No matter how good the current electric cars on the market are, (Nissan Leaf, Tesla Roadster, Chevy Volt) they still get the same reaction from the general public: too expensive and range limited, a sentiment I share. My next car won’t be electric……….but that could change if it was cheap enough that its EV limitations didn’t matter.

Thats the idea behind ApocalypsEV-1, a concept my brother and I have been working on for some time now – a cheap solar electric car for short commutes and errands. To make the idea even better, we realized that our concept was zombie apocalypse ready. While gasoline and plug in electric cars would quickly become useless as fuel and electricity were shut off, the ApocalypsEV-1 would still be on the road, outrunning zombies and providing post apocalyptic fun.

Our first apocalypse ready car, TWEAK cost about $1k dollars to make (build page here). It was powered by two 1hp electric drills and the battery pack was charged by a rear mounted solar panel. While fun to drive, TWEAK was extremely range limited (<3 miles) and had a top speed of about 10mph on a flat road. Even at that price, it was not very useful.  ApocalypsEV-1 seeks to change that with a 16-25hp motor that gives it a top speed around 35 mph and a range  of 10-20 miles. Most importantly, ApocalypsEV-1 isn’t a car, its a street legal, side-by-side ATV (similar to a Yamaha Rhino) that combines fun and practicality into a single purchase. An advantage of selling this as an ATV, is that ATV trips are generally slow and just a couple of miles in range, which perfectly overlaps the federal NEV (Neighborhood Electric Vehicle) limitations for street legal electric vehicles.

The real question is whether an NEV ATV would actually be a practical vehicle that people would enjoy using. Thats why we are using IndieGoGo to raise funds to build the ApocalypsEV-1 prototype that we can use as a test mule. If we find the design usable, we will try and form a company to build them. If you would like to help make this possible, please check out the IndieGoGo link above.

Neuralwiki author interviews presents: Todd Keisling

I met Todd Keisling on Reddit.com when I started my Smashwords Karma campaign. He introduced me to his novel, A Life Transparent (Available now for $2.99), which I bought and reviewed. Shortly after, we started  a back and forth email exchange and I learned he was doing a blog tour. I jumped at the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his work and about the brave new world of e-publishing in general. Enjoy!

1) Were you always a writer?

I think so, but it took a while for me to figure it out. For a long time I thought I wanted to draw. I mean, I used to draw pictures and create stories about them in my head. My earliest publication was a story I wrote to accompany a picture about two boys goingfishing. I was five years old.

At some point my interest in visual art moved into film, and I wrote a screenplay for aclass in high school. I later adapted that screenplay into my first novel when I was 17,and the experience of writing it changed my mind about what career I wanted to pursue. I majored in English, won 2nd place in a writing contest during my freshman year incollege, and the rest is history.

2) Since we are publishing on many sites, and ratings don’t transfer, what do youthink the ethics are of rating your own book on sites where readers have not yet rated, or even bought the book (possibly from lack of ratings)?

I think that’s a dangerous area to traverse. From the author’s point of view, it’s a good thing—you’re giving the book a boost on a site where a rating determines a sale, and howelse can you get a sale if you have no rank? But consider how it looks from a potentialreader’s point of view. Here’s a book with no ranking and only one customer ranking –by the author himself (or herself). Personally, I think that looks tacky, unprofessional andit would turn me off from buying the book no matter how intriguing its premise happensto be.

Even if the author is posting a reader’s Amazon rating on B&N, it’s still going to look bad to the average B&N shopper. Consider that some folks are brand loyal and will onlyshop in one place. Let’s say they find a book and see that all the comments and ratingsare from the author. Furthermore, the author has stipulated that these comments/reviewsare actually cross-posted from another site. If I’m that potential customer, I would feelput off by it and immediately skeptical. I’d feel obligated to visit the other site andconfirm whether or not the author’s telling the truth, which would probably annoy meand not leave a very good impression. That’s just me, though, and I’m a weird guy. Otherpeople may have no problem with this.

