Zero Sales Since June 2023

 

Updated cover for U-1215 Smashwords version

Sales for U-1215 has become zero since June of this year. It's strange because I had consistent sales almost every month prior to this.

Quarterly sales of U-1215 from 2016 to 2023

I don't know what happened so I sent off an inquiry to Smashwords. They said that it's probably due to a "long tail distribution." What's that?

A long tail distribution is a type of statistical distribution that seems to explain what probably happened to my book.

A book may do very well at the beginning but over time, will start to slump, meaning sales will start to slow down. There may be many reasons why this happens so I won't try to give examples. Eventually, sales drops to a much lower level than at the start and it may drop down to zero or stay at a low level indefinitely.

If a book is very well written, sales may increase sharply and then plateau after some time. In this case the vertical part of the long tail refers to increase in sales rather than the total sales.

I'm not sure if this is the case with U-1215. If you look at the quarterly sales chart, sales started to increase in 2018 and did very well during the pandemic years (2020-2022). In 2022 it seemed as if the sales volume was starting to go down but in the first half of 2023, sales spiked (much to my delight) and suddenly dropped to zero (much to my disappointment).

Yesterday, in a bid to try and solve the problem, I changed the cover of U-1215 (Smashwords edition) to see if that will restore sales. 

The last sale was in June 2023. It's almost December 2023 and the sales report is still zero. Is this a long tail distribution phenomena? I have no idea. (".)

Update 08 Feb 2024: 

In December, I received a notification that I had a sale, six months after the last, and received $2.05 in my Paypal account. There have been no other sales since then. I need to write another novel but I'm not getting any ideas at the moment. (".)

Scam Alert! Film Adaptation Proposal

 

This would have been a perfect start to a day...if this were true.

I received this email today and, I have to admit, it got me excited...for a while. What author wouldn't be, right? You get an email from someone claiming to be from a film/television production company and proposing to turn your book into a film or television series. Wow! Hollywood, here I come!

As I read through the email, red flags started to wave. The first paragraph says it's from Rhiley Roads and yet, the email address is from Adam Mckay, the CEO of Hyperobject Industry. Furthermore, the email address uses a gmail extension. Curious. Shouldn't an official email come from a corporate email address?

I checked out Hyperobject Industries. It's a legit company run by Adam McKay and they've produced several movies and television series on Netflix. This email, however, uses the words "Hyperobject Industry" instead of "Hyperobject Industries." When you're representing a company, you can't afford to make mistakes like that.

I don't know how these companies work. Do they really read someone's book and just contact them offering to convert the book into a movie?

They also want to pitch the book at a Producer's Pitch Event in January 2024. I checked for the event and found a Hollywood Pitch Festival scheduled for December 2023. I don't know if this is the same or is it a different event.

The final red flag is that they want ME to make the synopsis, loglines, film treatment, and screenplay. That's not something an ordinary author would know how to make. Therefore, they propose to hire professional screen writers to do it for me. Guess who pays for those? Yup, me!

If they really wanted to make a film adaptation of my book, they would contact me properly and they would propose to pay me, not me pay them.

Still, getting a legit offer would be nice. I just have to remember to be realistic and wary of scam artists like this one. (",)

New Book - RTD Temperature vs Resistance Tables

RTD Temperature vs Resistance Tables

Those who know me know that I'm an instrumentation professional and I've been in the profession since 1985. One of the instruments that I've handled many times are RTDs, or Resistance Temperature Detectors. These are temperature measuring devices and are very popular in industries due to their accuracy, temperature range, and low drift. Handled and installed properly, they will last almost indefinitely.

RTDs operate on the principle that metals change their electrical resistance in response to temperature. This means that you can determine the temperature of the RTD by mea-suring its resistance.

Unfortunately, there many types of RTDs and each type has a different resistance at any given temperature. This is usually not a problem because instruments that use RTDs as a temperature measuring sensor perform the conversion of resistance to temperature internally.

However, if the instrumentation technician or engineer doesn't have such an instrument, and all he has is a digital multimeter or a resistance meter (devices that can measure resistance) or a resistance decade box (devices that can simulate resistance), he needs to know what resistance corresponds to what temperature. This book gives that information in the form of tables.

