A Kodiak Bear Mauling

[KodiakBeer]

Welcome back, Lanius! Been to any American gun stores yet?

[Lanius]

[offtopic for KB]
Nah.

I don't think I'll ever go. What's the point of going to a gun store if you can't buy anything inside?

I'm just a tourist here, I can buy even less guns than an American in Czech Republic (where you can buy basically any gun, as long as you leave within three days of purchasing it)..

Looked at some airguns though, but. Feeling kind of depressed, will rather go running and I have a serious backlog too, no point in enabling myself to waste time with more hobbies.

[BritishHistorian]

I shall make a note to download it on Saturday :-)

a Kindle question: -

There is a lot of crap out there as well - people typing up old recipes (whatever) and throwing them in for 99 cents. In January, Amazon did a house cleaning and deleted most of the crap. I think that's going to become an annual task and an important one. It can be tedious to pore through all the crap looking for the gems.

How did Amazon decide what was "crap"? Because I noticed several things that I might have been interested in disappear from searches (some loadbooks and obscure historical monographs), as well as the "crap". And maybe some people want 99 c "Grandma's kitchen" recipe books?

I just mean that i'd be interested in knowing their criteria, and disappointed if it reduced access to obscure but useful information. Perhaps Amazon just needs to improve its search function, add some filtering options, rather than deleting?

[KodiakBeer]

I see complaints on the authors forum over there. One lady had translated a mid 18th Century French prostitute manual from some famous old brothel. Apparently, French from that period is quite different from modern French and translating it skillfully is quite a task. And they dropped it over copyright confusion - she claiming copyright only for the translation, not the original work.
In detailing her experience with Amazon it's pretty apparent that a lot of these decisions are being made by people who don't fully understand what they're doing. I suppose that's inevitable since this Ebook thing is exploding so quickly.

I suspect that this big house cleaning a few months ago was probably based on something more defined, like the number of downloads.

[Lanius]

There is also the problem of spam books. A number of get-rich-quick schemes have appeared where people take books, slightly change them, and self-publish them .. or just plagiarise and publish and hope no one notices.

That's not helping anyone. It'll take some time before it settles.

[KodiakBeer]

That stuff doesn't last long. To publish anything you need to go into a complete contract with Amazon, providing bank accounts and so on. Once exposed, you'd never be able to publish with them again. And since any customer can contact Amazon by just clicking a link on the book page, it's sort of self-policing...

[BritishHistorian]

KB - your book is not showing as free on Amazon.com, at least on my pc...

[BritishHistorian]

OK, just saw your post in "General". Sorry, should have looked harder!

[KodiakBeer]

Sorry! The free book will now be Sunday, 1 April.

[KodiakBeer]

Yesterday was my best sales day ever. Holiday weekend, I guess.. More often than not, the book has been hovering in the top 100 of the "Nature and Ecology" genre, but yesterday boosted it into the top 20 for most of the day (the ratings change hourly). I'm pleased.

I changed the cover on the advice of some authors who sell a lot of books on Amazon - they felt it was cheesy to put my bloody face on the cover. The advice appears to be sound and sales have doubled since the change. The reader can still see my bloody face inside the book...

The big test comes later this month when the paid ads hit Alaska Magazine. This will be my first real exposure to the general public. Up to this point, it's just been word of mouth from people like you.

Thank you all for your support!

The new cover:

[Johnny Dollar]

Happy Easter,KB! It sounds good. Seems like you are getting good advice from your PR guys.

I'm very happy for you! Seeing your own name in print is quite a joy.

You have earned the money and the accolades.

We look forward to more.

[KodiakBeer]

I've actually earned no money as of yet, since the three months of ads are costing about what I've earned in sales to date. Still, I think the risk is worth it. We'll see by the end of the month...

And in downloading the free copy to myself, I find more errors and edits to work on. Sigh... It's funny that looking at it in a new format brings them out, while in looking at them in the original Word document I don't see them. Sigh... So, one more corrected copy to upload before the ad blast.

[KodiakBeer]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I wanted to share my happy dance! I took this screen shot last week on a good day. These sales rankings change hourly, but for one golden hour I was #1 in 3 different (small) categories.

NumeroUno.jpg

[TallPine]

Congratulations!

[KodiakBeer]

Thanks! Even a very small victory is still sweet...

[Selena]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I wanted to share my happy dance! I took this screen shot last week on a good day. These sales rankings change hourly, but for one golden hour I was #1 in 3 different (small) categories.

A good product tells.

[KodiakBeer]

First bear death of the year (in Alaska at least). Surprising because it was up in Denali which is pretty tightly controlled - problem bears are regularly "euthanized" before they nail somebody.

At least one bear was on the ground, and it scurried away as the helicopter hovered, McLaughlin said. On the ground, the rangers found the victim's body, which had been dragged from a gravel bar on the river, where the attack occurred, into some bushes, McLaughlin said.

http://www.adn.com/2012/08/25/259954...y-bear-in.html

There's been a number of nonfatal attacks. One just last week which left a woman badly injured in Ninilchik. In this case, the bear was only interested in establishing dominance, which is often the case: http://www.adn.com/2012/08/24/259876...hik-woman.html