Birthday weekend sale: the rounduppening

On July 8, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, WritingLeave a comment

Man, it’s funny: I’m effectively unemployed right now, right? I work one night a week at OtherJob and while I pretend that my full-time job is “Writer” right now, the fact is that without my own initiative “Writer” and “unemployed” look exactly the same and frankly at the moment are bringing in the same amount of income. But hell if I don’t feel insanely busy right now. I’ve hit my word count for the day as of 1:30, which is when I’m writing this, but I’ve got about ten thousand things to do before the wife gets home and SHIT THERE’S SOCCER TODAY.

Arrgh. Anyway, point is, if I was ever worried about keeping my life full of stuff to do during the summer, I seem to be doing a pretty damn good job with that at the moment. Granted, most of my “stuff to do” boils down to “read this” or “write this” (I have promised several people I’d take a look at manuscripts, work I enjoy doing, but… yeah, I probably ought to actually do it) so maybe I’m more of a grad student than an actual unemployed person but the point is damn, busy.

So let’s talk about this:

I’m gonna call this a success, I think, and I’ve learned something about Amazon. With a minimal amount of promotion and a decent-sized audience (theoretically 3200 people subscribed here, although daily hits aren’t remotely that number, and around 800 on Twitter, with who knows how many seeing any individual Tweet, plus about 130 on Facebook who are likely mostly represented on other lists as well) you can hit #1 in a smaller sub genre for a couple of days. I hit #1 in Short Stories and Anthologies, topped out at #4 in Space Opera, and maxed out at #1031 (that I saw, at least) in all Kindle free downloads. In three days, I moved 311 copies of the book– 200 on Saturday, 72 on Sunday, and 36 on Monday, with three more that bled over into early Tuesday morning before Amazon officially shut the spigot off. That kept me at #1 for all of Sunday and most of Monday, so I’m going to attribute those drops less to the dwindling effects of my own promotion and more to Amazon’s own ebb and fall of traffic on the course of a weekend. I had not fallen out of the top 10 in Space Opera and was still #3 in Short Stories and Anthologies when I went to bed Monday night.

Suggestion: if you’re going to do a free day, do it on a Saturday. Hella more hits. This means that, combining this sale, the previous free days, and all of my sales, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 copies of my book in the hands of readers right now, which I feel pretty good about. There are eight reviews on the site, another on Amazon.ca, a few on Goodreads, and at least one that is just on the author’s blog and to the best of my knowledge not posted anywhere else. Three more are posted in the “Reviews” section in the mast up there because Amazon has removed them. All but one are positive, and most of them are glowingly so. I literally couldn’t be any happier with how the reviews have gone.

Now to see if the increased exposure over the weekend leads to any spike in actual money sales ($2.99 cheap!) this week. I’ve not made any so far today, but the pattern thus far has been that since the first couple of days that the book was available I never make any sales in the morning or afternoon. They’re always in the evening and sometimes very late at night for whatever reason. So we’ll see tonight if I get a bump or not. Here’s to hoping, right?

And let me repeat this one more time: Thank you so, so much to everyone who downloaded/read/retweeted/told a friend/reviewed/hell, sent positive vibes regarding this book this weekend. I appreciate it more than y’all could possibly know.

Now back to work on the sequel. Well, after I finish murder-painting the bathroom and these ten other errands I have to do. 🙂

In which I wasn’t mad until you apologized

On January 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized11 Comments

I haven’t talked much about the Great Target Data Breachenationing of 2013, mostly because, honestly, I haven’t been terribly concerned about it– I was one of the ones theoretically affected, because there’s a Target basically in my back yard and I shop there all the time, but I also generally keep a really close eye on my bank account and so I would have noticed any suspicious charges basically immediately. I feel like for the most part Target has behaved as a relatively responsible corporate citizen while all this has been going on, my bank hasn’t made the decision to fuck me unduly like some other banks did; no big deal, right?

I got an email from Target a few days ago; so did my wife and so did, very likely, a whole lot of you, offering me a free year of credit monitoring as a way to make amends. I’d love to know how much coin Target had to shell out to make this happen or if Experian is just figuring they can make it up on the back end by convincing a shitton of new customers to keep going after that year is up. I don’t currently have any kind of credit monitoring turned on, although I have in the past, and I’m considering taking them up on their offer. The email is, generally, very apologetic about the whole affair, and it appears that they’ve located a seventeen-year-old (of course it was a teenager) in St. Petersburg who wrote the malware that made the hack possible.

It didn’t hit me until yesterday that, at least for me personally, there’s sort of a big question hanging over my head about the whole thing, and that question didn’t come to light until I got that email:

How the hell did Target get my email address?

I have never ordered anything from Target.com. Target doesn’t ask for emails as a part of doing business. I have– and I checked, and since I use gmail my email archive goes back to forever— never received any emails from them before. I don’t have a Target credit card, and never have, and certainly didn’t in December when the breach happened. We had a wedding registry with them six years ago, but that was with my wife’s email; mine wasn’t on it.

I can think of one way and one way only that they might have it, which is that I applied for a Target field trip grant for the DC trip this year– but that wasn’t attached to any bank or debit card information, and the address and phone number I provided them was my school address and phone number, so even if they’re cross-matching databases the address and phone number wouldn’t match what they (might?) have through my debit card. They could, maybe, have done a match with my name and town and made an assumption– but that itself assumes that they’re willing to have a pretty fair number of false positives, and also that they’re working their asses off to collect and consolidate customer data that they have, in turn, then never used until this data breach. If they got it from my bank, I kinda feel like my bank ought to have told me that, and they didn’t.

I find myself more curious about how they got my email than I am about how the hack was able to happen. I don’t know if that indicates skewed priorities on my part or not. And maybe if you’re going to send a giant email to millions of people about how your data collection process got screwed up and compromised, you include a line somewhere about how you got the information that allowed you to contact them in the first place.

In which I slowly go blind

On December 7, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I’m spending the entire day crunching ISTEP scores and growth numbers and all sorts of other stuff, and alternately cursing myself, the Indiana State Board of Education, my boss, Microsoft Excel, human biology and math itself for the various frauds and iniquities being perpetrated on myself/my school/the state of education in general as I try and track down enough information to make what I’m doing useful to anybody.

I have discovered that the Windows version of Excel does not actually allow you to open two Excel documents in multiple windows. For system software that is actually called Windows this seems like somewhat of a curious oversight. Flipping back and forth is vastly annoying and I don’t like it one bit. I’d prefer to not have to wait until I get home to do this on my Mac– there’s a reason I’m doing it at OtherJob– but it looks as if I might have to, because it’ll take a third of the time if I can just have everything open at once on my wonderful home setup, which features two monitors, one of which is a 27-incher, and not this teensy laptop screen.

Further aggravating me is the fact that the state appears to have made slightly different decisions about who counts and who doesn’t than I did when I put my initial numbers for my own students together back when I actually got the ISTEP data in the first place. The low-growth kid who came in halfway through the year? For some reason, counts. The high-growth kid who I had for all but the first six days of the school year? Didn’t. Which shifts my overall numbers in a way I don’t like.

This don’ make no sense, and I’m wondering how exactly they decided who counts and who doesn’t, because length of enrollment doesn’t seem to be it. Which is a whole ‘nother column I need to worry about if I’m going to keep track of it– and right now I don’t want to.

On the plus side, most of my grading is done. I’m gonna take a break and read for at least an hour or so to let my eyes recover (from backlit tiny type to tiny type on paper, which… well, hopefully that’s a meaningful difference) and then I’ll see what else I can get done today.

What do people who don’t work two jobs on Saturday do on Saturday?