We are now in the third quarter of 2011, by my retelling. Our overwhelming feeling is that our kids have been treated as nothing more than guinea pigs by people who had boasted to us about their years and experience in education. Years that we readily admitted we didn’t have. We fell for their spiel to “trust them”. And, by turns (with the one notable exception of Boon Lay), our children were ignored, assaulted, bullied, insulted and yelled out by people who were in positions of authority over them.

I don’t know if I can adequately explain the sense of burning rage I still feel as I type these words, and that anger has not diminished. But still, despite all that, we had hopes for Prestigious UK School (PUKS for short). We went along and had several meetings with them.

I pause now so I can give you some context. Our son? TW? The one who was “severely retarded”? He’s two years ahead of his age in English and at least one year ahead in Maths and Science. Putting him in a regular school, we thought, would actually stunt him at this stage. PUKS told us that school would begin at 8:30am and that kids would get home by 5:15pm. That was the equivalent of a full working day, plus homework on top of that. That would leave no time for TW to indulge in his other passions of movie-making, game design and learning graphics and computer animation (all of which he currently does outside homeschool hours).

LD was another issue. There’s an old adage that says you should treat your children equally. Bullshit. Children are individuals and that means tailoring your demands to their personalities. However I was teaching was working with TW but was causing major tissue avalanches with LD. After some enquiries, I discovered a tuition system that was Kumon-like and close by. Encouraging independent working, they would take LD through Maths and English twice a week. But was this enough? We enrolled LD for those twice-weekly classes while we considered PUKS.

Tbh, I considered PUKS the superior choice. I could work on TW at home and LD, a really sweet and caring kid, could do what was so important to her and develop relationships outside the family circle.

I so wanted PUKS to be the answer. And then they turned out to be like everyone else we’d encountered. We heard the same old statements we’d heard before. “We have values that all children must adhere to….” “Our years of experience in education….” “You understand that, during the Primary years, we won’t be concentrating on academic performance at all….” “We have an excellent Sports programme….”

There were two death knells. The first came when we couldn’t even get a provisional place for LD. Oh, they went on about what a wonderful child she is, based on a one-on-one interview they conducted with her, but they wouldn’t even give us a tentative answer as to whether she’d be accepted in PUKS. They would have to wait for a Psychologist’s Report and — and these are my words — how much work they would need to exert before they could give us their final decision. They had already told us that they were over-subscribed and so not every child would get in. And, once more, we felt we were being set up for a fall. (We’re still going through with the psychological assessment, but that will be for our own benefit.)

The second was when the Head told us quite baldly at the end of our last discussion that we couldn’t expect their system (even with a given that there going to be a Learning Support component added) to cater to LD.

And it was like a lightbulb exploding in my head. Hold on a sec, I thought. Right now, I do have a system that specifically caters to LD. To my surprise, she was really taking to the outside tuition classes and, in the alternate days when I was schooling her, I was seeing improvements in her attitude and the quality of her work. I was also working on other, multi-sensory methods to help her with Maths and, to a lesser extent because she doesn’t seem to need it so much, English. Add violin, Wushu, Dance, and UK-accredited Speech & Drama classes, and I was still spending less than RM6,000 a year and getting out of it (I thought) a pretty well-rounded child.

PUKS was telling me that they were unable to be all things to all children and expected us to shell out RM60,000 for that first year of schooling (almost twice the average annual wage). Plus uniforms plus food plus extra-curricular activities plus a four-figure non-refundable registration fee, and so on.

Why would I give up a totally personalised, completely customised, eminently flexible, lightweight system that was working, for one that was rigid, inflexible, ponderous, with no guarantees, at TEN TIMES THE PRICE???

That’s all.

Today is the 11th of November, and that means Polish National Day. It is particularly important this year for a personal reason tied in with my newest release…I thought that it would be nice to publish a small travelogue on our family’s recent trip to Poland and what better day to do that by than the country’s National Day?

