Hugh Howey's Blog, page 28

It’s the Reader, Stupid (Part 2)

A year ago, I wrote a short blog post called It’s the Reader, Stupid, inspired by James Carville’s advice during the 1992 Presidential campaign, when he coined the term “It’s the economy, stupid.” The post was meant to be a reminder to publishers and bookstores that their customer is the reader, not each other.

I think it bears reminding to all of us just who should be in charge of the publishing industry, and that’s the customer.

What got me thinking about this today was a discussion on KBoards about how Amazon’s algorithms and also-boughts work, what gets promoted and what doesn’t, and all the ways that entrepreneurial writers attempt to figure out the market they’re writing for. Here’s my reminder: It’s all about the reader.

One of the biggest mistakes I see self-published authors make when it comes to Amazon (or any digital retailer) is to assume that they make decisions based primarily on our welfare. Any tweak Amazon makes, authors immediately determine how that change is going to affect them, which is smart. The mistake is to assume that the tweak was designed to affect them. It wasn’t. The tweak was designed to affect the customer experience.

It’s the reader, stupid.

(Please note that I hate using the word stupid, but that I use it for the same reason that Carville did. It shocks us into paying attention. Also, it’s hard to employ a meme without quoting the meme-ish bit.)

Reminding ourselves that it’s all about the reader can be immensely useful. What sorts of titles do we think Amazon might promote? My guess, using this reminder as a framework, is the titles that provide the highest level of customer satisfaction. That doesn’t necessarily mean the titles with the most or best reviews. It might mean the titles that have the highest completion-to-purchase rate. Or the lowest number of returns. Or the highest percentage of sequel purchases. It might even mean the titles that display slow organic growth via word-of-mouth rather than heavily promoted explosive growth. It could have to do with cover art or genre.

It’s no surprise to me that Amazon doesn’t promote my title I, ZOMBIE. It’s the only work of mine that my wife couldn’t get through. The book is revolting enough that I had to put a disclaimer right in the product description. Even if horror is a popular genre, Amazon would turn off customers by promoting a niche work that won’t satisfy most readers.

This is a philosophy I think any sane thinker would agree is a sound one. I’m sure Amazon does the same for its other products, heavily promoting the items that have the fewest returns, which signals not only customer satisfaction but cuts down shipping and restocking costs.

Personally, I enjoy writing all over the place, including things that I know won’t sell very well. I’m not in this to maximize my earnings. But for those who are, I recommend not looking at Amazon’s decisions as somehow being directed at authors. That just doesn’t make any sense. Their decisions are based on customer service and customer satisfaction. If you want to succeed with them, all you have to do is align yourself to that purpose.

And what could be more noble? Write what you think others will enjoy; edit the work to maximize that enjoyment; grace your work with a pleasing cover; and price it reasonably. Whatever happens next, it isn’t about us. It’s about the reader.

Paulo Coelho to Publishers: “Don’t be Greedy.”

Bestselling author Paulo Coelho, who has seen how lower prices on his own ebooks have led to higher sales and greater profits, cautioned publishers from Frankfurt this weekend not to be greedy.

He also suggests that lower prices for digital books are good for the industry, that change is inevitable, and a lot else that made a shocking amount of sense.

Bravo, Paulo. Bravo.

Time to Give DBW a Second Chance

“What is DBW,” you ask?

Digital Book World is an online news source for digital publishing developments. They also put on an annual conference in New York City. For the past couple of years, they have been the go-to source for all your Amazon-bashing needs. Their coverage has been so stilted, that when I noticed a change this week, I had to reach out to a friend and see if someone had called in sick. Indeed, there has been a change at the helm.

This is a most welcome development. Already, the coverage lacks the one-sidedness that plagued DBW in the past. Instead of tuning in every morning to hear what the Amazon Derangement Syndrome crowd thinks, I’m now watching fair and positive coverage of the digital publishing world. It’s a breath of fresh air.

I point this out because I’m not alone in my assessment. Today, I saw comments on a post at The Digital Reader that starts: “Pretty much anything from DBW can be safely ignored.” A reply from Nate, who runs The Digital Reader goes: “No argument here. I was initially going to be much more snarky when commenting on DBW, but then I toned it down.” Comments like these are rife across the publishing landscape. The previous editor had an agenda, and we should celebrate his departure.

