Stuffed with Words

This is a long tale.  Very long.  There's a great deal of time to cover, details to catch up on. Grab a cup of coffee, and have the pot handy for a refill.  Or a glass of wine and the bottle.  Or whatever beverage of choice you prefer.  And settle in.

Let's swing back to 2013, to the infamous Goodreads Purge.  The whole thing started in August over a 2-star review posted to a book that hadn't yet been released.  The author threw a hissy fit, wanted the review removed, wouldn't accept that GR had a policy of allowing reviews for unreleased books.  Her temper tantrum ended up garnering hundreds and hundreds of 5-star reviews for the book . . . which she then never released.  The book and its reviews remain on Goodreads to this day as far as I know.

Over the next several months, Goodreads, which had been purchased by Amazon in June of that year, began to tighten the rules on reviewing, specifically in the area of not allowing negative reviews based on the author's behavior if that behavior was unrelated to the writing in the book.  If, for instance, the author was spamming the various discussion groups on Goodreads and a reader wanted to note for her own reference that she didn't ever want to buy or read anything by that author because he was a spammer, she couldn't do it.  Shelf names indicating author misbehavior -- "Author spams," "Review troll," "Don't buy" --  were no longer allowed.  (Well, they weren't allowed for some reviewers though others got away with it.)  Slowly but surely, a lot of reviewers were either removed or silenced.

For the most part, those removed were reviewers who more often took a hard line when it came to poorly written books and/or poor author behavior.

I was one of those reviewers.

Between August 2013, when the whiny author fiasco started, and November 2014 when I was finally banned from Goodreads, I had become very active researching authors who purchased reviews from fiverr.com and the reviewers from whom they purchased those reviews.  Purchased reviews were absolutely forbidden on both Goodreads and Amazon, as being against both Terms of Service on the respective sites and against Federal Trade Commission guidelines on Amazon, where the books were actually sold.  With assistance from a small cadre of other reviewers, I got over 6,000 fraudulent reviews removed from Goodreads.  Several reviewers were banned from both Goodreads and Amazon, though most of them found ways to come back.  Some authors also had their GR accounts removed.  A couple of years later I was able to confirm that several of the reviewers were still in business under other names; I haven't bothered to research it further since then.

I don't mind admitting that there was a certain amount of self-righteousness involved in my crusade against the fake reviews.  For the most part, the books were published by their authors, often with little or no professional-level editing.  In other words, they were badly written. The authors couldn't generate positive reviews on the books' merits alone, so they bought reviews to gain visibility.  Some of them, I'm sure, believed that what they were doing was perfectly legitimate promotion.  Or they justified it somehow.

Most readers knew nothing about this, and there was nowhere to let them know.  They'd see a book with glowing reviews, buy it, and find out it was a dud.  But how were they to know?  And how many of them, not understanding that the five-star reviews were lies, thought it was their own fault for not liking the books?  Many of the paid reviewers had achieved high ranking in the Top 1000, Top 500, or even Top 100 Amazon reviewers.

What I realized through this experience was that too few people are willing to write a negative review.  They offer a lot of reasons, too, and I've discussed that often enough before that I won't go into great detail again here.  Suffice to say that there are issues with hurting the author's feelings or not knowing how to justify a negative review or even just wanting to make sure the free ARCs keep coming.

Taking into consideration that Amazon and Goodreads ultimately have the same bottom line, and that as a combined entity they are the single largest platform for book buying, book selling, book publishing, and book reviewing online, any author who steps in to review takes an enormous risk.

Under the same FTC guidelines mentioned above, authors are not allowed to review on the Amazon platform unless they are reviewing outside their own genre or they leave a positive review.  Most authors, for reasons of promotion and general public relations, tend not to write negative reviews anyway, even though in many cases they are the best qualified to do so.  Negative reviews from authors are more legal on Goodreads, but that's also the more social venue, so there are reasons why negative reviews from authors are less likely there.

Since that 2013 purge at Goodreads, the stand-alone review blogs have become more prolific, and by their very nature they are more likely to promote new books with positive reviews than they are to be analytical or critical of the not-so-good ones.  Well, that's the nature of the beast, and frankly, my disagreement with the philosophy that drives it doesn't really amount to a hill of beans.  I was booted off Goodreads in November 2014 (or thereabouts) and that was the end of it.

I had found a home of sorts at BookLikes.  I brought over some of my issues with bad books and skeevy reviewing, but there was less drama at BookLikes and that was fine.  A few odd little coincidences within the group I had joined there ended up leading me back to actual writing, and in July 2016, I published The Looking-Glass Portrait via Kindle Direct Publishing.  I had never had much luck with Smashwords, the only other platform I'd used for self-publishing, so I didn't even bother with it for LGP.  I had all my books on Amazon, and the five novels were all enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.  LGP did surprisingly well for me over the next eighteen months or so; I had no complaints at all.

What little reviewing I did on BookLikes was mostly related to books I read that I felt like sharing with others or to books I read for the games we played on BookLikes.  I didn't review everything I read, in part because I read a lot of stuff I knew no one else would be interested in.  I didn't have a huge following.

A good deal of my energy went into my crafting hobbies, and then my resurrected writing.

But I was also burned out on reviewing.  Not for the reasons you might think, however.  Or maybe so.

I had read a lot of crap.  I don't have a huge budget for book buying, so my digital purchases are pretty much restricted to the free stuff with the occasional bargain when something is on sale for $1.99 or less.  Rarely will I spend more than that on a digital book, unless it's a much-wanted non-fiction selection for research.

Reviewing a bad book is hard work, and given how few people would see it on BookLikes, I couldn't justify putting in the time and effort.  The negative reviews I had posted on Goodreads had brought a lot of negative feedback, some of it vicious to the point of death threats.  My own older books that I had republished on Amazon took the hit of dozens of one-star reviews, even though I knew none of the reviewers had read them.  I have a philosophy of never ever ever reading reviews of my work, which I maintain to this day, so I never read the nasty remarks, never reported them, never did anything.  Again, as far as I know most of those reviews are still there, on Goodreads and on Amazon, though some of the accounts were subsequently removed because other people reported them.  I never did.

