Netster and Qwikflix?

Posted on 19 Sep ’11 by John Poetzel

*Warning! Full rant mode follows…*
I wasn’t one of the Netflix customers that was taken by surprise or angered by the recent ‘price hike’. I think it amounted to a $3 bump for me, and since I can’t catch OTA television programming and they haven’t strung cable around here, it wasn’t a big deal. But, after the bizarre apology video I watched yesterday, I started looking around the web for entertainment alternatives.

GreenCine and Blockbuster’s pricing was similar to what I pay for 5 discs and Streaming from Netflix, and I could try to replace the DVD by mail with one of those services, but I don’t want to keep two accounts straight! Hear that Qwikster? I don’t want two accounts! I only want to go to one website!

The only reason I get movies from the Redbox up the hill is that there is nothing to remember save bringing the thing back. I swipe my card and watch the DVD and that’s it. It’s simple and I’m in control. We have Hulu. We have the CBS website. We have the PBS website. We have access to the vast majority of television programming and movie releases and we’re running out of things to put on our Netflix queue already!

“Hey, why did this Doctor Who DVD show up? We just watched that on instant view!” I say as I open the red envelope from Qwixster.

See? I already have a hard time keeping things straight between my queues on the Netflix website. So now I’ll have to look at another website (that will look exactly the same…) to check my instant queue and see if that disc I just picked from Redbox is available. Whatever…

This split is a dumb idea, and I do get a vote. I get to choose every time I see that $36.24 show up on my bank statement.

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Memories of Seattle keep floating around my head

Posted on 13 Sep ’11 by John Poetzel

Japanese floating lanterns in Olympia
I’m devoting my evening to what I hope to be
the final edit of Floating – A Seattle Mystery…
I finally nailed down the first two paragraphs of the book, and I’ll share them with you:

Nestled in between the cold, gray waters of Puget Sound and the dark green wrinkles in the earth, Seattle is often shrouded in mist and rain. All that moisture has a way of getting under your skin, or invading your thoughts. Some people can take it, some folks can’t. The short, dark days and long nights of the rainy season push those folks too far. The perfect summers beneath the bluest skies you’ve ever seen can even help tilt a mind past the point of no return.

Of course when you’re normal, you don’t think about the weather like that, but who’s normal anyway? With all the bluffs and high rise condo towers in the city, lots of people think that all that rain looks pretty good when it finally pools into the lakes and runs into Puget Sound. When you’re floating face down in the ship canal, you don’t get to continue the debate about where normal stops and crazy starts.

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Publishing an e-book with Smashwords

Posted on 10 Sep ’11 by John Poetzel

When I got Cheap Tequila to a point where I wanted other people to read it, I used a 4 pronged approach to getting out into the world. I think this might be where the phrase “Stick a fork in it” might have come from…

1. First I used the meatgrinder over at smashwords.com to convert it to a myriad of e-book formats. I studied the Style Guide, but I could have been helped by this list: Smashwords: How to Self-Publish an Ebook with Smashwords: 31 Authors Share Their Tips and Tricks

2. I got the paper version set up and proofed at Createspace. I find that I can spot errors more easily when I have an actual book in my hands. Some of the typos and punctuation errors that get missed on the computer screen just jump out in print. I also sent proofs to my crack proofreaders who were able to find things that I missed. (Thanks Mary and Jan!)

3. Based on the kindle version I downloaded from smashwords, I was able to really understand how to put together the file that I needed to upload to kdp.amazon.com.

4. I also uploaded the epub version to pubit.barnesandnoble.com.

I took the advice of sages around the internet and left amazon and b&n off the distribution list at Smashwords, since the commission structure varies a bit. Smashwords was great for getting the book into Kobo and the iBookstore.

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