Elysae Shar's Blog, page 12
August 23, 2015
Printer Woes And Drafts
Yesterday, I finally figured out why my shiny new printer keeps quitting mid print. To make matters worse, it’s exactly what I expected in the first place: Either the wireless function is inherently unstable, or something in the 10 cm between the printer and the laptop is interfering with it. And had I dug a little deeper then, I would have found the option to switch from network to local. Feeling a little stupid now.
Anyway, to test it, I printed my NaNo draft–single spaced, which I’m now regretting–and about ten pages from finishing, the printer tells me that I might have a counterfeit cartridge and starts going on about lack of warranty on those. One, I don’t care as long as it prints, two, the cartridge ,it was referring to, came with the printer, and three, taking more than 100 pages to notice a counterfeit product is kind of pointless, as is the option to just click Continue.
Turns out what it mean to say is that the cartridge was about to run empty, so the final pages are a bit paler than the rest.
Despite my intention to not get into it, yet, I did take a pen to the first few pages of the mess, I created in November, and I gotta say it’s terrifying to look at all the correction. Found some good stuff, too, though. I’m scared off the end, though, because I know I Deus Ex’d that just so I could put The End under it by Nov 30th. Oh, well, I got all the time in the world to figure it out. Especially since I got a stack of other things ahead in line of it.
Plus John goes live in two days.
August 21, 2015
KU/KOLL
I’ve been lurking in the KDP forums a lot lately and I can’t say I get the uproar the changes to KDP Select are causing. I mean, I do get that authors of shorter works or picture books are getting quite a bit less than before. Picture books especially need to be treated different than text only books. To them the new system really isn’t fair.
What I don’t get is why people insist on comparing it to the old system and count that as a loss. The old system isn’t coming back and that’s that. What people should be comparing in my opinion–if anything at all–is whether a fully read borrow gets them more than a sale. But than there’s also the fact that not every borrow would have been a sale, so…
If I sell say 10 copies of John, I get 3,50
With 10 borrows, assuming it’s fully read I’d only get ~1,40
But if none of those borrows would have been sales, I still make a profit
To me, if something is done about picture and maybe recipe books, the per page system seems a whole lot fairer than the flat rate. It’s probably the closest Amazon can get to fair without individually “rewarding” each book.
As a writer, of course, I’d love if people paid my 1k for my 24 pages. Who wouldn’t? But as a reader, and assuming the same quality–which Amazon kind of has to–I wouldn’t value 24 pages as high as say 400. Of course if the longer book sucks and the shorter doesn’t, I’d consider it worth more. That’s not a system a platform that big can apply.
And to be honest, and, assuming the same writing speed and skill, and the same quality end product, a short story author can put out more individual products in the same time another releases a single novel. thus payment evens out.
That said, John is staying in Select, because I think the potential extra exposure does me more good than an additional ~.20.
August 20, 2015
To Do List
Expand epic fantasy short story into novel/la/ette
Edit ~3k fantasy short story and maybe expand it a little
Finish fantasy short story I put on hold for Camp NaNo
Try to find the four flash fics I was working on before Camp
Finish horror sci-fi novel/la/lette
Edit NaNoWriMo draft
And to think, I was worried about running out of things to do. I’m going to try for at least one task a month. Except for the finish or expand X. Those I’ll do on the side as I edit.
August 16, 2015
John & Other Stories Announcement
After realizing that I was more likely to ruin the stories in this collection than to improve them, I changed my plans.So rather than October 13th, John is now scheduled to go live on August 25th here .
I stuck the book in select, too, because in my book getting even a few cents–or half cents for pages read– is better than getting nothing at all. Then again, I have low expectations anyway
