Quacking Alone

Hi there my little steamed dumplings, it’s yours truly, Angry Old Fat Man. We’ve decided to add a new feature to the website, mainly me rambling on about stuff in the middle of the week to augment Mary Anne’s weekend posts.

Mary Anne has a lot on her plate, especially writing-wise. She writes legalese while daylight burns, then comes home and puts in another work shift taking care of me and the children while trying to find time to write her books. Then the weekend comes, and it’s laundry, cooking, and bill-paying while trying to think of something to fill a blog post. And then actually typing out the post.

I swear to you, I don’t know how she does it. I would have run out naked into the street with a growling chainsaw and a Pez dispenser full of Xanax if I had that kind of schedule.

So being the helpful hubby, I suggested to her that I could post something in the middle of the week to keep readership up.

Yeah, she bought it. HA!

Now I get to torture entertain YOU, the formerly unsuspecting blog reader, with inane garbage insightful comments on random brain flotsam whimsical ideas and interesting events.

Just look for AOFM-MWU in the title of the post around Wednesday or Thursday of a single an occasional every week.

Tentative subject for next week: Apple overtakes Microsoft. See you then!

Hi kiddies, AOFM again. Just wanted to inform you all that Griffin’s Law is now available in both paperback and e-book from Amazon, Smashwords, and CreateSpace. Once a few other e-tailers’ systems get finished digesting it, it should be out for the Nook and Barnes & Noble as well. Keep watching our book list page for updates on where all of Mary Anne’s books can be obtained.

Have a great Sunday, and talk atcha laters. AOFM out.

The book that, to date, I had the most fun writing, Griffin’s Law, is being published as I type. It’s out there on Smashwords and almost out there (it should be through the publishing grinder shortly ) at Kindle. It’ll take a couple of weeks or so for us to get the paperback version out.

The Amazon process for Kindle puts the book out in stages. As I write this post, Griffin’s Law is up on the Amazon site, complete with hubby’s fantabulous cover image and, by the Great Green Toad Frog, with a buy button. The cover blurb hasn’t fed up yet. And this blog post is partly about Griffin’s and why it was my most fun book to write, and partly about that cover blurb.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a huge fan of Grey’s Anatomy and of its creator, Shonda Sunshine (Rhimes). And Grey’s Anatomy inspired this book. One night, as I watched the folks at Seattle Grace Hospital, I asked myself one question – What if Grey’s Anatomy took place in a law school? 

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Hello again kiddies! Now that we’ve moved to a fully-functional website, the big, old, and ugly AOFM has been busy putting little things up here and there in our little abode on the webbernets.

I can’t show you what I’ve done behind the scenes, because really those things are boringly technogeek and hair-tearingly frustrating. What I can show you, though, is over in the sidebar. You will now find Google News headlines about e-books, publishers, and the literary industry in general.

Try it out and see what you think!

As usual, I am open to suggestions that you, the reader and our customer, may have about improving the website, so by all means e-mail us if that’s the case. Or even if you want to just shoot the breeze or ask about Mr. Brick’s humble origins or whatevs, we’d be happy to hear from you.

Peace, AOFM.

Howdy chitlins, it’s me again, the husband.

I finally got the paperback cover completed for E-Mail Enticement, the text formatted, and the whole thing uploaded to CreateSpace. The e-store page for it is up, but the book itself won’t be available until we approve the proof copy currently on its way to the humble Graham abode.

Also, be on the lookout for it to appear on Amazon’s site. I will, as usual, update the links on Quacking Alone when Amazon does all of its voodoo to get the book up there.

In the meantime, please enjoy an image of the full paperback cover here (also accessible via the sidebar and the complete list of books page). And buy it on your Kindle or other favorite e-book reader if you don’t need a 5″ x 8″ projectile with which to smack a beloved cranium.

Until next time, chitterlings, be good and if you see me approaching, DUCK!!

Greetings and salutations, kiddies. One of the many reasons I haven’t got Mary Anne’s E-mail Enticement into paperback form yet (besides being an enormous slacker) is a little project she assigned me.

It seems the newest thing in publishing is the book trailer – essentially a short video to whet your appetite for a book. It’s much like a movie trailer, except more of a pain in the gluteus maximus because you don’t have any video footage to begin with and you do them for authors who just looooove words, words, and more words.

At any rate, with much fury, frustration, and cursing with Windows Movie Maker, I have finally completed Quacking Alone’s very first book trailer.

Behold, A Faerie Fated Forever, the book trailer:

Mary Anne’s husband here.

I’ve made a few tweaks to the website so that your visits here will be more enjoyable.

• Disabled the Snapshot feature.

You know that little cartoon speech bubble thing that would pop up when you hovered your mouse pointer on a link and show you a preview of the page being linked? I personally found it entirely too sensitive and annoying. It also took up precious bandwidth and memory. So whoosh! out the door it goes. I can put it back if enough people want it back, but I don’t see that happening.

• Added paperback book cover images and created special “large cover image” pages.

Mary Anne wanted me to show off my paperback book covers as well as the full-sized e-book covers already on the site. Doing this necessitated changing the way cover images were displayed, because I was just linking the raw large-sized e-book cover before. I decided to create a page for each book’s covers, which can be accessed from the side bar under Sections or from the individual thumbnail images on the Complete List of Books page.

