Anyone who’s known me for any length of time has heard me talk about DuckDuckGo, a site that is one of the very best search engines you can use today because unlike the other big search engines it won’t track you or filter your results based on what you’ve searched for in the past. And it’s getting ready to get even better. more “The Duck is getting a Redesign”
One of the things I love about Smashwords distributing my ebooks is that they give me great statistics, and they even let me get daily download numbers for my ebooks on days when I’m not able to get online thanks to their graphs that show the stats for each day. But Smashwords isn’t my biggest online partner in terms of sales, that’s Amazon and their Kindle Direct Publishing Program (KDP). The only problem is that if I can’t get online on a particular day I have no way of seeing how many downloads I got from day to day on Amazon.
But as of yesterday evening that’s all changed. more “Thank you Amazon for charts!”
I love looking at the stats for my ebooks every day. Even when there’s not much news I make a point to check the download numbers for He’s With the Band and the number of times the previews for Somewhere… and More and No Budget, No Pay got downloaded. It turns out that even eight months after I published WHTB I still see 200-250 downloads every month between Smashwords and their partner sites and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program. more “We have a new milestone!”
What do creative people do when they can’t create?*
We read a lot. We drink a lot of coffee (or tea). We smoke quite a bit (if you have that lovely personality trait (no monkey)). We surf the web a lot. We get together with friends. We listen to some great music. We check out what wonderfully creative things our friends are doing and support them. And we wish we could take some of the things that come into our head down to be creative with them.
What don’t creative people do when they can’t create? more “Creative people”
“I have a confession to make.”
That’s how Yumi Sakugawa’s I Think I Am in Friend-Love with You begins. You may have seen it since it went viral on the Sadie Magazine website. I saw it when StumbleUpon my first thought was “Oh. My. God. I wish I could show this to my best friend. It says exactly what I wanted to say but didn’t know what words to use.” Alas, my friend and I had a falling out and I couldn’t show it to them but I’m hoping they’ve already seen it and have shown it to someone super-awesome they know. more “Everyone should have one or two friends like this”
(Updated 30 December to include screenshots from the newly redesigned Smashwords website. I apologize for not having these screenshots posted sooner.)
So many people have ebook readers and love them, and for those that do some of the best gifts you can give them are more ebooks. Except not only do you have to decide which ebooks to give them, but you also have to make sure you give it to them in the right format for their device. If you’re an iPad user and the person you’re shopping for is a Kindle or Nook user any ebooks from iBooks could be useless to them, and vice versa. But Smashwords has just the thing for you.
(Full disclosure: Smashwords distributes my ebooks to iBooks, Barns & Noble, Kobo, Diesel, and many other ebook stores. They can also distribute to Amazon’s Kindle store but I upload my ebooks directly to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program.) more “[Updated] Give the gift of an ebook from Smashwords”
I realized this morning that I created a new page for the re-titled No Budget, No Pay but I forgot to change the image and link on the right hand side of the site. In the process of updating that I realized that I had rearranged how the pages for my books appear on the site but I didn’t update the sidebar links. It’s all fixed now, and I apologize for any problems my oversight caused.
Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Anyone who loves good soul music should clear time from your days to curl up with this book. Robert Gordon takes us all the way through the history of Stax Records, from back when it was just a glimmer in Jim Stewart’s eye all the way through the forced closure. if you want a feel good story this isn’t for you, but if you’re willing to see both the very good and the very bad, and everything in between, this may be just the book for you.
For best results make sure you’ve got some of your favorite Stax family music handy to play while reading. There’s nothing like reading how one of your favorite songs was written while hearing the final result. And don’t just give it a single read, this one deserves to be ready twice, once straight through and a second time checking the notes in the back.
Updated 21 November 2015 to point the link to the repost of the article on this site.
As we get into the meat of Hal-giv-hanu-mas-za-year I want to take a moment and wish everyone a happy, safe and joyful holiday season. Regardless of what holidays you celebrate and which ones you ignore, I want to thank everyone who’s discovered my writing and chose to look for more from me, both as ebooks and on this site. Knowing people enjoy what I write makes me want to write better stories to reward you for your time and energy spent keeping up with my writing. There are a lot of ebooks and websites you could read so I don’t take a single reader for granted. more “As we enter the last part of the year”
[Updated 20 November 2014 to add some links and to fix some errors that slipped through when I published it a year ago.]
Even before I began writing I’ve loved words. I love that a word can mean something specific, and as long as the person you’re speaking to know the word the way you know it there’s no chance of mis-communication because the words (usually) always means what it means.
Earlier this year I was thinking of some of my favorite words, and earlier this month I decided to come up with a list of my favorite words, one for each letter of the alphabet. Some of my favorite words may have a special meaning to me, and some words have come to mean something different from when I was growing up back in New Orleans, but they’re my favorite words and I’ll admit that a few have my own special little twist on them. more “A Words Lover’s Alphabet”