How to set up a Kindle, setting up Netflix and TV.

Courtbean's Kindle










How to set up your Kindle


When you come home with your Kindle new in the box, you must first charge it and power it up. According to Amazon, it takes 4-6 hours. While charging, an amber light will appear, when charge is complete, a green light will appear.


Charging and Powering Up your Kindle.:

Before going on to anything else, you must first register your Kindle. This is necessary so that Amazon’s content is available to the reader. Then in order to shop for content, (or at least purchase it,) you have to set up an Amazon account, and this will take a couple of minutes. Make sure your e-mail address is accurate.

These links load fairly quickly.

Here are the controls of a Kindle: (There are higher-end models with enhanced features.)

Buying and downloading content for your Kindle. (Video.)

Using your Kindle Fire. (Video.)

Browsing with the Kindle DX wireless. (Salon.)

How to set up your Kindle to watch Netflix and TV. (Askville.)

Download Netflix App. (Android. Free download.)

Good luck with your new Kindle and enjoy your reading experience.


Photo Credit:
‘Courtbean’s Kindle.’ Wikipedia Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 Courtney Boyd Meyers

The Law of Rapidly Diminishing Returns: Social Media

(Morguefile photo.)




In social media, at some point the Law of Rapidly Diminishing Returns comes into play.

You make a bunch of friends and get a bunch of followers. You post a few links. No one knows who you are, and they’re curious about what you have. Some will click on the link and have a look. Maybe you sell a few books or widgets, or whatever.

So you click on a few more people, and get a few more friends and followers, and you keep on posting, keep on tweeting, and maybe a few more books or grapple-grommets go out the door.

Now you are convinced this is a good thing, and so you keep on doing it. We must be aware that these are not really personal relationships. That’s not to say that we can’t make some new relationships with people. But it just isn’t that easy, and in fact, plenty of other people are doing the same thing for the same reasons. A spammer will always follow you back, incidentally.

Does it work?

If you post and tweet like crazy, at some point people tune you out. They ignore you. And so you try to build up your list of followers, which takes time.

When you are following a couple of thousand people on Twitter, just try to read all the posts. Try to read a posted link, perhaps some blindingly brilliant article on social media, and then when you go to re-tweet it, you’ve forgotten where it came from. The post has disappeared at the bottom of the page or column. You can’t remember their name.

Now imagine you are someone with a few thousand followers of their own, and they might be trying to read and or re-tweet your posts.

What did I learn today?

I learned today that Twitter hash-tags mean nothing on LinkedIn, where the majority of users do not use Twitter. If you tweet something and cross-post to LinkedIn, people there can re-tweet, but they can’t share it or comment on it in LinkedIn. They hang out on LinkedIn for a very special reason: they don’t like Facebook and Twitter so much…too much spam.

The solution there is to post directly to LinkedIn, right? Unfortunately this easy answer might not work for you. I got a notification that I would no longer be able to cross-post from Twitter to LinkedIn. I wondered if this was a new policy, but the more likely scenario is that someone reported me for spamming, and I have been cut off.

I have a guy who used LinkedIn to send me a message every day for months to my e-mail account inbox. I let it go on for months. Then I went into LinkedIn, and made sure it would not happen again. Maybe he believes that e-mail campaigns work, and some say that they do.

Those who make it work are not in the inbox every stinking day, talking about the same stinking book, every single stinking time.

I’ve always been leery of e-mail campaigns, as I’m not convinced that the small number of sales that you might get will outweigh the badwill (the opposite of goodwill) that you are far more likely to get. Just to clarify, I don’t hate the guy. But my inbox is full enough at the best of times, and at the worst of times I have spent three hours out of a busy day just going through my e-mails. All those Twitter follower notifications, and all those LinkedIn group conversation notifications…I’m spending far too much time checking and deleting crap that I don’t have time for.

On Facebook, you can be friends with someone, and yet how do you know whether or not they have blocked your posts? They haven’t un-friended you. You can comment on one of their posts.

“Oh, yeah,” they say. “I remember that guy.” Then they click like on your comment and you are none the wiser—you just had an ‘interaction’ with them so you don’t know any different.

