Writing with a mission.

Category: ebook Publishing (Page 2 of 2)

The Tucson Prophecy – Chapter 1 sample

Here is a sample of my newest book, The Tucson Prophecy, to be released this October.  Enjoy!

Chapter One

Tuesday, September 3, 2002

 

“Mr. O’Conner, it’s good to meet you,” the doctor said, extending his hand.

Jimmy shook his hand without saying anything, but that didn’t seem to matter much, as the doctor didn’t skip a beat.

“Your sister has told me so much about you,” the doctor continued.

Jimmy wasn’t one for small talk, and he didn’t much care for hospitals.  In fact, the only person in the whole world who could get him to set foot in one voluntarily was lying in a hospital bed in the next room.

“How bad is it, doc?”

“Straight to the point, I see.  O.k.  Well, Mr. O’Conner, your sister is in the advanced stages of heart failure.  As you probably already know, she had a VAD – a ventricular assist device, put in last year.  However, the disease has progressed since that time, and…”

“Just the bottom line, doc, please.”  Jimmy hated long explanations.

The doctor smiled mechanically before continuing.

“Of course.  I’m afraid that, unless we are able to find a heart donor, she has between two to four months left to live.”

Jimmy nodded his head up and down.

“And where could we find one of these donors?”

“Well, there is an organization called the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network, which maintains a list of all patients in need of an organ transplant.  When a new organ becomes available, they match things like blood type, tissue type, size of the organ, and a number of other things in order to find a suitable donor.  Your sister has been on the donor candidate list for over a year.  If a heart becomes available, she will be one of the top candidates.  Unfortunately, there is no certainty that a heart will become available in time, or that she will be the candidate selected to receive the heart.”

Jimmy nodded his head up and down.

“You already discussed all of this with my sister, correct?”

“Yes, yes, of course.  At this point it is simply a waiting game, Mr. O’Conner.  We’ll keep her as comfortable as we can, and have her ready if a heart should become available.  We’ll be sending her home in a few days, since there’s nothing more we can do for her here at this time.”

“Thanks for the update, doc.”

 

 

Jimmy knocked on the door to his sister’s room and cracked it open a bit.

“O.k. if I come in?”

“Jimmy.  Come on in,” came a weak reply from his sister.

He went in the room and looked at his sister, who was smiling ear to ear at the sight of him.  He felt his heart sink when he saw how pale she was, but he didn’t allow himself to show any emotion other than a slight smile.

“Do you like the flowers I sent you?” he said, as he motioned to the bouquet sitting on the window sill.

“Yes.  You know lilies are my favorite.  Thank you, Jimmy.”

“Nothin’ but the best for you, Sis.”

He stared at her for a moment before continuing.  As far as he was concerned, Sarah was his only family.  She was his half-sister.  They shared the same mother, and she had passed away five years ago, God rest her soul.  Sarah’s father had died two years after that.  As for Jimmy’s father – if the bum was still alive, he didn’t care to know about it.  No, Sarah was it, and he would do anything in the world for her – anything.

“Did the doctor talk to you, Jimmy?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“It doesn’t look too good for me, Jimmy.”

“Yeah… I know.”

“I want to be buried beside mama, in Chicago.”

Jimmy felt a catch in his throat, but he stopped it before a sound escaped his lips and pushed the thought out of his head.

“If it comes to that, I’ll make sure it happens.  You can count on it.”

“Thanks, Jimmy.  I know I can always count on you.  Come here.”

He walked over to her bedside and she picked up one of his hands and held it in hers.  She looked up at Jimmy before continuing.

“I want you to promise me one more thing, Jimmy.”

“Sure thing, Sis, you name it.”

“I want you to get out of Chicago and start a new life… away from the business.”

Sarah never did like to say the word ‘mob’.  Whenever she mentioned it, she always used the word ‘business’.  Jimmy always knew she didn’t approve, but she never said so to his face, never talked down about what he did for a living.  The closest she ever came to it was saying, “Jimmy, you’re better than that.  I know you.  You’re a good person inside.”  He’d thought long and hard about it, too – about starting over.  He’d saved up some money, but it wasn’t quite enough to get out.  The Chicago Mob didn’t exactly approve of people getting out of the business.  It would require a new face, a new identity, a new job, and not just for him – for both of them.  Because if he left, they would come to her to get him back, and then whack them both.

Truth be told, he was tired of the life.  He wasn’t a young man any more, and being an enforcer with the mob required a certain physicality that was better suited to a younger man.  Still, at fifty years old, he was in good shape.  He ate good, exercised regularly, and combined with his impressive natural size and physique, he was able to keep up and do what was required.  But how long could he keep it up?  Another ten years?  Maybe, if he didn’t get injured or killed because he was losing his touch or getting too slow to react in a fight.  He’d been waiting for the right time, and for Jimmy, with everything that was going on with his sister, now was the right time.

“O.k.”

“You mean that, Jimmy?  You’re not just sayin’ that because I’m dyin’?”

“Yeah, I mean it, Sis.  I’ll get out, like you want.”

