I can be found in several different places on the Internet. Here are the important ones:
Support me on Patreon! Just a dollar a month gets you access to exclusive stories, early access to new books as they come out, and more! $2 or more a month gets you access to CLICK, an entire exclusive book!
You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. Warning: Twitter is where Politics Luther hangs out, and Politics Luther is usually angry and profane. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I accept any and all friend requests.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.
I can be found in several different places on the Internet. Here are the important ones:
Support me on Patreon! Just a dollar a month gets you access to exclusive stories, early access to new books as they come out, and more! $2 or more a month gets you access to CLICK, an entire exclusive book!
You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. Warning: Twitter is where Politics Luther hangs out, and Politics Luther is usually angry and profane. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I accept any and all friend requests.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.
This is going to be a very short post, considering the amount of work that went into it, because Amazon and Square don’t play nice with each other and neither of them makes it especially easy to get these numbers in a format that I like. HOWEVER! I haven’t looked at book sales in a systematic way in a while, so this kinda needed to happen. And, frankly, included some nice surprises.
Note that “Amazon” includes both paid sales and free downloads, and I’ve smushed together both physical and digital copies as well; nearly all of them are digital. The Square sales are sales in person; some of those are going to be free giveaways for one reason or another but all of them involve physical books given or sold to people by me. This is 2018 only:
Eight hundred and fifty-seven books seems like a lot, honestly. The little discrepancy you see with Click from 2018 to the total includes the 14 people who got free copies through Patreon, which is one of the only ways you can get the book (pledge more than $2 a month!) and the 9 on the Square set were sold in person at conventions, which is the other way to get it.
As of right now, my books are starting to drop off of KDP Select, which means I’m about to lose the ability to give them away on Amazon. I am either trying to get all six of them (Click isn’t on Amazon) on the same schedule or about to broaden back out and put my books on other sites again. I haven’t decided. As of January 2nd, everything will be off KDP select, so I’ve got a few more days to think about it.
The overall numbers really surprised me. I didn’t think I’d moved this many books.
So, basically, if you include the occasional sale that isn’t captured here (Barnes and Noble, Apple, non-convention personal sales that I didn’t bother recording in Square,) I’m probably at right around five thousand books sold or downloaded since I started doing this.
Which, on the one hand, is a larger number than I thought it was going to be, and on the other hand, if I look at actual money earned from this … yeesh. I’m not going to share that because Amazon accepts currencies from all over the world and I’m not about to start digging through my tax returns, but suffice it to say that I’ve absolutely lost money at playing author since 2014. Cons and hotel rooms and book printings and all that cost money, and again, a lot of those Amazon numbers are from giveaways, not sales.
The totals for in-person sales, which are included in the above– this is just a summation of the “Square” lines:
Which, again, this isn’t nothing. Every one of these represents an actual human standing in front of me who bought books from me. Am I J.K. Rowling? Hell no. But this is a lot larger of a number than zero, which is what it would have been when I started doing this.
I should probably set some hard and fast goals for 2019. Not yet; I need to absorb these numbers first. But maybe that post is coming. Tomorrow, the 10 best books of the year.
I can be found in several different places on the Internet. Here are the important ones:
Support me on Patreon! Just a dollar a month gets you access to exclusive stories, early access to new books as they come out, and more! $2 or more a month gets you access to CLICK, an entire exclusive book!
You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. Warning: Twitter is where Politics Luther hangs out, and Politics Luther is usually angry and profane. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I accept any and all friend requests.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.
Ha! There are no Black Friday deals! My books are cheap. Everything is between $0.99 and $5! Go save money on an e-reader and then fill it up with some awesome new books:
INFINITEFREETIME NO LONGER. This blog is now called InfinitecomplaintsaboutAmazon.
Nah, not really. But in the midst of all this nonsense about the goddamn books we ordered some boots and shoes for the boy, because apparently November is just too ridiculously late to do something crazy like walk into a store and buy boots.
(I feel less sorry for brick and mortar retail every time some shit like this happens. It’s November. We haven’t had real snow yet. Leave some fucking boots on the shelves, you jackasses.)
Right, I forgot to complain about Amazon. So, we couldn’t find boots at the shoe store nearest to our house, or the Target nearest to that shoe store, so we ordered him a pair of boots and a pair of new shoes, because why not do both at the same time and OH HEY you missed out on that sale too. The boots got here the other day; all good.
The shoes got here today. Now, this was one of those “fulfilled by Amazon” things, so Amazon isn’t directly responsible for this, but I opened the box and there was still a fucking ink tag on one of the shoes.
