The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
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Fourth place? Awesome! I WANT MOAR.
Let’s check out the competition: 
Two books that I’m sure are great but I’m not familiar with and my nemesis of old, Hugh Howey. We can take ’em!
I want #1 for our inaugural #SilerSaturday! Go download a free book!
Starting tomorrow, every Saturday for the next 90 days I’ll be doing a free promotion for one of my books on Amazon. Every Saturday. This Saturday, for the first promotion, my book The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 will be free at Amazon all day.
(It’s currently just 99 cents, in case you feel like spending money…)
Here’s the rest of the schedule for September and October:
November’s up in the air a bit because I need to decide what to do about Black Friday/Cyber Monday, neither of which is on a Saturday. We’ll see.
Will this hurt sales? Yeah, it could. We’ll see if it makes up for it in volume and, eventually, some reviews. #SilerSaturday! It’s a 90 day experiment!
I got an email about their Kindle Scout program the other day; does anybody know anything about it? It appears to be a crowdsourced approach to publication, only Amazon is your publisher and not just a distributor. (Note to non-indie writers. There’s a big difference. I publish my books. Amazon’s my distributor.)
Anyway, it appears that the program’s been around for a while– I got the impression from the email that it was a new thing– so I’m surprised that I’ve never heard of it prior to getting the email last week. Have any of you fiddled around with this at all, either as a reader or a writer? Anybody have a book out there that could use a nomination?
What it seems to be to me is less a control on quality of the work and more a test of which authors already possess a long enough arm online to drive “nominators” to the site– which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I doubt I can compete even if I had a book at the moment I wanted to nominate, which I don’t. We’ll see what happens when the Skylights sequel comes out, sometime next spring.
As of about twenty minutes ago, I’m entirely Amazon exclusive. It may be that the other retailers haven’t realized that the plug is pulled for a day or two, but I’ve pulled everything down this evening other than Amazon. I have some ideas for promotions that I’ll be letting y’all know about in the next few days. I’m hopeful that things will work out the way I want them to.
Meanwhile, Malumba is easily outpacing Sanctum in terms of pre-orders so far. I’m starting to hear from alpha readers already and so far the response has been impressively positive. I didn’t have super high hopes for this one to do much, but I’d love to be proved wrong. Check it out! Just $4.95!
I think I’m going back to KDP
Select again, y’all.
Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 hasn’t been on KDP Select for close to a year now, and Skylights and Sanctum of the Sphere were both removed from the program when their terms ran out in June and July, respectively. I wasn’t super pleased with the payment changes on Kindle Unlimited, and I wanted the flexibility back of having all of my books available on all the markets I could reach.
Months later, all the markets I can reach aren’t selling any books, and Amazon sales are suffering as well, since I know Amazon does more passive marketing for you on books that are in KDP Select than otherwise. I’ve come up with a solution for the folks who want my books in other formats: they can email me and ask for them. Having BA 1 available at Barnes and Noble and the iBookstore has resulted in one or two downloads a month (that’s across both) and Smashwords is generally good for about 30. Openbooks.com used to be a good source of downloads, but those have dried up recently, and I have good reason to suspect that they may never have been real in the first place.
So, screw it. I haven’t sold a single copy of Sanctum or Skylights in any other market since I made them available. And if you really want Skylights as a .epub I’m pretty sure you can figure out how to email me and ask for it and we can work something out. And the other thing? I did 200 free downloads of Benevolence Archives in a single day the last time I had it on Select. Smashwords has 324 total.
This… is not worth it. I’d originally thought to use BA 1 as my free book to drive sales to my others, and to not ever use free promotions for the other two books. Right now what I want is people reading and reviewing my books, and I think I may just need to focus on getting more copies out there and floating around regardless of how much money I make from it. That means Amazon, where I can push more downloads in a single day with a free promotion than months on another platform. And if I decide 90 days from now that I was wrong again, well, I’ll put them up everywhere again.
