alexandraerin

For every 10 sales of The Gift of the Bad Guy Kindle edition... up to the first 70... I will expand the map(ish) that I drew showing Pelorus and the Mother Isles. So the "finished" expanded map will cover eight times the area, extending north to show Tylea, south to show the Argentus, more of the Ardan, and the location of Malbus and some other assorted places, and east to show the western part of Khazarus and the edge of the Shift proper, plus some other stuff to the west.

Note: It's not going to be any higher quality or more detailed... I'm working with physical limitations here. But it'll give the relative locations and approximate shapes of things, which more graphically capable people could use as a starting point and readers who have a difficulty reading about distant lands without a visual aid showing where they are in relation to each other can have that aid.

American Kindle Store.

UK Kindle Store.

German Kindle Store. (Note: Book is in English.)

Note: Kindle format e-books do not require a $100+ piece of specialty hardware to run. You can read them on your desktop or on many major smartphones using free software. While I get the same money even if people buy it just to see more of my map scrawlings, my actual goal here is to get more copies of the book into the e-hands of more people who want to read it, faster.

This offer expires in a week. When I wake up on Tuesday I'll check the sales and then start drawing the appropriate number of map segments. After that I won't have time to draw the map before WisCon, and after WisCon I won't be at my desktop computer for a while.

Edit: To sweeten the pot a little... my housemate has some actual "skills of an artist", as they say dans la belle internet... so when my scribblings are finished, and after I've shared them with you, I'll be turning them over to her to produce a higher-quality version. What do you say, internets?

Can't sleep. Creative brain isn't awake to write. So I've put what I hope are the finishing touches on the The Gift of the Bad Guy Kindle Edition and sent it off for review.

I've been having good results on the self-published version (in EPUB and PDF) with the sale price of 49 cents, so I'm going to leave it up for a while. That sale price is not going to be a permanent feature, but I'd kind of like to get a "critical mass" of copies out there.

Sales of the special Author Appreciation Editions (also available on that page, scroll down) are going to be closing on May 21st so I can draw a line underneath GOTBG and move on to other projects. Because of technical limitations, I'm not able to offer AAEs in Kindle format, though the PDF version works fine on Kindle and looks pretty sharp.

Top two questions I get these days are both from people who are eager to see the next newsletter, so I guess it's a hit. They are "When's the next one coming out?" and "Is there some way I can pay in advance instead of setting up a subscription payment?"

The answer to the first question is the last week in May... this way I have a whole month to accumulate content for it.

The answer to the second question is, yes, yes there is. I got like half a dozen inquiries along that line after the April newsletter went out, so I set up a "just send me the newsletter" payment plan. It's a one-time thing, gets you the newsletter for a year. The price is flexible. Default price is $25, which is just over $2 a month. It goes as low as $10 and as high as $100. So far most folks have been content to buy in at the $25 level.

The newsletter has generated way more "fan mail" than anything else I've done. It's really quite incredible.

On another note, in order to get more grist for Fantasy In Miniature I'm considering taking a page from other crowdfunders and doing a thing where people who make a donation to the site can provide a prompt. I'd put a "stock" limit of 3 or 5 or some other small number so I don't get buried... assuming there would be enough demand to bury me, of course. I'd put a field on the story to credit the prompter and list the actual prompt. If I do this, I think I'll name the service "For Prompt Payment and Speedy Insertion", which discerning readers will note is a reference to the greatest Edgar Allen Poe story of all time.

That's "if". Right now this is just an idle idea. If it tickles anybody's fancy, feel free to say so... an enthusiastic response can be the difference between "if" and "when"... though it would still be a "when". I've got a lot going on right now, so this would probably be a late June or July thing.

Anyway, I'm getting sleepy again... time to go upstairs and hit the floor.

After my learning experience that concluded yesterday, I decided to test the waters on Amazon with a small project. So I took my classicesque science fiction story "The Redundant Man Who Was Redundant" and made a quick work-up of it for Kindle. I don't recall when I submitted it to the store, exactly, but I have a feeling it must have been this morning. In any event, it's up already.

