Earlier I complained of the botch that Amazon had made of the listings for The Solomon Scandals---news of interest to others with small press books in E or P. Just how helpful is it when the most conspicuous listing in the Amazon catalog says your novel isn’t available in the United States? Well, I’m delighted to report that Amazon not only has zapped the DRMed version of Scandals at my request, but also has deleted the listing for this phantom edition. Big thanks to Sarah B and her team. She reports that the delay in the removal of...

Earlier this year Amazon quietly stopped paying commissions for ads for Kindle-format books, and Steve Weber, an expert on selling through the retail giant, sensibly protested. Now here’s the real kicker for many e-book writers---an annoyance that beset me today when I wanted to advertise the Kindle edition of my own novel. Amazon’s database setup wouldn’t even let me run the ad for $0 commission so I’d at least earn extra money via royalties from my publisher. Jeff Bezos’s people would permit only an ad for the paperback edition of the same novel. But why...

Responding to a mix of my publisher’s efforts and my own, Amazon has zapped the DRMed edition of The Solomon Scandals for the Kindle. It existed only because Twilight Times Books had used the Mobipocket Store, which required DRM. Then, against Twilight Times’ wishes and my own, a DRM edition reached the Kindle Store. It wouldn’t go away even after publisher Lida Quillen killed the Mobi edition. The unwanted file competed with our DRM-free Kindle version and lowered its rank. The authorized  nonDRMed Kindle edition is here. Now, with the DRMed edition gone from the Kindle Store, I’ll proudly apply the tag...

I wanted to thank a TeleRead community member for caring about the accuracy of a post telling how Amazon forced DRM on my publisher and me. TeleRead is not infallible, and we encourage people to speak up to help arrive at the truth. But, yes, unfortunately, my account is true---an unwanted DRM edition of The Solomon Scandals is very much up there for real---and here’s the sequence of events: 1. My publisher posted the Scandals as a nonDRMed book in the Kindle store. Cool. Yes, I agree it is possible to post DRM-free books at that...

I figured that it would be a timesink to get Amazon to stop DRMing The Solomon Scandals. Sure enough, it has been, and the damned DRM edition is still up at Amazon despite my objections and my publisher’s. Amazon’s Kafkaesque e-forms don’t simplify the task. So much for Jeff Bezo’s claim to Jon Stewart that Amazon is agnostic on DRM. Once again he comes across as two-faced on this issue. “Publishers get to decide whether they want to encrypt the books and put DRM on or not,” he told Stewart. If you feel you must buy from Amazon rather than elsewhere, get...

Liza Daly, a TeleRead contributor, has compiled a list of DRM free publishers such as O’Reilly and Drollerie. Help out “Liza’s List,” as I’ll call it---a kind of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval in the technical sense. Send her names to add. The definition of DRMfree can be tricky. I’d hope that little Twilight Times Books in Kingsport, Tennessee, the publisher of my novel, could go on the list. At the same time, yes, like certain other anti-DRM houses, Twilight sells through outlets that taint all books with “protection.” Twilight has no choice. Publishing is a brutal...

You read that right. An elderly, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor slugged a feature writer in the face, right in the Washington Post newsroom. Talk about “creative tension” in the old media. And here blogs were supposed to be crazy? Henry Allen, senior citizen and ex-Marine, is POed over the decline of the long feature story---although other, less cerebral reasons arose here: namely the obscenity that a colleague taunted him with during an editing session. Allen just didn’t like the copy. More at SolomonScandals.com. Well, so much for newspapers. Anyone with some charming editor-writer stories from the world...

I sympathize with indie bookstores caught in the crossfire of the price wars between Amazon, Target, Walmart, Sears and others, a situation in part reflecting the price competition from $9.99 e-books. So here’s a little experiment. I’ll give away free copies of The Solomon Scandals---for resale---to the first ten indie bookstore managers who simply promise to read the book and talk it up to customers if they like it. Perhaps they could use shelf-talkers. I’m also of course willing to do remote appearance by Skype---or show up in person, if practical---and otherwise help out. And, yes, if a chain...

Booklovers aren’t the only ones who’d benefit from bundling e-book editions with paper books. So would shareholders of companies like Barnes & Noble. It’s great to see a writer for a stock-oriented site, Seeking Alpha, saying the same thing as TeleRead community members have for some time now. Let’s hope that B&N follows up on the idea, quickly, and that publishers will go along. Like Seeking Alpha, I think that the bundles shouldn’t sell for that much more than paper books alone. Most people buying paper books aren’t going to buy e-books and vice versa, but they...

I’m a Kindle 2 owner myself and have talked up the K2’s good points and shared tips with fellow users. Even so, as long as Amazon taints bestsellers and so many other books with proprietary DRM, I’ll consider the Kindle a closed system---at least in ways that count for many readers. Open systems, moreover, don’t include the capability for the hardware provider to zap books---even 1984! Nor do open systems let publishers prevent disabled people from using text to speech. Looking beyond the machine, if the Kindle is so open, how come my publisher...

You don’t own your books for real when you buy ‘em with DRM, as Amazon’s 1984 recall showed us. When will the Federal Trade Commission, the bureaucracy housed in the building to the left, crack down on that---in a truly meaningful way? Just why isn’t the Amazon site full of big, conspicuous reminders mandated by the FTC? So you can bet I was more than a little baffled when the FTC announced hefty fines for bloggers who didn’t play by a newly announced set of rules about free products (PDF alert), including review copies...

Over the weekend some TeleRead folks replied to my post headlined “Should authors have to be talkers? Is multimedia a threat at times to the best lit?” Most disagreed with my concerns. Well, here’s some handy ammo for the folks who say, “No threat to lit.” Russell Brooks, a Canadian writer, paid an actor to read Pandora’s Succession, Brooks’ thriller, to help woo agents and editors. Enjoy the recording here. Yes, this was before Brooks, aka Russell Parkway, sold his book, reports Jeff Rivera at GalleyCat. Brooks still hasn’t made a sale. But...