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Oh, I didn't realise that. Although reading the OP more closely I now realise it says all of you write romance, and if there's no romance chat allowed, then ipso facto... I guess also because this is a sequel thread, right? So I guess a lot of you already know who's who and what's what. I'm totally happy with anybody and everybody to message me links to their titles and info. I just appreciated the fact that this thread was really honest and business-oriented, but then found it odd that nobody linked to their own stuff as examples.
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Jul 7, 2015 16:04
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You're allowed to talk about content if you're not erotica though. Right? I mean, allowed to, but I guess it's up to each author if they don't want to reveal their pseuds.
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Jul 7, 2015 16:05
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freebooter posted:Out of curiosity, what do you all publish? Like, your specific titles? I've read through a lot of the thread and people only seem to reference their stuff obliquely. And if that's on purpose because you prefer to keep it on the down-low that's cool, I get that, but if not I'd be fascinated to see links to your books and what they're about and the sales figures and stuff. Romance isn't the issue; it's erotica. No talking about erotica content / titles / covers, etc in the thread. You can talk about romance all you want. When we say "super romance" we're just being stupid and referring to erotica.  Romance is romance. Super-romance is erotica. It's just us being dorks.You can talk about your content for anything else you want. That being said, for many of us, self-publishing is our bread and butter and the last thing we want is a goon rush on our books or to out ourselves and risk an impact to our publishing. There's a balancing act between helping out the thread and protecting our incomes. quote:I guess also because this is a sequel thread, right? So I guess a lot of you already know who's who and what's what. I'm totally happy with anybody and everybody to message me links to their titles and info. I just appreciated the fact that this thread was really honest and business-oriented, but then found it odd that nobody linked to their own stuff as examples. Speaking for myself, I have no clue who most of the people in this thread are. There are a few, sure, but most I have no clue about. This reboot of the thread is honest and business-oriented, but that also had the effect of scaring away some of the newer self-pub authors who were kind of just in it for fun. Intimidating people was never my intention in "taking over" the thread, so by all means, come on in and post whatever!
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Jul 7, 2015 16:20
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Some possible reasons why people don't share their titles or pseudonyms here are (some of these examples stem from actual cases on Reddit; I don't know if they have happened here or would happen, but remember that this forum is not private): - It's connecting your private life with your online identity; and not just that, it's connecting it to a particular online identity that you may not want everybody you know being made aware of (e.g. super romance or trashy paranormal romance that sells great and is fun to write but you don't want to be known as "that guy" when it's just a small part of your personal or professional life - or, even, just letting people know about your financial success. You don't tell your friends exactly how much you earn, do you? Especially not in a self-employed business. They'll immediately go "oh hey I could do that" then start bugging you forever as though your entire success is based on your ability to put your hand up and receive free money) - People can look at your sales numbers (or get an idea for your success) and then go through all your titles and rip them off directly. Basically just re-create things cover to cover, premise for premise, and so on. It happens even without people connecting the Amazon author to any posting history, i.e. people just rip off wholesale someone in the top 100, so if you share too much about your success and tie that to concrete examples and some tips, people WILL go out and clone it. Which isn't just a case of "trying to keep out other authors" -- they're directly reproducing a significant portion of what you bring to distinguish yourself as an author in that marketplace. - People can and have and will go through all your titles and report them to Amazon etc for whatever abuses, even made-up, to get them removed. It doesn't even have to be a valid claim, Amazon will treat it as the typical customer complaint iceberg premise - 1 actual complaint reflects 15 or 30 unhappy customers or whatever the ratio is, and even if you have nothing to hide you don't want to make a blip on Amazon's radar like that. For them it's just easier to block books that are causing complaints, they have very little incentive to side with the authors over the readers. All in all, given all the risks and the fact that there is zero benefit in helping newbies or the public at large, you can understand why it's uncommon. I think people of similar success rates tend to reach out and establish 1 on 1 relationships with other authors for mutual proof-reading or criticism or tips or just making friends with people in the biz, but it's not one of those things where you'd expect it to happen in a large, public, anonymous sphere. Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 16:29
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:- People can and have and will go through all your titles and report them to Amazon etc for whatever abuses, even made-up, to get them removed. It doesn't even have to be a valid claim, Amazon will treat it as the typical customer complaint iceberg premise - 1 actual complaint reflects 15 or 30 unhappy customers or whatever the ratio is, and even if you have nothing to hide you don't want to make a blip on Amazon's radar like that. For them it's just easier to block books that are causing complaints, they have very little incentive to side with the authors over the readers. This is a very fair point. Amazon has a shoot-first/ask-never policy when it comes to abuse complaints, and I've seen plenty of people get hosed over by false DMCAs on Amazon (including someone in this thread, actually).
