Posts Tagged ‘reading’

Behind The Smile – A Review of The New Book By Owen Jones

Friday, April 27th, 2012

‘Behind The Smile: the story of Lek, a Thai bar girl in Pattaya’ is the first book by Owen Jones. It was published on April 19th. 2012. Behind the Smile is a book that Mr. Jones says he has been attempting to write for a number of years. It is set in Thailand, but the sort of people concerned are to be discovered in most countries in the world.

The story is not an atypical one in richer as well as poorer countries: a young woman gets married but her husband soon starts thinking that he is rather young to become tied to one woman and live a life of hard work. He begins partying and sleeping about. His wife, not being willing to put up with this, divorces him.

The difficulty arises in Third World countries that people have no state funds to fall back on, which is why family ties are so all important. You could easily die without the support of your family. This usually works well, but not always.

In Lek’s case her father dies at an early age and leaves enormous debts to the bank with the farm held in security. The future looks grim as Lek’s mother is not able to do more than she is already doing. Lek can begin to help more, but a farm girl’s wages are a pittance. One brother is already working, but the other is far too young.

At a family pow-wow, they reluctantly decide that there is no option but to send Lek away to a big city to work, where she will at least be able to pay the bank’s repayment installments off every month.

Lek goes to Pattaya where a relation owns a small bar. She is given a job as a waitress and she loves the thrill of the job. The dazzling lights, loud music and attentive men are new to her.

A month or so later, she realizes that she is pregnant with her ex-husband’s child. That is a total disaster, because it threatens her capacity to pay off the bank, which would ruin her mother and siblings.

This book, ‘Behind The Smile’, looks at Lek’s life from her own perspective and follows her through her fun and frustrations. It attempts to display her thought processes and tell you, the reader, why she does things and what she may rather be doing instead.

You get to be privy to Lek’s hopes and fears as the book takes you through a vital part of her life. You meet her friends, family, work mates and boyfriends and you get to see what makes Lek tick

A central theme of this book is not to judge a book by its cover; not to be to quick to judge at all, in fact, and above all, to be wary of what you wish for in case it comes true and there are unforeseen consequences

The title of the book, ‘Behind the Smile’, comes from the fact that Thailand is well-known as The Land of Smiles.

Owen Jones has just published his first novel which is called Behind The Smile: the story of Lek, a Thai bar girl in Pattaya in Thailand.

A Guide To Publishing An Ebook

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Computers changed industry in a huge way when they became popular in the Eighties and Nineties. Then the Net brought another wave if modernization in the Nineties and Naughties. It is hard to imagine an industry that has not been profoundly altered by these excellent innovations. The latest industry to be shaken to its nucleus is the publishing industry.

Publishers used to have a stranglehold on which books got published and which did not. Publishers yardstick for whether to publish or not was purely financial: is the book likely to make money or not?

This is reasonable enough, but it means a weighty predisposition towards commercial novels written by well-known authors. It was very hard for new writers to put a foot in the door.

The music industry was the first part of the publishing industry to lose its control over its sphere of influence. The book publishing sector will become the next to go and the movement is already well underway. These days, you can download a free publishing software suite which is at least as feature-packed as MS Office.

Open Office has a highly-rated word processor with which you can compose your book. It has an image editor with which you may design the book cover and other illustrations. It also has a built in PDF conversion module. This equals that you may publish your ebook in a style that any computer in the world can read.

When your book is finished to publish, there are at least two routes to go, if you live outside the US; within the US, Google will help as well. Google’s Publisher works like Amazon’s more fair system, so let us have a look at that one. First go to Amazon and then click through to Kindle Direct Publishing, a sister firm of theirs.

Then you will need to open an account with Kindle DP. This is easy, free and quick. Go to your bookshelf and click on ‘Add A New Title’. Follow the instructions and your book will be uploaded into the Amazon system.

You choose how much you want to sell it for and you can decide on how much of that you want for yourself. It seems a silly question, but you may take up to 70%.

