Blogfade and a Back Injury

Have you missed me? I’ve been off the grid, after trying to be superman and  lift a heavy bag of tent poles out of a trailer for a 4 room tent at Relay For Life and following that up a couple of weeks later mowing wet lawns (Auckland right?), piling up the clippings into a barrow and then lifting them to head height to empty into a garden bag, the straw that broke the Cappel’s back.

MRI Result? 3 bulging discs on both sides of my lower spine, all touching nerves and causing me lots of pain in my back and legs. I had 3 (starting very early in the morning) day trips to hospital when the pain was at 9/10, each time they kindly shoved a finger where the sun don’t shine to check that it still had muscle control, because my left leg is very weak and I had no sensation surrounding my left knee and referred pain down both legs. Or maybe they did it to scare me into not coming back:)

I thought I was over that one with my prostate cancer which has been in remission for just over a year now!

It was a real eye opener sitting in the triage rooms and seeing how awesome the staff are, dealing with a constant stream of frightened, sick and sore patients. My hats off to the staff (and the volunteers who fed me) at North Shore Hospital.

So I’ve been popping morphine and other drugs, (off work for almost 2 months on ACC) to the point where my brain has been mush. It only hurts when I stand, walk, lie down with a pillow between my legs (for more than 4 hours) or sit (only on a wheat bag on a straight kitchen chair with another bag on my back as I look longingly at the couch). I can’t drive and my decision making is such that I would not represent myself or my team well at work. I’m good at putting things in the wrong cupboards or forgetting what I went into a room for.

I’m not complaining, the drugs are keeping the pain between 4-7/10 and whilst I hate not having a clear head, having no responsibility means I can focus on getting well and not worrying about dropping clangers at work where I really do need to be on my game. My wife kindly took 2 weeks of work at the beginning to look after me. I can now look after myself and walk to the letterbox and back. Not twice in a row though I discovered.

The good news is I am mending. Tomorrow I will be getting 3 Transforaminal Steroid Injections guided by x-ray to within half a millimeter of the 3 nerves (sounds impressive doesn’t it). I had one a few weeks ago and it got the pain levels from peaking at 9/10 to peaking at 7/10, so we’re hoping that this lot will bring it down to a level where I can reduce the meds so I can stay in bed all night and get my brain back to near normal and start planning my return to work.

Work by the way has been fantastic. I have really felt bad about not being there with my team at the end of the financial year, but conscious that if I don’t recover carefully it could be much worse. As it is I’ve been told to be extremely careful after the injections because my back pain may be reduced, but I will have to be really careful when the pain is down to not lift or do sudden movements which could set me back, so I’m expecting some physio to follow.

So I’ve been off most social media, blogs and anything else requiring concentration, but I have been thinking. About real estate and location based services and all the mistakes we make when we buy houses. As you know, I wrote a book a few years ago about using apps, maps and location based services. I’m now looking at a follow up course rather than updating the book. I’ve been thinking about this while I’ve been off and am keen to hear from anyone who would like to share mistakes or things they would do differently when they buy their next house.

I’m not looking for sympathy, but I’d love to hear some stories about homes you have bought and things you should have checked out first, maybe the neighbourhood, crime, amenities, the commute, property values, flooding or other things that you could have researched first. Drop me a comment. Apologies for any typos, I did proofread this about 10 times.

 

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Authors Complain About Amazon Kindle Unlimited Service

Authors are complaining that the new ‘all you can eat’ service that people can subscribe to for $9.99 a month, gaining access to over 700,000 books on your Kindle device or app according to this article in the NY Times.

I think the article is very thorough and recommend it if you are interested in ePublishing, an author or just interested in changing business models.

I’m a Kindle author myself and have also written White Papers and articles about eBooks for many years. I therefore have an interest except that I am more interested in people benefiting from my knowledge than making money out of it. My most recent book is about the use of Location Based Services in Buying a House.

There are a lot of changes in the way people are writing and publishing. Some people are churning out series of books, targeting a youth audience around SciFi, Zombies and Vampires and doing formula writing. They put a lot of energy into the first book, which is often given away for free, finishing like a TV series with a cliff hanger at the end. If you liked the story, you will possibly pay for ongoing series.

Kindle also offers the ability to make offers like Countdown Deals where you can run promotional deals. I’m running one for a week on the above book starting on 30 December when you can buy it for only $0.99, it then goes up by a dollar a day back to full price on the 6th of January 2015. You might like to grab a copy for yourself or someone you know who is thinking about buying a house in the near future. It could save them hundreds of thousands of dollars or a lot of grief.

Anyway, the reason for this blog was to get people thinking about how they market their books and themselves and how they make money. The article compared the royalties from the Kindle all you can eat service to music services like Spotify (which I also subscribe to) and the fact that the songwriters and artists get minute royalties from these services. I doubt that authors get much from libraries either. I didn’t. I listen to eBooks from my local library whenever I’m in the car alone, many are best sellers and I enjoy them for free.

