The SoapBoxers

Inside Kosmo’s Life

Jul 26

kosmoAssorted Kindle, Writing 1 Comment

As usual, I’m juggling a lot of balls at the moment. That tends to be par for the course these days.

Amazon Associates

One of the more interesting – and profitable – ventures stemmed from Amazon’s recent decision to sever ties with California residents who were members of the Amazon Associates affiliate program. A lot of people took a financial hit when this happened. Previously, they were making commissions when they referred sales to Amazon. This revenue dropped to zero. This has happened in several other states, but I personally knew some people who were affected in California.

My simple solution to this problem is to have a middleman from a non-affected state step into the middle. Let’s call this person “Kosmo”. Kosmo provides new tracking IDs to the affected people that are tied to his account and then replace the old ids with the new ones (this only takes a few minutes for an entire site). Amazon then pays Kosmo, who then takes a cut and passed on the lion’s share of the money to the site owner. This creates two separate relationships. Amazon no longer has a direct relationship with the site owner.

Interested in knowing more details? Email me at kosmo@ObservingCasually.com

The Cell Window – Kindle version

I’m very happy to announce the release of The Cell Window for Kindle.  This is one of my all-time favorite stories, and probably the one that took the most work – requiring six weeks to complete the 10,000 word tale.  This is the story of Duncan, a tech-savvy voyeur who invades the lives of his employer’s customers.  I distributed free copies of this story to a lot of my friends, and it tended to evoke a reaction from everyone.  My friend Jaylene commented that if I weren’t married, she’d be a bit freaked out to be around me.  (I guess all the weirdos are single people?).  You really SHOULD find the story a bit disturbing.

You can buy the story on Amazon for 99 cents or you can be a big spender on pony up $3.79 for my short story collection Mountains, Meadows, and Chasms, which also contains the story (along with 73 other stories).

If you buy either book, please leave a review when you are finished.  All I ask is that you be honest with your feedback.

Other writing

I’ve been renting myself out in recent weeks in an effort to keep the lights on at Hyrax Publications.  You’ll be able to see articles on financial and insurance topics over at The Digerati Life.  At this point, I’m not looking for any additional work in that arena, but I am entertaining any offers to do some freelance short fiction.

I’m also making an effort to kick-start my novel, which has been laid aside a bit to make time to chase after young kids.  (I should clarify that.  I’m referring to my own kids.)

The book will be a nice little serial killer novel.  I’m starting basically from scratching, putting aside about 8000 words that I had written previously.  I’ve circulated the newly written prologue to a few trusted friends, and it has received very positive reviews.  Now I just need to write the rest of the book …  I’d love to finish by some time in 2012.  It’s going to be a ton of work (and require a fair amount of research), but it should be a lot of fun).