So, while it’s making its rounds of various etailers, I’m here to tell you that IT’S 10AM, WHY AM I STILL SOBER? is now available at XinXii and Smashwords. Because of today’s significance, I thought I’d give you an appropriate excerpt from the chapter on Kraków (appropriate, not because it has to do with Polish National Day but because it’s about a battle and Poles love battles; they’re very Klingon like that):

The initial view [of Kraków] is favourable and entertaining, from the cobbled streets to the artistic, renovated buildings. I posed for a photo in front of one of the places where Stanisław Wyspianski (Stan-is-wahv Vis-pee-en-ski) once lived. (He moved around a lot, it seems.) I’ve been a fan of one particular work of Wys ever since I saw his take on the Battle of Grunwald (Groon-vault). Grunwald was where, five centuries ago, a whole bunch of mostly Germanic Crusaders went up against a whole bunch of mostly Poles and got their arses thoroughly whipped. (There’s a recreation every year right at the spot. One day, we’ll make it there.) Wys, although painting around the end of the nineteenth century, delivered an extraordinarily modern interpretation of one of the archetypal paintings (by national hero, Jan Matejko) of the battle.

Matejko's painting of the Battle of Grunwald

In essence it was an interpretation (or, er, parody) of a portrayal of a battle. Poles are generally aghast that I’d want a copy of such a parody of Matejko’s much loved and admired masterpiece but there’s such an unbridled exuberance and clear understanding of space to Wys’ work that I find myself smiling each time I see it.

Wyspianski's parody of Matejko's painting

 

I know I’m going to end this excerpt with an unfair question. After all, Matejko’s painting is an undoubted masterpiece, full of symbolism, a merging of three events during the historic battle, passion and emotion. BUT…which do you prefer?

***

While IT’S 10AM, WHY AM I STILL SOBER? will be available at Amazon, and so on, I would really recommend that — should you consider purchasing a copy of the book — you get it from XinXii and that you get the PDF copy in particular. This is because there is quite a bit of advanced formatting and a fair number of photos in the book and PDF is still the best way to present such information. However, if you’re a diehard Amazon fan and can’t do without that format, then rest assured that you should have a copy available at Amazon US by the end of this coming weekend.

I should have the first chapter (after the Introduction) of the book up at my website by the end of today, if you’re interested in reading a longer excerpt. IT’S 10AM, WHY AM I STILL SOBER? is 30,600 words long and will set you back US$2.99 It would be a nice gift for Thanksgiving or Christmas (hint hint) but I wouldn’t get it for any God-fearing, puritanical armchair traveller…unless you want them to have a heart attack. Your choice. (Never know, might be fun.)

We shall return to regular (homeschooling) programming next week but, in the meantime, have a good weekend.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve never considered doing this before, hence the ad hoc nature of this offer, but if you can’t countenance XinXii and would still like to buy a copy of the book (and I really really think PDF is best), you can Paypal me the money and I’ll forward you the book via return email. Contact me at KS -at- KSAugustin -dot- com for the Paypal details if you’re interested in that option.

 

When I finally got my hands on the kids, and put them through their paces, I was appalled. We had been paying high school fees and I discovered that both kids had actually regressed. LD, at the age of eight, couldn’t even repeat the alphabet!

But we had an advantage. Being foreigners, we fell straight through the cracks of local federal regulations. Thus, if I wanted to, I could teach or not teach my children however I pleased.

J and I sat and discussed our options. There were a number of schools being built in our area. We would wait until one was open and enrol the kids there. In the meantime, I would homeschool. And that’s how it began. It was a move of desperation and we always thought that the time would come when we’d fold our children back into the traditional schooling mix.

The first six months were the worst, as I well admit. Per an old blog post:

Well, I had the kind of super-obsessive, “Asian tiger” parents that I detest but I have to admit they did a good job on brainwashing me. So I had to get rid of all that “it’s A’s or it’s nothing” shit (including the classic “you only got 99% for that exam; I refuse to talk to you for the entire day”) that made my own childhood such a misery. Forming new disciplinary pathways in my brain took months, to be honest. Months to relax into the kind of attitude that put comprehension, fostering an air of exploration, and questioning above 100-question drills on how to add mixed numbers. (Not that I don’t do that, but that’s usually at the end when the kids can do all that in their sleep!)

And when I started to relax, I branched out a bit, searching out resources on the Net. (There are no local homeschoolers to talk to.) LD looked like she was suffering from both dyslexia and dyscalculia, but there were also flashes of brilliance that made me catch my breath.

I totalled the amount of money that we had spent on school fees and told J that I was funnelling that amount into homeschooling. He readily agreed. I bought workbooks, reading books, learning systems and DVD courses. I set up a smartboard system to use at home. We bought the kids new laptops. We enrolled them in some external classes. And do you know what? With all that expense (and I spent money on whatever looked promising, figuring we’d assess its worth once we started using it) I still wasn’t spending a fifth of what we’d thrown down the drain at the local private school.

