The Amazon Pimpage I Haven't Done for a While

Nobody ever clicks on these, so I post them partially for my own amusement and partially to make it look like I have more content here. Well, actually, since it's been months since I did this, I should probably say those used to be my reasons. Now, I'm just doing it to clear some things out of my in-box and feel like I'm accomplishing something this evening.

First, Amazon suspects that some of you may be going back to school yourselves, or that you have little varmints underfoot that will be doing so -- for them, Amazon has created a banner! (That 75% of half-smart Internet users have already blocked.)

Shop Amazon Back to School Shop

If the school you or your wallet will be attending has "college" or "university" as part of its name, this alternate banner might be more apropos:

Shop Amazon Back to School

Second, Amazon thinks that there are some people out there who will be buying a lot of new jewelry because it's summer. I don't know who those people are, but, if you're one of them, here's a banner:

Shop Amazon Jewelry - New Earrings for Summer

And then, Amazon tries hard to make their customers happy, which means that they probably get a lot of returns, which is the reason I think there's a big Deep Discounts on Open-Box and Used Products thing going on now. And this is the banner:

Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals - Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Products

I also had banners for summer clothes, but the dude in the ad was just so obnoxiously board-shorted and dudely that I can't stomach putting him here for the two of you who haven't learned how to block ads yet. But there's plenty of other stuff to buy at Amazon, believe you me. They'll take over all world commerce if you don't watch out.

And Last, without any banners, if you want to shop or buy anything from that hegemonic Internet retailer, here's a link for you. It'll divert a tiny piece of what you would have paid anyway into my pocket, which I appreciate.

Ve Haff Vays Uf Making You Buy Kindles!

Now, I've been known to pick on Amazon for being a sharp-elbowed company, but not even I would say something so inflammatory as that they used neo-Nazis as guards in Germany to intimidate foreign workers.

Oh, wait -- it's true?!

If you want to support Amazon in this difficult time, the best way to do so, of course, is to buy something.

Manix Abrera's 12 Now Available as an E-Book!

Hey, remember when I gushed over Manix Abrera's wonderful wordless graphic story collection, 12?

(I'll wait until you go back and re-read that review.)

Well, you're all now in luck, because 12 is finally available as an e-book, through the global online selling behemoth that you expected.

I still want to see that book actually published, as ink on paper, on my side of the Pacific -- partially because I need to get a new copy of it myself, after the flood -- but that might come, eventually.

Shameless Shilling

I've got two problems right now -- well, I'm sure I've got more than two problems, but these are the two I want to talk about -- that I've got too many e-mails cluttering up my in-box and that I feel guilty for not posting much here lately.

I can fix both of those problems in a half-assed way, though, and I'm about to do it. You see, a lot of those e-mails are wheedling notes from Amazon, which really wants me to help them sell more stuff. And this very blog is a place I could use to try to get people to spend money!

Of course, my timing -- deep into the evening on the day before Thanksgiving -- isn't as good as it could be, but isn't Black Friday coming up? Aren't we all supposed to spend massive amounts and save the economy? I think so! And so here are some things you might want to spend those massive amounts of money on:

Plug the First: Amazon has a store for Black Friday Week -- and blame them for turning a day into a week, not me -- which will have offers and deals and other ways to separate you from your cash through the 26th.

Have a banner for that as well -- which I expect most of you will have already ad-blocked:


Plug Numer-o Secundo: Amazon also owns a site called MyHabit -- I know, I'd never heard of it, either -- which it describes as a "private sale site offering up to 60% off hand-picked selections from fashion designer and boutique brands". It seems to require a sign-up, but that's free, and uses your Amazon ID. (So, if anyone tries to sell this as "exclusive," feel free to laugh in their faces.) But, if you like to wear nice stuff (or give it as gifts), it's definitely something to check out.

Plugus Tertius: There's also a certain new reading device out -- it's been kept pretty hush-hush, so you might not have heard of it -- called the Kindle Fire. You probably know by now if you want one, but, just in case, hit that link or the below banner to check it out, and continue to foster the mono-culturization of the American literary marketplace.