I feel conflicted about putting a 3,000 word story up for 99 cents (Amazon won't go any lower). Following the "iTunes analogy", a short story is a song, but no analogy is perfect.

To me this seems like a price hike, but part of that is the fact that we don't typically buy short stories individually. I've learned as part of the conversation on e-book pricing that there is a market of people who enjoy buying shorts for that price, to read on their phones/tablets/whatever. That's something I'm going to bear in mind going forward, though I'll probably try to offer greater value in the future, either by doubling up short pieces or putting together slightly longer ones. When I've got enough of them of a suitable theme together to sell them as a package I'll put up an anthology within Amazon's 70% royalty sweetspot. This story here is more of a proof-of-concept than anything else.

So, let's talk about the Kindle. Buying it and not another e-reader was initially a business decision, but I am going to be using it as an e-reader so a review may be in order.

Note that my decision to focus on developing things for the Kindle does not reflect any great love of Amazon as a company. There are things about their existence that I love, but suffice it to say that if you have qualms about their business practices or attitudes towards proprietary content, nothing about the Kindle is so rock solid awesome that you should sit up and take notice.

Also note: I'm specifically talking about the Kindle 3G here.

Size/Weight

This is a big deal to me, because I have a mitochondrial condition and I can't hold weight out from my body for prolonged periods of time or I'll burn down the house and put John Larroquette into a coma without losing strength in my arms. This includes objects the weight of a typical hardback book, at least over the periods of time that I like to be reading. Older portable electronic devices sometimes gave me this problem, as well. Even a relatively small phone can wear my arm down over the course of a long call.

At the same time, I hate tiny devices. They're so easy to lose, overlook and forget. I'm happy that my new phone is bigger than my old phone (the Pre) was, because one of the reasons I was so slow in replacing the lost Pre was the possibility that I'd just set/dropped it somewhere inside the house.

The Kindle fulfills my needs nicely. It's big enough that I'm not afraid I'll lose it (much, this is me we're talking about) but it's quite light. It was thinner from front to back than I'd pictured... the whole e-ink thing and lack of a backlight and so on probably contributed to that.

The usable area of the screen compares nicely to the size of a paperback novel. It's not quite a "full-sized page", but it's a nice approximation. I can read it comfortably at normal reading distances.

The Screen

One of the best features. E-ink is awesome. I spent waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to long trying to figure out where the edge of the peely thing was to get the protective screen with the initial instructions on it off before I realized I was just looking at the screen. Things look really sharp and clear on the e-ink screen, whether it's the impressive etching-style pictures that pop up when you put it to sleep or the font on your book or the cool insignia that I took a picture of on using phone's camera. If you saw that on my Facebook, the graininess is all the phone. It's freaking sharp on the Kindle.

The lack of a backlight is hardly an issue at all because the screen is readable in any condition in which paper would be readable, and perhaps a bit more as the Pearl color/texture catches light well. My first attempt at reading in bed with a night light (it's right up by my head and has a switch to turn off, so it makes a decent reading light) was mixed because I waited until I was so tired the letters were moving. I'll give it a proper test tonight.

The refresh rate seems very low, which is both understandable given the underlying technology and not a great encumberance to usefulness. Probably there's somebody somewhere who would hack their Kindle into a Gameboy emulator, but this is not a natural platform for action gaming.

The Mechanical Interface

I miss having a touch-screen when I compare it to my phone, but honestly using finger swipes to page through a book five hundred times is just not great. In reading a hard copy of a book, we learn to ignore the page flipping. Maybe the same thing could happen with having to stop and flick a finger across the screen, but for now it seems like that takes me right out of what I'm reading. The little page-flipping buttons on the edge of the Kindle's screen? Seemed weird to me, but darn if they're not intuitive once you get reading.

I keep wanting them to be lower because I keep wanting to hold it down by the keyboard, but I imagine that reading it for long periods of time, the middle (where the page buttons are) will be a better place to grip. My housemate bryirfox got herself a Sony Reader this week and it has the touch screen page-flipping or via a button at the bottom of the screen. This seems better to me. I want any "interface" between me and what I'm reading to be invisible when I'm reading.

