b.standhaft

Comment Threads

• anonemouse commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  maybe this virtual credit card generator could be distributed as freeware. It would need to be picked up by the banks, not the customers; the people deploying it would need access to Visa (or whoever)'s credit card creation API. It's kinda double-entry transactions, where you alert your "store of value" that an amount is to be paid and receive a transaction ID, then give the payee that transaction ID to allow them to redeem the money from your store of value. Building it on credit cards takes advantage of existing infrastructure. Part of the problem with credit cards for micropayments...
• Nix commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Ian S, voice is 'higher bandwidth' than text to you? How slowly do you read?...
• Simon Green commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Long time lurker, first time poster, etc. etc. Chiming in to note relevant just-released study: http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-author-earnings-report/ Perhaps there is, or will be, more of a market for really good freelance editors who are not tied to a publisher. That way you could still engage the professional services of an editor, without having to deal with the publisher. I'm sure there are all sorts of details that would need thrashing out - such as, the editor will still expect to get paid; how to do that without recreating most of the evils of a publishing contract? - but it might start...
• Sean M commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Simon, the problems with a novelist becoming a one-man press is that most authors are better being authors than managers, and that now the author has to spend money in advance in hopes of making it back later (the first law of commercial publishing is "money flows towards the author"). Some people find that the best choice but it has serious consequences, and Our Generous Host has an essay on the problems under Common Misperceptions About Publishing....
• Simon Green commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  Oh yes, I understand that it's not nearly as simple as 'write awesome book, publish on Kindle, profit', and I don't expect publishers to go away any more than record companies have even though for the price of a teenager's first car you can buy a full suite of digital recording equipment that would have put a professional studio to shame 10 years ago. I've read the essay, too. :-) But I thought it was very interesting to see that indie publishers now outsell the Big Five, at least on Kindle, which is a pretty good proxy for 'all ebooks,'...