Early morning lilac bush

On May 17, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography2 Comments

This plant really is one of my favorite parts of the lawn. For about two weeks.

In which I am excessively excited

On May 16, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I get to see Godzilla tomorrow, guys.

Wheeee!

Let’s see. I may not actually have that much to say at the moment; today was a remarkably easy day at work and I haven’t been home long enough for anything on the Internet to piss me off yet. Mostly I’m looking forward to actually having two whole days off in a row, since I took tomorrow night off from OtherJob so as to not collapse into a rage/exhaustion coma at any point between now and the end of the school year. Next weekend I should also get two days off in a row since two Mondays from now is Memorial Day, so I ought to be able to make it to the end of the school year without killing anybody.

Ought to.

I dunno, maybe there will be more later; this is kinda blah. There will likely be work on the bathroom this weekend too so you’ll get to mock my carpentry skills some more. 🙂

On marketing

On May 15, 2014May 15, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing6 Comments

This post is gonna be super meta and maybe a little whiny, so feel completely free to ignore it. I got home and died on the couch again tonight (second night in a row!) and my head isn’t completely on straight at the moment, so… yeah.

It occurred to me earlier this afternoon that, while I’m excited to have Benevolence Archives: Vol. 1 out there in the world, I’ve kinda unintentionally shot myself in the foot with regards to plans for later this summer. Part of the reason I got the grant money was because I was going to publish my other novel, which is actually novel-length, not a 30,000 word novella, sometime in June. I’m not sure if that date is still in the cards because finishing BA took a lot more of my April and May than I intended and Skylights needs some real revisions before I can have it ready for publication– and my artist still needs to put the cover together. It’s my next project after I finish the story for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award contest that I’m putting together right now, but it’s still been delayed repeatedly.

Here’s the problem, though: I get pretty detailed sales data from Amazon, right? While I think I’ve decided that I’m fairly happy with sales (they’re not high, but “dozens” is legally accurate) I am pretty sure that I know exactly who each of those sales has been to. There was one in the UK somewhere that could have been a few different people (or a stranger) but I’m pretty certain that I can trace every single other sale to someone I either know in person or have met through this place.

(This is the bit where I sound whiny, and I’m not sure how to fix it.) Don’t get me wrong: I love everybody who’s shelled out money to see the nonsense I write when you can see most of my nonsense here, daily, for free. But I’ve kinda fucked up here: because I know my book is selling virtually exclusively to people with previously existing connections with me and not to random Amazon customers, it makes me really nervous when I have to go right back to the same well in, say, a month and a half, only in a month and a half I’m demanding that you shell out $5.99 for a 100,000-word novel rather than $3 for a novella you can read in a few hours. And then there’s novel #3, which I’m writing this summer, which presumably would be finished/available by this winter, and the teacher book that I haven’t even mentioned around here but now I’m really thinking about making into a real thing.

I gotta find a way of broadening my reach past people I know, is what I’m saying. This blog has over 2600 followers but the majority of those aren’t really interacting with the site that much; daily hits are a tiny fraction of that. I’d think about following Gene’O’s advice about trying to broaden my Twitter reach (and I’ll link those posts as soon as I can find them again) but nobody clicks on links on Twitter so I’m not sure how useful that is.

I dunno. Marketing’s not my thing. Gotta get better at it, I guess.

I am so freaking tired right now

On May 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

…that rather than generate a barely-adequate blog post or even hassle you to buy my book (see what I did there?) I’m going to leave you with a ridiculously adorable .gif and then go read comic books on the couch until I fall asleep. Because screw consciousness right now.

(buy my book.)

In which my decisions confuse me

On May 13, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek12 Comments

I can’t recall a specific post, but I have to have talked about my distaste for ebooks in some capacity during some point in the (very nearly!) year I’ve been writing here. I have thousands of books. I love books– and I love books as physical objects, not as a carrier device for stories.

I got my wife a Kindle for either Christmas or her birthday several years ago, back when the damn things cost $300 and that sounded reasonable. I bought it, but I refused to touch it. I disliked the concept of e-readers that much. I’ve softened since then; I do a decent amount of reading on my iPad, but I do a specific kind of reading on my iPad– mostly short stories or novellas or, occasionally, magazines; i.e., things that either aren’t available in print or that don’t store well. And it goes without saying that The Benevolence Archives(*) simply would never see the light of day as a printed book; there’s no way to price it that would be both fair and profitable. Ebooks are awesome for shorter works. A freaking comic book costs $4 nowadays; you can’t get a 116-page document at that price.

Anyway. It’s occurred to me in the past few days that since I’m literally trying to derive income from the Kindle’s existence nowadays, maybe it might behoove me to, y’know, own a Kindle. So I looked into them a bit and today, being the type who really doesn’t like buying technology (or, really, much of anything) online, I swung by Best Buy on the way home to look at Kindles.

Maybe you don’t know this; I didn’t: there are three basic flavors of the Kindle in existence. The baseline is just called a “Kindle,” has a black and white screen, and retails for around $70. Then there’s the “Kindle Paperwhite,” which has a screen (and front light) that is apparently vastly upgraded from the Kindle and, in general, looks like a more reputable piece of kit, which retails for around $120. Then there’s the Kindle Fire, which has a larger screen, four times the memory, is in full color, and can access the Web and do a whole host of other stuff… for $120.