And though I'm old and accustomed to that kind of stupid behavior, after November 2014 I had gradually lost contact with the writing and publishing aspect of the book world and I didn't make a special effort to renew that contact while writing LGP or even after publishing it.  The Amazon discussion boards, where I used to read a lot but never posted, became vicious when they weren't stupid; I walked away from even reading them long before Amazon shut them down.  I had never followed the Kboard platform very much, nor had I been more than peripherally involved with sites such as The Passive Voice or Absolute Write.  My time on social media became more and more devoted to arts and crafts via Etsy and Facebook.

Things took a slight turn in August 2016.  After I had published The Looking-Glass Portrait and was working on what I hoped would be my next book, I took a break one afternoon to browse through the freebies on Amazon.  I found this:

It's gone from Amazon now, but it was free that particular day and it looked harmless enough, so I downloaded it.  But I couldn't believe what I found.

It was garbage.

I won't bore you with the whole review -- which you can read on BookLikes here -- but it was pretty darn bad.  And I knew there were a whole bunch more like it, because I had downloaded them too.  I just didn't know what they were!

This was August of 2016.  Almost two years ago.  And if you read the comments posted to that review, even then there were questions about the Kindle Unlimited page views.  If I had stayed in the writing community, maybe I would have followed up on it.  I didn't.

This particular book was a collection of unrelated stories, a veritable hodgepodge of romances set in different eras and locations, with varying degrees of "heat."  Mafia romances, biker romances, shifter romances, Regency romances.  All of them poorly written, poorly formatted.  I had already downloaded several more of Sarah Thorn's other books, but I didn't even open them.  They weren't worth my time.

But I couldn't review on Amazon.  I was banned from Goodreads.  So I reviewed it on BookLikes where nothing much happened.  I didn't expect anything to happen.  BookLikes is too small a platform in terms of number of users.  There was no way for the word to spread about this type of
"book."

It wasn't until October 2017 that I encountered the next odd book on Kindle.  It, too, has disappeared from Amazon, but it was there last October. 

Again, the product was so . . . odd that I reviewed it on BookLikes in substantial detail.  And this time the comments were eye-popping.  One of them included a link to a David Gaughran blog post about book stuffers.  In that post, Gaughran stated that he had been in contact with Amazon about this problem for sixteen months.  Gaughran's post is dated July 2017.  So this issue of bookstuffing has been known and discussed with Amazon since at least March 2016.

I suspect Mr. Gaughran has gone way beyond frustrated by now.

I know a little bit about how he feels.  I went through the same thing when reporting on review buyers and sellers to Goodreads.  It became a bit of an obsession, and I wasn't even really writing at the time.  A few of my books had been republished on KDP, but I didn't really have a horse in the race.  It was all a matter of principle.

A principle that I should have risen to defend in October 2017, but I didn't.  And therefore I owe a huge apology to David Gaughran.

Because as I realized today, it's all related.  Or at least maybe it is.

So many critical voices were silenced as a result of the 2013 Goodreads Purge that maybe there were few to sound the alarms over the bookstuffing.

I had to stop and ask myself, as I pulled all this out of my personal wayback machine, how I had failed to pick up on it.  The answer was, sadly, pretty damn obvious.  In October 2017 I was just starting my annual season of arts and crafts shows.  When I wasn't preparing for one show, I was often recovering from another.  I went through several agonizing bouts of back spasms that often had me laid up for a week or more.  I was trying to write, too.  My brain was just going in too many directions.

Now here we are at June 2018.  My show season is over; outdoor temperatures are hitting triple digits so I'm comfortably settled for the summer.  Oh, I still have work to do to prepare for the 2018-2019 show season, but I shouldn't be bothered with back spasms or the tendonitis that flared up this winter in my left elbow.

As they say, getting old isn't for sissies.

I've been thinking for the past few months that it was time to resurrect this writing blog anyway.  So here I am, wondering what we do next about the book stuffing.  #GETLOUD at Twitter is, I guess one way.  But what are we up against?  And who cares?

Well, the authors sure ought to care.


Let's look at some numbers, just for fun.  The pot of Amazon money set aside for the Kindle Unlimited (and to a lesser extent the Kindle Owners Lending Library, or KOLL) is currently at $21.2 million for April 2018, to be paid in June.  At $10 per month for the KU subscription, that represents at least two million subscribers.  We can safely assume Amazon isn't turning over all the KU money to the fund, so if that $21.2 million is only $8 out of each subscription, that adds another half a million readers.  Plus all those who in any given month sign up for the free month and then cancel.

Is there anything scientific about this estimate?  No, not really.  What it does, however, is give an idea of how vast the pool of readers is out there who might care about book stuffing.

The KU subscriber who encounters a stuffed book might not care.  She's already paid her fee, so if she gets a dud book, it's no real loss.  She returns it and checks out another.  In that sense, she's not out anything and could be said to not have a dog in this race.

What about the non-KU reader?  She shells out $2.99 or $4.99 or even $0.99 for a stuffed book, discovers it's full of "stuff" she's already read, and she returns it.

Or will she?

Remember that Amazon recently instituted new policies about limiting returns.  What if the reader is now faced with the risk of returning a stuffed book . . . or losing her Amazon account altogether?

If she chooses not to return it, she's out the money, and the author is rewarded for his scam.  The reader may decide to be less eager to spend money on self-publishing authors and stick with the better-known, familiar names from the traditional publishers.  (This is why trad publishers are not likely to come to the assistance of readers or writers of author published material.  As long as the indie stuff remains bad, it sends more readers to the trad publishers.)

If the readers don't appear to be hurt by the book stuffing scam, what about the non-stuffing writers?  They're the ones who are really hurt.

