The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I’ve been tremendously happy with how The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 has performed over the last few days; we’ve spent a good chunk of that at first place in the “Short Stories and Anthologies” subgenre and top five for “Space Opera.”
…but it could be better.
You. Yeah, you. Have you downloaded The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 yet? This blog has 3200 followers, so probably not.
Don’t you think you should? It’s freeeeeeee today. But just until midnight, and not any more after that.
IT’S MAH BIRFDAY and so I’m putting THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 1 on sale for the incredibly low price of “nothin‘” until the end of the day on Monday. If you’ve already downloaded it, thank you! If not, what’s stopping you?
Reblogs, shares, other forms of publicity greatly appreciated. And I apologize again for all the book-related posts this weekend. 🙂
Troll evictions! Secret compartments! Dwarf pirates! Daring rescues! Angry gods! Unknown technology! Pissed-off ogres! The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is currently– holy shit— #15 in its genre on Amazon, and #2952 among all free ebooks. Free, you say? Yes! Free today only, unless I decide to extend the sale an extra day, which… actually, I’m pretty sure I might do. You can take this as either good news for me in terms of exposure or bad news in terms of whether people are willing to pay me for my nonsense, but I’ve moved over twice as many free books today as I had books purchased during the entire time the book has been on Amazon.
And here’s the thing: this book was never gonna make me rich. That’s obvious, right? It wasn’t, and isn’t. I am pretty sure at this point (and I need to be, because I’m supposed to be starting in a few weeks) that this summer’s book is gonna be a full-blown BA novel. And I’m thinking once that’s down and available, Vol. 1 is going to become perma-free, as a way to give folks a quick and easy intro into the world I’m working in. I may even attach it to the end of the novel as backmatter; we’ll see. But I think the goal for this thing needs to be not making money, but getting eyeballs on my work and the name “Luther Siler” into the backs of people’s heads. And Skylights is gonna be up soon, at something more resembling a novel price; if people like BA and get it cheaply maybe they’ll be more likely to shell out the $5-7 I’m imagining pricing Skylights at once it’s available.
Then I can get rich, right? 🙂
One caveat, of course: I’ve gotten a half-decent number of people to download the thing today. It remains to be seen how many of them read it. Or, say, post reviews, or if they do post reviews, post reviews of the fine quality of the couple I’ve received and not, say, “HURR DURR I HATE SWEARS AND SCI FI IS DUM ONE STAR.” Because that’s what a lot of the gripes I’ve seen about the program have said– that the free days cause your book to get downloaded by a bunch of people who don’t read it, and then if they do they put up a low-quality bad review.
(Note: Not saying non-sci-fi people can’t or shouldn’t read or review my book. In fact, both of the reviews I’ve gotten are from non-sci-fi people, and I’m looking forward to the first read I get from an actual genre aficionado. I’m just repeating what I’ve heard from other writers here.)
Anyway. Yeah. This is fascinating. And, again, feel free to go forth and download. Tell your friends! (No. Really. Tell your friends.)
The best space gnome book you ever saw is FREE today and currently #30 in its genre on Amazon. I WANT TOP TEN. Have you checked it out yet? What’s stopping you?
#88, to be precise.
Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is FREE TODAY! Go get your copy now if you haven’t already! It’s back to the extravagant price of $2.99 tomorrow!
(Top 100 is awesome. I want more. Go go go!)
I can’t recall a specific post, but I have to have talked about my distaste for ebooks in some capacity during some point in the (very nearly!) year I’ve been writing here. I have thousands of books. I love books– and I love books as physical objects, not as a carrier device for stories.
I got my wife a Kindle for either Christmas or her birthday several years ago, back when the damn things cost $300 and that sounded reasonable. I bought it, but I refused to touch it. I disliked the concept of e-readers that much. I’ve softened since then; I do a decent amount of reading on my iPad, but I do a specific kind of reading on my iPad– mostly short stories or novellas or, occasionally, magazines; i.e., things that either aren’t available in print or that don’t store well. And it goes without saying that The Benevolence Archives(*) simply would never see the light of day as a printed book; there’s no way to price it that would be both fair and profitable. Ebooks are awesome for shorter works. A freaking comic book costs $4 nowadays; you can’t get a 116-page document at that price.
Anyway. It’s occurred to me in the past few days that since I’m literally trying to derive income from the Kindle’s existence nowadays, maybe it might behoove me to, y’know, own a Kindle. So I looked into them a bit and today, being the type who really doesn’t like buying technology (or, really, much of anything) online, I swung by Best Buy on the way home to look at Kindles.
