I've been interested in Amazon's Kindle digital book reader since its inception (though, admittedly, I didn't start blogging about it until the second version came out). I haven't bought one yet because I'm waiting for the inevitable price reduction, but that doesn't mean I haven't been exploring its features and some of the content for the device.

The biggest source of content for the Kindle is, of course, Amazon's Kindle Store. The store features a lot of e-books. A quick run down of some of the categories:

Total, there's over 300,000 titles available for download to your Kindle. That's a lot of books.

I recently discovered one of the best things about the Kindle store: anyone can post products there. JA Konrath clued me into the possibility, and he does a nice job of breaking down some of his own sales numbers. You can see that he's had no small success at it thus far. Granted, Konrath is a published author, so his name is out there via other, more traditional channels, but he also puts forth a lot of effort online as well. Nonetheless, is the possibility of an unpublished writer posting his or her work to the Kindle store gold waiting to be mined? I plan to find out.

As of a couple of days ago, my novel, The Hall of the Wood, is available for purchase via the Kindle store:

I wanted to make the price $0.25, but $0.99 is the minimum allowed price. The one catch is that, of course, you must have a Kindle to which to download the e-book to. So, if you've already spent $300 for the device, what's another $0.99? ;-)

The concept of an unpublished author finding success in this channel is a challenge. As noted above, there are over 5,000 fantasy titles available for purchase in the Kindle store. How to make my novel stand out amongst those? For one, I created a book cover. Nothing fancy, but it gives the potential buyer something to look at other than "No image available". Second, I gave it a product description, which is the standard blurb taken from my web site:

Jed's wife and unborn child are dead, killed by a legacy he dare share with no one. Seeking a reprieve from his guilt, he sets out for his former home, the Ranger Hall of the Wood. Along the way, he discovers all is not well. Aliah Starbough, a friend from Jed's past, sends him a chilling warning: the rangers are dead, the Simarron Forest, thrown into peril. Nearby Homewood has issued a plea for help, a summonings which Kayra Weslin, knight errant, and her chronicler, Holly, answer. Along with Murik Alon Rin'kres, an Eslar sorcerer who harbors a secret purpose all his own, the four attempt to unravel the mystery of the missing rangers. They soon find tales of their disappearance frighteningly untrue.

The third way to gain attention is through customer reviews. This one is huge, and the one that in my mind will allow us as writers to break free of the traditional agent/publisher dependency. It's a stamp of approval, a guarantee of quality, a statement saying that your book is not crap. Customer reviews, to a point, validate a book's worth. In general, low reviews indicate a lack of quality. High reviews, the opposite. This is not to say that every review should be taken as gospel. But given enough reviews and a trend should emerge.

I often read of the struggle authors undergo in finding an agent or publisher. There's really no rhyme or reason to it: the decision-making is subjective, and how often have you come across a published novel that, to be frank, sucks? I've begun to doubt the vindication that supposedly comes with having your work blessed by a "real" publisher, and let's face it: business models change. We might be witnessing the beginning of the end for traditional publishers here. If not that, certainly a sea change in the way we purchase and read books.

The Hall of the Wood has been available as a free pdf download for a long time now. As Konrath points out, Amazon's web site gets a lot more traffic than his own. That volume has a lot of potential to increase sales.

A micro-book review, like micro-blogging, is a review containing as few words as possible. In the spirit of Twitter, mine will be less than 140 characters (not including this intro).

Beautifully written and wholly engaging, Perdido Street Station ultimately left too many threads unwound for my taste.

iSuppli, which makes a business out of tearing down electronics products to see what's inside and then publishing their cost findings, released a report stating that Amazon's Kindle 2 costs $185.49 in components. The Kindle 2 retails for $359. That's a difference of $173.51.

Engadget shows the component breakdown:

I don't mind Amazon making a profit, but I'm still not sold enough on the Kindle to fork over $359 for it. James Martin of PC World did a cost-justification analysis comparing the purchase of a Kindle 2 and associated e-books vs. going the traditional route and it didn't work out so well:

"...my number crunching reveals that even a loyal reader of paperbacks would only have saved $58.82 by the end of the second year of Kindle 2 ownership."

That's a whopping savings of $60 after two years. In his analysis, he assumes 2 paperbacks per month; that's a lot of reading. I know I couldn't maintain that pace for 2 years.

He goes on to say:

"Amazon is sure to introduce a third-generation Kindle during that period, which you may decide you can't live without. There goes your $58.82 savings, and then some." 

Therein lies the crux of technology, my friends. There's always something bigger and better right around the corner. However, I'd love to own a Kindle 2, and maybe that "next gen" version will help drive down the price of the current model.

Sometimes I need a little help coming up with the name of a character or place. I'm compiling a list here of the name generators I find most useful. Note that they have a decidedly fantasy genre bend to them; that is what I write, after all. Also, I rarely take a random name literally. Rather I'll tweak it a bit. But I've found these sites good starting places when the mind is stuck.

• Rinkworks Fantasy Name Generator
• Schub's Online Fantasy Names Generator
• Fantasy Land: Comprehensive Fantasy Names Links
• Orcish Name Generator
• Seventh Sanctum: Dwarf Name Generator
• Seventh Sanctum: Lovecraftian Name Generator
• Seventh Sanctum: Tavern Name Generator
• Manon's Garden: Fantasy Place Name Generator
  

Rumors of my death are false. I'm still alive and kicking and trying to squeeze in some writing whenever and however I can. I'm relying more and more on Office Live Workspace for those days when I don't have my laptop with me. It's working out pretty well; I'd like to do another blog post on the topic as a follow-up. Stay tuned for that.

Now, however, I've slowed the blogging, including doing weekly writing updates because I've been finding it harder and harder of late to make any significant progress. I hate to just post that I didn't make any progress week in and week out—of course, here I am doing just that.

On writing… I did take a couple of weeks off. I needed the time to step away from my current project (the one I'd been posting weekly about). I like the characters. I like the story. But still, it was missing something. To that end, I've started over on the editing. Page 1. With a mind towards adding another layer to the story and, in particular, to one character. The end result is that I hopefully end up with a better story. Whether I accomplish that or not… we'll have to see.

So, it's back to writing for me. Blogging will likely be kept to a minimum while I concentrate on wrapping up this novel. But I'll be around and back on the blogging thing in time.

Juggling two balls really isn't that hard. Three takes some practice. Four—I've never been able to juggle four balls without dropping one real quick. That's pretty much what happened to me these past few weeks, with my writing being the fourth ball.

That's not to say I did nothing, but it's been a few weeks since I've actually sat down and wrote or edited anything. Things are clearing a bit, though, and I hope to get back to it this weekend if not sometime during the week.

I'll leave it at that so I can get down to refreshing my mind as to where I last left off…

I was allowing myself some time to make a leap. That leap has to do with my current fantasy novel. Specifically, how to make it rise above the rest, so to speak. I think I've re-stumbled upon an idea I'd had way back when I started this venture. I'd steered away from this particular idea for reasons I'm not entirely sure of anymore. But, with the majority of the novel laid out, I think it's time to go back and add some additional layering. Sorry to speak in such abstracts, and because of that this post will conclude post-haste.

The end result of this shift into re-discovered territory is that I'm going to spend some time doing some research. I plan to post that research here as somewhat of an experiment. On my technology blog, I sometimes post information that hopefully is of some use to someone, but more importantly it's simply out there so I can find it again the next time I run into a similar or identical problem. I'm going to carry that idea over to this blog. We'll have to see how it goes.