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Mar 21, 2017 01:39
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I wrote up how I launched my post-apoc scifi on page 136 - with what newsletters gave good results. Since then I've run two more promos: http://www.thefussylibrarian.com/ and http://robinreads.com/ I bought a Robin Reads sci mailing list for $45 and they asked if I wanted to do a featured spot for $70. That turned into 122 sales last Saturday, which bumped me up to #1350 and the top twenty of Post Apoc, which I thought was a good result! Fussy Libraryian was also good and much cheaper at $17 and got 48 sales. Most newsletters only let you advertise a book every 90 days; that's about to roll around me. I'm running a new round of ads for Book #1 as Book #2 is coming out in a month.
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Mar 21, 2017 10:00
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Impressive! Thanks for following up.
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Mar 22, 2017 03:38
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Those of you who are Americans working at this part- or full-time, how do you have things set up tax-wise? Any incorporation?
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Mar 23, 2017 03:57
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Fuschia tude posted:Those of you who are Americans working at this part- or full-time, how do you have things set up tax-wise? Any incorporation? General rule is if you make $30,000 or more you should have an LLC and an S corp. until then, usually the benefits aren't worth it. Depends on the state though. Talk to a tax person.
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Mar 23, 2017 04:06
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jazzyjay posted:I wrote up how I launched my post-apoc scifi on page 136 - with what newsletters gave good results. Did you do any free ones? My last promo I did (second book in series released so first book free for a week) I think I only spent about $30 on a couple of paid newsletters but also put it in something like 20-30 free ones. Obviously the paid ones are going to have more reach, and it's impossible to measure exactly how useful the free ones are, but I reckon it's worth doing since it costs nothing but time. On a different note, looking at my book stats, I'm now making about 5 times as much money from Select as I am from sales. Last stats I saw, Amazon accounts for something like 75% of the ebook marketplace in the USA. I'm no expert and maybe my books are an anomaly but I can't see getting access to that other 25% of the market to be anywhere near as profitable as Select.
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Mar 23, 2017 07:25
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freebooter posted:Did you do any free ones? ... On a different note, looking at my book stats, I'm now making about 5 times as much money from Select as I am from sales. No, unfortunately I've been pretty time poor and haven't done anywhere near the sort of promo I should be doing. But that list you posted earlier looks pretty great and I intend to start working through it when I get Book #2 off to the editor, so cheers for posting that. My whole strategy is geared towards Select; I've kept Ebb Tide at 99c to shift copies to keep visibility up and therefore get KU reads. Plus more eyeballs = more newsletter sign ups etc. I tried selling at $2.99, had a spike in income but after three days my rank was sliding off the face of the planet. So I put it back to 99c and it recovered. I'm not making much money in 1st world terms but I'm trying the long game with setting up a series here. So yeah, basically I'm saying I'm KU only and have pulled my earlier books that were wide and have put them on KU. They're at $2.99 so they aren't selling anywhere as many copies as Ebb Tide - plus they were my attempts at literature rather than writing in a popular genre - but they still are generating some income now, only cause they're in the "Also by this Author" at the end of Ebb Tide.
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Mar 23, 2017 13:55
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Yeah, promoing is way more time consuming than I thought it would be - I think there are some middleman services that will do like 20 or 30 free newsletter applications for you for about $30, which might be worth looking into. I can justify it by saying I earn nearly $30 an hour at my day job and I'm pretty sure I spent much more than an hour submitting to all those free newsletters, so... A question for the old hands - are there any other solid marketing strategies besides ebook mailing lists, which are a thing I didn't know existed before I did this? Pretty much the only other thing I do is tweet about my book, and since my pen name account has about 12 followers I'm banking on hashtags. I thought I was being awfully clever (since I'm writing a zombie series) by using the #TWD hashtag right before and right after the Walking Dead airs on Mondays, but really, I doubt that does much. I've also been using the Ask David service, which gives you about twenty scheduled tweets for their 50k follower book promo account. But it's just impossible to measure. Like, when I did my "Book 2 is released so Book 1 is free for a week" thing, I shifted 1000 free units (way more than I'd ever sold) and saw my Kindle Select stats really spike, and thought that had been very worthwhile... until I released that a lot of it was simply the fact that I have two books out now instead of one, so all my sales and page read counts are almost doubled anyway. Which I guess underlines the fact that it's important to just keep writing and keep publishing, which is why I should go back to writing Book 3 instead of loitering around here.
