Making My Books Available

A very good, not to mention timely, question has been asked by one of my readers.  They want to get a copy of one of my books, but they don’t have a Kindle EBook reader.  I’m going to address that problem here – rather lengthy I’m afraid, only because I’m a big windbag and I want to talk about a few other things too.  And yes, I do have a solution up my sleeve – eventually.

As most of you know now, I’ve recently done something reckless and stupid – I’ve started publishing some of my stories.  What’s reckless and stupid about that?  Karen Singer doesn’t exist – even though she does exist.  See my “About Me” page for further confusion.  There’s a link at the top.  But the bottom line is that my wife knows nothing at all about my Karen side, and it’s important that things stay that way.  If she starts seeing an income in our bank accounts from Amazon, then you have no idea the problems it will cause.  So for me, it’s risky business.  End of story!

I started publishing my stories because I felt they were worth publishing and I wanted to make them available to a wider audience than just Fictionmania.  Those of you who think publishing books will make you rich, think again.  I published a book as myself – a truly good book – and I got almost nothing at all for it.  In fact, by the time I paid for an advertising package for the book, I’m literally thousands of dollars in the hole because of it.  But then, I can’t seem to find it in me to ask people to pay $34.00 for a paperback book – the stupidly high price the publisher placed on it, not me.  Because of that experience, I’ve been rather slow about doing any kind of publishing. 

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed a trend in books where readers are going away from the printed books and moving on to the EBook formats instead.  Both my wife and I have read from nothing but our tablets for a few years now.  Before that, our home was literally getting overrun with books we had read and didn’t know where to put.  The EBooks solved that problem, they’re cheaper to buy, we can get the books immediately, and reading them from out tablets is a lot easier since we can set the font size, the brightness, and many other things that literally make reading easier for us…especially at our age.  However, we don’t read from the Kindle Apps on our tablets, we went with the Barnes and Noble Nook Reader app instead.  We set this up several years ago, and back then, Barnes and Noble stores were one of my favorite places.  Besides, in my opinion, the Barnes and Noble Nook Reader is by far the best EBook reader out there!  I even do a lot of my story editing on it.  I can’t do that with the Kindle app.  The only thing I can’t really do with my Nook reader is to read a book I buy in the Kindle format.

But despite all that, I decided to go with Amazon to publish my Karen books.  From what I can tell, Amazon is probably one of the biggest book publishers out there.  As with normal book publishing where the publisher is taking all the risks, the three books I’ve now published through Amazon have literally cost me nothing at all to publish, so the few dollars I receive is nothing but pure profit.  No overhead at all!  Barnes and Noble has the same kind of deal available, and I could have set things up to publish through them as well – two different companies handling my book, but I decided dealing with only one was easier.  I could have also sent my book to a big distributer who would have made the book available everywhere, but they would have gotten their cut of the little money I receive and that would have cut into my profit margin. 

I’m going exclusively (for now) with the Amazon format, because if I sign up to make the books exclusively available through them, then I get a 70% cut of the price the books bring in.  If I don’t make the books strictly available to Amazon, then I only get 35%.  That’s a big difference to me!  Plus, dealing with only one company is much easier on me.  Of course, that’s where a good distributer would come in, but I’m going to be greedy and try to get all the money I can for myself instead of everybody else getting their too big cut.  Besides, as I said, dealing with only one company is easier on me.  So that’s why I went with the Kindle format.

Oh, and if you do have a tablet, the Kindle Reader app is free, and it is a pretty good EBook reader.  It’s just not as good in my opinion as the Nook reader.  So if you have a tablet, then you should have no problem at all getting one of my books from Amazon.  And now that I think about it, there are a number of very good EBook readers you can download for free that will handle any formats at all – Kindle, Nook, or just about anything.

Amazon offers me a “dashboard” where I can track the number of sales for each book and just how much I’m raking in for it all (or not raking it in as the case actually is).  I can’t tell you how good I feel when I check it each day and see that someone has been interested enough to take a chance and buy one of my books.  My favorite book, the one book I’d really like people to buy, “Second Life, Second Chance,” is actually selling a book here and there.  But “The Winds of Chaos” has sold fairly well.  I think between the two of them I’ve managed to sell about one book every single day – on average!  Some days I don’t sell any.  It doesn’t look like “Baby Bobby” is going to be a big hit, but I didn’t expect it to be.  The market for it is too small.  But it should still be interesting to watch.

Now…what to do about the people who don’t have tablets or EBook readers.  Yes, I’m finally getting around to the real point of this blog post. 

Several weeks ago, I decided to start looking into another service that Amazon offers – printed books.  What they do is, whenever someone wants a printed version of a book, they print out a copy of the book for that person and send it out.  I haven’t had time to look very far into the service yet, but I will be looking further into it.  As long as it doesn’t cost me anything, then I’ll go forward with it.  I’ll probably have to charge slightly more for the printed books since Amazon gets a much bigger cut, but I still want them to be relatively cheap so people can afford them.

So that’s what’s going on.  Hopefully, I’ll have my books available in both the EBook and the printed formats so you can have your choice.  And hopefully, the prices won’t be very different.  I still don’t know what’s going to be involved in the printed book requirements yet, but I hope it’s not a lot!!! 

So you can watch for blog posts in the future telling you what books become available in print as well as the EBook format.  And hopefully, that will solve all the problems of people wanting to read my stories, but not having the Kindle Reader to do it. 

Baby Bobby - My Third Published Kindle Book

For my third published Kindle book, I chose:  Baby Bobby.  This is a pure fetish novel.  A sissy baby fetish novel to be exact. 

