If you try to sign up to Google checkout as a seller/merchant you are given UK or US only. That is the issue.

As a customer, yes, everything is just fine for most people.

I'll be very happy to be proven wrong, but right now every time I try to sign up as a seller, those are the only two countries that appear in the list.

I would have loved to have jumped on board with Googles payment system in place of PayPal... but there was a slight problem... it was "US Only". It would seem that if I look at the dominant players in various fields, they are players that embrace the fact that the internet and more importantly, consumers, exist well beyond the US alone.

Soon as Google lets us buy/sell stuff using their PayPal-replacment across the bulk of the world, I'll be interested.

It would be a dumb move if that was the only financial pool authors could draw from - but it's not; it's only there for the lending/borrowing. Sales via the normal channels are still sales that you obtain money from directly - it's the best of both options. The KDP-Select "free" days are a nice addition, it gives you a chance to release a new book with minimal barriers of adoption - though the uptake rates are dropping significantly from the original "tens of thousands per day" when KDP-Select free was announced - however, it's still useful for a product launch.

We recently moved a couple of books to KDP-Select strictly for the free days and it has helped (easier than managing coupons!), though after 90 days we're putting our books back to normal KDP and then sharing the eBook editions out via LightningSource/INGRAM.

http://elitadaniels.com/ - Fantasy - Vampires - Zombies

and that is....? Because their stuff "isn't good enough for trad publishing"?

These days trad vs independent aren't an if-else type question, now it's a fairly even handed option either way. Contrary to the big dream, most people getting trad contracts are not able to just kick back and watch the money flow in, instead it's a full on marketing drive that -you- have to organise and perform (while also writing more to comply with the contract), it's no free ride. For the most part, people being signed up by the Big-6 end up worse off than if they take the independent route, assuming they put in the same level of work.

Things have changed a lot in the last 2~3 years and major publishers are having to now fight harder to remain relevant among their back catalogues. There are several independent writers who have been picked up by trad-publishing, but that's only after they've succeeded as indies and are subsequently given some fairly nice contracts - unlike the ones you'll get if you start from the bottom. Conversely, there's a lot of writers who have now cancelled their publishing contracts and reacquired the rights to their work and are going independent. Trad publishers used to be the only practical way of getting your resources for making a good book (editing, proofing, artwork, marketing) but with the introduction of ebooks, print-on-demand and improved internet connectivity those old exclusivity barriers have come right down.

No matter which way you go - you have to gain your own readership. If you want that, you then take the time to do your covers well, you get your work edited, proofed, beta'd and marketed. For sure there's a lot of trashy work out there by people, but there's also a lot of professionally run independent publishing who go through all the same steps, the difference simply is that they're taking it on their own back.

Except the big gain of the KDP-Select, the free days as you say, are already starting to lose its impact. We see each other on KB (Hi, I'm MrPLD) and we can see it falling away in front of us. We pulled ~2000 freebies last week over 3 days, but when it originally came out people were getting 10,000+, now more and more people are only seeing 50~200 freebies.

Sooner or later, we're all going to have to go back to the traditional way of getting our readership, we're running out of "pricing as marketing" strategies, unless we want to start paying readers $1/book (and yes, it will happen, I'm fairly sure).

I'm off the auto-renewal after 90 days on KDP, the free days were a nice thing, but I do wonder in some ways if Amazon isn't trying to make the independents destroy their own kind with this strategy [cynical hat on].

http://elitadaniels.com/

My fault for not being sufficiently specific and adding in "If they so wanted to [migrate]" as opposed to "they should then migrate". I for one certainly am not migrating to anything else, hell and I started with Slackware 3.0 :)

I've got dozens of anecdotal data points that say otherwise... just like everyone else.

The discussion is about the problem of diluted consistency rather than that of actual effectiveness of the opted path. We can discuss that for eons with pointless non-results.

New interfaces aren't as scary if people have others around them experienced in the same thing to fall back on, and that's the idea, instead of "Hey Fred, I've got a problem with KDE" - "Oh hell, I don't know that, I use Unity" etc... else WinCE phones would possibly be the dominant force in the smart-phone market, since everyone knows Windows.

Agreed.

While Ubuntu might have some issues that people are going to moan loudly about, remember, it's first job is to bring people into the Linux sphere, once they're accustomed to it, they can migrate out to other options if they feel they want to. Funding a parallel-but-different version is just encouraging the confusion. If there's one thing Linux suffers from in the eyes of the newcomer, it's too much choice, leading to confusion, subsequent frustration (with support) and returning to their hated-but-known Windows.

If we want cohesive desktop/apps then this is a reasonable move to make.

(I'm no fan of Ubuntu Unity, but I still use Ubuntu + Fluxbox instead :) )

I think perhaps I worded it wrong.

I have a commercial package (Xamime), it sponsored/paid-for the development of several OpenSource packages (ripMIME, alterMIME, openTNEF, ripOLE, Mailfeeder, FileType and ArBomb). The plan is, sell Xamime (commercial) and let it go its own way. The OpenSource packages I'll probably continue as I have, patching as required, if required.

As for the clean break, yep, I'm hoping for that :D

Hope that makes more sense - sincerely.

I'd be very curious to see what people thought about the similarities of these two images -

http://elitadaniels.com/images/zombie-cover.jpg

vs

http://www.criticnic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Passion-by-Lauren-Kate.jpg

Because while we did our artwork first, the Lauren Kate one has been more widely publicised. Every month we get people messaging us asking "Why did you copy the Passion cover? Epic fail!".

The only common element between these two book covers is that the central stock art image of the girl.

tsk.... notepad.exe ftw! ;)

( okay, I use vim )

People generally only make that mistake once or twice before they become a bit more clued up and invest in a backup option, even on OS's that provide undelete (Windows). Agreeably it doesn't save you when you create and then lose a file between the backup times.

It might be a nice option to have, so long as it doesn't inhibit/hinder the existing system. I think an entirely different filesystem would be a better option, something with inbuilt versioning/history.

Waiting to see the usual fanatical wars over filesystems... people calling for the death of the EXT3/4 system.

Personally the whole fanatical thing seems a bit silly - who'd have ever thought that people would lynch each other over having different options for different purposes/tasks, the very core of the whole idea of what we do and strive for. I'm fine with ext4, thanks :)

Similar here - had to quit for a while due to illness and found that my life wasn't any different without it. To be fair, I'm on 2 half-cups of moka-pot brewed coffee each day, so many it's just not enough to cause a massive upheaval when I stop drinking it.