First, a  quick followup to my last post about pre-orders, and Windswept Danger . Since someone near and dear to me was recently diagnosed with MS, I'm donating ALL royalties from pre-orders of the book to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Pre-order price of 99 cents, a $3 savings, is good through Oct 26th. You can find buy links here . And now, on to your regularly scheduled posting. Language, as everything else, is constantly changing. But what constitutes a legitimate change? When does something that was previously "wrong" become acceptable? Back in the Dark Ages, when I was in school, we were taught that already was an adverb that had to do with time. "When I got to the mall (although there were no malls back in those Dark Ages of my school years), Mary was already there." This was not to be confused with all ready , which means that everyone was prepared, or someone was completely prepared. Likewise, there's altogether and all ...

Last month, I talked about Amazon narrowing the gap between indie and traditionally published authors by making its pre-order option available to indie authors as well. Since then, I've tried the system, not only at Amazon, but at Kobo and the iBook store. As far as I can tell, there's no way to track sales at iBooks, so it'll be a matter of watching the sales reports when the book goes live in late October. Kobo doesn't track sales, but it does record rankings, so you can get an idea if you've been selling books by watching the rankings. Amazon reports pre-orders as a separate section of their dashboard. And, contrary to what I thought was their system, it turns out they regard these pre-orders as regular sales, so the book's ranking will reflect that. I put my newest book, Windswept Danger, up for pre-order on September 1st at all 3 channels, at the special pre-order price of 99 cents. Because I wanted to make sure everything was uploaded and working p...