Some Diesel Spam

Remember back in February when I talked about getting a rather spam-ish email from the owner of Diesel eBooks? Well, he emailed me again tonight:

Robert,

I’m Scott Redford, owner of Diesel eBooks.  You have  a nice website and we hope you will use it to announce where your ebooks can be found. Please take a moment and paste the below “My latest Diesel eBook” link to your website.  Your readers will be grateful (so will we), for when ”clicked”, it will take you to your most recent book at our web store. Please see for yourself by clicking on the below link or pasting the URL in your browser:

http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/index.php?page=item&id=SW00000026239

Paste this code on your website to show the above link to your readers:

<a href=”http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/index.php?page=item&id=SW00000026239” alt=”Diesel eBook Store”>My latest Diesel eBook</a>

You can also send your readers to a tailored listing of your eBooks at our store using the below code.

<a href=”http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/author/Swartwood,%20Robert/results/10-Default/1.html“ alt=”Diesel eBook Store”>See me at Diesel eBook Store</a>

Also, don’t forget to click the “like” button underneath your cover on your diesel book page. Get your friends and fans to click as well. More clicks equals more exposure for you.  It takes just a second and this will automatically put your title on Facebook for everybody to see. Never know – you may go viral.

Our authors tell us that linking to their titles increases their sales so please take a few moments to past the code and start promoting.  If you need help  just let me know.

If you would like a small Diesel logo graphic for your link you can find one here: http://affiliates.diesel-ebooks.com/datafiles/uploaded/promo/1/still_image_small_1_Diesel-eBook-Logo-No-background_124.png

Give me a quick email back on your decision if you can… and keep up the good work.

Scott

Diesel eBook Store 1202 Peachtree Blvd Richmond VA 23226 804-201-4162

Word for word what was sent to me a few months back. And if you remember the exchange I had with Scott, he got sorta testy. So I thought I'd try to test the waters again:

Hi Scott,

Is there some way I can unsubscribe from these automated emails?

Thanks,

Robert

His response, seven minutes later:

Not automated. I'm the real deal, Robert.

Yes, of course you are, I thought, and sent this:

You may very well be the real deal, Scott, but you sent me the same email back in February, which was odd because at the time none of my ebooks were even available in your store. In fact, what's even odder is that some of them now are, which is strange as I never authorized Smashwords to distribute them to your store. So obviously Smashwords went and distributed them anyway without my permission. One ebook, in fact, I had unpublished over a year ago but still it seemed to go through.

Anyway, you also sent me an email in April which was meant, I suppose, for Raymond Nye, so he probably never did receive your initial response.

Best,

Robert

And, just like last time I called him out on his spammy email, he never responded. (And yes, in April he did send me an email intended for Mr. Nye, and I was tempted to reply with something stupid but just ignored the email completely.)

I still don't know what to think about the Diesel eBookstore. It's not a bad looking store compared to some. Definitely more appealing than Smashwords itself, but it basically does the same thing. It's an unnecessary middleman. If you have a Kindle, you buy your ebooks through Amazon. If you have a Nook, you buy through Barnes & Noble. If you have a Kobo reader, you buy through the Kobo store. If you have a Sony reader ...

You get the point.

But Diesel? There is no Diesel ereader. It's just a website that sells different formats of ebooks (and I can't even imagine their prices are that competitive) and is, according to their website header, world famous. Also, from their "about" page:

Finally, you may be surprised to hear that we don’t view eBooks as our core business. Yes, we sell them by the boatload. That’s the product. Our real business, however, is to provide a fun, positive, engaging customer experience. That’s what we strive for. That’s what we hopefully deliver.

So how do they intend to survive against the major corporations like Amazon and Barnes & Noble? Superb customer service, apparently. So superb, in fact, that its owner spams authors with automated emails and then claims that they're not automated.

Uh-huh, sure.

Keep up the good work.

UPDATE: At 9:32 a.m. Scott Redford replied with this simple note: "okay, sorry about the duplicate emails." That's at least something, but still, it doesn't give me that warm and fuzzy feeling in my belly.

Joe McKinney On The Dishonored Dead

The talented and generous Joe McKinney had these very kind words to say about The Dishonored Dead:

"The Dishonored Dead is simply brilliant, and its telling a superb achievement. Robert Swartwood has given us a wonderful twist, not only on the zombie novel, but on the dystopian tale as well. It's like Brave New World meets Logan's Run, but with a bite all its own. Strongly recommended!"

Have you read The Dishonored Dead yet? If not, it's still just 99 cents at Amazon and Barnes & Noble for a limited time. While you're there, check out some of Joe's books too.

In other news, remember yesterday I mentioned how Amazon had once again made The Silver Ring free in the US Kindle Store? Well, apparently it's now back to 99 cents ... that is until Amazon decides to make it free again.

Finally, there's this essay about self-publishing that came to my attention today. Here's some of what it says:

So to start with, let’s see why you’re thinking of self-publishing. I’m not going to lie to you, friends, going it alone is an uphill battle. Although issues of distribution and printing are no longer a concern, you still have the marketability angle to deal with. The big boys have the money to shell out for advertising (such as they do), and big names will always dominate the searches on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the other online stores. You may well have written the finest horror novel of the 21 st century (so far), but on the day you upload your novel to the eBook store, the bestseller list is still going to be dominated by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Charlaine Harris.

Here’s the good news. Also on that list are guys like Scott Sigler, Paul Eldard Cooley, and Robert Swartwood -- names you may not be familiar with, but who started pretty much where you are now and have used the social media and new media techniques that are just as available to you as anybody else to earn a spot on those Amazon lists.

