Today’s “Make a Difference Monday” is a call to action. By now you may have heard that Amazon.com’s company BookSurge has basically told several LSI (Lightning Source, Inc.) customers to switch to their service or risk having their “buy” buttons turned off on Amazon.com. I’ve blogged over at Jupiter Gardens (http://www.jupitergardens.com) about what this means to a small publisher, but also, today, in light of Amazon.com’s open letter as a Amazon.com Prime customer.

To be blunt: Their claims that this will “improve customer experience” by “keeping within Prime timeframes” is horse manure that I can’t even fertilize my garden with. I went back through, and most, if not all, of my prime orders have always taken three-four days to arrive (plus they’re shipped by DHL who is notorious for shoddy service). As a prime customer I’d gladly wait an extra day if I knew it was because of a book coming from LSI and not because Amazon.com fulfillment issues.

So what can you do?

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Surviving promotion without losing your mind, money and soul.

by Ashlyn Chase

You know you have to do it.  If readers aren’t aware of your book’s existence, they aren’t going to buy it.  If you don’t know that, you must be dreaming or have a huge fan base to buy your books and do all the selling for you by word of mouth.  Yeah, that doesn’t usually happen.  Even if you’re with a large publishing house, you’ll be expected to make the occasional public appearance.  The bottom line is: if your books don’t sell well, your publisher might not love you anymore.  If your publisher doesn’t love you anymore, someone else’s books will be published instead of yours.  It’s not like they’ll go under without you or that there aren’t several other authors waiting to step into your shoes.  Unless you’re a big deal and you’re publisher loves you for your name, alone, you need to promote your books.

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Sitting in front of my monitor are several polar bear statues, a rock from our land in Missouri, a sea shell, a gem stone, a little bear that came as an extra with an ebay purchase, my “Mary Winter” sign from an EC signing I had, a sf print, my pen light and my access token for my day job, and three hot wheels cars, a white truck, the general lee, and a red sports car (T-top camero, I believe). Those three cars were played with in my grandma’s backyard, where I made motes and castles in the garden, jumped my cars over dirt ditches, and I bet, fifty years from now if someone is digging there in grandma’s back yard they’ll find a few more cars.

My life, and my writing, is kind of like my desk.

Ecclectic

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I went in and fixed all the coding problems so now the photos and pages show up now! All done!!!!! Thanks so much for your patience.

I’m still working out a few bugs in my website. Sorry about that and I’ll try to get everything back up soon!