The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
If, like me, you don’t drink at all, and if, like me, despite not drinking at all you find yourself in a position where you’ve had a long fucking day and fuck it you want a glass of wine anyway, and the only wine in the house turns out to be mango wine, and your wife says to you “shake it up before you open it, so the mango doesn’t settle”…
don’t fucking listen to your wife.
That is all.
It’s been a depressing couple of weeks, honestly. A bunch of things that haven’t managed to make their way into entire posts yet:
It’s here! It’s here! TALES, volume 3 of my BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES series, is now available for immediate download from the Amazon for the low price of $2.99! Prefer paperback? I’ve got you covered there, too, for just $8.99, with Prime shipping available!
New to the BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES? No problem; you can check out the entire series here.
I’m going to be at work all day, probably checking Amazon on my phone every second I don’t have a customer. Give me something to look at! 🙂
I’m Luther Siler. I’m a writer and an editor. Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.
I’ve written several books you might be interested in, ranging from short story collections to near-future science fiction to fantasy space opera to nonfiction, all available as ebooks or in print from Amazon. Autographed books can be ordered straight from me as well.
I can be found in several different places on the Internet. Here’s the important ones:
Thanks for reading!
Everything I might want to write about tonight is exhausting, so I think I’ll just put this up and let you write the post in your heads:
First day of fall today, supposedly. Not that I could tell; it was goddamn near 90 outside, the hottest day in weeks. We’ve had a couple of mild summers in a row around here, which is good since I’m incapable of handling heat.
Trying to decide what I ought to do next. Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3 is out next Tuesday, and can still be pre-ordered digitally for $2.99 or– sssh, don’t tell anyone— bought in print for $8.99. Unless you’re a Prime member, the book’s not getting to you before the 26th, so we’ll call it day-and-date and not worry about it. In general, presale numbers have not been making me happy. My presales have gone up with every book until this one, but with four days until release BA 3 has fewer presales than anything else I’ve released so far. I’ll take the blame for a good chunk of that; I haven’t had the time or energy to invest into properly marketing the thing, and it doesn’t help that blog traffic has looked like this for a while now:
Now, 2015 is a little unrepresentative– a single post was good for over a hundred thousand of those hits, and there’s still a few months left in 2017, but the overall downward trend is pretty evident. My twitter feed has been locked in at about 10K followers for over a year now, and nothing I can do will move the numbers. And the books aren’t selling very well, and aren’t getting reviews at all. I just fiddled around in KNP’s sales dashboard to generate a useful graph, but just picture a line dwindling to near-zero several months ago and staying there, other than a brief blip when Balremesh came out. Presales on that were good, but it appears that everyone who wanted it pre-ordered it. I’d blame the occasional free weekend, but my sales were shit before I put everything back on Kindle Select again, so nothing’s changed in that regard.
This is starting to sound like a Goodbye Cruel World sort of post, and maybe it should be, but it’s mostly me casting around trying to figure out how to shake things up in my life. Being an author is important to me, but I don’t think I can really go back to doing that until I figure out a way to not be a furniture salesman anymore– I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all these sales downturns started hitting when I stopped teaching, and got seriously bad when I started at my current job. The blog traffic predates that, yeah, but it’s kinda tough to surpass a year where you have a single post get 39,000 shares on Facebook.
And then there’s the question of the Next Book, and whether I should even try to start the next book right now, or focus on fixing everything else before I worry about that. It’ll probably be me going back to the Skylights universe and trying to nail the sequel to that book properly, but there’s another book bouncing around in my head trying to get out that doesn’t fit in with any of my established universes and might be fun to write. But I’ve kind of liked the last few weekends where I’m not stressing about whether I’m writing all the time, so maybe I need a break. I dunno.
So– have I mentioned this?– I’m going to be at Kokomo-Con on October 14th, if any of you are nearby and feel like hitting up a convention. I have a new book coming out on September 26th. You knew about that part!
It would be cool, wouldn’t it, if the new book was available at the convention? Seriously, right? It would totally be cool.
Which is why I spent the entire evening yelling and screaming at Microsoft Word, again, and at CreateSpace’s stupid, stupid online file proofer that doesn’t actually seem to work right, and okay I think that there’s gonna be a print edition of the book available for purchase on Amazon right around day-and-date with the ebook and the book will be available at the convention. But holy crap am I gonna get my butt kicked on shipping.
$8.99 for the print edition, by the by. Cheaper at the convention, probably. And I’ll sign the book for free! Come see me!
An insight into my personality: if I happen to pop open the iTunes store, mostly because I’m curious as to whether a new episode of The Orville is available or not (the first one performed well above expectations, don’t @ me) and I happen to see this:
…and, upon investigating further, I discover that Prophets of Rage is the self-titled debut album of a group composed of Chuck D from Public Enemy, B-Real from Cypress Hill, and the motherfucking entirety of Rage Against the Machine, I will enter a fugue state, as follows:
…and upon recovering from said fugue state I will discover that I have bought not one but two albums on iTunes, with no conscious decision-making process of any kind evident at all– that I somehow managed to not only download the debut full-length album which launched this week but also the EP (which I also didn’t know existed) which came out last year sometime, but I won’t even remember looking for it– my money will just be gone and I will have new music on my various music-producing devices.
I will listen to them during my various trips back and forth to work this week, and I may or may not report back with a review. But yeah. That combination? Shortcuts every mental defense I have against spending money and the shit just happens automatically.
Speaking of spending money: my new book, Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3 is now available for pre-order on Amazon! It’s just $2.99 and I think you should buy it right now so that I can afford more music.
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