That made us think. What exactly were we paying for in a private school?

I would spend half a day teaching the kids, test them, and still give them enough remaining time for them to indulge in their own interests (which, increasingly, seem to encompass making their own movies and games). Given the choice, without any kind of persuasion on my part, our children would prefer to storyboard a short movie than sit down and watch TV.

But how could this be? Weren’t we told that the “best” system was the public/private schooling system? That homeschooling parents were somehow “cheating” their children out of much-needed social and cognitive development? Yet, when I watched our own kids, that wasn’t what I was seeing at all.

Something wasn’t gelling.

As these heretical thoughts swirled around in my brain, two things happened. One very prestigious UK-based school announced that it was opening a campus ten minutes away from us. And LD started to burst into tears the moment she tackled any difficult problem.

Let me get one thing straight before I begin. J and I loved school. (I may not have liked what went on around school, like the bullying and the name-calling, but school itself…brilliant!) We were very good students ourselves. And, until fairly recently, were gung-ho proponents  of yer basic, federally-supervised, school system.

Our story actually started back in Australia, when The Wast was at the beginning of his schooling career. Now, TW has always been a bit of a “different” child…shy, a bit obsessive and stubborn. But, as parents, we could always see the intelligence lurking under that shield of obstinate near-silence. In our ignorance, we expected teachers (i.e. people with actual degrees in Education) to be able to discern part of that too. They didn’t. What the teachers proved to us was that they were super-quick to jump to conclusions, even after admitting they had no training in pedagogy or child psychology, and we have the reports on our “severely retarded” and “highly autistic” son to prove it.

When we moved to Singapore, and TW joined an International School (a move I was dead against, btw, because I had attended an International School and saw them as nothing more than social clubs for children), things didn’t improve. Again, he was accused of being developmentally challenged. When we paid for tests and got the results that said that he was “normal” (whatever that means), the school still didn’t believe it.

With, we thought, nothing left to lose, we put TW in a publicly-funded Singaporean school. (Hi there, Boon Lay Garden Primary School!) And, for whatever reason, he thrived! He became one of the class monitors and started scoring straight As in his subjects. It was as if a light switch had been clicked on. We still don’t know what, why or how it happened.

When we moved to Malaysia, we reluctantly made the decision to school the kids locally, and here’s where I start the tale of our second child, Little Dinosaur.

Both children were emergency, premature births, but LD spent a month in the hospital’s Special Unit that TW didn’t. We were warned that her complicated birth would have ramifications, and the ramifications came home to roost while we were switching from Singapore to Malaysia.

We put the kids in the top private school in Johor state at that time. And then, over the space of two years, we started to notice a deterioration in both our children’s performance. TW was bored and LD was being ignored in classrooms of 36 and 37 students. If you add the Great Tuition Scam, then it was a travesty.

All the school seemed interested in was making as much money out of status-conscious parents as it could. But, if we wanted our children to be educated in English, it appeared we had no choice. We had to stick to private schools.

The breaking point finally came when a repeat offender younger boy stabbed my daughter in the thigh with a pencil. The school actually forced LD, in front of the principal, vice-principal, her class teacher and the boy’s teacher, to say she “forgave” him and the school considered the matter closed. To my mind, that was coercion of the worst kind (where do I begin?) and there was only one solution: pull the kids out of school.

Last month, we went to Poland for a holiday. In fact, I’m writing up that trip as a small non-fiction book, titled IT’S 10AM, WHY AM I STILL SOBER?, to be released next month. (Ahem) Okay, I’ll get over myself now but the reason I mention it is because, as a writer, of course I was going to include my observations on Polish bookshops. What will be in the book is an abridged version of what I’m setting down now because I don’t think the average reader is really interested in the minutiae of book innards.

Bookstores appear to still be big business in Poland, although one woman in a bookstore in Sosnowiec (Sauce-no-vee-ets) complained that, since the small chain she worked for had been bought out by Germans, she was forced to give bookshelf space to non-book merchandise, much to her personal dismay.

