New Draft2Digital Policy = I'm On My Own (How Lovely)

Okay, Draft2Digital just posted a new thing they're doing, which really screws over legitimate writers like me who barely make sales. While the post makes sense and we understand why they're doing it, the platform no longer has everyone's best interests in mind. 

So firstly, there's going to be a fee onboarding new authors. That's not what I'm annoyed about. This is the part that's not good:

Annual Maintenance Fee: An annual maintenance fee of $12 will apply to accounts whose earnings from book sales, meaning your net proceeds after D2D’s commission, total less than $100 over the preceding 12-month period. If you earn $100 or more from your book sales over 12 months, you will not be charged this fee.

I've always been a writer who loves putting out books in a very, very small genre: gay gothic horror. With hardly any romance, at that, so in that sense, I'm already screwed since the books that sell the most are romances of all stripes. And I'm cool with that. I write the kind of books I want to read, and I know there are readers out there who also enjoy them.

Here's the kicker, and I'm going to be up front about my sales: I average less than $10 per month in royalties. That's right. Less than ten bucks. I'm used to it, and I'm lucky enough to be working full-time at a job I actually enjoy. I don't need to make millions off my books, and I like that the pressure to keep putting out books to maintain high earnings isn't there. The last thing I want is for my writing to turn into another job. Know what I mean? That's a shortcut for creative disaster in my case.

So I'm getting backed into a corner. 

Before this, D2D reduced the royalty rates over at their Smashwords store. And then they put a cap on the monthly checks so that you have to earn at least $10 a month for you to enjoy a deposit into your account for each month. So now not only do I earn less from their main store, I also get to be paid every other month. 

That was the reason why I opened (or re-opened) my Payhip store, and as of this post's writing, I've sold nothing over there. It may very well change if I take the nuclear option and pull my books from D2D and simply sell them from my store. That actually would be the ideal solution in the end, but I've always been willing to offer readers as many options as possible. 

I do have an Amazon KDP account, which has been inactive in years, but it's still there. I hardly sell books at Amazon, anyway, regardless, so that's not even on my plate. There are too many things about Amazon that leave a bad taste in my mouth despite their being the largest retailer of e-books. I'd rather take my chances with my piddling direct sales store front. 

Anyway, you can tell I'm not only annoyed, but absolutely dispirited by all this. I'm going to learn to format my own .epub books so I can do everything on my own. Eventually I will be pulling my books from D2D and will be selling direct. Period. The print books will be another thing, too, so we'll have to see. 

I'm not giving up on writing. I do it for the love of the act of storytelling and sharing my weird shit with those who share my taste in fiction. I love adding my books to a tiny, tiny niche and seeing it well-fed, in a manner of speaking. But, yeah -- money talks, and if I don't make it, I have to take my ball and leave the playground. 

At any rate, I'll be talking about this in the future, I'm sure. 

Wherefore Art Thou, Authors?

The thing about being in the thick of writing things is that there's really not much to talk about during that lull. I did pass the 30K-word mark, which usually also starts the paranoia phase of my drafting. I now only have less than 20K words to go to wrap things up, and let me tell you, things go REALLY quickly once that 30K-word line is crossed.

I'm on schedule, and this is going to be a bit of a challenge to revise and edit once the first draft's done.

The folktale I'm basing this on doesn't have a significant resolution, and unlike, say, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", which I based Compline on, "The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Is" is a weird -- albeit funny -- story because in the end, the main character (who's as dumb as a rock) STILL doesn't know how to shudder. Oh, his future wife makes him, of course, but it's got nothing to do with fear at all but, rather, cold water.

There's a lot of satire in the original folktale, though, but as to what, exactly, is being made fun of, I'm not really sure. There are only a number of interpretations from psychologists whose take I've never been a fan of. It's an old oral folktale that the Grimm brothers merely collected for their books, so whatever the point is for that story is lost forever, I think. 

The one thing I can say about the main character in the folktale, though, is that as stupid as he is (or one can argue he's just impossibly naive), he actually displays an impressive amount of compassion and empathy. Oh, he's got no understanding that the people he's trying to help are dead, but the need to help is there.

I am taking a lot of elements from the folktale and rewriting them in my own way to fit my version of it. So Errol and Edvin's ages needed to be bumped down a little more than usual, but I'm not marketing this as a YA book. They're both 19, which allows them to be utterly clueless about life and the world and believing the universe revolves around them still. We all know how it was to think we're indestructible. 

Anyway, that lack of a solid point in the original folktale has been difficult to keep out of my own story, and that'll make for a pretty intensive revision phase with maybe a lot of deletions and new material woven in. Or at least it'll take me longer than usual to get that done. 