With that said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking readers to leave a reviewor rate the book at a particular site if they’ve read the book. I feel I have to clarify that lastbit. You want honest opinions from readers, not the false ratings of people who’ve notread the book. Usually, if someone’s read your work and they enjoyed it, they’re happyto leave a review or comment, and I think that sort of thing will mean more to otherpotential readers. It’s all a matter of perception.

3) What is your long term goal as a writer, do you want to do this forever?

My long-term goal is to write something that affects people, and to leave a legacy. It’s
not really to find success (though that would be nice), but rather to be able to keep doing what I love to do regardless of the circumstances. I’ll always be writing something.

4) Is .99 the magic price for e-books?

That’s a good question, and it’s one a lot of authors are asking themselves right now. I polled readers last year about what they think is a reasonable price for an ebook. Most ofthem agreed that 99 cents is too low, and a few went on to say that $9.99 was perfectly reasonable.

Author Zoe Winters recently blogged about the subject [allindiepublishing.com], arguing that a 99 cent price point attracts the wrong kind of reader. In this grand age of entitlement thatis the internet, I can see her point. A 99 cent price point may get you more sales, but howmany of those people are actually reading it? Did they buy it because they’re interested inyour work, or did they buy it because it’s 99 cents?
I think a 99 cent price point should be utilized as a sale price, or a promotional price.But that’s just my opinion. Currently my novel’s 99 cents on Kindle until other vendorsupdate to the original $2.99 price (Amazon matches the lowest price by default). Whenthe next book hits, due out early next year at double the length of ALT, I’ll probably price it at $4.99 just to see how well it sells.

The great thing about the pricing debate is that we’re free to experiment. So, to answer your question, no, I don’t think 99 cents is the magic price. I think every author needs toexperiment and find that “sweet spot” in pricing.

5) If so, is it fair that novels and short collections sell for the same price?

I think the price should be dictated by length. Do you have a long novel? $4.99. Short novel? $2.99 – $3.99. Short story collection and/or novella? $1.99 An exception to this would be a huge short story collection, which would justify a higher price. Again, it’s allopen to experimentation. The ebook market is still a new, uncharted world for publishing,and it will probably be several years before a flat standard is reached.

Bonus Question: -What inspired the name of the cat in ALT? These things always have a back story.

Many years ago, my aunt adopted a stray Tomcat and named him Kitty Precious. I thought that was a horrible name for a Tom. So, almost a decade later, when I realized the Candle family had a cat, I decided it had to have the corniest name possible. I almost named him Kitty Precious, after his namesake, but decided to play around with it. When the name “Mr. Precious Paws” occurred to me, I knew I had a winner.

Thanks for the interview, Todd. I wish you much success with your upcoming novels.

Todd can be found on Twitter @todd_keisling

Available now on Smashwords.com

The subtle tells that let you know the movie you are watching was originally a play, are some of the same ones that let you know the book you are reading was originally a short story. It’s never definitive, but when the story spends just a little too long on a single character and has noticeable lack of set changes, these are all signs that the book or movie you are gobbling up has been converted from its original formula.  None of these are bad things, but it is always interesting when that realization shines through

ALT, is a very quirky book that started life as a short story (according to the authors website; suspicion confirmed!). For anyone who has worked a terrible white collar job, Donovan Candle’s life will seem all too familiar. Just another dreary mouse in the worlds most boring and frustrating rat race. And then the story gets interesting. Without giving away the plot, lets just say that the world begins to seek retribution on Donovan for his boring ways.

Todd Keisling is one of those ‘real’ writers we all had to read in school. He very capably uses his writing style to change the feel of the story, from boring and dreary, to tense and exciting, and does so periodically throughout the book. My only real complaint is that I had much higher hopes for the cats name at the end of the book. Ah well.  All in all, a very creative piece of fiction that, in my opinion, is best saved for a dark stormy day where this engrossing story can really shine.

A solid 4 stars on Smashwords, thanks for writing this great work. Hope to see more soon.