And that's it, actually; I had many Amazon e-mails, but they were all reminders to try to sell those three things (and related stuff; the holiday marketing engine is clearly working its way up, and will be in full force within a week).

So all that's left is for me to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving -- belated if you're in Canada, and somewhat besides the point if you live the rest of the world, but heartfelt nevertheless, since my favorite holiday is the one where you get a four-day weekend just for showing up and eating a big meal -- and that you do only as much shopping as you want to in the days afterwards, finding things you wanted and things you didn't expect at excellent prices and with the minimum of fuss.

Innovations and Innovations

So Amazon has a new Kindle reader for the web, which is nifty, and as part of that roll-out, they're also allowing first-chapter previews to be embedded on any webpage, which is doubly nifty.

Since I'm going to be encouraging my authors to use this, I figured I'd better test it out myself.

So here's a preview of one of my books, shipping this month, on a topic that's (I hope) of much wider interest than a lot of my controllership and fraud books. Let's see if this works as advertised. (Just click on the "full screen" icon to read it comfortably.)

(By the way, the book this chapter is from -- I really should tell you that, shouldn't I? -- is The Innovation Playbook by Nicholas J. Webb.)

Random Things Amazon Would Like You to Buy

I know, intellectually, that it's silly to keep my e-mails from "Amazon.com Associates Program" unread in my e-mail inbox, as they stack up well past the time when the offers and sales in them would be useful to anyone, and then spew them forth in a torrent. But, for whatever bizarre psychological reasons, it feels worse to get rid of them without linking, no matter how old they are.

So, here are some things that you might have been interested in buying over the past six weeks, conveniently organized chronologically by the precise moment you stopped caring:

Item the First: Amazon does a bigger and bigger business with textbooks every semester, and they had a big push in early August for their Textbook Store this time around. But, if you were going back to college this fall, you're probably there by now. Here, have a banner:



Item the Second: Amazon also had a big promotion for Summer TV, including this neat-o, kean-o banner about some ABC shows:

As you might have noticed, under most definitions, it is no longer "Summer" in North America. Oops. Well, you can still get video on demand from Amazon, if the free stuff coming over the airwaves doesn't suit you.


Item the Third: Like so many other shameless organizations, Amazon wants to create Best-of-the-Year lists even at times when a year has not actually ended. Why they thought mid-August was a great time for a list of the Best Books of 2010 so far is beside me, but they did.

And, of course, they have banners for books as well:



Item the Fourth: Amazon is intent on dominating all commerce of all kinds worldwide -- or at least that's the only plausible reason why they'd be so eager for schmoes like me to promote their store for watches. Look, there's a banner for this one, too!



Item the Fifth: For last-minute back to school stuff -- if you're in one of the three school systems nationwide that haven't yet started school, possibly due to sinkholes swallowing all of your buildings and a dearth of trailers available to be rented -- Amazon would like to suggest giving children gift cards instead of directly buying them protractors and crayons and black-and-white notebooks, because we know that children will instinctively buy the products they most need when given cash without strings.

And, inevitably, there is a banner for this as well:



Item the Sixth: Hey, I told you I'd been letting these stack up for a while! If you're still reading, you have only yourself to blame.

Amazon Wireless is their latest bit of empire-building, a website designed to drag perfectly happy consumers away from their current cell-phone plans and providers into the gravity of Amazon's massive maw. Or maybe it's a great site that allows consumers to compare phones to phones and carriers to carriers. How would I know? I've got a cheapie pay-as-you-go phone, so clearly I'm stuck in 1999 when it comes to mobile awesomeness.

And, to conclude, all I can say is: have another damn banner.

Hawking Non-Available Kindles

So you've probably heard by now that Amazon has a new Kindle e-book reader -- thinner, lighter, cheaper, in a soothing grey. You've probably also heard that it's currently sold out -- even though it's not in stock yet.

If you did want to buy it -- I mean, if you wanted to place an order for a thing that the manufacturer won't tell you when they'd be able to ship it to you, which is not very much like "buying" in any universe I'm familiar with -- I urge you to use the above link to do so, since I would thereby get a tiny piece of the money you'll spend on that device, assuming you ever do, when it's in stock, assuming it ever is.

