If you follow me on Twitter or you pay attention to the feed on the right side of your screen there, you already know this, but check back early tomorrow morning for a little announcement about a quick one-day sale.
Also: AGE OF ULTRON was amazing.
Tag: skylights
In which there’s some lint in there
WARNING: This is the whiniest, most inside-baseball ridiculous no-one-who-matters-will-ever-see-this whiny blog post of all time, so either click away while you still can or brace yourself.
This is Irish Dave. He has apparently decided on his own that he wants to be called that; I didn’t come up with the name. He’s the new morning DJ on the radio station that I usually listen to on my way in to work. (Left aside for now: why I bother listening to terrestrial radio. I have reasons; I don’t know that they’re any good.)
Anyway, he’s the new morning DJ, and they’ve completely redone the show now that he’s on it. It’s called the New Fun Way to have Fun Fun in the Morning while You’re Having Fun and Waking Up To Have Fun, or something ridiculous like that, and Irish Dave is the host. The previous morning show had a stupid trivia question segment that happened to coincide with my morning drive in to work; they’d basically quote a statistic (“40% of women say this never happens to them… but it does!”) and challenge the viewers to come up with the answer and give away some stupid prize.
On Irish Dave’s show, they’ve done something similar, and in the same time slot, except it’s appreciably dumber. He calls it the Whiz Kid segment, but the ads and promos call it Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, because god help us if we want to be original ever and the best thing to do is to steal other people’s dumb ideas. Here’s the problem: there’s no actual being smarter than the fifth grader; it’s just a kid reading the question, and frankly she’s reading it poorly– her delivery is syllable-by-syllable and halting as hell, and as a teacher I think she really needs to work on her fluency. It’s awful. But she’s not competing at all, they’ve just got a little kid asking the question for some entirely unclear reason. Occasionally Irish Dave pretends she’s calling in live. This is obviously not true at all and I don’t understand why he bothers.
This was this morning’s question, rendered word-for-word:
“Between 1845 and 1847, three fourths of one million people and hundreds of thousands of others emigrated to the United States. What caused this tragedy?”
A couple things about this. First, the style of the questions now make this shit much less fun. I knew right away it was the potato famine, but it’s not fun guessing if you don’t immediately know. That was the fun thing about the previous segment– the stats were always ridiculously generic and the answers could really be just about anything. This is a history question. You either know it or you don’t.
And it’s a horribly phrased trivia question. First of all, the kid’s reading the question badly, because no one ever says “three fourths of one million.” It sounds weird, but it’s written as a fraction on the sheet of paper she’s reading from and she’s a fifth grader so she doesn’t know to say quarters. Second, what the fuck is the deal about “3/4 of a million people” and “hundreds of thousands of others“? What the hell are these “others”? Are they people? Horses? Lice?
Finally, the actual emigration isn’t the actual tragedy. The famine was the tragedy. The famine didn’t cause the tragedy of emigration, the famine was the tragedy that caused the emigration. Did the fifth-grader write the question?
Fucking dumb.
On an entirely unrelated note, all of my books for the signing have shown up. I don’t know that I ever officially announced this, but I redid the cover and the interior for Skylights before printing the 30 copies that I’ll have with me for the signing. Here’s what the new cover looks like:
Pretty, innit? So if you order the print edition of Skylights (or buy it at the signing) it’ll look a bit better than the earlier version did.
In which I’ve been keeping secrets
Periodically I do an experiment with book prices somewhere and don’t overly publicize it just to see what happens. As it happens, Skylights has been on sale at Amazon for 40% off for close to a week now, and sometime late tonight before I go to bed I’ll roll it back to its regular $4.95 price.
But until then, if you haven’t picked it up yet, and a $2.99 price point appeals to you? Go for it.
Some book odds and ends
First! Skylights just got a really nice write-up over at Cat Lumb’s blog. Go check it out, and look through her archives a bit while you’re at it– there’s some neat stuff over there.
Second! We are thisclose to being within a month of the release of The Sanctum of the Sphere, the second Benevolence Archives book. Expect to hear things about this! Also, if anyone’s interested in helping out with promotion, keep an eye out this week, because I’ll be floating a couple of ideas out. Meanwhile, if you liked Benevolence Archives, vol. 1, you can pre-order the Sanctum ebook right now for just $4.95. The print edition will be an omnibus of both BA books; I don’t have a price just yet.
Third! If you follow me on Twitter you may have seen that I’ve been pushing BA 1 with a different site lately. Openbooks.com just concluded their open beta period and is open to the world now, and you can pick up Benevolence Archives 1 over there for free. The way the site is different: It’ll prompt you to pay once you finish the book, and you can literally pay whatever you want for it depending on how much you like what you’ve read. The site also encourages sharing of the digital files. You don’t have to pay, of course– which I genuinely don’t mind, because the book is free on other sites anyway. Amazingly, Benevolence Archives 1 is currently the #1 science fiction book on the site. There’s also an option to leave star ratings and reviews; if you’ve previously read BA through Amazon or whoever, I’d love it if you’d be willing to leave a star review at least. Check the place out.
Amazon advertising: beginning to suspect I’m wasting my time here
(Warning: Inside baseball.)
You may need to click on that to make it legible. Not too long ago Amazon announced that they were creating an advertising program for books in their Kindle Select program. It read a little… hmm… I’ll say suboptimally designed at first. Amazon already makes money from every book I sell, right? They take about a third of my sales, plus a little bit more that they pretend is a “delivery fee.” Now, I don’t actually mind the cut that they’re getting; as my distributor, they’re entitled to a piece of my sales. I don’t find it unreasonable.