For my own part, I’ve been extremely critical of DBW in the past. They have put together some really awful surveys and have used bizarre methods for making the results show what they want rather than what’s there. (Seriously. Read this blog post to see how laughable these attempts have been.)

My hope is that the change in editors will improve the coverage and get DBW back to disseminating the news rather than editorializing. Let’s give them a chance to prove themselves. No need to judge them by the mess someone else left behind. If you are interested in this industry, you should sign up for their daily digest. If you’ve been missing the last couple of years of digests, congratulations. And congrats to the new editor. Best of luck!

Amazon to Open a New York Store

It’s being reported that Amazon is opening a physical store in Manhattan in time for the holiday season. The company hasn’t confirmed this, but the move has been a long time coming. Once Amazon started paying sales tax in many states, the main disadvantage of a physical store was removed (the physical space would have nulled sales tax exemptions).

I’ve blogged in the past about how physical spaces could benefit the company, from providing an outlet for same-day deliveries to showcasing their electronic devices. It’ll be interesting to see how they treat physical books, if they also highlight the works they publish in-house and maybe even a sampling of print-on-demand titles.

If the store is a success, one imagines it’ll be replicated elsewhere. Any city big enough to warrant an Apple or Microsoft store could use an Amazon store. If the newest Kindle is as sexy as it’s reported to be, the chance to go hands-on could be good for device sales (and then e-book sales). It’s fascinating to me that the same year publishers are making moves to have their own digital storefronts, Amazon might be making its first foray into physical storefronts.

In related news, The Economist has an incredible projection showing ebooks outselling print books by 2018 (it’s not clear, but there are forward buttons below the first chart so you can see the progression). Amazon’s storefront might include books, since their titles are blacklisted from many other chains, but the move to digital suggests any physical presence will be more about devices (phones, tablets, e-readers), accessories for those devices, and perhaps even top-selling items in various departments (like electronics, toys, fitness, cooking), combined with a same-day delivery hub and pick-up locker.

Imagine being a tourist in a major city, realizing you left a charger at home or wanting a very specific item, and knowing that you can order it on your phone and pick it up at the nearest Amazon store. It may change the way we shop when we aren’t in our pajamas.

All that’s left is for Google to open up shop. And build us a car to take us there.

The Goal Over the Horizon

Amber and I are in Annapolis looking at sailboats. When we met nearly 13 years ago, I was living and working on boats. She domesticated me under the condition that we would get back on a boat one day and sail around the world. We’re still years away from departure, but perhaps only two or three years from selling the house and moving onto a boat.

I fell in love with sailing when I was very young. The beach house we went to every year had a small sunfish sailboat. Really just a dinghy with a triangle of fabric. But the thing would scoot, and at ten years old, it was like having your own car. The sensation of freedom, quietude, awareness, and constant striving were intense.

In college, I bought a 27′ Watkins to live on. It saved me a lot of money and filled my weekends with mini-adventures. After my junior year, I sailed south with plans to see how far I could make it. Not far, it turns out. The Bahamas were too nice; I was having too much fun; and then a couple hurricanes wiped me out.

The year I spent in the islands was largely afforded by doing odd jobs on other boats. This ballooned into a career as a yacht captain. I started delivering boats anywhere from Chicago to Barbados. I worked full-time on several boats for a while, living on them, caring for them, and taking the owners and their guests wherever they liked. One of these owners introduced me to Amber. Which brings us to our search for our next home.

The part of our looming trip that I look forward to the most is the immersion in literature. I already read a lot and write a fair bit, but spending five to six years circling the globe will give me the chance to do a lot more. One of my projects will be to write about our adventures, our travels, our observations. Maybe each month will be its own little story. Some might be about relationships, some about the environment, some about the people we meet along the way. The best part of such a trip is not having a definite plan. Perhaps we never escape the pull of the Caribbean.

I used to think that living simply (small house, few possessions, low expenditures) would make this trip possible. A lot of people take off on sailboats with very little means. Hell, I did it for a year when I was college-broke. But it isn’t living simply that makes a trip like this possible, it’s having a goal like this trip that makes living simply possible. It’s easy to forgo distractions and to not accumulate things when you have a larger goal on the horizon. Many of the decisions we make are based on our eventual departure. It makes me wonder what life would be like without a long term goal like this.