Who knows, you might even want to buy a paperback after seeing one of my covers or want me to design a book cover for you. E-mail Mary Anne if you would like to arrange for me to design a book cover for you. I’m sure we can negotiate a great deal in exchange for a testimonial or inclusion in a future portfolio.

• Assigned categories to blog posts.

It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here. I had to wait awhile to see what kind of things Mary Anne would blog about so I could create categories and assign them. Now, if you want to see just stuff about the trashy TV shows she watches or about Michael Jackson or Donny Osmond, you don’t have to wade through stuff about her personal life. You can just go to the sidebar, scroll down to Filter by Category, select Other Entertainment in the drop down list and VICHYSSOISE! you have all of her posts about the abominable Durrrrrrrr & Murrrrrrrrrr from Grey’s Anatomy (or as I have titled it, Young Doctors Who Like To Screw So Much That Their Patients Croak and They Have Nervous Breakdowns), or whatevs. So try that out and see how you like it.

Let me wrap this up with two last things.

I wanted to make sure you knew that Sixth Sense is now out in paperback on Amazon, so click on the link and check that out.

Finally, I’m working on getting E-mail Enticement ready for paperback, which includes redoing the cover, formatting the book using our old & busted copy of MS Word, et cetera, et cetera. So you should be able to get a molecular copy of it fairly soon to launch at a loved one’s head and put a romance-novel-shaped dent in a much adored skull.

Until next time… AOFM signing off.

I’ve just uploaded A Sixth Sense Of Forever to Amazon’s Kindle.  It will be available on Smashwords soon.  I’ll probably go ahead and publish it to Lulu and Scribd, although I’m not certain.   

My talented graphic designer/computer programmer hubby did the cover, and it has deep meaning for the novel.  I think it’s one of his best.   He’s working to format it for CreateSpace, so it should be available in paperback on Amazon soon.

After the Amazon paperback is out, I’ll upload the ebook to Lightningsource, the phenomenal ebook distribution service I’m now working with.  I hope to publish paperback versions with them soon, because they have a great network of retail partners for ebooks and paperbacks.  Unfortunately, there are some additional costs for publishing paperbacks through LS – namely, the purchase of ISBN numbers.  A block of 10 costs about $250-$300 and in today’s economy with a downsized household and an eldest about to start college – that expense will just have to wait. 

But the book is on the way, so keep your eyes open!  It is Boz’s story, and I think everyone who read Faerie and Golden wants to see how Boz handles his courtship.  Here’s a hint – The Duke of Sedgewick gets struck harder than Nial or Colt.  But then, he had it coming.  

Check out Sixth Sense  and let me know what you think!

UPDATE 08/09/2009 10:00 P.M. from angryoldfatman:

A Sixth Sense Forever is already available for purchase on Kindle, though the page is only partially updated (e.g., no description yet). I have linked to it from the book list page and changed all mentions of the title in this blog post to point to the book itself. The sidebar has also been updated.

Other links will be added to the list as Sixth Sense becomes available via the other sales channels Mary Anne mentioned.

Happy reading!

Mary Anne’s husband here again with a brief announcement: A Golden Forever, the second book in Mary Anne’s Forever series, is now available in paperback from CreateSpace. It will eventually arrive on Amazon.com; when it does, I will provide a link to it on the book list page.

In the meantime, enjoy my wife’s blog entry about Michael Jackson the romance novelist below. AOFM, a.k.a. Hubby, out.

Did you know that Golden and Faerie - my books now out in paperback – are about Arts & Photography? 

It was a shock to me too.  I can only imagine how much it surprises, and perhaps appalls the highbrow artsy browsers at Amazon.  I can hear them murmuring and muttering now, one of those books in our section?  Love and lust, sex and second chances, over the top head over wonder worm heroes in love – right here with books about art?  How dare the writer post such drivel in this section!

Well, this invasion wasn’t intentional.  I self published Golden and Faerie through the Amazon subsidiary, CreateSpace.  I chose that service after some research into pricing and retail channels.  With their pro plan, I can price my books reasonably, price them at numbers I’d pay for a book.  With some of the other services, by the time the initial publishers’ commission got added on, and then Amazon or the retail channel commission got added on, a paperback book would be priced at $25 to $30.  Lord knows, I’d never pay that for a  paperback and wouldn’t expect anyone else to either.  With CreateSpace and the pro plan, my books get automatically listed on Amazon.  I can price them well (now listed at $12.95) and everyone can still make a little money.  It’s that automatic part that’s caused me some trouble.

When I did the initial book listing, I paid a lot of attention to the category, genre and sub-genre. I debated pricing with my marketing-manager hubby.  What I overlooked was one small drop-down list.  It was the browse section, meaning, where books are listed for browsing on the Amazon site.  The first entry, where you’d get set if you don’t change it, is Arts & Photography.  It’s such a small little list compare to the rest of the data on the site.  Small and easy to overlook.  But sometimes, the small things are the big things.  Yes, I should have sweated the small stuff.

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