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brotherly
Aug 20, 2014

DEHUMANIZE YOURSELF AND FACE TO BLOODSHED
Posted my book today!

Sold a whopping 4 copies so far.

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Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
Congratulations. :)

brotherly
Aug 20, 2014

DEHUMANIZE YOURSELF AND FACE TO BLOODSHED

Sundae posted:

Congratulations. :)

Thanks! Not sure what I expect, really, but I'm already through the first draft of the next in the series, and over half way through the first draft of a novella I'm going to use as incentive for my mailing list.

Quick question: if I edit the book's keywords and categories, will it pull it down for another 12hr review?

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
"Write what you know" isn't about technical detail, it's about emotional resonance. Can't write convincingly about love unless you've been in love. Doesn't matter if you're a space pirate or a dragon rancher, the human experience is the human experience, and if you ain't lived it, you're not going to be able to fake people into thinking you know what you're talking about.

ex post facho
Oct 25, 2007
I don't agree with that at all, as whether or not someone is convincingly describing an event, detail or emotion comes down to the reader's understanding and experience as much as the writer's. If a writer's prose is seemingly knowledgeable about a topic like BDSM (i.e., Fifty Shades of Grey), they can still have "emotional resonance" with their audience even when it becomes obvious they know a minimal amount about the actual subject matter. Which is quite clearly demonstrated by the novel's runaway success.

moana
Jun 18, 2005

one of the more intellectual satire communities on the web

the brotherly phl posted:

Quick question: if I edit the book's keywords and categories, will it pull it down for another 12hr review?
It won't pull it down, it just updates it through the dashboard.

RedTonic posted:

If I only wrote what I knew, I'd write about middle-aged office ladies issuing W-2c's.
Hey now, I really liked DFW's The Pale King!

POOL IS CLOSED
Jul 14, 2011

I'm just exploding with mackerel. This is the aji wo kutta of my discontent.
Pillbug
Emotional resonance is trying to relate with someone as they foam about how you may have (obliviously) thwarted their attempt to commit tax evasion!

moana posted:

Hey now, I really liked DFW's The Pale King!

I want to read that, but part of me is concerned that it will be disconcertingly similar to my day to day. (There's also something unnerving about reading a final, incomplete work.)

Back to what started this... Are there seasonal sales swings for different genres? That might be some helpful info in figuring out when to pub. Marketing was my weakest b-school subject.

ravenkult
Feb 3, 2011




:suicide:

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
Oddly I also had 10x as many sales last month, though that was because I got into an Apple "first in series free" promo.

ravenkult
Feb 3, 2011


I wouldn't worry if sales hadn't been constant through all of 2014. It's a really strange dip. I can't imagine it being pure luck to see a 90% decrease in sales, even if we're talking sub-100 copies sold per month. No idea what the hell happened. Guess I need to write more.

Roar
Jul 7, 2007

I got 30 points!

I GOT 30 POINTS!

quote:

You may have noticed that we haven't been reporting daily sales numbers for Barnes & Noble this week. We noticed the problem first thing Monday and immediately contacted Barnes & Noble. We’re sorry that we’re just now letting you know, but each day they have informed us the issue would be resolved “today.” Unfortunately, this has not happened.

First, we’re sorry that we weren’t faster to communicate the issue, but we were optimistic it would be sorted out with only a minor hiccup. Second, we want to assure you that the rest of your sales data is being reported on time and accurately. Only Barnes & Noble is affected. Third, as soon as we work out the issue with Barnes & Noble, we will get the sales information to you as quickly as we can. Last, you can rest assured that we will take steps to stop the issue from occurring again and to make our communication quicker if it does.

So please bear with us as we bear with one of our partners while they work out an issue. We will keep you informed about the issue going forward. Thank you for your patience and we appreciate our continued partnership with you.

Sincerely,

The Draft2Digital Team

dunno if that helps you but that just came in the mail

ExtraNoise
Apr 11, 2007

You guys mentioned there being periods through the year that do better/worse for certain genres: Is there a slow period for horror?

ravenkult
Feb 3, 2011


Roar posted:

dunno if that helps you but that just came in the mail

I'm gonna wait and see what happens (sales were slow last week too so maybe this doesn't explain everything on my end, unless ''this week'' means since the beginning of February), but compare this to what I received on Wednesday:

quote:

All vendor's are reporting sales as usual. We typically see sales slow during Feb and March (we believe this is in response to buyers focusing on taxes), and if history is anything to rely upon, we've always seen a spike in April.
Best Regards,

Tara
Draft2Digital

Imperfect
Sep 24, 2009
So I have been awful, just thoroughly awful at writing reliably, and it has been making me feel pretty lovely. Lost my job back in January and still looking, so I figured that while looking, I could pound out an easy 2000 words a day, right? It's not like I have anything else to do.

