Page Turner

"Here I am
On the road again
There I am
Up on the stage
Ah, here I go
Playin' star again
There I go
Turn the page"

"Turn the Page," Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band, Back In '72, (1973)

The risks attendant to letting someone read what you write? They are honest when you ask, "How'd you like it?" Actual answers:

"I hated one of your characters. I know you wanted me to like him, but he's an asshole."

"Real cops don't talk like that."

"It feels like two different people wrote this book."

"It was professionally written, but not for me."

Fair enough. But, I'm not sure what to do with information I received recently, a sort of metric that amounts to a review. 

Each morning, when I get up and go on line (mostly me and one of the dogs... One of the dogs and I are the only ones awake) I check my author dashboard on Amazon, to see what's cookin'. The other day... One page, zero dollars earned.

One page.

Technically... I made $.004. That is added to the monthly total, and gets paid out on the 19th of (almost) every month. But, that's really not the problem. Apparently, unlike potato chips, The Fort in the Harbor did not represent, at least to this reader, that ultimate compliment - "A real page-turner." One page?!

Because this method of author compensation relies on the Kindle version, let's look at what KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) believes is page one of Fort. It's the title page! Are they telling me someone stopped reading Fort after only the title page?!

Okay, so maybe it was someone who was in the middle of the book. Or, like a reader recently reported, they had one page left to be finished with one of my novels. But, one page?!

I do get it. Our kids are all themselves parents. They report reading the same page of a book multiple times due to kid/pet interruptions. Pet owners - I recently calculated that we've opened the back door to our house over 80 thousand times since we closed on this house in 2010. That doesn't include breaking up dog disagreements, rescuing lunch from counter-surfing Water Dogs (not always successful) and hustling geriatric pets into the backyard before they "have an accident."

But... One page? At least, before you set down the reading device, brush to the next page. Then I get $.008. And that shit adds up.

Oh, yeah. One of my books actually was written by two different writers. I wrote the rough draft in the middle 2000s, and revised the second half of the book extensively in 2020. In a sense, I was a different, and I hope better, writer when I finished the final product fifteen years after I started.

Cheers!