Lifeliner and She will both be fifty percent off their regular price. And as always, all ebook formats will be available for download. So whether you have a Kindle, Sony Reader, kobo, Nook, iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, smartphone, or a computer, you will be able to read all my ebooks. And for July only, at a special price too! Just click the images below to be taken directly to the respective book pages.

If you need instructions on how to download and read ebooks from Smashwords, please check out my 2010 post on Reading Any DRM-Free ePub on iPod Touch, iPad, or iPhone. To read an ePub ebook on your computer, download the free Adobe Digital Editions, then download the ebooks from Smashwords. And when you’ve finished reading, please don’t forget to leave a review on the Smashwords book pages! Enjoy!!

But that’s not the only place you can find She in. So far, Apple’s iBooks and iTunes now lists all four of my ebooks in ePub version in its store: She, Lifeliner, The Job Sessions, and A Nibble of Chocolate. The latter two are available for only 99¢. And in a bizarre twist, the Canadian ebook retailer kobo, hasn’t listed Lifeliner, a biography on a remarkable Canadian woman who made medical, world-changing Canadian history, yet they have listed A Nibble of Chocolate, a nice bite-sized look at the nutrition of chocolate with a recipe included because nutritious food should always taste yummy.

If you’re a Goodreads member, you can now purchase and/or read both Lifeliner and She right on the site, as well as fan my author profile.

And as always, all four of my ebooks are listed and available on Smashwords (and through the ebook app Stanza) for instant download in your preferred format to your favourite device.

I hope you will enjoy my ebooks and be inspired to make a donation towards the substantial cost of She’s editing, by clicking the button in the right sidebar. No good novel appears in public without first going under the critical eyes of an editor. And you can be assured that mine have and always will. I hugely appreciate all those who have already donated and helped me afford this necessary step. Will you not join their number? Regardless, as always, I wish you happy reading!

“A compelling story.”

“Shireen Jeejeebhoy has written an extraordinary account of Judy Taylor and her fight for life starting in the 1970′s when medical science was not as it is today.”

“When (Judy) was drugged up, she’s going, ‘I can’t die cause there’s no way that Cliff can raise those three girls by himself. He can’t do it. I have to live.’”

“Jeejeebhoy’s style of writing sets the right pace as we follow Judy’s medical difficulties….It is truly a fascinating and eye-opening story which was well written.”

“Reading it will make you laugh, smile, cringe, cry and most importantly, think. If you want inspiration, Lifeliner has no shortage packed into its pages.”

“Thank you so much for telling the story of your father’s care for her and the strength and courage she displayed in such a compelling and interesting way!”

Just some of the nice things reviewers and those who knew Judy said about my book Lifeliner: The Judy Taylor Story when it first came out in print and limited eBook distribution. Recently, Smashwords made it possible for authors to publish their books in multiple eBook formats and have them distributed to all the big virtual bookstores from Amazon to Sony to Kobo to Apple’s iBookstore. It was time to properly join the eBook digital revolution.

Judy Taylor relished her simple happy life. She had a loving husband, three young daughters, a beautiful suburban home. Good health. Suddenly, intestinal blood clots annihilated her guts. Judy faced the certainty of starving to death in a cold Toronto hospital. “Don’t let me die,” she cried out. The year was 1970. There was nothing they could do. And then they heard of a radical young doctor doing revolutionary work on artificial feeding. She went for it; she agreed to become a guinea pig. And Judy lived two more decades without eating again. And because of her courage, she gave people a better chance at living with AIDS or cystic fibrosis, recovering from traumas, and surviving the rigors of chemo. Lifeliner is Judy’s inspirational story from death to life, from ordinary woman to medical pioneer.

Today, I’m proud to announce that Lifeliner is available on Smashwords and has been approved to be distributed to Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Amazon, and Apple. To celebrate this awesome occasion, I am offering — until May 31st only — Lifeliner for a measly $1.99 at Smashwords. Simply enter coupon code TX53X at checkout to receive this special introductory price.

At that price, I would buy it even if I didn’t know what it was, said one reader.

