Meet Mike Laser

Posted by unglueit on May 17, 2012 in Meet the rights holders

We’ve asked each of our first five rights holders to help us write a blog post introducing themselves to you — giving you a behind-the-scenes glimpse into themselves and their work. Here’s five things you might not know about Mike Laser.

Michael Laser author pic

Meet Mike

Mike's chair

Mike’s chair


1) He writes his novels longhand. In this chair.

2) He cares about social justice. He spent three years working for The Fortune Society, helping ex-prisoners to find work and re-integrate into society. And he spent a month in Nicaragua, helping to build a school. Both of these experiences have influenced novels he’s written, too.

3) He wants you to understand what’s going on in the world today — especially if you’re a teacher or a student. He runs a web site, News-Basics.com, with concise, balanced overviews of important issues in the news today. (He’s also written for the Christian Science Monitor on the difficulty — and importance — of respecting both sides of the story.)

4) He taught himself to hit a baseball again this year, having not played since childhood. It’s harder than you’d think!

5) He did lots of research before writing an autobiographical novel — the middle-grade novel 6-321. Learn more at its campaign on Unglue.it.

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Meet Melinda Thompson and Budding Reader

Posted by unglueit on May 17, 2012 in Meet the rights holders

We’ve asked each of our first five rights holders to help us write a blog post introducing themselves to you — giving you a behind-the-scenes glimpse into themselves and their work. Here’s what Melinda Thompson had to say about herself and her independent publisher, Budding Reader.

Melinda Thompson

Melinda Thompson, author and entrepreneur

I am a big reader of non-fiction books and a heavy user of my local public library. It seems to me if people can read they can learn to do almost anything. So when I decided to start a publishing company the first thing I did was read lots and lots of books on the subjects of publishing, business planning, and marketing in the internet age. I even set up my own LLC without the help of an attorney, just by reading a book and doing what it said to do. I see how digital content can empower people everywhere to pursue their dreams, but people can’t access the world of information online unless they can read. And it helps children learn to love reading if they experience success from the very start. That’s where Budding Reader e-books step in.

Read more at the campaign to unglue Budding Reader’s Cat and Rat.

V with Budding Reader write-your-own book

An Unglue.it staff kid writes and illustrates her own book with materials from Budding Reader .

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Unglue.it payment options: Amazon vs. Paypal

Posted by gluejar on May 3, 2012 in payments

When we were deciding on how to implement payments in Unglue.it, we considered two options, Paypal and Amazon Payments. We needed a flexible, easy to use system with the flexibility to implement campaigns where nobody’s credit card gets charged until a campaign succeeds. There were two providers whose systems were in use by similar crowd-funding sites. Kickstarter uses Amazon, and IndieGoGo uses Paypal, for example.

Despite having a good reputation for usability, there were two big disadvantages for Amazon. First, Amazon Payments offers no foreign currency transactions; our understanding is that non-US ungluers will only be able to use major credit cards and will need to pay currency conversion fees. This results in a big bite out of pledges, doubly so for non-US rights holders.The other disadvantage to Amazon Payments is that it’s Amazon; many publishers, fearful of Amazon’s dominance of the ebook market, may be wary of participating in a market that requires users to have yet another Amazon relationship.

So we decided on Paypal. But what we didn’t realize was the length of time it would take to convince Paypal that we were a legitimate operation working closely with rights holders and not some pirate ebook emporium. We passed technical review with Paypal in January, but have been in business review for almost 4 months. Apparently Paypal has been revising its policy for crowd-funding sites, and most likely has been deluged with new crowd-funding applications. We’ve had several back-and-forths with the Paypal team, and we fully expect to get Paypal approval at the end of the process. The extra scrutiny will be valuable to us in the long run to the extent that it makes consumers more trusting of Paypal enabled sites.

In the short run, however, we couldn’t afford to wait. So we implemented Amazon’s Flexible Payment system, and that’s what we’ll be launching with on May 17th. We’ll add Paypal payments (as well as other options) later.

We hope that Amazon Payments will meet the needs of most unglued book supporters, at least to start out. We’d love to know your perspective. If you’re outside the US, have you been able to use Amazon Payments? Do you prefer the usability of Amazon or Paypal? Are there other online payment systems you’ve used that you like to see us support?

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Launch ahoy!

Posted by unglueit on April 25, 2012 in Uncategorized

Unglue.it will be launching May 17 at noon EDT.  Watch this space for information on our campaigns, authors, and more.  In the meantime, have you made your wishlist?

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