Tag: janelle watkins

Beware the Facebook Ads

Like a lot of people, I use Facebook to stay in touch with family and friends. I also use it to promote myself as an author, although I’ve found it to be pretty ineffective in that respect (as I posted here).

But while it’s fun to catch up with the family and some of the posts are very entertaining, Facebook can be a dangerous place too. Dangerous, that is, in terms of sending you off to websites that might add a little something extra to your computer that you’d just as soon not have.

You’ve probably noticed the “Sponsored” content over on the right hand side of your Facebook page. Lots of ads there, some of them quite enticing. They change frequently. To the right is a screenshot I took of ads that appeared on my page recently.

You might have to click on that image and enlarge it to read the text. It’s perfectly safe to click since it’s just a jpeg image.

But the original ads would not have been safe to click. Although each one has a link displayed as part of the ad (enchantmen.com, lyft.com, weightwatchers.com, zulily.com), the true link for each ad is entirely different. Clicking that ad will send you not to Weight Watchers or Zulily, but to a site with malware.

As a user of Facebook, this is distressing, both with regards to the damage these sites could do to my computer, but also because of the fraud aspect. Facebook is taking money from companies that represent themselves dishonestly.

As an author who has used Facebook to promote, this is unsettling because I don’t want ads for my books to appear alongside scams. How would a reader know whether a click on my book cover would take them to Amazon where they can buy my ebook, or if they’ll end up on a site that downloads some kind of malware onto their computer?

Facebook does have a form I can fill out to report these fraudulent ads. But honestly, I’d be submitting forms all day long because based my observations, few of the ads in the sponsored section are genuine. Maybe my Facebook page is a scam magnet, and no other users out there are having the same experience as me. But it seems to me that Facebook is not performing due diligence in allowing those ads to run in the first place. And I’d say it’s their responsibility to fix the problem and not mine.

Here are some guaranteed genuine links for my latest books. Just click on the cover to buy.

January 27, 2014
Happy Book Birthday to Me-e-e!

Hip, hip hooray! After all the waiting-waiting-waiting, the book birthday for Clean Burn has finally arrived. Here’s a short blurb:

Wry, smart, tough private eye Janelle Watkins swore off investigating child abductions four years ago, when she left the San Francisco PD. But when two clients with missing children beg for her help, Janelle can’t say no. Even though it means returning to the scene of her nightmares – her hometown of Greenville.

Forced to enlist the help of her ex-partner and ex-lover, Greenville County Sheriff Ken Heinz, Janelle soon finds herself playing with fire in more than one way, and in a race against the clock to find the missing children before it’s too late.

Here’s what some bestselling authors have said about Clean Burn:

“Karen Sandler’s Clean Burn is a taut, timely thriller ripped from today’s headlines. Blisteringly paced, authentically told, here is a novel that demands to be read in a single sitting. I can’t wait to strap on a side arm and join Watkins for her next case.”
– James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of the Sigma series

“Clean Burn is a guilty pleasure. Curl up for a snappy pace, and an ex cop P.I. heroine with attitude, and a haunted past.”
– Lynn Hightower, author of The Piper and The Debt Collector

“Chilling, engrossing and addicting from page one! Karen Sandler weaves a tight, tense mystery, and with Janelle Watkins gives us an honest, tough, and flawed heroine – I can’t wait to read what comes next for this exciting character.”
– Brenda Novak, author of When Snow Falls and When Lightning Strikes

Published by Exhibit A Books in the UK, distributed in the US by Random House, you should be able to find copies in chain stores like Barnes & Noble as well as your local indies.

If you’d like to save yourself the petrol and the footwork, you can order Clean Burn online at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or other online bookselling establishments. Or try these great indie bookstores: Sacramento’s Avid Reader, Reno’s Sundance Books, or DC’s Politics & Prose. If you know of other fab independent bookstores in either the US or UK, please share them in the comments.

And watch out for the confetti and the helium balloons. They’re getting pretty thick in here. 🙂

August 27, 2013
The Trials and Tribulations of Book Surgery

Have you ever had a problem right in the middle of a sewing, craft or home improvement project? You’ve just realized you sewed the sleeve on inside out, or your embroidery thread is tangled in the middle of a satin stitch, or you’ve made the cut on your crown molding at the wrong angle. So you have to grab the seam ripper to remove that sleeve, turn it right-side-out and re-sew. Or snip the embroidery thread below the tangle and get that little short bit back underneath your work. Or schlep to the home improvement store for more crown molding and cut it right this time.

