations? I posit that it does. Some might argue that issuing tax incentives to encourage good behavior is a misuse of the tax code. I disagree with those people. I agree we need to tread carefully when offering tax incentives so that the long term consequences don't bite us where it hurts.

I know that in these economic hard times, people are screaming "close the loop holes." But if the nonprofits are truly doing good works that benefit our society, then it is a good idea to incentivize people to make donations to help the organization achieve its charitable goal.

In summary, I believe the restrictions and the tax benefits to 501(c) (3) organizations benefit our society. Both (restrictions and benefits) should stay.

The next question is "should organizations that try to influence elections be granted 501(c) (3) status”? Or stated another way, do we want to incentivize (via tax deductions) people to give to such organizations? I say no. There is already too much money being thrown at electioneering.   Many people were sick of all the political ads. I don't see any need to incentivize that kind of giving. In my opinion, that would be opening a Pandora’s Box.

Then of course, we get to the subject of free speech.  501 (c) (3) organizations cannot use donations (that qualified as a tax deduction) to try to get someone elected. Is that restriction to free speech fair? I say it is. The donations were given preferred tax treatment because of specific charitable goals that qualified the organization. 

I realize that laws (aimed at trying to prevent elections from being corrupted) create a quandary for free speech.  But it doesn’t seem to me that the area of the 501 (c) (3) is the problem.  If you want to influence elections, then don’t elect to be a 501 (c) (3) organization.  It seems an easy option. 501 (c) (3) status should be limited to organizations doing charitable work.

Susan Aertker

http://susaninflorida.wordpress.com/

 

A Shiver of Recognition

Isn’t that what all creative writers want … to have crafted a passage so powerful and compelling that the reader physically trembles at the emotional memory or the sudden insight triggered by the words on the page. 

The first time I heard that phrase was last week in a workshop run by one of my fellow trekkers in Nepal. A full-time teacher of creative writing, Yasmina has taken on the daunting task of getting each member of the trekking group to share his or her experience in written form. Many in the group have little experience with creative writing and struggle with how to even start to record their thoughts and feelings.

Yasmina walked us through a series of exercises that were thought-provoking even for an experienced writer. But when she threw out that phrase— “a shiver of recognition”—as the goal of our scribbling, it seemed a moment of synchronicity. 

I was meant to be there.

I was meant to be there because my “job” for the foreseeable future is to complete the final draft of my novel, A FITTING PLACE.  I’ve had great encouragement from beta readers, who connect with my characters and love the plot. But as Yasmina’s phrase echoed in my brain, I knew what is still missing from my story.  My two primary characters are interesting because they are more than a bit out of the ordinary. But if I cannot write their out-of-the-ordinary story in a way that causes my readers to have that shiver of recognition, I should stop now.

I will not stop.  I will write it so that my readers tremble.  The question is how do I do that.

And what about those of you who are writers?  Do you struggle with that “how”?

Mary Gottschalk

http://marycgottschalk.com

www.Sailingdownthemoonbeam.com

http://twitter.com/marycgottschalk

THE WRITING OF

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DRACULA:

A PERSONAL JOURNEY AND TRAVEL GUIDE

By

Steven P. Unger

   My obsession to travel to every site related to either the fictional Count Dracula or his real historical counterpart, Prince Vlad Dracula the Impaler, grew out of a visit to Whitby, England, where part of the novel Dracula takes place.  I stood on the cemetery hill where, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray spent hour after hour sitting on their "favourite seat" (a bench placed over a suicide's grave near the edge of the cliff), gazing out toward the "headland called Kettleness" and the open North Sea beyond—while Count Dracula slept just beneath them.

In my mind's eye, I could see the un-dead Count Dracula rising at night from the flattened slab of the suicide's gravestone to greedily drink the blood of the living.

       The graveyard where Count Dracula spent his days sleeping in the sepulcher of a suicide looks the part that it plays, with its weathered limestone tombstones blackened by centuries of the everpresent North Sea winds.  That graveyard made the novel more visible, more visceral, to me, and I wondered if the sites in Transylvania and in the remote mountains of southern Romania would evoke the same feelings. As I was to discover—they did.