Read a free sample. Then take advantage of this amazing offer and download it in your eBook format of choice. And if you have a moment, please leave a review too!

Technorati Tags: Medicine, Health, Inspiration, eBook, Publishing, Digital

This time I’ll be reading the almost archer sisters by Lisa Gabriele. Look for the review to appear here in a few weeks time!

Technorati Tags: Chapters, Books

They each have their strengths and weaknesses. I like the Community’s shelves, a sort of virtual replica of one’s bookshelves and CD holders and the fact that you can sign out. But Amazon Connect is soooo much easier to figure out and to find people on it, as long as you’re in the right area of Amazon.com. In contrast, it’s taken me awhile to figure out the Community, and I really don’t like the fact that it doesn’t automatically pull in my blog. Also, their FAQ on whether one can see a person’s profile on the community without being a member of the community wasn’t very helpful. Sure you can, they blithely answered, omitting the small detail of how to find a profile.

My own profile isn’t linked to Lifeliner on the book page, nor does there seem to be a people search feature as on Connect. But since I did happen to mention my book in one of the blogs I posted on the Community, there’s a link to the blog post on the Lifeliner page and hence to my profile. And voilà, I’m found. Sheesh. Connect doesn’t put my profile on the Lifeliner page either. It seems to me that if they want authors to have profiles, the least they could do is put a link or icon or something that a reader can click on to go to my profile. The best part about it is it’s a Canadian community focussed on Canadian authors and readers, which gives it a friendly feel.

Unfortunately, as far as I can see, Amazon.ca does not have the Amazon Connect feature. It doesn’t even list my book as in stock. Now there’s irony for you: even though people have ordered copies of Lifeliner from it, the Canadian subsidiary of Amazon is the only one of the three (US, UK, and Canada) that lists Lifeliner – a Canadian book by a Canadian author on a Canadian topic — as out of stock.

So if you’re an Amazon.com fan, you can find my Connect profile here. And if you prefer chapters.indigo.ca, you can find my Community profile here.

To backtrack a bit, so you’ll have some context: awhile ago Amazon decided to improve its own business performance and that of BookSurge, a print-on-demand printer it owns, by demanding that companies like iUniverse use BookSurge only to print all books sold through Amazon and, as well, that they reduce the wholesale price for Amazon. The story is long, the authors massively pissed, some companies outraged, refusing to be bullied. But not so for iUniverse. Actually, I didn’t know what precisely iUniverse’s response was to being bullied. AuthorHouse, which bought or merged with iUniverse, issued a statement back in April, and that was the sum total of iUniverse’s communications with their authors. At the time, it sounded like so much nothing wrapped up in words, and I got caught up in other, more immediate problems and forgot about it. I would have expected AuthorHouse /iUniverse to muscle up with other POD publishers, but apparently not only is communication with authors tough for them, but also working with their rivals in order to defeat a bigger enemy is as well. Reading their words now, after at last seeing my monthly sales history, I realise they essentially said, “We negotiated alone, and we caved to Amazon’s demands.”

“We do not believe that it is ever in your interest to limit choice.”

In other words, “we did what we thought we had to in order to continue selling your book on Amazon.”

Whatever. When I saw how little I’d earned on a six-book Amazon sale, my
eyebrows rose. I compared the September sales history to old royalty
statements. I frowned. I calculated the per book income from Amazon
versus from Ingrams or iUniverse itself. I gasped. And then I picked up
the phone. The unfortunate who answered never hung up or ended the
call, never pushed back, well, maybe once, politely. When I vented to the suffering associate that perhaps iUniverse’s software snafu conveniently hid the full extent of their capitulation until things had calmed down, he replied that I was being a bit extreme. Maybe. I noted that they neglected to inform authors of the downward change in Amazon sales income, neatly avoiding a massive backflash from authors. Still, why would they keep silent on a 27 percent decrease in income from Amazon? Surely they’d expect the pig waste to hit the fan when authors started reading their royalty statements? Or perhaps they were counting on the notoriously bad business sense and lack of math skills of the stererotypical author?

