"Desperate Deliveries" Paperback

[OndinePLC]

"Desperate Deliveries" Paperback Edition now available.

For those of you who are not e-literate or prefer the crinkle of the page to the glow of the LCD my latest book "DESPERATE DELIVERIES" is now available on Amazon as a PAPERBACK as well as an ebook. It includes 21 full colour photographs.

"Desperate Deliveries" is a true adventure story of boat deliveries and Venezuela, a sort of sequel or continuation of my previous ebooks "A Small Slip" (which will also be available in paperback shortly) and "Malandro" by Kay Vyner

By the way, I get less than $2 of the price per book, Jeff Besos and his crew get the rest. Fair enough, the upkeep and polishing of his boat costs more than mine and he uses it a lot less.
AussieNorman after reading a draft of the book while weathering Hurricane Ophelia in Cork October 2017 wrote:

hurricane gone but stillnasty weatherlhowling wind halyard slap cold trying to stop all the racket.
read finally your book,brian and his wife and danny all sat in the companion way n complained about the boat leaning over too far,50 degrees they told me was too much,so i;d let a little more sail out,trip from sxm to plo 47 hours,most of brians sailing experience.really enjoyed the story.
hoping to get on my way by the end of the month.
the waves coming thru the entrance were incredible,they claimed over 20ft n 105 kts of wind,i was down behind the ridge n registered 49.4 kts max no power for afew days n the roads blocked,trees etc,but last cupla nights in the 40s,looks like i;ll have a bash down to madiera

See also the kind comments of Jtsailjt on A Small Slip in this post:
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...ml#post2550116 (the last post in this thread).

The Amazon product code of the book is dp/B07BP7Y2V8 and if that doesn't work then go to your local Amazon page, select the "books" category in the search box, and search for: *Desperate Deliveries by Cris Robinson*.
A Small Slip is dp/B006ICIJW0

If you like them please give them reviews on their Kindle page!
Enjoy the books and thank you all for your support. I don't make money writing books but I make a lot of friends and that makes the effort worthwhile.

[djmarchand]

Based on this post I downloaded A Small Slip to start the series. It was free for Kindle Unlimited members and $3.00 for others. BTW if Amazon pays you $2.00 for purchased books (a fair part of the $3.00 total) what do they pay you for Kindle Unlimited purchases?


David

[OndinePLC]

Originally Posted by djmarchand

Based on this post I downloaded A Small Slip to start the series. It was free for Kindle Unlimited members and $3.00 for others. BTW if Amazon pays you $2.00 for purchased books (a fair part of the $3.00 total) what do they pay you for Kindle Unlimited purchases?


David

Short answer: I don't know - yet.


Amazon puts up a monthly sum ($22.4 million in June) which is divided proportionally amongst all the authors read on Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Lending Library according to the number of (normalised) pages read of their books that month.


I think you are the first to get my book this way. I see on my reports that you have read 30 normalised pages on 25 July. However I have no idea what the total number of pages read from all authors is. I will get the payment next month (thankyou) and let you know.


I think Kindle Unlimited is a good way for voracious readers to get books, and for authors to get more readers, which is the most important goal IMO.
However it´s a little scary to think that Amazon is tracking every page you read!

[djmarchand]

Thanks for your reply. I hope I am not hijacking this thread, and I promise to post a review of A Small Slip when I finish, later today I hope- so far pretty good!

$22 million to share in June, hmm. My Kindle Unlimited readership won't show up until July's share is apportioned and I look forward to seeing your numbers. Hope it is close to $2.00 per book, buy maybe not.

I download about a dozen Kindle Unlimited books each month and probably read 2/3 through to the end. Membership costs $10/mo so my membership fee pays Amazon about $1.00 per book, so if I am typical and I suspect I am not, then it would be hard for them to pay the authors $2.00/book.

FWIW I have also started borrowing Kindle books through our local library, which makes it surprisingly easy and fully integrates with Amazon's content management function.

David

[djmarchand]

Well I just finished A Small Slip, Cris' first book of two in the series. Cris is a very good writer and he made the story of his five years of owning and running a Venezuelan boat yard entertaining. His experiences will resonate with anyone who has had work done on their boat.

He had to learn fast how to run the yard as the first half dozen or so haulouts (slipping he calls them) were disasters. His yard uses an inclined railway and getting the boat positioned on the car under the yacht is tricky and his first attempts didn't go particularly well. I can relate as some years ago I had my Mainship 34T hauled with an elevator platform and railway system (in Long Beach, Ca no less) and the mis-positioned car bent my sand shoe and prop shaft when the operator ignored Mainship's marked lift points. Well he repaired the damage just like my yard repaired mine and all was good.

