Links

Susan's Kindle Sample Reviews: This clever new site reviews samples of bizarre Kindle romances and erotic romances. Hilarious (and a little mean). Fiction is stranger than fiction, evidently.

Why some people are so opposed to self-publishing: This blog post presents an analysis of why it makes business sense to self-publish. A summary: Percentages rule. Sales, not so much.

The meltdown resignation: What happens to an author when self-publishing math doesn't add up.

How Not to Sell Books on Amazon


The amazon forums are fascinating. Each forum has a distinct culture, and unwritten rules.

The romance forum, for example, hates author spammers. Spamming violates the TOS of the forums. The romance folk take this prohibition seriously. If a poster so much as has a link to their book in their sig line, the post will be down-voted, and the whole post will functionally disappear. The romance folk chase away the spammers, one by one, as they pop up. It's the cyber analog of torch and pitchfork. And because of that, the romance forum is lively and valuable, with genuine book recommendations and fabulous discussions.

In contrast, the related erotica and erotic romance forums are nearly barren. The threads have been completely overrun by self-published authors hawking their books. Such authors participate in the online societies only to sell, repeating their posts again and again, just as fast as Amazon deletes them.

There's been a recent reader uprising on the erotic and erotic romance forums. Spammers have been confronted. The spammers respond with entitlement (how else do I sell my book?) or counter-attacks, or even cries of being "bullied".

Someone came up with the idea to "tag" spammer-books with "spam" and "spammer". Unfortunately one of the spammers took offense at the tag war. This author electronically hunted down one of her taggers--and her family. The tagger's son was contacted by this e-mail at his job:
Subject Line: Your Wife is Sick

Message: Tell your sick wife {name deleted} that if she comes after my books with her tags again, or gets her friends too, I'll be advertising your company in a bad way all over the internet. She is affecting my income and I'll do the same back.
Sadly, this particular author is not even the worst of the vanity spammers. And likely she's not even the most insane. Amazon needs to do something about this "harmless" self-promotion.

Mangement Skills Reviews

I've got snippets of a few recent reviews of Management Skills for ya!

From Over a Cuppa Tea

I think I nearly fainted when I spotted this book, Management Skills by January Rowe available for review in Netgalley. Good Lord, the title surely fooled the readers...is definitely NOT a self help book or a business related... there’s only hot, sizzling, sexy stuff inside.

From Michelle R. at The Romance Reviews
...a brief but powerful novella. The memorable characters were among my very favorites...I was so sad to set my Kindle down and bid the two goodbye.

Erotica Audio Books



There's a new audible.com advertisement on TV. A pleasant fellow in a striped shirt says he listens to business books on his morning commute to stay ahead of the game. Because Management Skills is available as a download from audible.com, I have to wonder if any business person has accidentally downloaded it.

I recently bought the Management Skills audiobook, curious. I'd never listened to a "book on tape" before. It turns out my novella is more than 3 hours long!

The audiobook narrator, Montana Chase, has a wonderful voice. Low and rich. She reads this BDSM novella extremely slowly, savoring every word. She says things like, "He jerked up her robe, exposing her lovely, rounded ass." She says this sentence oh, so slowly. She does not crack up, like I would. It's bizarre to hear an erotic phrase you once wrote being said out loud. I mean, the words actually echo in the air--you can't get away from the intimacy!

An Audible.com customer posted this review of Management Skills:
when you think of bdsm you think very hot and steamy. this is vanilla. book spent more time talking about the lighting for the clients then it did about them. too much filler and not enough steam.

I'd be crazy to argue with anyone about what is or isn't vanilla. But the "filler" comment is interesting. (I would call it plot, but that's just me.) Do you suppose erotic romance book listeners have a different expectation of the sex/plot ratio than readers?