On Openbooks.com and who should be using it

On June 20, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

(Actually, first, a confession of a rather embarrassing math issue I should have noticed on my own: in that Kindle Unlimited post a couple of days ago, I didn’t check the math and rolled with another author’s suggestion that Amazon was implying you’d get $10 a page. That’s per page written, not per page read. Amazon’s suggestion is $.10 per page read. I still think that’s ten times higher than you’ll actually get, but it’s still a misreading of what the email says. I hate it when other people pass on that sort of stuff uncritically and I apologize for doing it myself.)

I have had– by my standards, as always– a really good couple of months as an independent author. Today marks two full months since I have had a “zero day”– a day where no one downloaded or purchased any of my books. I had a signing in May where I sold nearly 60 books in a day, and June is on pace to be very close to or actually pass May’s numbers without the bump from the signing, which is really remarkable.

My numbers across the board are trending upward, which is a good thing. But the single best source of downloads for my books so far in 2015 has been a site that I’ve talked about a couple of times but haven’t really devoted direct attention to: Openbooks.com.

(Actually, let’s do this right now, because this post is gonna come off as a little shilly: they didn’t ask me to write this, and I’m not being compensated for it. The model has some weaknesses and I’ll be discussing those. This post is my opinion as a user of the site; it’s just gonna turn out to be a pretty positive one.)

Right now my only book on OpenBooks is The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1. BA has been downloaded, as of this exact second, 223 times since January. There was a point where it was in the top 10 for their entire site; it’s still performing relatively well in the Fiction category and is the second-highest Science Fiction book. For comparison’s sake, BA has been on Smashwords since July 2014 and has 247 downloads. Openbooks will pass that this month.

Here’s how the site works: All of the books on OpenBooks are initially free. The site operates on a “pay what you want” model (rather annoyingly called “pay what it’s worth,” a phrase I have some linguistic quibbles with) and you are prompted to pay some recommended amount (the author sets that amount) when you finish reading the book. You can freely share any book you download as well, and folks you share it with are also prompted to pay if they like. Other than that, it’s a typical book site– you can review what you read and all that.

(No one’s reviewed BA over there yet, although the site itself did a great review of the book. I keep trying to fix that and haven’t gotten anyone to bite yet.)

Here’s what they’re good at: the site is young and doesn’t have a huge number of books yet, so they’re doing a really good job right now of helping their authors. They monitor Tweets and blogs and RT stuff that they find interesting and they seem to do staff reviews of books at a fairly fast clip. It may be just that I’ve hit a lucky patch, but right now my book is getting downloaded from the new, lesser-known site several times more often than every place Smashwords feeds combined.

What they do less well: right now, as I said, the book’s been downloaded 223 times. Three of those presumably 223 people have decided to pay me for it– a conversion rate of 1.34%. That’s better than the site’s overall conversion rate of 1.08%. And those three payments have added up to less than three bucks. So nobody’s getting rich off this site right now. Including, I think, them.

However.

If you are an author who is following the plan that I am– of having a perma-free book that you’re hoping will drive sales to your other work, you need to have your book on OpenBooks.com, because then the low conversion rate basically amounts to occasional free money since the book isn’t supposed to cost anything anyway, and these guys will help to push your book. The site is still young and so getting in on the ground floor is a good idea. The staff claims in the forums that they’re working on ways to drive up the conversion rate, and I believe them; it’s just not working super well right now. I wouldn’t recommend putting pay books on the site just yet because the conversion rate is so low. Then again, most of your volume is going to come from Amazon anyway– BA is 99 cents at Amazon because I can’t price it free, and despite me making it as clear as I can to everyone that you can get this free everywhere else it still sells several copies a month. It may be that if the book is free in one place that it wouldn’t hurt sales very much, but that would be an experiment for someone else to do.

So, yeah. You should check the place out.

(Back to Kindle Unlimited: you may be asking what’s the difference here? and that would be a fair question. I’d be perfectly happy to put BA 1 on Kindle Unlimited, because I don’t care about how I get paid for that book. OpenBooks is also a lot more open about their numbers and their process than Amazon is. If I want to be in Kindle Select, I have no choice but to be in KU as well. I don’t like that. I would rather have an honest this book is free for everyone except people who choose to pay for it than we’re gonna rake in a bunch of money for your books, and then pay you a very small amount of that money according to a formula that only we have access to and will change anytime we want.)

Three facts. Maybe four, depending on how you count.

On June 19, 2015June 19, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

I ordered my birthday present yesterday.

Today I went to a Fathers’ Day thing at my kid’s day care and then came home and took a nap.

Other than that I got nothin’. How’re you?

