American English vs English English V

Round 5

Pacifier vs Dummy

Pray silence for a battle that's bound to end in tears and sleepless nights.

A tried, tested and frankly absolutely marvellous way of keeping a child quiet, is to give it the above.

In the United States, it's a PACIFIER. The word does exactly what it says on the tit. Tin! Tin! It turns a wailing, screaming, yelling child into a quiet, becalmed and delightful little darling.

In the United Kingdom, such a device is referred to as a DUMMY. A dummy nipple/tit if you please. Bit clunky, but you can see where it's come from. But dummy also means fake and a fool, which these wailing kids certainly aren't, for they are getting what they want by screaming their tiny lungs out.

So, by saying what it is without any subsidiary negativity, this round is going to American English.

USA 3.5
UK 1.5

Top Of The Bots - reinstate book downloads carried out by Bots.

Forget official best seller lists.

I wanna know which books are favourites with the web crawling Bots.

This follows on from my previous post, which dealt with Smashwords' decision not count downloads and sample downloads of books requested by Bots.

Crazy, or what? Maybe even a little racist. These Bots know a good book when they see it. It's obvious. Because ever since Smashwords started disregarding the actions of Bots, my downloads have hit the proverbial brick wall.

It's like these poor Bots don't count. How can that be right? These Bots must be scanning millions of books a day. They know how to sort the wheat from the chaff. The Lymons from the lemons.

So let's get their opinions back on the sales radars. Humans and Bots can happily co-exist, with everyone's opinion counting. Surely?

I'm backing the Bots.

American English vs English English IV

Round 4

Fall vs Autumn

Some topicality to the blog at last. The time of year is right for this post. It's a trender for sure.

In the USA, this time of year is called FALL, and you can see why. It's when leaves fall from trees right? And when people fall over when they slip on the fuckers after they've been lying on the ground for ages and gone all mulchy and almost become part of the pavement/sidewalk.

In the UK it's called AUTUMN, and I can't think of a single reason why.

America has this one wrapped up, which is exactly what you need to be doing at this time of year. Brrrrrr.

USA 2.5  UK 1.5

The Day Smashwords Died. It's Off To KDP Select We Go

Mid-August. Height of summer. Something terrible happened.

Smashwords, my favourite publishing platform up until then did something devastating.

They stopped counting ebook downloads carried out by search engines and web-crawling robots.

So my sample downloads fell off a cliff. Shuddered to a halt. Hit a brick wall, the size of a very large brick wall/

I don't know what's worse - the realisation that many sample downloads of my titles were carried out by machines (with great taste in the written word, it has to be said) before the change, or the fact I was getting so few downloads after it.

Either way, it was the day Smashwords died for me.

Fair play to Smashwords, though. They've done this for the right reason, so authors can be more sure that downloads actually equal a human showing an interest, rather than a bot having a laugh. But if I was Smashwords, I'd have left it alone, and let authors like me think our books were doing OK.

But it's happened, and I've had to take action, delisting a lot of my titles and moving them over to Amazon for exclusivity on KDP Select. Let's hope the bots that love my work get busy, and Amazon counts their downloads of my work!