If you're too cheap for a regular Kindle, there's also the Wi-Fi only version, which is even cheaper --- but, sadly, is also sold out.

If you managed to buy a Kindle -- either this fancy-schmancy new one, or one of the previous editions (which seemed so fresh and new at the time, but now look kludgy, old, and oh-so-expensive) -- some time in the past, you may want to buy some stuff to read on it.

And, if you prefer real books instead -- then go to it. Most of them are available for shipping immediately...and wasn't "immediacy" supposed to be the big selling point of e-books, anyway?

Go Back to School!

Yes, it's that time of year again, when you start thinking about going back to school in a few weeks. (Or, for those of you in certain parts of the country -- whatever country that may be -- it's soon after you already did go back to school.)

And going back to school always means one thing: buying lots of required supplies, and then lining them up neatly on the closest desk/table, as you swear to yourself that this is the year that you'll keep it all together, that everything will go perfectly, that you won't lose your pencil sharpener on the second day and your highlighters won't dry out until after finals and the zipper on your oh-so-sweet pencil case will be strong and true all year and That Certain Someone will finally smile at you....

It won't happen, of course. But you can dream. Now is the time for dreaming.

And also for the purchasing of supplies.

If you're going to college, step into Door Number One. If you're still in the required portion of your schooling, there's a lovely Door Number Two for you. And if your schooling days are long over, but you still want to live the dream, Door Number Three will provide you with the monopolistic office software that your employer and mine most likely requires.

The virtual store is open eternally, so there's no waiting. Come and get whatever random list of objects that badly-mimeographed list you clutch in your sweaty paw demands.

Amazon Algebra

Amazon sent out another press release this morning, filled with glowing phrases attributed to Jeff Bezos and a whole slew of numbers carefully chosen so that they don't actually correlate with each other at all. Their clear aim is to show how their sales are growing immensely -- the underlying tone of every single Amazon press release dating back to 1995, though what, precisely, is growing hugely has changed often -- and that they have some big, impressive numbers to throw around.

So I wanted to try to quote some of those Amazon declarations, and put them into equation form, to show what it is we know, and what we don't know.

The full press release is here, for those of you who want to follow along at home.

the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189,"

So the first derivative of K1 (Kindle unit sales), has increased from x to 3x since June 21st. We do not know what K1 was before or afterward, nor what N1 (unit sales of Barnes & Noble's Nook device) is, nor what the similar sales are on any other e-reading device.

One month ago, Apple announced that they had sold 3 million iPads in three months. One may postulate that K1 has not yet reached this milestone -- because, if so, Amazon would mostly likely have said so -- but there is no solid data to support that assumption. (Amazon has sold four different physical Kindle units -- original, second generation, DX, and second-generation DX -- since November 19th of 2007, but total unit sales have never been released.)

Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books

K2 (Kindle book units) > B2 (hardcover book units), over an unspecified unit of time.

Note that this implies that K2 is less than B1 (total book units), though that's unproven.

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books.

K2 = 1.43 B2

Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.

No, wait -- K2 = 1.8 B2.

Amazon is clearly not willing to use a moving average to smooth out bumps in their data, and may well have timed this announcement to take advantage of specific bumps. (One possibility: the book business often slows down in the summer, and so Amazon is cherry-picking data to emphasize a recent peak.)

Also, see below -- the "past three months" may be Mar-May.

The Association of American Publishers' latest data reports that e-book sales grew 163 percent in the month of May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Kindle book sales in May and year-to-date through May exceeded those growth rates.

The first derivative of K2 (not to be confused with the first derivative of K1, mentioned above) is larger than 163% for the month of May and 207% for Jan-May, compared to the same period the previous year.

It is unclear how, if at all, this statistic correlates with the "last three months" data above.

On July 6, Hachette announced that James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books.

Kindle is claiming a 76% market share in James Patterson e-books. (My own doubts about whether that Patterson number represents the true ceiling so far of e-book units by a single author still stand, with no further data on either side of the question.)