The bookstores stock a lot of local works. A lot. By that, I mean a shitload. You can find Nora Roberts, Robert Ludlum and even Jack Vance translated into Polish (I say “even Jack Vance” because when was the last time you saw a Vance paperback still in print?), but the bulk of the offerings are books by Polish writers. Genre fiction, especially fantasy, occupies shelf after shelf and, when you crack open an edition, there are several things that strike you.

One, the typeface is rather large, as are the margins. The idea of maximising print on a page in order to minimise production costs is one that obviously hasn’t occurred to Polish publishers.

Two, the paperback size of choice is trade not mass. That is, the larger-format paperbacks. Hardcovers also seem to be popular and there is usually a decent audiobook section tucked away in one corner of the bookshop.

When was the last time you saw a healthy audiobook section in your bookshop? The media is cassette tape and CDs, which proves that yes indeed, Poland is behind, say, North America in terms of digital books and general book tech. But now we have something that I found rather interesting:

Three, the quality of the final book trounces your average Western print book. Let’s take one example. There is a current anthology out called “Deszcze Niespokojne”, which roughly translates to “Unsettled (Driving) Rains”. It contains twelve stories of alternate happenings during World War Two. Each story has three pieces of black-and-white artwork associated with it. I’m no art expert, but they look like they were all done in pencil by the same artist. The first piece of artwork takes up one page and encapsulates elements of the story you’re about to read. As you turn the page to begin, there is a second, smaller and different piece, like a drop-cap drawing, if you will. And, at the end of the story, there is a third piece, centred, below the last line.

There is also the layout. (And, for us digital authors, I note that this print edition has the Table of Contents at the back of the book.) Each individual story has the following layout:

Right facing page – blank
(Turn page)
Left facing page – a bio of the author
Right facing page – the author’s name again and the name of the story
(Turn page)
Left facing page – blank
Right facing page – full-page illustration of the story
(Turn page)
Left facing page – blank
Right facing page – the story begins a third down the page with its own introductory miniature artwork piece

So, for this one anthology, we have thirty-six separate and distinct drawings plus what we in the West would consider a criminal waste of six times twelve, or seventy-two, pages devoted to nothing more than sparse formatting and some artwork.

For the purposes of this post, I put two books side by side: the Polish one I mentioned earlier and another recent anthology, “Engineering Infinity”. Here’s a look at their formats. Note the larger Polish book:

Here is the interior of ENGINEERING INFINITY, showing the title page. The thing to note is the economical use of space. One story finishes, the other begins on the very next page, with only a paragraph for the author’s bio (I’m not making any kind of recommendation here or singling out this particular author for any reason, I just chose this page at random):

Here is an interior of DESZCZE NIESPOKOJNE, showing the succession of pages I described above, choosing the first story in the book because I didn’t want to bend the spine while scanning. First, there’s the author bio and the story title:

Then there’s the blank page and artwork:

Then there’s yet another blank page (that the author used for a poem fragment) before the start of the story proper (and note the second piece of artwork):

And there’s a third piece of artwork, roughly the size of the one you see above, at the end of the story. The size of the Polish book is, as I said before, closer to a trade paperback, there is ample white space between and around lines, and the entire anthology clocks in at almost six hundred and forty pages.

The recommended retail price of ENGINEERING INFINITY is US$8.00 (if you shop Amazon and live in the States). I paid US$11.07 for it (after a 20% discount) at The Book Depository. The retail price of DESZCZE NIESPOKOJNE is US$12.00 which, when you think about it, is not a bad deal at all.

I mention these prices because USians have an unrealistic picture of what paperbacks cost. They assume that, just because they pay US$8 for an average paperback, everybody else in the world pays the same amount. That’s not true.

The takeaway point from this is, Poland produces a superior print product at a price point that nearly matches or is a little cheaper than what the rest of the English-reading world pays. I’m sure they’re not aware of it, but it was pretty obvious to me. To go back to my recollections:

Other novels and anthologies I perused also had that same attention to detail that drew my eye in the first place: size, formatting, with an extra “fillip” of aesthetics (with the exception of a series of mass paperback-sized “classics” by such luminaries as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Austen). You get the impression that buying a book in Poland is something significant. Yes of course, there are the words, but there is also great care lavished on the way the words are presented. My personal opinion is that the average Pole would look with horror on the USD7.99 paperbacks that cram Wal-Mart shelves. As anyone who’s involved in the publishing world will also attest, the Poles have an unbeatable reputation for cover art. This was as true during the days of the Soviet bloc as it is now. Their enthusiasm for literature cannot be underestimated.

