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Hahaha...KENPC are now showing up but it's about 1/20th of what I expect by this time of day. Awesome.
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Jul 1, 2017 22:19
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Hahaha...KENPC are now showing up but it's about 1/20th of what I expect by this time of day. Awesome. I mean, it is 4th of July weekend, consistently a top contender for shittiest sales weekend of the year
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Jul 1, 2017 22:56
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I'm up to 23 pages. Yesterday was over 15,000. Should I publish a new book today or hold off until tomorrow?
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Jul 1, 2017 23:26
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Trustworthy posted:I mean, it is 4th of July weekend, consistently a top contender for shittiest sales weekend of the year I'm talking like tens of thousands of pages. It's not a "lose 95% of your revenue" weekend. There's no such thing.
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Jul 1, 2017 23:29
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:I'm talking like tens of thousands of pages. It's not a "lose 95% of your revenue" weekend. There's no such thing. 
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Jul 1, 2017 23:35
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Mine's at about 10% of what it's been over the last week. It's updated multiple times through the day, so I'm wondering if it's going to catch up at some point and shoot back up or if Amazon is using some new, more strict algorithm to count pages.
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Jul 2, 2017 02:35
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Popular Human posted:Mine's at about 10% of what it's been over the last week. It's updated multiple times through the day, so I'm wondering if it's going to catch up at some point and shoot back up or if Amazon is using some new, more strict algorithm to count pages. Top of reports has this now... Kindle Edition Normalized Pages Read updates are currently delayed, and may not reflect the most up-to-date values. We are working on resolving this issue as quickly as possible.
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Jul 2, 2017 02:58
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Sorry we might be talking past one another. I thought you were justifying the missing page reads on the 4th of July weekend instead of Amazon messing things up.
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Jul 2, 2017 18:54
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It's always something with Amazon.
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Jul 2, 2017 20:10
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Sorry we might be talking past one another. I thought you were justifying the missing page reads on the 4th of July weekend instead of Amazon messing things up. No I was 100% agreeing with you. That message is still there but I'm at least seeing some pages read again. I think I'm going to pull the trigger on publishing book 6 in my series. I figure with everything else going on it might just slip through.
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Jul 2, 2017 20:29
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Could anyone kind of provide insight on to what the current climate of genres or self pubbing in general is like right now? General impressions, anecdotes etc.
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Jul 7, 2017 01:17
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Aferisan posted:Could anyone kind of provide insight on to what the current climate of genres or self pubbing in general is like right now? General impressions, anecdotes etc. Treat it like a real job and get paid real money. I think there was a gold rush of easy money that has gone away. That being said, the market is still growing. We are at the beginning of a new normal, and now is a fine time to jump in. That being said, there are genres that sell better than others. Romance, mystery thriller, cozy mystery, urban Fantasy, military sci-fi, all have solid numbers if you put in a lot of work and can write a solid yarn. If you want to write poetry, have fun. You most likely won't get paid, but sure. Same with "fiction," and they sort of jazz. Make a mailing list. Read the OP. Read the thread. There's several good to great posts in here. Also, read. Read your genre. Read out of it. Pay for KU, read more. Go over to Kboards. Read more. Don't post. Just read. You'll quickly see who's actually giving good advice. I got Kinda crapped on for mentioning this earlier in the thread, but Chris Fox has a bunch of books on self publishing. I think they are great basic how to guides. Most of what he writes can be found here and on Kboards, but his books are short and are an easy source for a lot of solid info. Another classic book is 2 k To 10 k. Lastly. Write. A lot. How much is a lot? 3 to 5 k a day, 5 days a week.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:12
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Aferisan posted:Could anyone kind of provide insight on to what the current climate of genres or self pubbing in general is like right now? General impressions, anecdotes etc. For my own general impression - I know there are people in this thread who are making insane amounts of money, I personally am making a) a pittance if it was my only income, which is also b) way more money than I ever thought I'd make off writing and more than enough to put a smile on my face.
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Jul 11, 2017 10:06
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https://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/scammers-break-the-kindle-store/#more-4447 Interesting article about KU being broken by scammers.
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Jul 15, 2017 19:02
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Does anyone use dragon naturally speaking? I read that it basically massively speeds up your output if you're a slow typist, but I'm not sure how beneficial it would be for me if I'm already someone who can type at like 80wpm if I'm willing to accept lots of obvious typoes like swapped character pairs.
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Jul 15, 2017 19:10
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oliveoil posted:Does anyone use dragon naturally speaking? I read that it basically massively speeds up your output if you're a slow typist, but I'm not sure how beneficial it would be for me if I'm already someone who can type at like 80wpm if I'm willing to accept lots of obvious typoes like swapped character pairs. There's a great thread about DNS on Kboard's Writers Cafe (I think it's titled Riding Your Dragon or something) by a wickedly prolific author and user of Dragon. I believe her workflow allows her to produce 6,000 words per hour regularly, but this doesn't include the time spent planning and outlining. I used it with success, but it has it's own challenges. Right off the bat I would suggest getting a little personal digital voice recorder and a headset/mic. This will give you the freedom to speak your words anywhere, which I found more useful than sitting in front of a computer doing it. Plus I found file based dictation to be more accurate than it just doing live voice-to-text. I think it's one of those things where if you can make it work, it will pay huge dividends in avoiding wrist/neck/back issues.
