Goree Island. "The Door of No Return."

A while back I was in Dakar, Senegal, and went on a group trip to Goree Island, the westernmost point of the African continent. It is infamous for the "Door of No Return," through which slaves passed to board ships for the Americas. Now the island is a tourist spot, and tourists are assaulted by souvenir hawkers both before boarding the ferry and after arriving. The island has several nice, beach-side restaurants and some elegant boutique hotels. I found this to be very odd, considering it is hallowed ground, believing that the island should be preserved as a memorial, not turned into a means of profit. Those tour guides who condemn the slave trade are now profiting from it.

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Return to Zimbabwe

It's been a long time since I made an entry. A lot has happened. My wife and I returned to Zimbabwe, where we are going to stay for a while before going to the U.S. I like Zimbabwe. In spite of what is reported about the country, the inflation, failing infrastructure, and poverty, the country is a wonderful place and the news media doesn't get it right about Zimbabwe. It's easy to report the negative but not the positive, which are the beauty of the country, the climate (neither heat nor AC is necessary, because of the elevation and proximity to the equator), the people (very friendly (English is the national language), and lack of violent crime, the use of the U.S. dollar, the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables, the general peacefulness. Across the street from where we are staying there is a very posh restaurant, Victoria Twenty-Two , which is maybe better than the St. Regis in Amman. Glad we're not in Amman, considering what is going on in Gaza. Down t...

I saw where my novel, The Opium Addict , had sunk to around the 1.5 million ranking on Amazon, only to see a few hours later that it shot up to 180,000 or so. I contacted my publisher, Hear Our Voice, and Stacy told me that she ran a campaign on TikTok and had sponsored ads. I would guess that that had something to do with it. I was happy to see that it was just under James Clavell's Tai-Pan and remains high in the new release categories of Historical Japanese, Chinese, and Mystery Suspense. The ratings jump around a lot. The ranking has fallen since the good news, so keeping a novel high in the rankings is something I haven't quite figured out. But I have noticed that some that are ranked highly have been in the Amazon cauldron for years. So patience is in order, I guess. I also self-published a short novel--not sure I like the word novella, sounds like someone's name--which was up in the top five free Kindles, but then the free giveaway ran out . . . It's a more lite...

For the past several days I've been working with Amazon ads to promote the novella I have self-published, “Love Is Thicker Than Forget.” The title is taken from a famous e. e. cummings poem and directly connects to the storyline. I have posted the cover on a previous blog. Amazon ads, if a person knows what they're doing, can have a major impact on sales figures, but because I just started the ads I haven't seen that yet. The key to it all is to be patient, from what I've researched, and adjust the ads after sixty or ninety days, and not to adjust more than that, because Amazon's algorithms will not be able to adjust, and not to spend too much per day, because you might end up wasting money. There is a way to put in keywords, or a person can allow Amazon to do that based on the description of the book, which is what I've done. The novel I have on Amazon that was published by an independent publisher doesn't allow me as much flexibility with ads as KDP d...

The Expatriate

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