Smart bands and gigging artists today use any tools they can to get their music heard, whether its downloads, radio, streaming, services like Spotify, iTunes, CD’s or whatever method so that their music gets heard. They build up a fan base. The real money comes from selling merchandise and from live performances. Look at the money even old bands like the Eagles or the Rolling Stones can make from concerts. It’s BIG money!

There are some smart writers like Scott Sigler who exemplify how this is done. He is on every social media you can think of. He does book signings, you can order autographed copies of books. He has merch including shirts, hats, artwork in an online shop. He offers his books for free in episodes as podcasts and hopes that if you enjoy them, you will buy the audio book so that you don’t have to wait a week for the next episode. He goes to conventions, networks and engages with his readers. Despite giving away product, he is a New York Times best seller. He understands that he is competing on a world market and it is not just a matter of write it and they will buy.

The article implies that writers think they can just write and sit back and watch the money roll in, give up their day jobs and if they don’t get rich, its someone else’s fault. The reality is that the business is tough and always has been, but today making good money through self publishing is possible if you are prepared to do the hard yards, but you need to innovate.

It certainly helps to be a consistently good writer and to provide the form that your audience wants to read. But even a great writer still needs to market themselves and recognise that their fans are individual people. Stephen King is another great example. He totally understands that he is writing to his ‘Dear Reader’ and constantly reinvents the way he publishes his books. He also does merchandise, if you liked his latest novel Revival, you can go to his merch store and buy a I Climbed Skytop T-Shirt. He even has an online forum on his site. He even runs competitions from his site (I wasn’t impressed that it was for US residents only though, that was pretty stingy). The point being, he is one of the great big sellers of the last 20 years, but he works as hard above the line as he does on his writing. It’s a case of the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Having just written all this, I’ve just convinced myself that the $9.99 is great value and I’m probably going to sign up once I’ve read all the Kindle books I have already bought. I paid US$15 for Revival so that’s a month and a half’s subscription on its own. Oh and don’t worry Stephen, I will buy a hardcover for my collection as well, because despite being an eBook evangelist from way back (Fictionwise on my Palm Pilot), I also collect books of particular authors that I like. I’ve given over half of my books away, but still have around 2,000 in my music room.

So if you are an author, wanting to make a living from your craft, my suggestion is to allow as much time for marketing as you do for actual writing. If you don’t know what to do, ask someone, ask everyone, look at what people like Scott Sigler and Stephen King do. Don’t just copy them though, think of other ways you can sell your books. Look at creative things that bands do. There are so many cool things you can do, I can think of dozens of merch ideas that people would buy.

Don’t complain. Do something.

Who Can You Trust? Who Do You Trust (Read Time 1:41)

Who do you trust? Who can you trust? With happenings in Auckland, New Zealand mayoral politics recently, the NSA spying, and other revelations, we find ourselves in interesting times. With the invasive growth of social media we live in a world of increasing transparency. Corporates and Governments which have thrived on sharing only what they think people need to know are losing that battle.

I’ve been reading article in The Futurist by Rolf Jensen, Chief Imagination Officer (I like that title!) of Dream Company in Denmark who compares today’s society to the first Renaissance. Gutenberg’s Press accelerated the spread of new ideas, and the golden age sprung out of the middle ages where much of the world was controlled by a religious hierarchy.

We have a similar break-up to political hierarchy’s now, particularly in but not limited to the Middle East and Europe, and like the Gutenberg Press, Social Media is now making important information available to the masses, most significantly in real time. This means that it isn’t possible for governments and corporations to use smoke and mirrors quite so much. With trending information, we can see right past the kaleidoscopic obfuscation to what is really going on.

Here are some interesting statistics that Rolf shared in his article in The Futurist:

• From Pew Research: In the 1960’s 75% of the US public trusted their Government. In 2010 the result was 25%!
• The European barometer polled UK voters in 2005 and found a trust level of only 34%. In 2012 that was down to 21%.
• CEO’s of large corporations are trusted by 45% of the US population (almost double the number that trust their politicians, that’s positive isn’t it?)
• Gallop says that teachers are trusted by 84%. That’s great news isn’t it. What a shame they get one of the smallest parts of the budget!

Back to social media though, what we are doing is finding groups of people that we do trust and building a new society. We’re sharing knowledge and information in countless ways that have immediacy.

As an example, in my new eBook, Buying a House – Using Real Estate Apps, Maps and Location Based Services, I speak a lot about using social media to research where to live. I cover questions like where to find people who are like you, or people who can tell you about a suburb or area, who have nothing to gain by sharing that information. Who can you trust to give you honest information?

I feel very grateful to live in such exciting times where the power is gong back to the people. Of course ‘the people’ do have to take the power and whilst everyone subsequently had an opinion on Mayor Len Brown’s indiscretions, only 33% turned up to vote in the Auckland local Government elections. I do like the saying ‘You get the Government you deserve’.

So who do you trust? Who do you go to for advice? How are you going to use the information now available to you, to help build the world you want for yourself and your children? How will you contribute?

Comments welcomed.