The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
One, that even though Fear the Walking Dead didn’t air last week, I went ahead and recapped the series premiere of The Walking Dead over at Sourcerer, because why wouldn’t I do that, and two, #SilerSaturday is starting off swimmingly and that’s all good. Go check BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, Vol. 1 out for free!
Posting may be a bit heavy today; I hope you understand. 🙂
You read the headline, folks. BA 1 is free at Amazon today! Go forth and download!
Troll evictions! Dwarf pirates! Daring rescues! Angry gods! Impossible technology! Oversized bars! Pissed-off ogres! Disrespectful spaceships! All this and a mild disregard for proper wound treatment!
The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is a novella-length collection of six short stories set in a common universe. Combining elements of space opera-style science fiction and high fantasy, The Benevolence Archives tell the adventures of Brazel, Rhundi, and Grond, a gnome/halfogre team of smugglers.
THE PLANET IT’S FARTHEST FROM: A simple job in a saloon goes poorly for Brazel.
THE CLOSET: Brazel and Grond are hired to teach someone why gambling can be a bad idea.
YANK: Dwarven pirates. ‘Nuff said.
REMEMBER: Brazel and Grond are hired by one of the galaxy’s most powerful people for a suspiciously easy job.
THE CONTRACT: Rhundi tries to get through a simple business negotiation without anyone being shot.
THE SIGIL: Brazel and Grond encounter something horrifying on a frozen rock in the middle of nowhere.
This one’s creepy, y’all.
Th’boy’s been home all week because the Great Poop Suspension led directly into a bout with diarrhea that has flung my wife into a pit of howling madness where all she does is monitor the consistency and regularity of our toddler’s toilet deposits. I, as a caring father and husband, would love to be home with her to help with this, and would love to have taken over for half of it, but… something something my job is important for some reason, and also lesson plans.
Anyway, the boy found Bo on the Go, and I do not like it very much. This is Bo:
Bo has an insanely annoying voice that, combined with the animation style of the show, reminds me of Super Why, which I hate. Therefore I hate this show, because things that remind me of Super Why are awful and I hate them.
I also have a lot of trouble paying attention to it. Like, there’s a dragon there. She’s got a dragon with her sometimes, I don’t know why. The dragon’s probably got a name and it probably does things, but this show is too awful to pay attention to dragons. You can Google it if you really need to know his name, I guess.
Here’s what I do know about the show: Bo likes to insert her own name into normal phrases every so often, which is terrible and arrogant. Like, things are “Super-Bo-riffic!” because that is a thing people say and not a sign of runaway narcissism. Occasionally things are “Easy-bo-breezy.” She calls the people watching her show “Bo buddies.” That’s also terrible. This is the theme song. It sucks:
(I couldn’t find a copy of the actual theme song; this will have to do.)
Anyway, Bo does stuff; I don’t know what she does or what her problems are. I do know that every so often she “runs out of energy” and that unholy bracelet on her arm starts blinking. At that point she demands that her “Bo buddies” provide her with “Bo power” and she insists that they start doing something, like running or jumping up and down or spinning around or, hell, I don’t know, masturbating or something. And then that fills up her little meter to green and then she can go on with whatever she was doing. I assume she solves problems somehow. People on kids’ TV are always solving problems.
As far as I know she never takes off the bracelet.
Anyway, she spends more time than any other character in a kids’ show I’ve ever seen bossing around the audience. Like, there’s an episode on right now, and she’s demanding that the kids watching the show clear a space out in front of the TV. Now she wants them to spin. The boy has done neither of these things.
“I can feel your energy!” Bo says. I hate the way she says energy almost as much as I hate hearing Wyatt say problem.
So, what’s she doing with the energy, do you think? Because that’s the part I want to know. The public front of the show is that she’s trying to get the kids to move and exercise and all that, because healthy, but she’s a tv show, and the moppet above notwithstanding, the kids aren’t moving.
Nope.
Bo is a vampire.
I said it.
They just want you to think this is a show about healthy eating or exercise or whateverthehell. Bo is an energy vampire. She is stealing our kids’ life essences with her creepy tricolored bracelet and I don’t know what it is being used for but it is almost certainly pure evil. This energy is being used to fuel Donald Trump’s hair somehow. I know it.
Don’t let your kids watch this show.
EDIT: Not a joke. This happened just as I was fiddling with tags. My wife is at the grocery, enjoying a few minutes of blessed solitude without our rectally-challenged toddler at her side:
A true story:
I was out of the classroom today, again, taking care of some bidness that needed taking care of. During part of said bidness I needed to go around to each and every grade-level teacher in the building, some of them twice, and get them to sign and date something.
