IT’S not every day you get to do your debut (of my novel When
Life Walks On Bare Soles) Book Launch on Australia Day weekend. I must be
one of the luckiest authors in Australia.
I'M taking part in the Australia
Day Book Giveaway Blog Hop hosted by Book'd Out.
If you have not been there yet, go
to Book'd
Outfor the list of all the sites giving away wonderful books.
From me you can win one of two print
copies of my Aussie-steeped noir novel Iraqi
Icicle or one of two copies or my non-fiction collection of funny anecdotes
7 Shouts.
Enter by leaving a comment on
this post or email
me. I will not be using your email address for any other purpose. If you want to join my book review panel or receive more information about BBB, you
will need to tell me.
Whatever you do please say whether you would like to win a print
or eBook and which title. Two books will be for Aussie residents and two to readers
from other countries.
Learn more about Iraqi Icicle and
7 Shouts You can also check out some of my past blogs for info on #BBBooks.
Available HERE @ $2.99 and free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers
THE jury is still out on the success of my non-price based promotion of
Jane Sharp’s psychic mystery anthology, Vision: the Reluctant Psychic.
My publishing hut Bent Banana Books publishes Jane’s
book.
With the literary explosion propelling millions of eBooks
into cyberspace, literally hundreds of thousands of authors are filling Amazon
bookshelves.
Amazon has millions of eBooks for sale but only a few
hundred titles will rake in the big dough.
Maybe it is because writers are usually better at English
than maths. Whatever the reason, many wannabees do not seem to realize how astronomical
are the odds of having a best-seller to your name.
KDP is the arm of Amazon which facilitates self-publishing.
KDP provides a calculator which estimates sales based on Amazon ranking. You
would hope it is reasonably accurate.
So let’s look at an author whose book is ranked
1000, above millions of its competitors. Predicted sales are 100-300 copies a day. I would imagine the range of the predicted sales is so wide as books sell in different numbers during various months of the year.
Depending on the cover price, the 1000th top seller should be returning a reasonable income
to its author.
What of a book ranked 5000, still ranked above millions.
The calculator says 10-30 books a day. Even at the top
end, it is barely a decent wage by many western standards.
These figures debunk the myth that eBooks have
allowed a significant number of authors to give up their day jobs.
So how did Jane’s book go? Well it improved from
500,000 to 90,000. Sounds impressive. One or two sales can provoke such a movement so I am not
getting carried away.
But it did show you can market around things other
than price. That is worth crowing about. In this instance we pushed "free to Kindle Unlimited members" and Jane's birthday which by coincidence fell on the day of our promotion.
And now we press on towards #5000. Any suggestions for our future tactics?
Jane says I did all right and that reminds me of a song:
AS the publishing guru at the helm of Bent Banana Books, I decided I
would do a promotion for Jane Sharp’s first book, Vision the Reluctant Psychic, of her ghost-mystery series .
I decided I would do the promo with Kindle Book Review because they
seemed good value and Vision the Reluctant Psychic is exclusive to Kindle.
But the thing was to have another hook in addition to it
being available for free to Kindle Unlimited and Prime subscribers.
I did not want to do a price discount as I am tired of
small presses and indie author promoting around price while the major publishers
merrily sell heaps of eBooks at $15 and upwards.)
Anyway, I told author Jane Sharp I had booked a promo
for January 16 and she replied that it was her birthday.
Pretty clever, eh? Please ask all your friends to see
if they can find the message.
Do you reckon my alt to price-based marketing has any
legs? Will it garner sales?
Give us your opinion and other suggestions on non-fiscal
promos I might try.
I will keep you informed of the results.
Cheers
Bernie
When we sell heaps of copies of Jane’s books Vision: the Reluctant Psychic (http://amzn.to/1GbfAgg)and Vision: the Complete Trudy Harper Psychic
Investigations (http://bitly.com/1C9DWox ),
I will spend all of my money on bubbles, Bimmers and bling
and I will have discovered the meaning of life.
This is a wonderful story about a 38-year-old Irsaeli pacifist inspired by Lorde. It is from972 magazine
It is a bit slow to start but stick with it and your spirits will soar.
Freshly back from his journey downthe beaten path,
Yuval Ben-Ami is setting out on another adventure, a musical one, a political
one — forging a binational tribute to the Kiwi queen bee.
There’s
a nice restaurant in Tel Aviv where my girlfriend Ruthie and I have lunch
almost every Friday. It is named “Nehama,” or rather, it is named nothing. No
sign graces its door, or rather its opening. The entire place is a modest
kitchen that greets the Yemenite quarter by way of a missing “fourth wall.”
