Kindle Publishing Runaround

What a hassle!
Every time I write to Kindle with a problem it takes them two or three days to write back.  Sometimes they don't actually read my email and I have to try again.  Still I can't see the book I'm publishing.

Them: 
The book "The Heart in Exile" you recently submitted to KDP has been published to the Kindle Store and is already available* for readers to purchase here.

Me: 
This link "here" doesn't work, I can't see the book.

Them:
Your title The Heart in Exile is currently live and can be purchased.

Me:
What do you mean live exactly?
When I click the link you provided, it says "404-Document Not Found"

Them:
We've made your book(s) available in the Kindle store, but only in countries where they appear to be in the public domain. Your book may not appear in searches in territories where it is not offered for sale.

Me:
I marked that I have the rights for Canada. I live in Canada. When I click the link below, in Canada, I can't see anything.
When I search for the book on Amazon from Canada I get no results.
This is why I'm asking. If the book is for sale in Canada, why can't I see it?


It continues, will advise.

Book is live in Canada!

Letters to One: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s by Craig M. Loftin

Letters to One: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s by Craig M. Loftin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is a fantastic window into gay life in the 1950's and 60's and I highly recommend it.

The letters presented are more positive overall than I thought they would be, as the author mentions in the introduction. Even though being gay was a crime and there was no real collection of homosexuals or support system, many simply resigned themselves to the fact that they were gay and moved on with their lives as best they could. I've always believed there could be nothing wrong or immoral about being gay as, as far as I'm concerned, I woke up that way. It was never anything I did or made a decision about, it simply happened. And how could anything I had no control over be something wrong? Apparently many in the past felt the same way.

The book is divided into sections on different themes which I think is a great idea. I can't imagine how many hundreds or thousands of hours of work went into this, it must truly been a labour of love. First the author had to read all the letters to pick out the ones he wanted to use, then digitize them or in several cases type them out. The author even chose to leave in the original spelling and grammar errors, which would have taken even longer to type. Then go through each letter inserting footnotes for ease of understanding to a modern audience and reference where necessary pertinent issues of the magazine ONE, which probably meant reading every issue. The work is staggering and there's no way the editor could have been fairly compensated for his time. It truly deserves a wide audience.

One thing that struck me was the poor spelling and grammar of several of the letters. In the age before spell check, and possibly the age before standard higher education, the written word suffered. Two of the letters I was not able or willing to read through to the end due to the poor spelling and grammar. Also I will say I really wish this book had been published on Kindle. I can understand after all this work wanting something physical in your hands to show for it, but I have carpal tunnel and I had forgotten how difficult it is for me to hold a book for any length of time. I had to keep taking breaks and it would have been faster, easier, and more enjoyable for me to read this on the Kindle.

Several letters really moved me, my book is full of post-it notes. A few of them:

- The man who was 26 who had never been able to find a partner for sex saying "I tried to satisfy my sexual hunger with illustrations I drew but they were found by my folks and I was reprimanded". At 26!

- The letter referring to other gays as "fellow sufferers"

- The letters asking questions, about the most basic of things.

- The letter from the man in Hamilton, Ontario, near where I live, saying Canadian customs had confiscated the magazine as it was banned. A process that continues with some arbitrariness today.

- The letters from people in jail really moved me, people who were set up or framed or put through hell for being gay. The letters from "Timothy" were the best of the book and could have been a book all their own. I wanted more. Being arrested, fired, your picture on the front page of the paper, sitting in jail, being told you could get 60 years unless you pay thousands of dollars. The government needs to issue a formal apology to people so affected.

Once again, a fabulous, unedited slice of gay life well worth picking up.

View all my reviews

Playgirl: Letter to the Editor 2

Loving Dirk Shaffer. Super sexy pics, he looks better than he did 20 years ago, and has less feathered hair.

Your first Dirk Shafer cover was the first Playgirl I ever purchased so it means a lot to me to see him back. I also puchased an oil painting of Dirk from a trip to Berlin in 2008 (photo attached).

The shots of him in the mesh jock strap I think will live in my brain for the rest of time. If you have any more of them, please print them.

