Three sales today, which means I have eight for May, which means I have a sale-a-day! Hurrah! Very happy about this. They’re all US sales so far, hoping to catch a DE sale before the end of the month. Maybe I should do another giveaway … next I think I’d do Miya Black, since the third book is coming out soon (didn’t quite achieve all my goals yesterday but got the first three chapters edited).
Chrome continues to impress. The translation feature is kind of magic, I’ve been spending some time on Amazon.de for promotional purposes and it’s amazing to just click a button and suddenly be able to understand everything on the page.
Interesting discussion with Super-Wife today about Kindle in Japan–we both agreed that it would be a huge success there, Japan has, I believe (but may be wrong), the biggest publishing industry in the world, and Japanese people generally read a lot, especially those who commute, and we all know of Japan’s love of gadgets and technology. So why hasn’t Amazon targeted it yet? I think it might be because of the way Japanese books are printed, up-to-down rather than left-to-right. Huge hassle to implement in HTML so it’d have to be some kind of custom interpreter–what I mean is that the book itself would be generated from HTML, but with a “This is a Japanese book” tag included so the Kindle would know to display each paragraph up-to-down. It could be done, it wouldn’t be TOO difficult, but it would require changes in the Kindle itself. I’m not sure if this could be handled with an update, or if new hardware/hardcoding would be necessary. Actually, I’m not even sure if the Kindle can display Japanese characters at the moment, I’ll have to do some experiments.
Anyway, the iPhone is apparently reasonably popular in Japan, so I think maybe I’ll try to get a headstart on things by just tentatively doing a teeny bit of promotion on Japanese sites. This is one area in which writing YA gives me a bit of an advantage, since it’s quite popular with ESLstudents looking to practise their language skills. I could even write some short stories aimed at language students, in English and Japanese with study notes–at 99 cents a pop and readable on an iPhone, I could see those being quite popular.
Writing Is The Easy Part 