Nehama, a middle aged Yemenite-Israeli is the proprietor and sole cook. She
makes the world’s finest lentil soup.
There’s a nice guy in Tel Aviv. His name is Yaron Fishman and he
plays a good banjo-ukulele. Yaron leads a decisively Tel Avivian sort of double
life: working in the high tech industry during the day, then heading the
“Atomic Band,” an indie-folk combo, and cutting tracks in his Ramat Gan flat at
night. He and I recently started toying with my own songs and needed to decide
where to take them. What better place to do that than Nehama’s on a Friday?
It was a typically warm November Friday in 2014. Yaron, too,
arrived with a Ruthie: his ex-girlfriend and current best chum. Unbeknownst to
us as we sat down on Nehama’s plastic chairs, we were headed for an adventure.
We were about to break ethnic, linguistic and national bounds through music, or
at least to give it an honest shot.
This tale of attempted integration begins with a very
homogeneous crowd, in the heart of Tel Aviv’s all-Israeli bubble. Both guys and
both Ruthies at the table were Ashkenazi Sabras: Israel-born but of European
roots. The food, of course, wasn’t. Nehama served us delicious fried “malawach”
bread and long baked “jakhnoon” dough, spicy skhoog paste and “hilbe” – a
strange gooey spice that notably affects, though not disagreeably, one’s body
odor. Nechama’s joint is the haunt of Jewish Tel Avivians of many origins. from
Iraqi-Israelis to Ethiopians, but that night we were all of the same gene pool,
the same upbringing, and while feasting we spoke about the music we all liked:
Western music.
Old pigweed
“Do you know what pigweed is?” Yaron asked.
None of us did.
“I have this idea,” He explained. “I’m thinking of putting out
an EP each year, with Hebrew covers of songs by one artist I like. Right now
I’m working on Mark Knopfler, and he has this song called “Old pigweed.” It’s
about a man who’s about to eat this great soup, but then he realizes there’s
old pigweed in it, which is, like, some sort of unsexy herb. I’m just wondering
how I should translate ‘pigweed’.”
He smiled and hummed:
Who put old pigweed In the mulligan Was it you? Who put old pigweed In the mulligan stew?
I didn’t know what pigweed was. I did know Yaron was reading my
mind. He simply went ahead and made the exact suggestion I was planning to make
over lunch, though with a slight variation. I took a swig of “black beer,”
Israel’s peculiar but delightful malt pop. Alcohol free though it is, black
beer gives guts, and I needed guts, because the subject of my fan tribute is
not quite as established as Mark Knofler. “I’ve been thinking of doing the
same,” I said, “But with Lorde.”
Lorde, for the two or three people worldwide who haven’t heard
of her, rears from Auckland, New Zealand. Her real life name is Ella
Yelich-O’Connor, and her sober electro-pop hit, “Royals” landed her two Grammys
and a Brit in 2013. It won her ironic fame and fortune, ironic: because the
song is an ode to accepting one’s social status and rejecting the dream life of
pop stars as fantasy.
I discovered Lorde’s album, “Pure Heroine,” about a year ago
thanks to a younger friend, and became addicted. This was strange. I
haven’t descended into authentic fandom since obsessing over the Beatles in
sixth grade. Ever since then, I have been a music snob listening to Schubert,
to Ornette Coleman, to Leadbelly, to old stuff, in short.
Suddenly, at 38, an album cut by a 16 year old was spinning me
right round. The discovery surprised me, and I felt that my surprise
could amuse the world, so I shared it. I “went for it,” so to speak,
translating four of Lorde’s songs and uploading them to YouTube, coloring my
online personality with Lordeisms. Over my birthday, Ruthie and I were in
Europe and she stunned me with tickets to a Paris festival headlined by Lorde.
We hitchhiked down there from the Netherlands and got good lifts. When music
draws you, you fly.
All
this was goofy in a pleasant way, I suppose, but now I was hoping to put real
time and effort into a whim, not to mention money, and involve other people in
it. I outlined my vision before the Ruthies and Yaron: We will make an actual
little album with a cover, with guest artists and cool mixes. Silently, I
thought: Isn’t this going a bit overboard?
Yaron didn’t seem to worry. “Let’s do it,” he said, and raised a
forkful of jakhnoon in cheer.
The hypocrite
Not far away from Nehama and
its relaxed afternoons, this country is the very opposite of simple, and what
isn’t visible from around a happy table becomes amply apparent once one goes
online. Thanks to my array of Facebook friends, many of whom are activists, I am exposed to plenty of content relating to racism in
this land, including propaganda spread byextreme
right-wing organization “Lehava”(“flame”).