      At that moment I decided to visit and photograph every site in England and Romania that is closely related to either Bram Stoker's fictional Count Dracula or his historical counterpart, Prince Vlad Dracula the Impaler—to literally walk in their footsteps and to write a book about my experiences.

      Eventually I traveled along the Dracula Trail alone, using only public transportation, to some places that I'd seen before and to others I had only dreamed of, trying my best to systematically strip away the layers of myth about Count Dracula and Prince Vlad the Impaler to find the reality within.  I discovered in broken stones and parchments signed in blood why Prince Vlad's monstrous deeds in life would brand him forever with the name of Vlad Ţepeş (pronounced Tzeh·pish), Romanian for Vlad the Impaler, soon after his death.

     In my research and travels I discovered two fascinating coincidences that link the historical and the literary Draculas.  First and foremost is that Bram Stoker chose to name his villain "Dracula," based on the translation of the Romanian word "dracul" into "devil," never knowing that the historical Voivode (Prince) Dracula he had read about was also Vlad Ţepeş, with a horrific and compelling biography of his own.

     Bram Stoker's Transylvania was the pipe dream of an armchair traveler with a genius for writing:  real enough for the 19th Century reader, but bearing little resemblance to any Romania that ever existed.  For example, Stoker wrote of "hay-ricks [haystacks] in the trees" based on illustrations of Transylvanian haystacks built around stakes, with the ends of the stakes poking out like branches.  Thus, generations of Dracula readers assumed that Transylvanians put their haystacks up in trees.

       The second coincidence is the uncanny resemblance of the real Castle of Dracula—Vlad Ţepeş' fortress at Poenari, which Stoker had no knowledge of—to Count Dracula's fictional castle in Transylvania.  Perched on a remote peak near a glacial moraine in the Făgarăş Mountains of southern Romania and mirroring Count Dracula's fictional castle at the top of the Borgo Pass almost stone for stone, Poenari remains pristine and almost inaccessible.

     One of my favorite places on the Dracula Trail is Sighişoara, in Transylvania, the birthplace of Vlad Ţepeş.  I was enchanted the moment I entered Sighişoara's Upper Town.

     All at once I was in the middle of a perfect storybook medieval village enclosed by thick fortress walls, with cobblestone streets and Easter-egg-colored houses leaning every which way.  Guarding the town square was a spire-roofed and turreted 14th Century clock tower replete with carved wooden figures that circle a track to mark the passage of time.  In one window, a drummer plays to signal the hours; below the drummer, the angel of the night replaces the angel of the day at the final stroke of midnight.  In another window, gods and goddesses appear, changing for each day of the week.

     But let's get back to Poenari, the real Castle of Dracula.  I had traveled to other remote, forbidding places before entering the almost lightless forest of Poenari.  Near Albania's southern border, I hiked the Vikos Gorge, a dozen miles from the nearest stone-housed village.  I baked beneath the unrelenting sun of the Timna Valley close to the Red Sea, where 120º in the shade is considered picnic weather.  But never before or since have I felt the apprehension and isolation I did while climbing to Vlad Ţepeş' mountaintop fortress at Poenari.  The forest was as quiet as a tomb; I can't recall hearing the song of even a single bird.

     The ascent was exhausting.  At last I arrived at the lone approach to the fortress, a wooden footbridge (see top left of photo).  Of all the places I explored that are associated with Vlad Ţepeş, only at Poenari did I feel that he was somehow still keeping watch.  Thousands of boyars and their families had been force-marched there from Tărgovişte to die rebuilding the castle for Prince Vlad; it was here that his treacherous brother Radu stormed the fortress with cannons, reducing the once courtly residence into broken turrets and formless rubble.  And it was here that Prince Dracula's wife cast herself from the highest window of the eastern tower, choosing a swift death over the torture of the stake.

Walk along the top of the thick fortress walls of Poenari, look northward, and you can see part of the Transfăgarăşan Road, leading to a glacial moraine and one of the deepest lakes in the world.  (According to local legend, a dragon sleeps at the bottom of the lake, and the villagers nearby will caution you not to throw stones in the water lest the dragon awake.)  The view south from the fortress is straight down, to the Arges River far in the distance, and even farther, the road to Curtea de Arges.