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Jul 7, 2015 16:36
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Yeah, you can talk specifics for your sci-fi/fantasy/horror/whatever novel. Not everyone in this thread writes romance/erotica, but I'd guess a majority of the regulars do. Although a lot of us (myself included) write other, more "normal" stuff, too. And I don't know anybody's pen names, to be honest.  edit: also I'm an idiot - I didn't know 'super romance' was code for anything, and just assumed that a lot of people in this thread were writing supernatural romance novels, with ghosts and vampires and poo poo. I was all "man, the post-Twilight market is still humming along, I guess." Popular Human fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 16:43
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e: ^ That's actually probably one of the failings of the thread I'd say, for some reason the people who discuss the most are super romance authors, when this thread is obviously intended for everybody. I wouldn't mind at all if the lurkers came out and started talking about things that affect them, even if it's not business-specific. Technology, productivity habits, writing styles, conventions or resources, etc etc. We've focused too much on one specific part of it and I feel like we're hounding everybody else out unintentionally.Sundae posted:This is a very fair point. Amazon has a shoot-first/ask-never policy when it comes to abuse complaints, and I've seen plenty of people get hosed over by false DMCAs on Amazon (including someone in this thread, actually). Amazon definitely has a relationship with authors and publishers that would be termed "abusive" except that it's too busy to notice the vast majority of people. I don't think there's a single author or publisher that Amazon doesn't dwarf and hasn't shown itself to be more than willing to trample all over. I'm not talking about the recent KU changes either, just super romance authors who were at the top of their field and got run out of Amazon for some christian campaign, and look at their war with Hachette. Amazon is an absolute monolith and they are not afraid to bully people around, they just don't give a gently caress. Safest thing is to keep your drat head down. Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 16:48
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quote:I wouldn't mind at all if the lurkers came out and started talking about things that affect them, even if it's not business-specific. Technology, productivity habits, writing styles, conventions or resources, etc etc. We've focused too much on one specific part of it and I feel like we're hounding everybody else out unintentionally. Agreed. That was never the intention of the thread remake -- it was just to catch it up to the modern self-pub era and to give a little more focus on what makes a "good" book from a selling perspective (though thanks to Amazon's KU changes, it's out of date again already). I am all for seeing more sci-fi, fantasy, etc showing up in here. The only thing I didn't like was when people complained about how badly their stuff sold when they'd created terrible covers, poor blurbs, etc, etc.
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Jul 7, 2015 16:53
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Amazon is an absolute monolith and they are not afraid to bully people around, they just don't give a gently caress. Safest thing is to keep your drat head down. This really cannot be stressed enough: catching Amazon's notice is like having the loving Eye of Sauron on you. You WILL have to jump through a half-dozen hoops and send two e-mails to do the simplest things. I lost an entire pen name to that poo poo a year or so ago because it became less hassle just to start all over again.