If your book is accepted by a reviewer, it will be assigned an exclusive book number and will become part of the colossal number of books that Amazon sells worldwide.

It will be downloadable anywhere in the world; Amazon will process the payment and keep the money in your account. You will also be able to download a snippet of code to promote your book on your own website.

The alternative is ClickBank. ClickBank will also arrange for your book will get showcased to over 100,000 affiliates who might be willing to help you sell your book for a percentage of the profits.

Look very cautiously at CB’s small print on paying out. I have sold things on CB and never received a bean from them, because of the small print. I do not bother with them any more.

Amazon is the way to go. In 2010 they sold more ebooks than paper books for the first time ever. They also have a motive to be pushing ebooks – the Kindle, which is their own ebook reader.

A traditional publisher would pay the author 5-6% of the profits on a book with Kindle it is 70% of the sales price – that is a big difference for the author.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a range of subjects, but is now concerned with electronic book devices. If you want to know more, please go to our website at Kindle vs Book

Outsourcing Your Ebook For Increased Revenue

Sunday, December 18th, 2011

Ebooks are likened to ordinary paper books, but in fact they are a lot more flexible than paper books. For instance, you could write an ebook to publicize an event say, the opening of a shop, the launch of a new gizmo or even the publication of a new book, within a couple of hours or a day and get it out working for you; whereas if you wanted to print flyers, a pamphlet or a brochure, it would take quite some time and money to do the same type of thing.

That is on the marketing front; if you just want to write a novel and publish it as an ebook, your book can be on sale within a day or two of having finished composing it. In the paper publishing world, it can take six to a dozen months or even years to get a book into the stores.

Although there is still more status to having a book accepted by a traditional publisher, there is actually more reward per ebook sold than per paper book and Amazon reports a number of authors having sold more than a million units of their ebook through Amazon. This difference in revenue is surprising. look at the numbers, assuming sales of one million units:

Traditional Publisher: book price: $20; writer’s cut: 6%; sales: 1,000,000 = 20 x 0.06 x 1,000,000 = $1,200,000

Amazon eBook: book price: $10; writer’s cut: 70%; sales: 1,000,000 = 10 x 0.7 x 1,000,000 = $7,000,000

Notice the difference in price. It is probable that you will sell more ebooks at $10 than books at $20, so the profits are likely to be even higher. It shows that there is a huge new potential earnings stream for aspiring author/publishers.

However, take into account this. If your ebook is a novel set in, say, Thailand, you could insert a travel link for Thailand in the bottom margin of every page and that link would contain your affiliate link, so that you got paid a referral bonus every time someone clicked it or used it to buy a vacation or flight. The advertisement does not have to get intrusive and certainly not maddening.

What if you had a hundred ebooks out there at $5-10 each and a couple of novels or books of short stories with adverts in them? That could be an income or a retirement pot or simply a bonus to what you usually earn.

And what if you wanted to get it begun quickly? You could outsource the writing of the ebook, yet buy the rights to it so that you could put out it under your own name.

If you choose to go down this path, ask the author to also compose a press release of 200-300 words and a sales letter-cum-summary of the book in 500 words to help you sell and promote the publication.

You could compose these things yourself, but there is a huge difference between professional sales copy and what most individuals turn out and it makes all the difference to sales figures.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a range of topics, but is now concerned with handheld book readers. If you want to know more, please go to our web site at Kindle vs Book

Choosing A Good Subject For An Ebook

Sunday, December 18th, 2011

There can be many factors why you would would like to write an ebook, but the two most usual are to promote something and to publish a novel. This piece will concentrate on how to use an ebook for promoting, because even the writer of ebook novels has to promote them because they do not have a publisher.

When you are considering using Internet promoting techniques, three of the best are all related. You may write an article for a newsletter or blog (maybe as a guest writer); you can compose articles on subjects related to what you want to promote and hope that owners of newsletters and blogs copy your piece into their publication or you could compose an ebook on the subject.

