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So, yesterday...
Toby and I did a lot of yardwork on Sunday (a lot) and by Tuesday it hit us so hard that we were achy, cranky, and physically exhausted. So last night we decided to go out to eat...
"Hey, let's go to Bennigans!" we said. "It's not quite the same since it reopened, but their cottage pie is good. Yes, let's go!"
We get there. Bennigan's is closed. Not just closed, but gone--no sign, nothin'.
"What about Schlotszky's?" we say. "Schlotszky's also sounds good, and it's on the way to the grocery store that we need to drop in at. Let's go to Schlotszky's!"
We get there. Schlotszky's is closed. There's still a sign, and chairs inside, but the lights are off and the doors are locked and there's nothing on the door telling us if this is temporary or permanent.
"Hm. What else is nearby? There's that Chinese place on the other end of the parking lot..."
We turn around and look behind us, at Szechuan. There are no cars. There are no lights.
"Let's go to Razzoo's. It's right there, we can see there are cars and we can hear that there is music playing. Razzo's is open."
We go to Razzoo's. We get inside. We get greeted. We get seated. Things are looking up!
Ten minutes pass. Nobody comes to get our drink order. Servers go to the booths on either side of us, and across from us, but not to ours.
"I could get a frozen pizza at the grocery store," says Toby. "I am giving them one minute to take our drinks order, then I am leaving."
One minute passes.
We leave. The hostess, to her credit, tries to tempt us to stay with the offer of bringing a manager over to speak to us, but we are too hungry and cranky to wait.
On the way to the grocery store, we see a McDonalds. We look at each other. We look back at the McDonalds. If we kill the McDonald's, it will be OK. We stop in.
And that is the end of the story, except for a moment of panic when it took extra-long to get our food when we were one of three occupied tables in the entire place. But it arrived, and by the taste of the fries it was delayed because they were dropping fresh fries into the fryer. And then we went to the grocery store and then we went home.
Also, there was this thing with Amazon yesterday, which turned out well today...
Yesterday, in the midst of poking about looking for things like new bento cookbooks and freezer meals etc., in one of my periodic attempts to find things that will streamline lunch (I literally keep forgetting about that blog I set up to keep track of our lunches!), I came across a self-published book about bento. (There's a lot of self-published cookbooks out there, of varying degrees of quality.) It didn't seem that it was exceptionally good by the lone review, but I noticed that the description said FREE FOR TODAY ONLY! Well, hell, why not? I'm not suspicious of that, because this is a thing that lots of self-published authors do--set their books free for a time to get it pushed up the charts and to gather reviews.
So I click on the BUY button without thinking too much about it, or looking too closely at it, and the next page says "Your card will be charged $5.99! Thank you!" Um what? I go back to the listing and realize that the price field itself hasn't been changed. The description says FREE, and it's on Kindle Unlimited, which is the lending-library thing you can pay monthly to join which lets you read books in the program for free, which is why I didn't notice the teeny-tiny $5.99 underneath that.
So I figure well, lesson learned, pay closer attention next time, and then I scroll down to the physical (well, "physical") description of the book and it says 19 pages. NINETEEN. NINETEEN PAGES. OH HELL NO.
This is obviously one of those jerks that Amazon changed their Kindle Unlimited program payouts to combat. You see, under the old rules, you got paid somewhere between $.99-$1.30 for each KU read if the reader made it past 10% or so. This led to a lot of people slapping up 10-20 page short stories and, presumably, cookbooks, because they'd get paid a buck if the reader just flipped past the first two pages, which just about everyone does before giving up. That's been changed now--you now get paid per page, and the rates per page are kind of wibbley, but are geared to encourage people to publish novellas and novel-length books, instead of extremely short books. And this particular book author/publisher is compounding that by overpricing it for non-KU customers. I wouldn't have thought twice about $.99 for it, but they think that they can get $5.99 for it from people like me trusting the large FREE FOR TODAY ONLY that they're lying about in the description.
I start poking around the Amazon Help site for their cunningly-hidden Contact Us link, which I know is in there somewhere, and I do find the help text that tells you how to return an ebook. You get a short period of time, a few days, to send it back. I do that, and it takes.
I still go ahead and find the Contact Us link and send in an email complaining about the misleading description, noting that I already returned the book so I didn't need a refund.
This morning, what arrives in my inbox but a profusely apologetic letter, a promise to escalate the issue, contact the publisher and remove the content from the website, and a $10 credit to my account.
Woo! I wonder if I can now make bank by reporting KU scammers, or if they'll figure out what I'm doing too quickly. ;)
"Hey, let's go to Bennigans!" we said. "It's not quite the same since it reopened, but their cottage pie is good. Yes, let's go!"