Ultimately the associate could do nothing about it. And as I told him, I’d learnt that one needed exceptional persistence to reach and to get anywhere with management, so I wasn’t going to bother. I’d just blog about it.

OK, he said. (Like that would make any diff.)

So here I am blogging, the equivalent of yelling into a moving tornado, telling you how iUniverse now sells my book to Amazon at 47% of the cover price, while they continue to sell it to distributors and other retailers at 64% of the cover price, wondering if that will make any difference to where you shop for books. Amazon’s sweet deal means that although my royalty percentage remains constant, I receive less in absolute dollars from Amazon sales.

This tactic is how Amazon has increased its annual revenues by $4 billion from 2006 to 2007 and continues to increase it this year: on the backs of authors like me. While this booming company now saves itself $2.85 each time it buys a copy of my book — giving itself wiggle room if they want to sell it for less than the competition, but in reality having increased its profit margin by that amount as you, its customer, does not see that discount –  it has robbed me of 57 cents per book. And I got zippo say in this drop.

The guy on the phone tried to mollify me by saying that the figures on the monthly sales reports are not the final say and are subject to change on the quarterly royalty statement, whatever that means. Because let’s face it, iUniverse isn’t about to renegotiate its contract with Amazon back to the fairer deal or pay me what I had contracted with them to receive. This is the final straw for me. Ever since the buyout/merge with AuthorHouse, iUniverse has become noncommunicative and its specialty associates here today, gone tomorrow. And now this! I really cannot recommend iUniverse to any author musing about self-publishing nor will I use them for my next book. I will, in fact, actively recommend against AuthorHouse and iUniverse to anyone who is thinking about self-publishing. I am extremely disappointed in both iUniverse and Amazon. But as Kassia Krozser on Booksquare wrote, “Businesses are not nice, fuzzy creatures that cuddle with you in the dark of the night and believe in fairy tales.” Not even when they’re supposed to be your partner in publishing.

With “Search Inside” a curious customer can click on the image of Lifeliner‘s front cover and get a peek at actual sections of my book. For some books, this feature allows a person to see the entire inside of the book, but for mine, it shows the Front Cover, Table of Contents, Copyright page, an Excerpt, the Back Cover, and “Surprise Me!”

I like the way they executed this feature as it doesn’t show the entire text of Lifeliner, yet does allow a person the electronic equivalent of flipping through the book to see what it’s about.

Turns out BookLocker filed a class action antitrust lawsuit against Amazon and BookSurge in May (the latter is the print-on-demand company that Amazon bought and which requires all print-on-demand or POD publishers to use). The thing that hadn’t really sunk in when I first started following this story was that Amazon is not only forcing small publishers to use their printer BookSurge in order to sell books on Amazon, but that they are also putting the screws on publishers to give Amazon more of a discount than any other wholesaler or retailer or even the publisher itself through their own bookstore.

At the moment, the person who gets the smallest part of the pie is the author. With Amazon insisting on even tighter margins for the publisher and author, guess whose tiny pie piece is going to shrink even more? Yup, the author’s.

Publishers already work on thin margins, and so it will be very difficult for them to absorb giving more of the price to Amazon and having less of it for themselves. Thus, in time, the author will more than likely be asked to take a smaller royalty percentage under the new Amazon model. Right now, the numbers are like this: If, for example, a book sells for $20 retail, and Amazon gets a 50% discount, then that means Amazon pays $10 for the book, but like all retailers, it still prices the book at the printed retail price of $20. However, with such a deep discount (wholesalers get 36%), Amazon has the leeway to sometimes offer a better price to customers than what’s printed on the book. Let’s say they discount it 30%, that’s $6 off. Amazon would then net $4 from the sale. (If it doesn’t offer a discount, it’ll net $10.) In comparison, the author receives a royalty of 10 to 20%, depending on the publisher, on the $10 Amazon wholesale price — not the retail price — which is $1 to $2. Seem fair that the company who simply retails the book earns 2 to 5x more than the author who created it? No, not to me either.

