First, that my suspicion appears to have been correct: I think I’m probably good with reading the rest of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books and then never touching anything that calls itself “LitRPG” ever again. The best thing about Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon is the title, which suggests that the book is going to be delightful. It’s not bad, but it’s not something that, at about the 2/3 mark, is leading me to believe that I’m going to be spending a lot of time with any examples of this genre not written by Matt Dinniman.
The second thing is that, yes, my Kindle is genuinely saving me money, as I’m reading this book for free through Kindle Unlimited and, believe it or not, I don’t think I feel the need to own it. Also, I got to annotate this sentence:
I haven’t used the annotate feature very much, but it might come in pretty handy when I want to be able to find bits of a book to talk about during reviews. Or, y’know, talk about the part in the book where there are worms throwing baby heads at the protagonist. Dungeon Crawler Carl definitely can trend toward raunchy and gross humor– a talking sex doll head is a major secondary character, for crying out loud– but Kaiju is a level beyond.
Having read an entire big-ass book on this thing (TEOTBB is 260,000 words) I can get to the meat of a review of my newest tech toy in a single sentence:
Reading a book on this thing feels like reading.
If you don’t know what I mean by that … I’m not sure how well I can explain it, to be honest. I have an earlier version of the Paperwhite– about ten years old now, so probably pretty close to the first generation– and on that device and every other Kindle I’ve ever touched, I was never able to forget I was holding a tech object with a screen and not a book. I couldn’t get into stories the same way I could with a book. I had trouble remembering details, or even keeping my place on a page. Reading short stories on the Kindle wasn’t bad, but entire books? Forget about it.
At some point in the last ten or so generations of this thing, they fixed that problem, and I’m not sure exactly what the difference is. I can say it’s tremendously faster than my old Paperwhite, which is no surprise, and since ebooks themselves haven’t really evolved all that much in that time you can really feel the speed difference in a way you might not be able to with a phone upgrade or a new laptop or something. It’s got a pleasing heft in the hand and while I wasn’t terribly happy with spending nearly $40 for a case at first, now that I have it I really like it. I got the fabric cover, and the texture is marvelous, both on the inside and the outside of the case, and the automatic wake-up/shut-off when you open and close the cover is a nice feature.
(Why did I spend $36 when I could have gotten a case much cheaper? It says “Kindle” on the cover and not some other random brand. If I’m going to put my device in a case, the case needs to be either featureless or branded for the device and not for whatever random company makes the case. Yes, I know that’s dumb. It’s how my brain works. That’s my original Paperwhite case under the new one up there, and you’ll notice there are no words on it.)
Battery life is going to be excellent– I’m not sure how long I spent reading that book, but it only ran the battery down to 81%. It says that “typical reading time” is just under 14 hours, but I don’t know if that’s how long I took in my one read or what. I was annoyed by the Kindle displaying when certain passages had been annotated by a ton of other people, but I was able to turn that off.
I spent a pleasant half-hour today rearranging my wish list on Amazon, moving fiction books by new authors into a new “Kindle Wish List” section, keeping books I know I want in print and nonfiction on my original wish list. I’m going to need to get into the habit of deciding I Shall Read A Kindle Book Now and buying the book right then from my wish list, because I still don’t like how this thing displays your library and anything I download and don’t read immediately is going to get lost. That will require a bit of an adjustment, but at least I know the reading part is going to work, and that’s good.
(Two more quick things: I just started Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain today, and it’s 1200 pages, and after holding it for a while I damn near shelled out another $17 to get a digital version that wasn’t going to torture my hands as much. I may still cave, we’ll see. Also, Bedlam Bride is unfairly fucking good; it’s the best book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series so far, and as I’ve said repeatedly DCC already didn’t have any right to be as good as it is. I only have one book from the series left and then I have to wait for the rest of them to come out. I’m not happy about it.)
I said it was happening, and yep, it’s happening: My novel Click is even as we speak being approved by Amazon’s fooferall machines and will be available for humans to buy in the very near future. Official release date is July 26, but it’ll be available for preorder soon, and as soon as the fooferall process concludes I will actually have a link you can click on to order it.
This isn’t even the official announcement post, really, because if it was there would be a link. This is like that card you get before a wedding announcement, that tells you there’s a wedding announcement coming and to hold a date, but somehow is not, itself, either the announcement or the invitation. This is just the announcement that there’s gonna be a book and that you should be prepared to buy it, if you like.
In other news, my YouTube channel is still out there and I’m still having fun with it, so you should go look at that and hit Subscribe as quickly as possible. Am I talking about it too much? Yes, absolutely– but if I don’t, no one will know about the great fun we’re having with Chicory: A Colorful Tale over there. And that one doesn’t even cost you any money! Go do it.
In other other news, the prophesied Second Child has entered the house, and I’m realizing as I’m typing this that I don’t currently hear any screaming, so either the children are both dead or they have gone somewhere without my knowledge, which seems like it could possibly be an alarming development. I don’t know where my wife is either, though, so maybe she’s with them.
(Thudding in the hallway)
Okay, I guess it’s fine now.
My sleep study has been canceled, because, I shit you not, my insurance company has deemed me “not sick enough” to require one, which … man, that’s a whole entire rant, right there, and I’m going to not bother writing the majority of it because the fact is I don’t think I have sleep apnea and not having to spend Thursday night in a hospital makes the rest of my week easier. Instead, at some as-yet-undetermined point in the future I have to do a home sleep study, and if you happen to know what the hell that might involve, let me know, because I haven’t gotten around to Googling it yet. Fact is I have got shit to do, and taking an entire night in a hospital bed hooked up to machines and pretending to sleep off my plate makes the chances that all the other stuff will actually get done a lot higher. Tomorrow’s tasks involve finding presents for my cousin’s two children, one of whom I’ve never met, and getting all of my video recording for the entire weekend done and out of the way. None of that can really start until the extra child is out of the house, and there may be a trip to the county fair in there sometime as well. I’m bringing my laptop to Michigan with me so I can keep up with bloggery, but if there’s anybody out there thinking hey, I would really love to write a piece to promote something for infinitefreetime on, like, no notice at all, let me know.
You may recall that I have written books in the past.
My novel Click has been an exclusive for Patreon subscribers and people who buy it from me at conventions since its publication. It has struck me recently (and has been true for some time) that this no longer really makes any sense; my Patreon rapidly grew to sixteen followers and froze there– I don’t think I’ve added a single follower since the first month I was on the site– and I haven’t updated it in forever. Similarly, Covid has made cons impossible. So this means that this book, more or less by definition, is just sitting there, not doing me any good.
I’m going to continue to offer it as an initial reward to new Patreon people, but it’s losing its exclusivity in the very near future, as I’m going to make the ebook version at least available on Amazon. Right now the print version is being handled through someone other than KDP, and I need to figure out if they can play nice with each other, and the actual file (not the text, the file) needs some slight revision, so I don’t have a release date just yet– but probably in the next few weeks. I will, of course, let everyone know immediately once I have a date; there will likely be a short pre-order period before the book actually launches, but I’ve got to get the leg work done first. I’m telling you now mostly to force myself into accountability, honestly.
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.
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:
I realized a bit too late that my Kindle Direct term was about to run out and I hadn’t used all of my free days, so a bunch of my books are going to be free for the next few days. In particular, I just discovered Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is #2 on Amazon for free science fiction anthologies, which seemed important enough to put it on blast on every social media outlet I have. So forgive me if you’ve seen this four times in the last few minutes, but if you were to want to download that book right now or tell your friends to, seeing my book at #1 would be kinda awesome.
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!
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