Scottie's Books

An Open Letter to Mr. Jeffrey Blackburn, Senior Vice-President, Business Development, Amazon - free ebook promotions don't make sense (or cents).

2/3/2019

Dear Mr. Blackburn,

This is an issue that is already a grave concern for Amazon authors, but it should be for your stockholders as well. It appears we are jointly leaking substantial profit every year.

I wanted to put forward a short proposal in regards Amazon’s free ebook promotion program which I believe is losing both Amazon and authors substantial potential profit. I’m an author of a few ebooks, some under my own name and others under a pen name, and I predominantly use the Amazon platform for sales. I also use the free ebook promotion, but only begrudgingly as there is limited alternative. As an author it loses me profit, with not much payback. As an example, I have recently had a giveaway of about 800 ebooks that resulted in only about 4-6 customer reviews. That was about $2400 of ebooks given away.

Multiply that by the hundreds of thousands to millions of Amazon authors who may be using this facility, and Amazon and its author base could be jointly leaking hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars per year with the present program. At the same time ,the free ebook promotions are growing a ‘free book culture’ undermining part of our potential customer base. If the present situation continues, some customers will be lost forever as there is no reason for them to pay for books.

There are two reasons for an author to use the free ebook promotions:
1)To get more reviews
2)To broaden word about their books.

While other means might be used to deal with (2), I want to suggest a better means of dealing with item (1).

I applaud Amazon’s efforts to ensure only legitimate reviews are on its website, however, those efforts haves also resulted in a much higher bar for Amazon authors to get such legitimate reviews. 800 books being given away for a handful of reviews is not a sustainable model. It is also counter to the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ ethos that Amazon has adopted for its review system – as the crowd is essentially ‘missing in action’ when less than 1% are reviewing.

May I suggest that Amazon initiate a program of discounts for ebook reviews? If Amazon authors could nominate to provide back a discount of say half their ebook costs to customers who provide a review this would encourage a review culture for legitimate ebook customers within Amazon. Reviews would remain unbiased under such a ‘blind’ customer program since it would be untargeted, and because some money is paid, the something for nothing culture which is undercutting all our profits would be partially stemmed. I hope you might consider this option as one of many that could alleviate this problem.

Regards Scott Butcher (an author on Amazon)
Thunder Bay, Canada

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Pictures from the Canadian Rust Belt (first posting)

5/26/2017

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So, I got this idea after taking pictures of the jack-knife bridge (shown to left). There probably aren't many Canadian cities that can lay claim to being part of the rust belt, but Thunder Bay is one of them. It has been re-inventing itself though. Jobs lost in previous years have been regained with new industries, it's not perfect but the city is doing much better than some of its southern neighbours. Still, there are signs of the rust belt everywhere.

Here's a picture that proves it, this is the iron ore loader, rusting away from disuse it hasn't been used since the 70s and is largely land locked now, so no new ships are coming in there. Nothing says rust belt better than a rusty, old iron ore loader. There is talk of it being reused, and the clean up of metal scrap around it is a good sign. Lets hope.

Here's a rusty old bridge, leading to Mission Island. Over a hundred years old.

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Where did all the blacksmiths go? Are they still with us today?

3/18/2017

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What I was told in school was that all the blacksmiths lost their jobs when cars came around (which wasn't actually true) and that industrial automation is losing jobs all the time. And to a certain extent that latter assertion is true, but not always, sometimes technology creates jobs. The best example I can think of is the web, we really didn’t have it 30 years ago, it just didn’t exist before 1989. Today there is a whole new industry of programmers related to the world wide web, all having jobs that didn’t exist in the recent past.

Change isn’t always good news, the recent trend of internet shopping is now closing local shops and losing local jobs. However, catalogue sales were once upon a time, the only shopping centres that people in remote areas had in North America. So maybe internet shopping is just the new catalogue. Perhaps in going forward we’re returning to the past.

Anyway, what happened to the blacksmiths? Did they just disappear from the face of the earth? Were they swallowed en masse by a black hole? After all, weren’t blacksmiths magical? The workers of iron were often seen as magicians, and only escaped the witch hunts of the Middle Ages because they were so very useful. So maybe a fairy queen took them all off to some Seelie court… only fairies don’t like wrought iron.