Whichever course of action you choose, you will be hoping that the reader of your piece, clicks through to your web site and buys what you are advertising. They will be able to do this, because you have left a hyperlink to your web site at the end of your article or book.

Which of these methods is the best may depend on your skill as a author, on your abilities as a promoter or on the technique that best suits the product that you are trying to promote. Time can also become a factor. It will naturally take longer to write a book than an piece.

So, is there anything to be gained from writing an ebook instead of an article? That depends on quality and your ability to send the piece or book viral.

What does viral mean? it simply means that the writing is so good, practical or funny that people will want to pass it on to their friends.

You can see why this is called viral advertising: your twenty friends forward the piece to their twenty friends et cetera, et cetera. It could get read by millions in a week. If it is decent enough. An piece of less quality might be read by thousands over the same period in low-circulation newsletters.

So, let us aim for the top. How do you decide on a subject for an ebook? Well, does it have to relate to something that you are already selling or planning to sell? Is the ebook itself the product or is it a advertising tool? In viral promotion, the ebook ought to really be a free signpost to your web site.

So, in order to find a subject, look in places like Yahoo Answers. See what surfers are having problems with. Mosquitoes in the summer; presents for the loved one at Christmas and St. Valentine’s Day, etc. etc.. Then open Google’s search page (open an account if you do not have one) and turn on predictive text.

Now type the phrases that you lifted from Yahoo Answers slowly and see what comes up. These are the most popular search phrases for that subject to have been used recently. Note a couple of of them down and type them back into Google or whichever search engine you like.

How many other websites are using that key phrase? 500 million? Well, at least you know that individuals are interested in it, but there is tons of competition. Find a key phrase that you are happy with, write your ebook using that title and then you ‘merely’ have to promote it, but at least you know that the public would like it and you know the strength of competition.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a range of topics, but is now concerned with electronic book devices. If you want to know more, please go to our website at Kindle vs Book

Authoring An Ebook

Sunday, December 18th, 2011

We all have skills, whether they be occupational skills like construction or welding; or managerial skills like working in or running an office; or sales or public relations skills like working in a shop or the front desk of an office. There are also other skills or experiences like parenting or having studied how to cope with a serious illness, whether it is your own or someone else’s.

Everyone has experiences that are either collective or unique. Like growing up – if you look, you can find both general common experiences and also (quite) unique individual life experiences. The trick is unravelling all of these experiences and working out what individuals would be interested in reading (or paying to read).

So, if you would like to publish a book or, to a lesser degree, a short story, you have to attempt to determine what interests individuals. There are at least two approaches at this stage. You could:

1] just write on what you are interested in and hope for the best or

2] do some investigation to find out which is the topic that you know most about that will have the best chance of selling to a (fairly) wide public

It appears that most individuals who compose short articles adopt the first approach, but successful writers of larger works tend to adopt the latter. This is of course because of the amount of time that it takes to compose a book likened with an article.

Nevertheless, many people in both the book and short story markets are probably doomed to failure because they have chosen the wrong approach. For instance, spend weeks researching a book that may take you a year to write, but why spend the same amount of time researching an piece that will just take you an hour to write?

You can go too far and not far enough in your study and if common sense does not counsel you, then you will have to wait for experience to let know you instead.

Once you have selected your subject and written your ebook (or had it ghost written for you – do not forget that alternative), you have to think about marketing it – bringing it to the public. This used to be the most difficult part, but now you can sell it through quite a few online bookstores including Amazon.

These firms will advertise your book, deliver it to your customers, collect the money and pay you out after they have taken their cut of about 30%. There has never been a less risky or / and easier way for a writer to get going than now and if you want to sell hard copies like paperbacks or hardbacks, Amazon, through their associates, can take charge of that as well.

This is a wonderful time for non-established writers. When you have done your research and written your book, it costs nothing to get it out there on immediate download in front of billions of potential customers!

