April 16, 2011: Hacking My Way, Part Deux

On February 12, I speculated about the eccentricities of Amazon.com as they related to It's All Academic. One specific amusement was the notation that "customers who bought It's All Academic" also bought a Stephen King book (in truth, I'm sure that was a single customer).

Always interested in the e-book market, I have been following some of the websites that offer the book in e-book format. Today at Diesel e-books I note that four books are offered as "similar to It's All Academic." (See bottom of web page.) Apparently, this satirical look of higher education administration shares qualities and characteristics with the following:

a) A book about vampires (Skin Trade)?

The Boan environment does suck the life out of Mark Carter, and apparently the main plot in Skin Trade is the search for a killer (in this case a killer vampire). Maybe I can see the connection.

b) Two romance novels (The Sabbides Secret Baby and Hard to Handle)?

Having never read anything from the romance genre, I am ill-suited to identify the connection. I would hope that the romance novel typically has greater scenes of passion than Mark Carter's wife playfully sparring with him as he nurses his aches and pains from the administrative basketball game, which is the closest any scene in the book comes to "hot." One reviewer of Hard to Handle criticizes that book for not having enough sex (do people really want to see that in a novel?), so maybe she (I hope I'm not too presumptuous with my gender guess) was equally disappointed in the lack of sex in my novel.

c) A romance novel with a witch (Witch Heart)? In this case, one reviewer of Witch Heart praises it for how "hot" it is, so there went my theory directly above. I would need a few glasses of scotch to see how demon handmaidens and warlocks are found at Boan University.

Checking out the additional "more from this category" box at Diesel E-books, I see there are a lot of books with "dead" in the title. I suppose a dead body is a dead body, even if it is only a cheap trick used to frame an entirely different plot.

I find all of this quite entertaining, and if the book sold more copies, I'd be worried that there were a lot of angry mystery fans (and apparently romance fans) tossing It's All Academic into the trash or the fire. What does one do with a disappointing e-book, though? Simply deleting it doesn't seem a forceful enough act.