In which that’s enough of that (on leaving Kindle Select… again)

On June 18, 2015June 20, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing6 Comments

kindle-unlimited Both of my novels are currently enrolled in Kindle Select. Skylights‘ term will run out at the
end of June, and The Sanctum of the Sphere will leave the program at the end of July. I will not be renewing the program for either book. Now, one thing: Skylights has unquestionably sold better on Select than it did without it. There’s no doubt of that. Sanctum has never not been on Select so I have no data to compare yet. That said, I’ve gotten a lot better at marketing this year (and having a third book hasn’t hurt) and I can’t prove that being on Select has actually been the determining factor for the sales increase.

I can say with certainty that being on Select does one thing for you: your book’s ranking will react faster to sales if you’re on Select than it will otherwise. (This “updated every hour” thing is nonsense, and always has been.) But none of my books are selling well enough that that is likely to matter all that much, and frankly that’s not likely to be changing soon. I would rather be in a place where I can say my books are “available everywhere” right now than be exclusive to Amazon.

Plus, Kindle Unlimited. They’ve futzed with Kindle Unlimited again, and I really don’t like the way they’ve changed their terms this time. Not that I was happy with it before, mind you. Previously, a borrower had to read 10% of your book before the author saw any money for the borrow. Because authors are reasonably clever people, this led to a rebirth of the novella– short works, written specifically for Kindle Unlimited, where that 10% marker got hit quickly. A prolific author can churn out a novella a month, and the market got saturated quickly.

Now? They’re paying by the page. So if you borrow my book and you only read a page, I’ll probably get about a penny. If you read ten percent of my 300-page book, I’ll probably see about thirty cents. Amazon’s emails on the subject to their authors have implied a $10 page rate, which is utterly insane. (CORRECTION: I should have looked closer at the math. That’s $10 per page written. The actual rate Amazon suggests you might get per page read is a dime. The rest of this remains true.) Much like the author of the article I just linked to, I’d be stunned if it was more than a penny a page, and it’ll likely be a fraction of that. Plus, Amazon gets to determine what a “page” is, and it won’t be equivalent to a swipe on a Kindle screen, since users can set the size of their text.

So, here’s what this means, right? You borrow my book from Amazon. Amazon gets your $9.99 for that month no matter what. They always get your money. As far as I’m concerned, once you’ve determined that you should have a thing I made, right then is when I should get paid for that thing, and not when you use it. This model exists for no other consumer good that I can think of. If I buy a couch, and I never sit on it, I still gotta pay for the couch. Hell, even with the rental model, I still gotta pay to rent the car even if I never drive it. Would I prefer that people read my books? Of course I would! But I’m an avid reader and it can take months for me to get to a book even after purchasing a physical copy. At least previously the 10% rule wasn’t terribly onerous and then you got paid for the entire royalty. This model feels like Amazon thinks they deserve to get paid for my books more than I do.

No thank you.

My work will continue to be available at Amazon, mind you– but no longer as part of Kindle Unlimited, once I’m able to pull them from the program. I’m not cutting my own throat here, and while there are benefits to making my books available at Barnes and Noble and Kobo and Smashwords and everywhere else, they won’t be making me much money even by my current not terribly high standards. But I’m not doing Kindle Unlimited anymore. This royalty structure’s unacceptable and if this is how they’re treating their authors the program should wither on the vine and die.

(Coming soon: that post on OpenBooks I’ve been promising for a while.)

You are adorable (dumb)

On June 18, 2015June 17, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

So the Snowpiercer review’s been spiking in hits again lately. I followed a new and surprisingly robust referrer back last night only to discover that among the usual chorus of derps suggesting that I JUST! DIDN’T! GET! IT! there was one accusing me of plagiarizing the title of the review.

The title of the review is SNOWPIERCER: I HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED THIS MOVIE. I’m not linking to it. It’s not hard to find.

If you are remotely film-literate, you recognize that as being very close to a line from a review Roger Ebert wrote of a film called “North,” differing only in the addition of the word Snowpiercer, which one would clearly not expect to appear in a review of North from many years before Snowpiercer actually came out. One of his books, named after that line, is I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.

Everyone fucking knows about that line. Ev. Er. Y. One.

When literate people do this, it is called a reference, and you are supposed to notice it. It is not “plagiarism,” which is an entirely different and completely unrelated thing. There is another of these tricksy “references” somewhere in this article! See if you can spot it.

You moron.

(Wait, there’s two! Wouldn’t want anyone to think I plagiarized the word tricksy from Tolkien.)

(Three, if the .gif counts. I did not write The Professional.)