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Jul 7, 2015 16:59
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Well, I used to write only literary scifi that I was trying to trad pub in Clarkesworld and Apex etc., and I wandered into this thread and tried to talk about writing, and I was told this thread is not about writing. There's a fiction writing advice thread already for writing, but I do think there's room to talk about what actually would sell as self-pub other than romance. The problem though, and what got me writing erotica, is that people who make a lot of money in this thread will come in and make the argument of: Romance/Erotica is the most profitable thing you can write. Other stuff can and will sell, but much less than romance/erotica. Do you want to spend 10-20 hours per week after your full-time job self-pubbing scifi to earn $100 in your first month of work, or do you want to spend 10-20 hours per week writing romance/erotica to earn $1,000 in your first month? Those numbers are kind of pulled out of my rear end, but the point still stands that you'll do more work for less money if you choose to write outside of what is proven to be more profitable. I can tell you that even with the new KU changes, you can make at least $1,000 in your first month if you follow good advice and write a lot of romance/erotica. I don't know what you could realistically do with some genre like sci-fi or fantasy, but it would be much more difficult, and I seriously doubt you could make $1,000 in your first month without some huge skill, or luck, or both. I haven't actually tried self-pubbing sci-fi, but I am fairly certain that even if I got really nice covers and blurbs and just self-pubbed a bunch of my existing sci-fi shorts, that they WOULD NOT sell. Why? Because if you want to read my stories that I tried to get Clarkesworld to publish, but they weren't good enough for Clarkesworld and were rejected, then you can go to http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ and read hundreds and hundreds of the best sci-fi shorts out there, many from big-name authors. Clarkesworld and other high-brow magazines though are often lack that Hugh Howey or Andy Weir "grip you and make you want to read to the end" feeling. They might give you these really weird ideas or make you think in awe about something you've never even considered, but they won't entertain the gently caress out of you. I think for self-pub, regardless of genre, you need to be entertaining the gently caress out of people. Leave big ideas, slow burns, and anything that requires critical acclaim or, 'trust me, this starts kind of slow, but it's so good' to traditional publishing. For stuff that doesn't grip someone from the first word, you need a name backing so that readers will trust you long enough to read through something more dense. As much as I loving hate the Hugh Howey's smug face right now, read the beginning of the Wool series and you'll see why it took off. Weir's 'The Martian' is known for being kind of flat and lacking depth by people really into scifi, but it immediately grips you with this guy stranded on Mars who uses all his science skills to get him out of situation after situation. For Wool, you immediately want to know what the deal with the silos are. The second you start reading, you want to know 'what is the silo, how does it work, what is it for, what happened to the outside world, why did...' You will keep reading to get all those questions answered, and--for me personally--the answers to those questions were not terribly interesting and I got bored of reading it, but that didn't stop me from buying several of the first parts and tearing through them. If you're going to self-pub outside of romance or erotica, look at those and figure out some angle that will guarantee people have to keep reading. Then you still have to figure out how to market the poo poo out of it, and I'd argue that it would be worth it to write erotica or romance for a few months ahead of time just to figure out how to do blurbs, keywords, covers, promos, etc. The reason erotica/romance is so good is that you don't have to think up some clever and awesome hook that will keep people reading, because the answer is sex. You identify what turns someone on, and you write about it. Instant hook. You still have to know what you're doing to get people to read through, and then buy more of your stuff, but your hook is there before they even start reading.
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Jul 7, 2015 17:28
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Hugh's also a pretty cool dude. I sat next to him on a Worldcon panel and had no idea who he was, but I'd at least seen Wool and recognized the cover, and he had good answers for the questions people were posing to us. Later in the same day I was sitting on a panel next to Brad Torgersen and didn't know who he was either. It really drove home for me that I needed to be reading more "contemporary" science fiction, and in the years since I think my writing has grown all the stronger for it.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:40
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He's not being a cool dude about the KU changes though. His answer to people not making money off short stories anymore in KU is "Well, put something in the front matter explaining that it's a lot of work to write these stories and ask for donations so you can keep writing."