Now, Amazon apparently wants more. And it’s trying to get the class action lawsuit dismissed, standard operating procedure. If Amazon gets its way, then the author will earn a royalty on less than $10 per book sold through Amazon, so even less than the $1 to $2 they receive now.

iUniverse has an interesting deal with Barnes & Noble for its authors. Any book sold through B&N, and only through B&N, receives a much larger royalty rate of 25%. Now Amazon may be more of a book retailing juggernaut than B&N, but B&N has far more consideration for authors, the very people who make their business and Amazon’s possible, if I may be so blunt.

This looks like it’s going to be a long fight. Money is a powerful incentive for Amazon to try to shaft small publishers and authors for as long as possible. What’s an author to do? What’s a consumer to do?

Here in Canada, we have Chapters Indigo as an alternative to Amazon for buying books online. I’ve found the Chapters community in-house support for authors very good; there isn’t the equivalent from Amazon as far as I can see. Even Facebook provides more advice and support for budding authors than Amazon does. As for customer support, I’ve always received good service from Chapters Indigo. I found Amazon.ca actually to be slower in delivery than Chapters Indigo. In the US, you have B&N. I’m not familiar with their customer support, but I’ve heard that they’ve been improving their online presence. For Britain, I’m afraid I don’t know what your online alternatives are. But if anyone has good suggestions for Britain or any other non-North American country, please leave them in the Comments section!

As for me, I’ll be leaving my Orders page as is. First off, decision making is no longer my forté (thank you stupid drivers), and second I really don’t know what is best for me as an author. The thing that concerns me the most is that Amazon.com is the only place that has reviews on my book. B&N does have one review, but Chapters has zip, not even a rating. Reviews and ratings are very helpful for would-be readers to determine if a book is worth buying. And, as well, Amazon has the most informative affiliate links. Even if people don’t use them, the information contained in the Amazon affiliate links is far more helpful than the Chapters affiliate links (just a graphic, big deal). Plus, after doing a quick check on my Amazon rankings, it looks like people are ordering from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca, but alas not Amazon.co.uk. (Now if only someone would buy the darn copy at Book City…) Eventually, I’ll figure it out. Meanwhile, I’ll probably post updates about this issue every so often. Stay posted!

Amazon has its own affiliate link system that is easy to understand and to set up. Chapters Indigo, on the other hand, uses Commission Junction to manage its affiliate links. CJ, a US company, actually provides and manages affiliate links for a whole host of companies, not just Indigo. Unlike Amazon’s system, I found the CJ system confusing and, at one point, it incomprehensibly cancelled my affiliate link shortly after I first set it up. And so it came as no surprise, even though unexpected, to learn that there was a class action lawsuit against it.

Today, I learnt that a class action lawsuit against CJ, covering 2003 to 2008, is about to be settled. I highly doubt I’ll receive a penny as my affiliate link didn’t seem to work. For the most part, I found that readers would prefer to take the long route round to my book page by Googling and then clicking until they found the order page rather than using the quick cut from my website, through one of the affiliate links, to the order page on the bookstore website. To complicate matters, neither Chapters nor CJ, indicate in any way whether people have ordered your book through them. Amazon, at least you can tell, by the ranking numbers — if they go down, someone has ordered a book; if they go up, no one is ordering. It’s not surprising then to me that the lawsuit was about commissions being stolen or diverted from Publishers and Advertisers. It makes you realise how much you trust these companies to report purchases accurately, even the bookstores themselves. The latter is particularly trust-based. The affiliates pay you monthly, but bookstore sales take a long time to reach you. Royalties are added up over 3 months and then take another 2 months to reach your bank account, by which point so much time has passed, how would you know — unless a reader told you directly — that they have omitted a sale or two (that actually happened to me in my first quarter of sales, and I caught it because a reader had told me how many books they’d bought, which didn’t appear in my sales statement)?