Come the fuck on, guys. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow, and my appointment is near an actual Dick’s, so I’m gonna just swing by there with all my receipts and everything and see if they will remove the tag for me. Alternately, we’ll just cut the fucking laces off and buy new ones. I don’t have the damn energy to deal with a return right now.
(Wonders how effectively the internet can help with removing the tag.)
Anyway. The image up there isn’t there for any reason other than that I’m listening to Shimmy Shimmy Ya right now. I am officially on Thanksgiving vacation, meaning that I don’t even have to think about any children other than the one that lives in my house for the next several days. Virtual hunting is about to get way more important to my lifestyle than it used to be. It turns out we’re not leaving town like we thought we were, so we’re hosting Thanksgiving, but we’re gonna keep shit simple. The other four days of the weekend? Relaxation, motherfuckers.
The Amazon books showed up today, finally, and while I didn’t do page-throughs on them, at least the covers look okay. A little more orange than I’d like, but I can live with it.
Been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 all night while my wife does a puzzle and my kid plays with slime. So it’s been a quiet evening. I can live with that, especially when the alternative is blinding rage.
I know, typically three posts in a day is a bit on the excessive side. But this is going to get worse tomorrow, and there will probably be another post about it tomorrow, so I need to get this one out of the way.
A moment to provide you with context, for those of you who aren’t obsessive readers: I tried to order books, on October 27th, for an author event I had on November 11th. It was initially a bit of a risk to get them here on time, so on Friday the 2nd I upgraded my shipping to two-day, which guaranteed them to arrive on the 7th, a Wednesday. Then things began to go wrong:
Amazon update: I got a notification from them on Friday that they had shipped me … wait for it … one book out of the 28 or 29 that I ordered. It is supposed to arrive today. The cover will be on upside-down, inside-out, and no doubt on the wrong book altogether.
Welp. I got a buzz on my phone that my package had been delivered about an hour ago, and ran outside to collect it from the mailbox. I showed the package to my wife. “Wanna take any bets on whether this makes me happy?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
And I opened the package:
So. This is the one mystery copy of Searching for Malumba that, for no clear reason, Amazon has sent by itself. I am, remember, ordering these books at author cost (I charge about $15 for SfM, and the cost to me is just over $6) so that I can sell them to people at conventions.
This book is already borderline unsalable, just because of the cover. If it were for me, I’d be kinda pissed, but I’d probably not do anything about it, because books are made of paper and shit happens. This isn’t for me. It’s for someone else. So we are already sending this book back.
(Brief sidenote: another one of the fun stupidities of the new editor? If I try to write something in italics, it tends to erase spaces for no clear reason.)
So. Yeah. This is already going back. But what the hell– let’s look through and see what else is wrong. Because there’s no way that there’s just one thing wrong, right? There’s gonna be a printing error or something in this motherfucker somewhere.
And then I find out why Amazon sent me one copy by itself, before sending me the rest of my print-on-demand author copy books:
You motherfuckers.
I was wrong about one thing: there was apparently one copy of a Luther Siler book out there somewhere at a secondhand bookstore. And, to be clear, I’m not mad at “Taelor,” whoever that is. I vaguely remember being proud of myself that I remembered to ask how to spell his name. I don’t remember what con or how long ago it was that I sold him this book. Maybe he didn’t like the book, maybe he isn’t the type to hold onto books after he reads them, maybe he just moved or came up short on cash or whatever. Taelor and I are cool. He can do whatever he wants with my books after he buys them.
But, uh, Amazon?
I bought this book from you. I sold it at a convention. That person sold it to a second-hand bookstore. I paid Amazon again, much later on, in a different transaction, for additional new copies of this book.
And y’all thought it was okay to send me, not only a used book, not only a damaged used book, but one with my own motherfucking signature already in it?
I am an author and I literally don’t have the words for how fucking angry I am right now.
I’m not gonna bother calling or emailing their fucking useless helpdesk motherfuckers just yet. Because I supposedly have another box coming tomorrow, with the other goddamn 20-some-odd books, and there is absolutely no Goddamn way that I believe there’s even a single chance of them getting that order right. The @ in the post title will ensure that someone sees this and lies to me some more. But we are about to have a motherfucking reckoning about this shit, and when we do, I’d better be talking to a motherfucker who speaks English because they are in America and said motherfucker had better know what the fuck KDP is.
INFINITEFREETIME NO LONGER. This blog is now called InfinitecomplaintsaboutAmazon.
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