The keyboard is where we hit my first actual complaint. I prefer a physical keyboard to a visual one. I'm a skilled enough QWERTY typist that it doesn't matter how small the keys are, I can probably pop out text at about the same rate that you (for a statistically average you) could do so on a real keyboard. You give me a device with a QWERTY keyboard and a way of transmitting written documents and I'm going to write stories on it. The Kindle has a keyboard; it can do Gmail. Knowing this, I figured it would probably replace my keyless phone as my portable handheld thought transcriber.

It took me a while to figure out the typing position. Holding the device like a Gameboy and thumb-typing doesn't work. It's awkward because the keys are to the middle of the device and there are rather wide margins on either side because of the contours of the bottom giving less usable space than is apparent from the top. This is especially true on the right side, where the nav buttons take up a lot extra real estate... you have to reach past them to hit the right hand keys. "N" was the letter I missed most consistely, because of this placement issue. It takes more of a calculator-style grip, with the device held in one hand and my finger gliding over the keyboard. It works. Not as fast as two-handed typing but it works.

Until I need to punctuate. The period is right there. If I want to comma or quote or apostrophe, it takes a minimum of three keystrokes plus a variable number of nav-key pushes: symbol key, [navigate to punctuation mark if necessary], click, symbol key again to get out of it.

So I'm probably mostly going to be writing chunks of narration on it to get me started on longer stories that I'll finish elsedevice, or as bits of flash fiction (shit, I knew I forgot to do something today... the Kindle kind of ate my non-MU time).

If you're not a such a ninja typist that you can bang out a story by tracing a finger over little tiny buttons in the first place, this -might- not be an impediment to you. But I have a feeling that lesser typists will find the keyboard even more frustrating when they try to use it.

The Operating System/Interface

Not great. Some of it's nice and intuitive but the Kindle seems to be built on arbitrary limitations. I can organize my Cat Valente books into a folder, but I can't seem to take my subscriptions to Fantasy In Miniature and Tales of MU and do the same with them. I imagine people with lots of blog subscriptions find this frustrating, or else they know some separate bit of organize-fu that I'm missing. Regardless, it's frustrating to not be able to use one grouping solution for everything.

(Yes, I'm paying to get my own work... but it's more than offset by what others are paying and I'd rather see what they're seeing. The preview function on the Kindle blog publishing site just doesn't isn't very good, and doesn't seem to work on all browsers.)

I understand that this is not a tablet or a computer substitute, but more personalization/customization would be nice. Yes, the screensaver images are very sharp and very cool and will be one of the first things I show off to people who haven't seen a Kindle before. It's a nice bit of branding, that. But people would care more about their Kindles if they could put change out the pictures, keep only their favorites, replace them with their own images. Imagine if when your Kindle goes to sleep it looks like the cover of the Necronomicon Ex Mortis from the Evil Dead movies. Or if you could put the cover of your favorite actual book there. Or a picture of your partner and kids. Or a random picture from your photo album. This would change the Kindle from being a e-reader with a cool picture to my e-reader with my cool pictures.

It would also make it easy to spot yours when there's more than one in a room.

Maybe people have hacked these things already, I don't know. I'm just reviewing the features out of the box.

Sound

The text-to-speech feature is an accessibility feature. This isn't a bad thing, I'm just saying that if you're a sighted reader, don't think of it as a value-add for you, unless you are as entertained as I am by imagining the "you-know-it-lady-friend" superhero guy from the stupid Geico commercial reading Prester John's letter aloud.

The Kindle includes an "experimental" (i.e., incomplete) MP3 player. You can start it. You can stop it. You can advance to the next track. The documentation suggests using it to listen to podcasts, but unless you're planning on copying podcasts over one or two at a time and listening to them individually or putting a bunch of them in a queue and listening straight through, it doesn't seem worth it. I copied some of my all-purpose relaxation music to it, as I won't need to find specific tracks/albums within them, they can make reading more pleasurable, and it's the kind of music I'm most apt to really want/need if I'm caught somewhere and I don't have my netbook with me.

