The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I’m starting to look around for promo opportunities for Searching for Malumba: Why Teaching is Terrible, and Why We Do It Anyway. It’s currently available to preorder for $4.95, and comes out October 27th.
If anybody’s interested in a guest post, or an interview, or anything like that, or knows anyone running an education blog who might be interested in such things, would you mind letting me know in comments? We can work the details out by email.
Thanks!
I’m still trying to get the newsletter off the ground and to a point where it’s worthwhile to bother sending messages out to it. Sign up and I’ll send everyone this new short story I’m working on once it’s done. Hopefully sometime next week.
There will be very few messages sent out to the newsletter. I promise it won’t ever get spammy.
I’m at Booth C9 in Creators’ Alley at InConJunction in Indianapolis for the next three days! Print copies of Skylights and The Sanctum of the Sphere will be available in abundance– seriously, abundance, I think I overordered a bit– and I’ll be giving free bookmarks out to anyone who 1) buys a book or 2) makes eye contact until I run out of them. Same-day registration for the con is pretty reasonable– $25 for a one-day pass for Friday or Sunday, $35 for a pass for Saturday, and the programming list looks really cool.
Hours and such are here. I’ll be there for the whole thing. I know some of y’all are in Indianapolis. Mention the blog and I might have something special for you. Come see me!
That… went very well.
If this picture weren’t a trifle blurry it would be my new profile picture for absolutely everything. I managed to sell 48 of the 60 books I brought with me yesterday– 47 at the signing itself, and one at my other job after the signing, where a customer overheard me talking with a co-worker and started asking questions, and then discovered that I had a card reader and the rest of my books in my car. Which is why I’m going to keep a Square reader in the car forever now.
I haven’t seen all the pictures folks took yesterday– and it seems like there was a fair number of them– but I’m gonna share two more:
These two lovely young ladies are both former students, and are both Tuckerized somewhere in Skylights. I won’t provide any more detail for probably obvious reasons but they’re both high school graduates now so my usual policies about anonymity can be relaxed a little bit. They managed to beat me to the signing, which both entertained and frightened me. Truth be told, I was a sweaty, gross mess for most of the first half hour or so until the air conditioning kicked in and I got used to what I was doing. Memo for next time: bring a handkerchief.
And, oh, next time? It’s not official-official yet, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be at InConJunction XXXV in Indianapolis in July!
More details to come. For now, though, I’m exhausted, and will be taking it super easy today.
Does anyone have any experience with nookpress.com? I popped in at my local Barnes and Noble this afternoon and spoke with a (genuinely!) helpful and nice manager about potentially doing a book signing there some time after Sanctum comes out. The good news: they’re completely willing to work with independent authors and don’t particularly care that I don’t have a traditional publisher. The bad news: they do care that my print books are printed by CreateSpace, because Amazon owns CreateSpace. Interestingly, the print edition of Skylights is available at Barnes and Noble.com, but corporate policy states that they won’t stock CreateSpace books in-store and therefore they can’t do signing events with authors published through them, since they order the stock themselves when that happens.
Print sales of Skylights have been minimal– I have sold seven copies, total, and I know who ordered six of those seven. I suspect I also will eventually find out I know the seventh person as well. So even if Amazon’s not willing to carry a book in print if it’s printed through B&N, I don’t know that I’m hurting myself if I can sell print books a few times a year at author sales– at least not right now, although if I somehow magically hit the big time that’ll become a problem quickly. If Amazon is willing to carry Nook Press books, the only problem is that NP charges a bit more than CreateSpace does and the price of the books would have to go up a buck or so. Then again, without one in-hand … maybe there’s a quality difference, too, y’know?
Anyway, back to the question: anyone used this service? Advice is gratefully received at the moment.
I’m going to claim this is in no particular order, but I know I won’t be able to resist trying to make it somewhat organized:
None of this will get done today, because we’re having a few people over tonight (!!!) and I need to clean.
By “crunch time,” I mean “so tired I want to die,” just so you know.
I made arrangements for my first in-person author signing today. It’s not happening until after Sanctum comes out, so probably the first Saturday in May (which, my calendar informs me, is the 2nd) and as such I will have more details on it later for the few of you who live near me and may want to come out.
Current mental state:
Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit ohshitohshitohshitohshit.
Anyone out there using about.me for anything?
Tell me about it.