I do find it slightly unreasonable that they want to directly charge me for an advertising program that makes them more money if it succeeds. It feels… unkosher, somehow, in a way I don’t like very much. But, hey, Amazon’s a business partner, here. They’re not my friends. They’re allowed to try and make as much money for themselves as they want regardless of whether or not I like it.
I’ve run two campaigns with them (and, I should note, not actually spent any money yet, because they charge per click) and both have, thus far, been literally completely useless. The first time through, I timed it around Skylights going on sale and specifically targeted it to people who looked at certain other books– I had a list of about forty. This time, I’m targeting by genre and not by specific books.
The first time, I got 728 impressions and not a single click. This time… well, they don’t seem to be able to keep their numbers straight. I had 21oo impressions a couple of days ago, which fell to 820 this morning and now is back up to 1414, but never more than the one click… and that click also disappeared for a time this morning. (6:00 PM edit: I’m down to 1200 impressions, and the click is gone again.)
I have not sold a copy of Skylights since the sale ended. Scarily, this is still a really good month– even independently of the sale, the first third of February was stellar enough to make up for a genuinely crappy middle third. And I’ve had 2142 impressions through this “advertising program” that has resulted in (maybe!) one click, for a return rate of .047%. In other words, less than a twentieth of a percent. Industry standard is 1-5%.
“But Luther!” you say. “Maybe your ad just sucks! Maybe it’s not Amazon’s fault!”
Which could be true– except for the part where Amazon generates the ads themselves, and they all look exactly the same: the book cover, the title, author, and star ranking. Skylights has a decent star ranking on Amazon right now, so unless people hate the cover I can’t really blame the ad.
The only good news is that they charge by the click, and if they never get any clicks, I never get charged. I’m not going to cancel this one for a while, but they’re gonna have to find a way to pick up the pace if they really think they’re going to hit my advertising budget (or even come close) by April 1st.
New SKYLIGHTS review, and another announcement
Is it possible– I think it is– that Skylights hasn’t actually had a review on a blog yet? I’m up to seven at Amazon, all of which are four- or five-star reviews, and my interweb-buddy D. Emery Bunn just posted a four-star review of the book over at his website. He’d already provided me probably my favorite Twitter-friendly tag line for the book (“Half love letter to NASA, half space exploration porn”) and he just today came through with a full review.
It’s interesting, actually: this is probably the most critical any reviewer of the book has been, especially if I don’t count a textless two-star review at Goodreads. He liked it, but he definitely goes into some details about the parts of the book that didn’t work for him. I’m linking it anyway because I think the criticisms he raises are completely fair, and at least a couple of them are the direct result of deliberate decisions I made while I was writing the book. Sadly, not everyone is going to unconditionally love every single word I write.
Even though you all should.
Anyway, check the review out; the book itself remains a scant $4.95 as an ebook at Amazon, or a little bit more if you want the print edition.
I promised another announcement: I found out that Stone Skin Press was issuing a call for submissions for their anthology Swords v. Cthulhu yesterday. Thought about it, walked out to the living room, and said to my wife “Do you think I can pull together a submission for this in just two weeks?”
“Sure you can,” she said.
And maybe an hour later, I had my story– a story that, granted, has had barely a single word committed to a word processing document just yet, but who needs that, right? Anyway, point is, I’m totally in on submitting something to this anthology, which is always fun, and I’m posting it here because I have a sneaking suspicion that I have a few among my regular readership who might be interested in being my competition.
Anyway. That’s it for now; I’ll try and shut up until tonight unless something really interesting happens.
Briefly, on the sale
Not going into my usual numberwanking on this, just a few bullet points, mostly because I was teaching again today and I’m kinda tired and crabby and shot for other stuff to talk about. I’d like to promise I won’t mention writing again for a week or so around here but who the hell knows if I’ll hold to that. You got a poop post yesterday; quit whining. 🙂
- In general: that went well. Sales every day, a couple of days down from others (the second and third day of the sale in particular) but it went well.
- Interestingly, while I haven’t sold a copy of Benevolence Archives in a while, I had seventeen free downloads of that book from Smashwords during the sale. That’s impressive for that time period, so I’m going to say it was because of the countdown deal.
- Amazon marketing appears to be literally and entirely useless, but more on this later.
- Skylights also picked up a new five-star review during the sale, which was gratifying.
- I also had my first day of more than ten actual sales. Even my launch days haven’t hit double-digit sales yet, although I’m fairly certain BA 2 will.
- What did work? Twitter, believe it or not, and Facebook. A larger-than-expected number of my sales came about through good old-fashioned schmoozing. The other interesting thing is that while casting out sales Tweets generally doesn’t get you anywhere, people seem to notice and respond when they’re part of a narrative. My clickthroughs on my sales Tweets closely track with my actual sales. I had thought Twitter mostly useless for this; I may have to refine that viewpoint.
- And, finally, I’ve made some sales today, so the end of the sale didn’t kill my momentum dead for a week, which I’d suspected might happen. The last day where at least one person didn’t download at least one of my books was January 26th, which is awesome. Also awesome: one more sale in February will make February a better month than January was, and it’s only the 10th.
- I will moooostly be going quiet on the marketing front until April, at which point I’ll start ramping up for The Sanctum of the Sphere. So if you’ve grown tired of my yammering over the last week, I’ll be giving you a break for a while. 🙂
So, yeah. All told? I’m pretty pleased with that. My deepest thanks to anyone who downloaded, shared, RTed, or helped out in any way during the sale.
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