I suppose the limitations make it less likely that people will fill their Kindles up with music and then complain about how small they are, as sound takes up a lot more space than books.

I don't want or need my Kindle to be an iPod, but if I knew it had speakers and it couldn't play music I'd wonder why not, and since it can play music I want it to be more robust. Let me view my files and choose from among them. Let me shuffle. Let me skip pack. Let me repeat a track. Basic stuff. The "experimental" aps have a solicitation for feedback and I intend to let Amazon know that I consider this to be a potential standout feature, if I don't have to carry music separately when I want to take my Kindle down to the beach, or if I can otherwise marry the relaxing pleasure of reading and playing soothing music.

(Sidenote: It's just occurred to me that I should have ordered a waterproof case for this. Ah, well.)

Web Browser

Better than I expected, after all the complaints I've heard but that's not saying much. I think the 3G connection is probably more useful for its ability to give you new content no matter where you go than for making the Kindle into a platform for viewing the web. After having found how easy it is to find, buy, and immediately start reading a book with it vs. how clunky navigating the web is, I no longer wonder how Amazon can afford to offer free lifetime 3G service. They've opened themselves up to accepting impulse buys anywhere you can get a signal.

After checking out Tales of MU's website, I can see why people are willing to pay for the Kindle store feed. By zooming the page in the site becomes fairly legible with the words occupying most of the usable screen real estate, but it's not as clean-looking as reading it in the feed and the interface for scrolling a webpage differs from the one used for paging through reading materials, so you'd have to go back and forth between methods.


The Bottom Line

I think it's a pretty great electronic book reader. It seems to perfectly fulfill my reading needs, and the wireless capabilities is really handy for getting content on. It's nice not to have to fuss around with getting something on my computer and then syncing or downloading to it. I believe my housemate's going to be very happy with her Sony Reader, but this meets my needs better.

In terms of being a "device" in the generic sense, it's not the best one, but that's clearly not what they were going for. It's an e-reader.

Someone suggested to me that whoever wins the e-reader format wars is just going to be blown out of the water by tablet PCs, but I doubt that. I don't want to carry a tablet around. I wouldn't want to take a tablet to the beach or in the bath, even in waterproof bag/case. I want a physical, tangible, tactile keyboard on my computer... and on everything else around me, since I never know where I'll be when inspiration strikes.

Man, I should have been looking at Kindle stuff earlier. I've had people ask me if I was going to put Tales of MU on Kindle and I didn't really understand what they meant (I mean, I knew it had a web browser and I figured that was good, right?) so I said I'd look into it. Well, now I've looked into it and it's like, wow. This is so easy. I don't really understand why people would pay money to subscribe to RSS feeds of stuff they can read for free, but I'm not turning up my nose at it. I guess I of all people shouldn't underestimate the willingness of people to pay for free content, right?

I'm not even thinking of Tales of MU in particular here... I can use this to monetize Fantasy in Miniature, which is one of the major problems I've had with keeping it going.

Mmmm, the thing about putting Tales of MU on Kindle is to make it really work I'm going to have the RSS stream have the full copy. But you know what? I can do that. I'm big enough, and my ad revenue is a small enough part of my income now that lose some views if people are reading it on their feed-readers. At this point I feel like I should be focusing on getting more eyes on my content... and the cross-promotion I do for my other projects and my fundraising attempts... than on trying to maximize the number of ad views. It wasn't too long ago I was considering axing the ads entirely, after all. It's only the fact that other creators asked me not to that kept them there, and you know, it's really kind of gratifying to see how many other serialists have been able to use the remaining ad spaces for under a dollar a day. I don't want to cut them out from that, but zealously trying to squeeze every pageview out of the ads is just not going to help.

(And of course, I could get ads on the RSS if my survival comes down to that, somehow. But I doubt it will.)

I don't expect this to be a huge revenue stream by any stretch of the imagination, but it's money that will come in just from me doing what I'm doing.

Update: Tales of MU is now available on Kindle. If I get 10 subscribers there today, I'll do an update on Wednesday.