But seriously, what happened to the blacksmiths when cars started rolling down the roads of the world replacing horses? Well, my great grandfather was a blacksmith. I know what happened to him, he built cars. In 1910 he moved his family from Scotland to Canada, and became a machinist for a car manufacturer in Amherst, Nova Scotia. And apparently, he wasn’t the only one. This occurred to me as I was watching a documentary on an early car manufacturer, and for their first cars blacksmiths had a pivotal role in helping build them. Blacksmiths were the metal workers of their day. What were cars made of? Metal. So what happened to a lot of blacksmiths is that they didn’t actually lose their jobs because of the advent of cars, like I was told in school, they were actually the first builders of cars, and large numbers of them were absorbed into the new car manufacturing industry as a skilled workforce available for working the metal needed by that industry.

And blacksmiths didn’t just make horse shoes, they made pots and utensils and all sorts of other metal ‘things’. As time went on these skills morphed into machinists, fitters and turners, and other skilled labour. Working with metal is still magical, though automation is now seeing a decline of those skills. I work with machinists now, my own company is centred in a rare little jewel in North America, a town with lots of machinists. It’s true that fewer people are needed in the industry because of automation, but it’s also true that manufacturing doesn’t exist without a core of machinists available. That is definitely the case for our business, which is regarded as hi-tech. The company is where it is because the town has the machinists we need.

Working with metal is as ancient as civilisation itself, and manufacturing is synonymous with those who can work metal. So here’s to the blacksmiths of today, those who work with steel, aluminium, brass, and more exotic materials, such as Inconel, Haynes Alloys, and many more materials unknown to many. It’s still magic, and always will be. So what happened to all the blacksmths? They’re still with us today, we just call them different names, and I’ll go as far to say that a nation without blacksmiths, is a nation without manufacturing.

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Escapism versus the Great Literary Masterpiece

10/22/2016

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I recently had a fellow writer ask me:

“Why don't you write literature with a thought-provoking message rather than pure entertainment.”

So I thought I’d take a minute to explain a side of escapism that many people may not have considered, and to point out that it has a lot more value than most people realise. I never consciously write messages into books. They may be there but it’s wholly incidental if they are. I don’t try to write that great literary masterpiece. I unabashedly write escapism. And like a fair proportion of readers, I enjoy reading escapism.

My wife reads literature with messages, I don’t. I see enough of the serious side of life, so when I relax, I want to escape that side of life. There may be those who seek serious subjects to add to themselves - the Ophrah Winfreys of the world. But I don’t have that capacity.

When I was young, I was sickly with all the victimisation by bullying, and loneliness, that is brought by that. I was a chronic asthmatic at a time before medications such as Ventolin. I outgrew that sickness in adulthood, but as a child, books became my friends, I could escape a not so great life through stories. As it happens, I’m not the only person who has found refuge in books. Many others on the fringes of society are able to get by because they can escape.

Have you ever wondered how something like Comicon can be so popular? In the same way that I escape, others have found ways to add to their existence. They’ve taken escape to a new level making a culture of it. The cult of the superhero, a guy who stands up for the bullied, it’s something straight out of the imaginations of those who were bullied. There’s so many people in the world like that.

So we’re the ones on the other side of the coin, we’re the ones that live, or who have lived, in those serious situations that are sometimes written about in serious literature. Sometimes one of us will write about it as a form of catharsis, but one of the strongest of human self-protection mechanisms is the ability to remove yourself from a bad situation. Even if you can’t physically escape, you can mentally escape, and books help millions of people do that. So I write for that.

Books helped me through my life, I enjoyed escaping with them, and now I give back to others by helping them escape too. I don’t need to write a great literary masterpiece, I write so that my readers and I can take flights of imagination.

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Authors: The Next Big Market for the Publishing Industry

9/16/2016

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With declining book sales and stagnant e-book sales, it seems only a matter of time before it's realised that the next big market for publishing won't be the readers, it'll be the authors. The signs are already there.

It's called the slush pile. Amazon currently estimate they have 1.8 million authors with roughly 3.2 million book titles (see this link). For traditional publishing, the publishing houses were the gate keepers in terms of quality. But for ebooks, there is no gatekeeper. Anyone can publish a book, and they do. This process has been going on for a while now.

At the beginning, readers were more than happy to take a punt on books from the slush pile, however, over time that's changed. Customers will only buy so much garbage before they look for a means of not wasting their hard earned dollars. The way this has worked in Amazon is by reviews, and for a while people could look for good reviews left by other readers, and hope for better quality based on the experiences of others. However, even that process is coming to an end.

There are two problems with the review process. The first one is that many readers are either sick of giving reviews, or couldn't really be bothered to begin with. Hardly a day goes by when I don't see someone complaining on Facebook about being hassled by review requests from Amazon. The other problem will probably be an issue in the future and if there's enough interest in this blog, I might post about that too.

