B. Justin Shier's Blog, page 11

Australia, Ireland, India, Romania, and Norway—what do these countries have in common?
They all have representative governments, and they all have fans of Zero Sight.
How do I know? 

Because I've received emails from readers in all these countries.

I consider this super cool. With only three months of indie authorship under my belt, I'm having some rather radical conversations with people

A long time ago (in a land far far away), I thought I was going to be an ad man. This was the sort of ad I wanted to make:


Anybody know the name of the song?
B.

Got back from a very long (and rewarding) week in the hospital, passed out on the carpet, woke up, made coffee, logged onto Mr. Lappy, filed away the ten PDFs on colon polyps (yum), booted up Firefox, took a peek at Zero Sight's progress...and found myself passed out on the floor again.

Why?

Because Zero Sight is now the #85 Contemporary Fantasy book on Amazon:


But then I picked myself up off

Yea, I get that a lot.

Why on earth did a medical student decide to write a novel. And a fantasy novel no less. And a young adult fantasy novel no less less.

A recent exchange via email with a very nice bloke from the UK forced me to reflect on the whole process. Let's start from the beginning...

How did this mess happen?

The first draft of what would become Zero Sight and Zero Sum was

Just finished my first day in clinic in many a month. I love doing a job that grabs you by the heels and swings you. I never know what I'm going to get when I walk into a hospital, but I know it'll be unforgettable.
That said, holy crud do I have a lot to read tonight!
B.

A thorough report showed up on PCWorld today about innovation and consumer outrage. Among much good research was this tidbit:

"So far, 5892 Amazon users have tagged electronic Kindle books 36,704 times with the 9 99 boycott tag."

I've commented on this topic before in Jim Butcher's Ghosts 1 and 2, but if you are interested in understanding why publishers are settling on such high ebook prices,

2-month battery life and the same price as the Amazon Kindle? Holy cow, that's sweet. Can't wait to see how Amazon responds.

B.

I was reading a great Wikipedia article the other day. It was all about dime novels. Dime novels were cheap, paperback adventures popular from around 1860 to 1915.  From what I could glean, they averaged about 30K words in length. That's about 1/3 the length of your average novel.


And that's exactly what should be priced at a buck: 30K word works. And they should be called dollar

http://www.urlsinternetcafe.com/coffe...

A new version of Zero Sight is now available on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The updated version corrects a few typos spotted by readers and fixes a spacing issue in the Nook version. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback.

You can see which version you are using by inspecting Zero Sight's cover page. If it already says v

Hot off the wire...

Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle books. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
So far in 2011, the tremendous growth of Kindle book sales, combined