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Jul 7, 2015 19:42
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Yeah, I've been sort of rolling my eyes at his recent pro KU posts, and as chill as he is in person, I find myself disagreeing with him on issues of exclusivity. I'm not really one to ever wring my hands at the idea that the sky is falling (it's always falling), but to deny that people are going to have to rethink some of their business plans is a bit naive. But being an indie author has always taken adaptability. You need to react fast to capitalize on the good changes, and fast to mitigate disaster from the bad. Hugh still acts, in some ways, like he's "one of us", but he's really not; his success has him off in a world where his concerns are less "will I make rent this month" and more "do I want to sail around the world clockwise or counterclockwise this year."
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Jul 7, 2015 19:46
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He straight up said in a post that money is literally no longer of a concern to him and once you've made it to that point, you can't relate to your fellow man at all.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:50
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I do have to agree with him that it's unfair to expect the same income from the effort to write short fiction as it is to write full novels. It was absurd to value a 5k or 20k borrow at the same as a 100k work. You can make arguments about the staying power of longer pieces and the presence they offered by their larger page counts, but in the end, the old system was asking Amazon to pay short stories and novellas the same as novels and I find that insane. The only thing Amazon did that's unfair here is change the system after people had grown used to what was something heavily out of balance. Amazon never should have been paying out on borrows for a system that rewarded authors for readers filling their baskets with books they'll never read. If the new system had rolled out originally it would have gone by with little fanfare.
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Jul 7, 2015 22:35
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Mortanis posted:If the new system had rolled out originally it would have gone by with little fanfare. And no one would have signed up for it because it's super lovely.
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Jul 7, 2015 22:42
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Mortanis posted:The only thing Amazon did that's unfair here is change the system after people had grown used to what was something heavily out of balance. I don't know that I'd call this in particular unfair. Amazon has a track record of upsetting their publishing ecosystem with massive unforeseen changes. If this catches you off guard at this point, it's not Amazon's fault. I'd say that a major change was not only 'fair' (as fair as anything ever is), but inevitable. "Learn to roll with Amazon's fickle nature" has been a vital indie survival skill since KDP debuted.
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Jul 7, 2015 22:56
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Mortanis posted:Amazon never should have been paying out on borrows for a system that rewarded authors for readers filling their baskets with books they'll never read. Shows you don't really know what you're talking about. You only got paid if they read past 10%. I agree $1.34 was an inflated price for a borrow on a short, but don't bring 'fairness' into the argument. Fairness would be algorithms that don't punish shorts, no adult dungeon, search functions that don't punish erotica, etc. etc.
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Jul 7, 2015 23:03
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I have a question about CreateSpace expanded distribution. Are expanded distribution sales reported as they happen? Or is it a weekly/some other time period thing? I had several expanded distribution sales for one of my books appear all at once, and was curious if someone bought five copies at once, or if five different sales over a time period were reported then.
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Jul 7, 2015 23:05
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angel opportunity posted:Shows you don't really know what you're talking about. You only got paid if they read past 10%. Well, I've been at this since 2013, same as many of us - apologies for using hyperbole. All I was trying to argue is that people got used to the payment of shorts and novellas being equal to full length novels and I don't think that's "fair". If you have a problem with that word, choose another that reflects the mentality of getting paid for less work. I do agree with the rest. I wish BN had more prominence in the game, though I still make more there than anywhere else. Not by much, though.
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Jul 7, 2015 23:15
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Hijinks Ensue posted:Are expanded distribution sales reported as they happen? Or is it a weekly/some other time period thing? I've never tracked this but we get a lot of sales at the end of the month through it so I assume it's monthly or something.
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Jul 7, 2015 23:20
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I'm in talks with a freelance editor, who says that she wants "editorial credit when the book is uploaded to any distributor." I checked to see what she meant, and it looks like her name shows up next to the author's name beneath the title of the works she's edited. Like so: TITLE By Jane Smith (Author), Jane Doe (Editor) And when you search the author's name, you get a listing for the book that just says "By Jane Smith and Jane Doe" with no differentiation between the two at all. That seems like such a weird requirement to me. I obviously understand giving co-credit to an artist or illustrator or something, but why put the editor's name right up next to yours, as if the book is "by" them as well? Am I being unreasonable in thinking that I would rather not do that, or is it becoming more common practice?
