Bestselling Black Horse Titles on Amazon

Charts courtesy of Black Horse Express

1. Jake Rains by Tony Masero (Hardcover - 30 Nov 2011)
From £9.12

2. The Black Horse Westerns: Collection No. 1 by Abe Dancer, Dean Edwards, Tyler Hatch and Scott Connor (Kindle Edition - 1 Jan 2011)
Buy: £6.86

3. Captain Talbot's Reckoning by A. Doran Leishman (Hardcover - 31 Oct 2011)
From £9.12

4. Trail to Fort Laramie by Jack Edwardes (Kindle Edition - 30 Dec 2011)
Buy: £2.86

5. The Ballad of Delta Rose by Jack Martin (Hardcover - 29 Jul 2011)
From £8.51

6. Arizona Pay-Off (Black Horse Western) by Duke Patterson (Kindle Edition - 31 Oct 2011)
Buy: £2.86

7. The Kansas Fast Gun (Black Horse Western) by Arthur Kent (Kindle Edition - 31 Oct 2011)
Buy: £2.86

8. Gunhawk (Black Horse Western) by John Long (Kindle Edition - 31 Oct 2011)
Buy: £2.86

9. Viva the Brazos Kid! by Frank Longfellow (Kindle Edition - 30 Dec 2011)
Buy: £3.19

10. Trail of the Burned Man (Black Horse Western) by Thomas McNulty (Hardcover - 30 Nov 2009)
From £0.50

Tainted Stats

Weekly Stats Report: 2 Jan - 8 Jan 2012
Project: THE TAINTED ARCHIVE
URL: http://tainted-archive.blogspot.com/

Summary

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total	Avg
Pageloads	705	772	791	730	777	854	741	5,370	767
Unique Visits	534	555	535	514	578	616	546	3,878	554
First Time Visits	524	533	518	504	564	594	528	3,765	538
Returning Visits	10	22	17	10	14	22	18	113	16

There and back again - trailer

The eNews - Kindle once again tops the Christmas eReader sales

Four million Brits unwrapped an Amazon Kindle on Christmas morning this year.

In April Amazon announced that customers were choosing Kindle books over hardcover books at a rate of more than two to one, even as hard cover sales continued to grow. Since then 242 Kindle books have been sold for every 100 hardcover books.

The Kobo too experienced record sales over the festive period but are still unable to get anywhere close to Amazon's big hitter, the tremendously user friendly KIndle. The Kobo eReader is a fine device but it is discovering, as did Sony before it, that an eRaeder not only has to compete with Amazon in terms of hardware but also with the Amazon Kindle store which makes dowloading eBooks simplicity on the Kindle. In the UK the Kobo is closely linked to W H Smith's eBook market and it's been chopping and changing so much that it could hardly be called user friendly.

Harper Collins saw one hundred thousand eBook downloads on Christmas Day. Over 100,000 eBooks published by HarperCollins UK were downloaded on that single day. This was both a record high as well as over  times as high as the average daily downloads during December 2011.


And in other eBook news the most pirated eBooks over the festive period were:

1. 1,001 Facts that Will Scare the S#*t Out of You
2. 7 Weeks to 50 Pull-Ups: Strengthen and Sculpt Your Arms, Shoulders
3. 7 Weeks to 100 Push-Ups: Strengthen and Sculpt Your Arms, Abs, Chest
4. Kindle Library (4,687 Ebooks – Mobi)
5. Do Not Open: An Encyclopedia of the World’s Best-Kept Secrets

First actor to play James Bond dies.

Best known as the host of TV quiz show, Blockbusters actor Bob Holness was actually the first actor to play superspy James Bond, when he took the part for a South African Radio play of Moonraker.

He died yesterday at the age of 83 after a battle with several strokes.

The actor/broadcaster died peacefully in his sleep.

Hollywood 2012 - Mo(o)re of the same.

"If you can give the audience something that's visually spectacular, a reason to come out and watch movies in the theatre, then audiences will come out to see it on the big screen," Paramount's vice chairman of marketing, Rob Moore recently told the New York Daily News - he was speaking after cinemas experienced a boom in attendances this Christmas with Sherlock Holmes 2 and the new Mission Impossible doing particularly well. Though it must be noted that 2011 saw a decline in ticket sales and attendance fell to a 16-year low.

The key words to Mr. Moore's statement, and the ones that really worry me, are VISUALLY SPECTACULAR - this suggests that the powers that be in movie land still consider eye dropping visuals to be more important than story, that the dumbing down of cinema will continue. And what's more Hollywood may be correct and films with plots, good acting and only limited visual effects will only reach  a limited audience - a case in point is David Fincher's "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," which has been left for dead after a disappointing debut last weekend given all of the hype surrounding the adaptation. However Fincher's movie has now raked in $60 million and is showing signs of finding an audience.

"Our franchise films has gotten younger, and family movies have been soft," said Chris Aronson, senior vice president of distribution at Fox, in an interview with the L A Times. "I'm not going to be Pollyanna-ish about the box office this year. We know that attendance figures are slipping, and we need to reverse that by doing everything we can to put the best possible product out as an industry."

 Rusch

The industry are talking about the long haul for their movies and the revenue generated by DVD sales and yet, the fact is, that DVD sales are also on the decline. And the much hailed Blu-Ray has not exactly set the home entertainment world on fire - most Blu-Ray discs these days come with a standard DVD disc included in an attempt to boost sales, but that does not speak well for a format that was supposed to replace standard DVD. It is akin to Microsoft including a copy of Vista with every Windows 7. The decline of the DVD is being masked by the still strong sales of DVDs to children and it's hiding the real slide in sales of smaller movies.That's limiting the guaranteed income for a lot of productions. It will be harder to guarantee money to make a movie as the way people watch movies changes. The entire nature of a film's availability is changing as people watch things on tablets and smart phones and people aren't buying digital copies the way studios want.




I've always been a regular cinema goer though I must admit that I've not been since True Grit and prior to that my last cinema visit was when I walked out of the travesty that was Quantum of Solace - nothing has really appealed to me, at least not enough to visit the multiplex. The few films that I have wanted to watch I've waited for the DVD's to become available. And it's the same with DVD - where I once bought at least four titles a month, I now perhaps buy half a dozen a year. Granted this is down to the fact that I've now amassed a DVD collection of over a thousand titles and I've already got all the classic movies that seem to come out on digital disc.

I guess that like TV and popular music, the cinema is becoming a place for kids only.

At least that's the way I feel, and I suspect, so do many others.

Tainted Stats

Weekly Stats Report: 26 Dec - 1 Jan 2012
Project: THE TAINTED ARCHIVE
URL: http://tainted-archive.blogspot.com/

Summary

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total	Avg
Pageloads	698	678	812	774	748	598	668	4,976	711
Unique Visits	507	485	568	562	531	442	465	3,560	509
First Time Visits	484	466	550	537	514	431	451	3,433	490
Returning Visits	23	19	18	25	17	11	14	127	18