The story is a combination of yard experiences and life experiences for Cris and his family living on an island not far from a bustling port city- Isla de Plata near Puerta la Cruz, Venezuela.

The story has a somewhat unhappy ending as the Venezuelan authorities finally tear down his house and yard to make way for a national park after a fruitless legal battle with the authorities. That part of the story was a bit tedious and he could have easily boiled it down to a dozen pages.

I did enjoy the periodic (roughly yearly- 1984-1990) updates on the political and economic situation in Venezuela. Nothing has changed in twenty five years: the country is as corrupt and mismanaged as ever and totally dependent on oil prices and export revenues for its existence.


David

[jtsailjt]

I've read "A Small Slip" and "Desperate Deliveries" on my kindle and enjoyed both immensely! Cris is "one of us," a real boater with vast boating experience, and has a very good ability to roll with life's punches and to see the humor in some pretty "desperate" circumstances, and he's also an excellent story teller. I found both books to be very entertaining and informative.

While both books are primarily about his experiences with other boaters and boats and dealing with many unusual situations from getting shipwrecked to dealing with unique, interesting and unsavory characters (boat owners and neighbors and overzealous police/bureaucrats) to many situations that could never be anticipated as he attempted to rebuild a run down boatyard over many years, they both also include elements of the evolving political situation in Venezuela over the last 25 years from the perspective of someone who actually lived through it and had to deal with it in their everyday life. I initially chose to read the books because they were about boats and boating but also enjoyed gaining a bit of the insiders perspective of what's "really" been going on in Venezuela. Because he's a fellow boater and is writing about his personal experiences, he's a source that I trust much more than what I see on TV or read in newspapers and his books made me want to learn even more about the situation in Venezuela and understand how this beautiful and once prosperous country got the where it is now. Chavez certainly was a big part of their downfall but the corruption didn't begin or end with him.

I can highly recommend both of Cris books. He's a real boater first who has embraced a rather unusual path in his life rather than an author first so his books have the ring of truth about them. I can't imagine anyone not finding them to be very entertaining and you'll learn a few things about boats and boaters and how deliveries really can be along the way as well. As I mentioned above, you'll also learn a bit of what's been going on in the country of Venezuela and I found this to be a bonus that piqued my interest in that subject as well. Buy them both, and enjoy, as I did!

[Aussienorm]

Hi,enjoyed reading desperate deliveries,read it in crosshaven ireland just after I had a hernia operation.
Almost had to go back for surgery from laughing so hard.
Whens the next story coming out?
Cheers.norm bimrose sy pawnee

[hellosailor]

Ondine-
Kindle is what is traditionally called a "vanity press". That is, when you can't get a regular publisher to pay up front, print the book, warehouse it, distribute it, publicize it, take back unsold copies, and then pay you something out of any profits that may be left or contracted, you go to a vanity press and YOU PAY THEM up front for the entire publication process. Then you are free to sell them, if you can, and keep all the profits.

The wonderful thing about Kindle is that anyone can throw spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks. You don't have to pay them significant upfront money, like other vanity presses. The incredibly BAD thing about Kindle, is "garbage in garbage out". Many of the works are poorly edited, full of typos, and sometimes obviously OCR scanned with more hilarious (not) production errors. Amazon really needs to offer copywriting, proofreading, and production skills to authors, perhaps even to mandate them in order to keep from letting the sloppy stuff detract from the entire Kindle name.

And of course, some offers sell their ebooks directly online, or contract with self-publishers and send out printed volumes themselves. Amazon takes a slice, to be sure, but after all, they are doing something (ergh, something minimal) for the authors. Among other things, applying rudimentary copy protection so the work can't just be passed around from one person to the next.

Not always a bad deal. If you get lucky, sometimes real publishers have even picked up authors from Amazon.

[OndinePLC]

I don´t agree that Kindle is a Vanity Publisher. I think it is a disruptor which has probably put most vanity publishers out of business. They charged you large sums of money to print limited runs of your book, but now on Kindle you can publish them without paying any up-front money at all. Anyway It doesn't make sense to Vanity Publish an ebook, you can just send it to your friends and family as a PDF or whatever.



Kindle does offer its authors editing and other services if they want to use (and pay for) them. Also it allows you to correct your book content on line at any time, both for ebooks and print on demand paperbacks, something conventional published books can´t do. So readers please notify authors of any errors they find and thus help to improve their products.


Conventional publishers are looking for best sellers and don´t like taking risks. George Orwell was turned down by four publishers before he found one willing to publish Animal Farm.


They prefer young authors who are likely to write a series of books rather than old codgers who might die before they get a second book written. They like well worn themes involving bodice ripping and serial killing and the inflated trivialities of celebrities. rather than themes of limited interest such as true sailing stories. They used to control what you could read.