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a variety of topics, but is now involved with Kindle screen size. If you would like to know more, please go to our web site at Kindle vs Book

How To Use Forex Trading Ebooks

Saturday, December 17th, 2011

If you would like to learn a new skill, you will have to do a lot of research on that topic. This is even more the case of hobbies that could earn or lose you loads of money. The places that most individuals go to to try to eaern a bit of extra money are the stock exchange and the foreign currency exchange (or Forex). Of these two, the foreign currency exchange is the more dangerous.

The Forex is the largest market in the world and individuals, banks, institutions and governments in each country deal on it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The waters are very deep and the sharks are incredibly big and they are always in a feeding frenzy.

So, before speculating with your hard-earned cash, you have to do a huge amount of work. However, help abounds both on and off line. There are thousands of expensive books in the bookstores suggesting trading strategies and techniques for making money by predicting currency movements.

There are also many ebooks and free on line trading simulation accounts. This is a cheaper option to purchasing paper trading training books, which always appear to be dearer when they are on money than other hobbies. Ebooks are frequently a third of the cost and the free on line simulation accounts are priceless.

The first thing to do is open a Forex Trading Account. This is not always as easy as it might seem. You will probably have to be a notary public to verify your identity, which is to counter money laundering, although just how it does that I do not know.

Then you may be required to put some money in your account. These were the stipulations I came across while joining a Swiss Forex broker earlier this year. Shop around, you might be more fortunate.

Then, download a few free ebooks on Forex trading for novices soak up the fundamentals with reference to the trading simulation feature of your live account. Do not gamble with real money at this stage. Once you are comfortable with the operation of your account and you understand the trading terminology, move on to the next phase.

Get some more ebooks which focus on trading strategies and test some out. This could take months and that is not a bad thing, at least it has not cost you anything yet. Once you feel competent at this stage, you may need to buy some ebooks of the highest quality or on specific trading techniques and strategies that interest you.

Now you are ready to go live, but take it slowly. Have you been successful on the simulation trading platform? If so, strive to use the same strategies with real money. Keep your stakes low until you feel confident and set yourself a maximum loss – an amount that you can afford and if you lose that, go back to studying.

You can earn money on Forex but it takes a lot of research and lots of time. Never allow yourself to be rushed into taking a snap purchase – there are hundreds of trading opportunities every day. Keep reading ebooks on Forex trading to improve your skill.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a variety of topics, but is now concerned with kindle reader format. If you want to know more, please go to our website at Kindle vs Book

Hand Held eBook Reading Units

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Everyone knows about the problem of the production of greenhouse gases and the destruction of the rain forests. We all know of the stress that over-population puts on the environment and we all know that we are attempting to do our bit by recycling. The differences of outlook usually come down to extent. In short, we all know that it is happening, but we do not all agree how serious it has become yet.

Fair enough, in my opinion. I distrust anyone who calls himself an expert. That is a description that ought to be used to describe you, no one that you use to portray yourself. Like the individuals who call themselves entrepreneurs rather than business people because it sounds grander.

Anyway, I digress. One of the things that readers can do is not purchase books, newspapers and magazines. This would alleviate the strain on trees and permit the recycled material that we presently use for books, newspapers and magazines to be used on crucial school books. It may even make them a bit cheaper.

Obviously, publishers of paperback books, newspapers and magazines are not going to be happy with that suggestion and neither are individuals who work in the industry or readers who like to hold their reading material in their hands. Nevertheless, it appears inevitable that it will come to pass one day.

Indeed, numerous moves have already been taken in that direction. There are dozens of handheld ebook reading devices on the market, the most well-known of which is almost certainly the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle comes in two sizes: the normal 6″ model for reading ‘regular’ books and the 9.7″ item for reading technical books, newspapers and magazines. Needless to say, the larger model will also display normal books.

