ROBUST discussion

The numbers are starting to come in at Smashwords. I've noticed a trend. My e-books are starting to sell in other markets...but Amazon has dropped to a handful.

Of course, we have the Christmas season to go through, but I'm encouraged to see sales from Sony, B&N and the phone-e-book people.

Anyone else seeing this trend?

I'm nowhere but Amazon.

Are you saying you're doing better in all the others combined (versus Amazon), or better in each market individually (versus Amazon)?

All combined is better than Amazon for the last 2 months. My last giveaway was less than 500 and I only had 3 sales this month. I had a few more last month, but I had sales at Create Space, B&N, Sony, Apple, Kobo and Baker-Taylor, that's amazing for me.

So it's a mixed bag. A few here and there, makes up for very little at Amazon.

I never of Baker-Taylor before.

Of all the markets, which one is your best?

This is one of those 'Strange but true' things I can't explain.

Impressive Bravado sells very well on B&N - but ONLY via Smashwords. Same book, same cover, same $.99 price. Zero sales via Pubit this year, 660 free/sales on B&N. Freebies go well via Sony, but only the freebies.

I don't get it.

Probably the best approach to selling ebooks is to give up trying to figure out what works.

Pretty much. I just make them available, I don't try to market them much. I did try a Halloween promotion, but the weather fizzled that. With 6 to 8 million people without power on the East Coast, I'm not selling books. There may have been 2 sales, but they didn't register. The rank jumped, but the sale never showed up.

Patricia wrote: "Probably the best approach to selling ebooks is to give up trying to figure out what works."

Good advice. My book has dropped off the radar entirely, probably nothing to do now but write a new one. I've dedicated the past few weeks to my friend who is in town for leukemia treatments, so that is not going to happen any time soon. I'm okay with that, it will come when it comes...

My month started out with one whole big lucrative sale in the Kindle Store -- which was promptly refunded. Sigh.

Best wishes for your friend, Sharon.

I had two sales get lost in limbo over Halloween. The rank jumped on the 31st but the sales didn't show up until today.

However, I've got $8 in my account for Smashwords. I signed with them in 2010 and got my first payment 2nd Quarter 2012. Looks like I might get a payment in 2013. Two years in a row, thats a new record.

Kench.

Kench, Kat.

Thanks, Patricia. It looks as if she is on the mend, or as she puts it, 'regaining her sense of self'.

Never rains but it pours. My golfing buddy bro collapsed last week in his home, crawled to the phone for an ambulance. Looks like he is okay, Docs think it is an inner ear thing that will heal itself.

Then today my sis-in-law was rushed to hospital because of a blockage in one of her inner organs. She had the same thing about 15 years ago and had a couple of surgeries to fix.

Hope that's the last of it, not sure if my heart can take much more...

Bless your heart, Sharon!

That's a lot of crisis for one person in a short time.

Thanks, Kat. A few years ago I had a stretch of a couple of years where I lost a whole passle of friends/family, ranging in age from 24 to 63 years. Just about did me in. I DO NOT want a repeat thank-you-very-much!

I'm sure everyone on here has a tale of woe of their own...

Sharon, it's strange how these things seem to hit all at once. I hope your family and friend all recover quickly. They're lucky to have strong support like you.

(((Sharon)))

xx

Thanks, Katie. It is strange indeed how these things seem to clump together. Everyone seems to be okay.

I've had some bad years like that too. In fact, I'll be glad when this year is over.

Yeah, I was thinking of you, Kat.

All we can do is take one day at a time. There is no sense worrying about tomorrow. Do what you can with what you've got and make the best of it.

(Good grief, I sound just like my mother...)

My daughter tells me she used to swear she'd be nothing like me, but now she keeps hearing my words coming out of her mouth as she deals with her kids.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

Ha, ha, it would be an honour to be like my mom. My kids, however, I am certain, tell all and sundry they do not want to become just like me.

Sorry, never meant to start a pity party. I don't have much to compain about, all things considered. I just don't do well when I lose those close to me - no matter my spiritual beliefs. I want them all to be around forever, healthy, as I intend for myself...

Gonna walk a labyrinth again today. T'would be easy to just snuggle in as it is pouring rain again today. But as my friend figured out as she was making excuses for not joining me, we cannot do that every day since relentless rain is what we get here in winter.

Rain is my favorite kind of weather. Especially night rain in the summer.

My thoughts to you and yours, Sharon.

Bless your heart, Sharon. I'll send a bit of Kentucky Sunshine your way!

Hmm, with Irish sunshine comes Irish winter chill...

What? You mean the only time the sun shines is in winter?

K.A. wrote: "What? You mean the only time the sun shines is in winter?"

See, how you know it's summer, and supposed to be warmer, is because it's overcast in the summer, and a little more heat is retained, boing boing between the earth and the clouds. On crisp sunny days like to today the heat is just lost to the atmosphere and space, and it is winter.

10.32am. I'm off to bed.

Thanks for the good wishes, all.

We are back to sunshine for a few days, I am happy to say. Which does mean back to cooler weather as in Eire, but we get so little in the winter here, we celebrate every minute. Long walk yesterday, one planned today. Expected to continue through the weekend, yeah!!

Still, with what New York and New Jersey have had to face with Sandy and the subsequent cold weather puts everything into perspecive, doesn't it.

Anyone here from the New York area?

Andre Jute wrote: "... 10.32am. I'm off to bed.
..."

Andre, are you just a night person or working too hard. Or both?

By long habit and choice I work at night and sleep during the day.

I did that for years, but the older I get, the more I appreciate daylight.

I wish I could do that. :(

J.A. wrote: "I wish I could do that. :("

You could, but it may not go over well with your employer.