At the moment, I’m leaving the links up because they do provide information for people who wish to order my book, even if those same people don’t click on the darn things, but then would rather surf over to Amazon or Chapters and do a search on those websites for my book instead. Sigh. The travails of trying to sell a book.

When I searched for “jeejeebhoy” on Amazon.com, I did a double take when I saw next to the title of my book “4 reviews.” Four? Didn’t I have three? I clicked on the “Customer Reviews” link and first noticed that at least one person had found Gloria Oren’s review helpful. That was new. Gloria had reviewed Lifeliner back in February and had awarded it 5 stars. Then I scrolled down and discovered that there really was a new review of my book, posted just two days ago on May 24th.

Diana Rohini LaVigne, Online Editor of Indian Life & Style Magazine and India-West Magazine and the South Asian Journalists Association Bay Area Chapter Coordinator, had succinctly and kindly reviewed my book on Saturday, giving it 4 stars. Cool! She’d summarized Lifeliner and commented briefly on the kind of research I’d done, then wrote:

“Arranged in chronological order, readers are taken on the journey with Judy; experiencing her triumphs and her challenges. Reading it will make you laugh, smile, cringe, cry and most importantly, think.”

Wow! But her last paragraph really blew me away:

“Once you finish the book, you will take stock of your own health and that of your family’s. If you want inspiration, Lifeliner has no shortage packed into its pages. An excellent book to read and pass along to anyone from those interested in true stories, medical history and those interested in anything to do with health. Lifeliner isn’t just a book, but a voyage about TPN, living with adversity and the power of human will.”

Please pass the word to folks you know, work with, hang with, say hi to on the street, anyone you know, for I have 8 weeks to prove that this book is salable and worthy to be kept in store. If you can’t find it, I can attest that the folks who work at WBBS are very helpful and easy to approach, so don’t be shy. In fact if you look confused, they’re liable to approach you and find what you want as has happened to me many a time!

My marketing guy at iUniverse, with profuse apologies from him and Chapters, told me that Chapters is yanking Lifeliner from the display in the World’s Biggest Bookstore because of a “corporate initiative.” What the heck does that mean? Apparently, it means they need the space for another commitment. Sigh.

They will now stock it from April 1st to June 1st. I shall give you all the details on April 1st because as I’m now learning you just never know where my book will end up. In the meantime, dear interested potential readers, please order it through one of the affiliate links on the right sidebar. It’s much the easiest way!

Indigo at Bay and Bloor will stock Lifeliner: The Judy Taylor Story, starting on Tuesday, February 19 and ending 8 weeks later on April 14 or 15 (I don’t know the exact date) unless all of my wonderful readers spread the word to buy books steadily and in good numbers during that entire period. If sales are good and steady, then Indigo will continue to stock the book beyond the 8-week period, according to what I’ve been told anyway.

To honour the occasion, there will be a book signing at an intimate café in the Yorkville area. Details to follow!

In other news: I’m pleased to announce that my first short story Angelica is up and available on Amazon Shorts in digital format. This piece is entirely fictional — unlike Lifeliner, which is entirely non-fictional.

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I’ve been waiting with great anticipation for when Lifeliner will be stocked at my Indigo bookstore of choice. They asked me for my top three choices, and this week I finally got the good news!

Lifeliner will be stocked at Indigo — Bay & Bloor, starting Tuesday, February 19! Whoo hoo!! Now, all I have to do is encourage people to go to Indigo in the Manulife Centre at 55 Bloor Street West, starting after Valentine’s Day, to buy Lifeliner. Easy? Nope! But a good challenge!!

Meanwhile, to fill in that wait, local bookstores are supposed to order Lifeliner for you upon request. The operative word here is “supposed.”

One person I know called several Indigo or Chapters stores about ordering a copy of Lifeliner, and to a one, they all said order it online. This replicated the experiences of several others who’d tried to request it through their local bookstore. Now yes, my book is self-published and yes, it’s POD, which means the bookstore cannot return it once ordered, but it is also available through their wholesaler, just like any traditionally published book. And if someone requests a copy, especially at this early stage in the book’s release, they’re not likely to leave it at the counter. But bookstores are used to being able to return their merchandise and are hesitant to order nonreturnable books. They like the comfort of being able to return books that do not sell; but nonreturnable books serve an author well because each sale (to a bookstore) is final and each sale generates a royalty that won’t be reversed down the road, which can happen to authors with traditional publishers.