Upcoming

On June 17, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

My boss seems to think that my school year will be ending on Friday; I disagree and think I’ll need at least a couple of days next week, but one way or another it doesn’t look like I’ll be going until July like I originally thought. This is good, as I’m chomping at the bit to get moving on a couple of projects. All of the following are slated for some serious movement in the next few weeks:

Essay collation (no editing, rewriting, or new material yet) for Searching for Malumba, still planned to be my fall release. I did some work on this already but not much.
I’m starting the Skylights sequel, currently tentatively titled Starlight. I probably need to spend a couple of days in research mode before I write anything at all but I really want to get moving so maybe I’ll just fix up the science later. Starlight is currently slated for early 2016 but who knows.
At least one Benevolence Archives short story, this one for submission to Lightspeed magazine. Once Lightspeed rejects it it’ll become the first story for the next Benevolence Archives book, which will be another short story collection, tentatively called Tales from the Benevolence Archives. Release date? Who the hell knows.

Also, during the first weekend in July I’ll be signing and selling books in Creators’ Alley at InConJunction in Indianapolis. It’s a three-day con, and tickets are cheap, and the last day of the con is my birthday, so everyone ought to come by and say hello.

Sometime in there maybe I’ll look for a job, too. Whee!

In which I’m ahead of the game

On June 16, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

I’d like to point out that I was calling the Mayor “Mayor Bootyjudge” way before he came out of the closet today, and I can’t decide if amending his nickname to Manbootyjudge is homophobic or not, but at least for the time being I find it hilarious. Is “lovingly homophobic” a thing?

At any rate, I’m glad to have played a part in allowing him to live long enough to make his big announcement today by not hitting him with my car back in December. Keep an eye on this kid, y’all– and I can call him that, because he’s still like twelve years younger than me, even if he’s got a gray hair or two now– because while I don’t doubt any of what he says in his statement to the Tribune, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is Bill Clinton-level scary-smart, and he knows full and goddamn well that this is only going to raise his profile. He’s still the youngest mayor of a city with more than 100K inhabitants in the country, and now he’s one of only a handful of openly gay mayors. He picked up a profile in the WaPo today, ferchrissakes. You know when the last time was that the Washington Post mentioned South Bend? I do. It was the last time they wrote a profile on Pete Buttigieg. It’s happened more than once.

You watch. I don’t know if he’s planning on ending up in Washington through the Senate or the Governor’s mansion or both, but by 2032 everybody in America is gonna know this guy’s name.

In which the picture should be the whole post

On June 15, 2015June 15, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

Yes, this. COME AT ME BRO I’M IMMORTAL.

You may have noticed I’ve been a mite stressed out lately.

It came to my attention recently (last Thursday) that someone-it-might-have-been-me-and-the-person-who-told-me-definitely-wanted-it-to-be-me lost sixty thousand dollars of someone else’s money. Money that we were supposed to pay these other people in October, and didn’t pay them, and– to further compound the error– money that they have been paying people with during the several months since then.

Yes, they were paying people with money from an empty account. I’m not a CPA. I don’t know how that works or how it takes eight months to notice sixty grand is missing. I do know that it’s a problem when it’s discovered, though. So most of the last couple of days at work has been a horrible process of collecting evidence that, no, for a variety of reasons this shit wasn’t my fault, although that was only after half a day or so of oh shit I’m so fucking fired before I started putting together what had actually happened.

Meanwhile, I’m looking for jobs that have mostly so far involved at least some degree of budgetary supervision. So “lost sixty grand once” will look real good on a résumé.

At any rate, we got that cleared up, and I was able to prove to a fair degree of certainty that shit was not my fault, and came up with a way to solve the larger problem once you get past “not my fault!” of how do we pay this while I was at it. There is a reason I never delete emails, people, and it’s so that I can print them out eight months later with dates and times and certain key phrases highlighted.

Plus, also, we discovered they never actually invoiced us. That’s kinda a problem. If you expect someone to send you sixty grand you probably ought to actually generate the piece of paper necessary to ask for it.

But anyway! Late Friday afternoon I discovered another problem, and this one definitely was my fault: I had somehow managed to adjust an amount in a certain budget line to a total that was actually less than the amount of funds we had already expended from that budget line, and that without everything submitted for the year yet. So today’s hell stress was trying to figure out how we were going to fix that problem. We got it taken care of by noon, but there was a point in the day where I was seriously trying to figure out how to explain to my wife that I owed my job three grand. Because this shit was definitely my fault.

But that’s fixed now too.

I’ve used up all my mistakes and good luck for June, and I’m still battling bronchitis. I need the rest of the month to go easy, thanks.

So, yeah…

On June 14, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized10 Comments

I am literally only posting this because as far as I know I haven’t missed a day in 2015 yet. I’m sick enough that I just went to urgent care for drugs. And now I’m going to go to sleep. For like the fourth time today.

Last night, delirious, I wrote an entire BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES story. I remembered none of it when I woke up. Maybe tonight I’ll have a dream with a typewriter in it.