There are parallels with writing. Putting words on paper every single day is motivated by having a larger goal in mind: writing a novel. But more importantly, the goal serves as the impetus for doing what’s truly important, and that’s the habit of daily writing. It doesn’t matter if you finish the book, if you publish it, how many copies you sell. What matters is the daily routine of escaping into your imagination, crafting sentences that please and scenes that excite, getting away from the noise and enjoying the soft sigh of sail, wind, and sea.

The goal is the thing only because it affects our daily routine. I’ve wanted to sail around the world since I was a young man who read Joshua Slocum’s account of doing just this back around the turn of the 20th century. But even if I never complete the journey, it won’t matter. I’ve applied myself daily to get there, and that’s made all the difference.

*Standing Ovation*

Thank you, Margaret Sullivan, for renewing my faith in my favorite newspaper.

With a statement that admits its coverage has not been entirely fair, Margaret Sullivan calls for more balanced reporting on the Amazon Hachette negotiations. This is great news. From Margaret’s piece:

I would like to see more unemotional exploration of the economic issues; more critical questioning of the statements of big-name publishing players; and greater representation of those who think Amazon may be a boon to a book-loving culture, not its killer.

Give Customers What They Want

Two forces tug legacy industries from opposite directions. On the one side, you have customer demand. On the other side you have a mix of fear and laziness. In-between is where corporations and industries find themselves, and they face a choice. Sadly, in most cases, the fear and laziness win out. It’s left to radical new upstarts to provide customers with what they actually want.

The examples are numerous. Look at Tesla, a company that builds all-electric cars and wants to sell them direct to the consumer in order to keep the price down. These cars are sexy, great for the environment, and becoming more and more affordable. What’s the response from the competition? An appeal to the courts to block the skirting of dealership laws. An appeal to an old and wasteful system that means higher prices to the consumer and lined pockets for the middlemen. Check out what the New York Times had to say about these attempts:

Car dealers in New York, New Jersey and several other states are waging legal, legislative and regulatory campaigns to stop Tesla, the fast-growing electric-car company, from selling its vehicles directly to consumers. These moves are little more than attempts to protect an old retail model by limiting consumer choices.

How about Uber and Lyft? Having used these services, and having gotten around dozens of cities by cab, the most amazing shock to me is that taxis weren’t the ones who innovated here. With every potential customer holding a networked computer in the palm of their hand, the increased efficiency made possible by an app that handled dispatching, routing, and payment is a no-brainer. But fear and laziness win out, and now taxis are appealing to the courts to keep a system that is less efficient (which means worse for traffic and worse for the environment) and provides less customer satisfaction.

What does the New York Times have to say about this innovation and Uber’s pricing strategy with UberX?

The key to understanding Uber’s strategy is the concept of “elasticity of demand,” which is how people will react to a lower price. If consumers’ demand is highly elastic, it means that a slightly lower price will lead to people taking a lot more UberX rides.

Price elasticity. Lower prices will result in widespread adoption and greater profits. Interesting.

How about that great disrupter, Netflix? Having put video rental chains out of business and then proving that dropping an entire season of TV all at once can be a good thing, Netflix is now arguing that the classic program of “windowing” is not good for the film industry. Netflix wants to release the sequel to 2000’s smash hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on Netflix as well as in theaters, all on the same day. The theaters (which are predominantly three companies) refused. Netflix appealed to the Imax chain, but Imax waived control of their screens to the same three aforementioned companies, who host their installations. Again, the companies refused. And again, the New York Times had fair coverage of the event, saying:

Theater chains in the United States have rallied against attempts to change the traditional model for releasing films, worried that movie fans might stay at home rather than pay for movie tickets. The theaters now typically play movies for three months without competition.

…

Netflix, Imax and the Weinstein Company, which is producing “Crouching Tiger,” said that movie fans were asking for new ways to watch films. “Going out to the movies is a very different experience than staying in,” said Ted Sarandos, chief content officer at Netflix. “Withholding access only invites piracy.”

In cable television, customers want a la carte (the ability to choose individual channels rather than packages bloated with programming they’ll never watch), but cable providers resist. More balanced coverage from the New York Times ensued, showing both sides of the argument, with their reporter writing: “I don’t watch Animal Planet or TruTV, but I pay for them as part of a package that includes the channels I do want. The cable industry books that inefficiency as profit. It is the lucrative lifeblood of the current entertainment business.”