The Kindle and lots of the other similar handheld ebook reading devices will permit the owner to link to an online book store, library or repository and download books, newspapers and magazines for a fee. Having said that, there are hundreds of thousands of books that are out of copyright, which can be downloaded free of charge from Amazon, Google and the Glutenberg Project.

Lots of these handheld ebook reading devices will hold 3,500 books! That is a lot of paper, whichever manner you look at it. 3,500 books at your finger tips and in your pocket with millions more where they came from and lots more being added to the libraries each day. All downloadable from anywhere where the Internet is available anywhere in the world in a minute or two.

This means that avid readers or researchers never need wait for the bookshop to open again or have to go into town to look for a bookshop or library. How many trees and gallons of petrol can that save you in your life?

It is already widely predicted that universities will be selling course books to their students on such devices within five years and that high schools and colleges will follow suit within ten years. These handheld ebook reading devices are probably not suitable for infants because they are not robust, but private readers are taking them up in a hurry.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a variety of topics, but is now involved with Kindle screen size. If you would like to know more, please go to our web site at Kindle vs Book

Pointers For Outsourcing Ebooks

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Ebooks are starting to come of age. It is now becoming a more viable option to sell your ideas or niche book on line than it is to sell it through a traditional publisher. There are on line publishers like Amazon that will upload your ebook, help you market it, deliver it to your customers, track sales, take the money and pay you the balance.

You can to set your own price for the book and you will receive about 70% of the total revenue. Dedicated ebook readers are making the ebook even more accessible. For example, say that you are travelling and you finish your book, you might find it a problem to buy another book to read for a time, particularly if you are abroad.

Not so with modern ebook readers. You only go online with their built-in WIFI capability and download a different one. Or you could download a dozen so that you do not run the risk of being without. Ebooks are cheaper than traditional paper books and more readily accessible. Lots of readers will also hold over 3,000 books.

So, this is a way to go for publishing a book, but what if you cannot write well enough? What if you have immense concepts for books – fact or fiction – but you only cannot write them down? There could be several reasons for this. Perhaps writing in not your specialty; maybe English (the biggest market for books) is not your mother tongue; or perhaps you just do not have the time.

So why not outsource them? Many books supposedly written by famous sports personalities were in fact outsourced or written by ghost writers. That is nothing new and no cause of shame. It is only horses for courses.

This actually is a business in a box. Let us look at some scenarios. If you think that the current fad for stories on macabre topics will continue, why not think up a few scenarios and pay for five short stories that you can compile into one ebook? Or look on line, find out what individuals are having problems with and pay for ebooks to solve those issues.

You could have ten books for sale on Amazon within a month offering revenue for years.

So how do you go about it? Well, first of all, someone has to have the concepts and that has to be you or your family or friends. Then you have to outline those ideas for the writer to be able to follow. Then you have to state how long the writer has to complete the project; how many words it should contain and what standard of English you expect.

Then Google ”ghost writers desired’ or something comparable. There are numerous sites acting as go-betweens and lots of solo writers as well. Give them the specifications and carefully decide on your writer.

Make sure that all intellectual copyrights are signed over to you on payment and then go over to Amazon, open a publishers account and follow the directions. You can be publishing within 20 minutes and earning within a couple of days. It is really a business in a box.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a range of topics, but is now involved with Kindle screen size. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Kindle vs Book

Pointers For Publishing Your Ideas

Sunday, December 11th, 2011

Ebooks or electronic books are getting more and more well-liked in comparison with normal paper books every month. In 2010, Amazon sold more ebooks than traditional books for the first time ever. It is likely that this tendency will continue, because ebooks are much cheaper than printed books. Not only that but it is easier to download a book in moments than go to a book stare.

Traditionally, ie since the Internet started, individuals read ebooks on their desktop or laptop computer. In ‘those days’, most ebooks were promotional items, providing just limited information as a tempter to go to the author’s web site in order to increase sales. In other words, most ebooks were merely adverts to hook a potential client.