As an experiment, I am strongly tempted not to post a product link for a solid month, just to see what happens.

Now, a person I was reading earlier says that the less they post, the more they sell. I’m not sure that will be true in my case. They may have books much higher up the rankings than mine are.

They might be figuring prominently in Amazon’s ‘also bought’ and ‘also viewed’ customer presentations. As long as they are selling a lot of books, they will continue to be presented.

Another worthwhile experiment might be to only post my own blog, and to only re-tweet interesting posts, or to actually engage in actual conversations, which is theoretically what Twitter is for. I don’t see too many people who do that, with a few exceptions. The ‘chats’ on Twitter are interactive. I’m a little shy about jumping in there when I don’t know anybody, when I haven’t read the book, et cetera, but it’s better than being blocked or ignored.

It took me a very short time to realize that people re-tweet you because they want you to re-tweet them. This is not possible if you can’t remember the exact configuration of their handle, and if you simply can’t find them again—that’s why the notifications in your inbox are so ‘useful.’

The Law of Rapidly Diminishing Returns applies elsewhere.

The law of rapidly diminishing returns also applies as a site grows. This seems to be true of Smashwords. When I signed up and published my first two e-books, there were only 12,000 authors on there. And I did see a limited number of daily page views for my books. Now there are probably over 44,000 authors on there. And I don’t seem to be getting any page views at all for some books, which maybe haven’t sold a copy in a while, and the sheer number of other books has drowned them out.

My gut instinct tells me that this law of rapidly diminishing returns works in some form or another in any social situation, whether it’s online or for real. People ignore Coke commercials. They ignore any commercial that isn’t relevant to their exact needs at that exact time. In fact, people buy devices that drop commercials when they record something to watch later.

Subliminally, maybe such advertising has an effect, but it’s costly and takes a very long time to have any effect. Even that is subject to, ‘The Law of Rapidly Diminishing Returns.’

Anything else is just a con-job. To a certain extent, we are conning ourselves, and when we’re doing all the talking, it’s easy to convince ourselves. Even that is only going to work for so long.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and this article sort of helped as well.

Hints and Tips
 
Now, if you want the re-tweet, the ‘RT’ as we say, make your posts a little shorter. That’s because I want to put it like this:

RT @JoeSomebody999 and then your post, and it all has to fit in 140 characters. That way Joe knows I RTed him and maybe he will reciprocate.

Do good covers sell bad books?

Do good covers sell bad books? I don’t know, but the book with what I consider to be the best cover seems to sell the fewest books. My best seller has a good cover, but another best seller has a ‘bad’ one. What this should tell us is that the product description, the subject matter, and above all, the genre has a lot to do with it.

Maybe a reader's preference cannot be 'gamed.'

People have loved mystery since its inception about 150 years ago. The Red Baron is a popular character, from WW I history buffs to people who liked Snoopy. What the heck is a weird western? This might be a very tight little sub-genre, with a good number of very loyal readers, but first I have to crack the door open, and there is no guarantee that it is a good book by the standards of those who actually read the genre.

Comments are always welcome.

The Writer's Rules of Engagement.

(Morguefile) The author is a big fan of Luc Besson, and films like 'The Professional,' (hence the milk,) and 'The Fifth Element.'


Here are the rules of engagement for writers.

Money flows towards the author, not away from them. Otherwise, it's just vanity publishing. While the industry is in a state of flux, and the situation is such that major publishers have fewer and fewer production slots for new and unproven writers, to blow big chunks of cash in the hope of beating the odds is a kind of vanity publishing. And in my opinion, Amazon is the king of vanity publishing.

How many times have I heard it?

“Get yourself a good editor.” A good editor might cost you $2.00 a page, or it might cost you $35.00 an hour. Either way, it adds up pretty quick and this cost will have to be recouped by sales of your book. The more books you write, the more your costs go up. People are writing 40,000-word young adult books in three days, and then they spend a lot of money trying to make this work.