Maybe you don’t know this; I didn’t: there are three basic flavors of the Kindle in existence. The baseline is just called a “Kindle,” has a black and white screen, and retails for around $70. Then there’s the “Kindle Paperwhite,” which has a screen (and front light) that is apparently vastly upgraded from the Kindle and, in general, looks like a more reputable piece of kit, which retails for around $120. Then there’s the Kindle Fire, which has a larger screen, four times the memory, is in full color, and can access the Web and do a whole host of other stuff… for $120.
Here’s where I’m weird: I have no desire for a Kindle Fire at all. I have an iPad for everything the Kindle Fire can do. I do a lot of reading in bed and the iPad is just a wee bit unwieldy for that. The screen improvements of the Paperwhite appeal to me. But I can’t find a reason to pay $120 for a Paperwhite when another tablet with a bigger, color screen, with better functionality, is the same price.
Or, to be clearer: I didn’t buy a Paperwhite today because something else that I don’t want was the same price.
I’m not sure that’s sound reasoning.
Feel free to make fun of me in comments. In fact, I encourage it.
(*) Buy my stupid book!
There will be a real post coming later today– no, really! I promise!– but for now all of the writers who see this (and there are a lot of you) should take a look at this, especially if you are or have ever considered self-publishing.
Yesterday I signed up for a Kindle Direct Publishing account at Amazon; when the book goes live it’ll be at Amazon first and then I’ll try and get it up at B&N and iBooks and everywhere else. Before I do that, though, I need to make a couple of decisions: one relatively inconsequential, and one a pretty big deal.
Inconsequential: The collection itself is going to be called The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1. It’s the stories inside that I’m wondering about. As it stands now, they’re named numerically, and numerically they’re out of chronological order– they’re just numbered in the order I’ve written them. Two, notably, isn’t finished, and two has the potential to be much longer than the others– it may, in fact, be a novel. I’m currently thinking that the first volume will contain at least four stories: BA 1, 3, 4, and 5, possibly also 6 if I’m able to get it written in the next week or two. 1, 3, and 4 together are about the length of 5, so toss in a brief foreword and we’re looking at around 30K words for the entire collection, for, I think, $1.99.
At any rate, I like the numbering scheme for the stories, but it may prove confusing, especially if I envision a world where I continue to write these things, and BA 2 ends up being in volume 4 along with stories 6, 8, and 12, only none of them are in chronological order. Seems potentially troublesome. So I need to come up with names for these things. This isn’t really a problem, I just suck at names. But it’s fixable.
A bigger problem is the cover. The cover, for obvious reasons, is huge for casual sales. I can handle the basic typography bit myself and between me and my former newspaper editor wife I think I can manage to avoid any major rookie mistakes like putting the title of my book in Comic Sans or Papyrus or something like that.
No, the real trouble is the image. It’s a sci-fi book, so finding something I can just take a picture of is effectively impossible even if I were a talented photographer, which I’m not. I considered using some sort of public domain nebula picture from NASA or something, but the problem is that while a star field would communicate the idea “science fiction” fairly effectively it’s not going to be an especially striking image, especially when boiled down to a small Amazon thumbnail, and it would be pretty generic, too.
Then I thought about something like this. Recognize these?
Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but they’re the symbols for the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance, respectively, from Star Wars. The Benevolence Archives are heavily influenced, by design, by Star Wars; I just hope I’ve differentiated myself enough that we’re clearly in “homage” territory and not “ripoff.”
But I’m thinking if I can come up with a stark-looking, black-and-white symbol for the Benevolence, and put that image on a textured background along with my title and author information… that just might work. Something simple and instantly memorable, and hopefully not outside my meager skills as an artist.
I just need to, uh, come up with something. I have an idea in mind but I haven’t tried to actually put it together either on paper or in a graphics program yet. We’ll see how it goes.
—————-
Quick Jihad note: I’ll dig up the link later, but you might remember that he came back from his expulsion and promptly got suspended for three days after lunch, not even making it half a day. He returned on Friday of last week, made it through the entire day, then didn’t even make it to first period on Monday (yesterday) before getting suspended again. At this point Mom is being strongly encouraged to withdraw him before we expel him again, which will be happening the next time we see him in the office for any reason. I’d give him one more day, the way things have been going.