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Jul 7, 2015 23:39
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angel opportunity posted:Romance/Erotica is the most profitable thing you can write. Other stuff can and will sell, but much less than romance/erotica. Do you want to spend 10-20 hours per week after your full-time job self-pubbing scifi to earn $100 in your first month of work, or do you want to spend 10-20 hours per week writing romance/erotica to earn $1,000 in your first month? Those numbers are kind of pulled out of my rear end, but the point still stands that you'll do more work for less money if you choose to write outside of what is proven to be more profitable. poo poo, I wish it were actually that good. I tried pubbing a few non-erotic/non-romance stories that sold literally nothing, like one copy of each that kind of poo poo, then tried super romance because I was unemployed and needed to make money somehow. I wrote as much as I could stand, quit because I loving hated it and found it to be a chore of Herculean proportions to even get 100 words down for those, managed to find a job that makes ends meet, and when tax time rolled around this year my slip stated I made a total of like $125 out of about 17 shorts written in late 2013/early 2014 throughout 2014 with about half of them wide and the rest Amazon-only. Not saying it's something that everyone would experience, but for me, trying to write that far out of my preferred genres burned me the gently caress out on writing to the point that I've only even started wanting to get back to what I enjoy now, in mid-2015. I'm actually a bit wary of even trying regular romance with this return, and that's what my current most fleshed-out brainstorming would end up being, at least partially.
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Jul 7, 2015 23:43
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Spent money on a Facebook ad for my book, got a bunch of clicks that resulted in a non-zero number of sales. Same ad for a slightly different demographic got me more clicks but no sales whatsoever. Marketing is baffling.
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Jul 8, 2015 00:07
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Blue Scream posted:I'm in talks with a freelance editor, who says that she wants "editorial credit when the book is uploaded to any distributor." I checked to see what she meant, and it looks like her name shows up next to the author's name beneath the title of the works she's edited. Like so: Sounds shady.
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Jul 8, 2015 00:22
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ravenkult posted:Sounds shady. Yeah, I already turned her down. Lots of other fish in the sea.
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Jul 8, 2015 00:25
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Mortanis posted:Well, I've been at this since 2013, same as many of us - apologies for using hyperbole. All I was trying to argue is that people got used to the payment of shorts and novellas being equal to full length novels and I don't think that's "fair". If you have a problem with that word, choose another that reflects the mentality of getting paid for less work. I do agree with the rest. I wish BN had more prominence in the game, though I still make more there than anywhere else. Not by much, though. Whatever may be fair in relation to other books, I think the rights to exclusive distribution of my product are worth more than 8 cents/read (yay, my few readers/borrowers make it all the way to the end). Amazon may be going for paying authors more like Spotify pays artists, but no one who has music on Spotify is barred from also selling individual tracks on iTunes (or Amazon!) for a worthwhile amount of money.
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Jul 8, 2015 00:28
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Fuego Fish posted:Spent money on a Facebook ad for my book, got a bunch of clicks that resulted in a non-zero number of sales. Same ad for a slightly different demographic got me more clicks but no sales whatsoever. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18813237 Organic advertising - sharing it with like minded people and hoping they share it themselves - is what FB's good for. angel opportunity posted:Fairness would be algorithms that don't punish shorts, no adult dungeon, search functions that don't punish erotica, etc. etc. They tried making an erotica category so it wasn't spilling over into the other categories, and now smut authors have refined keyword placement to a fine art to try and keep themselves out of the very category created for them. Without mentioning the exact subjects themselves, there was content that erotica writers knew they shouldn't have been publishing, and they did it anyway. So Amazon scans for certain keywords now, and the authors do their hardest to come up with new and exciting euphemisms for things they know drat well aren't allowed. Talk about being 'fair' all you want, but let's be honest here - erotica authors have been making money in ways they knew they shouldn't for a while. Now that Amazon have found a way of stopping them that works, they're indignantly protesting that it isn't fair. I guess it's not. But ultimately, neither was people making five figure incomes from flooding non adult categories with some very dubious content, while the novelists KU wanted to attract were getting buried by the smut.