Except videogames and movies and Let's Plays and books and a shelf full of my girlfriend's comics that I haven't read yet and an infinite number of distractions that are so much easier to contemplate than actually, you know, sitting down and writing. So I've been doing the whole "Oh, I'll write later" through the whole day and just feeling awful about distracting myself, but still doing it. Sitting down for a few hours to bang out 2000 words is just gross to contemplate, and so I've been miserable.

Except that I had the fortune to sign up forever ago for Cathy Yardley's email newsletter forever ago, and I recently received the amazingly well-timed and well-titled email "What to do when you fall off the writing wagon." She suggested setting a super-low goal and making sure you hit it every day for a while before bringing it back up to your "target" goal, so I tried that. I changed my daily goal to 500 words (a half-hour's work, if that) and installed a habit-tracking app on my phone (Good Habits, if you're interested) that displays a little notification until you perform your good habit for the day, and now I've completed 5 days of writing in a row, and most days are closer to 1000 words because once I get started it's easier to keep going. It's just that initial "Oh god, I have to write 2000 words" dread that was keeping me from even beginning.

Anyway, just wanted to come in here and celebrate a little bit about the beginning of a good habit. 22k down, 78k to go.

Hijinks Ensue
Jul 24, 2007
I have a question about ebook formatting. I'm getting ready to publish a book of movie reviews. I usually never worry about a table of contents for fiction, but I want to have a list of the movies covered as a table of contents, so that a reader can, say, just jump straight to the review of Salo without having to skim all the way through the book to the "S" movies. How do I make that happen with KDP and D2D?

Unbelievably Fat Man
Jun 1, 2000

Innocent people. I could never hurt innocent people.


D2D will probably just figure it out on it's own. When you upload your file it'll show a box with the section hierarchy for it's auto-generated table of contents. If you use a lot of different formatting it might get a little too judicious and parse everything that isn't normal text as a separate section (so far I've only seen this on overly elaborate files). If that happens you can go through the settings panel in the main section of D2D and there's a setting in there to define section separations as a specific type of formatting (heading 1, heading 2, centered->bold, whatever). Keep uploading new versions until you get the hierarchy you want. It shouldn't take too much effort. Then just download the .mobi it generates and use it in Amazon.

Hijinks Ensue
Jul 24, 2007
So if I'm understanding correctly, you can generate a .mobi from D2D and upload that to KDP?

Szmitten
Apr 26, 2008
Alternatively you can do it yourself in Word by using page breaks and hyperlinking the chapter names on the Table of Contents page (aka, page 1) to the chapter title in the manuscript.

Fate Accomplice
Nov 30, 2006




Malloreon posted:

I'm going to go on record and say it will be a massive box office success. the early reviews range from "it's not bad!" to "it's pretty good!" and most complaints are that there's not enough sex in it. Considering the rumors that 20% (25 minutes) of the 125 minute movie are sex scenes, people pretty much want porn.

february is huge for romance movies, and this will be the king of those.

With only 2.5 release days under its belt, 50 shades has already grossed $239M worldwide - $81M US, $158M foreign. Even if it drops like a rock after this, it'll be a huge success.

Jalumibnkrayal
Apr 16, 2008

Ramrod XTreme
KU/KOLL Borrow Rate is $1.38 for January.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Malloreon posted:

With only 2.5 release days under its belt, 50 shades has already grossed $239M worldwide - $81M US, $158M foreign. Even if it drops like a rock after this, it'll be a huge success.

My own sales made a jump, thanks $50 $hade$

moana
Jun 18, 2005

one of the more intellectual satire communities on the web
Yeah, thank you FSOG, I'm going to see it today :) Broke 1k/day in sales+borrows this past week and holding strong. Go go sexy billionaires!!

FrostedButts
Dec 30, 2011
Planning on submitting a book of essays on animated films. Most of the film essay books were nothing too flashy so I'm trying to keep my cover fairly simple. Let me know if this is too little.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

moana posted:

Yeah, thank you FSOG, I'm going to see it today :) Broke 1k/day in sales+borrows this past week and holding strong. Go go sexy billionaires!!

I saw one of your names passed up both of mine, congrats!

moana
Jun 18, 2005

one of the more intellectual satire communities on the web

FrostedButts posted:

Planning on submitting a book of essays on animated films. Most of the film essay books were nothing too flashy so I'm trying to keep my cover fairly simple. Let me know if this is too little.



If those books were published by a textbook publisher, they don't need to care about flashy covers because you don't buy a textbook based on its cover, you buy it because it's in your curriculum. What do the top indie books look like? Are there indie books of film essays? Who are you trying to sell to?

Brass Key
Sep 15, 2007

Attention! Something tremendous has happened!

FrostedButts posted:

Planning on submitting a book of essays on animated films. Most of the film essay books were nothing too flashy so I'm trying to keep my cover fairly simple. Let me know if this is too little.



To be frank it looks like one of those "books" of copy-pasted Wikipedia articles. (Also there's something wonky in your typesetting. Are there different sized spaces between the title words?)