So, yeah. Expect all of my ebooks to be Amazon exclusives by this weekend. Note that print editions will still be available through Barnes and Noble’s website if that floats your boat, but we’re gonna take another long look at exclusivity and see if I can’t find a different way to make it work.
If you want to download something for Nook or through the iBookstore while you still can, check out the “My Books” link in the masthead for all the links you could possibly desire.
Scalzi is right, here, but in a way completely unrelated to how I was thinking about KU earlier this week:
Amazon Tweaks Its Kindle Unlimited System. It Still Sucks For KDP Select Authors.
Both of my novels are currently enrolled in Kindle Select. Skylights‘ term will run out at the
end of June, and The Sanctum of the Sphere will leave the program at the end of July. I will not be renewing the program for either book. Now, one thing: Skylights has unquestionably sold better on Select than it did without it. There’s no doubt of that. Sanctum has never not been on Select so I have no data to compare yet. That said, I’ve gotten a lot better at marketing this year (and having a third book hasn’t hurt) and I can’t prove that being on Select has actually been the determining factor for the sales increase.
I can say with certainty that being on Select does one thing for you: your book’s ranking will react faster to sales if you’re on Select than it will otherwise. (This “updated every hour” thing is nonsense, and always has been.) But none of my books are selling well enough that that is likely to matter all that much, and frankly that’s not likely to be changing soon. I would rather be in a place where I can say my books are “available everywhere” right now than be exclusive to Amazon.
Plus, Kindle Unlimited. They’ve futzed with Kindle Unlimited again, and I really don’t like the way they’ve changed their terms this time. Not that I was happy with it before, mind you. Previously, a borrower had to read 10% of your book before the author saw any money for the borrow. Because authors are reasonably clever people, this led to a rebirth of the novella– short works, written specifically for Kindle Unlimited, where that 10% marker got hit quickly. A prolific author can churn out a novella a month, and the market got saturated quickly.
Now? They’re paying by the page. So if you borrow my book and you only read a page, I’ll probably get about a penny. If you read ten percent of my 300-page book, I’ll probably see about thirty cents. Amazon’s emails on the subject to their authors have implied a $10 page rate, which is utterly insane. (CORRECTION: I should have looked closer at the math. That’s $10 per page written. The actual rate Amazon suggests you might get per page read is a dime. The rest of this remains true.) Much like the author of the article I just linked to, I’d be stunned if it was more than a penny a page, and it’ll likely be a fraction of that. Plus, Amazon gets to determine what a “page” is, and it won’t be equivalent to a swipe on a Kindle screen, since users can set the size of their text.
So, here’s what this means, right? You borrow my book from Amazon. Amazon gets your $9.99 for that month no matter what. They always get your money. As far as I’m concerned, once you’ve determined that you should have a thing I made, right then is when I should get paid for that thing, and not when you use it. This model exists for no other consumer good that I can think of. If I buy a couch, and I never sit on it, I still gotta pay for the couch. Hell, even with the rental model, I still gotta pay to rent the car even if I never drive it. Would I prefer that people read my books? Of course I would! But I’m an avid reader and it can take months for me to get to a book even after purchasing a physical copy. At least previously the 10% rule wasn’t terribly onerous and then you got paid for the entire royalty. This model feels like Amazon thinks they deserve to get paid for my books more than I do.
No thank you.
My work will continue to be available at Amazon, mind you– but no longer as part of Kindle Unlimited, once I’m able to pull them from the program. I’m not cutting my own throat here, and while there are benefits to making my books available at Barnes and Noble and Kobo and Smashwords and everywhere else, they won’t be making me much money even by my current not terribly high standards. But I’m not doing Kindle Unlimited anymore. This royalty structure’s unacceptable and if this is how they’re treating their authors the program should wither on the vine and die.
(Coming soon: that post on OpenBooks I’ve been promising for a while.)
I am– once again– trying to get a clean manuscript of The Benevolence Archives uploaded to Amazon. The version on Smashwords hasn’t been touched, because that’s the one I actually get movement from and I’m not fixing it until this is ironed out.