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Jul 8, 2015 00:53
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Facebook ads have been proven to be pretty much useless, at least when purchased from the company they are. So many click farms and weird SEO inflation tactics going round that unless you really, really tighten your target audience down, most of the views will end up going to fake profiles. I've been trying the organic approach and it hasn't been working out so well, and my options are otherwise limited due to my finances. Last time I asked for marketing advice in this thread, the suggestions given to me were "research what's popular and copy it" and "spend a thousand dollars on this service for guaranteed success, or five dollars on this other service which probably won't even do anything". I'll keep doing the "I wrote a book, please check it out" thing, of course, but I'll keep looking for other methods.
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Jul 8, 2015 01:11
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Bobby Deluxe posted:They tried making an erotica category so it wasn't spilling over into the other categories, and now smut authors have refined keyword placement to a fine art to try and keep themselves out of the very category created for them. I've mentioned this before, so I'm just going to quote the post again. TL;DR: That's not what the erotica category did. They didn't make a category for the erotica authors, but rather a prison for them. Sundae posted:I understand that, as a reader, this pisses you off. I totally do (it pisses me off, too). Having been one of those authors, though, let me explain to you why they're putting it in sci-fi. Sundae fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 01:11
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I'm sure someone who has been doing this longer than me can articulate this better than me, but a huge amount of people want to buy that poo poo. Why do you think people are trying to get themselves out of erotica if they can? Because the algorithms and search results are rigged against it. I just started a new series specifically because I saw someone else doing a certain type of story that is allowed to go into the 'short reads' and 'women's fiction' category if you slap a happy ending where they get married onto it. I'm going to do whatever I can to make sales, and the stuff I write is a) good for what it is, and b) a lot of people want to read/buy it. I don't think it's fair for Amazon to try to actively get in the way of me selling stuff on their store. I don't have the option of just making an honest blurb talking about the contents of the book; I can only use THOSE WORDS if my book is romance. The creepy poo poo some of my erotica deals with is off limits, so I have to call a 'house' the 'place I grew up in' and the 'desk' the 'thing I work with.' So imagine someone is trying to buy a lamp, and they say "I want to buy a lamp," and the guy smiles and starts showing the customer all kinds of lamps, but the customer isn't seeing the kind of lamp they want, so they have to actually say, "Oh, not lamps, I want standing light projectors *wink wink*" Then you have the opposite case of people browsing around and wondering, "what the gently caress is a 'standing light projector'?" To get what kind of erotica they actually want, the customer has to use weird-as-gently caress code words for the kind of porn they like. If they don't, they get ROMANCE, which is basically just as creepy and weird but longer with more plot stuffed between. So if Amazon is going to make up crazy and arcane rules for what we have to do to sell this poo poo, then I'm going to rules lawyer the poo poo out of it to maximize my sales. I'd much prefer they just write down their guidelines and make it easier for authors and readers both to market/find what they want, but that's not happening, so here we are.
