by john | Apr 6, 2011 | Poker
Best Books About Poker
Lots of poker fans love to read about the game but of the thousands of poker books on the market, 95% of them deal solely with things like poker strategy and the mechanics of the game. While everyone would love to know the optimal way to play pocket jacks from early position, it doesn’t exactly make for gripping reading, especially if you’re a more casual fan of the game (or buying a present for a poker playing friend or family member). Below you’ll find some of the best books about poker that take a broader, more writerly approach to the game and include a lot of the fascinating history that makes poker such an interesting game.
“The Biggest Game in Town” by Al Alvarez is one of the most compelling books about poker, coming from a writer that’s well-known in literary circles. Alvarez deals with poker before the online boom of the early 2000s, weaving together a variety of amazing stories, anecdotes, and interviews with poker players in the early 1980s as they made their way to Las Vegas to take on the world’s biggest poker games. Be forewarned, though, that Alvarez deals with an older generation of poker players (such as Doyle Brunson, Stu Ungar, Johnny Moss, and Nick the Greek), so you’re not going to find any ink spilled on players that weren’t even born in 1983 such as Tom Dwan or Viktor Blom.
Anthony Holden’s “Big Deal’ is another amazing poker book, which chronicles Holden’s attempt to make a go of it on the professional poker circuit for a year from 1988-1989. His book deals much more with the psychological and emotional toll that poker can exact, with players chasing a big score that often remains just out of reach. While it’s very much about poker it also appeals in a broader sense to anyone who’s found themselves chasing a dream that takes them farther and farther away from the people they care the most about in their lives — a plight that many poker players face each and every day.
Jim McManus has contributed two excellent poker books to the canon: “Posititively Fifth Street” and “Cowboys Full: the Story of Poker”. “Positively Fifth Street” includes personal poker action from McManus’ deep run in the in the 2000 WSOP Main Event, with the backdrop of the murder trial of Ted Binion (which is the story he was originally sent to Vegas to cover). “Cowboys Full” is a more historical piece on the evolution of the game of poker over the years, from its humble beginnings to the poker boom fueled by online poker rooms that has seen it grow into a multi-billion dollar global industry.
This has been a sponsored post.
by john | Apr 4, 2011 | Writing
I’ve got a few posts percolating, but here’s a quickie for a Monday morning. Hard Day’s Knight has gotten a great review over on Grace Krispy’s MotherLode Blog. She enjoyed the book, and lodges some valid critiques about character development and editing. Editing is something that all self-pubbed (indie) authors struggle with, and I’m grateful that for the most part people give me at least a partial pass on a few typos. I try as hard as I can to weed them all out, and use beta readers and freelance editors to try and get the ones that I didn’t see, but some slip through the cracks nonetheless.
I’m not making excuses (yeah, I know I really am) because the ultimate goal is as error-free a product as can be produced, but for me typos are something that are going to fall below writing new material and promoting existing material, at least as long as I’m a one-man band. Once I get to the point where I can hire an assistant to handle some of those things, I’ll be doing everything myself, and thanking all that is holy for Richard Brodie every time I see the red squiggly line (inside joke, I’ll explain it over a drink if you care that much). And frankly, it’s hard and I’m pretty lazy by nature, so I appreciate the folks that read the books and enjoy them anyway, and I’ll take my lumps for the typos that slip past me and my editors.
But let’s be real clear – it’s not just a self-pub issue. I had real problems with a legacy publishing book a few months ago because there was a consistent homonym error. Not once, but every time the word was used, the incorrect homonym was chosen. I don’t remember the book, and I don’t remember the specific words, but it was something as basic as “through” instead of “threw.” And I remember how it jarred me out of the world of the book (and also made me a little schadenfreude – esque to see a major publishing house miss one, too. So I try to weed all the typos out of my work, because I know it’s important to keeping my readers in the world of the book and not disrupt the flow of the story. And thanks to all the readers and critics who cut me a little slack (just a little) for being stuck in a one-person enterprise.
On the promo and contest front – the winner of the Kindle/Nook/Gift Card will be announced this week!
Also on the promo tip I’ll be running a blog tour coming up in the near future, so there will be more coming on that soon.
And I’ve actually gotten rolling on Knight Moves, Book 3 of the Black Knight Chronicles. I’m only at a bout 3,000 words, but I’ve plotted most of it out, as well as a rough story arc for Books 4 & 5, so I should be able to get the first five books out by the end of next year!
Sales are cooking right along for April, so thanks for all the support, I appreciate it!
by john | Apr 1, 2011 | Writing
To say that things picked up a little in March with regards to books sales would be a pretty significant understatement. I’m happy to say that my revenue rebounded from a dismal February, and that I blew through all hopes of my ebook sales for the month.
February was a good ebook sales month, seeing 88 total units sold, but a terrible revenue month, barely breaking $100 for the month overall. There are a couple of reasons for this – I dropped the price of Hard Day’s Knight to .99 halfway through the month, and I did no personal appearances/signings/cons during the month.
So in March I had high hopes for a 20% increase in units sold, which would be 106 ebooks (these are all Amazon-only numbers, because so far my sales on all other ebook sites are negligible). I chugged along through the month, steadily selling a couple of books each day, and when we got into last week I felt pretty good about my chances of getting there. My revenue also increased pretty strongly because I did a few trade shows and friends from the lighting world bought a few copies off me at those shows (I actually sold 16 books at the two shows, and two more at the Charlotte ComiCon, so 18 books sold face to face in a month is pretty damn good for me).