Thirsty kitty

One of the central questions that really intrigues me about our brains is this:  If your brain could directly read the neural output of another persons brain, lets say their representation of a cat, would you interpret it as a cat?

Studies in epilepsy patients reveal that humans have cells (in reality, they are networks of cells) that represent people we know like Jennifer Anniston or Bill Clinton. These are responsive to almost any representation of this person; cartoon, drawing, or video.

However, your neural networks wire up during development and are unlikely to directly correlate directly from brain to brain….on the other hand, there would have to be some similarities because your brain gets wired based on sensory inputs from sensors like your the retina and auditory cells, which, unlike memories, are extremely similar between humans. This is why you can get a retina transplant, because the basic sensor is interchangeable between people. Since your representation of a cat comes from a basic ground truth, your lower level wiring would need to be similar to convey the texture information. Therefore, it is unlikely that your cat representation would be like my car representation (their features are too dissimilar), but your cat representation could be like my dog representation.

Anyway, this really gets at the heart of dictionary based learning in neural systems. You can learn multiple dictionaries to represent the same object.

Cheers,

Michael

Edit:  Picked up A life Transparent by Toddy Keisling

Midland County Public Library

This is the landing page for FineStories and SOL, to go directly to the newest post, click here

As a kid, I loved reading, but rarely had the money to purchase books, new or used. Therefore, if it wasn’t available at the library, I usually didn’t read it. Lucky for me, my public libraries had great selections. Sometimes I had to wait a month or more to read  a brand new book, but I discovered writers like Franklin W. Dixon, Edward L. Beach, Dale Brown, Larry Bond and hundreds of others.  Today, now that I have my own disposable income, I am a sucker for purchasing books written by my favorite authors, many I discovered for free.

Now, after co-writing a book I am proud of, I feel it is my responsibility to give back to other readers. However, like my favorite authors, I need to sell more than a few books to cover the money spent hiring an editor ($256) …admittedly it would be awesome to make some extra spending money off the deal and garnering  enough sales to get Betrayal turned into a movie would be a dream come true.

Originally, we hoped to go the traditional publishing route.

Step 1: get an agent

Step 2: get a publisher

Step 3: sell a kajillion books.

Step 4: $ profit $

That plan quickly went to hell after sending over 50 query letters, and  hearing nothing back. The fiction market is tough, especially for an unknown author. However, early in the process we realized there was another route available. E-publishing. At the time, it seemed like a really terrible idea. Among traditional literary agents there is a stigma associated with self-publishing and taking that path seemed like a death sentence to any potential writing career.

Then a funny thing happened. We decided to go for it. We put the book up on Lulu.com, and people started buying it. Admittedly it wasn’t many sales, but people bought the book. Astonishingly, buyers included people we didn’t know personally! This was exciting on the same level as realizing that bacon goes with everything.

Originally Betrayal was priced at a traditional paperback price (5.99), and we sold five copies.  Without an agent, and no budget for advertising, we had to find a way to attract a readership base. After some thinking, we decided to try the library route: release the book for free, and hope to attract sales along the way. We started releasing the book, a chapter at a time, on Finestories.com. At the end of each chapter, we put a note saying the book was for sale. This worked and we sold another three books. Then over Christmas break, we dropped the price to $.99 and sold 12 books that week. However, on Lulu.com, we made $0 because Lulu took the entire $0.99 (don’t go with Lulu if you want to self publish). Obviously this was not a sustainable policy, but it showed the power of publishing online.

And then Finstories shut down the notes; apparently the sales pitch ran against site policy, oops. This was a major setback. We now had a problem: We were releasing the work, but had no good way to attract sales. This didn’t turn out to be the worst thing, it forced us to get creative. I started posting blogs and linking to them at the end of each chapter. In many of the posts, I noted that the book was for sale. This worked well enough and we ended up selling a couple more books at a more e-book friendly price of $1.99, but our cut was only $.80 of each sale on Lulu. We sold another 5 books.