When Aereo provided a workaround to direct access to over-the-air networks at an affordable price, instead of providing this service to its customers, the networks appealed to the courts. Screw the customers has become the mantra of those whose industries are being disrupted. The networks won, but at least the story was covered fairly in the print media, with Aereo shown as an innovator appealing to customer demand and networks described as “titans,” “powerful companies,” and “fixtures in American living rooms for decades.”

The stodgy and entrenched vs. the awesome new innovator. That’s how these showdowns are rightly portrayed.

Ah, unless it’s books. Unless it’s the publishing industry.

As these same trends hit my favorite pastime, it amazes me how bizarre and lopsided the coverage has been. When the six major publishers banded together to raise prices on consumers, charging upward of $14.99 for ebooks and getting hammered by the DOJ for collusion, the coverage was often sympathy for the publishers and lack of concern for the consumer. This article starts out not by detailing what publishers did, but by making the story about the DOJ’s aggressive response.

The Justice Department jumped directly into the fight over the future of digital books on Wednesday — and Amazon came out the winner.

In an action that could lower the price of e-books and shift the expanding market in Amazon’s favor, the Justice Department slapped Apple and five of the largest book publishers with an antitrust lawsuit, charging that the companies colluded to raise the price of e-books.

Note the “jumped,” “fight,” and “slapped.” How rude of the Department of Justice! And note that the winner in lowering prices, according to the New York Times, is Amazon, not the consumer. Reading the paper every single day, these differences in coverage jump out at you and clobber you over the head with a baseball bat.

The difference in coverage must stem partly from direct conflicts of interest (more on that in a moment) but also from what Clay Shirky brilliantly points to as a brand of elitism. Clay says:

The traditional industry belief — if you don’t live in a big city and have a lot of money, you deserve second-class access to books — is being challenged by a company trying to say “If you have ten bucks, there’s not a book in the world you can’t read.” If the current industry can’t keep their prices high while competing with instant distribution of a vastly expanded literature — and that seems to be their only assertion worth taking at face value — then it’s time for them to figure out how to make a business out of improved access. They can drop DRM, sell ebooks directly to readers, add or improve their subscription services, offer print-on-demand—any strategy, really, except continuing to insist that readers must accept high prices and restricted access.

And:

The tension between their ordinary sympathies for the general public and their withholding of that support in this particular case stems from the duality of authorship as an open marketplace and a closed cultural arena. To criticize Amazon, the publishers and their defenders must simultaneously insist that literature is essential for society, and that a sudden increase in its availability would be a catastrophe.

Finally, quoting at length (you should read the entire piece. Here’s another link to it:

When Packer registers his concern for “books,” he masks the aristocratic core of his argument: fear of popular participation. Like Coll, he imagines a world where the current elites aren’t in charge, and he does not like it, ending his discussion of Amazon with a the question, “When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good?”

To which the answer is obvious: Of course Amazon won’t care. That’s none of their business. And note well Packer’s concern: It is not that people will stop writing or selling books that rich, well-educated people want to buy (an unlikely outcome, in this or any market.) Instead, he is concerned that publishing will become too easy, that there will be no one who can stop the publication of dreck, and by dreck he means books he and I and our fellow members of the highly educated class won’t approve of.

So that’s the cultural elitism aspect of the one-sided coverage. The other is the direct conflict of interest. The same company that owns HarperCollins, one of the five remaining “major” publishers, also owns the Wall Street Journal. Hachette was part of Time Warner and is now owned by a French media conglomerate that runs newspapers and magazines around the world. Penguin and Random House have merged and are both owned by the Bertelsmann Group, Europe’s largest radio and TV broadcaster and one of the largest magazine printers. Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS, one of the handful of broadcast TV companies. MacMillan is owned by Holtzbrinck, another multinational media firm.

The “Big Five” are all wings of larger media conglomerates; they are not mom-and-pop book-creators. In fact, each major publisher is made up of dozens of imprints each, many of which used to be smaller publishers, some of them daring to publish affordable paperbacks until they were gobbled up and merged into the hardback-windowing high-margin machines we see today. These publishers, keep in mind, occupy some of the most expensive real estate in the world. In London, publishers are erecting towers along the Thames, despite real estate there being crushingly unaffordable for the general public.

So two things are at play here: The first is that innovation is happening everywhere, and the response everywhere has been for legacy industries to have as their “Kodak Moment” entrenchment, fighting against customer desires, banding together where possible, and appealing to the courts for protection.