In reference to this blog post title, I'm wondering about the "old guard" of writers who've been very active for years and then suddenly dropped off everyone's radar (or significantly cut down on their presence everywhere). It's very difficult, keeping writing and publishing up. It's not only hard actually turning words in your head into readable text following a plot that does everything it needs to do, but also go through the rest of the publishing stages of revising, editing, book cover design, marketing, etc. 

The sudden or gradual disappearance of the authors whose books I own and am happy to add to gives me a lot to think about. Things aren't forever, and life happens to everyone. For those authors with a massive following and who enjoy significantly more success than I, I reckon the added pressure of reader expectations can also burn them out eventually. 

I do miss them. I miss their stories and their voices and only now hope they're all doing well. A handful of go-to writers are still writing and publishing fairly consistently, but they're doing so at a markedly slower pace. I've been trawling Smashwords for new voices to discover now, and the proliferation of AI-written books is putting a damper on things. I did get sucked into maybe four books from "authors" I now actively avoid, but I've also discovered one relatively active writer I'll be following. 

I'm still keeping an eye out and hope to run across more of these new writers. Serendipity rules, man. 

April Store Sale

Life's rough, and sales are good. Apologies for forgetting to update both my Payhip store and this blog, but a late day is better than nothing.

So for all of April, my Masks collection as well as my Miscellaneous collection are 80% off. In essence, most of these books are cheaper than my Grotesqueries novellas, so yay!

This sale lasts through -- yep -- the end of April, and it's only happening at my store. So if you'd like to snag a copy or two of whatever books you might have been on the fence about, go to the following pages for them:

Masks (80% off the entire series including the omnibus)

Miscellaneous (80% off the entire series including all the omnibuses)

There'll be another sale (a different one) in May, and I'm trying to make these offers a monthly thing. Hopefully I'll be a hell of a lot more on top of things by the first of May, but I'm me, and life is life. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the books if you do purchase any, and thank you so much for your support! 

 

La Colline Aux Oiseaux

Hello, Sping. The Bay Area just ended Winter with a freaking heat wave, and I'm glad it's over and that we're set to enjoy milder spring weather in the coming days. Seeing as how it's still hot where I am, I'm unable to go to bed and have been diverting myself with stuff to feed my brain for my weekend writing.

You know, I actually debated adding this song to the gallery page for Doppelgänger, but I honestly didn't start listening to this until the tail end of that book's creation. I didn't listen to any song at all for inspiration, and it was solely by accident that I ran across this one again after a long spell of forgetting it existed. 

Maybe it's sentimental of me to use it, but as it does have a lullaby-like quality, I imagine this melody being hummed by Marguerite when putting little Théodore to bed. 

I've also listened to the English versions of the song, but I don't know how faithful of a translation they are to the original French (the title might come close enough with the English being "Mockin' Bird Hill"). 

At any rate, it's a melancholy touch if I were to apply it to the book and the LaSalle family's backstory. I'm not adding it to the gallery page, though, but posting about it here is good enough. In the meantime, I'm also not listening to any songs for The Shadow Groom although one of the book's original prompts (besides being inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairy tale) was the Gothic album from Nox Arcana, which I listen to religiously alongside other albums from them. 

Hell, given the way my brain works, I might end up recycling ideas that Gothic gave rise to for a future book.   

Big Sale (Payhip), Baby Sale (Smashwords)

So I did a thing. 

But, firstly, a bigger thing, i.e., the big sale over at my Payhip site. When you purchase a copy of Doppelgänger, you can add another book from the Grotesqueries collection for free. This BOGO sale will be on through the end of March, and it's there to help promote my new release. 

So head on over there if you'd like to support me directly.  

Secondly, a baby sale -- this time I decided to hold a 50% off sale through the month of March over at Smashwords for two books specifically: Hell-Knights and The Flowers of St. Aloysius. 

I only plan to offer future BOGO sales of my books over at Payhip, by the way, because I'd like to draw more reader traffic toward that site. It's my personal store, and I have a lot more freedom when it comes to offering sales and other promos. 

As for Smashwords, I decided to try out their site-specific deals via Draft2Digital since D2D now owns Smashwords, and I can play with their coupon manager feature since I can't participate in their tri-annual site-wide blitz sales (the rules aren't flexible enough for me, I'm afraid). For this month, I'm offering the two novels listed above for my first round of sales. Depending on how well this ends up, I might be doing this on a monthly basis, but by and large, my Payhip store will be where the bigger deals are. 

And I'm going to make it a thing now that each new book released -- all of which will be for the Grotesqueries collection -- will mark a month-long BOGO sale linked to that book and the rest of the other long novellas under that heading. That will be the only time I'll be offering any of my 99 cent books at some kind of discount. The rest of the year will be a mix of 60 - 80% off or maybe a limited BOGO for the rest of my backlist.  

I already have two sales set up for April and May (one per month), and I just need to put one together for June before the next big sale for Grotesqueries, i.e., when The Shadow Groom releases on July 1.