An entertainment and an announcement

On November 9, 2015November 9, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

augustus_primaporta First, a bonus story for those of you who have read Searching for Malumba, particularly those of you who have gotten to the chapter called “A Long Day, Pt. 2.”

Out of nowhere, my Bruce Banner Facebook account just got a friend request from Caesar, of all people. I haven’t heard from Caesar since the last day of the Washington DC trip I took him on when he was in 7th grade. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to do that, because he had transferred out of our school earlier in the year, but the adults involved basically looked around and went hell, he’s a good kid, let’s just not tell anybody, and it ended up working out fine anyway.

Caesar, and this will only be funny to those of you who have read Malumba, is a politician now, as in “he is actually running for state office in 2016,” and he has a Facebook page full of pictures of himself in a nicer suit than any of the ones I own, standing next to important politicians, including one former President and at least three people currently running for office.

I approved the request immediately. This is one of the ones I have wanted to be able to keep an eye on. 🙂

And now, the announcement, and this one’s a big one: I have just received confirmation that I will have a Small Press booth at C2E2 2016, running from March 18th-20th of next year. This means that I have three convention appearances currently planned out and official: Starbase Indy later this month, C2E2 in March, and IndyPopCon in June. I’m still trying to get into one more in August that I’ve not been to before (and which will also be a really big deal), and I’m thinking about going to next year’s InConJunction, which was the one I want to last summer. If Starbase Indy is fun and profitable, I’ll seriously consider doing that again next year too, but we’ll see how the first one goes.

That’s a big deal. That’s tens of thousands of people who I’ll have access to next year in person and not through my blog or Twitter. 2016 could be a very, very big deal for Luther Siler.

I’m excited already. 🙂

Saleswanking extravaganza! (Saleswankstravaganza?)

On November 1, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized8 Comments

Sure.

I have had an immensely productive day; it’s almost like I have to go back to teaching tomorrow and I’m trying to keep myself from going crazy. I disassembled and reassembled (correctly!) two different sinks today, for fuck’s sake. I’m like some sort of freakish monster.

Anyway, the two of you who are big number nerds like I am, click for large:

While I didn’t have a 300-download day like I did last month, at least I can be certain that all of those represent actual downloads to actual humans. I broke away from the Siler Saturday formula a bit this month and sprinkled some free book days on various days of the week to see if anything made a difference, and given that my level of promotion on the day where I had 300 downloads in September was just about exactly the same as the two 25-download days in October, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the main factors in a free promo are 1) how generically busy Amazon is on that day, and 2) how highly ranked the book is as paid the day before the free promo starts. In other words, it’s good to do a free promo right after you have a day with a couple of sales for that book, because that’ll push you into the low six figures if not the high five figures just on the strength of those couple of sales, and I think it gives the book a bit of a bump. Again, though, this is all theory; I don’t have a lot of data.

Here’s how actual paid sales went, by the way. This will easily be my most lucrative month from Amazon, especially once I work KENP money in there– more on that in a minute:

In other news, I’m immensely pleased at how well Searching for Malumba has done. It’s had 24 sales in its first five days since official release, half of which were in print, which is outstanding, at least by my standards. It’s moved twice as many copies as The Sanctum of the Sphere did in its first five days, and it already has more reviews than Sanctum does, although that required an email to my beta readers a couple days after the book came out that I’ll characterize as “pushy” and which reasonable humans would probably call “fuckin’ rude.”

I still love you guys, I swear.

Sanctum continues to be my redheaded stepchild, and I’m not sure why. It’s my only sequel, but it’s a sequel to my most popular work and it’s good, goddammit. I gotta figure out how to market it better. Weirdly, it does just fine when I’m selling it in person– it just struggles online.

Anyway. Let’s talk about KENP. I am fascinated by this. I just started seeing KENP reads recently– note that these are pages read by people who downloaded my books for free through Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, and that I get paid about half a cent per page:

Here’s the same range of dates, only it’s just KENP pages for Skylights:

I swear those are two different graphs. Look carefully, you’ll find the differences!

There are 13 pages for BA Vol. 1 in there somewhere, and that little blip at the end is about 80 pages for Malumba. Every single other KENP read I’ve had is for Skylights. Now, Skylights, cover-to-cover, is 535 “Kindle Edition Normalized Pages” long, which is what KENP stands for. Note that that means that on October 26 two different people read the book goddamn near cover-to-cover, or at least a lot of people read smaller chunks of it.

KENP doesn’t pay well– those thousand pages in a day of reading earned me less than six bucks– but overall for October I’m looking at about another $20something on top of what I made from sales. Which isn’t nothing, I guess? And I’ll freely admit that, while I love selling books, it’s actually even neater to log in and discover hey, someone’s reading one of my books RIGHT NOW, because that number was smaller than that earlier today.

I’d love to know why Skylights is the only one getting any love, though.

INTERVIEW!

On October 28, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

My friend James Wylder interviewed me about SEARCHING FOR MALUMBA. Check it out!

SEARCHING FOR MALUMBA now available for purchase!

On October 27, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Writing2 Comments

Let’s not bury the lede: my book Searching for Malumba: Why Teaching is Terrible… and Why We Do it Anyway is now available at Amazon in both a Kindle ebook version (4.95!) and, if I may say so, an incredibly handsome print edition (15.95!) The first essay in this book was written in 2001, guys, and this book has been in the back of my head for a very, very, very long time. If you’ve ever enjoyed anything I’ve written about anything, please, please check it out. You won’t regret it.