We receive fair coverage of many of these trends, but completely busted coverage of what’s happening in the publishing industry. Instead, the New York Times sells $104,000 ads to wealthy authors and gives them in exchange article after article presenting only one side of the issue. It is rare when a member of the media presses with facts, and a disaster for the pro-legacy pundits when they do.

So what needs to happen? Someone in the media business needs to cover the publishing industry fairly. I’ve pleaded with David Carr to be that person, as he’s sharp enough and independently minded enough to pull it off. And I want to see my beloved New York Times at least dip a toe into the right side of history. The coverage can be fixed, I’m sure of it.

But what about the disruption taking place at the heart of the industry? What should we hope to see from publishers?

I’ve blogged before about what I would do, and it comes down to slashing the waste in the industry and passing those savings along to customers and artists. Basically Amazon’s strategy. Amazon gets hammered for making its employees (gasp) pay for candy bars in vending machines and for not taking large profits—choosing instead to focus on customer service, low prices, and better margins for authors. Publishers, meanwhile, set up in Midtown Manhattan and along the Thames, collude to raise prices on consumers, offer lockstep and horrid digital royalty rates, and they are the paragons of virtue. It doesn’t have to be this way. Any one of them could make an about-face immediately and change their corporate culture, and we should want them to.

Just as it should have been the taxis who embraced technology and linked up with customers through their cell phones, it should have been publishers who invented ereaders and celebrated a less wasteful and more affordable story delivery mechanism. And it’s not too late for them to innovate and lead rather than go to the courts and sue against progress.

Let’s talk about solutions. When I worked in a bookstore, I lamented the choice publishers made to window book formats. Hardbacks came out first and paperbacks were delayed. Rather than give the customer what they wanted, the publisher made only the most expensive version available. $30 for a hardback that cost less than $3 to print. No affordable option during the window in which the bulk of the advertising dollars would be spent. It made no sense to me as a bookseller (or as a reader).

Giving customers what they want makes good business sense. It also makes sense to give customers a variety of experiences, not just because the audience is made up of a mix of people with different wants and financial means, but because of the effect of an upsell. If there are two versions of the same product, and one is in some way superior but costs more, the upsell means the price of the more expensive product is — in the mind of the consumer — equal to the difference between the two prices.

If I know I want a certain book, and the paperback is $15 while the hardback is $25, I tell myself that the hardback is “only $10 more.” The money I’m spending is now a smaller amount than even the cheaper of the two options. The choice between two editions removes the choice of whether or not to buy the book. Now I’m deciding which format I want.

In the NYT article about Netflix’s Crouching Tiger release plans, a great analogy is made with professional sports. Being able to watch the game at home doesn’t stop the stadiums from being well-attended. It’s a different experience. In the publishing world, the reading experience across formats is becoming more and more similar, with even ebooks providing something closer and closer to print, but the ownership experience is still different. Hardback buyers are often collectors. Paperback buyers might read once and then pass the work along or sell it at a used bookstore. E-book buyers are free to hoard without worrying about clutter or the psychological weight of unread books staring them down from the bedside table.

Publishers obsess about hardback margins at the expense of customer choice. They do this despite the fact that the #1 breakout publishing hit of the decade was 50 Shades of Grey, a paperback original. The hardback editions came later and still sold, because not all readers are the same. When Simon & Schuster released WOOL in the US, they published the hardback and paperback on the same day, and both editions hit their respective New York Times bestseller lists and went into third and fourth printings.

It’s simple: Ask yourself what the customer wants, and give it to them. Stop running your business by the whims and needs of the middlemen. Treat writers and readers as well as possible, and refuse to do business with anyone who tries to squeeze you for making that decision. That means no windowing. It means free copies of the audiobook and ebook with the sale of every hardback. It means getting rid of DRM. It means ebook prices in the $5.99 – $6.99 range, even for new releases from top-selling authors.

What do we have instead? Publishers fighting against every one of these trends. We have appeals to the public and to the courts that get it all completely backwards. We have a part of a much larger trend of legacy industries fighting progress, working against the public’s best interest, all because fear and laziness win out over customer demand.