Kindle and other ebook providers have disrupted that model to the benefit of writers who have more opportunities to publish and readers who have more choice of material to read. Naturally this means they publish a lot of junk, but you don´t have to read it. To help you choose you get a much more extensive preview of the book than you would with a preprinted paperback and a reader rating qualification (though this is prone to manipulation).


I price my books around $3 so if a buyer doesn't like it they haven´t lost much. I would be quite happy to return the money to a disgruntled reader if it were logistically possible.


A low budget cruiser can buy a Kindle Fire for less than $50, fill it with a thousand ebooks and have literary fodder for a long voyage, instead of carrying bulky boxes of mouldy paperbacks. It's a pity he can't put OpenCPN on it as well!


I posted a thread a while back suggesting a CF forum containing a wiki catalogue of sailing related ebook links. This would help e-literate C-effers to sort the gold from the dross and let them grade and review relevant ebooks. One of these days when I have some time and a half-way decent connection I will put together a mustard seed starter list.


If you don´t beat me to it!

[hellosailor]

Oh, the disruptor and pricing are absolutely great, to be sure. Although, the Kindle software is so incredibly crude that it horridly mangles anything that might pass off as good typography, as compared to a PostScript device. I'm sure that was an intentional choice years ago, so they could use less processing power on the devices. But it makes a lot of Kindle stuff just butt ugly, even when it is from a big-name author and a real publishing house.

If Kindle is offering all those extra services now (they didn't always, I've read their guides but not recently) then I'd still only agree that *sometimes* it is more than a vanity house. There's still a lot of stuff that looks like the same thousand monkeys that accidentally pounded keys until they duplicated Shakespeare, were doing the input. Stuff that no one even runs a spell chequer [sic] on.

I'd expect Amazon, as a "publishing house" to at least promote SOME professional standards on Kindle but in reality? Anyone can throw anything up there and I don't think they make any attempts beyond culling jihad and porn.

[StuM]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

I don't think they make any attempts beyond culling jihad and porn.

Culling pr*n ? Shirley, you jest.



Being a cheap b*st*d, I periodically do a search on Kindle for "free books". Half of the offerings are at least soft pr*n and there's plenty of hard core there as well.

[belizesailor]

Originally Posted by OndinePLC

..

A low budget cruiser can buy a Kindle Fire for less than $50, fill it with a thousand ebooks and have literary fodder for a long voyage, instead of carrying bulky boxes of mouldy paperbacks. It's a pity he can't put OpenCPN on it as well!


...

Originally Posted by hellosailor

Oh, the disruptor and pricing are absolutely great, to be sure. Although, the Kindle software is so incredibly crude that it horridly mangles anything that might pass off as good typography, as compared to a PostScript device. I'm sure that was an intentional choice years ago, so they could use less processing power on the devices. But it makes a lot of Kindle stuff just butt ugly, even when it is from a big-name author and a real publishing house.

...

For a bit more cash even a budget cruiser could upgrade to a tablet and put both OpenCPN (though the Android version is limited) and the Kindle reader on a tablet. The Kindle reader for Android is WAY better than the native Kindle device (color, better navigation...).

I run both on a Samsung S3 (9.5" screen)

There is the vanity aspect to Kindle and lots of junk, but there are also serious authors on there too and some great content...u just have to weed them out. Kindle Unlimited offers virtual library like services where you can check out a few titles at a time.

One amazing thing about publishing on Amazon is that you instantly have access to global markets.

The ability to easily turn your ebook into a paper back is pretty cool too.

[OndinePLC]

[QUOTE=belizesailor;2685904]For a bit more cash even a budget cruiser could upgrade to a tablet and put both OpenCPN (though the Android version is limited) and the Kindle reader on a tablet. The Kindle reader for Android is WAY better than the native Kindle device (color, better navigation...).]


To be clear I am not pushing the Kindle Fire for Cruisers, there are many better tablet options as various threads on the theme have already discussed, I only mention it as an example of how cheap it can be to read ebooks.


The Fire is cheap for a reason of course, Amazon uses it to aggressively advertise and push its books and other products.


There are many great ebooks available free; for example the selection of great classics from Project Gutenberg. The Fire tries to obstruct access to non-Amazon sources but there are ways round this. One is to download the books to a PC or laptop and then use the "Send to Kindle" app.


I use this method to put free Cruisers Guides on the Fire as well as books.


At sea I use OpenCPN both on my laptop (below) and Android phone (at the helm), but I believe you can't have too many independent plotting or at least location devices on board.
I learnt this the hard way as readers of Desperate Deliveries will know!