Um, what??? Don't get me wrong, I'm flattered to be mentioned, but right there next to Scott Sigler? The man is a New York Times best-selling author, for pete's sake! Still, my thanks to Blake Petit for including me in his essay. You can check out the first installment here.

And Another One

As I discussed before, I have sort of become obsessed with this image everyone's been using for their book covers. I posted a bunch of them here. And now here's another one:

In another news, at some point this past Friday Amazon decided to make The Silver Ring free again but only in the US Kindle Store. I'm not complaining, as more readers the better, but it's difficult now to tell how many e-books I'm actually selling as opposed to selling and being downloaded. I haven't gotten last month's report yet, but I can view the prior six week's royalties, and The Silver Ring alone sold well over 1,000 units for the week after it came off sale. That's what we call momentum, baby!

Freaky Friday Fun

I haven't done a Freaky Friday Fun in awhile, but thought today why not. Here are a few things of freaky fun interest ... Everyone and his mother is talking about the new The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo teaser trailer, and while yes, it is very well done, I'm tempted to think this might be a sleeper hit. Niles Crane FTW!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YnAfHRscOM

Very rarely do I see a good, funny commercial anymore. This is one of them. (Thanks to Dave Silva for pointing it out.)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGb8pMIeY6w

Finally, I'm really digging this song and have listened to it maybe a dozen times in the past two days.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU2bC07gq6E

Have a great weekend.

Lessons From Lady Gaga

Despite what you may feel about Lada Gaga, when it comes to marketing, she knows what's she doing. Look at how she recently went directly to Amazon to sell the MP3 of her new album for just 99 cents. I'm not that big of a fan but I'll admit, I bought it. And why not? When you can buy a brand new album for 99 cents, that is what I like to call a no-brainer. When asked whether her new record was worth more than 99 cents, Gaga said:

No. I absolutely do not, especially for MP3s and digital music. It’s invisible. It’s in space. If anything, I applaud a company like Amazon for equating the value of digital versus the physical copy, and giving the opportunity to everyone to buy music.

Of course, as it turns out, Amazon paid the difference on all of those purchases to the record company, as this was also a way to help promote Amazon's new Cloud Drive and Player, so you can't quite equate it to the same as authors publishing their novels for the same price, but in a way, it does show a level of outward thinking on Gaga's part.

So what can we learn from Gaga here? Well, that 99 cent can be beneficial at times. There will always be the debate on whether 99 cent e-books are good for the author and blah blah blah, but do you know who they can be very good for? The reader.

Last week Aaron Polson did a little rant about this literary agent's blog post. It basically talks about self-publishing and comes to this startling conclusion: "This trend toward self-publishing serves primarily the writer. (Not readers and not the publishing industry as a whole.)"

I thought about doing a blog post about this but never could think of anything good enough, as I began to focus more on why do writers read these blogs by literary agents in the first place? Sure, you can get some insight into the publishing industry, but do you really want to be represented by an agent who spends a lot of their time blogging when they should be reading manuscripts and trying to sell those manuscripts? In my opinion, most of these agents blog just for the ego boost it gives them and nothing more. I mean, look at that one agent's blog post and the 100+ comments. Almost all of the commenters are writers, and guess who they agree with -- the agent, of course! Like by agreeing with the agent might bring them closer to one day being signed by the agent.

Anyway, my thoughts on "this trend toward self-publishing"? Yes, it serves the writer, but it also serves the reader by delivering reasonably priced e-books. I'm sure I mentioned here before how one of the main reasons I finally decided to jump into self-publishing e-books with both feet was because of Scott Snyder's Voodoo Heart. The Kindle edition had been $9.99, and I had waffled a bit on whether or not to buy it. Then, a month or two later, Random House went with the agency pricing model, and guess how much the collection became? $14.99. That's actually a bit more than the trade paperback at Amazon, believe it or not.

So now I ask you: how does that price benefit either the writer or the reader?

It doesn't benefit either of them. Who it benefits, of course, is the publishing company, and, perhaps, Scott Snyder's literary agent.

Obviously that blogging literary agent doesn't really care much at all about readers, but just her own job. Because if more and more writers start going directly to readers, then where does that leave her?

But 99 cent e-books? Sure, they can be beneficial. I mentioned last week how Amazon had stopped the free promotion The Silver Ring but the e-book was still selling. I figured when June started, sales would begin to trickle. But they haven't so far. Yesterday alone I sold over 100 e-books. As of right now today, I'm currently at 164 e-books. That's just in a day and a half. To give you some prospective, the number of e-books I sold on Kindle in April -- the month I released The Calling and did that mini blog tour -- was only 165.

So within less than two months I already have massive increase. Granted, Amazon's free promotion on The Silver Ring helped matters drastically. In fact, so far this month the bulk of the sales are for The Silver Ring. I was lucky, but I also used that luck to my advantage. I didn't just sit back and see what would happen. No, instead I used the free promotion to promote my other work and did everything I could go spread the word to get the e-book to the top 100. And that happened. And, right now, it's paying off.

Will sales for The Silver Ring eventually slow back down? You bet. Dave Silva says I'm way too pessimistic all the time, but I like to think of myself as just being realistic. Because let's face it -- the e-book isn't going to keep selling as well as it is all month long. It will eventually drop off. But that's okay. Because I'm sure another one of my e-books will just take its place. After all, the prices are right for the reader. And the reader is the most important thing here, no?