FrostedButts
Dec 30, 2011

moana posted:

If those books were published by a textbook publisher, they don't need to care about flashy covers because you don't buy a textbook based on its cover, you buy it because it's in your curriculum. What do the top indie books look like? Are there indie books of film essays? Who are you trying to sell to?

I'm staging it similar to Roger Ebert's The Great Movies books. His books are pretty simple covers that either just feature his face or just the title against a background of one color or some film photos that have been darkened.

I essentially just want something to sell at conventions since I talk an awful lot about animated films. The panels I host always draw a large crowd and most attendees follow up with me about other animated films they want to talk about.

Sulla Faex
May 14, 2010

No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING

moana posted:

Yeah, thank you FSOG, I'm going to see it today :) Broke 1k/day in sales+borrows this past week and holding strong. Go go sexy billionaires!!

Jesus, congratulations. You've made in 2 hours of a single day what I've earned over almost 3 months. I'm only at 6 titles so far but whatever I'm doing isn't working. I'm going to finish off some non-writing work for a client and then it's back to the drawing board.

Bobby Deluxe
May 9, 2004

Yeah, I gave away 45 copies over valentines weekend, which for me is a lot. Would have preferred KU borrows (or ideally sales) obviously but hey, exposure right?

So as not to stray back into talk of that sort of thing, does anyone want to share their writing routines / setups?

At the moment I'm working on a laptop in the spare bedroom, wearing a set of noise reducing headphones to counter the constant sister-in-law / neighbour noise. It's not great, but it's about the best I can do. Was just wondering what everyone else's sanctums are like.

Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Feb 17, 2015

brotherly
Aug 20, 2014

DEHUMANIZE YOURSELF AND FACE TO BLOODSHED
I did a bknights promotion yesterday and got a whopping 23 sales. Hit an 8k rank. 0 sales today though. Making the big time!

Do KU/KOLL borrows change sales rank?

Bobby Deluxe posted:

So as not to stray back into talk of that sort of thing, does anyone want to share their writing routines / setups?

At the moment I'm working on a laptop in the spare bedroom, wearing a set of noise reducing headphones to counter the constant sister-in-law / neighbour noise. It's not great, but it's about the best I can do. Was just wondering what everyone else's sanctums are like.

I write in two shifts every day, 10am-11 and 4pm-5, and try to hit at least 2k words a day. I'm usually closer to 5k a day. I like the two shift method; if I'm struggling in the morning, I force myself to get down 1k, then I let myself go back to "real" work for awhile. Usually I'll read a published, successful romance for ~10 minutes before I dive into my second shift, basically as research/inspiration.

I have one book published at ~50k words (that's not really doing much in terms of sales, but I sorta expected that), another manuscript of ~55k words, and a novella I'm going to finish today, at ~25k words. I started buckling down early January.

ArchangeI
Jul 15, 2010

the brotherly phl posted:

Do KU/KOLL borrows change sales rank?

I fairly certain they do.

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
Yes they do, 100% guaranteed.

January wasn't half bad, and I continue to love KU. $6,200 in short stories and about $900 from my older novels. I can deal with that, though it'd be really nice if I could stay focused long enough to loving finish one of these three novels sitting on my desktop.

brotherly
Aug 20, 2014

DEHUMANIZE YOURSELF AND FACE TO BLOODSHED

Sundae posted:

Yes they do, 100% guaranteed.

January wasn't half bad, and I continue to love KU. $6,200 in short stories and about $900 from my older novels. I can deal with that, though it'd be really nice if I could stay focused long enough to loving finish one of these three novels sitting on my desktop.

Thanks and wow! that sounds like a good month to me.

ravenkult
Feb 3, 2011


Sundae posted:

$6,200 in short stories

:catstare: How many stories?

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

ravenkult posted:

:catstare: How many stories?

About 40.

ravenkult
Feb 3, 2011


Sundae posted:

About 40.

drat man, that's not many at all! Oh God I should be writing.

brotherly
Aug 20, 2014

DEHUMANIZE YOURSELF AND FACE TO BLOODSHED

Sundae posted:

About 40.

How long are they, on average? And I'm assuming it's the genre-that-shall-not-be-named.

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

the brotherly phl posted:

How long are they, on average? And I'm assuming it's the genre-that-shall-not-be-named.

You are correct. 5K-8K range.

ex post facho
Oct 25, 2007
Am I missing the genre that shall not be named thread? Haven't been able to find it in CC and have a few questions to ask other writers.

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POOL IS CLOSED
Jul 14, 2011

I'm just exploding with mackerel. This is the aji wo kutta of my discontent.
Pillbug

a shameful boehner posted:

Am I missing the genre that shall not be named thread? Haven't been able to find it in CC and have a few questions to ask other writers.

I believe that direct discussion of the unspeakable genre has been banished from the forums. I think there's another forum where goons talk about it, but I don't actually know the URL.

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