Introducing the Palace in the Sky Cloud Digital Bookshelf

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

Sideloading is a thing of the past!

Long have authors and bookstore owners searched for a way to get digital publications from their stores on mobile devices without putting their readers through the technical challenge of copying files from computer to phone or tablet. While some PC manufacturers make things easy, most don’t, and navigating your way through the file system on a phone or tablet can be perplexing even for someone with a lot of technical experience.

Those days are over. The Palace in the Sky Bookstore is pleased to introduce one of our new featured cloud services, The Digital Bookshelf.

We use a technology called the Open Publication Distribution System to maintain a list of books purchased by our bookstore customers. We make that list available to customers using reading apps like Moon+ Reader.

OPDS works very much like an RSS feed. When you buy a book from our bookstore, you get a personalized feed from our cloud server containing all your books. Your feed is automatically updated with each book you’ve purchase plus any free offers you’ve redeemed. You can read your books online or download them to your device.

Moon+ Reader is an excellent choice for reading our EPUB3 premium digital books on Android devices. It works well on phones and is particularly impressive on all flavors of Android tablets with a side-by-side reading mode and high-definition display. Our books have never looked better!

Like most EPUB reader apps, Moon+ also has a catalog display feature which is seamlessly compatible with our new Digital Bookshelf. Readers can download books from their cloud bookshelf and then import them all at once or one at a time. Imported books show up in your catalog and can be read offline at any time.

If you have an iPhone or an iPad, your titles should download from the Digital Bookshelf and be automatically imported by iBooks. I haven’t had a chance to test this yet, however. If you have an iPhone or iPad and you’d like a free book or two, drop me a line and help me test the service!

Our Digital Bookshelf Cloud Service is now in beta. The Palace in the Sky Bookstore can now do everything the big retailers can. When you buy a book, you can download it immediately. It will be automatically added to your Digital Bookshelf if you would rather download it later.

We’re including a Digital Bookshelf trial with all purchases for a limited time. If you’d like to try it out, send me an e-mail and we’ll get you signed up! For updates on this and all bookstore news, be sure to join my mailing list!

What’s Dawnsong: The Last Skyblade About?

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

When an idealistic boy steals a celestium sword and gives it to sixteen-year-old Jessica Halloran, he doesn’t realize he has broken a centuries-old bloodsworn truce between Aventar’s most ancient and ruthless guilds. Mercenaries, assassins and hideous creatures suddenly emerge from every depraved and unclean place across the land seeking to claim Dawnsong for themselves.

The long dormant Champion Skyblade’s magic inexplicably responds to the girl, which inspires one guardian of the truce to intercede to protect Jessica’s life. Reina’s act is an open declaration of war that threatens to plunge the seven kingdoms into chaos.

Jessica quickly learns Dawnsong is most powerful when she is truthful and acts honorably. Her compassion becomes healing magic. Her joyful personality becomes a golden glow that follows her everywhere and her kindness becomes a blessing that heals and strengthens others. Even learned scribes and arcanists cannot explain it.

Now, after the discovery of a hidden map to a place called the Palace in the Sky, Jessica and her friends find themselves in a race to rescue the other seven Ajan weapons before Lord Dane and his vile Cryptics discover and destroy them!

Here begin the adventures of Jessica Halloran and the Greatest Fighting Team of Teenage Girls Ever Assembled!

Dawnsong: The Last Skyblade is available now at the Palace in the Sky Bookstore!

Million Dollar Artist: Your Own Bookstore

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

In my Million Dollar Artist™ series, I’m going to show you how to open your own bookstore. You might be asking yourself “who needs their own bookstore?” Well, that’s why I picked the title I did, because I’m about to show you the answer to that question.

Parts One and Two of this series covered The Future of Digital Publishing and The Shopify Revolution. Part Three brings it all together.

It’s 2018. With the right tools and an hour of spare time you could have an original product for sale on the web. Anyone in the world will be able to pull out their credit card, order your book from desktop or mobile and have it instantly available for download.

You keep more than 96% of the cover price. All you pay is the credit card processing fee. The rest is pure profit.

Bookstore owners like me can take full advantage of crowdfunding, video marketing, blogging, social media and subscription services, and do it in a way that is light years beyond anything a third party retailer will ever offer you. You can publish your work cheaper, faster and more attractively.

But the question remains. Who needs a bookstore?