At the current limit of 3000 KENPC per book, the stuffer is paid $15 for each "first" read.  It's very easy to slip in a link at the beginning of the book that takes the reader immediately to the end.  It may be a link to a newsletter sign-up or even a link to a Table of Contents that's at the end of the book instead of the beginning!  Regardless what it is, as soon as the reader reaches the end of the book, the author is credited with a full read, even if 99.9% of the book has been skipped over.  Instant $15 profit.

Next month, the author shuffles the order of the "stories" in the book, slaps on a new cover and new title, and publishes again.  Another $15 royalty, even though none of the content is new!

Some of the stuffer/scammers boast of six-figure monthly incomes from their books.  That money comes out of the general pool, meaning it's less for the non-stuffing authors -- like me!  It's not just the per-page payout that's affected.  Amazon also pays All-Star bonuses for the most pages read.  My book at 637 pages doesn't stand a chance against those 3,000 KENPC stuffed monsters, with links that take the reader to the end from page one.  So the pool shrinks further.

Not to mention, of course, that Amazon sales are driven by reviews and reads and algorithms.  A book that gets lots of page reads will generate its own visibility, and when the book stuffers are all grouped together, they corral all the visibility to themselves.

A check of Tia Siren's Love Next Door: A Romance Compilation shows that the first four "Customers who bought this book also bought" recommendations are also stuffed books:

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What happens as a result is that independent, self-publishing authors find themselves unable to earn enough to keep writing.  Some have (reluctantly?) turned to book stuffing themselves, gaming a system that's rigged in favor of the gamesters.  Others have turned to other publishing platforms where at least they don't have to compete with the stuffers. Others have given up entirely.

Readers lose out and writers lose out, and the scammers win big.  Now that some people are speaking out, is it too late?  The scammers are being reported to Amazon, but is it doing any good?

If you look at a selection of these books, they get few negative reviews, if any.  So how is anyone to know they're not well-written, not well-formatted for the digital reader, and not stuffed with old stories?

Looking at just one at random, I can immediately see from the "Look Inside" preview that the formatting is off.

I downloaded the free sample to my plain Kindle, and the double spacing between paragraphs made the reading experience uncomfortable, but not impossible.  I've seen worse.

But here's the thing -- the writing is bad.  It's bad from the beginning.  It's bad on the micro level that few readers pay attention to.  It's bad on the level that would keep the writer from ever being considered by a traditional, gatekeeping publisher.

Parades don't arrive from the town square.  If there were to be a parade for the home-coming hero, he would be in it and it would go to the town square.  Is this important?  Is it nit-picky?  Yes, to both.

Unless, of course, this is just crappy erotica to be read for the titillation and the profit.

But the second paragraph is worse, because weapons aren't automated.  They're automatic, or semi-automatic.  This error tells me the author doesn't give a shit about the quality of the writing.

The few negative reviews contain references to the level of sexual content in the book as being quite high.  One review refers to it as porn.  I'd be willing to bet that most of the stuffed books that are topping the Amazon sales charts are also high on the sex level.

Is that what it's come down to?  Is it all just porn?  Is it all just fuck books with no attempt to write well, craft a story, create an imaginary world for the reader to slip into for a while?

I'd like to think not.

But no one criticizes these books.  No one points out how badly written they are.  Is it because no one cares?  Or is it because no one knows how to tell bad writing from good?  Is it because those who do know the difference have been bludgeoned into silence by the hordes of "Think of the author's feelings!" and "If you can't say something nice. . . " and "I have to leave good reviews if I want to keep getting free ARCs from the authors!"

The silence at Goodreads and Amazon when it comes to badly written and/or badly published books is at least part of what allowed this to happen.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews?  Yes, they do.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews because they want to keep getting free books?  Yes, they do.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews because they don't want to hurt the authors' feelings?  Yes, they do.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews because even though the books are bad they don't know how to tell anyone they're bad?  Yes, they do.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews because they're afraid of the backlash from fans or authors if they publish a negative review?  Yes, they do.

Do reviewers have the right to publish only positive reviews because they are also authors and don't want anyone to give their books negative reviews in revenge?  Yes, they do.

Do readers have the right to read honest reviews of both good and bad books so they can make informed decisions on how to spend their money and their time?

Yes, they do.

If books are badly written, if they are poorly researched, if they are stuffed with other material to boost KU page reads, they deserve to be reviewed as such.  Readers deserve to know this.

#GETLOUD

Part 1: The price of buying -- and selling -- words

This is going to be a very long work in progress.  Rather than wait until I have the whole thing written, I'm going to post each part as it's completed and then post updates and/or corrections as needed.

The quick background is this:  Effective 1 January 2015, the European Union ("EU") will require all sellers of digital media to include Value Added Tax ("VAT") in the listed prices of the item being sold, to collect the VAT from the buyer, and to remit the VAT collected to the appropriate authority.  This requirement has been public knowledge for at least six months as of this date (18 December 2014) and some sellers of digital media have taken steps to comply.  Others have not.  Others are trying to but cannot.  There appears to be a huge amount of misinformation, misunderstanding, ignorance, and, well, a lot of other stuff.

I don't have all the answers, and don't claim to.  I'm just trying to ask the questions and put whatever information I find into some coherent order.


The concept of VAT has been around for quite a while.  It functions as a national sales tax for some 28 European countries, and ranges from a low of 3% to a high of 27%.  Much like state, county, and local sales taxes in the U.S., VAT is imposed on the buyer of physical merchandise at the time of purchase.  The merchant collects the tax at the rate imposed on the location where the purchase is made and then remits the monies to the appropriate authorities.  The purchaser may be from another country (or state, county, or city) where the rate is different -- higher or lower -- but the rate is charged based on where the actual transaction (where the buyer actually takes possession) takes place.

Unlike U.S. sales taxes, however, the VAT is included ("VAT inclusive") in the advertised price.  Assuming a 20% VAT rate for the United Kingdom, an item with a price of £5.00 would be displayed/advertised/listed at £6.00.  The customer thus knows up front what the total price is.