You can get these tables on the internet, yes, but you'll likely get only one table for one type of RTD. To get tables for other types, you'll need to perform several searches. Also, the smallest temperature interval you can get is 1°C. If you need to know the resistance of a fraction of a degree (e.g. 43.6°C), you'll need to perform a small calculation and you'll probably need a calculator.

This book gives the resistance values at temperatures ranging from -200 to 650 or 850°C for Pt100(385), Pt100(3916), Pt100(3926), Pt200(385), Pt500(385), and Pt1000(385), the most commonly used RTD types in use today. Furthermore, the book lists the resistances for temperatures at 0.1°C intervals. You're getting a very comprehensive source of information for temperature-to-resistance tables.

U-66 vs USS Buckley: Duel in the Atlantic (adaptation of a true story)

cover of U-66 vs USS Buckley

Just published my newest book, U-66 vs USS Buckley Duel in the Atlantic. It's a book that's been in the works for around seven years. 

Back in 2016, while I was researching for information about u-boats for my other book, U-1215, I came upon the story of U-66 and USS Buckley. The story I found was short so I went looking for more information about the event. The best source was from USS Buckley's after action report at the uboatarchive website. It detailed the almost minute-by-minute retelling of the whole battle.

With no thought of publishing the story as a book, I gathered every bit of information I could get and filed them in a folder in my computer. I went ahead and published U-1215 and forgot about U-66.

During the pandemic in 2020, the movie Greyhound came out. While watching it, the surface battle between the USS Greyhound and the u-boat struck me as very similar to the story of U-66 and USS Buckley. I decided to review the story and make it into a book.

I wanted to tell the story from both sides but all the information came from the American side. There was almost no information from the German side. I found an report on the interrogation of the captured survivors of U-66 but it offered very little information about the German side of the battle. There was no choice, I would have to invent some of the scenes.

Even though I decided to use my imagination about the German side of the story, I didn't want to abuse my artistic license but just coming up with sensional details. The scenes had to be plausible so as to be believeable. Besides, I didn't want to put "based on a true story" in the book. As far as I was concerned, it was to be a historical retelling of the event.

I started writing in 2022 (can't remember what month I started but it was around the last quarter of the year). I didn't concentrate on it, however. I was also busy trying to build my YouTube channels (Yes, plural) so I couldn't devote 100% of my time on it. I finished the book in July 2023.

With the book writing done, I needed to create a book cover image. I had a choice of two scenes: a front view of the destroyer escort and the u-boat side by side, blasting away at each other from what seemed point blank range (indeed, the battle did involve such distances). The second choice was an aerial view of the battle showing the two vessels maneuvering around the sea from the point of view of a US Navy aircraft that was watching the two gladiators duke it out below him.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find images that would work. I thought of hiring an artist but I couldn't afford them at this time. In the end, I decided to just put images of the destroyer escort and the u-boat side by side, empty of people and just lying there as if abandoned. If I could afford an artist in the future, I'll change the cover eventually.

The actual battle lasted only 16 minutes so the book is only 5,743 words, which qualifies it as a short story. Here's to hoping that it does as well, if not better, than U-1215, my best seller.

Old-style Calculators

This is something you don't see anymore.

Back when I was a kid, I saw this rectangular thing on Dad's table. It had a slideable strip in the middle and a transparent sliding window with a thin line down the middle. There were numbers all over it that, at first, made me think it was a fancy ruler but the number spacing was all wrong. It couldn't be a ruler so what was it? Ever the curious kid with a fascination for technical stuff, I asked Dad what it was (after experimenting with it for awhile).

He called it a slide rule.

So, it's a ruler without the extra "r", I thought. So, how does it measure things.

He said, "You don't measure with it. It helps me calculate things, like with multiplication."

I guess my eyes went wide. My first thought was, "This thing can help me with my math?"

"How does it work?" I asked him.

He asked me to give him two numbers to multiply. I decided on something simple. I wanted a test that I knew the answer to so that I'd know if the thing really does what Dad said it could do.

"Two times three." 

He starts demonstrating. "You move the slider bar until the '2' is here, then you move the sliding window until this marker is on the '3.' Then you can see that the answer is here, it's '6'."

