From Squidoo to Wizzley August 23, 2014 Uncategorized

I used to keep authors notes and extra content on Squidoo. Unfortunately, last Wednesday, it was announced that Squidoo was closing and moving content to Hubpages. I will miss the community there, but I spent a very enjoyable few years on the site and would like to thank them for that.

As I have no intention of using Hubpages, you can now find my notes on Wizzley, a site set up by some former Squidoo writers. My profile is here:

http://wizzley.com/authors/VHFolland/

It seems that recently I have been writing everything except my blog. I have two competition entries out, soon to be posted here if they don't win, a new manuscript in progress and one that may be released in September.

Going Under – special offer November 6, 2013 Amazon, Promotion

Amazon have recently revamped their Select offer to include something called Countdown. This allows you to discount the price of a book for a set period (up to seven days) instead of making it free for five days. There are some obvious advantages to this - still getting royalties, the range of ways you can offer the discount, and the increase ins sales rank. More importantly, if you were on the 70% rating you still get that even if the price temporarily drops. It looks like a good offer, so I'm trying it out with one of the only titles I still have in Select.From 5th Nov to 11th Nov, Going Under will be slowly incresing from 99cents back to its initial price of 2.99.

"There are plenty of twists and turns that keep you wondering until the

Kobo Survey – Initial results October 22, 2013 Uncategorized

A few days ago I launched this poll: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W82N6TY covering authors affected by Kobo's actions. It's been live for three days, with answers from many authors covering over 1000 books: an interesting poll with some interesting results. There were a few issues:People believing their books were live when they were not. Many overseas authors did not realise that their books can be live on their author accounts and the US site, but had been removed from the UK site. I received a number of corrective emails when they realised. Likewise authors in other genres assumed because the books were not adult they had not been removed and did not check.Some questions were poorly worded - the details that came out in the comments revealed a lot of extra data.Although I made

Kobo & WhSmith – Author Survey October 19, 2013 Uncategorized

Following up from my last post, this ia a quick survey to find out how many of the afected authors actually wrote erotica or adult material. Without going into the rights or wrongs of whether books should be banned, this is more about assessing the collatoral damage of the recent actions taken by WH Smith and Kobo.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Kobo & WH Smith – Insanity or Incompetance? October 14, 2013 Uncategorized

It has been very hard to miss the complaints about "adult material" making it into the WH Smith online ebook store recently, or the fact they have taken their site down. The basic issue - adult books showing on a general search for innocuous - is correct and as reported. The causes of this, however, are a little more complicated than the standard press story covers.First, it is necessary to note WH Smith gets its ebook feed from Kobo, which allows a much broader range of such explicit content than many suppliers. Second, WH Smith have removed their entire site, instead of just the ebook store, inconveniencing a lot of customers for little reason.

Fire Season going to Amazon July 2, 2013 Uncategorized

Fire Season has just been removed from Smashwords.This isn't something I ever thought I would have to agree to, but it seems that the ebook pricing between some of the linked premium sites has got out of control. Effectively one discounted, then another beat their price and so on. The price on Smashwords itself never changed, and there seemed to be no way to get this back under control, since none of the affected sites would raise their price. (For people complaining about favouring one platform over another: As an author outside the US I can't publish directly through these sites, even though a US tax ID is available. Allow me or my publisher to publish directly and I will happily put my book on multiple sites.)There was also an issue, now resolved, with one of the sites making an

A new NA Plagarism case June 28, 2013 Uncategorized

I wasn't going to post until the new story was ready to come out, but this has been going wild over kindleboards, goodreads and then the web.

Dear Author broke a story about an author called Jordin Williams, who had put up a book called Amazingly Broken that turned out to have plagarised parts of Easy by Tamara Webber. Jordin Williams claimed it was ghost written, but then Kindleboards found a link that made it appear the text was actually borrowed from a fanfiction: Amazingly Damaged.

And then things really started to unravel into cross promotions, suspected fake IDs and more. There's a full breakdown here, with a diagram that has to be seen to be believed.Teresa Mummert's blog: Plagarism Plot thickens

The problem is that this

Writing vs. Writing April 18, 2013 Articles and Opinions

If you are wondering why I have not been writing for a while, it's because I have been writing. One of the odd ironies of writing is that the more time I spend writing books, then less time I have to write the blog or website pieces.Write the books to sell, or write the marketing to sell them...it's a tough choice.I'm also now trying dictation software again on my PC. It's not very good, and normally I type faster and more accurately, but I've burned my hand so unless I want to try and do everything with my off hand for a few weeks, it's a choice I need to make.New books coming out, will therefore depend on getting the software trained and useable. Sorry.

Wattpad March 24, 2013 Uncategorized

It has not been a bad week. Going Under has a good review on Amazon, and Standing Guard has picked up two more. I have just put the first chapter of The Docks on Wattpad, along with Arrival, and there may be a few more pieces and samples joining it soon.Unfortunately it's a bad time of year for me, and followers of the blog will know why. I'm taking a bit of a break from blogging as a result. I am still writing but its going to be a few weeks before I release anything. Hopefully I will be back after Easter, with a new release and more blogs.

Behind Reviews: Part 2 Spoilers March 6, 2013 Articles and Opinions

This was going to be the third part of the review series but I'm moving it up to second. Spoilers are a hot button issue among reviewers and authors. In case anyone is not familiar with spoilers, spoilers are reviews that give away the ending - e.g. revealing the murderer, how the cast get out of their fix, or vital plot twists - effectively spoiling the story for the reader. While some readers don't mind these, there are certain genres e.g. mystery, where they can damage a book's sales badly. The effect that spoilers can have on a book's sales can be shown by reviews where the reviewer states that they are deliberately giving spoilers to make sure no one buys the book. However a review with a spoiler in it does not need to be negative, for example an enthusiastic fan of an earthquake

« Previous 1 2 3 4 … 24 Next »

Recent Posts

Author Newsletter

Social Bookmarks

Archives

Categories

From Squidoo to Wizzley

Going Under – special offer

Kobo Survey – Initial results

Kobo & WhSmith – Author Survey

Kobo & WH Smith – Insanity or Incompetance?

Fire Season going to Amazon

A new NA Plagarism case

Writing vs. Writing

Wattpad

Behind Reviews: Part 2 Spoilers