The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Today involved two different fights, one a cafeteria-clearing brawl that took at least four adults to break up, and that wasn’t the one where a staff member got injured. I took two different staff members to urgent care today– the one who got hurt in the fight and our nurse, of all people, who had a massive asthma attack around 10:00.
I came home and took a nap. I’m awake now, so it’s time for bed.
Do I really have to do this four more times this week?
This is a pretty cool interview of some dude by some other dude and you should check it out.
This is the inaugural edition of a new feature: author/blogger interviews. Today I’m chatting with Sourcerer contributor Luther M. Siler, author of The Benevolence Archives and Skylights. Luther has graciously agreed to conduct the next interview.
1. You’ve just released The Sanctum of the Sphere, volume two of TheBenevolence Archives. Can you tell us a little about that series and how it came about?
I read an interview with Brian K. Vaughan, writer of the excellent comic book sci-fi series SAGA, right after George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney. Vaughan made a point that resonated with me immediately: instead of getting mad at Lucas for doing what he wanted with what was, after all, kinda HIS stuff, why not channel that energy into making up our own stories? I don’t know that he specifically used SW as inspiration, but the question that ended up leading to…
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In honor of Star Wars Day, which is today, both of my ebook novels are on sale for $2.99, discounted from their usual $4.99. I’d put Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 on sale, but it’s already 99 cents at Amazon and free everywhere else, so short of paying y’all to read it there’s not much I can do. 🙂 The sale will last until late tonight or, a bit more likely, tomorrow morning. May the Fourth be with you!
The Sanctum of the Sphere at Amazon.com
Skylights at Amazon.com.
If you follow me on Twitter or you pay attention to the feed on the right side of your screen there, you already know this, but check back early tomorrow morning for a little announcement about a quick one-day sale.
Also: AGE OF ULTRON was amazing.
So, this is interesting. I’m fairly certain that the campaign manager of the candidate for City Clerk whose mailing I criticized the other day has made an incredibly ill-advised attempt to start shit with me on Facebook. At the moment it’s just a couple of posts, to which I have responded in what I’ve come to think of as my I’m Being Gentle Right Now but It Won’t Last Much Longer tone. The follow-up to IBGRNbIWLML is I Have Fourteen Thousand Followers Between My Blog and Twitter; Do You Want the Internet Dropped On Your Head Two Days Before the Election?
That one may need a snappier name.
At any rate, I’m hoping that the silly people recognize that antagonizing voters before a low-turnout primary election is a real bad idea and back off. We’ll see.
Stuff what I wanna do today: I have tickets to Age of Ultron at 3:00, and the wife and I plan to have dinner together somewhere civilized afterward; there is a final wrap-up A to Z post to write, and I’d like to spend some time planning out what’s next in what I’m pretending is my writing career.
Speaking of that: my story for the Swords v. Cthulhu anthology made it to the final round but was rejected. It is, at the moment, directly Cthulhu-linked. In other words, it directly references Shub-Niggurath, as you might expect from a story entitled Warrior Jayashree and the Young. It’ll therefore need a touch of rewriting before I can submit it to other markets.
Or I could just post it here. I haven’t posted any short fiction in a while. What say you?
The next installment of the Spreadsheet of Doom! for April. As always, click for something that’s remotely readable, and I hope you have a big monitor or good eyes:
April was a real real real good month, relatively speaking, and the amazing thing is it would have been a real good month even if I hadn’t launched a new book. My previous best month was February, which got to 72 sales with the help of a Kindle countdown deal. April had 102 sales without the Kindle countdown, which makes me super happy. My best market continues to be OpenBooks.com, which brought me 46 downloads of Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1. The book continues to be top-10 in its genre there, although it’s lost its #1 ranking, which makes me sad. It’s #15 in all fiction ebooks right now. That’s awesome.
Interesting fact: Skylights sold more copies in print than in ebook form. Then again, I hope May will see both of my print books doing that, since I have the signing. Second interesting fact: only four days in all of April with no sales. That’s fantastic.
