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  Price of Amazon’s Top 100 Bestsellers. For the past couple of years, every now and then, I have checked the price of the top 100 selling ebooks on Amazon. Originally the top 100 included free ebooks, which quickly came to dominate the top 100, but about a year ago Amazon split the free ebooks into a separate top 100. Then the top 100 was dominated by very cheap ebooks priced from 99c to $2.99. But over 2012, more ebooks in mid-range prices of $3.99 to $4.99 began to appear on the list. But that trend seems to be reversing. I checked the top 100 today and found: 35 ebooks priced at $2.99 or less, including 14 at 99c. The last time I had checked in September only six ebooks were priced at 99c, there were seven at that price in August and three in June. This is down from a massive 34 at 99c in February 2011. Eleven ebooks were priced at $1.99, which I noted in September “had resurfaced as a frequent price in the best seller list, with eight ebooks at that pric...

  ipads and the Writer Last week I saw a post for a free writing course called Creative Writing, Learning from the Masters. The six featured writers included Norman Mailer. I quickly went to have a look at it on Apple’s itunes U. I successfully download the ibook of the course onto my computer but could not open it as I did not have an iphone or ipad. Rotten Apple. But then I thought, maybe I could buy an ipad. Apart from allowing me to get advice on how to write from Norman Mailer, buying an ipad would allow me to download from the ibookstore. And if I downloaded a wordprocessing app, I could use the ipad to write with when my laptop got sick. I went online and found that ipads ranged in price from a mini-ipad at just under $400 to fourth-generation ipads at just under $800. My eyesight’s not too great, so I wanted the biggest screen possible, which cut out the mini version. The cheapest full sized fourth-generation version was $500. That version only had wi-fi,...

My last couple of posts were about my writing aspirations for this year and movies I planned to see because I had read the books. So here’s an update on how my writing and movie viewing is progressing. Writing After writing 50,264 words for National Novel Writing Month last November, I have decided to keep monthly records of the number of new words I write for my novel in the hope it might motivate me. In December I wrote 11,459 words or 376 words per day. So far in January I have only added 3716 words to the novel. I have some good news about the Divine website: the editor tells me it will continue this year, but at a reduced capacity. Only three articles will go up per week, instead of five. So it might be harder to get an article posted. I pitched an idea for a new article to the editor on Friday. I have been fooling around with Google+. So far it is has not done anything to piss me off, unlike Facebook. My writing friends on it seem to be less active, perhap...

My Writing Year in Review. Okay, I am into stats, so here’s a few writing numbers for 2012. ·          Last year I wrote, at least according to my daily word counts, 117,649 words, which is an average of 321 words a day. ·          I wrote on every day of the year, so my output on many days was very little. ·          I wrote and submitted ten articles to the DiVine website of which nine were posted on the site. ·          I blogged at least once a week. ·          The novel I am writing grew to 166,000 words. ·          I critiqued/edited a non-fiction book and critiqued a couple of short stories. Not that impressive. My Writing Aspirations for 2013. This year is going to be one of primarily editing/rewriting.   ...