Going back

There's been a lot of criticism on the Amazon review boards about the grammar in "For Sale in Palm Springs". I agree, it needs an edit. When it was written, 7 years ago, I did have a professional editor proofread it. She was a technical editor who worked on software manuals, not a book editor. So it needs some work. But it is hard. This is something that I wrote seven years ago and by now tens of thousands (really!) of people have downloaded and read it. I really feel disconnected from the story and if I were to write it today, I would write something totally different. In fact, that is probably why my latest book, "Guilty by Association" is not making a lot of progress. Readers have said that I "owe" another book to them. Ya know what. I don't. I'll probably finish "Guilty by Association". This year even. But I may find a way to kill Henry Wright. He's getting a bit stodgy.

Albert Simon
July 2011

Weather in Palm Springs

It's been hot some days, windy some days, but always sunny. Two days ago it was 110, finally nice enough to be in the pool all day. When the wind comes up in the afternoon, the pool gets a little chilly. But it is always refreshing to take a dip. We've been doing some research and have turned the research into the physical. We now own a house in Palm Springs that we are getting ready to turn into a vacation rental. You will be able to stay in a mid-century modern house. It doesn't have a similar layout to Henry Wright's house, but it is certainly one that realtor Rex Thornbird might have listed and sold. It was originally owned by a couple that worked for the movie studios. The woman, Betty, was a PR specialist for Warner Brothers. Her husband worked for Universal in the real estate department. They bought the house new in 1961 and used it as a weekend home until Mr. Rifkin passed away. Then Mrs. Rifkin moved in full time and lived here until she went into a retirement home about ten years ago. For a while it was owned by another couple, and now - we're the third owners. If you're interested in checking out Henry's neighborhood, you can rent this house - we're happy to have readers as guests!
www.vrbo.com/354531

Albert Simon
June 2011

June in Palm Springs

Normally it is hot here even in June. But temps have been very mild with days in the low nineties and cool evenings. Last night at a fund raiser for the Palm Springs Fire Department there were twice as many people as expected. Some folks (us) waited in line for over an hour to get a piece of fried fish. Were these locals? Canadians soaking up the last of the sun before heading home? Los Angelites who wanted to escape June Gloom that is covering the coast? We don't know but the town is busy. It was hard to find a parking spot on Palm Canyon at midday, something that is usually pretty easy in June. It seems to be good for this little town though, restaurants are humming and business is booming.
Just wait until it gets hot.

Albert Simon

140 Character Conference

Have you heard about these? They're popping up around the country. I went to a local one on Tuesday. It was supposed to teach me how to use the new social media to do marketing for my business or product. It didn't. It seems all the presenters care about is how many Twitter followers they have. Yawn. I mean it doesn't matter. Most of the presenters never worked in any job with "Marketing" in the title. Now I'm not saying that in order to be a good marketer you have to have experience, but you do need to know the fundamentals. And the fundamentals are that you need to make sure that you are reaching the right person with the right message at the right time. And that you utilize all available marketing options that you have and don't limit yourself to one (just because it is cool.).

In other words if I am selling car insurance and I'm telling you how good the coverage is and how cheap the rates are and you don't drive - you're going to hit the delete key. (In the old days you would have hung up on me.) I would rather get my message across to the right person (a licensed driver who owns a car) at the right time (right before their premium expires), with the right message. (Save on your premium with my plan.) Right message, right person, right time.

How to do that is the challenge. Do you do it by getting 50,000 followers. Maybe, perhaps a couple of them meet the criteria. The rest of us will hit the delete key. More challenging is to hone your message and deliver it to the right person.

How do you do that? I don't always know, perhaps when I finish watching season 1 of Mad Men this summer I'll pass it along.

Pricing - tough choices

I received a note from Amazon Digital Publishing the other day that they discovered that my book, For Sale in Palm Springs was available for free at another book sellers. That's right Amazon. I made the book free at Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Diesel. Why? Because those platforms are not as popular as the Kindle and I was hoping to stir interest in the series by making the first book free. The second reason that I made it free is because I could. That's right, my distributor Smashwords has a $0.00 price option. Amazon does not. But, now that they have discovered that I give that book away at those site, they have decided to follow suit. What does that do to "sales"? Well, so far this month more than 3,500 copies have been downloaded. Wow! So how do you follow that up? Well, I decided to reduce the price of my other 4 books to $0.99 (minimum price on Amazon.) That means that on each book that Amazon sells I will receive $0.35. Y'all need to buy a lot of books in order for me to be able to pay for the electricity to power my computer that I use to write these. But then I read that some woman in San Francisco is earning $10,000 per month from selling books at $0.99. I'm going to have to buy one to discover her secret.

When does one become an expert?

Over the weekend I attended a class. It was a very good experience in that I learned that what I was doing and my experience doing it was fairly decent. I didn't really learn anything else from the class other than that some folks make e-book publishing hard on themselves in order to save a few pennies.

On the way home I thought about putting together a presentation about my experiences in the past five years of publishing e-books.

Five years? Well, maybe six. But e-book readers have not been around that long. True, but computers and Palm devices have and that is where I got started. Up until late last year I published e-books in .PDF and .LIT formats as well as Mobi for Palm devices (never sold a Mobi version of any of the books.) and distributed them first on CD, then later through email (I even learned how to use PayPal and implement a shopping cart!).

When Amazon Kindle came along three years ago, it was a salvation. Finally a large scale e-book publisher that could distribute a little guy like me globally. Then Smashwords came into being. While their initial masher (the application that converts your Word file into different formats) was a bit clunky and error prone, they quickly fixed it and it now spits out a number of different formats for different readers quickly and clean. Sign me up! Smashwords followed that up with becoming a distributor of e-books with a number of online sellers - sign me up again!

At this point, I have written five different books, sold over 10,000 copies since burning my first CD with PDF files back in 2005 but don't consider myself an expert.

I certainly wouldn't want to stand in front of a class of impressionable e-book author want-to-be's and tell you how to do it. Since things constantly change in this world, the presentation I put together today will be out of date tomorrow. The terms and conditions I present today will be superseded by an update tomorrow.

Do I have some experiences to share? Well, I have written and converted quite a few books (and endless revisions) to a variety of formats (some have gone the way of the Betamax). I've created websites, blogs, and done some interesting marketing to try and get people to read my writings.

But I am by no means an authority on the topic and don't think I'll be putting a presentation together soon. But if you want some advice for someone who's been to the rodeo - let me know.

2010 sales are outstanding

Well, thanks to a special Amazon Kindle promotion in October, book sales hit an all time high in 2010 with over 4,400 books sold by Amazon that month. Total sales for the year on all platforms was nearly 10,000 books and we want to thank all our loyal supporters for making this year a success.

Research is continuing on my newest book, Guilt by Association, with another research trip to Palm Springs at the end of February. Without giving away too much of the book's plot, I've located a trade-person who is very knowledgeable in the topic that killed our poor victim and will be interviewing him to get a lot of details.

In the meantime, other work is continuing, we've revised the first book For Sale in Palm Springs to make it easier to read on Kindle. We've already uploaded that revised edition to Smashwords which makes it available on Barnes & Noble's Nook, Sony eReader and Diesel and KoboBooks but we were hoping that some of the downloads on Amazon would quiet down enough to upload the revision. (Amazon places a one week hold on book sales when an author makes a change.)

We'll try to update this blog a bit more often this year, please drop me a line if you enjoy the books and are following along.

Albert Simon
January 2011