That situation still goes on, but increasingly, ebooks are stand-alone items of value without any promoting or any links back to a website, because they are complete things in themselves – like any regular book you would buy in a shop. But they are cheaper and more readily available.

A different very attractive aspect of ebooks for authors is that it is easier to be up and running – selling your books. If you have ever tried to get a book published, you will know that it can be – and usually is – a very long, drawn-out process involving long spells of waiting and nail-biting.

For instance, it is rumoured that it took the writer the book ‘Virgin Soldiers’ 21 years to find a publisher, yet it became a successful film too. The same, to a lesser extent is the case of the Harry Potter books.

If books of that calibre had concerns, what opportunity do you think that you have? I have read that approximately one manuscript in ten thousand appears on the book shelves. Would odds like that encourage new writers? No. So how many good authors are falling by the wayside? Quite a few, so it would seem.

Another bonus for online ebook publishing is the fact that writers on small niche subjects, have the opportunity to spread their expertise and make some money as well. The fact is that publishing a book in the conventional manner is so expensive that the subject of the book has to be very well-liked or the book will be too expensive to sell.

This is not an issue for ebooks. If you are interested in, say, German teddy bears from 1950-1955, you can publish your book as an ebook whenever you like for the same price as a high interest issue like, say, the Death of Princess Diana – almost at zero cost.

This situation will only improve as more and more firms bring out low-cost ebook readers and more and more firms are prepared to host, market and sell your ebook for a commission.

For example, Amazon will handle the sales and distribution of your ebook for 30% of the cost of your book, which you can set yourself. This empowers authors who would never have got their books to market in any other way.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a range of topics, but is now involved with Kindle screen size. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Kindle vs Book

When Fear Is A Part Of Life At School

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

Do you have happy memories of your school years? Do you have happy memories of teachers and school friends? If you do then you were lucky, because some children hate each minute of being in school and not because they are no good at it either. Frequently it is the clever kids who are taunted for being swots and teachers’ pets. They are safe in the class, but the travelling to and from school and the school breaks can become nightmares.

However, it is not only bullying from other children that causes fear in school children. There are other reasons for fear in school as well. Occasionally, children think that a certain teacher does not like them and sometimes children are just frightened of failing or doing badly. Occasionally teachers are frightened of doing badly as well. It can all lead to an atmosphere of fear at school. It makes you ask yourself how anyone could have enjoyed their school days, does it not?

This atmosphere of fear can be greater in state schools because the teachers are subject to success charts and the children are more open to bullying. Furthermore, all of the school shootings in the world have taken place in state run schools.

However, the most subtle form of fear in school comes from teachers who are scared of missing the targets set by the state, because that will cost them their jobs. This fear is passed on to their pupils. The regime of fear is exacerbated by over-sized groups. Why?

Because teachers can hold the attention of only so many pupils – as we all can in regular discourse. Therefore, if the class is too big, the teacher will have to switch roles from being a teacher to a controller. When this happens, education suffers for the sake of keeping order.

For all of these reasons and more, many parents are turning to home schooling. Some of the reasons why parents are deciding to instruct their children themselves are: distrust of the state education system; fear of bullying or worse of their children; a desire to educate their children in a more traditional or religious fashion.

There are education packages that parent-teachers can purchase to give them guidelines on what to teach. There is also a lot of help accessible on the Internet. The difficulty facing any parents who wish to educate their own children is providing an all round education.

All people have a natural tendency to specialize in one topic or group of topics like, say, astronomy or the sciences, which is why schools provide numerous teachers, so that each one can teach his or her favourite subject. However, if you are the only teacher you will have to teach all the subjects yourself.

This is why it is best to have a program or set of guidelines to follow. It is difficult to teach maths if you have no aptitude for it, so look at your strengths but also your weaknesses before you take the momentous decision to withdraw your children from school and teach them themselves

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on numerous topics but is currently involved with Fear At School and Home Schooling. If you would like to read more, please go over to our website entitled Home Schooling.