Fantastic issue, best ever. If you had a whole Dirk issue, just Dirk, I'd buy 10 copies.

Thanks so much,
Adam Dunn, Toronto, Canada

 

 

The Man From C.A.M.P. by Victor J. Banis

The Man From C.A.M.P. by Victor J. Banis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Has any company in the history of eBook publishing ever proof-read their book before putting it on sale? I'm beginning to think not.
I found about 100 mistakes in this book, from simple things like periods instead of commas, or missing punctuation, to big obvious things like the eight times the word "but" got changed to "hut", or the strange sound at the end of the hail instead of the end of the hall, or music to my cars instead of music to my ears. Music to my cars??? Really, no one picked that up?

The book itself was fun, a quick, light read. I enjoyed it well enough. While I was reading it, I pictured it as a sixties TV show playing in my mind. The story was cute, I would have liked more camp from C.A.M.P., but I enjoyed it.

View all my reviews

The Golden Age of Gay Fiction by Drewey Wayne Gunn

The Golden Age of Gay Fiction by Drewey Wayne Gunn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fantastic book, lousy formatting.

If you're considering buying the Kindle edition of this book, franly don't. The formatting makes it unreadable. Words are changed to gibberish, columns from the print edition are read across rather than down so nothing makes sense, the page numbers and borders from the print edition are included even though they no longer correspond to the end of the pages, a photo is shown and then two or three paragraphs later you find the reference, chapter headings appear at the bottom of the first page of the chapter, lines are justified to the left leaving the whole right side of the page blank, I could go on.

The print edition is the best book produced on the gay pulp fiction industry. The book has everything, a section is interviews with authors from the period, another section is essays on entire bodies of work from the popular writers of the time, including Guild Press, Gordon Merrick, etc. Some excellent articles you won't find anywhere else. The book ends with essays on the books by genre, making special effort to pull out titles you haven't seen discussed elsewhere.

Making this book was obviously a labour of love and reading it really was too. I don't understand why they couldn't transfer this labour into the electronic edition.

View all my reviews

Ebook: The Crooked Man by Charles Beaumont

Download ebook (MOBI file for Amazon's Kindle) here or here.

Charles Beaumont’s “Black Country” was selected as the first short story ever to be featured in Playboy, but it was his “The Crooked Man” that drew the most attention. The story inverted the era’s rampant homophobia by chronicling the unjust plight of a straight man trying to escape detection and persecution in a society where being gay was the standard. Although the story was originally rejected by Esquire, Playboy agreed to publish it in 1955′s August issue despite an angry outcry from readers, to which Hugh Hefner later responded: “If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too.”

I'm selling a book!

The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland is available for purchase on the Amazon Kindle store, you can get it here. 

I've been working on publishing a few gay themed books for the Kindle lately and I had in the back of my mind that it would be nice if these books could find a wider audience.

There is so many questions around copyright, what is in the public domain and legal for me to distribute, that I never really bothered.

I found this great article, How do I find out whether the book is in the public domain? In the United States, copyright keeps getting extended due to Walt Disney, but in other countries the copyright expires 50 years after the death of the author.

Rodney Garland's real name is Adam De Hegedus and he died in 1958. As this work was not created in the United States and the author has been dead for more than 50 years, his work entered the Canadian public domain in 2009.  Amazon lets you publish works in the public domain providing you're the first to do so, which I was.  So I set the permissions to only be available for purchase in countries where the copyright is life +50 years and I am now selling the book on Amazon. 

The status is right now at "publishing" and it says the book will be available within the next 12 hours, ASIN # B0095IRZHY.

If this works out, I'll try another Garland book.  There's so few that fall into these narrow requirements....

I tried first submitting the book to Project Gutenberg Canada but their requirements for submission are beyond belief.  We're talking days of work to get the book to their standards.   I have no idea how they get any submissions.  We're talking putting the page numbers back in, noting how each page ends, whether with a period or the continuation of the paragraph, entering HTML code for Italics and bold, removing line indents, inserting line breaks after 70 characters, changing Em-dash's to --, etc.