Tag Archives: indie

Ask The Alien – 4/12/15

ALIEN JONES:  I really don’t want to do this.

BQB:  Will you just shut up and put on your suit of armor and helmet?

ALIEN JONES:  No.  I hail from the most intelligent species in the universe.  We cured cancer, heart disease, and excessive gastrointestinal distress.  I’m not going to walk around like I’m in a damn Renaissance Faire.

BQB:  Please?  It’ll spike my readership from 3.5 to 10.12.

ALIEN JONES:  Sigh.  Fine.

Sigil of House Jones

Sigil of House Jones

Verily, forsooth and so forth.  It is I, Lord Alien of House Jones.

ALIEN JONES:  Lord Alien of House Jones?  Seriously?

BQB:  Will you?  Please?  OK?  Seriously.

Sigh.  Fine.  Lord Alien of House Jones here, taking your questions in my ongoing effort to raise your planet out of its exceptionally stupid status.

Apologies that my column has been out of commission for a couple of weeks.  Luckily, my memory receptors have not forgotten who asked what.

Kim Magennis of the blog Whimsy had two questions:

1)  Was Nikola Tesla one of yours?

No.  He was just a random Serbian guy who was hijacked by rogue aliens.  He managed to escape and passed off the knowledge he saw on their ship as his own.

Many human inventors have done the same.  That guy that made the Sham-wow?  Totally an alien invention.  You really think a human made cloth can suck up an entire gallon of milk?  Please.

2) Another question for Alien Jones: out of place artifacts (like that hammer in made from an alloy of iron which was found inside a “100 million” year old rock and the 100,000 Years Old Stone Embedded With A Three-Pronged Plug) are they pranks or the real thing?

(Read more) 

Three possibilities:

1)  Some of it is just human junk that got mixed into ancient rocks due to human incompetence.  For example, that plug was just left there by an archaeologist trying to find a place to charge his Kindle Fire.

2)  Some of it is alien junk.  Many aliens are slobs and just chuck their trash wherever they please.

3)  Some of the items were left as pranks.  Young aliens especially have been known to go out on a Friday night, flying around the Cosmos with a bottle of space hooch and a bag of screws, dropping them all over primitive planets, only to laugh about it thousands of years later when scientists print longwinded papers about them.

BQB:  Lord Alien of House Jones!  Behold!  A raven brings a tweet from the land of Twitter!

ALIEN JONES:  Are we really going to do this crap for all of Game of Thrones Season 5?

BQB: Tara Ellis, Author of Bloodline:  Forgotten Origins Trilogy, now available on Amazon, tweeted:

BQB:  March 27 that tweet came in and here you are responding to it on April 10.

ALIEN JONES:  Need I remind you I was hit by a space bus?

BQB:  Oh yeah.  How are you doing?

ALIEN JONES:  I’m fine.  You should see the bus!  :::rimshot:::

BQB:  AJ, Tara’s book is about alien viruses.  Can you elaborate on the subject?

ALIEN JONES:  Why?  Do I look like a dirty virus carrying alien or something?

BQB:  No I just thought…

ALIEN:  Yeah, yeah…you “thought.”  Just because some aliens have viruses we must all have viruses!  That’s some backward thinking man.

This book seems like a fine tale worth a download.  In the opening paragraph, Ellis lets the reader know a) the narrator’s father had something bad happen to him whilst in Egypt and b)  said father wasn’t the type to go down easily, thus a mystery ensues!

Thank you Kim and Tara for your interest in #AskTheAlien.  Lord Alien of House Jones signing off now, taking a break from what will be apparently a long season of dealing with GOT fanboy Bookshelf Q. Battler.

Alien Jones is the Intergalactic Correspondent for the Bookshelf Battle. Do you have a question for the Esteemed Brainy One? Submit it to Bookshelf Q. Battler via a tweet to @bookshelfbattle, leave it in the comment section on this site, or drop it off on the Bookshelf Battle Google + page. If AJ likes your question, he might promote your book, blog, or other project while providing his answer.

Submit your questions by midnight Friday each week for a chance to be featured in his Sunday column. And if you don’t like his response, just let him know and he’ll file it into the recycling bin of his monolithic super computer. No muss, no fuss, no problem.

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The NY Times Article Self-Publishers Are Talking About

Have I gained an interest in self-publishing too late?

After reading this New York Times Article, I’m thinking that I just moved to the Wild West at the tail-end of the period of discovery, after all the gold had been panhandled, all the saloon fights had been fought, and all the stagecoaches robbed.  Well, I never would have robbed a stagecoach anyway, but you get my drift despite my poor analogy:

For romance and mystery novelists who embraced digital technology, loved chatting up their fans and wrote really, really fast, the last few years have been a golden age. Fiction underwent a boom unseen since the postwar era, when seemingly every liberal arts major set his sights on the Great American Novel.

Now, though, the world has more stories than it needs or wants to pay for. In 2010, Amazon had 600,000 e-books in its Kindle store. Today it has more than three million. The number of books on Smashwords, which distributes self-published writers, grew 20 percent last year. The number of free books rose by one-third.

-David Streitfeld, NY Times, Amazon Offers All You Can Eat Publishing, Dec. 27, 2014

My thoughts, as a person new to this world, who has yet to hit the proverbial “PUBLISH” button on any self-publishing platform, but entertains thoughts of doing so one day:

1) 600,000 books in 2010 to 3,000,000 today.  Wow.  Kind of makes me wish I could hop in a time machine and travel back to 2010.

2)  On the other hand, is there anything that can be done about the glut of self-publishing?  I suppose we can’t start saying “You get to self-publish, but sorry, you don’t get to.”  After all, that’s what the Indie Market has always been against, isn’t it?

3) What do authors think about KDP Select?  I’d like to know.  If you’ve had experience with it, feel free to share.

4)  If you have any thoughts at all, feel free to share.

5) 600,000 to 3,000,000.  Sorry, I know I already said it, but I have still yet to pick my jaw up off the floor.

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