Ordinary readers are less and less inclined to leave reviews. The end result is that fewer and fewer quality books are being recognised. In part, because reviews by family and friends are nearly always positive, you need more than just a few reviews, you need a lot, otherwise there is no form of differentiation. So how do you get those reviews when people are less likely to give them? Well, it appears that there is a growing trend toward paying for them.

An author can spend an awful lot of time on book promotion without making much headway. The internet abounds with methods for improving book sales... 'this and this worked for author X and he's now famous'. The trouble being that when 1.8 million authors all hear of this strategy quite a few of them try to use it. The method then quickly becomes overused so it has no further advantage, or perhaps the advantage is significantly reduced. Free book giveaways are an example of this. Time was you could promote a good book by giving away some copies hoping for reviews. This still works to an extent, but nowhere near as well as it once did. Amazon now actually categorize and rank free books separately, there are so many of them. I was quite pleased to have given away around 60 books during one weekend promotion, but this only got me one review. Time was I could have hoped for a couple of dozen.

As things become harder, authors become more frustrated and seek other means of succeeding. I note that in their Feb. 2016 Author's Earning Report, Amazon staff seemed somewhat puzzled by the fact that there were around 500,000 fewer books since their 2015 report. It's pretty clear to me that it was just author's giving up on Amazon. So what else can they do? Already the snake oil salesmen, and some legitimate vendors, are lining up to sell 'the' marketing solution for authors. From videos, to paid reviews, to professional editing, professional book covers, to advertising. Pay, pay, pay. It's already started. It could well be the biggest growth market within publishing... the author market.

"Welcome to the slush pile we'll help lift you out. Send us your first born, your right arm, and your credit card details."

Now all I have to do is work out how to tap into this new market... he thinks cynically to himself.

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An excerpt from 'The Soul of Nemach and the Burbank Adventure'

9/10/2016

2 Comments

Just to mention, this book is free on Amazon for the weekend ending Sunday 11/Sep/2016. The main Amazon link is here, but you can get it in any Amazon store, just search for Nemach.

This is what's called a hard-boiled mystery story, which basically means it gets a bit steamy and maybe a bit gritty at times. It's in the tradition of Film Noir, which is 1930s and 40s detective stories.

This excerpt is from the second chapter:

Cats. She wasn’t a cat, but she was feline. Maybe she was a cat. Whatever. The Woman in Black, sometime agent of the Nazis, woke the spirit of Nemach, just like a cat. The first time had been when she was seducing a young movie executive in Nemach’s back room. Imagine Nemach’s surprise when his eyes fluttered open to a poxy young man, barely out of his teens with eyes closed, sticking his tongue out in the hopes of lips being returned. How the Woman in Black managed to swallow that tongue he would never have guessed. As it was, he didn’t have to, he could see it all, she kept her eyes open. It was enthralling, this was a perspective he could never have imagined to have. How she managed to swallow other things was the thing of legend.

Even more enthralling were her thoughts, “I’m having a glass of red wine after this, perhaps several, maybe something stronger – to kill the germs. He should have finished by now. I hope he knows more about the film, otherwise this is a waste of my time.”

“Well, if the young man proves to be ineffective, perhaps I can help.”

She almost gagged when Nemach picked that critical moment of the young lad’s first pants down event, to make his own thoughts known. The unfortunate bite marks would probably traumatize the lad for years to come, while the scars would most assuredly require an embarrassing and painful explanation on his wedding night.

“Oh, my love, I’m so sorry. Oh, you’re bleeding.”

“What did you do that for? You almost bit my dick off!”

“Tsk, tsk,” Nemach thought to the woman, “but I take it that you were not truly enamored of the boy.”

“What? Who said that?”

“I think I’m going to faint,” whispered the lad, and so he did.

“Ah, alas, his experiences have been less than he might have hoped for. There is a first aid kit behind the door. Perhaps you could save him from bleeding to death. Who would have thought that a male member could lose so much blood so quickly.”

“Who is that, where are you?” The woman was looking about the room trying to associate the voice with a person.

“I, my dear, am Nemach, a servant of Pharaoh. You need not look for me, I have passed to the greater life.”

“You mean you’re dead. You’re a ghost.” The woman continued scanning the room, looking for a hidden view point, or panel.

“Ah, the poor lad. The bandages would save his life. Perhaps … if you would?”

Looking down at the spreading pool of blood, the woman scowled, but then lit to action, adeptly binding the young man’s appendage.

“He’ll live.”

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Winnie the Pooh

6/11/2016

4 Comments

I saw this little fellow between the northern Ontario towns of Wawa and Sault Ste Marie (the Sault). It’s hard to tell from the shot, but he only came up to my knee. I think he was an orphan as there was no sign of a mother bear – though I remained safely in the car while taking this picture as I didn’t want to end up as mother bear bait. Those are flies around his head, it’s the season for black fly here, but they didn’t seem to be bothering him.