Amazon, as usual, is throwing around the largest numbers they can mine from their data, salting those numbers with their standard triumphalism, and declaring their obvious victory -- while, at the same time, not actually revealing the most important numbers. (K1, K2, the actual rate of growth of both of them.)

If you're impressed by that, and would like to join the bandwagon now before it leaves you behind, just click on the below banner and you can buy your very own Kindle -- and have your purchase be part of the next round of Amazon Algebra, sometime later this year:

Buy "Back to School" stuff, Get Free Money

Well, it's not money, strictly speaking. It's a credit that you can use to buy further stuff, so it's the equivalent of a gift card. But it's still a decent deal, if you need to go back to school in September anyway.

Here's the deal: Amazon, in their effort to get a greater percentage of the market share of everything, will give you $20 in shiny store credit if you buy $100 of eligible school supplies. Eligible stuff includes pens and paper, staples, scissors, expanding files, glue, and various other things -- and you don't need to pretend that you're going to school to claim this deal, so if you need $100 worth of scissors for your new art installation, then go to town, man.

Here, have a banner. I've got thousands of 'em:

Supersize Your Kindle!

Two days from now, Amazon will release the all-new, super-spiffy, neato-keano, ultra-wonderful and mega-gigantic second generation Kindle DX, as part of its latest salvo in the e-book wars. The new giant-sized Kindle DX comes in at a good hundred dollars cheaper than the launch price of the first edition Kindle DX (though you can grab a 1G DX right now for $359, as Amazon tries to clear out their inventory ahead of the new one [1]).

The new DX comes in a soothing grey, and is still large enough to read a newspaper or magazine on. And its battery life is about as good as you can get from any e-reader -- roughly a week, even with their wireless connectivity on, and longer without it. Amazon is happy to natter on and on about its other wonderful qualities, if you're interested, at the link above -- but I'll stop here. If you want a large-format e-reader, presumably you know that already.

On the other hand, if you're annoyed with slow page turns -- still faster than most human beings turn actual pages, true, but slow as electronic thingies go -- and demand full-color in your large oblong hand-held devices, might I interest you in an iPad?

And, if you're a real curmudgeon -- much like myself -- you may instead want to peruse the selection of old-fashioned print-on-paper books.

But, please, for the love of Mike, buy something. It's so sad to look at my Amazon statistics and see that I've made only 42 cents recently. Remember -- only your frenzied spending can stave off a double-dip recession!


[1] You didn't hear this from me, but, if you really want a 1G Kindle DX cheaply, your best bet is to wait a few days and check out Woot! -- which Amazon just bought -- just after midnight Central time each day. I have no solid knowledge when -- or even if -- it will show up there, but I'd bet money on it.

Buy Some Stuff!

So the economy is teetering on the brink of disaster -- housing sales plummeted last month, as the credit expired, and unemployment is still high and sentiment low. (I'm only talking about the US here; your Euro types have even more trouble with your PIIGS and their insolvencies, and the rest of the world, I'm sure, has its own individual list of woes.) The only thing that can save us all is to spend money.

To help you do your part to save the world economy, here are some baubles and bangles that you might consider acquiring:

Amazon dropped the price of its flagship Kindle book-reading device earlier this week, in the wake of Barnes & Noble doing the same thing with their Nook device. (I'd link to Nook, but B&N doesn't have a kickback scheme that bloggers like me can use, so fooey on them.) You can get a Kindle for only $189 now, and Amazon claims a library of over 600,000 books (and I believe that doesn't even count the free classics and other stuff you can stick on a Kindle) to read on it.

But, you ask, what if I insist on reading old fashioned ink-on-paper, the way God and Gutenberg intended? Then Amazon can still help you out, as long as you're willing to trust their omniscence in gathering what "everyone will be reading this summer" into a Summer Reading Store. Can you afford to be reading a book different from the one all of your friends are? Surely not.

But let's say that you don't like reading books at all -- it's too old-fashioned and 19th century. You want something zippy and modern, something that's entirely digital. Well, Amazon now has a cellphone store called Amazon Wireless where you can get all the fancy new gadgets you'd ever want. (Unless, that is, you want an iPhone, which I haven't been able to find there. Guess those two pushy behemoths Amazon and Apple don't play well together.)

