E-Book Sales Fall After New Amazon Contracts

Three very large publishers signed deals with Amazon gaining the right to set prices themselves. Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, and Simon & Schuster were very pleased with winning this battle, but it’s starting to look as though the readers were a lot less impressed.

For centuries publishers have told readers what they can read, how long they have to wait to get it, and how much they have to pay for it, by their method of choosing which books to publish, when to release them, geoblocking sales zones, and rigidly controlling writers’ contracts.

But just as vast numbers of authors have gone digital and self-published, avoiding the traditional publishers, to the great delight of readers, it is starting to look like readers are avoiding the higher prices these three publishers are setting for their new digital releases. While large numbers of books from these publishers are priced at $13.99 and $14.99, no title priced at more than $9.99 was on the top twenty bestseller lists.

Food for thought.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Writing emails 101

Sending a clear, concise and grammatically correct email seems like a no-brainer yet consistently, mistakes are made. Most of the time, these mistakes are minor and quickly forgotten, but sometimes they can be disastrous.

A well-written email is about presentation and professionalism. You don’t have to be Shakespeare, but a sound grasp of basic spelling and grammar is essential.

1. Incorrect names or titles. While spell checkers and auto-correct are important tools in eliminating spelling and grammatical errors, they can trip you up when it comes to writing names accurately. Ensuring you spell people’s names correctly, use their preferred title, and address them as the correct gender is about basic research.

2. Everyone knows that work isn’t always rainbows and lollipops, but never let the frustration bleed into an email. Take a deep breath, consider the recipient and the content of the email, and write to that point. Remember that long after your anger is gone, the email will live on in someone else’s inbox as a relic of your bad mood.

3. The subject line needs to grab the attention of prospective readers quickly, and convey what your email is about succinctly. Make sure it doesn’t sound like spam.

4. ALWAYS check the addressee and never hit “Reply All” or “Forward” without checking. The internet is full of horror stories about emails sent to the wrong person.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Passive Voice

Many readers lose the plot (quite literally) when the author starts to use passive voice. Passive voice is when things happen to something or someone, instead of people doing things.
“The grass was mown by Fred from next door.”
No!
In active voice it’s much better. “Fred from next door mowed the grass.”
See the difference. Second time around we want to know all about it. Did the person watching enjoy the scent of fresh-mown grass? Was Fred from next door young and handsome? Or was he a senior citizen that had our reporter wondering if she ought to take him a cool drink before he developed heat stroke?

Some writers (and school students) struggle to know whether what they’ve written is active or passive. A simple test is if you can insert “by zombies” after the verb you have passive voice.

In our first example above “was mown” is the verb.
“The grass was mown by zombies” is passive voice.
In our second example “mowed” is the verb.
“Fred from next door mowed by zombies”. Nope that doesn’t work. The sentence is in active voice.

So now you know. If you want to kill off the bad habit of writing in passive voice, be sure to check by adding “by zombies” after your verb.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Intensive purposes

People often use words and phrases in speech and writing that they have heard or misheard. A common one is: “Intensive purposes”. The correct phrase is “for all intents and purposes”. It means “practically speaking.”

Another annoying error is “I could care less”. If you could care less it means you do care. What people mean is “I could NOT care less”. In other words I don’t care at all.

“Decimate”: This means to take ten percent. It’s often used incorrectly to indicate something is almost totally destroyed. Taking ten percent is a lot but it’s nothing like wiping something out completely. If you decimate someone’s army you still have a very big battle ahead of you to get rid of the other 90%.

Travesty: Means mockery. Many people use it incorrectly to mean tragedy.

For twenty-five commonly misused words check out: http://www.trendzified.net/common-words/

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.