Recently I fell out with my US publisher (Eloquent Books aka SBPRA), who I have been working with closely for a great many years. While I understand that times are hard for publishers of printed books, I expect as a minimum that my publisher sticks to our contract whatever the financial circumstances.
As it turned out, and to my big surprise, SBPRA wrote to me and told me that because I had not sold a minimum of 100 books in the last 12 months, they would be putting my book 'on hold'. On hold mend that they would no longer be selling or listing my book, though they expected our contract to remain in place!
Taking legal advice on the matter, it turned out that SBPRA was in breach of contract as the contract did not stipulate that I had to sell 100+ books per year or that they were able to place my book on hold.
So I cancelled both my contracts with SBPRA (which has now lost the sale of almost 200 books per year of my two books) because I quite frankly found their behaviour unprofessional. Why should they allowed to treat me like that - making up rules and financial claims as they see fit.
I am pleased to note that the rest is history. 'Evolution for Young Minds', one of the two titles SBPRA recently has lost the right to publish, has today been released on the Kindle Platform.
As I have written about before, the Kindle publishing process is easy and cheap to use, and I am now, which is extremely important to me as an author, in complete control of my own works.
There is in my view no longer a need for authors to pay publishers a lot of money to help publish their work whatever that be in print or as an ebook.
Power to the author and Hurray for self-publishing!
Not really sure what is going on, but I have been in a very productive mood lately. I have been inspired by the smallest and strangest things in the last month. Ideas for many different types of puzzles just keeps pouring out of my head.
A few weeks back I sat looking out the window and suddenly realised that I could make up a fun maths puzzle based on my washing line. The way I log onto an online web service lead to a difficult code cracking puzzle. And so on.
The good news is that all this has lead to a second volume in the "50 Math, Logic and Word Puzzles" series being published on Amazon Kindle in record time.
So if you like puzzles here is a LINK to volume II.
Here is a little taster, a word puzzle from Volume II:
What word is hidden in the above image
Happy puzzling and never give up!
It is almost 7 weeks ago since I published my first book on Amazon's Kindle platform.
Having never attempted any form of electronic publishing before, I was surprised to discover just how easy the whole process was. After having completed my manuscript in Microsoft Word, it was just a matter of saving it in HTML format, zip it all up, and follow Amazon's guidelines, which helps budding authors quickly upload their manuscript, a front-page, as well as setting a retail price and a target market. Job done!
The actual time taken, from the moment I started to upload everything to the time my first puzzle book was available to the world, was less than 48 hours. Very impressive. However, even more impressive is the fact that just 15 minutes after my book went live, I sold the first copy!
Seven weeks later I can only say that I am still impressed with Amazon's Kindle platform. Sales of "50 Math, Logic and Word Puzzles - Volume I" are steady and significantly higher when compared to the number of conventionally published books I sell each month.
The whole electronic process and experience has made me realise that a monumental shift is taking place in publishing. The public, that is you and me, we want publications to read and to entertain us. And we want choice and access to these publications 24/7 and we don't want to pay a lot each time we decide to make a purchase.
Amazon has turned books into everyday consumables. We buy them, read them, and then we throw them away. Soon we will be looking back at a forgotten time when books were purchased in bookshops, expectantly carried home in a small, brightly coloured shopping bag, before being handled and smelled and read by a book lover, who would keep the book visible and treasured on a shelve full of other books, all of them full of memories, coffee stains, the odd book mark made from an old postcard and pages with their corners bent inwards in a small triangle.
Traditional publishers, old established names in the business will either adapt to this new world of publishing or perish and be gone forever. Authors will have to change too, or never have their work read by readers in every corner of the world.
Sad but true!
The book is dead, long live the electronic book.
What a week! Have just a few days ago published my very first title on Amazon's Kindle platform - a Puzzle book containing 50 new puzzles! Hurray, pop open the French champagne!
Link to Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/bws7voq
While it was a lot of hard work, and a lot of working out how the publishing process works, it was not as complicated as many of the publishing houses - many of them quite happy to charge authors a lot of money to publish their book on Kindle - would have you believe.
Yes, I got it wrong a few times, but there is actually a lot of good documentation available to download and on the Amazon web-site.
As the old saying goes: "Practice makes perfect".
So if I can work it out, so can others too.
Happy publishing and Puzzling, if you decide to purchase my Puzzle book.
Flemming
Things are looking up!
Spring has finally arrived in the UK, though it is still cold and frosty some nights, and I would not trust mother nature with my fragile pea plants just yet ;)
Received some great new 5 STAR review for both 'Global Warming for Young Minds' and 'Evolution for Young Minds', which I would love to share with you.