Amazon and other service providers want you to do this of course, because they have no gate-keeping system in place to ensure quality. Much has been written about ‘spam’ books put together by copyright-free, license-free content skimmers. What I would suggest here is ‘buyer beware.’ I would also say, ‘author beware,’ because people who figure out that they got ripped off will remember your name.

“Pay for a proofreader.” If you use spell-check and grammar check, they will not catch all errors. However, they will catch 99 % of them, which is close to industry standard, and you can pick off the rest by carefully reading and re-reading your manuscript four or five times. Learn to write clean copy the first time around, and you will save yourself a lot of money. Also, the average self-published author sells less than $500.00 worth of books. Don’t load up your book with a lot of overhead before you even start.

“Pay for formatting.” Use the Smashwords Style Guide, read the Amazon formatting FAQs, or grab a free copy of a book by a professional author during a promotion and learn this simple and valuable skill on your own and for yourself. At some point, you will be good enough that you can begin offering a service to other authors, and this might be a valuable revenue stream. If nothing else, you will save a lot of money over the course of time. Right now, I have ten or eleven books in the Smashwords Premium Catalogue, and I formatted them all myself. If each one cost $50.00, I saved $550.00. This cost does not have to be bought and paid for out of book sales. It makes it easier to make a profit. I also have four PODs on CreateSpace, and these files are also used to upload books to Lulu.com. There may be other free service providers out there, and most likely there will be more coming along very soon. So I saved another few hundred there, and with more PODs in the works, more savings will ensue. Any good businessman will tell you that a dollar saved is a dollar earned in profit. Ben Franklin said it too.

“Pay for a professional marketing image.” This is a tough one to argue against, but here goes anyway. You can download copyright-free, license-free images from websites like Morguefile. You can learn to use Photoshop, or Paint.NET, or Nero Photosnap, and come up with marketing images that rival professional images. Work on it for an hour a day for a few days. Don’t settle for the first one you come up with. I often go through ten or twelve images before publishing. If I come up with a better one, I upgrade my image. My first covers were admittedly crap. Now look at them, for example this one for 'On the Nature of the Gods.' Not only that, they can have the stamp of individuality that is lacking in many of these images. Without getting too heavy here, your individuality is your brand, and quite frankly, there are a lot of clone covers out there. Until July 27/12, you can use coupon code WM65R and get 25 % off the cover price on all e-book formats from Smashwords for 'On the Nature of the Gods.'

My only costs to date are internet service, and I have the cheapest service I can get. I pay about $30.00 a month, and with a little Hollywood accounting, it goes under my personal expenses as entertainment. That’s because I don’t have a TV set, and I spend a lot of time on the internet. It is my only real form of entertainment, and since I love my job, that’s okay.

Another cost is in ordering proofs from Createspace. I only order one proof. If I need changes, I use the digital proofer, but I have the book in my hand to prove to my own satisfaction that there is nothing else in the book that needs changing. As an example, I read ‘Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery,’ and there were exactly three small changes, none of which were formatting. They were typos. This meets or exceeds industry standards, and it also meets or exceeds the standards met by all those other authors who paid a lot of money for services the experts are telling you are essential. Case closed.

Do not pay for promotion, or blog hops, or whatever. Swap blog posts with friends for free if you must. No one has proven to my satisfaction that they actually work, or justify their cost in any way, shape or form. Do not pay for Twitter followers. Walk away from anyone charging fees to use their service platform. There are a lot of them, and lots of people will tell you they work. But if someone is actually selling a few books, they may be erroneously convinced that a certain technique or strategy worked when really it didn’t. Figuring out exactly what sold a book is almost impossible. See this article for more.

Do anti-aging creams actually work? Women spend billions annually on cosmetics. What an anti-aging cream actually does is to temporarily moisturize the skin. The wrinkles look smaller. You are exactly the same age as you were before you put it on. This is vanity, and the same holds true for all of the vanity publishing enterprises out there. I’ll say it again. “Buyer beware.”

My total cost to produce all of my titles, except for the internet, is about $50.00. My business is profitable, and sales are slowly creeping up. This is the only true test. If, like so many authors, you are holding down a day job and have $100,000 a year in household income, you are not a professional writer. You are easy meat for the vanity sellers because you think that throwing money at it is the best way to save time and solve problems. It is the easy road to success in the minds of the uninformed.