With physical goods, this isn't difficult to understand.  VAT being a national tax, even such things as printed books could (but in actuality may not) carry the correct VAT-inclusive price printed right on them.  Merchants collect the taxes at the time of the sale and then later report and pay them.

The U.S. having so many different taxing authorities -- state, county, city -- as well as various exemptions within those authorities, sales taxes are calculated after all the retail prices are added up.  Again, the merchants collect the taxes and remit them to the appropriate authorities.  Large retail merchants who sell a variety of goods at various tax rates have much of the complicated calculations programmed into their scanners and cash registers.  Smaller merchants who only sell one category of merchandise are permitted to calculate manually; in some jurisdictions they may even be allowed to calculate tax as a percentage of the list price paid rather than adding it to the list price.

You may think I'm writing this on the wrong blog and that this applies more to selling my arts and crafts than to writing books.  In fact, this has everything to do with books, and almost nothing to do with selling jewelry or wooden bowls at an art show.  Well, almost nothing.  We'll get to that later.


What worked for physical commodities sold in physical stores/locations was one thing.  Online selling of physical merchandise posed a different scenario.  In the U.S. as well as the EU, application of taxes to physical goods that were ordered online and delivered from one taxing location to another required some new requirements and strategies as well as implementation procedures.  In some cases it works, and in some it doesn't.

Digital distribution of digital products across jurisdictional boundaries was a bit trickier, for a variety of reasons.  The most obvious issue was that since there was no physical object being transferred, there was no physical point at which the taxing authority could intercept a package and demand payment (or evidence of prior payment) of taxes before turning the merchandise over to the purchaser.

Digital downloading via the Internet also meant that buyers and sellers could be in different states, even different countries.  Which taxing authorities then applied?  What rates?  How could the funds be collected and remitted?  What currencies would be involved?

The rapidity with which digital selling of digital products has increased apparently caught the EU taxing authorities sort of flat footed.  Especially when digital behemoth -- and infamous tax avoider -- Amazon got involved.

For one thing, the EU were upset that Amazon was taking over retail markets of physical goods and not paying any VAT at all, nor was Amazon paying any corporate taxes.  While various negotiations were taking place to rectify those situations, the EU took steps to begin collecting VAT on one market where Amazon had a very visible market dominance: ebooks.

The EU, in order to capture revenue from huge digital sellers and Amazon in particular, declared that VAT on digital media would be assessed based on the location of the seller.  Amazon then chose to set their EU location as Luxembourg (so did Nook and Kobo) whose VAT rate on ebooks is 3%, even though such a low VAT rate apparently contravened EU directives.  (France's rate of 5.5% on ebooks has also been deemed in violation.)

Effective 1 January 2015, that will no longer be the case.  Because of the amount of VAT funds being lost, the European Commission has stated that sales of digital products -- electronic books, crochet and knitting patterns, music recordings, digital training materials, etc. -- will have to be taxed by the seller but the rate will be based on the purchaser's home location, or at least the IP registered location of the computer or ereader device to which the file is downloaded.   This is similar to how U.S. sales taxes have generally been assessed on physical goods:  It's not the point of sale that matters; it's the point of purchase.  As online purchases of physical goods have increased, many taxing authorities (usually the individual states) have implemented measures by which sales taxes can be collected based on the buyer's location, especially if the seller has any physical presence in that particular state.  But again, it all depends on the taxing authority.  They're the collectors; they set the rules.  (Enforcing them may be a different matter.  We'll save that for another post, I think,)

There are several stipulations involved in all this beyond just the assessing, collecting, and remitting of the tax itself.

1. The listed price posted by the digital seller must include the specific VAT amount for the prospective purchaser and that VAT-inclusive price must be posted prior to any sale.  The VAT amount can't be tacked on afterward the way sales taxes in the U.S. are.
2. The seller must be registered with the EU and each member state (there are 28) in order to collect and remit the funds.  (There are some procedures in place for "one stop shopping" programs to allow digital merchants to remit VAT monies to just one location, which will then distribute according to the merchant's tax return.)
3. Returns must be filed quarterly to those 28 member states.
4. Records identifying each and every purchaser's location via IP as well as corroborating indentification evidence must be kept a minimum of 10 years and it must be stored on a server in the EU for auditing purposes. 
5. Sellers' records must be auditable.
6. And so on.

Amazon is complying with the order, albeit imperfectly.  Some other distributors of digital publications are not.

Amazon's fix is not, as I said, perfect, and that lack of perfection will have a direct and potentially serious impact on the digital self-publishing author.

Digital publication has allowed author-publishers to put their digital products online via a single distributor and then sell virtually anywhere in the world.  Amazon's Kindle dominates the ebook market.  One report suggested that 9 out of every 10 ebooks purchased in the UK came from Amazon.  But Amazon isn't alone.  There are other ebook distributors such as Smashwords, Nook, and Kobo, but there are also craft-oriented sites such as Etsy.com that allow "shop" owners to upload and sell digital files such as knitting patterns and downloadable graphics files.  The files are held on the website's servers -- not the seller's -- and downloaded automatically upon payment, usually through PayPal or another automated payment platform.  The EU and the UK's taxing authority HMRC have stated that such platforms constitute "3rd party" sellers who are liable, as is Amazon, for the collection and remittance of the taxes as well as the recordkeeping.  I'll get to the details of that distinction in a subsequent post, but I wanted you readers to know that Amazon isn't alone.

But getting back to ebooks in the EU.  The VAT rates on ebooks in the European Union range from 3% (Luxembourg) to 27% (Hungary).  There are 28 taxing bodies.  (Because most of those member states have more than one rate, there are actually the possibilities for 75 or so different rates on various products, but this post is only concerned with ebooks.)

Let me reiterate part of this:  The law that is slated to go into effect on 1 January 2015 (two weeks from today) includes the stipulation that each digital product be priced to include the appropriate VAT amount.  Thus, to use one example, a digital book priced by the publisher/author at £5.00 in the U.K. would have to be listed at £6.00 to cover the 20% VAT rate.  Amazon has its amazon.co.uk website, so the Kindle edition of the book would appear there at £6.00.  Amazon would collect that amount, remit the £1.00 VAT to the taxing authority (HMRC), and pay the author's royalties based on the selling price of £5.00, which the publisher/author set.