Start watching for these trends, and you’ll see them everywhere. And you’ll notice that there are companies (usually on the west coast), like Uber, Tesla, Netflix, Google, and Amazon that are trying their damnedest to provide a better experience at a better price with more choices. While other companies, in expensive towers built of stone, are conspiring with one another and appealing to the courts to do whatever they can to fool and rob their paying customers. Who do you think is going to win with those two strategies? Who should win? And what affect can a biased media play in the outcome?

 

 

John Pavlovitz Can be My Pastor

 

John Pavlovitz is my hero. A Christian pastor and father of two, he recently penned this blog post on what he will do if either or both of his children realizes they are gay. He won’t love them in spite of being gay or because they are gay; he’ll just love them for being awesome people and for being who they are. He understands that being gay is not a choice or a thing to cure. He will pray for them not in order to “fix” them or change them, but in the hopes that they aren’t subjected to abuse just for being themselves.

I can’t sum up his words as lovely as he writes them, so you should just go read his blog post.

What’s heartening is that John has seen an outpouring of support since he blogged about this. It was an incredibly brave thing for him to do; he feared the reaction the post would receive.

I was raised a Christian, but I left the church when I was young. I didn’t believe in God anymore. As I got older, I was drawn back to the teachings of Christ, not because I had faith in his existence (or that of his dad, despite the obvious dual miracles of cocoa and coffee beans), but because I liked to think of Jesus as one of several revolutionaries of his time who tried to change how we see the world and how we treat one another.

I was fortunate to grow up with an openly gay uncle and openly gay friends. It gave me early role models, so I didn’t have to overcome any ingrained bigotry. I don’t take credit for feeling this way; I’m a product of circumstance. Others have a lot more to overcome, a much steeper climb. I think that helps me avoid the feeling that I’m anywhere near a moral pinnacle. I obsess instead over this puzzle: What are the many ways in which future generations will look at my supposedly modern views as abhorrent?

Every age likes to think it is an enlightened one, but if history is any judge, we do plenty today that will be seen as barbaric in just a generation or two. Perhaps it’s eating meat (which I do with quite a bit of guilt. I consider myself a Jeffersonian Vegetarian, which is someone who knows it’s wrong and does it anyway. Which is probably a lot worse than doing something out of pure ignorance).

In the near future, a generation might puzzle over the fact that we had the technology to have self-driving cars and could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, but we dragged our feet. Or that we let totalitarian states like North Korea fizzle out rather than rushing to aid the oppressed. Or that we watched a virus run rampant and gave a half-assed effort to put a stop to it. There are probably half a dozen things I do poorly while feeling smug about getting a handful of obvious things right, like loving my neighbor. I’m a troglodyte who thinks the wheel is as cool as it’s ever gonna get.

My view of our religious texts has changed over the years. I now see the challenge as being to somehow unravel what parts are real–in the sense of capturing something deep and meaningful about the human condition–and which parts were just the people of their time being afraid to take their minds and hearts to the next level. Fear and love are mixed in those works together. It takes a deep reading to tease them apart.

Because wouldn’t it be boring if our sacred texts had all the answers, spelled out right there in black and white for us? If we don’t have to do any work, what’s the point? One way to look at the Bible or the Koran or any such text is as a puzzle given to us by a lost time (or a higher power if you prefer). The challenge is to defy our peers, our parents, and our culture to read the work and interpret it with the ultimate in compassion and kindness.

These books aren’t recipes. They’re treasure maps. The goal is to figure out where (and what) the treasure is and how to get there.

 

 

Signed Limited Editions of MISTY

Cool news! In addition to the paperback and digital editions of MISTY, we’re also doing a limited edition hardback. There will be 1,000 copies of these, and all of them will be signed! Should cost an arm and a leg, right? Wrong. $14.99. Exactly what I’d charge if I didn’t scribble all in your book.

The link to pre-order the hardback is here.

There’s also a paperback pre-order page here.

A video of what signing all these inserts looks like (and a Bella cameo) below:

**UPDATE**

Wow! You all have jumped the Hardback up to #947 in all of books. I’m a little worried we didn’t plan on enough of these signed hardbacks. If we run out, I’ll do everything I can to try and get another 1,000 ordered, and I’ll sign those as well. I’ll make sure they’re marked as a second printing or something, so those of you who got in early can gloat.

**UPDATE 2** It’s now at #379 in all of books!

A Squid, a Pebble, or a Policeman

The main character can’t die at the end of chapter one!! C’mon.