Here’s where I’m weird: I have no desire for a Kindle Fire at all. I have an iPad for everything the Kindle Fire can do. I do a lot of reading in bed and the iPad is just a wee bit unwieldy for that. The screen improvements of the Paperwhite appeal to me. But I can’t find a reason to pay $120 for a Paperwhite when another tablet with a bigger, color screen, with better functionality, is the same price.

Or, to be clearer: I didn’t buy a Paperwhite today because something else that I don’t want was the same price.

I’m not sure that’s sound reasoning.

Feel free to make fun of me in comments. In fact, I encourage it.

(*) Buy my stupid book!

Good gracious, ass bodacious

On May 12, 2014May 12, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching7 Comments

Today was a really nice day until around 12:30, when within the first fifteen minutes of my Algebra class starting the temperature in my classroom jumped twenty damn degrees and the weather outside took a serious turn toward hellishly humid as well.

Class didn’t go as well as it could have.

Entertaining fact: Middle school students are idiots. Justification: the exact same damn kids who refused to wear coats in the dead of freaking winter— and remember we lost several days this winter not to snow, but to cold— are now insisting on sweating through the armpits of their wool jackets because they don’t want to take them off. The exact. Same. Kids. Now, under normal circumstances, I’m perfectly comfortable to simply mock them from a distance. Be an idiot; that’s fine. But when I’m damn near choking on the funk in my classroom from your sweaty-ass bodies, and, worse, you’re complaining about the heat while you’re wearing that wool sweater… well, it may be that you may be chastised for expressing your opinion.

Mildly. Lovingly.

Possibly with something heavy. But maybe not!

And then the phrase “It’s getting hot in here, take off your fucking coat” floated through my head, with a certain cadence to it, and, well at that point I was done with teaching for the day too.

(Slight detour: Teachers take a fair amount of crap for shifting toward a less academic, more movie-showey style toward the end of the year, and especially past standardized testing. I would like to point out that that is at least partially because it is hot as a motherfucker inside these buildings and we hit a point where absolutely no one can concentrate.)

I have no idea how to contextualize my book sales so far in terms of “successful” or not except to say that I am tremendously gratified by the sales I’ve made and I still demand more. I think I’ve got a goal of a hundred sales during the first month the book’s out. I’m a complete unknown, obviously, so I figure that’s high enough to be a goal without being insultingly low. Needless to say, at this point more people have “liked” the post announcing the book being on sale than have bought the book. 🙂

Point is: buy my stupid little book! It’s $2.99 and way more entertaining than that amount might indicate! I’ll buy you cookies!(*)

(*) I may not deliver them. But they will be yours!

So this is sorta fun

On May 11, 2014May 11, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

A couple of observations:

Releasing a book on the Saturday before Mother’s Day probably wasn’t the smartest marketing move I ever made in my life. I went through the whole registration process on Amazon thinking that at some point it was going to have me pick a release date for the book to go live and then it became clear that “Okay, you’re published!” was the only option I had left. Because I have no patience (and had already said, a whole bunch of times, “This weekend!”) I went ahead and did it. Whee!
It’s an incredibly heady feeling seeing something you did available on a site like that. Granted, self-publishing ebooks are kinda Amazon’s ghetto, but it’s still real estate.
That was a crappy metaphor.
Current sales rank is #43,315. Which isn’t very high, until you realize that there are a few million books on the site. It gets me wondering how high I’d climb in the rankings after, say, a couple dozen sales.
There are over 2600 of you, supposedly; read between the lines. 🙂
One scary thing that happened: I got an email from Amazon pretty promptly saying that there was content from my book available free on the Web and that I needed to reconfirm they owned the rights or they’d delete the book. And my account. Which: yikes. That said, going through their process and pointing out in an email that the website that was hosting the free content was also linked from the back of the ebook got me a polite email from what appeared to be a human this morning confirming that everything was fine, so I’m gonna go with “I appreciate this service” even though it nearly gave me a heart attack.
That said, I’ve pulled the first-draft version of BA 5 from the site, both to avoid future potential Amazon drama and because I made some pretty massive revisions in the actual ebook and don’t want both versions floating around. You can still read the first BA story using the “Look Inside” feature if you like.
Happy Mother’s Day, if you’re into that. 🙂 I’m making breakfast for folks soon so I won’t be able to babysit the internet as much as I really want to today.
Who am I kidding, of course I will.
I have an author page over there now, which actually publishes bits from Twitter and from the blog through RSS. I am not convinced of the wisdom of allowing them to do this but it’s active at the moment.
On the non-book front: Kosovo, what’s your deal? I’ve been chasing hits from you for like three months and you’re starting to hurt my feelings. I got two hits from Libya this week, ferchrissakes. Does Libya have better internets than Kosovo?
Also, I’m thinking of buying a Rams jersey. I don’t have a favorite pro football team so I might as well be political about it.