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Jul 8, 2015 01:22
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Blue Scream posted:I'm in talks with a freelance editor, who says that she wants "editorial credit when the book is uploaded to any distributor." I checked to see what she meant, and it looks like her name shows up next to the author's name beneath the title of the works she's edited. Like so: This kind of accreditation is actually super common. Translators get a bunch of recognition in most form contracts, editors as well. It depends how much work you're expecting them to do or how much you're paying them - generally if you're happy to pay more up front (they aren't cheap if they're professionals) they'll remove the parts about needing recognition, but being able to put their name on the work is super important to them. If you look up standard contract templates for editors I bet you'll find it turns up in almost all of them. But if you're just starting out or you don't have the financial backing, what you want is to pay someone to check the words and fix it. A real editor will tell you about your plot holes, will check for internal inconsistencies, will tell you what parts don't flow well and fix it, etc etc. There's a reason so many pulitzer-prize winning authors are so carefully respectful towards their editors. I'm not saying it wasn't a rip off or that you need an editor with a gold-leaf contract, but that kind of agreement is quite common.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:20
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The problem with erotica on Romance was that the authors wanted it and the clients wanted it but Amazon didn't. Sure, they wanted the clients' money, but selling smut is just such a headache for them (they're not hurting for money) that they obviously just decided to give ground any time somebody complained. Don't fight any battles, don't stand your ground, just acquiesce any time some outraged christian hypocrite kicked up a fuss and backpedal. You're still making money hand over fist, you're not bleeding any authors you wanted to retain anyway, and if the clients gently caress off then you're not losing any sleep because it was a market you didn't want in the first place. But unfortunately Amazon are so big and the money was so good for so long that nobody bothered trying to compete. Now that it's shifted massively maybe someone will set up a viable marketplace for smut that can boast actual paying clients, and the business can get into stable maturity rather than just "make as much money as you can and be prepared to roll with the punches." I know this sounds like complaining, I really don't mean it to be, I just wanted to share my take on the situation, which was essentially that Amazon never really wanted that market from either the customers or the authors, but like any huge organisation change takes time.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:26
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Fuego Fish posted:I've been trying the organic approach and it hasn't been working out so well, and my options are otherwise limited due to my finances. Last time I asked for marketing advice in this thread, the suggestions given to me were "research what's popular and copy it" and "spend a thousand dollars on this service for guaranteed success, or five dollars on this other service which probably won't even do anything". I'm jumping into the FB ad thing to build a mailing list. I'm split testing about a dozen ads to see what works. Some folks are able to get it down to $0.10 CPC but the lowest I've gotten is about $0.28. I'm waiting on another ad to get approved that just points to a $2.99 book on Amazon. I'm gonna put $5 a day budget on that one just to see what it does.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:47
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Anyone who writes anything like "erotica authors deserved this" is dead to me. Not all words are created equal.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:50
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:This kind of accreditation is actually super common. Translators get a bunch of recognition in most form contracts, editors as well. It depends how much work you're expecting them to do or how much you're paying them - generally if you're happy to pay more up front (they aren't cheap if they're professionals) they'll remove the parts about needing recognition, but being able to put their name on the work is super important to them. If you look up standard contract templates for editors I bet you'll find it turns up in almost all of them. You should read more carefully. Editors get a line in the front matter and that's it. They don't get accreditation on the cover or on Amazon.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:53
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Amazon finally noticed my novella clocking in at 500 pages on the KENPC  Now it only counts as 154. But they left all the pages it racked up in the last seven days on my account. Small victories.
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Jul 8, 2015 04:18
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ravenkult posted:You should read more carefully. Editors get a line in the front matter and that's it. They don't get accreditation on the cover or on Amazon. Yeah, exactly. I wouldn't even mind putting a clickable link to her site in the front matter, but I don't want her name right next to mine as co-creator, because she's not. I get that editors provide an invaluable service (it's why I want one), but the book is not "by" them in the way that it would be also "by" a co-author, illustrator, or even a translator (who must effectively re-write the work).
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Jul 8, 2015 04:35
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Mortanis posted:Well, I've been at this since 2013, same as many of us - apologies for using hyperbole. All I was trying to argue is that people got used to the payment of shorts and novellas being equal to full length novels and I don't think that's "fair". If you have a problem with that word, choose another that reflects the mentality of getting paid for less work. I do agree with the rest. I wish BN had more prominence in the game, though I still make more there than anywhere else. Not by much, though. You're right. $1.34 is unfair for a short. It should be around $2.10, since people are willing to pay $2.99 for them.
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Jul 8, 2015 04:51
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I don't understand this ''unfair'' talk. Some people wanted to spend their 10 books per month reading short stories. It was worth it to them.
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Jul 8, 2015 04:54
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