At about this time, we were introduced to Smashwords.com, which takes a significantly smaller cut than Lulu. The best part is that Smashwords will format your book in a wide variety of formats, give you a free ISBN, and can put your ebook up on Amazon, Diesel, iTunes, Sony, and Barnes and Nobles. With Smashwords, your book is ready for any of the major e-readers, the Nook, Kindle, iPad, iPhone, and Android phones. We immediately transfered our main operation to Smashwords and kept the price at $1.99. We saw a slight increase in sales, but still had an advertising problem.

Then we were introduced StoriesOnline.net. While run by the same guy as FineStories, it allowed end notes with advertising and had a much larger readership base. We started posting the book, and sales exploded. Within the first week we posted 30 chapters and sold 50 books. Now we were getting closer to paying off our editing costs.

However, soon the entire book will be fully posted, so there will be no sales from people who want to read faster than we are posting, but we are hoping to find a balance between free and sales.

Recently, I was inspired by this fascinating interview with John Locke. He discussed how writers can skip the traditional agent/publisher model and sell hundreds of thousands of books, all for a low price. Locke’s guess is that all ebooks will drop to $.99 in the near future. I think he’s right. It’s a big step, because at $.99 you make 39% of the money you do at $1.99 ($.54 vs $1.39; pre tax). However, at $.99 the book becomes more of an impulse buy for readers and could drastically boost sales.

Update: after dropping the price to .99, we sold more than 30 books in two days!

Our strategy is centered around the hope that some portion of those who read it for free will consider picking it up and keeping it in their digital library, while others who do not purchase it, will spread the word and attract more readers. We really hope this plan works, because if we can make enough money to cover costs, this is how we would like to release the entire Liv Driscol series. This way, we can give back to readers who want to read, but not purchase, and still make enough money to create a good product.

Your comments always appreciated.

Cheers,

Michael

These guys have some cool software that will turn whatever displays you have lying around into an ad hoc JumboTron

I had asked the question, why wasn’t the Girandoni air rifle the main battle rifle of the early 1800′s. It was a rapid fire rifle, back in the time of muskets. It did not produce smoke, so your soldiers could see their targets, and with enough of them, you could have a large crew charging them up, and put down a huge volume of fire, while your opponents reloaded. This was the closest thing to a semi-automatic rifle as you could get. However, all of this is a modern mindset, where it’s cool to be a ninja, and war is thought of differently. A reader sent me this:

[The reason they weren't widely used was the] really slow time to pump up, and the belief that they were an assassin’s weapon (nobles had ideological problems with assassins that might be trying to kill them)

At one point, possession of an air rifle sufficient to kill large animals or men was the same as having been caught in the
act of assassination  except for agents (assassins) of the King or Duke (except for the one country that tried their use, the Swiss maybe, and then it was an anti-officer tool even then).

Probably few were ever imported into the New World, and the noise signature was less of a problem than the rate of fire and velocity

1) if not pumped up exactly the same, you expand the circle of inaccuracy to a vertical oval of inaccuracy

2) the different pressure curve meant a longer barrel was needed.

For [Lewis and Clark's trip], both not needing to carry as much powder as well as the lower noise signature while
crossing various tribe’s rigorously defended hunting grounds was a plus.

This also explains why they had so much trouble with grizzlies, as most of the air rifles would be either a smaller projectile or lower velocity.

Thanks for the info. I still think these were superior to the powder guns at the time, but ah well. Now we have AKs

Michael

Email #1 “my impression at this point, is that, almost predictably, Max will turn out to be Liv’s father.”

This was interesting because, while I had never contemplated this before, I can see where the reader is coming from. However, the reader definitely picked up on the fact that more about Liv’s dad is revealed in the book.

Email #2 “Bit of a continuity error around Chapter 11. Liv witnesses the murder while searching for water but then you say there is water in her Go Bag.”

This was a seriously good catch. I had to think about this one. My defense here is that Liv carries approximately 1L of water (two .5L bottles) in the Go Bag, where the Porsche would need about a gallon of water to fill. Anyways, very interesting comments.