Lehava incites Israelis against
Palestinians,portraying the
latter as sexual predatorswho
prey on defenseless Jewish women. Their hate speech reflects that which was
used to defame my ancestors in Europe of the 1930s, which means that it offends
me personally. I cannot stand silent when something this
disgusting is going on.
A few days after our lunch I was reading a report about Lehava’s
latest actions, then calmed myself by putting together a fifth Lorde
translation. This one is less literal than the previous ones. It referenced
Lehava’s propaganda directly.
The song is Lorde’s third single: “Team,” which is naturally
anthem-like. Relying on Lorde’s original imagery, I turned it into an anthem of
sorts for those who fight Lehava and their likes. “We are imprisoned, already
in the crib,” read the lyrics when translated back into English, “In barricaded
yards they hold us segregated. We’ll build a palace on the ruins of
their lies, and know: we are friends.”
“I’m kind of over being told that my neighbor is the devil. So
there.”
I sang this to the camera and uploaded to Youtube and then fell
into sadness.
Are we really friends? Are we on each other’s team? Could we be?
One thing cannot be denied: We really are held segregated. I grew up in a
settlement in East Jerusalem, surrounded by Palestinians, yet hadn’t spoken to
one until I left home to travel Europe in my twenties. Times have changed.
Today I work with Palestinians, guiding dual narrative tours of the Holy Land.
I have become a huge believer in the idea that sharing this land in equality is
the only key to giving it a future. Everything I do today is
bi-national. Everything – except the Lorde EP. Here I was, putting
together something special with another member of my tribe, my very specific
tribe
This was going to be a local tribute, and in my book, the word
local has changed meaning over the past few years. Nothing can be local unless
it is inclusive. This called for some thinking. I put on “Pure Heroine” and did
just that.
(to be continued)
And I
hope I can bring you part 2. In the meantime, Here is the link to my eBook O Lorde
Here is
our vid: Yuval Ben-Ami’s cover of Team by Lorde
READERS around the world buy more books in January than any other month.
Christmas
Day and Boxing Day are the easily the two biggest book buying days of the year.
But January beats December on monthly sales.
Why
so? Well, the predominant theory from those who theorize about such things is
you, the reader, give indies and small publishers a go in January.
People
with new Kindles or other eReaders in their hands on Christmas Day or Boxing
Day are not inclined to take chances so they choose best-selling authors. By January they are more likely to flirt with a tempting book by a writer previously
unknown to them.
But
how do readers choose indie books or small publishers? How do they even find the good ones among the three million books Amazon alone stocks?
Good
question and I do not know. How do you do it? (You might need to be a Google+ member to comment below. I am not sure but sometimes I can be a hard marker and I may have whimsically made that stipulation. Anyway, you can see my email link right of this blog so there is little excuse not to continue the conversation, admittedly one-sided ATM.)
I received a good review for my neo-noir novel Iraqi Icicle in Publisher’s Weekly which resulted in few sales. I received
another good review in our State newspaper and a fellow author said that must
have provided a sales boost. Nope. Professional reviews do not seem to cut it anymore.
Print media supplies book reviews less
frequently than they used to. The reviews are shorter and harder to find.
I
suspect the 80-20 rule applies to book buying as it does in many situations: About
20% of readers buy 80% of books, that is what I believe.
If
you are a 20 percenter or know of one, please alert them to the books on my website. See if any tickle their fancy. Ask them to take a little time to read the reviews on Amazon. There are not a
stack of them but they are authentic and should ring true to the reader.
Tell
me how you find books you wish to read.
Here
is my Publisher’s Weekly review in case it might spark you into investigating my novel
Iraqi Icicle.
AND here are all the wonderful books you can buy from #BBBooks retailers in January. Oh, and please pass on this post to other 20 percenters. I am sure they are lovely people unlike those nasty 1-percenters. No I am not talking about Hell's Angels.
OUR song is associated with a true story in the novel, Iraqi Icicle, which is set in
Brisbane Australia, BTW, despite references to international cultures and conflicts.
The U.S. invaded Panama on
December 20, 1989, to arrest that country’s president Manuel Noriega for drug
and arms smuggling.
Noriega took refuge in the
Vatican Embassy in Panama City.
Armed Forces Radio launched a rock music attack of soldiers' requests on the Embassy. It is not quite as straight-forward as that and you will need
to read the novel for the full story, or my version of it.
Noriega had been in the pay
of the CIA for many years before he became a designated bad guy. One U.S. soldier
certainly knew this because here’s his request for a war blast at the Vatican.
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