Parts of this article have previously appeared in Romar Traveler and other online publications.

In the Footsteps of Dracula:  A Personal Journey and Travel Guide, is published and distributed by World Audience Publishers  
On FB: In the Footsteps of Dracula 
In the Footsteps of Dracula available at: www.amazon.com,. www.amazon.co.uk, www.barnesandnoble.com, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.com/Kindle, and with free delivery worldwide from www.bookdepository.co.uk.

Thanksgiving, a bird’s eye view

Traditionally, the holiday season is viewed as a time to reflect on ‘thankfulness’ for the general health and welfare of our communities. Nevertheless, a 21^st century question is, ‘Are we, as communities, contributing to the eco-health or demise of our urban, suburban as well as rural communities?’

Through participating in a series of community meetings related to the reclassification of wetland areas from ‘flood plain’ to ‘hazard area’, I heard person after person describe significant change in the quantity of their community’s flood waters, areas flooding that had never flood before; and even, not once or twice but numerous times, raw sewage which seeped into surrounding creeks, streams and rivers. So, as the present-day caretaker for a ‘generational family owned property’ once labeled the Bolton Estate located in Henrico County Virginia, I am alarmed.

When stable, this property serves as a host site for a variety of wildlife, ranging from fox to the American eagle. In fact, historical records indicate the central lake to be a natural pool; but overtime, it was extended to first support more than 500 acres of agriculture activity and a second time, to support outdoor active recreation facilities. Nevertheless, due to the impact of surrounding urban/suburban development, the area is no longer usable for fresh-water recreation. So, you see, I share with the wildlife a ‘bird’s eye view’ of the impact of urban/suburban runoff and pollution. I’ve watched a so-to-speak once pristine spring-feed wetland become a dumping ground; yet, it is one of the few remaining community green corridors – habitats.

On the other hand, the area similar to other areas does not have to remain a dumping ground, a hazard area. There are alternative land use strategies which will not only recover but prevent future negative impact. First and foremost, there is – related to this property - a County of Henrico sponsored creek restoration program. Still, for it to effectively work, other strategies need to be implemented; for examples, a rethink of how land is developed, use of ‘green build’ construction alternatives; and perhaps, more importantly, an awareness of the eco-consequences of individual life-style choices.

So, while I cringe at the fact we have labeled 21st century green spaces hazard; perhaps, it is an excellent first step. For, it should be the beginning of an evangelistic awakening: a challenge to focus on implementing forms of green land use that not only lessen the impact of urban/suburban development but recover the eco-health of our Nation’s communities. Individually and collectively we do have a pivotal eco opportunity: the option of choosing to implement green land use strategies which enable eco-healthy community landscapes or continue down a path of present-day life-styles which contribute to the decline of eco-systems.

While many view the holiday season as a time to celebrate family and host feasts, I want be thankful for the world’s natural beauty, focus on the recovery of community eco health. Why? In early 2013, members of the Global and National Climate Change Academies will release eco research compiled by member national and global scientists. Then, our newly elected National representatives are legislatively required to review this research and enable eco regulation.

Recovering ‘hazard areas’ – green space corridors, will require the joint effort of all: elected and appointed representation, land use development professionals, governmental regulation and of course, regional businesses and residential communities. So, together, let’s make a commitment to ‘green’ America’s landscape - move ‘hazard areas’ from eco-weak to eco-chic, create a legacy of eco healthy urban, suburban as well as rural green spaces. And, perhaps one day, the birds will look down and think, ‘Whew, those humans, they had a close call; but, thankfully recognized the error of their ways!’

About the author – Spotlighted by Landscape Architect magazine as an Industry ‘mover & shaker’, Glen Allen VA based The Wright Scoop –Sylvia Hoehns Wright, recipient of the ‘Turning America from Eco-weak to Eco-chic’ award sponsored by Hines Horticulture, Project Evergreen and Today’s Garden Center magazine – challenges all to ‘green’ America’s landscapes, create a legacy of healthier urban/suburban communities. For details of Wright's activities, visit web site www.TheWrightScoop.com 

Pix available on request – Pix caption – Generational-family wetland property provides habitat for Wright’s Glen Allen VA community. 

Sylvia Hoehns Wright