You can find the book here at:  https://www.amazon.com/Baby-Bobby-Karen-Singer-ebook/dp/B01M9J6BZ4/

This was my first book that I published to the Fictionmaina website back in 2009.  I’ve removed the story now from Fictionmania so I could publish it.  This story immediately caused a big stir on Fictionmania and somewhat of a debate within the reader comments as to whether this story was a masterpiece or not.  In my opinion – not.  It’s just a very good, very unique story.  But to be honest, I do think it’s without a doubt a classic of the tiny min-genre that it occupies. 

Of course, I’ve rewritten the story a little bit in order to smooth it out and fix some of the errors.  The result is something much more satisfactory (at least to me), and perhaps something much more worthy to be a classic of that tiny genre.   

 

For a fetish story, there is NO SEX in the book at all.  Not even close.  So don’t go looking for it.  This novel isn’t about that at all. 

So what is the story about?  I’m so glad you asked – you did ask, didn’t you?

Baby Bobby is about Bobby, a high school sophomore who gets bullied by Brandy, a very cruel girl in the school, who beats him up and puts a diaper on him.  But the idea was put to Brandy by one of her friends to see if she could keep Bobby in diapers for the entire school year.  Could she do it?  Her friend didn’t think it would be possible, but Brandy believed otherwise.  But of course, once Brandy got started, she became more and more obsessed with dominating Bobby, and not just diapering him, but completely sissifying and feminizing him as well.

This is a story where the cruelty goes on and on throughout.  If you don’t like stories like that, then please don’t buy it.  But if you can get past that, then I truly believe you’ll enjoy this unique story.

So that’s it in a nutshell.  A book that I believe should be a classic for the subject, even though I’m sure every author thinks that of every book they write. 

If you’re wondering about the cover, I create all the covers for my books myself.  And this time I think I’ve created one of the absolute cheesiest covers imaginable.  Yet I think it pretty much sums up the book perfectly.  The cover was a lot of work to create, and also a lot of fun.

And once again, should you read the story and feel it’s worth someone else taking the time to read, please leave a comment about it on Amazon so that others can gain from your experience.

The Winds of Chaos – My Second Published Book

 I’ve gone and done it again!  I published another book (sort of).  Again, it’s an EBook available through Amazon.  This is a new one called, “The Winds of Chaos.”  And again, like “Second Life, Second Chance,” this is another transgender novel.  Although that is the ONLY thing these two stories have in common.  These are two very different stories.  

You can find the book here:  https://www.amazon.com/Winds-Chaos-Karen-Singer-ebook/dp/B01KVPGBPG/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

So what’s The Winds of Chaos about?  I guess that’s a fair question.

Mathew Montclair is an ex-Marine and a big hero in every sense of the word.  But all his life, Mat has felt wrong about himself and has tried to run from it.  He’s tried to hide his problem by becoming the exact opposite of the person he always felt he was on the inside – a woman.  Now, after being wounded in battle and gaining one of the worst cases of PTSD the doctors have seen in some time, he’s decided to leave the Marines and become the person he always thought he should be. 

His plans were to go home, see his family, then disappear so no one will have to put up with the strain and embarrassment of what he’s going to do.  But despite all of Mat’s best planning, things didn’t exactly work out the way he wanted.  Despite what he wanted to do with his life, destiny is something that simply won’t be denied.  Because Fate needed a hero.  And Fate chose Mat.

It may not be that way for you, but it is my hope, that somewhere along the line, you will get so caught up in the story that you will forget you are reading a transgender novel, and in the end, it will leave you absolutely breathless!  If not, then I still hope you enjoy it.

Should you read the story and at least feel it’s worth someone else taking the time to read, please leave a comment about it on Amazon so that others can gain from your experience.

Oh, just one other thing.  Like most of my stories, The Winds of Chaos didn’t start with an idea or a story plot.  It started with words.  Words that seemingly don’t have much to do with the story.  But the story grew out of those words.  Before there was the book.  Before there was the concept.  Before there was even a main character, the story started with a poem in my head:

The Spider of Fate

The spider of fate clung tight to its web

While the cruel Winds of Chaos blew its artwork to shreds.

When the winds ended and the spider could see

The fates that were altered were hard to believe.

Strands torn asunder and shifted around

Strands wrapped in each other where chaos abounds.

And out in the distance where beauty should thrive

Some strands were ended, and so would those lives.

The web was in tatters, the grand plan was gone

And lives sorely altered would end before long.

The web needed mending, a new plan conceived.

No time could be wasted, too many would grieve.

A hero was needed, a soul brave and true

To carry the load of a burden so cruel.

To carry the burden, but also the blame

For to save all those lives he must live in shame.

Only by being the target of spite

The hero could help them and make them unite.

Only by being an object of hate

Could anyone save them and alter their fate.

“Fate” is a spider that spins fantastic unimaginable webs from the silky strands of everyone’s lives.  The glorious artistic webs that it creates cannot be imagined by mere mortals.  Mere mortals could never appreciate the true beauty of the webs that are spun.  

Around and around fate goes as it creates its amazing webs, wrapping the strands of life in ways that only it can know.  Each time the strands touch another, new changes are brought into those lives; changes that represent the spider’s beautiful grand artistic plan.

Fate has but one enemy, one thing alone that can disrupt the amazing beauty of its complicated webs.  And that thing isn’t even anything sentient.  It is nothing but a storm.  A storm of cosmic winds that blow with nothing guiding them.  Blowing here, blowing there, blowing anywhere their unseen course may take them.  And in their path, the winds leave nothing but change and disaster.  For these winds are the Winds of Chaos.  Pure chaos, leaving unimaginable disturbances everywhere they touch.  These winds, and these winds alone, can disrupt the spider’s grand scheme for everyone.  For nothing, not even the Spider of Fate, can resist the touch of Chaos.