My writing blog

New Covers for 3 of My Suspense Thrillers – Check ’em Out!

October 22, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

NEW COVERS! I decided to try some Sponsored Products ads on Kindle and submitted six of my eight suspense, thriller-novels, which have been out on Kindle for an average of two years. The ads per se consist of the cover and a small blurb of text. Well, the “Thought Police” in far away India took offense and rejected five of my six covers. Wow! What did I do wrong, I wondered. Full frontal nudity? Gruesome Zombies? Blood and Gore? Kiddie Porn? Nope. My books are action adventure suspense novels. Some have Cold War, WW II, Delta Force, or Middle East subjects. Why, pray tell, did the Thought Police reject them? Well, one had a gun on the cover. No guns! One had a WW II theme and had a small swastika, a US Army, and Hammer and Sickle behind a U-boat. One had a swastika on a WW II German airplane. They don’t like nationalistic symbols. They might offend someone. Another had a rifle sight and a cross hairs. I protested and argued to no avail. Cain’t fight city hall. He who has the gold, make the rules, I guess. So, reluctantly I bit the bullet and had my wonderful cover designer, Todd Hebertson, come up with some new covers that would pass muster in far away Mumbai or Delhi. Wow! The net result is I have some really neat new covers. These were approved, but don’t expect me to thank the Thought Police anytime soon. Here’s the first three of the new covers, let me know what you think.

You can check out my other suspense novels, read a few chapters, see some of my other writing, and the status of my next book at my web site http://box5462.temp.domains/~billbro4 Check ’em out!

Kindle Unlimited: The New Paperback

September 26, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

Amazon rolled out the Kindle Unlimited program a little over two years ago. While they continue to tweak it and it does have its flaws, I think it will prove to be the most revolutionary step in publishing since the e-book itself, and perhaps since the first paperback was published in 1939 by Pocket Books. They priced them at $0.25 each, at a time when a reader’s choices were $2.50 – $5.00 hardbacks for the wealthy, library books for the literate but less wealthy, the Book of the Month Club, and Reader’s Digest, which surprisingly is still doing fine today. Pocket Books priced the first paperbacks at $0.25 with the expressed intention of bringing affordable books within reach of the masses. Naturally, all of the major publishing houses laughed at them, as they have at nearly every other innovation since the Gutenberg printing press. Their reaction to paperbacks was a precursor to their reaction to e-books. That lack of innovation has always been at the heart of the publishing house’s problems. Within five years, however Pocket Books had sold over 100 million copies, and no one was laughing anymore.

The economics of book prices are interesting. The first Pocket Book paperbacks came out at the end of the Great Depression. A postage stamp cost $0.03, gas cost $0.10 a gallon, and bread was $0.5 a loaf. At $0.25, it was roughly the same as a gallon of milk, or a pound of butter, chicken, or coffee. More importantly, they were priced at about 10% of the cost of a hardback book. That was a lot of money back then, which is why hardback books were mostly found in libraries. According to government statistics, inflation has totaled 1589% since then, which means that 1939 Pocket Book would cost $4.22 in 2016 dollars and that hardback around $42.20.

Think about that for a moment. First, that 10 to 1 spread between hardbacks and paperbacks hasn’t held up over time. The average paperback today is more like twice that and new paperback releases are normally in the $10-14 range. Meanwhile, the average new hardback still manages to stay under $30, so that 10 to 1 spread now is more like 2 or 3 to 1. While a new, big name e-book in the Kindle store comes out at $10 to $14, the price doesn’t stay there for long. After about 6-8 months, they are normally discounted to the $6 to $9 range, still, in a 4 or 5 to 1 spread to the hardbacks, and the average e-book on Kindle costs less than, roughly equivalent to that $0.25 Pocket Book in 1939 dollars. In fact, many readers only buy the Free or $0.99 e-books on the Sale pages, making Kindle the equivalent of the old public library for the frugal among us. One conclusion you can reach from these numbers is that e-books have had a larger effect on hardback book prices than they have had on paperbacks.

The growth of e-book readership has been phenomenal. Technically, they were first “invented” in the 1930s, but they only reached any level of popular use in the past 20 years, following the introduction of the Sony Reader in 2006, and the first Kindle in 2007. Today, over half of all adults own some type of reader or tablet. More significantly for authors, Amazon now sells 65% of all e-books and 85% of all self-published e-books. In 20 years, the e-book and Kindle have grown to become the twin, 800-pound gorillas in the publishing industry, but their biggest impact may be yet to come.

That comment brings us to the Kindle Unlimited subscription service, which Amazon launched in July, 2014, initially to compete with Scribd and Oyster from HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. At that time, the three services had similar sized libraries to choose from; but like everything else, Kindle just seems to do it better. Kindle Unlimited’s offerings have now grown to over 1 million books. Scribd and Oyster have grown as well, but none of the three offer their first rank bestsellers as part of their subscription services. If you are a reader however, and go through three books or more a month, at $9.99 per month the Kindle Unlimited subscription service is a no-brainer.

True, the Kindle Unlimited library only includes books that are part of the Kindle Select program and “exclusive” to Kindle, which unfortunately is less than half of of their total library, primarily the better, self-published books. Unfortunately, it does not offer many new releases, books that were brought out by the major publishers, or books from front line authors, except their old ones. Still, for $10/ month, there are a lot of good books available for an avid reader, and Kindle is now experimenting with ways to expand their book availability options to Kindle Prime.