And that’s why I wonder whether the Kindle phenomenon that’s sweeping North America and the United Kingdom…may not gain as much traction in European countries where there’s a different mindset at play.

Okay, and now we come to the digital part of this post.

Books are incredibly popular throughout Poland. The Czech Republic boasts the highest book-reading population per capita in entire Europe. Moreover, the books these people read are different to what you and I are used to. Individual artwork, two-tone printing, border flourishes. And that’s just for the fiction!

It’s obvious that the philosophy that led to the printing of paperbacks in the Anglo world is completely different to the philosophy that led to paperback printing in Poland. And that tells me that the two sets of people perceive “value” in different ways.

The Anglo reader — faced with a rather utilitarian, monocolour typeface on cheap paper — sees value in the words themselves. Does it matter, then, how the words are presented? Probably not.

The Polish reader — faced with oodles of white space, custom drawings, two-colour border flourishes on good paper — sees value in the entire package. Does it matter, then, how the words are presented? Yeah, it probably does.

I’m not making any surefire predictions here. If ebooks are priced less than print books, then of course there’s going to be an uptake of ebooks across Europe. However, we have to realise that we’re also dealing with a population of a different mindset. They are as interested in the packaging as the words themselves. I translate this to mean:

There is a lesson there for digital authors and that’s to make our ebooks as interesting as possible. Ebooks don’t have the costs associated with multi-colour printing, so we can afford to let our imaginations soar.

I’ve taken this tack, particularly with the PDF version of THE CHECK YOUR LUCK AGENCY (not the Smashwords version, but the one appearing at XinXii and AllRomanceeBooks), adding the kind of flourishes that I saw in Polish print books. The feedback has been very positive. It’s like showing the reader that we care to present our words in a way that puts them first, that tries to give them an experience they’ll find enjoyable beyond the text itself. There is certainly an extra investment of time involved in doing this, but that investment dwarfs the cost of doing the same thing in print.

Last week, ripping on Charles Tan’s post, I related my experience of self-publishing through Amazon and the fact that I can’t even download (or even buy) a copy of my own book to check the formatting.

This is not to say that I’m against self-publishing. I’m not. I’m still convinced that, after getting several agent reactions to the tune of “love the writing, can’t sell the story”, self-publishing WAR GAMES was the only principled way I had of getting the novel to readers. I also feel that self-publishing is the best option for an urban fantasy series featuring mostly non-Anglo characters set in the non-Anglo environment of south-east Asia (The CHECK YOUR LUCK series).

What I am against is one playing field for Anglo readers and publishers, and another playing field for everyone else. And I am particularly leery of Amazon, with which I have a love-hate relationship.

I have no doubt that if we were to pin the digital book revolution on one factor, it would be the Kindle. Despite very serviceable ebook readers being around for years prior to that, there was something about the Kindle that spoke to consumers and boom!, the phenomenal rise in ebook sales began. Was it the device itself? The timing? The advertising? All three, plus other factors I don’t even know about? Possibly. The end result was that Amazon and Kindle ended up holding immense power in this new world.

My own first niggling doubts about the Wonderfulness of Amazon was sparked then when I discovered that, not only wouldn’t Amazon publish in that international standard of EPUB, but it wouldn’t even publish in Mobi, despite the fact that it bought Mobipocket. No, the Kindle would read “Kindle format” books, its own Mobi-deviant standard.

That first decision was a clear indication of the direction of Amazon. They weren’t here to join or expand the market; they were here to completely overwhelm and dominate it. And that’s okay for a business to aspire to, but don’t go imputing any kind of selfless motives to them that they don’t have. They are a business and everything that they do leads directly to their business. Not yours. Theirs.

Remember the “disappearance” of pro-homosexuality books and books tagged with the “erotica” label? The automatic price-adjusting? The agency argument with the disappearance of the “Buy Now” buttons on all Harper Macmillan books? The walled-in mentality to readers outside the reach of its franchise that I mentioned last week, despite the fact that I specified “No Geographic Restrictions” when I published my books. How naïve was I?

The fact of the matter is, with just a couple of keystrokes (“a glitch in the software”…yeah right), Amazon can make entire categories of books appear and disappear in seconds. Now that scares the hell out of me.