“Is it something you want for you, Jimmy?”

He paused a moment before responding.

“I’ve been thinkin’ about it, and yeah, I think I want it for me, too.  It’s no life to grow old in, not doin’ what I do.  Besides, I got a lot to make up for so I can see you in heaven.”

Sarah smiled, and Jimmy smiled back at her.

“Thank you, Jimmy.  Thank you.”

By the look on her face, it seemed like a great weight had lifted off of her shoulders.  She seemed to be at peace.  It made Jimmy feel good.

 

 

He left the hospital and drove across the street to a strip-mall where there was a Chinese restaurant called, The Little Dragon.  He settled down into one of the booths and ordered a General Tso combo with egg-drop soup.  He thought about the conversation he had just had with his sister, mulling over the details of what he would need to do to get out of the life while he waited for his meal to arrive.  When it finally came, he wasn’t very hungry.

He ate about half of the meal before giving up and signaling the waiter for the check.  While the waiter was gone getting his change, he opened the fortune cookie and popped it into his mouth, and then he read the fortune.  Suddenly, he stopped chewing.  Staring up at him from the small piece of paper he had just extracted from the cookie were the words of the fortune:

 

Save the girl, and your sister will live.

 

Copyright 20016 – C.L. Wells – all rights reserved.

Should authors say ‘NO’ to Amazon’s KDP Select Program? (part 1)

I’m an indie author.  I published my first book last year on Amazon’s KDP Select program.  For those of you who don’t already know what KDP Select is, it is a program whereby you, as the author, agree to make your ebook available exclusively through Amazon for at least 90 days.  In return, you get the following:

  • Preferential promotion through Amazon’s KDP Select promotional advertisement program.
  • Detailed sales and readership statistic reporting not available to titles that are not in the KDP Select program.
  • Ability to run promotional pricing, including free giveaways, which are not available to non-KDP Select titles.
  • Promotion to Kindle Unlimited users as part of their ‘free’ reading program, thus exposing you to a sizable group of readers who may not otherwise see your book through the other advertisement methods.

Sounds good, right?  Amazon is the largest online book retailer, and they are agreeing to give you preferential marketing status so that your book is advertised to a much wider audience than it otherwise would be.  What’s not to like?  Well, actually, there’s a lot not to like.

Mark Coker, creator of the ebook distribution site Smashwords.com, gave an interview as part of the Indie Fringe 2016 conference on the top trends of the publishing industry.  It is a great interview that I highly recommend.  You can watch it here.  In that interview, he discusses KDP Select.  He had many good points to make, but I want to drill down on just two of them in this post.

  1. The KDP Select program effectively buries all independently published books that are NOT in KDP select in an advertising black-hole.
  2. The KDP Select program is training one of the largest indie reader groups in the world to expect to read books for free, thus undermining sales of indie author titles and ultimately de-valuing indie author ebook titles en masse.

The combination of these two effects is having a negative effect on the indie ebook market.  In order to get premium access to Amazon’s customer base for a new ebook, authors are being asked to give their books away for practically free to a large segment of would-be book buyers (Kindle Unlimited users).  You will get some limited financial reimbursement for this from Amazon, but only for pages actually read, and at a much lower reimbursement than what the book’s selling price actually is.  To add insult to injury, Amazon actually won’t agree to the reimbursement rate until AFTER the sales month ends.  You are effectively surrendering your right to sell your ebook at the selling price you want to this large group of ebook customers.  These readers, whether they like the book or not, will certainly not then BUY the book that they have just read for free.  So, if you sign up for KDP Select, you are effectively discounting your book to the point that you will likely not make much money on this large group of users.

Now, let’s say you take your book OUT of the KDP Select program after the first three months.  Your $3.99 ebook is now positioned to make money hand over fist, right?  Wrong.  Now, all those Kindle Unlimited users, who have likely already read your book for free, don’t want to pay to read it.  Additionally, all the other books still in the KDP Select program are showing up in searches ahead of your book.  Thirdly, your book is no longer new, further negatively impacting your search result standing in the coveted ‘new books’ searches.  Your options?  Lower your price even more in order to compete against a game stacked against you, or re-up for KDP Select.

Ask yourself, all things being equal, why would anyone want to buy your ebook for $3.99 on a market flooded with thousands of new ebooks a week when they could either a) read a similar book for free as a member of the Kindle Unlimited program, or b) find dozens of other books on the same topic listed before they even see your book, that they could buy for the same price?  The answer?  They probably won’t buy your book unless you are an author known to them or your genre is so small or niche that you happen to be on the first few pages of their search results.

The net result is that if you DO sign up for KDP select, you are 1) automatically lowering your per unit sale profit by a huge margin, thus undercutting your overall profitability, and 2) contributing to a system which is rigged by Amazon to ultimately force all indie authors to lower their per-unit prices in order to compete.  In a game rigged like this, where even a book priced at $0.99 is too pricey, nobody wins.

Is there an upside to all of this?  Yes, there is, and that will be the subject of my next post. 😉

 

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