Show me the money. Please.

Writing a book is one thing. Publishing it is another thing altogether.

Having gone through the initial folderol to get the book into a Kindle edition, one would like to think that that’s the end of it. Hardly. That was just a bunch more typing, hardly onerous if one has plowed one’s way through numerous drafts of a novel. Mostly it’s just saving it as HTML and looking it over and thinking, okay, it doesn’t look any more or less crappy than any other Kindle book. Press the button, and there you are.

When the book went live, I got a message asking me if I wanted to build an author page. Okay, sez I, I’ll do that. But this takes 5 days to go live, and there’s all sorts of choices one must make. You can put in Twitter or a blog feed, a bio, a photo (that I did, the standard one of me looking like I just stole the royal baby and am holding it for ransom and nobody has a clue that I was even mildly involved), video, biography, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then I’ve got to start beating the bushes to get people to buy it. That’s the key thing, people buying it. (You’ve bought a copy, right?) I don’t care if anyone reads it, as long as they buy it. It’s not as if I intend to live off the proceeds, but that’s about the only measure there is of how well it’s doing. If people like it, they’ll tell me. If they don’t like it, they won’t admit to having read it. I know how these things work.

Kindle has this plan where, in return for exclusivity, you get a higher royalty and they claim that they’ll do this and that, but I find it unconvincing. I’ll look into it further and report back. Maybe I’m missing something. Let’s face it: I sold my soul to Amazon years ago. What’s another year in hell compared to eternity?

Meanwhile, I was talking to O’C this morning. Apparently he’s been having battery problems on his iPhone. Join el clubbo. Last week I went into Manhattan at 1100 hours with 100%, and by the time I got on the train at 2000 hours, I was totally out of juice. (Like that military time thing?) All I did during the day was send text messages to the people I was meeting up with, corralling and whatnot. No games. No calls. No check-ins. No nothing. Including no juice.

To cure this, I turned off all location services (except for Find My Phone). I also notched down how often it checks for mail, since I have no need for getting my mail instantly, and since then, I’ve got juice coming out my ears. Seeing that it was only the GPS and Google apps and mail that were actually turned on, this makes one realize just how much crap goes on in the background when you’re not using your phone. Google is, apparently, an enormously busy battery hog. (Also, I need to remember to turn off wifi when I’m on the road, as the search for wifi is another drainer.)

Goal: a phone with enough juice that you don’t have to think about phone juice. Do you think there is such a phone, Toto? O’C is also in the market for new hardware like a mini iPad. Moi, I’m seriously likely to buy a new MaxiPad when the next iteration comes out, as my original V1 will by then be two OSes behind, and is already unable to perform as it should (and won’t run some apps at all). Which is why people should buy my book. I think that the least all that writing can do is earn me a new iPad!