I know people like Joe Konrath have done very well via Kindle and best of luck to him, Locke, Hocking and the others, but I’m not Joe Konrath. In one old blog post, Konrath describes how helpful Amazon Support have been to him and how he talks to A Real Person when he has issues about something. As I said, I’m no Konrath. When I have an issue (and, to my reckoning, it’s a Damned Big One), all I get are occasional emails that say nothing at all from a low-cost Support service based in India. Go me!

I’m not saying this to disparage Konrath, who has worked long and hard for his success. All I am saying is that each self-publisher must find their own path, their own way of making things work. And, since I’m not Konrath, I’m more for democratisation of venues than monopolisation.

You see, here’s my dilemma. Amazon have now moved into the publishing arena themselves by setting up imprints left, right and centre. They’ve choked off Lightning Source, a distributor they’ve dealt with quite amiably for years, even after buying the competition, CreateSpace. And they wouldn’t hesitate to shut down those self-publishers who have only, say, sold less than an arbitrary number of books. Why do I say that? Because, by choking distribution and opening imprints, Amazon is turning into one of those legacy/traditional publishers we love to hate (except with greater control of the end-to-end business process) and the time will come when they view all the little self-publishers milling around their feet in the same way that the Big Six do. As ants to be crushed with nary a thought. Annoying little critters who, none the less, are eating into Amazon Imprint’s bottom line. Put yourself in their shoes. And be honest. What would you do if you wanted to dominate the entire business?

(Maybe that’s all Kindle was ever meant to be?  A long-term loss-leading strategy for Amazon to be The Biggest, Perhaps The Only, publishing house/distributor in the entire world!)

So where am I leading with this? Diversification. Of course I distribute through Amazon; I’d be a fool not to. But you’d better believe that I’m also distributing through other channels as well. As a corollary, the idea that there are self-publishers out there who only use Amazon is incredible to me. Why do that to yourself? Why give Amazon the opportunity to completely shut you down at some point in the future via a software “glitch”? For the same reason, as a reader, I refuse to buy a Kindle (or an iPad). I don’t like the idea that one business has that much control over what I have access to. Maybe, as a consumer, I may be able to let it slide. (Not me, but obviously a sizeable portion of the tech-savvy population.) But, as a producer, there’s a word for letting such control slip from my hands and it’s STUPIDITY.

But back to digital distributors. I don’t like Smashwords so much because that’s another venue where I have to give up control and rely on their Meatgrinder software. I do like XinXii, which is why I’ve now priced my books there at the same price as Amazon (a reverse of the Amazon price-matching strategy if you will) and I’m prepared to eat the VAT surcharge because I’m betting the time will come when that VAT will disappear, and I want a loyal cadre of readers at XinXii when that time comes.

If you’re a self-publisher, don’t blindly follow what other people say. (Even me!) It’s your business and you have to weigh each decision carefully. You can change your mind — of course you can, that’s the beauty of being your own publisher! — but you have to make decisions based on your own circumstances. And nobody knows those better than you do. Not Hocking, not Konrath, not me.

(A related issue to all this is the move of Amazon into Europe. I have a take on this that I’ll share next week. Needless to say, it bucks the trend.)

Earlier this week, the indefatigable Charles Tan had a post up entitled “Publishing Favors the West”. I started replying to him but it got so long I thought I’d turn it into a separate post on this blog.

Charles starts off with a blunt question:

First, there’s the “Big Six” publishers. Guess where they’re based and who their primary audience is?

He talks about the issue that the flow of books is one-way; that is, away from the developed world towards the underdeveloped. (Not that the underdeveloped/developed divide is even true any more. As far as infrastructure goes, I’d much rather live in Malaysia than the United States. For a start, the roads are better. But, for simplicity, let’s stick to cliches for the moment.)

Charles talks about how the size of the North American market naturally lends itself to economies of scale, something that can’t be taken for granted in a lot of other countries:

If you’re wondering why local [Filipino, but also s-e Asian --kaz] publishers don’t have Advanced Reader Copies or ARCs, it’s because they can’t afford to do a separate print run.

There’s public perception:

Import books get their own diverse shelf categorization: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Romance, Horror, Science Fiction, etc. Local books get one shelf….

