Author: Eamonn Murphy - Writer

Eamonn Murphy has published over seventy stories in small press magazines and collected them into small, cheap volumes for posterity. They are available at all good eBook retailers and libraries. In his spare time, he writes reviews for sfcrowsnest. Retired now after years of hard labour (building sites and call centres), he lives near Bristol, England, with a nice lady, a nasty Jack Russell, an untrainable loony Labrador and some ducks. He has a BA (Hons) from the Open University but very little common sense. Find out more at eamonnmurphywriter.com.

Bookfunnel: You can join Giveaways on the first time author plan

I  queried Bookfunnel on this and got the following reply(and promptly):

Hi, Eamonn!

You can join promotions on the First-Time Author plan!

You create a download page that does not collect emails and then include a call-to-action inside the book file (meaning, an invite to join your list with a link that takes them to a signup form on your own website). While not everyone will join your mailing list after downloading the book, the readers that do click the link and sign up will probably be more engaged! Most of our First-Time authors put the invite at the front and back of the book.

If you want to collect email addresses up front, you would upgrade to the Mid-List monthly plan for the promo. If you wanted to downgrade back to First-Time after the promo ended, that’s always an option too. :)

Please let me know if you have any questions!

Jamie
BookFunnel Support

I think there was a query on my submission to one of my giveaways/promotions because some of the organizers want you on a plan that collects e-mails. I have no interest in collecting e-mails to pester people with ‘news’ about me.

I thought that was best clarified with a new post. Yay Bookfunnel!

Bookfunneling again

The other day I rejoined Bookfunnel on the cheap plan and updated my books. I couldn’t remember what plan I was on before and why I had quit. I soon did. On the cheapest plan you can’t join Giveaways and promote your book so membership is not so useful.

On the other hand, you can provide easy-to-use links to the books for readers and send out advance review copies and review copies and such, which isn’t bad for $20 a year.

You can also – and I did – make a Bookfunnel Bundle of all your books with just one link to connect to the download page. That’s a handy thing to have on your website so I’ve put it over on the right in my widgets.

 

 

 

Real Books v E-Readers (or Space: The Final Frontier)

I was wandering through the greensward with my dogs the other morning, contemplating how to improve my stories and decided I should re-read a bit of Silverberg. His wonderful short fiction has been collected by the highly esteemed Subterranean Press into a series of volumes many of which I have reviewed for SF crowsnest.

Then I remembered that I had given them away to a charity shop. One tidies up occasionally, scans the pile of books and decides that with all the new stuff that old stuff won’t ever be read and is taking up space (see subtitle). Inevitably, I find, the day comes when I want to read it again and I kick myself for giving it away. But my girlfriend would kick me harder if I kept everything because we’d have to live in the garden.

With an e-book reader, you never have to get rid of anything. Even if your device has reached capacity, which is unlikely (mine hasn’t yet) e-books can be stored in the cloud, retrievable whenever you get the urge. If I’d had Silverberg in bytes instead of pages, he would still be available to me.

Of course, I’m just as fond of ‘real’ books as the next person. I particularly prefer graphic novels and comics on real paper but they can be even more of a storage problem. So it may be time to embrace new technology and go with e.

The other advantage of e-readers is that you can enlarge the text size to suit. That’s useful for us old people.

 
P.S. Heinlein predicted e-readers in Stranger in a Strange Land where Gillian is sat in bed with a ‘real book’ and states that she prefers it to the text scrolling across before her on a screen. Heinlein envisaged a flow of words on one line like those advertising things.

 
P.P.S. I’m keeping my CD’s.