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Mar 24, 2017 04:35
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jazzyjay posted:No, unfortunately I've been pretty time poor and haven't done anywhere near the sort of promo I should be doing. But that list you posted earlier looks pretty great and I intend to start working through it when I get Book #2 off to the editor, so cheers for posting that. Actually when I published my own Book 2 I found myself with a conundrum: how do you advertise Book 2 of a series? Nobody's going to just pick that up; if they think it's interesting they'll click around until they find book 1, so you may as well just advertise that to begin with. I ended up doing a huge promo blitz for the temporarily free Book 1, and nothing whatsoever for Book 2, relying on flow-through sales from people who liked Book 1. But I'm not sure what I'll do for Book 3, or when I'm six books deep or whatever. I guess maybe I'll just make Book 1 temporarily free every time I publish a new one.
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Mar 24, 2017 04:39
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edit: gently caress off
angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 05:52
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I've been following this thread quietly from the background, and have my first novel still half written, but is there a way to see the best selling books by genre that's easily accessible? This is something I've gotten hung up on whenever I try to do any research. I'm going to retool my fedora dude fights chtullu book to make him a leather-clad lady, I think, and go ahead and finish it. Angel Opportunity, you've sent me a couple messages that I read whenever I feel myself falling out of writing. You're super helpful, and a real treasure. Thanks a lot.
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Mar 24, 2017 06:32
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edit: gently caress off
angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 06:39
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Okay, that's what I was doing, I just didn't know if there was a more streamlined way to look at the data. Wishful thinking I guess. Thanks.
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Mar 24, 2017 07:12
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Before I respond to this let me just mention that I appreciate the long post there, especially breaking down the actual spending and finances, even though those numbers are insane to me. They're massively useful to people who are reading this and just starting out and are wary of what they're getting into, especially in an age when people still seem - even on the anonymous internet! - awkward about discussing income. But I specifically wanted to respond to this: angel opportunity posted:If these numbers I am throwing out there about my daily spend are scaring the poo poo out of you, realize that romance is a huge money maker, so you have to spend more to make more. In non-romance genres, something like $20-$50/day spend might be really high. I also feel more and more convinced from doing this full time and from reading this thread that it doesn't make much sense to self pub a genre that isn't able to make money. If I ever get around to writing a scifi or fantasy novel, I'm pretty sure I will try to traditional publish it. Even with everything I've learned from making a living at selling romance books, and even with all the experience that comes with that, I wouldn't bet on myself to be able to release a scifi or fantasy book (one that I'd actually want to write for fun) that would profit me more than $1,000. If I started feeling like I had to "target the market" as I'm advising you to do, I'd just say "gently caress it" and write another romance novel to make real money. I think there is probably an unavoidable gap between the people in this thread who self-pub fulltime and the people who don't, or who are just starting. I started self-pubbing this zombie series (which I already wrote 10 years ago and I'm now mostly editing; I wouldn't have chosen to write a zombie series from scratch) and in the last couple of months I've made more than $1,000. The bulk of that has been in March alone, and I'm hoping that will continue over the course of the year as I publish more books in the series. Making $1,000 that quickly was jawdropping to me. I know it probably sounds silly to people who are writing fulltime but it really was. The idea of quitting your job to write fulltime is such a distant pipe dream to so many writers that even making enough money in a month to boost your standard of living (the more expensive dinner, the new phone, not delaying that trip to the dentist) is quite startling. More so when it's profit from something you enjoy doing in the first place. But this is obviously a world apart from somebody earning enough money to completely quit their day job and do it full time. (And sure, maybe that 1k will be a shortlived anomaly, but even if it is it's more than I ever expected to make from that particular bit of writing.) Reading that back it seems snarky - which is not what I mean at all! This thread has been massively helpful and I literally would not have selfpubbed without it. I suppose I'm just throwing myself out there for lurkers and saying, hey, you can self-pub whatever it is you've been writing for fun in your spare time and still get a return on investment. (I think so far I spent about $200 on two covers, plus maybe $50-100 on promotional stuff.) If you're already writing it for your own enjoyment, then why not? (Just remember the holy mantra, YOUR COVER AND YOUR BLURB ARE AS IMPORTANT AS YOUR BOOK!) You talked about going the trad pub route for a sci-fi or fantasy series, and I get that, but I have to say the unexpected success of this zombie series makes me actually less inclined to go down the trad pub route. Although that may come from being Australian where apparently the average author makes about 13k a year. Americans' mileage may vary. (And there is definitely something deeper there about Amazon giving easier access to the global English-speaking market.) But even if you think the art is more important than the money (which I do, if it's writing I actually put my heart and soul into) I suspect I'd get more eyeballs on Amazon.
