This week I’m reading Tunnel Vision, by Aric Davis, in which a red-headed teenage detective assists a couple of teenage girls who are investigating the fifteen-year-old murder of one of the girls’ not-quite-a-teenager-at-the-time aunt.
Now with all those “teen” qualifications and a ginger detective, you might think this was an installment of Encyclopedia Brown. Hoo boy, would you ever be wrong!
“Just because the cops thought Duke was a stupid, lying criminal doesn’t mean we have to.”
“He’s still an asshole,” muttered June.
That’s a mild one; the teenagers in this book, as do teenagers in real life, drop a truly epic number of F-bombs — almost as many as “My Cousin Vinny“, in fact.
Speaking of F-bombs, when you’re lost in the mountains at night with vampires, ogres, goblins, and whatnot, you may be expectd to drop a few yourself …
He didn’t know how much longer he could hang on, and when he fell, there wasn’t going to be any leaping hero to catch him. He would be taking a one-way trip to the bottom, but maybe he would get lucky and Kyle would happen to be walking by below and he would land on the motherfucker’s head.
Incidentally, for August, I did a price drop to (mostly) $0.99 on all my eBooks whose pricing I control (everything except Night Watchman) — call it an “end of summer blowout”, I suppose. I had tried to run a special through BookBub, but they declined to take one of my books for their list, so I’m running my own special on all of them instead.
But why “mostly” $0.99, you ask? Well, reducing prices across the board was not as easy as one might expect. Through Ingram (which distributes Shards and Ravels everywhere that isn’t Amazon) I was required to set the regular distribution price to a minimum of $1. Then I was required to set the Apple iBook to a price that ended in “.99”. So, non-Amazon shoppers, that’s why the pricing might look a little inconsistent on my two most recent books. And then, over at Lulu, it turns out they now charge a $0.99 “hosting fee” (which I don’t remember seeing before, but it’s been a while since I played with my Lulu projects) in addition to their percentage cut, so if I set the price there to $0.99 I would have been making … let’s see … carry the one … a grand total of $0.00 on each eBook sold if I set the price to $0.99 there. Now if I’m going to be making $0.00 on a book, I’m going to be giving it away for free, not charging $0.99 that all goes to someone else. So with apologies to Lulu shoppers, the price there only dropped to $1.99. Whew! No wonder Crazy Eddie had such trouble with his insane pricing …
But of course, nobody shops for eBooks at Lulu, which is why, once Television Man is finished, my next task is going to be creating ePub versions of Dragon Stones, Long Before Dawn, and A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder, so they can start being sold through Kobo,the iBook store, and elsewhere. Of course, I fully expect 99% of my eBook sales to continue to be through Amazon, but still. There are other sandboxes out there, and I might as well play in as many of them as I can. (This is the reason I’ve never enrolled my eBooks in KDP Select, which requires them to be made available exclusively through Amazon — although I sell almost nothing through other venues, that exclusivity requirement just bugs me on principle.)
Besides, I have a Kobo Glo HD now, and I want to see my other books available on it! 😉
Viscosity 
From what little research I’ve done (mostly just listening to The Creative Penn podcast) it appears that both Kobo and iBooks are starting to have a bigger impact. Now that the Nook is all but dead (some say it may get absorbed by Kobo) I think Amazon, Kobo, and iBooks are going to be the “Big Three” for indie authors. Of course, I could just be shit-all-ass-stupid with manure for my brains.
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