As far as presales: The Sanctum of the Sphere ended up doing about exactly as well as Skylights did on launch, but with one interesting caveat: I had eight presales for the book. All but one of them actually downloaded on the 27th, and one of them downloaded on the 28th. I didn’t sell a single digital copy on the 28th that hadn’t been presold. That sounds like a complaint. It’s not, although it was an enormous surprise. What it means is that I basically convinced literally everybody who might have bought my book on launch day to preorder it– which says good things about my ability to push preorders and slightly less good things about my ability to drive sales in general. Eight sales of anything in a day is a big deal for me, so I’m happy with it– as of right now, combining print and digital sales, Sanctum has moved 13 copies, which I’m fairly happy with for a book that’s only been out for five days.
I had initially thought that pre-sales didn’t affect day-of-release sales rank, but it turns out that that’s not the case, it’s just that Amazon takes its time to update it, since Sanctum abruptly jumped into the 50,000 range sometime on the 29th. They claim to update sales data hourly; that may be true for high-selling books but definitely isn’t true for the long-tail items.
This will be a big week, as Tuesday is May the 4th, Star Wars Day, and the signing is a week from today. I haven’t decided exactly what I’m doing for SWD but I’ll be doing something, and hopefully the signing is going to be hugely successful and not a giant waste of money.
We’ll see. April was great, but hopefully May will be even better.
WARNING: This is the whiniest, most inside-baseball ridiculous no-one-who-matters-will-ever-see-this whiny blog post of all time, so either click away while you still can or brace yourself.
This is Irish Dave. He has apparently decided on his own that he wants to be called that; I didn’t come up with the name. He’s the new morning DJ on the radio station that I usually listen to on my way in to work. (Left aside for now: why I bother listening to terrestrial radio. I have reasons; I don’t know that they’re any good.)
Anyway, he’s the new morning DJ, and they’ve completely redone the show now that he’s on it. It’s called the New Fun Way to have Fun Fun in the Morning while You’re Having Fun and Waking Up To Have Fun, or something ridiculous like that, and Irish Dave is the host. The previous morning show had a stupid trivia question segment that happened to coincide with my morning drive in to work; they’d basically quote a statistic (“40% of women say this never happens to them… but it does!”) and challenge the viewers to come up with the answer and give away some stupid prize.
On Irish Dave’s show, they’ve done something similar, and in the same time slot, except it’s appreciably dumber. He calls it the Whiz Kid segment, but the ads and promos call it Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, because god help us if we want to be original ever and the best thing to do is to steal other people’s dumb ideas. Here’s the problem: there’s no actual being smarter than the fifth grader; it’s just a kid reading the question, and frankly she’s reading it poorly– her delivery is syllable-by-syllable and halting as hell, and as a teacher I think she really needs to work on her fluency. It’s awful. But she’s not competing at all, they’ve just got a little kid asking the question for some entirely unclear reason. Occasionally Irish Dave pretends she’s calling in live. This is obviously not true at all and I don’t understand why he bothers.
This was this morning’s question, rendered word-for-word:
“Between 1845 and 1847, three fourths of one million people and hundreds of thousands of others emigrated to the United States. What caused this tragedy?”
A couple things about this. First, the style of the questions now make this shit much less fun. I knew right away it was the potato famine, but it’s not fun guessing if you don’t immediately know. That was the fun thing about the previous segment– the stats were always ridiculously generic and the answers could really be just about anything. This is a history question. You either know it or you don’t.
And it’s a horribly phrased trivia question. First of all, the kid’s reading the question badly, because no one ever says “three fourths of one million.” It sounds weird, but it’s written as a fraction on the sheet of paper she’s reading from and she’s a fifth grader so she doesn’t know to say quarters. Second, what the fuck is the deal about “3/4 of a million people” and “hundreds of thousands of others“? What the hell are these “others”? Are they people? Horses? Lice?
Finally, the actual emigration isn’t the actual tragedy. The famine was the tragedy. The famine didn’t cause the tragedy of emigration, the famine was the tragedy that caused the emigration. Did the fifth-grader write the question?
Fucking dumb.
On an entirely unrelated note, all of my books for the signing have shown up. I don’t know that I ever officially announced this, but I redid the cover and the interior for Skylights before printing the 30 copies that I’ll have with me for the signing. Here’s what the new cover looks like:
Pretty, innit? So if you order the print edition of Skylights (or buy it at the signing) it’ll look a bit better than the earlier version did.
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