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Mar 24, 2017 07:45
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edit: gently caress off
angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 18:11
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Someone is trying to doxx me I'm never posting in this thread again, bye!
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Mar 24, 2017 18:49
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angel opportunity posted:Someone is trying to doxx me I'm never posting in this thread again, bye! Just came in to say the post earlier you wrote was great... and then I see this poo poo. Come on folks. Be better than this!
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Mar 24, 2017 20:40
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What the gently caress is wrong with people?
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Mar 25, 2017 00:07
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angel opportunity posted:Someone is trying to doxx me I'm never posting in this thread again, bye! AO, I've been reading this thread since the beginning - my first laughable attempts at a cover were rightly smashed on page 8 - and I remember you starting out. I wanted to say that its awesome to see your success and your advice has been invaluable to me - and I'm sure it is for many other folks. Your transparency and willingness to help others has been a great inspiration (and why I'm posting about how my own book is doing) so its bullshit to see someone loving with you. Good luck and I hope this poo poo doesn't get you down.
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Mar 25, 2017 00:58
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What kind of doxxing attempt lets you know that you're being internet detectived, right as it's happening? 
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Mar 25, 2017 02:00
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Trustworthy posted:What kind of doxxing attempt lets you know that you're being internet detectived, right as it's happening? I'm assuming they got a PM with either their author info or a guess at it. It's a real shame that people are such assholes, especially to someone providing such fantastic advice. Edit: people were generally much more open about pen names and traceable details in the old BFC thread. And for their trouble, a lot of them ended up getting 1-star brigaded in their reviews or having complaints filed about all of their books to Amazon until they had to abandon their pen names. Goons don't let other goons have nice things. Popular Human fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Mar 25, 2017 |
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Mar 25, 2017 05:11
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Trustworthy posted:What kind of doxxing attempt lets you know that you're being internet detectived, right as it's happening? Most likely someone attempting to guess AO's pen name. This forum (SA in general) and this thread in its various incarnations has managed to chase off every single successful author who ever posts in them and dares to reveal that they're making (good) money off their work. It's loving ridiculous. E: And it was much, much worse than just 1 star brigades and Amazon reports. People actually had goons calling their places of work and their families, telling them that they were writing taboo erotica etc. Bardeh fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Mar 25, 2017 |
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Mar 25, 2017 07:00
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I have never in my life been so glad to be trapped in the mindless cycle of leaving multiple tabs of the same page open. Thank you for all of your advice, AO!
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Mar 25, 2017 07:48
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Bardeh posted:Most likely someone attempting to guess AO's pen name. This forum (SA in general) and this thread in its various incarnations has managed to chase off every single successful author who ever posts in them and dares to reveal that they're making (good) money off their work. It's loving ridiculous. Yeah, I think I'm out of this thread too. It's what got me going, and I've made a career out of it.. thanks thread. There are safer communities out there now. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way.
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Mar 25, 2017 07:49
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This thread is almost three years old now. Anyone want to pick it up and go with it under a new OP? I don't think I'm a good thread owner for this now since I'm not active enough in publishing these days. (Now that I've made enough to kill all my family's student loans / other debts and moved to the west coast, I just don't feel the same sense of urgency anymore. I'm too happy to write, as weird as that might sound.  )quote:Most likely someone attempting to guess AO's pen name. This forum (SA in general) and this thread in its various incarnations has managed to chase off every single successful author who ever posts in them and dares to reveal that they're making (good) money off their work. It's loving ridiculous. Yep, this stuff pisses me off to no end. I ended up burning a pen name back during the BFC thread era because it got the attention of the one-star brigade. I hate that poo poo.
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Mar 26, 2017 07:24
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Why on earth do people do that?
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Mar 26, 2017 07:45
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Sundae posted:This thread is almost three years old now. Anyone want to pick it up and go with it under a new OP? The onion explains everything: http://www.theonion.com/video/how-self-publish-book-55659
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Mar 30, 2017 22:43
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Anyone else having issues with publishing right now? I have a title that's been approved for over 24 hours now, but has yet to show up on Amazon or SalesRank. What gives?