Here, have a banner:


But the most important thing to remember -- whether or not you follow my links, or buy anything from Amazon (ha! as if anyone could avoid buying from Amazon! it's futile!) -- is that the entire world economy is counting on you to spend lots of money to keep itself going. Remember, there are bankers at Goldman Sachs who will only get seven-digit bonuses this year!

Yo, Dude, It's, Like, Totally Real!

Always loathe to see a bandwagon that they can't jump onto, Amazon has thrown itself into the latest media frenzy with its Amazon 3D 101 store, selling all manner of 3D entertainment gewgaws.

(And any reference to the fact that the real world is itself in three dimensions, and so no fancy machinery is required to see, for example, a sunny day in a green field, will be sternly shouted down by the Amazonian sales team.)

Here, have a banner, while I weep for the future of mankind:

Outdoor Fun Can Be Yours -- With Purchase!

Amazon would like it to be known that they are selling Outdoor Fun for the summer. That's right -- they're directly selling fun. No need to purchase objects and experiences and hope that using and experiencing them will create fun -- now you can simply buy fun itself.

I trust we will all rejoice at this amazing leap forward in commerce.

Buy Your Father Power Tools! Avoid Unseemly Displays of Emotion!

Father's Day is coming up -- as I was just reminded by a certain Internet retailing emporium -- and they would greatly appreciate it if you (and, actually, every single person in the whole world) were to buy expensive powered machinery for the fathers and father figures in your life.

To encourage you, they have various discounts and special offers, as well as dedicated pages to such man-centric brands as Gladiator GarageWorks.

They also have instructed me to place the following banner in front of your eyeballs, which they have assured me will inerrantly drive you to buy many expensive items redolent of stereotypical concepts of manhood from their overflowing distribution center:

You know what to do now.
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Listening to: Josh Ritter - Folk Bloodbath
via FoxyTunes

Amazon Lightning Round!

I was away most of this past week, meeting and socializing with my colleagues down in the swamps of Florida, and my e-mail has piled up because of that. Amazon, in particular, has a whole bunch of things that they want me to hector you folks about. So, in case any of these deals look good to any of you -- I don't judge what other people want to buy; I just want my cut of it if at all possible -- here's what I can offer:

For some reason I don't really understand, Amazon's shoes-and-accessories biz runs under the name Endless.com, rather than being yet another random tab on the main store. Right now, there's a big sale on Men's dress shoes, accessories, and watches. They also are all excited about their all-shoes Bridal Guide. And there's a regular page with special deals on Fridays.

They also recently announced that peons like me will now get a kick-back on Kindle books, not just the device. (Which will help eliminate one of the reasons ebooks were annoying me, at least.)

So, I'm not going to tell you that you have to go buy something. But, if you are going to buy something, and you're planning to do so from Amazon, please use somebody's affiliate code (I used to use Locus's code, back in my book-club days, when I ordered a lot of skiffy). It doesn't have to be mine...though, of course, I'd prefer that.

Amazon Deals: Quick-Fire Round!

My Secret Masters have been getting annoyed with me lately; they've sent me many offers that I was supposed to pass on you people, but I've been leaving them for later. But I'm on the verge of attracting unwelcome attention from the Lidless Eye of Seattle, so have some quick links:

1) Need baby stuff? (Need it slightly later than right this second, which is when The Wife and I always needed baby stuff?) You can get free two-day shipping from Amazon if you sign up to subscribe, as well. (Did you ever think, when you were young and fabulous, that you'd ever consider subscribing to diapers? Life is just an endless sequence of unpleasant realizations, isn't it?)

2) Amazon has noticed that Mother's Day is coming up, and, through its vast databases, determined that most of you were not vat-grown, and are likely to have mothers. So they'd like to entice you to buy those mothers gifts from their vast catalog, from which they've excerpted a tastefully curated selection.

3) Speaking of holidays, Earth Day is coming up on Thursday. So any of you hippie types who want to celebrate that -- if you're also the kind of person who celebrates Earth Day by having expensive consumer goods transported across a vast continent by airplane and truck -- will want to go spend money here.