At one time, persistence was the key to some small success in this field. That’s not good enough anymore. Now you’re going to need some endurance, and an ability to look ahead and think clearly. You need to learn how to play the long game. You’ll need a thick skin and be able to let the bullshit roll off you like water from a duck’s back.

Just as a Dodge Ram 1500 is one of the world’s safest and most effective penis-enlargers, for some, writing books is all about ego, and vanity. They cannot accept that it takes a very long time to train a good writer. It’s learn on the job. You have to take a lot of pain. Most people really aren’t suited to it, and that’s tough love, but it is the truth, ladies and gentlemen.

It takes many years to become an overnight success. It requires patience, ability, and a lot of hard work.

You heard it here first.

Comments are always welcome.

Altered Perceptions.

(Morguefile.)



When I got my new glasses, they were mostly for driving at night, in the rain, when it’s overcast, misty or foggy. When there are no amber lines, on a paved outlying road, where the streetlights are only at intersections and might be miles apart, the average reader will agree that it’s sometimes kind of hard to see.

I also wanted the right type of glasses for riding a bicycle. They keep bugs and rain and dust and gravel out of your eyes when cycling. They are useful for cycling at night, when all of the conditions in the first paragraph still apply.

Trying to walk in my new glasses was very strange. That was because it felt like the ground was up around about my belly button, and my legs are or at least were designed to reach the ground from about ass-level.

The glasses brought everything a lot closer to me. It took a while, but I walk and wear glasses at the same time just fine now. I had to learn a new skill: filtering. Or skewing, or ‘optimizing’ or whatever.

What had really changed was the perception. My visual perceptions were being filtered by clear lenses made of plastic. And it changed my whole physical world, for all perceptions are interpreted, and certain conclusions are drawn from them by the central processing unit, i.e. my brain.

What is interesting is how easily fooled we are as to what might be termed ‘spatial awareness.’ This was brought home the other day when I was riding my bike down the street and I took my glasses off while riding with no hands. I used a corner of my shirt to rub some dirt off the glasses.

Holy, crap. It was like I was nine feet tall on that bike. It’s quite a frightening moment. I couldn’t believe how effing tall that bike was, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t think I could ride without my glasses now, but I was doing it before just fine.

Incidentally, I took the garbage out the other day, and wasn’t wearing my glasses. Holy, crap. Was that ground ever a long ways away! You wouldn’t want to fall from this height. What was normal a couple of months ago seems very strange now. It seems to me that when we alter our perceptions, the brain works very quickly and efficiently to detect and identify these changes in our environment, and to filter them out, and make everything look ‘all right’ again.

Otherwise it would be very difficult to cope with an ever-changing world. To read a description or report on such a process is one thing, but to experience it is another. Over time, the effect of perceptual distortion is pretty seamless, and of course now I wonder if we’re fooling ourselves on a whole lot of other issues as well!

This is an uncomfortable idea, and possibly even a very dangerous one. I say that because if I rejected the new reality presented by my new glasses, and attempted to consciously contradict and compensate for what is presented in terms of the environment around me, I wouldn’t be able to walk, or drive, or cycle at all.

That’s because things happen too fast, and there is a glut of information that must be processed very rapidly by subconscious means.

In a sense, we take a lot for granted—that our feet will work when asked, and that the ground is indeed located in such and such a place.

When you look at the world around you, and see the number of people trying to skew the flow of information using various means, by adding to it, attempting to shut it down, attempting to discount or augment some message, we really should wonder what sort of effect that it has on our consciousness over an extended period of time.

The other day I was on a website, and reading a couple of posts in some discussion. It was tempting to comment myself, and then I thought: I don’t know anything about this subject, nor have I read ‘Harry Potter,’ and I don’t really care if Tolkien invented elves, trolls and dwarves.

It was such a pettifogging dispute, and how the hell did I come so close to getting sucked in?