It’s true here in Malaysia too. We have a “Local writers” category that, in addition, is never at the front of the store. Fancy that. And we sure don’t have an Amazon with all that wonderful free shipping, gift wrapping, streaming video, and so on. Book Depository comes close but, while I love them to bits, they just don’t have the range of stuff that Amazon has.

Charles goes on to talk about ebooks and you really should go read his essay because it’s chock-full of home truths, but let me diverge at this point and talk about Amazon and my experiences with them as a self-publisher.

Together with hubby, J, we are running our own little publishing house called Sandal Press. And because I want to get my books in front of the widest audience possible, of course I’m going to sell them through Amazon. Here are the problems:

– Because I’m not in an “Amazon” country, I cannot install the Kindle tools that are available to content creators in countries where Amazon exists. When I pointed out that it was ridiculous inviting non-Western content providers to publish on Kindle but refusing to give them utilities available to their Western counterparts, the India-based Support team told me they’d “pass along” my suggestion to the Marketing team. Gee thanks.

– I’m not even allowed to download the Kindle reading app for my PC!

– I can’t see my own books after they’re published. This is not so bad for my Sandal Press books because I can get sideways access to the pages via my KDP Administrative panel but, for my books that are not published by Sandal, Amazon behaves as if they — and I — don’t even exist.

Charles’ essay bites especially deep because I’ve just finished uploading a book by my alter-ego Cara d’Bastian. Yes, the first book in The Check Your Luck series, The Check Your Luck Agency, is finally up and being processed. But do you know the kicker?

I won’t know what it looks like.

I know I passed through clean clean code (having been an ex-programmer) that’s been validated by every HTML engine I can find, but the fuzzy preview tells me that the first letter of each chapter (which I coded as an image, with its corresponding text character as an alternative display) isn’t appearing!

It’s driving me completely batshit because I can’t check to see if it’s my problem or the previewer software’s problem. And I can’t take a post-conversion copy and pass it along to an American friend to check because Amazon doesn’t allow any content provider to download a free Kindle copy of their own book.

Am I pissed? You bet I am. The deck is stacked so much against any person of initiative who happens to reside outside the Holy Western countries, that I’m completely wrung out — mentally and physically — whenever I hit the “Save and Continue” button.

Uploading to Amazon is nerve-wracking because it’s like baking a calzone for the first time. You’ve followed the recipe exactly, you’ve listened to all the advice available, the thing looks good when it comes out of the oven, but you can’t tell how it actually tastes because the calzone is for someone else. All you can do is guess and when it’s your own professionalism at stake, that is a terrible terrible thing.

Charles finishes with:

[W]ill eBooks be the great equalizer? They could be. Just not in the ecosystem of Apple or Amazon….

Damn straight. Apple is as much a restrictive closed-garden environment as Amazon is. I watch every day for news of successful competitors to these two arrogant behemoths, which is why I also publish with Kobo (they’re not without their own problems though), Smashwords and XinXii. (And don’t get me started with those poxy bastards at Nook, who even — amazingly — make Amazon seem tolerable at times.) With recent news in mind, I’m hopeful that Apple will repeat its history and disappear down the drain. Hopefully, this will open up the field a bit. I’m waiting.

I originally penned this story for Maria who’s just been through an operation  (just rest up, M!) and thought you might get a chuckle from it as well.

We were overseas recently. And discovered, upon returning, that life at the tropics doesn’t stand still. Due to our diligent pre-trip spraying, we didn’t get the Invasion of the Ants that we so feared, but we did get a mini-infestation of cockroaches that has now sent the kids into a regular cleaning frenzy (can’t be all that bad then, can it?), a spider the size of your fist (and they bite too, as J can attest), as well as two other critters.

The first was a juvenile spitting cobra. Yeah, you know those snakes you see on National Geographic, where the camera is up close and waving around, and this snake rears up and shoots venom and it smears on the camera lens? Yeah, one of them. We found it in the pantry. They are endemic to this region and can just as easily be found in urban areas as forested ones. (It doesn’t help that our house sits in a combination of the two.)

The poor thing was just looking for a place to call home but we didn’t have a choice. At first we looked around for something to trap it in but we barely had two long sticks! How the hell could we manoeuvre it into a jar or something? Where’s that little noose on a long stick thing when you need it? In the end, we had to kill it and did so with regret. The juveniles are supposed to be more aggressive than the adult cobras, but this one was so desperate to just get away and only got angry when J pinned it against the wall with one end of the broomstick. You would have lost your temper before it did.