In the end, the decision to order a book upon request or not comes down to the bookstore manager. I’d heard that Americans had different experiences with different Barnes & Noble stores — the equivalent to Chapters Indigo in the States — depending on the manager. Some managers welcome iUniverse authors and will happily order their books for customers upon request, whereas others are not too pleased to see them. Here in Canada, the same holds true. Whether or not a Chapters or Indigo store will order Lifeliner for you is up to each manager; to compound the problem, the managers won’t even know that my book will appear in an Indigo store as my title has not yet been submitted to the chain’s buyer.

So my best advice at this point is that if you or someone you know would like to buy a copy of Lifeliner, go with your favourite online bookstore and click on its link in the right sidebar.

Any bookstore in the Indigo chain will order a book on request, but may suggest online shopping as a quicker and easier way to get the book. However, it’s not true that it will not be stocked. As a Publisher’s Choice author, I will have my book stocked in an Indigo store, and it will spread out to other stores in the chain IF it does well in the 60 days it’s in stock. Unfortunately, I have not heard yet when Indigo will stock it and which store. I will definitely let subscribers know as well as post it on the website home page when I do!

(P.S. This post is also serving as a test for seeing if my website is finally sending out post notifications automatically as I’ve had some trouble since upgrading.)

It’s taken me awhile to acquaint myself with the basics. I settled at first with just filling out some rudimentary profile info. I didn’t upload a photo of myself — all these online places keep asking for your photo! — but chose a nice icon instead. I couldn’t figure out what to populate my shelves with and finally decided to start with a few pre-injury favourites and ended with a post-injury current book. DVDs I have very few of — mysteries, of course, I had to put up there on my shelf. And lastly music. Well, that’s a toughie. What do I like? My tastes have changed, but there were a couple of easy choices to begin with. Listening to the radio this morning, I realised I’d forgotten another obvious choice. Will definitely have to add her!

But filling a few shelves is only the start of building your presence in the chapters.indigo.ca community. There are all sorts of other things they want you to reveal about yourself and contribute as well. What are my top tens (uhhhh…do I have any?); what are my reviews (I like, I don’t like, what more can I say?); what are my recommendations (now here’s something I could probably sink my teeth into, given time); what groups am I in (first Facebook groups, now community groups, I’ll have no time left for anything else!)? Questions, questions, questions. And then there are posts to do. Posts? How is a writer supposed to keep up?! First a personal blog then a community post and then Amazon blogs? Facebook makes it easy. They’ll import your blog automatically. I think I’ll just copy and paste relevant blog posts from here into the community. The groups are like book clubs; they really are designed for readers. And here’s where I fall down because my current reading sucks. How can you be a writer and not a voracious reader? Easy. Get a brain injury! I think I’ll steer clear of groups for the moment.

So if you’re a reader, this new online community looks promising. There are many, many familiar names on there. And of course, there’s me! If you have already bought books from chapters.indigo.ca, then it’s pretty easy to join the community. Actually it’s easy to join even if you’re not a current customer. So click over to the community and look me up!

I’ve always liked to see how readers interpret my stories, and it’s no different for the book. The reviewer’s last line, for me, was unexpected: “…and a shout of encouragement to doctors who _dare_ to try.” As usual, a reader sees something that I didn’t consciously think of but was probably in the back of my mind, which proves my idea that a published work is not complete until it is read. It’s also why I’m loathe to discuss what I was thinking when I wrote such-and-such, unless I think the reader is really, really off base! I figure everything I wanted to say is written down. That probably makes me one of those annoying authors who drive people nuts in their refusal to discuss their work(s)! Ah well. I may change.

Of course, this now means, time to join the Chapters community, the one all us Torontonians have been inundated with ads for on the subway.