Bloggers

Take a few minutes and look up the bloggers who have turned their articles and other writing into books. What better way to amplify your message than to put a cover on your best work and make it available for sale? Not only does it add value to what you do, it gives you considerable marketing advantages. The title “author” inspires respect and gives you credibility. Nothing is more important for a journalist or a writer.

Now imagine having your books promote your blog and your blog promoting your books. Exactly. That’s your lightbulb moment.

Video Channels and Hosts

If you run a channel on YouTube, you’ve probably run into problems monetizing your work. You face a lot of the same problems self-published authors have faced over the years. Since you’re building an audience on someone else’s site, you are subject to rules that can damage your relationship with your viewers. You may have even been “de-monetized.” As it gets harder and harder to sustain your income, you’ve likely turned to things like crowdfunding to stay afloat.

Having books to sell and a place to sell them literally changes everything. It fits right in to your current business. You can sell your books directly from your videos and you can offer them as rewards to your contributors and viewers.

Game Developers

Who better to publish hint books, character adaptations or comics featuring video game characters than the developer? Have you been watching Blizzard lately? Here’s a billion-dollar game developer rushing headlong into both publishing and animation as fast as they can. Why? Because both of those categories strengthen their core business and produce new revenue streams in the process.

Consider the average role-playing game. Even if the developer publishes a great deal of material about their game online, no medium can go into the kind of depth a book can. Your players want to know more. Give them what they want and enjoy the profits.

Authors

You might be wondering why I put authors fourth. It’s because authors can leverage all the advantages in all the other categories in addition to acquiring a supercharged marketing platform of their own. If you are used to publishing on third-party sites, the fact you will instantly increase your income by as much as 30% should be enough of an incentive, but you should also consider the fact you have zero pricing restrictions and zero formatting restrictions on your own store. If you’ve been publishing for any length of time I’ll leave it to you to imagine the possibilities.

Oh, and you’re going to be astonished at what you can do at conventions and book signings.

Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

Every business has a need to communicate with its customers. From marketing to instructional materials to technical manuals, getting good information into the hands of the people who matter most to your business has always been a top priority. Running a bookstore gives you a central place to serve as a communications channel with your clientele. Even if all you need to offer is free instruction manuals, once you get your customers used to the idea of visiting your bookstore to get more information about your business, the potential exists to turn publishing into another revenue stream.

Publishing enhances any business. In an era ruled by entrepreneurs, new enterprises and new ideas, the need for quality documentation, instruction, inspiration and entertainment has never been greater. The tools to make all these things possible have never been more powerful or less expensive. If you’re looking for ways to enhance, amplify and accelerate your work, starting a bookstore is a great next step.

If you’d like to learn more, I recommend joining my mailing list. I publish in a lot of different genres, so don’t be surprised if you get e-mails announcing new releases in my fiction, comic or game series. But do watch those newsletters, because in them you’ll find links to new articles, tips and tricks and some special offers you’ll find quite useful.

How Did These People Get Hired?

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

This kind of thing has long confused me. Let me explain why.

When I interview for a job, I take it pretty seriously, and I’m sure my employer does too. If I were the kind of person who was routinely frozen in terror when my alarm went off, or the kind of person who has trouble brushing my teeth, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be taken very seriously at work. That’s why commercials like this are so confusing and annoying.

Let’s take “Tyler,” for example. The man is brushing his teeth while wearing a dress shirt and tie. He has an anxious and frankly dull look on his face. Yet he is apparently the head of HR for the same “medium-sized” company as “Marcie” the cartoon character who is probably still motionless and staring at the ceiling.

Then there’s “Whitney,” who is texting in the shower with the same amphetamine-fueled look on her face as Marcie. What is this commercial trying to say? Are these people lost? Mentally ill? Paranoid?

I realize commercials like this are supposed to be light entertainment. The narrator’s alliteration, the silly looks on everyone’s face and the “plodding towards mediocrity” soundtrack are all rather obvious in their intent. We’re not supposed to take these people seriously. But that’s really the problem, isn’t it?

Why are office employees always portrayed as borderline incompetent, terrified adolescents in popular media? It’s not funny. It’s not entertaining. It’s like a fast food commercial where a customer is served a dead rat in a rat-shaped styrofoam container. It shatters verisimilitude and makes us question how any of these people got hired in the first place.

How can we expect anyone to invest tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives earning an education, gaining marketable skills and acquiring the experience and qualifications to get a good high-paying job if this is what our society thinks of the average office workplace?

