and on that very subject...

Just heard this morning that Northern Ireland MLAs want an extra £10K per year. So wee Sammy Wilson wants to stick ten grand onto his Westminster and Stormont salaries.  The vast majority of the buggers aren't worth £10K pa let alone an extra £10K.  What a bunch of greedy tossers.

just a random thought...

Can anyone explain why, when we go to vote - no matter what country we live in - we manage to elect a frightenlingly high proportion of incompetent, corrupt douchebags, and then expect them actually to give a fuck about more than lining their own pockets?

and then I realised...

Of course - how stupid! Why on earth did I not know that Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk are two completely different entities that do not seem to talk to each other?? So now I have had to create a duplicate of my Amazon.com page on Amazon.co.uk.  But what if I want to write in German? Do I need to construct a third page at Amazon.de? And if I'm Czech or Swedish, is there any hope for me? What a carry on!!!

The sun has gone down and the cloud is back. Maybe it's the lack of summer that's making me more dyspeptic than usual!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAGgggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh - again

Amazon are really amazing.  I have just tried to log in, only to be told that my account does not exist.  But since I can see it with this latest blog, I have to wonder what sort of organisation these yoyos have.  Well, I do know from my dealings with KDP.  Anyhow, since currently I cannot edit this biblio, I add this blog to tell people NOT to follow the link to see 'all of my books', because all but two of the ones listed were written by other people!!! It is just the two currently.

Hey, the sun has come out!

and guess who forgot about the bloody apostrophes???

Oh Dear! It doesn't get any easier. Why  oh why Amazon can't simply change a couple of lines of code instead of makign a major production....

And it is raining again!

My new book on formatting for the Kindle

Finally, after much messing about, I've published my guide to formatting for the Kindle.

Kindling without Tears is available from Amazon (ASIN B005QOWR9C

Hopefully it will help folk, especially with the difficulties of dealing with the crassly stupid Kindle Direct Publishing 'customer support'!

Let me know how it goes!

Best

Brian

Do not use apostrophes

Hi! Amazon do not seem to like apostrophes in your blog feeds, because they kill them by using the ' code instead of  the ' or ’ that normal folk use. Even Wikipedia knows that ' is XML specific and is not supported by most browsers. But there ye are!

Anyhow, this is why the last two feeds from my blog look like they do!

And this is why there are no apostrophes in this short rant!

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh

Rant #2

I've just set up my Amazon author page and linked this blog to it, thinking that it will help widen the publicity for my new novel The Eejit's Tale (Amazon ASIN B005HRSUHQ).

Can you imagine how pissed off I am to find that the blog feed on the Amazon author page has lumps of HTML code showing? And this is not the only case!!

If you want to try a sample of the book and you use a Kindle 3, you'll find that the sample looks like crap with the text and images all over the place.  Amazon unashamedly told me that 'this only affects the Kindle 3', the very piece of kit that samples are supposed to be displayed on.  What about that for marketing??

And if you use a Kindle to shop on the online store, you'll find that the description associated with the book has lumps of HTML in it too, making it a real dog's breakfast.

And the worst thing about this is that these folk obviously don't give a flying fuck! 'Enhanced customer experience' my ass!

Well here we are again on the balcony...

I've called this blog 'Waldorf and Stadler Ride Again', since my good lady wife tells me that I'm getting to be as grumpy and carnaptious as the pair of them put together.

So from time to time I am going to vent as much spleen as I can spare on this blog.  That is, if I am sufficiently pissed off, or cynically motivated, or just want to insult some dickhead or other.

I find my blood pressure raised increasingly by the shit service that companies seem to think we should accept nowadays for the dubious pleasure of access to their products.  So

Rant #1

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Ryanair, British Telecom to name but a few, when are you going to go back to the concept of

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT

as opposed to

Customers will take what we want them to take and if they don't like it, they can fuck off!!

I really would appreciate an answer, although I don't expect one!