I worked second shift for so many years I can't hardly wake up before 8 am.

Even when I worked in advertising it was rare for me to reach the office as early as four or five in the afternoon. People who wanted to speak to me made an appointment from about 7pm onwards.

Patricia wrote: "J.A. wrote: "I wish I could do that. :("

You could, but it may not go over well with your employer."

Really, I could do my current job from home (and probably better because of fewer interruptions), but that's never going to happen.

When I think about it, I sometimes turn on the TV to watch a 2 minute segment from my fave local channel called Health Watch, in which a very down-to-earth Doc either disses or confirms the validity of new health studies. (among other things, he analyses the numbers of people and length of study)

Recently a study was released that showed that those who work nights suffer a greater number of health issues. This Doc said his own experience with patients who work nights corroborated that.

Stay healthy, Andre. Whatever would we do without you?

While I'm on the subject, a couple of days before that a new study showed that the those who exercise their bodies (as we know AJ does) have healthier brains than those who only exercise their brains (which of course we've all been brain-washed to believe is the best way). Just puttin' it out there...

When I ran my own ad business, my biggest benefit for clients was that they could give me a project at 5pm and have it waiting at their office at 8:00 the next morning. I generally went to sleep about the time they were waking up, or a little later. The creatives I needed for projects were on the same sleep schedule i was. Companies loved that overnight service. I found it impossible to work unless it was late at night and I never took a meeting till well into the afternoon. Dawn was my midnight.

Thanks for the good wishes, Sharon. But that study doesn't apply to me. I'm not forced to work at night and upset a daytime metabolism, like the people in the study. I have a nightime metabolism and work when it suits me best and is least stressful, for instance the phone doesn't ring.

My chairman ran into me once as he was coming in at 7am and I was just heading out for pastrami and sleep. "I thought you were in Kyoto," he said.

"I fixed that problem before the weekend. Didn't they tell you?"

"We needed you in Cologne."

That was why I hadn't told anyone I fixed the problem in Kyoto, because I was playing polo over the weekend in Brazil.

"I was touring the skunk shops in the Village."

"We have skunk shops in the Village?"

"They don't keep office hours. That's why we call them skunk shops. You can't let client anywhere near them. They smell."

"Is somebody on top of them?"

"Me." And with an airy wave I was gone.

Never any concerns about it affecting network, visibility, and what not?

Andre Jute wrote: "Thanks for the good wishes, Sharon. But I That study doesn't apply to me. I'm not forced to work at night and upset a daytime metabolism, like the people in the study. I have a nightime metabolism ..."

Good point, Andre. I'm a morning person so working nights would kill me.

I once read an article that suggested one was a morning or night person depending upon the time of day they were born. I was born at 6:30 am and my internal clock has always awakened me at 6 am. It is just about impossible for me to sleep in.

No wonder Andre writes adventure, he appears to have lived it...

J.A. wrote: "Never any concerns about it affecting network, visibility, and what not?"

Not sure if you're asking Andre or me. For me, it was no problem. This was before email. There was little that couldn't be done by fax and phone if the client was efficient, and I worked only for clients of that description. I delivered work about 5 or 6 in the morning, leaving it in drop boxes. That drive made a nice unwinding for my day before I hit the sack. Out of town work was FedExed.

I had clients I never, ever met face to face. If someone had a problem with that, I didn't want the work. One guy went city to city in his various jobs, and he worked with me from all of them -- then recommended me to more companies in whatever happened to be his hometown at the moment.

I couldn't have done this if I hadn't worked in the industry prior to starting my own business. I already had all the network I needed. I (and the creatives I worked with) had only so many hours in the day that we could sell and we chose to spend those hours actually creating. With most clients I was on a retainer so I got paid even when I didn't work. In fact, the most money I've made in my life was made while doing nothing -- just being available for work.

Those rare times when a client did want to drag me to his office for a face to face meeting, I upped my hourly charge by about double and then even higher if I had to wear a dress (I live in jeans). There was a $125 surcharge if I also had to shave my legs. Clients would laugh when I said that, but it made my point and as a result I almost never had to go to a meeting or wear a dress.

J.A. wrote: "Never any concerns about it affecting network, visibility, and what not?"

If you're talented or really good at what you do, people find you.

Patricia wrote: "This was before email."

Good heavens! When was this that there wasn't email?

Ha! I did a multimillion book in the middle '90s for an international consortium in which until the book was finished I met not a single one of the publishers, and only one of the editors, who happened to be on holiday in my part of the world and dropped in because she already knew me (years before I found her a job after I spoke at Ruskin, her college at Oxford -- I'd forgotten about it and didn't recognize her, which was embarrassing). Everything was done by email and FedEx.

It was the '90s (but began in the stone age -- the '70s) when only the geeks were emailing, not the common folk and not corporate types.

Once I sent an updated page from a serial killer novel to my publisher, a scene of blood 'n gore, but hit the wrong button on my fax machine. It went to one of my clients -- was pulled off the machine by a sweet young secretary who must have wondered why in the world I'd send them such a thing. No cover letter, no explanation.

Kench!

Kench!

Patricia wrote: "It was the '90s (but began in the stone age -- the '70s) when only the geeks were emailing, not the common folk and not corporate types."

You're mistaken. We corporate types were permitted by the Pentagon to use their net which was the predecessor of the internet. I now remember "ARPAnet", but somebody said recently I was not remembering far enough back, though he couldn't remember either what the predecessor (or possibly two or three back) of the ARPAnet was called. The thing was operated by a sort of telex keyboard, no monitor, a perforated printout instead.

MiliNet?