“Marcie” is a “masterful marketer,” yet she can’t get out of bed. “Tyler” apparently plans to spend most of the morning grinding the bristles off his toothbrush and “Whitney” is going to need a second job to pay for a replacement for the phone she’s trying to destroy in her shower. The commercial tells us they all need “a little help.” No, what they need is a psychiatric evaluation and a weekend or two at the Happy Home.

Then we switch to a scene with Marcie and her boss where a grown man is jumping around the room and making alarming gestures while the “masterful marketer” is sitting at a cafeteria table in an enclosed office. Meanwhile the “head of HR” has a line of people (who are ostensibly on the clock with benefits and accumulating paid vacation days) lined up at his door while he taps a pencil eraser on the desk and has a slow motion conversation with a mental patient. Then there’s Whitney, who is still popping speed and can’t manage her e-mail.

Now I may be overthinking this, but these people are being PAID to work in the glass-walled offices at this company. Commercials like this make hard-working, well-educated and competent people doubt themselves and our whole society. If these three clowns have jobs and paychecks, with executive titles no less, what’s wrong with you if you can’t find employment? If I were a college student in 2018, and I saw this commercial and then attended even one job interview that didn’t become an offer, I would have a long list of questions starting with “can I have my money back?”

How can someone get hired and paid to work a full-time job and not be able to handle their e-mail without throwing themselves on their desks? I can understand the problem if the man auditioning to wear a gorilla costume in the circus really is the manager of this company.

What I object to in commercials like this is the infantilization of grown men and women with jobs and careers. Hiring managers far and wide complain at exhausting length they can’t find qualified candidates, yet this is the result? The people in this commercial aren’t qualified to dress themselves in the morning. The proof is the pattern of toothpaste stains on Tyler’s shirt that were obviously CGI-ed out of the later scenes.

This portrayal is the workplace equivalent of the “incompetent dad” character that has been a staple of family commercials for the last 20 years. Here’s Bob. He weighs 275 pounds and is five feet eight inches tall. Bob can’t change the liner in the kitchen trash can without two people helping him, yet somehow Bob pays the mortgage on this fabulous five-bedroom house and makes the payments on the $40,000 SUV parked next to the Mercedes in his 1800-square-foot driveway every month. Don’t you wish you were Bob and got paid every two weeks despite that frozen puffy blank look on your face?

The audience for these works of 90 IQ entertainment is being made to believe these people are not only gainfully employed, but “masterful” high-ranking executives who are “wizards” of arcane skills like “project workflow,” whatever that is.

There’s another one of these commercials somewhere on YouTube where employees are running in circles and screaming because they can’t make their business software work. I’d look it up but I just ate. If the soundtrack were added to video of toddlers engaged in a food fight in a daycare center nobody would be able to tell the difference. Again, how did these people get interviews and job offers? How does this company stay in business?

Our parents didn’t work in places like this. My father was a newspaper reporter and my mother was an award-winning features editor. When I visited their offices, everyone in the building was a full-fledged grown-up. They covered important news stories and put 90-page newspaper editions out every day. The Los Angeles Times had a circulation of close to two million readers (who all got a newspaper every morning) when I was in elementary and junior high school. There was simply no such thing as people jumping around and crying and screaming at work. It simply didn’t happen.

I think I speak for more than a few people when I say I wish we could see examples of professionals in commercials for a change. While we’re at it, let’s throw in a real dad too. Because I can guarantee you there is no woman alive who would marry or even date Bob the talking beach ball. Black out.

The Shopify Revolution

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

You’ve likely seen one or more commercials on your favorite video or social media site lately extolling the benefits of opening your own Shopify store and using it as a platform for drop-shipping. If not, allow me to briefly explain how the drop-shipping business model works.

I’ve already written about the future of digital publishing. Now we’re going to explore the infrastructure needed to put it into practice.

You open a Shopify store. In it, you can list nearly any product for sale. So, like any retailer, you get products from a supplier and then list them in your store. You add a markup of say, 20%. When someone buys the product, you order it from the supplier.

The “drop-shipping” part is when your supplier ships the product to your customer instead of to you. As the store owner, you provide the shipping information directly to the supplier, and they send the product straight to your end customer. This means you have no inventory or any of the expensive and potentially burdensome requirements of running a store.

You likely charged the customer for shipping, so you use those funds to pay the supplier the shipping charge.

Let’s say the supplier price was ten dollars. You charged the customer twelve dollars. You keep two dollars profit.