I tried a few other numbers and the thing gave the correct answer every time. Wow! That's neat!

He also had a circular one that worked in much the same way.

Fast forward about five years or so. I was in high school. I noticed that the third or fourth year students were holding slide rules. It was a sort of status thing. If you held one in your hands, you were almost an engineer. There was a giant slide rule in one of the laboratories (maybe ten feet long) that was used to train the students on how to use them. I couldn't wait to get to their level so I can have my own slide rule.

It wasn't meant to be. The calculator began to appear around 1975 or so and it promised to be be vastly better than the slide rule. The slide rule ceased to be part of the curriculum and this status symbol disappeared almost instantly. 

Calculators were better. I bought a few of them during high school until I bought a programmable one when I was in fourth year. It's what got me started in programming.

The TI-57 programmable calculator

Occasionally, however, I see a picture of a slide rule and the memory of my first encounter with it comes back. Sometimes I'd think of buying one just for the heck of it. Maybe something to impress my grandchildren with, just as I was.

New Book My Facebook Notes is Out

My latest book, My Facebook Notes, is finally published and is available at Smashwords, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. I expect it to appear soon in other online bookstores that Smashwords distributes to. So, what's it about?

When I first joined Facebook back in 2009, I immediately noticed the Notes feature. My friends were using it to post inspirational articles but I wanted to be different. I decided to use it to write about my experiences about my travels. Those series of posts later became my first book, Funny Stories from My Travels (now retitled, Travel Mashups and Mishaps).

Then, I began writing smaller stories, funny anecdotes, inspirational notes, and various other things. I had dozens of those notes and might have gone on and on if not for a change in Facebook.

Around September 2020, Facebook announced that they were discontinuing the Notes feature. People could no longer make new notes but the old notes would still be available for viewing.

I was saddened by the loss of an outlet for my creative juices. I immediately began copying the notes to MS Word files and kept them in my computer in case Facebook decided to delete them. One day, a little more than two years later, I got the idea to compile these notes and put them into a book. That's how My Facebook Notes came to be.

I pasted them into a single Word file and arranged them as to topics. There were my speeches, my tips on public speaking, memories, tips on writing and publishing books, and other notes and stories. There are 150 of those notes in the book.

After the book was finished, I uploaded them to Smashwords and soon got the message that it had been accepted and was now being distributed to other ebook distributors.

I chose the title My Facebook Notes because, first of all, it is a compilation of my Facebook Notes. Second, I thought it was unique, that other people might not think of sharing their own notes. I later learned, I was wrong.

While searching for the book by Googling it, I discovered that there were other books with the same title and, they too, were about notes that the authors converted into books. It was not an original idea after all.

No worries though. Titles cannot be copyrighted so it's common to find books that have the same titles. There are even movies that have the same title. I can change the title but I'm not going to do that just yet.

Airline Woes

 

My family recently had the sad experience that our brother suddenly died. I decided to go to Bacolod to see him one last time before he was cremated.

But this post is not about my brother. It's about the experience my wife and I had with the airline that we took. I'm going to make a video about my brother but I haven't decided if I will make a blog post about him.

I bought tickets for me and the wife several days in advance. The flight was on Monday and the tickets were purchased four days earlier. Since there were no direct flights to Bacolod from Cagayan de Oro, we had to have a layover in Cebu. Our flight to Cebu was scheduled for 1:35pm, arriving in Cebu at 2:25pm. The next leg was Cebu to Bacolod, departing at 4:45pm and arriving at 5:50pm. 

The first sign of trouble was an email informing us that our Cebu to Bacolod leg had been cancelled so I had to find another flight. I was able to get a flight that departed Cebu at 7:30pm and arrived in Bacolod at 8:35pm. So, instead of a layover of 2 hours and 20 minutes, it had become 5 hours and 10 minutes. We'd have a late dinner but that couldn't be avoided.

The trip started from Cagayan de Oro a bit late. The departure was delayed by about 30 minutes (can't remember exactly). This was just the beginning. We arrived in Cebu and settled down to wait for our next departure. It was around 3pm so we had a long wait until our 7:30pm flight.

It was already around 6:50pm when we heard the announcement that our flight will be delayed because the plane that was supposed to take us to Bacolod had not yet arrived. The airline was kind enough to provide snacks and then dinner (Jollibee one piece chicken with rice). At least we didn't get hungry.

