BookDaily.com: Is there anyone home?

Around two weeks ago, I stumbled upon what looked like could be a good promotional site for writers, BookDaily,com. Their motto is "Book samples for book lovers". They also proclaim their ability to promote emerging writer's books to readers, so I became interested enough to check them out.

I now have seven e-books published on Amazon, and I can use all the free promotion I can get. BookDaily offers free promotion to authors. All they have to do is sign up as an author, and provide a few details about their books, including an excerpt, and the books will be listed on the site under whatever category or genre you choose. Visitors can then peruse the categories and read the first chapter or excerpt of your book. If they like what they read, BookDaily provides a nice little "Buy it now" link. So you can see why I was interested.

BookDaily looked like a fairly well designed, professional site. As quoted from the BookDaily about us page:

"BookDaily is owned and operated by ArcaMax Publishing, Inc. ArcaMax.com publishes more than 300 of the most popular syndicated features and 700 classic books. This content is sent to 1.5 million subscribers by email -- all free of charge." 

So the parent company has been around awhile, and BookDaily is a spin off of it, being geared towards modern books and emerging authors. Of course there has to be some kind of gimmick, there always is. In order to gain the full benefit of the BookDaily site's promotional prowess (as an emerging author) you have to pay a fee of $49 a month. For this fee, they guarantee to expose your book to 25,000 new readers per month by sending your book details and excerpt by email to readers that have signed up for this by adding books to their book shelf. Further, they go on to say:

"Typically 1000 or more open and read their daily email from us. Your title will also receive featured placement during the month on BookDaily.com and ArcaMax.com, driving additional exposure and readership."

 I get it. It's a professional site and obviously they're a profit oriented business. I don't have a problem with that, though I do feel $49 a month is a bit steep. However, they still do have the free promotion, and it is up to you as an emerging author to go the free route and hope readers will see your book offering (where apparently it is listed at the very end of the list in whatever genre you post it in, not alphabetically but by the date posted) or, you can pay the fee. Paying the fee also gets you a special icon in the top right corner of your listing indicating that you are an 'Emerging Author'.

Seriously, I don't have a problem with any of that. My problem with them is a simple one. For lack of a better word, their community relations suck. They don't have a forum of any sort to discuss problems, and repeated emails sent to them through their 'Contact Us' link have been totally ignored. They don't even send a confirmation email  regarding your message like most, if not all professional sites do.

I admit, I had no intention of signing up for the $49 promotional benefit package. I did however sign up as an author and provided details of one of my books for free promotion. What gets me is that the 'Buy It Now' link is not working. It's such a simple thing to fix, it makes me wonder if you have to pay the $49 fee just to get a working link. It makes me wonder if you have to pay the $49 fee to get an answer to my email concerning the broken link. It makes me wonder if they are as professional as they appeared to be at first glance.

After posting my book, I waited several days to see if the link simply  took a few days to become active. It didn't, so I emailed them through their contact page. As on many 'contact us' pages, there are six subjects you can choose from for your inquiry. The best I can tell, five of them are oriented toward those that have paid the $49 fee. After the first email, I waited a few more days for a response or to see if the link would get fixed, but it didn't. Since then I have sent two more emails, also with no response.

To be fair, there is another link in the book details that lists the book as "Kindle Edition", and that link will take you to Amazon if you want to purchase it. But it's been a week now. They said in their promo that they would provide a Buy It Now link and they haven't. I had thought that maybe in the future, I might consider paying the fee for further promotion when and if I could afford it, but I seriously doubt it now. I also thought I might provide details for a few more books too, but again I'm not so sure I'll bother.

I plan on contacting them every day, for a while at least, to see if I can get a response. As hard as it is to find exposure, I thought BookDaily.com might be a good place to gain a bit of traction, but so far it has been another example of just spinning my wheels...

Updated Thursday afternoon: I'm sure it had absolutely nothing to do with this post, but this afternoon I finally received an email from BookDaily saying they had fixed the broken 'Buy It Now' link. A week to fix a broken link is way to long IMHO, but at least it has been taken care of.

The Night Before The Night Before Christmas

 Here's another cynical little Christmas story...


People said I looked like Old St. Nick Himself. It's not like I could deny it or anything. I was fat and had a long white beard and mustache. All I needed was a red suit trimmed in white fluff and a big wide size fifty-two black belt with a huge silver buckle on it. And a goofy hat of course.