Now, why use Shopify? Well, they handle all the back end financial details for you. You get merchant-style credit card processing and the ability to collect money from sales at the point of purchase. You pay Shopify a monthly fee plus a small percentage of each transaction and you keep the rest. A few days after you make your sale, Shopify deposits the money into your bank account.

Shopify also provides you with everything you need to open and operate your store. They give you the site and the tools to set it up the way you want it — all available in your browser. In this respect they are very much like Wix and Squarespace. All you really have to do is plug in your product images, prices and descriptions. In the drop-shipping model, the image and description are provided by the supplier. You set the price.

Throw in some good marketing and you just might have yourself a revenue-positive business.

Sounds good, right? Well, remember that ten bucks you had to pay the supplier to get the product to sell? What if you didn’t have to pay that ten bucks? What if you got to keep all the money? Stay tuned, because I’m about to show you how you can take the Shopify drop-shipping model to the next level.

An Exciting Way to Build a Library for your Children

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

If you’re a mom or dad, I’m about to show you how to get $1000 worth of books (or more) for your child without spending a cent initially. No catch. No hidden fees. No fuss.

As you might already know if you’ve read my work I have a degree in English Education. Reading is important to me and I know it’s important to parents. It is one of the skills I’ve long been inspired to improve. I consider myself an above-average advocate for literacy, especially for elementary, middle school and high school students.

The more someone reads, the more they improve many different skills. Critical thinking, writing, research, public speaking and reading comprehension all improve naturally when someone reads often. These are among the most crucial basic skills any student can have regardless of their chosen field of study. Reading is the very bedrock of all education.

If you want your children to get the best start in life they can, reading should be your absolute top educational priority. This doesn’t mean your kids have to read textbooks or academic works from the moment they can turn the pages. The great thing about reading is all those benefits I listed happen even if you’re reading your favorite space novel, adventure series or pirate story.

To take full advantage of a program like Kindle Unlimited, you should start with a new Kindle if you can. The newest models are very reasonably priced and some are even designed for young readers. Amazon has installed parental controls in most of the color tablets, so you don’t have to worry about inappropriate content and you’ll have a chance to vet your child’s choices.

Even if you don’t get a Kindle, you can make use of Kindle Unlimited on any mobile device including tablets and phones through Amazon’s Kindle App. If you have the Fire Tablet like mine, some books can be set to read out loud! So you and your children can listen to books as well as read along.

The first 30 days of Kindle Unlimited is free.Once you sign up, you will be able to check out up to ten books at a time, read them and turn them back in to check out more. You don’t have to pay the cover prices. All you have to do is pay the monthly subscription fee which is $9.99. Think of it as Netflix for books.

Here’s the best part: Right now there are over 50,000 titles eligible for Kindle Unlimited in the Children’s eBooks category. If you paid full price, a library that size could easily run a half-million dollars or more! But if you’re part of the program, your kids get access to all those books at no additional cost.

Among the many recognizable titles on the list are:

  • Disney’s Frozen
  • Minecraft
  • Disney’s Cars
  • Harry Potter
  • Heroes of Olympus
  • Mary Poppins
  • Erin Hunter’s Warriors Series
  • Diary of a Sixth Grade Ninja
  • Liv and Maddie
  • Spongebob Squarepants
  • Star Wars
  • Big Hero 6

Once you have access to Kindle Unlimited, you’ll find enough reading material to keep any child occupied for years, and they will never run out of new books to try out. Even if you cancel after the first 30 days and don’t pay for the second month, you’ll still be able to download and read a thousand dollars or more worth of top quality material: Enough to give a family of any size a library without limits.

I plan to write occasional articles on interesting books I find in Kindle Unlimited. If you’d like to keep up with my recommendations, consider joining my mailing list. I’d love to hear about your experiences with Kindle Unlimited, and learn about any great books you find. Perhaps I can pass along what you discover. Be sure to add your recommendations in the comments and enjoy your next great read!

The Future of Digital Publishing

Posted on by Shane Lochlann Black

how do i set up my own book store

While it would be both entertaining and predictable to say this is a Jerry Maguire moment, the truth is anyone who has been in the business of publishing books, articles, comics, anthologies, non-fiction or anything else that starts out or ends up in a written form knows we’re at an inflection point. We’ve proven a dozen viable business models, but like all industries, things are about to change again. As authors and publishers we need to be aware, and do our best to influence the business for the better.