Where I saw this little bear isn’t too far from White River, Ontario, and that reminded me of another little bear that was taken from this area about a 100 years ago during world war 1. That bear was also an orphan and was adopted by a lieutenant Harry Colebourn when his train stopped at White River as he was being transported to the battlefields of Europe. The little bear was dubbed Winnie, after Winnipeg where Harry and his unit were from, and he became a mascot for Harry’s unit. Winnie went to London with them, and was eventually given to the London zoo where he lived very happily until 1934.

At the London zoo one of Winnie’s fans was a Christopher Robin, the son of A.A. Milne, who wrote the Hundred Acre Wood, the story of Winnie the Pooh. So for me, a 100 years later, it was very fitting to see this little reminder of the origin of that much loved story. I wish him well in his fight for survival, and I spent much of the rest of the day during my long car ride to Montreal thinking of Winnie the Pooh bear.

Here's another website where I found some information about Winnie http://www.just-pooh.com/history.html

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"The Legend Series" Book Trailer Reveal

9/18/2015

6 Comments

It's my pleasure to be able to introduce the new trailer for Lockie Young's two books, Ryan's Legend and The Legend Returns. It's very dragonish. Check it out. I've known Lockie for a couple of years now, and know that he is an excellent writer and poet. The Legend series is for middle grade readers, but also for families to read together. Well done Lockie! Follow his tour tomorrow by going to KMJ at
http://kmjbookreveals.blogspot.ca

The Legend Series Trailer:

This is part of a Blog tour for Lockie's books, there's a rafflecopter give away, which includes a surprise prize, an MRP Tote and a notebook. Entry details below. There's also a puzzle to solve and a book discount. Plus, what would be a book tour without a bit of info about the books and their author!!!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Ryan’s Legend

http://morningrainpublishing.com/project/ryans-legend/
My name is Ryan, and this is the story of how I discovered a legend, and the biggest secret of my entire life! Just after Christmas, I saw these weird tracks in the snow, so I just had to check them out. You won’t believe what I found!

Deep underground, in a hidden cavern, I met the best friend a guy could have. The coolest thing of all was we used real magic to talk. He told me all about his life, and why I had to keep his secret. I know keeping secrets from my family is wrong, but this is different. I just can’t have my parents or my annoying older brother figuring out what’s hidden in the old chicken coop. If anyone finds out about this legend, he might disappear from the world forever.

The Legend Returns

http://morningrainpublishing.com/project/the-legend-returns-by-l-f-young/
“Everyone thought he was some kind of imaginary friend, but he was a lot more than that! In fact, he wasn’t imaginary at all, even though he was the stuff of legends.”

School is finally out for the summer, and Ryan is looking forward to long sunny days on the beach with his best friend Cory, and his old friend, Willie. What Ryan hadn’t anticipated was how difficult keeping Willie’s secret would be. Torn between doing what’s best for his old friend, and being honest with this friends and family, Ryan has to think fast. The world isn’t ready to know about Willie, but it might already be too late.

Author Bio

In 1995, Lockard Young started banging away at the computer, and before long he had completed five chapters of a book. Because the characters were named after his children, he thought it fitting to read the tale to them. Enthralled by the story, they demanded more and so Lockard wrote. The end result was a story entitled, Ryan’s Legend. A book was born, and so was a hobby. A plumber by trade, Lockard lives with his wife in the countryside of rural New Brunswick. In addition to a number of stories he has “in the works,” Lockard also has an impressive poetry collection, inspired by his trip to South Africa.

Check out Lockie's Website at:
http://poems-and-other-ramblings.webnode.com/

And his Blog at :
http://lockardyoung.wordpress.com/

Don't forget, tomorrow the book tour goes to KMJ at http://kmjbookreveals.blogspot.ca

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Stillwart is travelling the world.

9/6/2015

1 Comment

Well The Fairly Stillwart Chronicles, Volume 2, has now been released. Big thanks to everyone who was involved. In her travels Stillwart has been from Australia, to Canada, to Cornwall and to Ireland. During the blog tour for the book release, there were bloggers from America, Australia, Germany India and Canada. All this internationalism has given Stillwart the travel bug. She's decided to go to as many new places as she can. Help her along the way, by sharing this. I'll list new countries as she goes.

Starting at

Thunder Bay, Canada
Durham, England
Braunschweig, Germany
Mexico
Mollymock, Australia
Barnard Castel, UK
near Montreal, Canada
Moncton, Canada
Grande Prairie, Canada

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