(There should be some reviews popping today, too, and a few promotional thingies over the course of the week. I will, uh, be being kinda noisy about it. Just buy it now and then ignore me for the next couple of days. 🙂 )

In which I am content

On October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Photography4 Comments

unnamed I admit it: I’m feeling slightly guilty right now about the fact that I’m not going to work again this week. The note from my doctor specifically said that I was not to return to school before November 2nd, and the main reason was that we wanted to check on the new medication. Well, so far, the new medication’s been fine, although I can come up with at least one example in the last couple of weeks where I was fine one day and emphatically Not Fine for several days after that. Point is, I’m following orders.

I’d be off today anyway, though, because for the first time we have a fall break, and today is the last day of that fall break. As it turns out, the preschoolers at Hogwarts (have I mentioned this? From now on, my kid’s school is Hogwarts) had a field trip today, and they went to a farm in southern Michigan– here, specifically. They put out a general call for chaperones last week and since I didn’t really have anything else I needed to be doing today (again, I’d have been off of work anyway) I decided to tag along. And… well, it was a hell of a lot of fun, actually. There’s perfect October weather outside. We went on a hayride and explored the farm and picked and ate apples and grapes right off the tree (or vine, as the case happened to be) and the boy got a pumpkin to bring home with him. There are now four pumpkins in the house; I probably ought to get thinking about what I’m going to do when I carve mine, because I wanna do something fun and creative and having an idea of some sort would probably help with that goal.

Speaking of perfect October weather, I was lucky enough last night to get a gorgeous one-day-before-full moon and a completely cloudless sky, so I hauled out the telescope. I need to get an attachment to make taking pictures easier, but I did manage this one:

Searching for Malumba is out tomorrow! I’ve officially hit my goal for pre-orders, but if you want to make me even happier, it’s available in print and digitally here. Expect more about that tonight. 🙂

The last SEARCHING FOR MALUMBA post for a minute

On October 16, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

First, two small announcements, one of which Twitter got yesterday: the final cover price from Amazon will be $15.95, which is all of 30 cents above the minimum they’d let me charge for the book. It’s a bit higher than I wanted, but the book’s pushing 500 pages and over 115,000 words, so at least you’re getting some material for the money. Ebook cost will be my typical $4.95.

Second: while CreateSpace still doesn’t do pre-orders, barring some sort of shipping-related disaster, the print edition will be available day and date with the ebook edition on October 27th. Right now they’re telling me I’ll get my proof next Wednesday, which should be plenty of time for me to find and fix any errors and have the book ready for release.

Finally, a request: if anybody wants to help me out with publicity– interviews, guest posts, anything like that– get in touch with me, either by leaving a comment or by emailing me. I’ve got a thing or two lined up but more is always great.

And now I’ll shut up about my stupid little book for a few days. I promise. 🙂

Aaaaand it’s done

On October 15, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

SEARCHING FOR MALUMBA is done in print and as an ebook, ready to go. I’m waiting on my proof copy of the print version, which could screw up my timing, but it’s all done.

Two short stories to write in what’s left of October, then back to STARLIGHT. Or maybe it’s called SUNLIGHT now. I’m not sure.

PRODUCTIVITY!

On October 14, 2015October 14, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing3 Comments

I went to bed Monday night around 11:00 PM. Maybe a bit before; that’s probably around when I fell asleep. I got up at 6:20, normal time, went to take a piss– which is also normal– and the world went away, which is not normal. I went back to bed and spent a solid 20 minutes shivering despite the presence of wifely body heat, an extra blanket, and a fricking heating pad turned up to full power, and at that point it became real clear that I wasn’t going to work. Again.

I’ve missed, at this point, 10 of the last 13 days of school. I proceeded to sleep until 4:30, when my wife and son got home, got up until around 10, then went back to sleep, meaning that I got eighteen and a half hours of sleep yesterday.

Not normal.

I didn’t go to work today either, because when you sleep 18 1/2 hours on Tuesday, you don’t go to work on Wednesday, because who the hell knows what could happen if you go to work.

Last night, I didn’t take my Lexapro, because fuck it, that’s why. And would you like to know what I got done today? I got the ebook edition of Searching for Malumba finished with the possible exception of a couple of edits if my wife demands them, the entire print edition ready to go from scratch, and the cover, from start to finish. This is, in case you’re wondering, more productivity in about six hours than in the entire three weeks that I was on Lexapro.

Fuck Lexapro, is what I’m getting at here.

I haven’t wanted to/been able to do anything other than sleep for the last three weeks, and the intermittent bouts of insane dizziness haven’t helped with anything either. I had an episode last week that was attributed to dehydration despite the fact that I drink enormous amounts of water and I piss like a racehorse to prove it. I’m at the point where the anxiety was better than not being able to do anything, and I cannot afford to keep missing work like this– in the most literal sense imaginable, since I’d run out of sick days before this week’s nonsense.

I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to ask my doctor to find me something else to take or if I’m just going to go with the non-medication suggestions my therapist made. One way or another, I’m not dealing with Lexapro any longer. It’s not worth it.

(But hey! Searching for Malumba is coming out on time after all! I was seriously starting to worry about that! Pre-order it, dammit, and reward my productivity!)