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Goodbye To The Big V

/ Bob Walton / Leave a comment

Goodbye To Kindle Vella

Going along with the publishing motif, I’ve been given an advanced warning by Kindle Publishing that Kindle Vella will no longer be available. It is kaput as of February 26, which is in three days. I don’t know why they can’t wait until the 28th of the month. I mean, well, I wasn’t getting anything out of it anyway. So, I guess it’s farewell old friend. It seemed like a great venue to serialize a story, and they tried really hard to make it as successful as one could hope for.

They said we might want to download the stories we have on the site, but I already have them in Word format on my computer. I tried to make a go of it on Vella – I really did. I enjoyed putting the stories there, even though we were only supposed to put serials there and not short stories, which is what I did.

I stopped my serialization of The Gods Among Us on Vella, a story that is still unfolding as we speak in July, because the stories were then locked from public view unless the public wanted to purchase keys to be able to read their favorite author on Vella. I told everyone I knew about this “great site” where they would be able to peek at my wonderful talent, but I got nothing. I don’t blame anyone. It seemed like you had to hurdle mountains just to sign up to read your favorite author.

One of my favorite authors, a local man, Dennis Royer, turned me on to another similar site called Wattpad, where an author, such as myself, could write whatever the hell he wanted to and hope people would want to follow said author, me. Wattpad, it turns out, is very well known and has millions of readers and almost as many authors/contributors. Wattpad is also a publishing house, and some of its stories have even gone on to become movies on streaming services. So all those stories I put out on Kindle Vella can be found on Wattpad here: Login – Wattpad.

This is all to ask you to read my ongoing science-fiction story, “The Gods Among Us.” It is about a savvy Texas woman who is taken back into our past so that she might start a new line of human beings.

If you liked William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, you may like The Gods Among Us. I recently read another Golding novel, The Inheritors, which has a similar subject matter to mine.

About The Business of Books

/ Bob Walton / Leave a comment

I hope all of you are finding a good life and a clear outlook in this new year. And what a year it promises to be. I’ve been living the life of a recluse for too long. The image that brings to my mind is what Howard Hughes looked like during his last reclusive years atop his Las Vegas Casino. That wasn’t me. Okay, so I did wear an adult diaper after my prostate surgery, but that was short-lived (TMI?), and I did grow a beard, which I kept trimmed. Oh, and I went to a salon for manicures and pedicures. One more thing, I don’t own a casino.

So here I am all fresh and full of spirit with energy stored up to go out and talk about my newest novel, The Relentless Sun. It is the first book I self-published through Amazon Kindle. It was a learning experience going through that process, and I gained some insight into the publishing industry. The first thing I learned was it costs money to publish books. Hiring an editor to make it readable is possibly the second most costly part. Another cost is getting the right cover for the book. Very important. I found the perfect image to describe the book on a free image site called Pixabay and put it out there on the internet, and within a week, some guy wrote me saying his publisher used the same image for his book. I couldn’t believe it. I took it down and got the same company that edited my book to make a good cover that is my own and cannot be duplicated.

The most tedious and expensive part of publishing is advertising. Knowing how, when, and where can lighten your pocketbook and your head.

There is a lesson here, folks. Writing books is fun. Publishing and selling is hard, especially for someone who hates spending money.

I will be continuing with this subject matter in future posts.

Keep reading