If J.K. Rowling ripped off Tolkien’s invention of elves, trolls and dwarves, ah, then good for her. Take your billion dollars and enjoy the hell out of it.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. At that point, I shut down the computer. I got on my bike and went for a ride.

Now this is real.

***

For more on perception, read this Wikipedia article.

Cycling for health and wellness.

(Morguefile)

When I bought my first new bike a few years ago, it was because I wanted to get back in touch with something I lost long ago. I wanted to get in touch with my youth. It must have been a reaction to being forty-something, but youth, the energy of youth, the optimism, the adventurousness of youth, that is a very precious thing.

We lived on our bikes. From a very early age, my buddy and I used to ride out to the airport. We would check the schedule and wait for the twin-engine planes to land, disembark their passengers, and with a roar and a puff of blue smoke, fire up the old Pratt & Whitneys for another take-off. There’s not too many piston-engined airliners around these days.

The first bike I bought as an adult was a Supercycle Inferno, a mountain bike with a nice big frame. The geometry was far different from the highly-stable ten speed racing bike that I grew up on, or the cast-off six-speed commuter bike that I had been riding until a couple of cables broke and the cost of repair got too high. I started off riding around in a tennis court. It took a long time before I was able to ride with no hands.

It had been that long since I rode, but the three compression-fractures at L-3, L-4 and L-6 might have had something to do with being totally out of shape. My lungs were bad, my legs were bad, and everything hurt. I kept at it, and worked my way up a few kilometres at a time. The summer I turned forty-eight, I rode sixty kilometres round trip in about three and three-quarter hours. I hurt for a week afterwards, but I did it.

I wore that bike out in about two and a half years. At that point, I bought a Matterhorn, an all-steel frame Raleigh mountain bike. The machine was stiff, I’ll give you that much, but the frame seemed to be very short-coupled after riding the Supercycle. It was also heavy and too small for me.

By that time, I was much stronger, and so I wore that bike out, a machine which cost about $125.00 Cdn, in a year and a half. At some point the repair shop guy tells you, “Nine bucks for a gear cluster, twenty-five bucks for a chain, eight bucks each for two cables, twenty-three bucks for a tire, forty bucks for a rim…” and the conclusion quickly drawn is that a new cheap bike is actually cheaper and ultimately more satisfying than fixing up an old cheap bike, bearing in mind that it will never be really right again. That’s because old cheap bikes become loose all over, need bearings re-packed, new cables, new brakes, new tires, new seat…et cetera.

So then I bought a Trek 3700. Mine has a two and a half inch oversized frame. At first, it was like I was swimming on that bike. Seriously, after the too-small Raleigh, and even the Supercycle, which was a relaxed-stability revelation at the time, this bike is the first one in my entire life that actually fits me. The bike cost just under $400.00. It took five or six months to pay off my credit card. It was worth it.

This is my fourth summer riding it. It was pretty warm around here in late winter, and while riding in six or eight degree Celsius temperatures can be a character-building experience, it also gave me a chance to train up a little bit for summer. So far today, I have visited my dad in the old age home, (north end,) dropped off some mail, (downtown,) and stopped in at my brother’s place, (south end.) Then I rode home, and at this point I’m up to sixteen or seventeen kilometres for the day.

The only reason I came home was to make a couple of hamburgers, otherwise I would have gone to the beach—which from here might be another fourteen k’s or so. The bike has its limitations. Sometimes, coming home with forty pounds of groceries slung on the handlebars into a stiff breeze is hard work and a tough ride. Heavy rain is a bit of a downer. It’s cheap to operate, and since I never run anywhere, it will have to do. (I don’t run for nothing and nobody.)

I may not really be able to recapture my youth, but this is one good way to make my golden years a little less miserable. Nobody likes getting old, so a little procrastination can be a good thing sometimes.

Sometimes my knees hurt, and my lower back is a little stiff and sore the last couple of days, but some folks just wouldn’t be happy unless they had something to complain about, you know?

Here’s a previous post entitled, ‘Cycling is Therapeutic.’

For more information on the benefits of cycling as therapy, check this out.

(Morguefile)