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Apr 2, 2017 13:23
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Popular Human posted:Anyone else having issues with publishing right now? I have a title that's been approved for over 24 hours now, but has yet to show up on Amazon or SalesRank. What gives? It's been weird for me the last three books. As soon as one of mine e goes live I always buy it to check it out on a kindle and the last few have taken forever to show as sales. And is book-report broken right now? I'm so used to letting it calculate for me it's weird to not have it.
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Apr 3, 2017 03:01
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The Fuzzy Hulk posted:And is book-report broken right now? I'm so used to letting it calculate for me it's weird to not have it. It's been working fine for me today (including now). V V
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Apr 3, 2017 03:37
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Trustworthy posted:It's been working fine for me today (including now). V Yeah now it's working for me again. I've grown really dependent on it I guess.
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Apr 3, 2017 03:46
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I just really wanted the old "complain on the internet, problem solves itself" magic to work, and it did. Went live a couple hours later.
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Apr 3, 2017 14:27
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It sucks that goons are still doxing self-pubbed writers. I was hoping to re-read this thread for all the pre-pub advice, now that my book is near completion. How do I find another community like this one? Reddit self-pub seems like it gives bad advice. The official Kindle forums?
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Apr 7, 2017 15:58
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Eyeneedle posted:It sucks that goons are still doxing self-pubbed writers. I was hoping to re-read this thread for all the pre-pub advice, now that my book is near completion. How do I find another community like this one? Reddit self-pub seems like it gives bad advice. The official Kindle forums? Kboards has an okay hub. A good first thing to look at in the morning place. Erotic authors (Reddit) has terrible advice at times, but also great authors in there too that help out. If you read the big threads there , you'll find the right redditors to follow. I won't really post here due to what I just saw with dox, but this thread Will always hold a special place in my heart for getting me started on my self publishing career. That was three years ago, and it's changed my life. It's not a get rich quick scheme like it used to be, but if you're willing to work hard you can still make plenty of money.
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Apr 8, 2017 23:57
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LionArcher posted:Kboards has an okay hub. A good first thing to look at in the morning place. Erotic authors (Reddit) has terrible advice at times, but also great authors in there too that help out. If you read the big threads there , you'll find the right redditors to follow. Trawling through Reddit right now. Still trying to figure out how to get those first few reviews. Am a UK Goon and Amazon is running a UK only KDP contest to hunt for new UK authors. I think I'm in with a shot, but have no idea how I'm going to get UK reviews for a book that will only be available on the Amazon UK website. All the usual promo options are out.
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Apr 9, 2017 21:38
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Huh - just ran up against the end of my free trial for Book Report, didn't realise it was a subscription service. I don't think I actually will get a subscription, though, because all I end up doing is obsessively checking my daily earnings instead of writing my next book.
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Apr 13, 2017 00:12
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Anybody else doing this? https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?node=12061299031 I have to give up a keyword on a new release (since I can't stuff them now lol) but figure it might be fun.
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Apr 13, 2017 02:18
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Anyone have any experience with This calculator? Does it look accurate? https://www.tckpublishing.com/amazon-book-sales-calculator/ I'm trying to see if Amish romance is still worth getting into based on sales. I was obsessed with Amish culture when I was a young teen and live pretty close to a small community so I've got plenty of knowledge to write it. The thing That sticks out to me the most when reading the books is that they are paced really weird. Like, the first half will take place over the course of 1-2 days and the second half will blaze through months or years of story time. Is this normal for all chaste romance or specific to this genre? As a side note, is paranormal romance all dragons these days or did I just look up the top 100 on a weird day?
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Apr 14, 2017 14:03
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SquirrelFace posted:Anyone have any experience with This calculator? Does it look accurate? I don't write romance but this is overestimating the sales of the the two horror books I have out by a factor of around 2/3 to 1. But I'll say as I have before, I'm making about 4 or 5 times as much money from Kindle Unlimited page-reads as I am from actual "sales."
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Apr 14, 2017 14:43
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freebooter posted:I don't write romance but this is overestimating the sales of the the two horror books I have out by a factor of around 2/3 to 1. Yeah, I guess it would overestimate "sales" since it's not estimating any KU page reads which I would absolutely be utilizing. Is there a rule of thumb any of you guys use when deciding if a niche is worth it? Is there an overall rank limit you look for in the genre or is it just a write and pray approach? I work in data analytics right now so I want the numbers, but I know Amazon is not very forthcoming...
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Apr 14, 2017 14:56
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