I had the following conversation, I am not joking, every single time, right down to the under-the-breath profanity:
MR. SILER: <hands teacher clipboard and pen> Sign here, date here, verify this here.
TEACHER: <verifies, signs, stares off into space for a second> What’s the date today?
MR. SILER: September 11th.
TEACHER: Oh… Shit. I feel terrible. Of course it is.
I was commiserating with, oh, the first three or four, and after that just started making fun of people. Because, again: I had this conversation with every single teacher. The best one was the one who was literally showing a video about 9/11 while I was in the room.
Starting tomorrow, every Saturday for the next 90 days I’ll be doing a free promotion for one of my books on Amazon. Every Saturday. This Saturday, for the first promotion, my book The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 will be free at Amazon all day.
(It’s currently just 99 cents, in case you feel like spending money…)
Here’s the rest of the schedule for September and October:
November’s up in the air a bit because I need to decide what to do about Black Friday/Cyber Monday, neither of which is on a Saturday. We’ll see.
Will this hurt sales? Yeah, it could. We’ll see if it makes up for it in volume and, eventually, some reviews. #SilerSaturday! It’s a 90 day experiment!
This is all I have at the moment.
I got an email about their Kindle Scout program the other day; does anybody know anything about it? It appears to be a crowdsourced approach to publication, only Amazon is your publisher and not just a distributor. (Note to non-indie writers. There’s a big difference. I publish my books. Amazon’s my distributor.)
Anyway, it appears that the program’s been around for a while– I got the impression from the email that it was a new thing– so I’m surprised that I’ve never heard of it prior to getting the email last week. Have any of you fiddled around with this at all, either as a reader or a writer? Anybody have a book out there that could use a nomination?
What it seems to be to me is less a control on quality of the work and more a test of which authors already possess a long enough arm online to drive “nominators” to the site– which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I doubt I can compete even if I had a book at the moment I wanted to nominate, which I don’t. We’ll see what happens when the Skylights sequel comes out, sometime next spring.
As of about twenty minutes ago, I’m entirely Amazon exclusive. It may be that the other retailers haven’t realized that the plug is pulled for a day or two, but I’ve pulled everything down this evening other than Amazon. I have some ideas for promotions that I’ll be letting y’all know about in the next few days. I’m hopeful that things will work out the way I want them to.
Meanwhile, Malumba is easily outpacing Sanctum in terms of pre-orders so far. I’m starting to hear from alpha readers already and so far the response has been impressively positive. I didn’t have super high hopes for this one to do much, but I’d love to be proved wrong. Check it out! Just $4.95!
I think I’m going back to KDP
Select again, y’all.
Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 hasn’t been on KDP Select for close to a year now, and Skylights and Sanctum of the Sphere were both removed from the program when their terms ran out in June and July, respectively. I wasn’t super pleased with the payment changes on Kindle Unlimited, and I wanted the flexibility back of having all of my books available on all the markets I could reach.
Months later, all the markets I can reach aren’t selling any books, and Amazon sales are suffering as well, since I know Amazon does more passive marketing for you on books that are in KDP Select than otherwise. I’ve come up with a solution for the folks who want my books in other formats: they can email me and ask for them. Having BA 1 available at Barnes and Noble and the iBookstore has resulted in one or two downloads a month (that’s across both) and Smashwords is generally good for about 30. Openbooks.com used to be a good source of downloads, but those have dried up recently, and I have good reason to suspect that they may never have been real in the first place.
So, screw it. I haven’t sold a single copy of Sanctum or Skylights in any other market since I made them available. And if you really want Skylights as a .epub I’m pretty sure you can figure out how to email me and ask for it and we can work something out. And the other thing? I did 200 free downloads of Benevolence Archives in a single day the last time I had it on Select. Smashwords has 324 total.
This… is not worth it. I’d originally thought to use BA 1 as my free book to drive sales to my others, and to not ever use free promotions for the other two books. Right now what I want is people reading and reviewing my books, and I think I may just need to focus on getting more copies out there and floating around regardless of how much money I make from it. That means Amazon, where I can push more downloads in a single day with a free promotion than months on another platform. And if I decide 90 days from now that I was wrong again, well, I’ll put them up everywhere again.
So, yeah. Expect all of my ebooks to be Amazon exclusives by this weekend. Note that print editions will still be available through Barnes and Noble’s website if that floats your boat, but we’re gonna take another long look at exclusivity and see if I can’t find a different way to make it work.
If you want to download something for Nook or through the iBookstore while you still can, check out the “My Books” link in the masthead for all the links you could possibly desire.
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