In the event, however, that a copy of the book is purchased from the amazon.co.uk site by a customer in Ireland, the numbers change.  The Republic of Ireland has a VAT rate of 23%, which on that book would be £1.15.  Since there is no separate Kindle pricing available for Ireland, the Irish VAT would be assessed and paid out of the posted price of £6.00, but now the publisher/author's selling price is docked to cover the shortfall, and subsequently her royalty from Amazon is based on £4.85.  In effect, the author in the U.S. has subsidized the higher Irish VAT rate.  The author can set a higher price, of course, to cover the Irish VAT, but that means the UK buyers will also be paying the higher price, too, and higher than they really need to.  Amazon will essentially split the difference with the publisher/author.

Amazon does not provide sufficient information to the publisher/author distinguishing the number of sales to Ireland and the number of sales to the UK.  The publisher/author just has to make a guess.

The VAT was never intended to be paid by the producers of the goods but by the consumers.

Amazon does have a variety of websites for Kindle publishing and publisher/authors are able to set the prices for each of those venues to cover the VAT rates.  But those venues do not cover all the taxing situations.  Amazon.de would presumably cover the 19% rate for Germany as well as the 20% rate for Austria, since Amazon doesn't have a unique Austrian platform.   The publisher/author will have to cover the 1% shortfall.

No big deal, right?

But what about situations involving France?  Amazon.fr will presumably require ebooks to be priced to include the 5.5% French VAT on ebooks.  Can a Kindle buyer from Sweden buy Kindle books from Amazon.fr?  If so -- I've searched and haven't been able to find anything definite yet -- who pays the difference between the French 5.5% VAT on ebooks and the Swedish 25%?

So far, I have not been able to find out if buyers from Sweden even can purchase from Amazon.fr, or are they restricted to Amazon.co.uk, or can they buy Kindle books at all?

If there is a shortfall, even if it's 19.5% between the VAT-inclusive French price and the 25% Swedish VAT rate, how much you wanta bet it's gonna be charged to the publisher/author as a deduction from the selling price of the book, with a resultant diminution of the publisher/author's royalties?

So far, only France, Luxembourg, and Malta have applied a substantially reduced VAT rate on ebooks.  Austria, however, only applies a 10% VAT to physical books and periodicals.  Other EU member states also have lower rates on books, magazines, newspapers.  Ireland and the UK impose no VAT at all to physical books and periodicals.  That reduced rate does not apply to digital books and periodicals, per the EU declaration that it's not really clear that digital and print media are equal, the same, equivalent.  (They are discussing the issue, however.)  After all, digital books have linkable indexes and so on.  (Never mind that digital books require some kind of digital reading device; physical books don't.  Or that digital books cannot be legally resold because they aren't legally "owned."  Did you know that?  You really don't own any of those Kindle books.  All you have is a license to read them. . . .)

If the Kindle books are sold(sic) and taxed at the rate posted on the Amazon marketplace website but purchased by someone in another country with a different VAT rate, the tax is going to be applied unfairly.  Either the publisher/author will have to subsidize the buyer if the posted rate is too low, or other buyers will be paying more than they should.

There is another effect of this variability in taxation:  The publisher/author may take an even greater hit when it comes to royalties because of KDP's two-tiered royalty schedule.  That issue is just full of math (or maths) so let's save it for Part 2, shall we?

Letting go of the words. . . . again

So, it's done.

Legacy of Honor is live on Amazon.

I was never a shameless hussy of self promotion, and I doubt I'm ever going to be.  This blog and my comments on various books-and-authors websites like Booklikes and maybe a post on Facebook are as much promo as I've ever been comfortable doing.

But as I blogged earlier, something about this republication of my first print-published book has been very emotional for me.  I'm not totally sure why.

Back in March of this year, when I really began the process, I blogged some of my thoughts about to change or not to change a book that had been written over 30 years ago, whether I should bring it up to the, for lack of a better phrase, market sensibilities of 2013.  Back then I made the decision not to. 

In March I already knew some of the problems with the various versions of the book, and I knew I was going to have to make at least some revisions.  I had no idea then how extensive they would be or how much effort they would take, but I didn't really think the process would be too difficult or complex.

I was wrong.  Very wrong.

Part of that March blog post was intended to form the basis of an author's foreword to the digital edition, and I did paste it into the digital manuscript as I worked on the edits.  What started as a couple of paragraphs, however, quickly grew to several pages.  As usual, I was telling someone how to make a watch when all they'd asked for was the time.  Fortunately (I hope!) for my readers, I cut that foreword back to just a couple of paragraphs for the now-republished digital version.

While sitting at my desk today, working at my day-job and waiting for Legacy to go live on Amazon, I experienced a very unexpected emotional assault.  Like my heroine Alexandra, I cry easily, and so I wasn't particularly surprised that I found myself near tears several times this afternoon.  I know myself pretty well, and that's how I am.  But I also usually shake that stuff off pretty easily.

In the context of all the ruckus online regarding negative reviews and authors responding inappropriately and especially my own comments, I sat back to examine how I felt about all this.  In particular, how did my emotional reaction compare to the "my book is my baby!" nonsense I had criticized when other authors offered it as an excuse for their tirades against negative reviews.

Was I more sympathetic to them?  Did I have a clearer understanding of how they felt?  Did I accept their defense as valid?  In words of one syllable:  No, yes, and hell no.


What follows now is that much, much, much too long "Author's Foreword to the 2013 Edition" further expanded with some thoughts now that the book has in fact been republished.  Some of this text will be familiar to those of you who have read the earlier version in March, but much of it is new.

There is sometimes a temptation, when preparing a work for republication many years after its debut, to alter the story and make it more suitable for the present day's audience.  In essence, to write it the way it would have been written today.  After some considerable deliberation, I chose not to do that with Legacy of Honor, which was my first published novel.