By now everyone has heard of e-books. The electronic book has been the subject of speculation since the earliest days of the technology industry and for decades in science fiction before that. Everyone remembers the ubiquitous devices in television shows like Star Trek that allowed the characters to read documents and technical manuals at a glance and even carry them from place to place. It was the 1960s version of the iPad.

During the 90s I continually predicted (and eagerly anticipated) that Apple would be the company that brought e-books to the marketplace in a big way. They already had a major presence in education. It was the logical next step. I was wrong about who, but I wasn’t wrong about what or how.

Over the last decade or so, digital publishing has grown up without a lot of fanfare. There were a few big winners in the early days of the early adopter platforms. Some authors sold a lot of books and some even managed to get traditional publishing deals as a result. The industry coalesced around one retailer and grew in relative obscurity. The average person didn’t know much about e-books and few were making any real effort to educate them.

By many measures, digital publishing is still dependent on those early adopters. Genres have become hidebound, sales are stagnating and the innovation that once drove the early adoption of enough e-reader devices to make a difference has all but disappeared. In fact, some might contend we’re moving in the wrong direction.

I’ve been publishing fiction professionally for almost eight years. I’ve had an opportunity to not only observe but experience many changes in the market for both fiction and electronic devices. Throughout this process, I’ve become increasingly impatient about the contraction and volatility of a market that should be expanding and becoming more reliable.

It became clear to me not long ago the market for digital books isn’t going to expand any further unless authors like myself make it happen.

Since I make my living writing, the best way I can contribute to the new era is to turn what I’ve learned into a course and a book series.  Since I’ve already written extensively about my experiences in freelancing, I decided the best way to organize my message was to combine the two and re-launch my Million Dollar Artist™ series.

I have some unique viewpoints on these matters because I have not only run a successful publishing business, but I also ran a fairly large animation studio and a fairly large webcomic network. Those two previous businesses succeeded largely because of my skill in sales. My goal with this new initiative is to teach those sales skills to others and show you how to adapt them to your creative business. What I have to say isn’t necessarily limited to the publishing business. It will definitely affect how you think about any creative enterprise. Even software development.

The biggest problem with relying on someone else’s store is they make all the rules: Rules which will inevitably infringe on your marketing plans. Only a fool builds his empire on someone else’s land. Why do you think Apple opened their own retail stores? Because putting their product in someone’s hands in their own building was the right way to sell technology, and they have a trillion dollars worth of market capitalization to prove it.

When I combine my business experience with my work in children’s television and interactive development, it provides me a lot of unique knowledge I think will be very useful. Along with several other authors, I’m spearheading an initiative called Enchanted Airship, which will finally do for middle grade and YA fiction what Broderbund and Leapfrog did for kids technology 20 years ago. If you happen to be a middle-grade or YA author, Enchanted Airship goes with “your own bookstore” like three jacks go with a pair of aces.

I started my first online business in 1995 (live in 95!) selling shareware through a service called SWREG. I opened my first online store in 1999. I’m happy to report things have gotten a lot easier since then.

In short, I’m going to teach you how to open and run your own bookstore.

You might be tempted to think a bookstore is only useful for authors. I will show you how having a bookstore can help any business. Books are venerated in our society like nothing else.  The title “author” carries with it considerable respect. Think blogging is a great way to get the word out? Having your own bookstore and your own publications is blogging with rocket engines! Bookstores and blogs are complimentary. One strengthens the other. For writers, marketing doesn’t get any better, or easier.

When you see what I’ve done and what you’ll soon be able to do, I think you’ll agree this is the beginning of a new era in digital publishing. The industry is growing up, and this is the next big step. The “feature list” of your new store will astonish you if you’ve been relying on third-party retailers up to this point. Plus, you can simply add your store to your retail network without interfering in your current distribution plans.

If you happen to be crowdfunding-minded, and you’ve wondered how to do for your books what all those enterprising folks on YouTube do with their video channels, running your own bookstore is going to provide you with a number of inspiring and lucrative answers. Yep, I have the key to crowdfunding for authors too.

If you’d like to learn more, I recommend joining my mailing list. I publish in a lot of different genres, so don’t be surprised if you get e-mails announcing new releases in my fiction, comic or game series. But do watch those newsletters, because in them you’ll find links to new articles, tips and tricks and some special offers you’ll find quite useful as you build your new and improved publishing business.

The future is here, and your writing is going to be a big part of it. Part Two: The Shopify Revolution.