To bad I didn't much care for kids, destructive evil  little terror machines that they were. I could have been Santa any day of the week. Hell, I couldn't even go out shopping during the Christmas season. Every brat in the store would flock around me like I was their best friend  and try to drag me after them to show me exactly what they wanted so I wouldn't screw up.

I would ask them their name and then I would pull a wadded up piece of paper out of my pocket. I would pretend to find their name on the list and tell them they were bad this year and weren't getting anything but coal in their stockings. They would run off crying and tell their mothers that Santa was being mean and she would drag the child back and tell me how ashamed I should be of myself.

My snappy response to her would depend on whether I had already been to Tenny's Tavern, or just getting ready to go there. Needless to say, it was much easier to stay out of the department stores from Thanksgiving till Christmas. It's not like I had to go to Walmart that often anyway, living alone and all. If I did feel like going, it was as much to torture the kid's as anything. At least that's what I told myself.

The Ghost Of All

Here's another old piece, one of my favorites!

The Ghost Of All

     "I'm waiting," said the voice.

     "Who said that?" I asked.

     "Sam Dilbert, 1955-2002," it responded.

     "But that's me!" I exclaimed. "I'm not dead!"

     "I know, that's why I'm waiting!" replied the calm voice...

***

     I was under the knife. Twenty five years of smoking, and drinking two pots of coffee a day has a tendency to clog the plumbing, or so I understand. The old ticker needed a bit of repair in order to function as designed under extended warranty. If I hadn't waited so long it probably would have been a simple enough procedure. But I wasn't one much for heading off to the doctors at every little pain and twitch I felt torturing my well worn body.

     They put the mask on my face and said to count backwards from one hundred. I don't know why they had me start so high, I only made it down to around eighty seven. And now I was dreaming. I didn't know you dreamed when you were put under like that. But that had to be it, why else would I be talking to someone while my chest laid split open like an over ripe tomato?

***

The Good-The Bad-The Santa

This is an old piece for the holiday season. I have one or two others if I can find them.

The Good The Bad The Santa

Little Jimmy didn't believe in Santa. After he found a bunch of gifts in his parents closet last Christmas that turned up under the tree with 'From Santa' written on the tags, why should he. Still, he was a normal kid in every other respect. He loved Christmas, he loved unwrapping presents and getting new blue jeans and toys. This year on Christmas eve, he laid awake until his parents had finished wrapping presents from 'Santa'. He heard them go to bed and he waited for what he felt was a reasonable length of time, like ten minutes, then he sneaked quietly out of his room and headed down the stairs to get a sneak preview of what 'Santa' had brought him...

Just as Jimmy had reached the landing where the stairs turned ninety degrees to continue their decent into the living room, he heard a noise coming from the fireplace so he hid behind the stair railing as best he could.

Fun With Conspiracy Theories

Who doesn't like a good conspiracy theory? OK, let me rephrase that. Who doesn't believe in at least one conspiracy theory? And to qualify that a bit further, I would be very surprised if anyone on the planet doesn't believe in at least one conspiracy theory, even if they don't realize it's a conspiracy theory.

The point of this piece will not be to explore conspiracy theories in depth. Consider it more of a primer to introduce you to a few of the more popular mainstream, and also fringe conspiracies. Needless to say, any comments I give are only my opinion. People will believe what they want, utterly convinced that what they believe is the truth, no matter how unsupported or ridiculous their truth sounds to you or me. Or perhaps their theory is your truth as well, no matter how unsupported or ridiculous it sounds to others.

Google Earth Images

These are just a few of my favorite Google Earth images. It pisses me of when you find pictures of cool stuff on maps and then can't locate them, so I'll paste the co-ordinates to them so you can check them out yourself. Get Google Earth here. Click on the image to enlarge...

Yeah, weird shit in China. Lots of conjecture about these things... looks like landing strips...  40°29'9.60"N  93°28'55.65"E

This Is Big... Really Big

Sky City

China is a big country. They have the largest population, so it only makes sense that they are going to build the biggest skyscraper on the planet. How big? A 220-story behemoth that reaches 2,749 feet into the air. That's quite a tall order, pun intended. Still that's hardly the amazing part. The amazing part is that after preparing the foundation, they plan on completing the building in 90 days. Yes, I said 90 days.

The building will house a hospital, a school, 17 helipads and apartments for 30,000 people. The construction will be by Broad Sustainable Building Corp. and 95% of it will be prefabbed. Sky City will supposedly withstand a 9.0 earth quake. Follow the link below to read more...