Tag Archive for book sales

Amazon Book Sale

reading versus watching

For many many years, I’ve been a sales associate at Amazon. I’ve started just as they’ve started, when selling books over the Internet was a novel and cool thing. I haven’t written back then (but soon after). And for as many years, Amazon has been trying to get me to promote things. But that’s just not what I do — I’m not interested in selling home products or pushing beauty items. In decades of being an associate, I’ve never made a dime, but I hope that some of my readers got discounts of books I’ve recommended over the years. This month, Amazon tried to reach out again by giving me a list of 200,000 products to choose from. And less than 0.5% of those were books. And of those, a smidgen of a percentage were books that I actually own and love, have bought over and over again (I have multiple copies of many of these; but I’m not a hoarder), my kids and friends have read, I’ve recommended and for which I wrote reviews. So, Amazon finally figured me out — it gave me an opportunity to share books with my readers that I endorse at a discount. So…

Room for Creativity

The lion man from the Stadel Cave in Hohlenstein, Lonetal.

We often say someone is “creative”, but what is creativity good for? It’s not just for solving problems, although it takes a lot of creativity and expertise to figure out the thorniest issues. Creativity is a way we express ourselves and stand out; there are lots of experts but the best have both the creativity and the expertise to get a job done. While I believe most animals evolved to have some creativity, humans take this trait to the max (as we do with most things). Consider the Lion Man — a 40,000 year old statue of a humanized lion carved from ivory. Read the origin date again — it was created forty thousand years ago my cave men! It’s about a foot tall, has the head of a lion and body of human. It’s one of the earliest examples of human creativity we know about, in addition to all of the cave paintings that date to approximately the same time. But unlike cave painting which tend to depict scenes of real life, this statue is something else. It’s a fictional creature. Nothing like that ever existed in nature, it’s a figment of someone’s imagination. The statue, which was found…

Women, Sex, and Plotlines

Epic header

I had this idea for writing a post about mothers and their children, but then I’ve decided that I’m too close to that subject at the moment and moved on to writing about sex. Sex sells, right? So here it goes: women, sex, and plotlines. Per statistica.com, 84% of romance readers are women. Obviously, that’s not a big surprise. I remember listening to a woman who was rhapsodizing about ebooks because she no longer needed to make covers to hide the fact she was reading romances on her subway rides to work. Ebooks hide lots of unique reading preferences behind their bland consumer electronics facades. And what people say they read and what they actually buy is quite revealing. The most popular answer to what genre you like to read is mystery/crime/thriller. And yet romance/erotica is by far the most profitable category at $1.44 billion, while crime/mystery came a distant second at $728.2 million. You’d be shocked, shocked to learn that people lie about what they love to read (or do). And while we are focusing a bit on statistics, here’s an interesting tidbit: engineers did research on what kinds of search relating to sex do women do as opposed…