Busted!

In an article posted today, the Alligator is reporting that former Student Body President Marc Adler may have joked about bribing various members of an opposing political party to jump ship only days before they did just that.

It seems UF politics hardly changes, especially if the actors stick around. Adler is a former student lobbyist who failed to stop passage of the Rave Ordinance in 1999, got arrested for drunk driving in 2001, and was involved in the unsuccessful Innovate campaign in 2004, the first landslide defeat of the FBK-backed party in nearly 15 years.

Adler is a smart, cunning guy, and definitely knows how to play the game. He can even be personable, in his own way. But geez - shouldn't he especially of all people know to keep such ideas as bribery from being talked about in front of someone who wasn't on your side?

Checking In

Eventually, I'll get back to more frequent blogging. But a lot of projects are taking my free time. Here are some updates:

1) Redesigned kenkerns.com, and cleared out some of the older content no longer useful. I took the opportunity to showcase my book, complete with a page-long summary and explanation and technical details.

2) I am contemplating how to salvage RTP 4, which has floundered with my new lack of free time and recent bout of the flu.

3) I am at work on a new President Forever scenario mimicking UF politics. My first 2 were based on RTP and Cyberia, so this is a logical choice for my 3rd effort. It's not going to be a strict copy of UF, especially because we have no electoral college, but it might work. And it will serve as a template for possible sequels.

4) As you can see on kenkerns.com, my book is now available in the major online vendors. I am also at work on the first draft of "Confirmation" and enlisting the help of a coworker on editing "The Proxy Senator", which will be the second book I release with Mike Adams as the lead character.

UF's election season is in full force, by the way. 2005 has an FBK-backed Gator Party, the incumbent Impact party, a Progress party, and a radical Voice party. It's interesting from what I hear from Christian Duque and James Argento.

Markups

I've grown to like middle-men less and less during this process of releasing my book.

Lulu's price ($11.99) includes $2.97 of royalties and Lulu's profits and $9.02 in production cost. To determine suggested retail price, they take the royalties and profits ($2.94 in this case), add it to $6.05 in production costs and then DOUBLE it. In other words, anything over $9 is the total profit for the bookstore that lists my book.

Think about that. Amazon.com is using the suggested retail price of $17.99 and getting a nearly 50% profit from it. If they just used the $11.99 price Lulu sells my book for, they's still be making $3 a book, which is still a 33% profit. But they don't do that because they think they can sell it at the higher price.

Think about that when you want to hire a middle man.

Overnight Disappointment

Apparently, overnight, Barnes & Noble jacked up the price of my book to the suggested retail price (adding more than $6 to the cost) and dropped my name from its listing, forcing you to type the title into the search engine to get it rather than just my name.

Grrr.

"Reunion" at Bookstores

You can buy my book at the following bookstores: Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Books-A-Million, among others.

It is a really cool feeling to see something you created available on a website like Amazon.com, where literally millions of Americans look. Actually, right now, Barnes & Noble offers the best price on this side of the Atlantic, at under $11, while Books-A-Million offers the heaviest markup (10% over the suggested retail price, which was set to give bookstores a 50% profit to begin with) - with a total price of nearly $20.

So, please pick up your copy today!

Update

My book has appeared on a number of online bookstores from the United Kingdom! Unfortunately, B&N and Amazon.com are a bit slower; those 2 sites have only placeholder pages up saying the book is "not available at this time". Strangely, amazon.co.uk has it available, whereas amazon.com doesn't.

Anyways, I'll post links here to some of the bigger name bookstores once they're up with availability for buying (hopefully in the next week or two), and a link to a search engine to get the smaller stores.