We get there. Bennigan's is closed. Not just closed, but gone--no sign, nothin'.
"What about Schlotszky's?" we say. "Schlotszky's also sounds good, and it's on the way to the grocery store that we need to drop in at. Let's go to Schlotszky's!"
We get there. Schlotszky's is closed. There's still a sign, and chairs inside, but the lights are off and the doors are locked and there's nothing on the door telling us if this is temporary or permanent.
"Hm. What else is nearby? There's that Chinese place on the other end of the parking lot..."
We turn around and look behind us, at Szechuan. There are no cars. There are no lights.
"Let's go to Razzoo's. It's right there, we can see there are cars and we can hear that there is music playing. Razzo's is open."
We go to Razzoo's. We get inside. We get greeted. We get seated. Things are looking up!
Ten minutes pass. Nobody comes to get our drink order. Servers go to the booths on either side of us, and across from us, but not to ours.
"I could get a frozen pizza at the grocery store," says Toby. "I am giving them one minute to take our drinks order, then I am leaving."
One minute passes.
We leave. The hostess, to her credit, tries to tempt us to stay with the offer of bringing a manager over to speak to us, but we are too hungry and cranky to wait.
On the way to the grocery store, we see a McDonalds. We look at each other. We look back at the McDonalds. If we kill the McDonald's, it will be OK. We stop in.
And that is the end of the story, except for a moment of panic when it took extra-long to get our food when we were one of three occupied tables in the entire place. But it arrived, and by the taste of the fries it was delayed because they were dropping fresh fries into the fryer. And then we went to the grocery store and then we went home.
Also, there was this thing with Amazon yesterday, which turned out well today...
Yesterday, in the midst of poking about looking for things like new bento cookbooks and freezer meals etc., in one of my periodic attempts to find things that will streamline lunch (I literally keep forgetting about that blog I set up to keep track of our lunches!), I came across a self-published book about bento. (There's a lot of self-published cookbooks out there, of varying degrees of quality.) It didn't seem that it was exceptionally good by the lone review, but I noticed that the description said FREE FOR TODAY ONLY! Well, hell, why not? I'm not suspicious of that, because this is a thing that lots of self-published authors do--set their books free for a time to get it pushed up the charts and to gather reviews.
So I click on the BUY button without thinking too much about it, or looking too closely at it, and the next page says "Your card will be charged $5.99! Thank you!" Um what? I go back to the listing and realize that the price field itself hasn't been changed. The description says FREE, and it's on Kindle Unlimited, which is the lending-library thing you can pay monthly to join which lets you read books in the program for free, which is why I didn't notice the teeny-tiny $5.99 underneath that.
So I figure well, lesson learned, pay closer attention next time, and then I scroll down to the physical (well, "physical") description of the book and it says 19 pages. NINETEEN. NINETEEN PAGES. OH HELL NO.
This is obviously one of those jerks that Amazon changed their Kindle Unlimited program payouts to combat. You see, under the old rules, you got paid somewhere between $.99-$1.30 for each KU read if the reader made it past 10% or so. This led to a lot of people slapping up 10-20 page short stories and, presumably, cookbooks, because they'd get paid a buck if the reader just flipped past the first two pages, which just about everyone does before giving up. That's been changed now--you now get paid per page, and the rates per page are kind of wibbley, but are geared to encourage people to publish novellas and novel-length books, instead of extremely short books. And this particular book author/publisher is compounding that by overpricing it for non-KU customers. I wouldn't have thought twice about $.99 for it, but they think that they can get $5.99 for it from people like me trusting the large FREE FOR TODAY ONLY that they're lying about in the description.
I start poking around the Amazon Help site for their cunningly-hidden Contact Us link, which I know is in there somewhere, and I do find the help text that tells you how to return an ebook. You get a short period of time, a few days, to send it back. I do that, and it takes.
I still go ahead and find the Contact Us link and send in an email complaining about the misleading description, noting that I already returned the book so I didn't need a refund.
This morning, what arrives in my inbox but a profusely apologetic letter, a promise to escalate the issue, contact the publisher and remove the content from the website, and a $10 credit to my account.
Woo! I wonder if I can now make bank by reporting KU scammers, or if they'll figure out what I'm doing too quickly. ;)
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The new KU deal is making a lot of the writer-bloggers I read very happy. So I'll probably sign up for it rather than trying to format my book for Smashwords and Nook, which I've heard scary stories about.
* I am old. I should probably upload an icon showing the grey beard.
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