Dale’s Comments (group member since Sep 15, 2017)

Dale’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

My latest Writing Cooperative piece: Dictionary and Thesaurus

Carole wrote: "Bulwark was named as a Distinguished Favorite in the Independent Press Awards 2019- Fantasy Category.

Both Oh Susannah's were named as well."

Congratulations!

Yep, Alex called it. I always use a fairly standard manuscript format: a Word doc with inch margins all around, a basic font like Times New Roman or Courier New, 12 point either way, lines double spaced, half inch indent for paragraphs, and a header with the title and page number. Aside from that, you don't need to worry much at this stage.

Medium publication "Don't Awake the Mage" invited me to submit to a short fiction contest. My entry, Grandpa Becker's Second-Hand Time Machine, is now available for reading.

Sam (Rescue Dog Mom, Writer, Hugger) wrote: "Hi & Hugs to All,
For those of you that don't know me, I'm Samantha Beach (pen name) and I'm physically and mentally ill and haven't been able to work outside the home.

Over 3 years ago I download..."

Do you need help on rewriting the story, or just with publishing it? Probably KDP is the easiest way to go, although I've never used their templates. We always imported Word docs into Adobe InDesign, did the layout there, created the PDF and ebook files, and uploaded the final files to sales platforms. I doubt you'd want to go that way, since it involves $$ and time to learn the software.

Erica wrote: "Someone clapped 4 times for an article I wrote 2 months ago and I was credited $3.34 for it. A new article I wrote that has 175 claps for the week from 5 different people only received $2.27. I am ..."

Yeah. It's not the absolute number of claps that counts. For one thing, non-paying members can clap, but those don't count for payment. Each paying member's "contribution" is divided up among all the stories they clap for, so somebody who claps for a lot of stories contributes less to any one story than somebody who claps for only a few. The number of paying members who clap for a story is a closer indicator of earnings, but even that depends a lot on circumstances. It's a convoluted system.

Erica wrote: "*Happy dance* one of the articles I submitted to a publication was accepted and published today! This is similar to an article I did before, but I altered it to fit the specifications of the public..."

Congratulations! I'm having trouble opening that page right now (the problem is with my office network, not your story), but I'll try to get to it later.

D.J. wrote: "That’s interesting, thanks Dale."

My pleasure.

Can't remember if I was on it, but I haven't noticed anything. I think maybe I wasn't on it.

My latest from Lit Up: Not Quite A Ghost Story

An updated take on Medium Partner Program payments: Whence the Claps?

I sent Medium's support people a query about a couple of my recent stories that showed vastly different results in the views/reads/fans stats and the surprisingly inverse relationship to the payments I've received from them. (The far more popular story received very little compensation, while the less popular story received a lot more compensation.) I got an interesting reply from them.

First, they said, that the primary "signal" for payments is claps and that time spent reading a story is a secondary signal. ("Reads" can probably be used as a proxy for this.) As we already know, claps and reads only count for payment if they come from members. Non-member claps and reads don't count.

Second, they said that the only place to see claps is on the story itself, where total claps are show, and where you can click the clap count to get a breakdown by member. I didn't realize this, but you can tell who is a member and who is not by looking at the member's image. If it has a green circle around it, they are a member. If not, they aren't. So you can tell, on an individual story basis, how many member claps you've received.

Of course, that doesn't map to pay period. The claps shown are cumulative and don't bear timestamps. It is also rather tedious, once you have a sufficient number of stories published to sift through them to find out how many claps each one is getting. And finally, the total number of claps doesn't mean a great deal, because a member's membership fee is divided up based on all the stories they have clapped for. Someone who gives one clap per story they like has the same effect on payments as someone who gives 10 claps per story they like. (Hopefully most people give more to stories they like better, but you have no real way of telling.)

I offered a suggestion on how they might make payment calculations more transparent. They said they would pass it along to the responsible development team and noted that they've been getting a lot of comments from writers asking for more transparency in how payments are calculated.

If enough writers make enough noise about it, maybe something will eventually change . . .

Here's a flash fiction laugh for you: Broken Solitude.

This was written for the IU flash fiction contest this week. If you're in the mood to vote for me, you can do so here. Voting is open until 8:00 PM EDT 4/25/2019. Thank you!

Alex wrote: "Holy *bleeping* *bleep* I took a huge risk today, possibly the biggest of my writing career today, I submitted to Bookbub for a combined international and US featured deal.

Nervous is not the word..."

Congratulations, and good luck!

Alex wrote: "You're probably right about most of the sales coming from Amazon, but if you're like me, it would be nice to know if any came from else where. If you suddenly got a flurry of B&N sales or something..."

True...

Carole wrote: "Happy holiday yo you, Dale."

Thank you!

A bit late, but I hope everyone had a happy holiday, whatever you celebrate. Baha'is celebrate a 12-day period called the Festival of Ridvan (Paradise), which commemorates the declaration of Baha'u'llah's mission in 1863. Depending on the year, it starts April 21 or 22. This year it was April 21, so it coincided with Easter. The first, ninth, and twelfth days are Holy Days.

Alex wrote: "Did those sales just come from Amazon or were they from wide distribution?"

I have them listed everywhere but Google Play. (Ingram doesn't send them there. Something about Google's policies, I think.) I include all available links, but I suspect most sales came from Amazon. I did have one from Apple. Ingram's sales reports are a bit weird. They list Apple separately and everyone else together.

FYI, I ran BargainBooksy promos for The Fibonacci Murders in March, True Death in May, and just set up Ice on the Bay for this Saturday (also May). Because I use IngramSpark, I don't see sales results until after the middle of the following month. The results for Fibonacci are pretty good: 35 sales, earning me about $43, which almost covers the $55 promo feel.

I won't know for another month how the other two went.

Erica wrote: "Congrats. It has been a long time for me too. I used to always count on my more technical articles being distributed, but not recently. I figured it was because I haven't been consistently posting,..."

Yeah, I think they're being more picky.