It’s a groan-worthy experience, both because you’ve just spent X amount of time in wasted effort and because you have to spend Y amount of time to make it right (can you tell I was a math major?). That’s about the time I start to yell at my sewing machine (and the poor thing is an inanimate object), saying a few choice words not suitable for polite company. I sometimes feel like chucking the whole thing into the garbage bin, but I never do it. That would truly be a waste because I know with just a little more effort, I’ll soon have a nice shirt/skirt/pair of shorts to wear.

This is sort of what’s going on with the young adult paranormal book I’ve been working on. After I finished the most recent rewrite, I knew it needed another pair of eyes. So I did a beta-read trade with another author. She had some excellent feedback, some of which I’d already figured out, some that was more of a doh moment. Like I have far too many characters, and several can be eliminated and their actions shifted to the truly important main and secondary characters.

But to make the changes my beta reader suggested requires some major surgery of the book. Large chunks will be able to remain the same, but they’ll have to be detached with that seam ripper, rearranged the proper way and re-knitted into the story. It’s a good-sized book, rather like a massive quilt, and it’ll be a challenge keeping straight what goes where, particularly with the elimination of several characters.

It’s like I’ve got my book gutted and on the operating table, but I’m still not sure where all the parts go. I am truly grateful for my beta reader’s feedback. I’m excited by the prospect of making the book better. But wow, what a messy project.

I’m really just starting out reassembling this odd garment of a story. I only have a small window to work on it since I’m carving out time before I my editor returns the edited manuscript for Rebellion, the third book of the Tankborn trilogy. I probably don’t have quite enough time to get the YA paranormal rewrite done before I have to shift to Rebellion and then my second Janelle Watkins mystery. It will be so nice to finish it eventually though, to get those last seams pressed and the final bit of embroidery around the neckline. Then I’ll sit back, admire my work…and send it to another beta reader.

So what projects have you got going, writing, craft, or other? Have they been a straightforward or a tricky job? Share your stories.

#SFWApro

July 9, 2013
When Fiction Becomes Future…or Present

Science fiction is a funny genre. There are those (like me) who devour it, who sometimes feel there’s something missing in a book that doesn’t include at least a little imagined science. Then there are those who just don’t get the genre, are completely alienated by it. To them, it’s weird and unreal.

Yet in the best science fiction, there’s nothing more real. It looks ahead to what might be and extrapolates not just the science, but how people adapt to the science. It can show how one change, small or large, completely transforms a people, a society.

The Green Movement in Iran and the more recent Arab Spring got me thinking about a Larry Niven story I read thirty or so years ago. “Flash Crowd” showed the impact of the transfer booth, an instantaneous, essentially free form of travel. You step into a transfer booth down on the corner near your house (like a way cooler bus stop) and in the next moment you’re downtown, or at the university or at the local mall.

What happens in the story is that folks start hearing about something interesting going on at Santa Monica mall (a stretch of several pedestrian-only open air blocks in Santa Monica, CA) and all those people jump into transfer booths. This near immediate influx of people on the mall leads to a riot, something that never could have happened if folks had to climb into their cars, negotiate Los Angeles freeway traffic, find a place to park, etc. Easy availability of transfer booths = riot.

Transfer booths haven’t been invented yet, but think about their virtual equivalent. The Internet. Facebook. Twitter. Texting. The demonstrators during the Arab Spring used those near instantaneous forms of communication to organize, to plan, to keep their compatriots and sympathizers and the outside world updated as to conditions on the ground. The protesters couldn’t instantaneously appear in the streets of Cairo or Damascus, but the Internet and cell phones have facilitated their movements.

What Larry Niven predicted when he published “Flash Crowd” in 1973 didn’t come literally true. We still haven’t figured out how to instantaneously transport matter from point A to point B. But that phenomenon of informing the world in an instant has come to pass and in the case of the Arab Spring (despite the current state of affairs in Syria), I think that can be a good thing.

Have you read a book or a short story that has projected a possible future? Have you seen that projected future become now? Leave a comment. Include the title and author if you have it.

May 23, 2013