For authors, the question has been whether to go exclusively with Kindle Select and get your books eligible for the Kindle Unlimited program, or stay out and try to market them through the other independent e-book publishers such as Smashwords and others. My writing friends have gone either way depending on how much they dislike or don’t trust Amazon. I understand those feelings, but my writing income has doubled as a result of the Kindle Unlimited “Nominal Pages Read,” and it now provides 60% of my books sale income, so don’t let your suspicions or emotions pick your own pocket. More about that in my next blog piece.

William F. Brown, is the author of 8 action, adventure, suspense novels on Kindle, Kindle Select, and Kindle Unlimited. To read about them or subscribe to the blog, go to my web site, http://box5462.temp.domains/~billbro4

Book Review – Daniel Silva’s The English Spy – 5 Huge Stars!

May 28, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

The English Spy – Frankly, I did not find the last two or three of Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon novels to be up to his very high standard. However, whatever faults they had, The English Spy more than makes up for in spades. It’s is one of his very best — a complex, fast moving, character driven page-turner that

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continues and advances plot threads in a number of the recent books. As such, it brings back most of Allon’s old enemies, the Russians, the IRA, and the Iranians, as well as his old friends and allies. It also sweeps us back through familiar settings in London, the rocky coast of Cornwall, Belfast, “Bandit Country ” in Northern Ireland, Vienna, Lisbon, Corsica, Hamburg, and Israel, with lots of gunshots and bomb blasts in between. There’s enough story and real-world geopolitics in this book to provide four or five novels if he had wanted to structure it that way. Instead, Silva provides a roller coaster you really can’t miss, if you’re one of his big fans, which I am.

The author is obviously a strong supporter of Israel, and provides a very accurate picture of what’s happening in the Middle East today, particularly regarding Iran. It’s interesting to note that all of Allon’s closest allies are Brits. They are the story, as are the Russians in the Iranians. Nowhere in this mix, do we find a single American politician or spy, and Silva does not pull his punches about the current American administration, the mess it has created in the Middle East, and the simple fact that they have become both incompetent and irrelevant. That’s not fiction, and few people who have followed events over the last five years or so, could do anything but agree. But politics or not, The English Spy a great suspense novel. While Silva wraps up a number of plot threads, he leaves enough others alive and kicking to make us hope the next one be just as good as The English Spy.

William F Brown is the author of eight of his own action, suspense novels on Kindle, the latest of which are Burke’s War and Burke’s Gamble. See the book review tab on my website for more book reviews.

Michael Connelly’s The Crossing – Book Review

May 24, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

Book Review – This is a very good Harry Bosch novel by Michael Connelly. You don’t need to know anything else. Connelly is the best in the business. The stories are always about watching Harry Bosch slowly pick at the threads of a mystery, one thread at a time until he has the case solved and the bad guys in jail. In this one, he is actually sharing screen time with Mickey Haller, his half-brother defense lawyer, who is hte main protagonist of five of his own books in the second series by Michael Connelly. Those Mickey Haller books are every bit as good, but I personally prefer Harry Bosch. He is a dark, plodding vulnerability about Harry that is hard not to like.

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“The Crossing” refers to Harry Bosch going to work for the criminal defense, which violates every Blue Line cop rule and earns him the enmity of the other LAPD homicide detectives, at least until he makes his case. I love Harry Bosch, but Connelly has created a slight character/ plot / chronology problem for himself. As those of us know who read all of the books, Harry Bosch was a tunnel rat in Vietnam, I think, in nineteen sixty-eight. Even if he went in when he was 18 or 19, he’s now in his upper 60s and getting a little long in the tooth for the action scenes, much less having an eighteen-year-old daughter. I thought Clint Eastwood was a little old for the part in Bloodwork, but now he’d probably work just fine in The Crossing.

Bill Brown is the author of eight mystery and suspense novels currently for sale on Kindle — Burke’s Gamble,” “Burke’s War,’ ‘The Undertaker,’ ‘Amongst My Enemies,’ ‘Thursday at Noon,’ “Aim True, My Brothers,’ ‘Winner Lose All,’ and ‘Cold War Trilogy.’ Enjoy! You can find other reviews under the book review tab on my website.

“A Wanted Man ” suspense thriller by Lee Child – Book Review

May 24, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

A Wanted Man – I’m not sure what Lee Child has against Nebraska and its surrounding states, but he has placed several recent novels in that setting. Not just Nebraska, but Nebraska in winter, with flat, cold, muddy, stubbly cornfields. This story, like a wanted man, is are dark, which fit precisely with the setting. It’s a little like that scene in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, where Cary Grant finds himself standing at that crossroads with absolutely nothing around him from horizon to empty horizon, except

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Child’s stories usually happen at night. Clearly, the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce needs to have a talk with him. Stylistically, Child seems to be writing stories that are as sparse and Spartan as the landscape — no character back-story, very few adjectives or adverbs, just straight action. After 18 books in the Jack Reacher series, no one needs any back story on him, but would be nice to better understand some of the other characters. Lee Child and Michael Connelly are my two favorite authors. That said, I do have two criticisms about this book. First, the back and forth car trips and plot moves about two thirds of the way through the book get pretty confusing. Secondly, as with several of his other recent books. We know absolutely nothing about the bad guys. In “A Wanted Man,” Reacher kills them all, but they have no face, and we never do get a clear picture of who they are or what they are doing, much less how Reacher figured it all out.