Check out http://tiny.cc/ac7gww and http://tiny.cc/re7gww
Happy spring fellow earthlings!
Vesto Melvin Slipher was born on a farm in Indiana in 1875.
At the tender age of 26, after having completed a degree in mechanics and astronomy, he was offered a post at the Lowell observatory in Flagstaff. Slipher would be working as an assistant to Mr Lowell, the observatory's founder, who was using the telescope to look for signs of life on Mars. Mr Lowell offered Slipher the position for one year.
As it happened, Slipher left the Lowell observatory as observatory director 53 years later, and after having made one of the most important cosmological discoveries of the twenties century. A discovery that would have greatly helped Einstein.
In 1901 when Slipher started work at Lowell the general consensus amongst astronomers were that the universe was neither expanding nor contracting, but holding steady. A belief that lead to the expression 'The steady state universe'.
Slipher was not interested in discovering life on Mars. He wanted to know how far away objects travel through the universe and how such objects travel relative to Earth. To measure the movement of a galaxy Slipher used a spectrograph. An instrument, which splits the light from a distant object into individual colours.
Over the next 10 years Slipher perfected his understanding of the spectrograph output. He discovered that if a distant object was moving towards Earth the observed colours would be shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum. Likewise, if a distant galaxy was moving away from Earth the colours would be shifted towards the red end of the spectrum.
By 1912 Slipher had completed the analysis of four distant objects. Three of the spectrograph outputs were redshifted, while the last was blueshifted. Continuing his research, Slipher completed a further 12 observations in the next 24 months and found that all but one was redshifted.
(If you don't have sweaty palms after reading the last paragraph, read it again.)
Slipher's genius had within a short decade completely shattered the common belief that the universe was in a steady state, and had found concrete proof that the universe was expanding in all directions at great speed.
Slipher was not much of a 'salesman'. He hardly ever told anyone about his important work, or attended meetings with fellow scientists, or published scientific papers.
When Slipher finally left his beloved Lowell observatory in 1914 and presented his findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, he received a long and deserved standing ovation from everyone there.
And now back to Einstein.
At the time Slipher was tucked away in his observatory and making one of the most profound cosmological discoveries, Einstein was putting the finishing touches to an equation, which described how space-time would develop over time.
To complete his equation Einstein needed to know if the universe was expanding, contracting or holding steady. Hence, he asked the world's leading astronomers what type of universe they believed to be in existence.
Had Slipher been a little quicker to get his findings out into the wider scientific community, and spend a little more time convincing other astronomers about the validity and significance of his observations, then perhaps Einstein would have received a different reply to the one he got in 1917: The universe was likely to be in a steady state.
The 'steady state' answer made Einstein reluctantly add the now famous cosmological constant to the final version of his equation. An action Einstein later described as 'The biggest blunder of my life'.
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Slipher was by some margin the most important observational astronomer in the twenty century, but his genius was never really celebrated. Even to this day his name is largely unknown, though an obscure crater on the Moon and Mars carries his name.
Even Wikipedia's entry for Slipher is minuscule.
In 1995 Shell announced that it would dispose of the run-down Brent Spar platform by dumping it in the sea. A hole would be blown in the structure, and it would sink to the bottom of the ocean.
A public outcry followed. Conservationists, naturalists and millions of ordinary people in the UK and abroad protested against Shell's Brent Spar plans, which were seen by many as a lack of corporate responsibility, and general disregard for the natural world in the name of profit.
Despite support for Shell's plans from the British Government, people started to boycott Shell service stations and products. People went somewhere else to buy their petrol, which is bad news for a company that makes a large portion of its profit selling fuel.
In Germany, Shell lost 30% of its turn-over, while the company at the height of the boycott lost millions every day. On top of the financial damage, Shell suffered a fatal blow to its corporate image, which is lasting to this day.
At the time, I was part one of those who decided to boycott Shell. And I still don't buy my fuel from Shell if I can help it.
I know that Shell is run by a different management team now. And I know they have green policies and is working to reduce their CO2 emissions and general impact on the world.
Great, but I am still not prepared to let them off the hook.
The sinking of the platform would have cost Shell just £4.5m. But in the end, the loss of income and dismantling of the platform on land cost Shell over £60m.
Could it happen again today? Yes, and it does, all the time.
Think about fair-trade products. People want farmers in poor countries to be paid a fair price for their crops, and people don't want to see all the profit going to big multi-national organisations.
As they say: With great power comes great responsibility - so make sure you use your Consumer Power wisely.
