Take heart, more interesting things happened today. I didn’t say I’d write about them. There is one item I should tell you about, since you know I am always looking for writing work. I responded to this ad that needs articles written to “introduce” seniors to newer technologies, sort of a “dummies for seniors”. The Florida market must be enormous. Anyway.In a departure from local custom, the ad also stated the rate of pay as “$30 per page”, so I had really inquired about their definition of a page. Within the hour I got a reply and it was encouraging. It seems that it is a magazine and any page that contains any word(s) of my material pays $30. If an issue has my words on 5 pages, that’s $150 and that’s also what I wanted to hear. Now to find out the frequency of the issues.
All this happened while I was investigating ebooks. Back in my day, an ebook was something you let people download after paying a fee. It has become a little more involved. There are two formats, an exe file, which is more flexible but people hesitate to download, and a pdf file, which reads on every machine but requires software. The sites I visited also spoke of an ebook reader. This is apparently like a small screen that sells in the $40 range displays the pages of the ebook you are reading. I will look into this, as I have never seen such a beast.
You compose the book, then you compile it into an ebook. There are various marketing techniques, which include giving the book away to draw traffic to your web page, right up to allowing the reader to browse the first few paragraphs, then requiring the purchase of a password to continue. These passwords are owned by the ebook distributor, not the author, and restricts people sharing a given book. Gotta love that. Also, the distributor acts as a virtual bookstore which collects the money and sends you your share. Gotta hate that.
One could have a private web page to market the ebooks. That gets expensive and from what I’ve seen, you need a lot of books to draw people in. Titles in the thousands, so it seems to me most ebook stores must be selling other people’s books in addition to their own. Of the two routes, I think I’ll try joining one of the existing stores. Most ebooks appear to be in the 25-40 page range, just a few days work for me.
I have several hundred pages of information to assimilate [concerning these ebooks]. As usual, it will become child’s play if I decide to pursue it. For all I’ve said about never returning to the Doggie Wig place, I’m heading over there at 11:00 a.m. tomorrow, due to a plaintive request to get the last order into inventory and to place another order. I will not listen to sales, answer phones or take pictures if I can help it. It seems I was not all that easy to replace, yet any reasonably competent person should be able to go in there and figure out my system in a few hours. I can only imagine the situation over there after an entire month.
Let me fire off the first few articles to the magazine to test the water. If it goes, I promise to take the first $30 and go to a nice restaurant or on an extra trip nearby, and of course, report the details back to you. Have not been to a restaurant since Wallace treated back in April or so. Maybe I’ll go have a meal in these much-touted gambling dens nearby.