4) If I'd been more organized, I would have pointed out earlier that the Amazonians were offering a get two years for the price of one offer on magazine subscriptions this month. Hey, the month's not over yet, right? And we all love subscribing to magazines through an Internet emporium...don't we?

Please return to your regular activities after conducting whatever commerce you feel is necessary. Remember: only your frenzied and over-extended consumer activities can sustain the world economy and keep us from a devastating "double-dip" recession. No pressure.

Your Semi-Regular Unabashed Commerce Update

My Amazonian overlords have spoken again, and these are the things they wish for me to transmit to you unsuspecting sheep discriminating consumers:

Not content to provide year-ending lists of approved books, Phase Two of the List Program has launched with best books of the month. Use that link at your own risk -- if this idea gets enough traction, can the Best Books of Last Week be far behind?

Hey, did'ja know that Microsoft recently realized that their piles of money weren't high enough? It's true; apparently this winter was so cold in Redmond that they had to burn a few piles of fifties, which means Ballmer's TP supply is running low. But don't worry: they've got a "new" "updated" release of the Office suite of products -- which they've already convinced all of our employers is absolutely necessary to the continuation of Western industrialized society -- and so they'll probably have to open Money Shed #725 for the first time since 1998:



(If there's no banner there, possibly because you ave an ad-blocker installed, you can click here for all the gory details.)

Amazon also sent me an e-mail crowing about how wonderful their Blogger plug-ins are, but I'll spare you the details; when I switched over to the new, Amazon-friendly version of Blogger, the Amazon links worked for approximately forty-eight hours, and then sat there like a lump. In another six months or so, I'll take a gander at it again and see if it's any better, but, for now, it's old-school Blogger for this homey. (Disclaimer: blogger is about as far from being a "homey" as humanly possible.)

Edit: The first banner -- chosen because Amazon's banner-choosing page oddly refuses to actually show me what most of the banners actually looks like -- was humorously inappropriate, so I've replaced it. Let's see what this one looks like in 3,2,1....

Edit 2: Well, that wasn't the banner I wanted either, but I like it anyway (for a reason my co-workers would understand), so I'll move it down here:



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Listening to: The Wonder Stuff - Better Get Ready For A Fist Fight
via FoxyTunes

My New Favorite Amazon Item

It's This Is a Test Product and Nothing Will Be Sent to You. Sadly, it, too has fallen afoul of some corporate infighting, and its buy button is also disabled.

So customers who want a This Is A Test Product must either go to their local Test Product stores -- and we all know that they're few and scattered these days, despite the best efforts of the League of Test Product Stores to rally them -- or chance Amazon's other sellers. As usual, there's a huge discrepancy in price, with new This Is A Test Products going for a mere penny but a collectible This Is A Test Product demanding nearly $10.

I was in the mood to buy some nothing today, and now I can't. Oh, Amazon. Must you take all our buy buttons away?

I Can't Help You Out With Death, But...

It's Income Tax season in the US once again -- and probably other places as well, but I don't know their schedules, and, honestly, don't care all that much -- which means we're all trying to figure out what we owe and how to make that number as low as legally possible.

My first recommendation -- for partially self-serving reasons, which I readily admit -- would be for the fine books and subscription products of the esteemed J.K. Lasser Institute. I'll also note that the flagship of that program, the immense and magisterial J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2010 (a complete line-by-line guide to filing) is also available at practically every bookseller in these United States of ours, both virtual and physical, and is near the front entrance of a whole lot of 'em right now as well.

But, if you're insistent on buying from my Secret Masters, and you're demanding a link to them, and you're not sure you want a book -- such a dirty, tedious, old-fashioned thing as that is, well, then, I have to shrug and point you down the road to Tax Central. (Though you will find Mr. Lasser there as well -- you can't avoid him! You might as well buy all of his books now and get it over with!)

Good luck to you all in tax season -- merry deductions and many happy refunds.
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Listening to: The Mountain Goats - How To Embrace A Swamp Creature
via FoxyTunes