If I look at my document in Word, it looks like this:
(“Queris” is yellow because I used the search function to find this particular spot.)
Note that there are spaces between all the words.
Now look at one happens in Amazon’s online previewer after it converts the file for Kindle:
Note that the space between “to” and “the” has been arbitrarily removed.
Note also that this happens all over the damn place. And it appears to not only be arbitrary and random, but unfixable– and Amazon’s spellcheck isn’t even finding those mistakes any longer, as it reported this manuscript to be free of typos, ignoring not only the spacing errors it introduced but also words like “Queris.”
I am angryified at the moment.
EDIT: I think I’ve got it. There are still a couple of spots of wonkiness but at least it doesn’t look like it’s filled with typographical errors any longer. God, that was annoying.
I appear to have fallen victim to the most minor identity theft of all time; a single charge of just over $50 to a Family Dollar in Atlanta, Georgia that just showed up on my online statement. As I have not been to Atlanta at any point in my life, much less in the last two days, I quickly cancelled the card and get to go to my bank branch tomorrow and do a spot of paperwork. I checked all of the rest of my cards and they’re all clean; this weekend I’ll change all of my passwords.
Yesterday I made the terrible mistake of trying to add an “Also by Luther Siler” page to my pre-existing ebook manuscript for The Benevolence Archives. It led me down this lovely little rabbit hole where, after adding that page, a Prostetnic logo, and fixing the three places where I screwed up and referred to Lady Remember as “he,” the Amazon converter that turns my .doc file into a .mobi for the Kindle told me I had thirty-some spelling errors. The vast majority of them were words with no spaces in between, which is not normally a typo I’d allow to slide past– much less thirty times.
I checked the manuscript. Spaces in the proper places, every single time. Weirdly, the word before the space tended to be a single italicized word. In other words:
“I can’t believe Amazon is putting me through this bullshit,” Brazel said.
became
“I can’t believeAmazon is putting me through this bullshit,” Brazel said.
I actually rewrote every set of words where this happened, sometimes removing the italics and a few times where I felt they were really necessary leaving them in but carefully italicizing just the word and nothing else. Viewed the file in two or three different ways to make sure it wasn’t an artifact of the viewer’s insistence on full justification. Nothing made any difference. The next step is to put two spaces after each of those words and see if that fixes it. I promise the spaces are there in the source document; this is just a weird-ass artifact of the conversion process, and at the moment I don’t have a way to turn a .doc into a .mobi on my computer to dodge the need to use their converter.
Then, once I gave up on that frustration for the evening, I discovered that for some reason it doesn’t seem to be pushing the updated version through to my Kindle anyway, so the new version, which ought to be pushed out to replace old versions for anyone who hasn’t deliberately turned that feature off, appears to only be working for new downloads– and since I’ve already downloaded the book, I can’t download it again to double-check– I’ve tried to force my Kindle to update the file every way I can think of and it won’t do it, so I can’t check to see if the typos are just in the online viewer and I can’t get the book to recognize that the “Also by” page is supposed to be there. It won’t work on the Kindle app on my phone or my actual Kindle, although come to think of it I may not have downloaded the app on my new iPad so I may try that next.
So yeah. I’m frustrated. If, by some magic, you happen to download BA from Amazon tonight, I’d appreciate you letting me know if you get a version of the file with the “Also by Luther” page at the back– you’d be able to tell immediately, because the Prostetnic Publications logo is on the first page in the new one too. I need to know if the changes went through and if the space-omissions are there– they’re most common in the story called “Remember”.
Might even throw in a free copy of the new book once it comes out, actually, if you were to do that and tell me what happened.
(EDIT: Okay, I may have figured out the non-updating thing, as apparently you need to increment the “edition” number to make Amazon realize the new file is “important” changes. I’ve done that. The version up there now should still be different for new buyers, though, so the deal in the previous two paragraphs still stands. I have a hunch those errors will disappear when viewed on an actual Kindle device or through the app.)
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