I have, however, made some minor changes that I feel will improve the reading experience without changing the substance of the book, in either content or tone.

Written over a period of roughly two years between 1980 and 1982, Legacy endured rejections by several of the major paperback publishers.  During the submission process, one editor suggested the manuscript be trimmed from its original hefty 240,000 words (Version #1) and she'd take another look at it; I made substantial cuts and resubmitted the manuscript (Version #2), but that editor ultimately did not offer a contract.

At some point after that rejection, I decided on my own to make a major revision to the ending, for reasons detailed in one of the previous blog posts.  I also purchased a new typewriter.  Since the entire manuscript would have to be retyped to lead into the dramatically altered ending, I rewrote the synopsis to reflect that change, then typed the standard outline-and-sample-chapters submission to send to Leisure Books.  I anticipated at the very least the usual two to three months before receiving any response, which would be plenty of time to make all the revisions necessary to accommodate the new ending as well as type the rest of the approximately 650 manuscript pages.

I didn't count on a letter arriving just five days later -- via snail mail, which was all we had in 1984 -- requesting the complete manuscript.  Somehow or other, I managed to make the changes so the book matched the revised synopsis, to retype the whole thing, and to send it back within about a week.  That was the version (Version #3) Leisure purchased, of roughly 180,000 words.

Months later, the editor requested further cuts – about 15,000 words – to meet production costs; I made those in two or three days (Version #3a), with little time to make sure internal consistency was maintained and no glaring plot errors were created in the process.  I did the best I could, then trusted any details I missed would be caught and fixed by the editor.

Except that they weren't caught or fixed.  With the exception of typesetting and other errors, Legacy of Honor was published exactly as I had written it.  There were no revisions requested; there were no revisions made.  I never saw the page proofs prior to publication, so was quite stunned to discover the product that hit bookstore shelves in February of 1985 was riddled with typos and other minor errors that I probably would have caught if offered the opportunity to proofread.  But in those days, a published novel was essentially carved in stone.  My name was on the cover and I had to live with the errors.  I could always blame the editors for the errors; after all, they were the ones responsible for the errors -- including typos! -- on the back cover blurb.  I had nothing at all to do with that.

Fast-forward to 2013.  With the publishing rights reverted to me after the Dorchester bankruptcy, my first task in digitizing the text was to catch as many of those errors as possible, just as I would have done if I had proofread the print version.  I made an OCR scan of the print version to digitize it and thought it would simply be a matter of proofreading and fixing small errors.

In the process, however, I also discovered minor line-editing details – many of which were related to those cuts demanded by the editor at the last minute – that I had thought would be fixed but weren't, such as a character who entered a conversation before entering the room.  Most of these errors required little more than the restoration of a line or two from the original, untrimmed manuscript or other similar quick fixes.  I knew I had a copy of the original Version #2, and I located a copy of Version #3 to see where most of the cuts had been made and what could be restored.  I felt comfortable that I would be publishing a digital version that was 99.5% identical to what was printed in 1985, and that the 0.5% (or even less) would be virtually undetectable.

As I began what I thought was a final proofread of the digital edition, I discovered a much more significant error of exactly the type I had expected an editor to catch.  I'm not sure if I would have noticed it in 1985 when all I'd have been looking for was typos, but on revisiting the story almost 30 years later, the omission of some crucial text was glaring.  I went back to my original manuscripts and realized that, for various reasons, this problem could not be solved just by adding back in a paragraph or two from a previous manuscript version.  Several scenes needed substantial revisions, not so much to change the story but to make it make sense.

 

I recognized that the major change I'd made between Version #2 and Version #3 really required more revision than I'd been able to make in that ten day or two week period.  There were some rather large continuity errors, some of which had in fact been exacerbated by the later cuts that became #3a.  I realize this almost certainly makes much more sense to me than it does to you, dear reader, because I know how the novel evolved through those changes.

But that is what led to the dilemma.  Did I want to make the changes now, in 2013, that I felt an editor should have requested to correct what appeared to be, well, some rather significant plot holes?  Or did I want to preserve the original as much as possible?

I had to give the matter some thought.  Serious thought.

Because there were some other issues. 

Writing in the days before the Internet, before Google and Wikipedia and all the other wonderful research tools now available at our fingertips, I had to rely on much more limited resources for historical detail, and as a result there were some minor errors of fact – minor, that is, in terms of how the story was constructed.  I didn't want to leave those uncorrected, which meant at least some changes from the original text.

Given those changes and the fact that I had already made minor line editing corrections and restored other bits and pieces that had been cut from the original, I finally decided that if the book was worth republishing at all, it was worth republishing with its flaws fixed so it at least made internal sense.

 

I still work a day job, though I do work at home and have a certain amount of flexibility.  My day job, however, requires a great deal of intense mental focus, which precludes using that time to write or even think about writing.  I had to do all of my rewriting, all of my proofreading, all of my writing in short bits of time snatched here and there from other endeavors.  Because the revisions also required very tight focus -- I had to weave everything in as seamlessly as possible to the existing narrative and not change any more than absolutely necessary -- I was rarely able to do very much at a time.  And I had to keep going back and checking to make sure I didn't make more problems with each revision than I was fixing. 

 

Unlike the other previously published books I'd put into digital format, Legacy was demanding a lot of original creative effort.  In a way, this was good, very good.  I was enjoying that creative effort immensely and only wished I had more time to devote to it.  My frustration came not from the complexity and delicacy of the project but from the time I had to give to other activities. 

 

Slowly, slowly, page by chapter by revision, everything began to come together.  I found a cover design I really, really liked.  I made it through a second read, then a third to do an intense proofreading.  I found more small errors that had to be fixed, so I fixed them.  Then came the conversion for Kindle -- with no misspelled words on the first try!! -- and another proofreading.  Even on this fourth read, I found tiny, tiny mistakes that reminded me no matter how carefully I would go over it, undoubtedly there were still errors.  Nothing is ever perfect.