Meanwhile, the dogs were going berserk on the other side of the baby gate to the kitchen. They couldn’t see what was going on but they knew that Something Bad was in the pantry and were rearing to have a go at it. They didn’t get the chance. J had brought in Squeak to help him out but all Squeak wanted to do was get out and go back to lazing on top of the scratch post. (This is not the first of Squeak’s iniquities.) J finally despatched the snake, we toasted it that night for the forbearing animal with unfortunate choices that it was and moved on.

But then, a couple of days later, Sausage started sniffing around the library like a bloodhound, culminating in one solid hour barking at the shoe cabinet. I didn’t think it was another snake, but I did think it was either one of those large-arsed spiders again or a cockroach. The kids and I got ready. Various insect sprays. Check. Torch. Check. Broom. Check. Dustpan. Check. A long stick. Check.

I took the torch and shone it around and between spaces. Didn’t see a thing. But Sausage was still barking like mad. The Wast brought Fluff and Squeak into the room to help out Sausage but they looked as if they didn’t know what was going on. No sniffs, no curiosity. Nothing. So I tried moving the cabinet a little, shifting one side, to give us more working room. Little Dinosaur and I saw a flash of grey-brown and a long tail before we all ran screaming from the room. (I’m not ashamed to admit that.)

We regrouped in the living room. “Right,” I said, “it looks like we’ve got ourselves a rat.” Meanwhile, Sausage was still barking around the cabinet because she didn’t see the rat take off for one of the bookshelves. “Let’s go get some rat poison.”

We piled into the car, drove to the nearest supermarket, purchased some poison and headed back. Meanwhile, from Sausage’s investigations, we gathered that the rat was penned up around a particular bookshelf. The kids hightailed it upstairs to their room but I had my working machines in the library, so I didn’t have a choice. I did put some shoes on though.

When we went to pick up J from the bus-stop a couple of hours later, I thought we had a plan all figured out. We’d pack up the cats and dogs for the night, put out some poison, then collect it (and, hopefully, a dead rat) up the next morning before letting our pets out again.

It wasn’t to be. While we were gone, Rat obviously decided to head for somewhere safer. She must have darted to another bookshelf but, unfortunately for her, Sausage saw her this time. Our dog pawed an entire bottom shelf of books out of the way and Rat must have panicked.

Instead of heading back to the sanctuary of the shoe cabinet, she must have decided to chance it in the rest of the house. Under she went, below the library baby gate, and that would have stopped Sausage cold. However, what Rat wasn’t to know was that Cookie was on the other side of the gate.

Now, while Sausage is fast, Cookie is faster. Our smaller mini bully loves to run, looks like she’s half-whippet and is able to catch arrogant birds in mid-air on take-off from our front garden. Rat didn’t stand a chance.

When we came home from the bus stop, we found a dead rat in the dining room with its throat crushed, but otherwise intact. I pieced the rest together from the evidence available. Lowest bookshelf in a mess with network switch unplugged. Squeak still in the middle of the library, having a nap. (Fluff had buggered off back upstairs, the lazy sod.) Baby gate moved out of position but still holding. (Sausage must have slammed into it, chasing Rat.) Said dead Rat. Cookie outside sunning herself by the koi pond.

We were never so proud of our dogs than at that moment. They may not be what people think of when they think of working dogs but it looks like they’re our working dogs, perfect for our current environment. They got extra treats that night and the cats got a lecture on the responsibilities of being part of the household…but I don’t think it took.

Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

That’s my issue of the week. As well as this name (KS Augustin, just to remind you!), I’m just about to start an urban fantasy series under another name of Cara d’Bastian.

At first, the decision seemed very simple. Two different genres, two different pen-names. Augustin sometimes writes erotic stuff and mostly sf, d’Bastian keeps it fantasy and sweet.

The problem, however, is how to cross-pollinate between the two. Now, I’m not sure I want d’Bastian readers to follow me back to Augustin (especially as the UF books can be read by my kids with my full blessing, whereas some of my Augustin books…ahem, not so much). On the other hand, being a greedy little writer, I’d like some of my Augustin readers to try my d’Bastian books.

I have no answers here, I’m just thinking it through on this blog. Maybe I can put a link here somewhere to d’Bastian? Would that work? I’ll try to get that up next week while I continue thinking.