It was around 9:30pm when the plane arrived. It discharged passengers and then began boarding around 9:50pm. We took off around 10:20pm and arrived in Bacolod around 11:20pm. That's about six hours after our original, scheduled arrival.

The wake for my brother was from March 13 to 16 (Monday to Thursday) and our departure was on March 18. On March 15, I received an email saying that our 8:30am flight from Bacolod to Cebu had been cancelled. The only choice for us was a layover in Manila instead of Cebu. Again, no choice.

Come March 18, we arrived at the airport for our 11:15am flight. We'd have a two hour layover in Manila which meant we'd have lunch at the airport in Manila.

It felt like deja vu when we received word that our flight was delayed. We would be taking off around 12:30pm. The trip is about an hour and ten minutes. We'd have to hurry to our gate to make our connecting flight.

The flight to Manila was uneventful except for the last part. Air traffic meant that our arrival would be delayed. Nothing we could do about it but just hope for the best. 

Eventually we got clearance to land and we touched down around 2:10pm. The boarding time for our flight to CDO was 2:40pm. We hurried through the airport and in our haste, got lost. We actually passed the departure entrance but didn't see it. We wandered around the airport until we spotted the sign that identified the departure entrance.

There was a long line to get to the x-ray machines but my being a senior citizen saved the day for us. We got ahead of the line and entered the departure lounge. We hurried through the different gates and finally arrived at our gate. They were already starting the boarding process. Loida and I decided to visit the restroom before lining up. Again, being a senior citizen gave us first dibs on boarding.

Another bonus, they told us that they'd be taking our baggage and putting them in the baggage compartment, for free. We won't have to lug them up into the plane. The flight left around 3:30pm.

Just a funny aside. Our boarding passes didn't have a gate assignment yet. I did see on the big screen what our boarding gate was so it wasn't a problem. When we were already seated in the plane, I received a text message from the airline telling me what gate we were supposed to board. I shook my head. Things were really messed up with the airline.

The flight home was uneventful. We arrived around 5:30pm. At the airport in CDO, our baggage took some time to come out but that was just the last hurrah for all our troubles. We took the Magnum van to Limketkai and had dinner at Jollibee. We got home around 8:20pm.

The airline wasn't finished with us, however. The next day, I received another text message from the airline reminding us of things concerning our flight (check in, baggage rules, and baggage check-in procedures).

This airline has a lot of complaints about its services. I felt I just went through five years worth of problems with them in just a week.

Legend of the Moon is on Google Play Store!

 

Legend of the Moon is now available in the Google Playstore.

I decided to put it up in the Playstore because, first of all, the Playstore is not included in the list of bookstores that Smashwords distributes to. Second reason is, the Playstore is not included in the list of bookstores that Smashwords distributes to.

Okay, so it's obvious what the reason is. I don't have to give the third reason, right? (",)

Anyway, Legend of the Moon is my first attempt at writing a novel. I put in about six months worth of work into that book. I didn't even intend to make it into a book at first.

It started as a short story on my other blog. I was thinking, "I'll just make it three posts long, just three acts and it's done."

As I wrote the story, I began adding elements, other situations, more characters, and soon, it had ballooned into several posts. Finally, I decided I'd change it into a full length novel and deleted the story from the blog and rewrote it on MS Word. It took about six months of writing and a month or so of editing. Then I uploaded it into Smashwords and, there it was, my first full length novel.

It was while writing this novel that I discovered my writing style. I was a "pantser", someone who writes novels "by the seat of their pants". You get an idea, type away, and stop. You get another idea, type some more, and stop. Sometimes, you "get into the groove" and you type almost non-stop for several hours, the ideas seemingly flying into your brain like bats flying into their cave to nest. Sometimes, the stop extends for several days or even weeks before another idea comes up.

It's not very efficient but there's a certain element of suspence in writing this way. It's as if you're the reader instead of the writer. You yourself don't know what's going to happen next, how the story progresses, or even how it will end.

And that's how I'm writing this post right now. Write a paragraph, stop, write another one, and stop. I'm not sure how I'm going to end this. It'll come to me eventually.