Then it was time to write the blurb (that's a blog post in itself!) and put it all together and actually publish it.  I did that about 11:00 this morning, and around 6:00 this evening, Legacy of Honor went live for the first time since 1985.

And for most of those seven hours, I was a basket case.

Do I have a better understanding now of how an author feels when her precious work receives a negative review?  No.  I always understood that.  I also understood, better than those who have never been through the process, what it's like to put your creative work in the hands of someone who will not have the intimate respect for it that the author does and who ultimately puts it out there in the public's hands with what amounts to a dirty face, mismatched socks, and holes in its underwear. 

I took that poor abused child back, washed its face, made sure its stockings were the same color, and put on brand new undies.

And then I let it go.

Because that's what you have to do.  It's what you have to do as a parent and as an author.  You have to let go.

So how does this saga end?

 

Cleaning up the typesetting and a few research errors, plus restoring some of the excised text (a total of approximately 25,000 words, including the original Prologue, thus bringing it to 194,000 or ~550 Kindle pages) and revising for clarity were the only changes I made.  The story line, the events and actions and the characters remain otherwise unchanged from what was printed in 1985.  And I've left my writing style alone, too, pretty much.

Did I write the book differently in 1983 than I would if I were writing it today?  Of course.  But the Legacy of Honor I wrote in the early 1980s was true to its time.  In releasing it again, I wanted to keep it true to itself, and to myself as the writer I was then.  So yes, there is rampant head-hopping.  Will it drive the reader crazy?  Oh, maybe.  And if I'd had an Internet to do research, I might have gone into more historical detail.  But I wrote with the tools and experience and style and editorial guidance that were available to me, and that's the way it will stay.

I hope you enjoy it.

And yet another update: Your words, my words, and Amazon

Okay, folks, this saga just goes on and on and on, with no resolution in sight.  And yes, this is in progress and will be updated as I get more information.

A second lengthy online chat with an Amazon service representative on Friday, 13 July 2012, yielded more misinformation, but it did not provide a workable solution to the problem.

Amazon is still saying that the problem with the formatting of Norma Beishir's Angels at Midnight as it appears on my Kindle for PC is caused by my Kindle for PC and that the only way to fix it is to de-register all the various Kindle for PC apps that have somehow appeared on my laptop computer, uninstall them, delete all of my Kindle content, and start from scratch.  This would involve redownloading 628 books.

When I tried actually installing the Kindle for PC app on my desktop computer, guess what happened?  ALL THE OTHER KINDLE FOR PC APPS also appeared.  Worse, however, was that some 54 of my downloaded books DISappeared.  Or so it seemed.  The suggestion I made to Amazon -- and documented in the chat log -- was that it looked like the 54 missing books could very well be free samples that I had downloaded, and some of them were for books that were no longer available on Amazon.  I had no desire to lose those free samples, at which point the Amazon rep told me there was nothing they could do about it.

In fact, she had no clue what she was talking about, because it turned out those missing books were NOT the free samples.  I still have no idea why there is a discrepancy of 54 books between my Kindle library as it shows for the Kindle for PC that I downloaded to my desktop computer and the Kindle for PC app on my laptop.

So I spent a good portion of yesterday -- Saturday, 14 July 2012 -- making sure I had back-ups of all my Kindle content.  Don't ask me how I did it.  You don't want to know.  At least not right now.  I finished that project this morning, which involved deleting and redownloading approximately 25 of the 627 books already on the device.

No one seems to know why that was necessary.

Sidebar update:  It appears, but it is not confirmed, that an update to the Kindle for PC app was made sometime in March 2012 and this may have caused all existing Kindle content to require the delete-and-redownload process.  Again, this is what appears to have happened, but I have no confirmation.  For some reason or other approximately 25 of my Kindle books had not been redownloaded at that time, and they required that process in order to facilitate the back-up process.  All of my Kindle content has now been backed up.


But with everything backed up as securely as I could make it, I decided to try downloading a new book.  On today's free list was Danger at Mellin Cove by Rena George.  I downloaded it and opened it in my Kindle for PC.  And the formatting was screwed up.

Although it's not easy to see on this screen shot, the problem is so bad that I cannot read the book:  At the beginning of each line of text on the left margin, about half of the first letter is missing.  The first letters of indented lines are fine; only the very left edge is affected.  And this goes through the entire book, making it unreadable.  One has to stop at the beginning of each line to figure out what the missing letter should be.

Here's the "Look Inside" version:

As you can see, this version has indented paragraphs, and all the letters are clearly visible.  Not at all like the version that showed up on my Kindle for PC with its indented block paragraphs and chopped off letters.

The  first thing I did was report this to Amazon via the book's page.  I explained what the problem was and that it was through the entire book.  About an hour later, I received a stock message from Amazon asking me where in the book the problem was and what the problem was.  As you can imagine, I was not particularly polite in my reply, since that is exactly what I had already told them.

About two hours later, I received another canned reply from Amazon informing me that due to the formatting error, Danger at Mellin Cove was being pulled until the problem could be fixed.  As far as I've been able to determine, the book has not been pulled and the problem has not been fixed.  Again, the problem doesn't show up on the "Look Inside" preview. 


Update:  16 July 2012:  Danger at Mellin Cove was briefly unavailable in the Kindle edition.  It is currently available for $1.54, which may be a conversion of the UK price.  I don't know. 

In the space of a week now, I've discovered two self-published books that are not showing up correctly on the Amazon Kindle for PC application.  I already know about the problems that cropped up with Firefly and which I now have no real way of verifying if all is well.  There was a huge and very nasty brouhaha in the Amazon "Badly Behaving Authors" thread a week or so ago because of another book that didn't show correctly on all devices; it was actually removed from circulation and some changes made, but that book, Wisteria Falls, remains not-quite-right on my Kindle for PC.

Self-published authors should not have to purchase every single variety of Kindle device in order to be sure their product is being published correctly.