Then this week happened. And I have no idea what happened, but somewhere a switch got flipped and books started to sell. I had a strong sales night last Sunday night, with 4-5 overnight sales, and then proceeded to average about 10 sales per day for the rest of the week. Now these aren’t Joe Konrath numbers by any stretch, but they resulted in a whopping 43% increase in sales from month to month! That also equated to a minimum of $315 total revenue for the month, the first time I’ve cracked the $300 mark in a single month. I don’t expect for every month to be this good, but I would like to hope that I can get steady growth from month to month. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, according to everyone who sells more books than I do.
So I got started last night working on Book 3 of Black Knight Chronicles, with a hopeful release date of June (yeah, I can do that – write a book in April and release it in June – one of the nice freedoms of being indie). Because the best way for me to keep sales increasing is to keep adding to the list of stuff I have for sale. So there’s my quick update on March, sales like a lion, let’s hope April continues the upward trend!
by john | Mar 30, 2011 | Poetry, Writing
As we pull into the last couple of days of March (just a few hours left to enter my contest for a Kindle!), National Poetry Month is looming on the horizon. To celebrate said celebration, I’m going to participate in Kells’ Poetry Book Giveaway! All you have to do is comment here to enter, and you’re entered! One lucky winner will win a copy of Rhett Iseman Trull’s amazing book, The Real Warnings. The consolation prize will be a copy of my book, Red Dirt Boy, signed by the redneck himself!
Yes, I know the link is to the ebook, but you are registering to win analog editions of both books!
I saw Rhett Iseman Trull read selections from this book last year at an event at the Green Rice Gallery, and it’s simply one of the best books of poetry I’ve ever read. I laughed, I cried, I was in awe of the poems this woman crafted. I liked it so much I quit writing poetry for a month or two because I felt like I couldn’t touch the quality that she nailed in this book. Don’t worry, eventually my ego rose back to the surface and I resumed writing. But I still love the book and think everyone should have one, so leave a comment and you might just get one!
Red Dirt Boy is my second collection of poetry for people who think poetry is for wussies. There’s laughing, shooting, drinking, strippers and even a little dancing scattered through the pages, and I’ll be happy to autograph it for whoever wins. I might even spill a little moonshine on it just to complete the package! So leave a comment, and win a book!
by john | Mar 29, 2011 | Book Spotlight, Writing
So I’ll admit to crushing a little on Kalayna Price just off of her author’s pic. But seriously, go here and tell me she’s not just cute as all get out. I dare you. Then I met her at RoundCon, and found out that she’s just as nice, engaging and smart as she is cute and fashionable (there’s a post coming about convention/signing wear, the writer’s costume and all that, but I think I have to finish formulating my opinion before I can write it. Not that having a half-baked opinion has ever stopped me from writing anything.). Then I got my paws on an electronic copy of Grave Witch, her first Alex Craft novel, and damn if she isn’t the trifecta – gorgeous, nice and a hell of a writer, too!
I only have the ridiculously good-looking and talented parts covered, personally. I’m not really that nice, so I only get two out of three. Oh well, just imagine how insufferable I’d be if I were any cooler? But I digress. Again.
Grave Witch is a novel about Alex Craft, and she sees dead people. More to the point she’s a private investigator that can raise ghosts (shades in the world of the book, as ghosts are different, but world-building isn’t my gig). Alex is a great character in that she’s struggling – she doesn’t have her crap together by any stretch, and I love that real weakness in a character. Alex is broke, has a crap car, is estranged from her family, and doesn’t have a boyfriend. Except for Death, who keeps dropping by and looks better in a pair of jeans than a force of nature really has any right to.
I found Grave Witch to be a quick read, engaging from start to finish, with a good foundation for sequels (one’s coming later this year, as a matter of fact). I cared about the characters and wanted to see more of them, which is great for a first book in a series. I thought Kalayna built an interesting world, with some neat twists on our own society, but still similar enough to our reality to be really familiar. I happily paid the publisher’s retail on the ebook, even though I usually balk at paying more than $5 for a digital edition, and I’ll buy the others as soon as they’re available, too.
So here’s a raging debate in the ebook world – pricing. What’s fair for an ebook? I paid $6.99 for Grave Witch, and just bought Neil Gaiman’s American Gods today for $9.99. Those are pretty steep prices for a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, but certainly not significantly more than I’m accustomed to paying for an album of a dozen songs. So what’s fair? Neil Gaiman will get maybe $2 out of the ten I spent, and Kalayna got maybe $1.50 off her book. When I sell an ebook for $2.99, I get $2.05, but am I still selling too cheap? After all, I don’t write for art, I write to get paid. I know, I’m supposed to love my work and suffer for it, but I’ve got twenty years of theatrical suffering under my belt, I don’t need any more.
I think $5 is a reasonable price for a novel, and it should stay in the “impulse buy” category. So April 1 I’ll be raising the price of my $2.99 novels to $4.95, as an experiment. So if you’ve been planning to buy The Chosen or Back in Black, you should do so before Friday, or you’ll pay more (not that I have a problem with that).
On a related but different note, what do you think about combo packs? A paperback book packaged with a promo card for a free download. Any interest? How about being able to buy a postcard at a book show with a promo code for a download? That way you can still get something signed by the author if you’re into that, but you can stay all-digital in your reading habits. That was something Bobby and I were chatting about at the con last weekend.
