I can't believe I have to ask this.    But I don't actually know off-hand.

On Bookbub's requirement pages, it says

Novels and collections of short stories or novellas should be at least 150 pages in length

But what does that mean? Yes, we can all format our books to be any length we want (one word per page!) but I assume Bookbub has a finer formula than that.

I believe Amazon calculates a page at about 350 words, so is Bookbub looking for ~52,500 words?

I've done a Google search on "The Sound of Footsteps" + "Diane Patterson" and nothing has come up. It's already sold 5x over yesterday, and it's only 10:30 where I am.

I am really sorry if this is a duplicate or well-trodden. I did a search on "Kindle First" but didn't see anything.

I went to the Kindle bestseller lists to see what was what, and immediately saw there were four new books I'd never heard of before high up on the list -- including at Number One. Since that one was a Roman history novel, which I can't get enough of, I checked it out, and it turns out it's free to Prime subscribers under the Kindle First program.

The Kindle First program offers Prime subscribers a choice of 1 out of 4 new books coming from Amazon Publishing. For free.

My question is: obviously the book is benefiting from this -- I Am Livia hasn't even been published yet and it's number one. The other 3 are doing spectacularly well too.

Seems like a huge incentive to go with Amazon's imprints.

Does anyone know how this works for the author? Like, do they get paid per book, either the full 70% or a lesser percentage?

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/27/sherlock-holmes-is-in-the-public-domain-american-judge-rules/

A federal judge has issued a declarative judgment stating that Holmes, Watson, 221B Baker Street, the dastardly Professor Moriarty and other elements included in the 50 Holmes works Arthur Conan Doyle published before Jan. 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law and can be freely used by creators without paying any licensing fee to the Conan Doyle estate.

Images will now show in Gmail by default.

Have you ever wondered why Gmail asks you before showing images in emails? We did this to protect you from unknown senders who might try to use images to compromise the security of your computer or mobile device... Instead of serving images directly from their original external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers.

You won't be able to tell when someone opens your newsletter any more, because Google is going to send everything through a proxy.

Some cynics out there speculate that Google will be coming out with its own analytics package soon.

I've written a prequel novella to my series that currently I've entitled "The Ghost In The Walls." The blurb I've come up with it so far is:

There’s no such thing as ghosts. Reality is always much, much worse.

Drusilla Thorne and her sister Stevie need a place to live in San Antonio while Drusilla sets up her new identity. The place they find is insanely cheap — because it’s supposedly haunted. That’s fine with Drusilla, because she knows ghosts aren’t real.

But something is making enough noise to keep her awake at night. And Drusilla will get to the bottom of the haunting.
Sometimes Drusilla needs to remember asking questions might bring answers nobody wants to hear.

I really want to be sure that anyone picking this up isn't going to be surprised when (spoiler alert) there are no ghosts. There is a very terrestrial explanation for everything going on.

Is the lack of ghosts clear from the blurb, or am I going to get angry readers?

In one thread today someone mentioned VC Andrews and I thought, "Man, I remember those books." Then I ran across this story about how Kiernan Shipka (Don Draper's daughter on "Mad Men") has just signed to star in Lifetime's (!!!) adaptation of Flowers in the Attic.

Well, one mention is nostalgia; two mentions is an excuse to stop trying to write and come to WC to ask.

I know that in the erotica category there's lots of "pseudo-incest" -- daddies get turned into stepdaddies. I know Andrews' books don't qualify as erotica. (Actually, I had to run over to Amazon to see what genre they're considered. They're listed under Genre Fiction: Family Saga, Horror, and Suspense, in case you care.) And they sure don't qualify as pseudo-anything. They're straight-up incest.

Could VC Andrews self-publish her tales of intrafamily woe these days? Could Big 5/Random Penguin publish them and we can't?

The last three times I've posted to the WC the posts haven't shown up. Is my browser hungry? Am I on Betsy's bad list? Sun spots?

(Mostly, this new topic is a way to test if this post shows up.)

My book comes out of Select on 5/15. I set it up for pre-order on Kobo and iTunes.

Today I've gotten an email from KDP saying my book is available elsewhere and they're not happy about it.

I double-checked: Kobo still clearly says "pre-order."

Is this a typical problem and I can just tell KDP what's what? Or is there another problem with setting up pre-order?

Before I get started, let me start with the caveat: I am NOT referring to any one in particular with this question. I'm just generally curious.

Lots of authors have generously shared the numbers that they've made from their trade pub contracts and from self-pubbing. How much they made from every sale, what it took to earn out, etc. Often the number of books sold is not astonishing: tens of thousands (more than I've ever sold, but not a crazy, unbelievable number).

Many of these writers begin self-publishing and start moving TONS of books. Hundreds of thousands of books.

Of course, ebook prices tend to be lower than trade pubbed. And writers can get more books out faster, because their readers want their books now.

But still... 100,000 books > 10,000 books, any day of the week. And this kind of numerical discrepancy gets mentioned again...and again...and again.

So my question is: what's going on here?

1) Trade pub houses have much higher expenses (after all, they need to foot the bill for the books that don't do so well, as well as the big ones), so simply producing a book makes it difficult to produce a lot of them, or
2) Physical distribution impacts the number of books that can be sold by as much as an order of magnitude, or
3) Price (7.99 for a trade paperback vs 2.99 for a self-pub ebook) plays such huge factor in attractiveness of books that paper books will never move as fast as ebooks, or
4) Trade pub houses have been unbelievably ripping off authors, to a degree no one previously suspected?

I know Kris Rusch had come right and said publishers are cooking the books. But is this a general suspicion with trade pubbed authors? Because if I'd been selling 10,000 books with a house and then turned around to move 10x books on my own, I'd be looking for someone to start 'splainin'.

I uploaded my book in February, and I just got my first remittance email from Amazon for February's sales!

SQUEE!

(It's not a huge check -- I could maybe buy the next twenty people a small coffee at Starbucks. Which isn't much but would make for one heck of a party at that Starbucks! BUT I'M NOT GIVING IT BACK.)

...and I feel a tummyache coming on.

Like somehow sending it out to people who requested it (in exchange for reviews!) was a bad idea.

I don't get this: I put my work up for appraisal (and hopefully approval) and then get scared that I might, I dunno, actually get some.

The human mind is a funny thing.

There's a subplot in my current book that is best described as the MC engaging in self-sabotage: there's something she needs to do, something she very much claims she wants, something that she absolutely thinks she wants... but every step of the way she sabotages the mission. Because, of course, deep down, she knows that achieving this goal is absolutely the worst thing for her. (The irony, of course, being that this goal is coming toward her, one way or the other, and she can't stop it.)

Someone suggested that this describes every rom-com ever, which might be true. The closest example I could think of that felt more like the flavor I have in mind would be the investigation in "Angel Heart" (sorry to spoil that for anyone), but there was an external supernatural influence working there as well. In this story, it's definitely Man vs Himself (or Herself), and I would love to see how someone else has handled it.

Any suggestions gratefully appreciated!