Another update: Is Amazon messing with your words?

I am going to publish this in an incomplete form because I want to get this information out as soon as I can.  The basics are here now, and I will be providing the balance over the next day or so.  Unfortunately, I have to devote some time to my day job.



At the moment, Thursday evening, 12 July 2012, I'm so angry I can scarcely type.  And considering my day job consists of transcribing recorded interviews and I'm several hours behind on today's work, I'd better get my fingers back under control.

I just spent an hour and a half "chatting" with "Shiela" at Amazon.  She may be a real person, or she may be a cleverly programmed bit of software designed to answer customer questions.  I don't know for sure.  But here's what happened.

This morning, while I was at my favorite coffee shop, I downloaded the free Kindle edition of Norma Beishir's Angels at Midnight.  I already have a print copy of the 1989 edition, but I'm trying to clean out some of my paper books and this looked like a way to eliminate one more.  After downloading, I popped open the Kindle for PC app and sat back to read for a while.

Unfortunately, I couldn't read it.  The formatting was totally messed up.  I went back and checked the "Look Inside" preview on the book's listing to see if I had missed something, because what I was looking at on my Kindle for PC was totally unlike what I'd seen in the "Look Inside" feature.

Here's what I saw when I looked at the preview:

Standard Times Roman font, indented paragraphs, just like one would see in a "real" book.  Since Norma Beishir is a long-time publishing professional, this was nothing less than I expected.

What showed up on my Kindle was something entirely different!  Arial font, double spaced indented paragraphs, it was horrible! 

So I reported the formatting problem to Amazon via the book's page, and not too long after that I got an emailed reply from Amazon with directions on how to fix it:  Remove and redownload the book, and if that didn't work, make sure I had the current Kindle for PC installed on my computer.

By the time I got that reply, I was at home on the main computer and couldn't access the laptop where my Kindle app resides, so it wasn't until this evening that I got around to trying that fix.  Ultimately, it didn't work -- the Kindle version was still horrible.   I first did the remove and redownload of the book.  Then I installed the latest update to the Kindle for PC app.  Still no change.  I deleted the book and downloaded it again.  No change.

And so I got on an Amazon chat with a technician to fix it.

Guess what.  It can't be fixed.  Period.

The first solution "Shiela" offered me was to de-register and re-register my Kindle for PC.  That would involve removing and re-downloading all 626 books I've already downloaded.  Since some of those books are no longer available at Amazon and I didn't want to lose them,  this was not a preferred option.

As it turned out, it wouldn't have worked anyway.

When I told "Shiela" I wasn't willing to do that just to fix a formatting glitch on one book out of 626, she went to find another solution.

The second option involved her checking to see if the file had been properly formatted.

After putting me on hold for several minutes, she came back and told me she had checked the document as Beishir intended it, and that's what I was seeing.  In other words, best-selling author Norma Beishir is uploading documents to the Kindle Direct Publishing platform that don't look any better than what the most rank amateur SPA does when she/he uploads a badly written short story.

Somehow or other, I just didn't trust this answer.

I then asked why the "Look Inside" preview was fine, if the actual document wasn't?  Again, I was on cyber hold for a long time, and finally the answer came out:  ALL BOOKS are converted to Times Roman font for the "Look Inside" preview, regardless what they look like in actuality.  When I pointed out that there was no such disclaimer, "Shiela" gave some rambling nonsense but eventually agreed.  She said someone in another department would be informed.  And that was pretty much it.

Now, remember the suggestion that I de-register my Kindle app and re-register it?  Well, that proved to be more than a little bit problematic as well.

The original email from Amazon after I reported the problem said to delete the book and redownload it.  I tried that, and it didn't work.

The second part of that email said to make sure I had the most current Kindle for PC version.  The email contained a link to the Amazon page to do that.  I tried that, went back to the new version of Angels at Midnight but the problem persisted.  The font was still Arial and the paragraphs were still double-spaced.

I then tried deleting and redownloading the book again.  Still no improvement.

And I know I'm repeating myself here, but I want to make sure I'm not leaving anything out.

In the process of doing this, however, I discovered that somehow or other I had four versions of Kindle for PC on my computer and on my account.  I have no idea where they came from, but I did know that I had set mine for automatic updates.

"Shiela" informed me that updates require that the existing Kindle for PC app be uninstalled and the new one installed.  But I had personally never done that manually, and so I asked if it had been done automatically via the "Tools" button.  Her answer made no sense.

Shiela:For updates, we need to uninstall and re-install the application.8:52:22 PM

Me:That didn't answer my question: Do I have to de-register, re-register, and redownload 626 items when you do an automatic update?8:53:23 PM

Shiela:If we will re-register an application, we will be needing to re-download the books. There is actually no automatic updates for Kindle application for PC.8:55:02 PM

Me:Then why does it have a box to check for automatic updates? And how did I get all of these applications on one computer if I only installed it once?8:55:42 PM

Me:(Oh, by the way, the box for automatic updates cannot be not checked.)8:57:39 PM

I will post the entire conversation on another post so anyone who wants to can follow the entire conversation.  What eventually came out of it was this:

1.  All "Look Inside" previews of all books on Amazon are displayed in Times Roman font, regardless what the actual book will look like.  Neither readers nor authors get an accurate view this way.

2.  There is no disclaimer anywhere on Amazon that explains the "Look Inside" preview may in fact be significantly different from the actual product.

3.  The Kindle for PC application may or may not be automatically updated by Amazon.  The button on the program for opting out does not operate, leaving the user to believe that automatic updates are, well, automatic.  At least one service rep has stated, however, that Amazon does not automatically update the Kindle for PC application.

4.  I currently have four installed Kindle for PC applications on my computer.  Earlier this morning I had six, because I have managed to deregister two of them.  At no time when I downloaded the "newest" version last night did Amazon ask me if I wanted to replace the existing application.

If you've stayed with me through all this, you're probably wondering why this matters.  Well, check out the next blog post and you'll find out why.