back to the word mines

[julesjones]

back home, with some quality time with my computer for the first time in a couple of weeks. I'm still using Dragon for most stuff, and I'm out of practice from not using it much for three weeks, but I've spent the last hour tagging all my books on Amazon. That's Amazon UK, US, France and Germany. :-)

Apparently it does help if a book has plenty of tags, preferably for more than one person, but any tags at all help. Once the book has been tagged on Amazon, it'll show up on future tag searches. At some point I ought to go and start tagging some of my friends' books as well, but I need to go and practice some things besides copy and paste.

Of course, spending that much time looking at my books' pages on Amazon means getting in a lot of practice at ignoring the one star reviews -- an essential author skill these days. :-)

I probably won't get any work done today on the current manuscripts (unless Predatrix is available to work on the Ipswich story). But I might be able to start catching up on the book log, which has been sorely neglected for the last three months, on account of me being sore.

Comments

[watervole]

Completely voiceless, otherwise I'd phone for a chat.

[watervole]

Would you be willing to write an article for the Dupuytren's website on things that Dragon is and isn't good for?

We're hoping to produce a page of advice for the disabled, partly on their rights and how to follow up on those, but also practical advice on how to do your job when you have problems with your hands (where there is a practical alternative) and possibly some advice on retraining for another job if there isn't a reasonable adjustment.

Knowing where voice dictation can and can't help would be a good starting point.

[julesjones]

I'd be happy to, but it might be a while before I can do it. Remind me in a couple of weeks. I think speech recognition probably would help quite a lot in mild-to-moderate cases, and it's a relatively cheap adjustment -- you can get the basic version for less than £100, and I've seen the really basic version for under £50. It's also the sort of thing that a small business might be able to get funding for from a government department under one of the access to work schemes, although I'm not up to date on those.

[mishalak]

Your post inspired me to look and see what is available through iTunes (because Amazon annoyed me a while back) and there you are with enough bookage to send me to the poor house. <g>

[julesjones]

[grin] At some point my publisher started sending its catalogue to iTunes. I don't think everything's there (it wasn't last time I checked), because they only upload books to 3rd party distributors where they're actually going to make a sensible profit after the third party takes its very large cut. But there's still a good selection.

Looking at my royalty statements (which break the numbers down by distributor), I haven't actually *sold* any copies through iTunes yet. People seem to prefer Amazon (huge chunk), with a sizeable minority going to B&N, Fictionwise, or the romance specialist site ARe.

[carl-allery.livejournal.com]

Ahah, so, clearing the decks ready for fictional wordage, then. ;)

[julesjones]

I very much hope so. :-)

As you will have gathered from the ranting at Eastercon, it's been rather frustrating to be finally on medication that doesn't fry my brain, but be too sore to be able to type. It's been satisfying to be able to go through the trunk and work on finding some short story markets, particularly as I've got one sale and one possible sale out of it so far, but I really want to get back to writing Taxman. And once I've got that done and sent off to my editor for consideration, I need to go back for another go at the third Lord and Master novel.

[carl-allery.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I'm intrigued by the Taxman title and definitely looking forward to Lord and Master 3. Not sure why I have a thing about office-based novels except that it probably ties into my stationary fetish! ;)

[julesjones]

Speaking of stationary fetishes, you probably want to have a look at this blog post for Cult Pens -- they have an interesting competition this month.

http://www.cultpens.com/blog/20120525/make-your-mark-at-cult-pens-with-uni-posca/

[carl-allery.livejournal.com]

Much as I'd love a thousand pounds worth of pens, I'm crap at design. :( Nice idea of pens you can decorate walls with though.