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Jul 15, 2017 19:30
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oliveoil posted:Does anyone use dragon naturally speaking? I read that it basically massively speeds up your output if you're a slow typist, but I'm not sure how beneficial it would be for me if I'm already someone who can type at like 80wpm if I'm willing to accept lots of obvious typoes like swapped character pairs. I use it in my day job, have never considered using it for personal writing. You have to use a real robotic monotone and verbally dictate all your punctuation and I think that would completely take me out of the zone when writing fiction.
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Jul 16, 2017 10:51
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I just found this thread and decided to thank you all for your contributions in here. I have always enjoyed reading and as a kid, I remember trying to write a detective story since I loved Hardy Boys books so much. I had decided April 2016 to write a book (it would be a three part series) but unfortunately, I am a procrastinator (along with teaching and a person who gets pulled into political news easily) and have been working on it once every few months. July came and I decided to focus on it a lot more so I have been working on it almost every night. I can get out a chapter (2.000-3,000 words) in 2.5 hours. I am over half way through the book (looking at 24-30 chapters and between 60,000-70,000 words) and I cannot wait to get all the editing done (as well as blurb and cover which I had not really thought about until this thread) and put it out there for people to read. Thanks for the encouragement through your own stories, struggles and successes.
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Jul 21, 2017 06:17
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:I just found this thread and decided to thank you all for your contributions in here. Well done jumping right in with a novel! Mystery/thrillers are fairly evergreen, so if you think you've got a few of these up your sleeves then some solid planning out the gate could net you some great results. I think most important is going to be your cover: find top-selling books that are similar to yours on Amazon and see what they're doing with their covers. What colors are they using? Do they feature the sleuth? Murder weapon? Are they foreboding or haunting?
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Jul 22, 2017 14:11
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My book is not actually a mystery book. It is more of a book in the vain of "The Most Dangerous Game" (especially the first book). Because of this thread, I have been thinking about my cover more and I think I want something simple. More of a sketch than an actual picture. I was thinking of a style like this with a sketch as my main image: 
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Jul 22, 2017 19:07
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Abandon any notion of having a cool cover or a different cover or an interesting cover. Amazon is not just a bookstore, it's a search engine in which 99% of people are first glimpsing your cover as a compressed thumbnail. There's a reason the vast majority of book covers (even in traditional publishing) are boring as hell: they're logos for genre recognition. Also bear in mind that even the most basic of and generic of professionally done covers will cost you around $100.
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Jul 24, 2017 08:43
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Anybody else unable to publish a book today? My KDP just keeps reloading the "Kindle eBook Details" page no matter what I do. It won't let me actually move on to uploading my book and cover.
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Aug 1, 2017 22:39
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Popular Human posted:Anybody else unable to publish a book today? My KDP just keeps reloading the "Kindle eBook Details" page no matter what I do. It won't let me actually move on to uploading my book and cover. This happens to me sometimes. Not sure why!
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Aug 1, 2017 23:10
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POOL IS CLOSED posted:This happens to me sometimes. Not sure why! They just announced KU 3.0 so that might be why.
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Aug 2, 2017 01:28
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LionArcher posted:They just announced KU 3.0 so that might be why. Oh god. What is 3.0 going to be?
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Aug 2, 2017 04:19
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I finished the book last night. It ended up being a little above 69,000 words. I am now going through and proofreading it with a hope of getting it published on Kindle on September 1st (side note: I decided that I wanted to publish a book before I turned 35 and I turn 35 at the end of September). I had a few questions though. I took a break from proofreading to sign up for KDP tonight. I entered my information and began to look around. 1) Which option do most of you use when you choose your royalty plan (35% or 70%)? I would assume that the 70% route is the best to go through but I did not know if there was anything that was a downfall of that plan? 2) I typed all of my book in Google Docs (YEAH CHROMEBOOKS!). It is in documents that contain 3 chapters per document. What is the easiest way to upload that book into the KDP system? Thanks for the information.
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Aug 2, 2017 05:48
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:I finished the book last night. It ended up being a little above 69,000 words. I am now going through and proofreading it with a hope of getting it published on Kindle on September 1st (side note: I decided that I wanted to publish a book before I turned 35 and I turn 35 at the end of September). From kindleboards... If your price falls outside the 2.99 - 9.99 USD range, you are not eligible for 70%. If your file is so enormous from either code bloat or lots of pictures, or both, that the download fees exceed 35% then you are better off with 35%, because download fees are subtracted from your 70% royalties. A 70k novel w/o pics coded awkwardly can run 45 cents in download fees (think about it; that's more than you'd get on a 99 cent sale) and that same novel coded properly can run less than 10 cents. The publishing page where you choose royalty structure gives you an estimate.
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Aug 2, 2017 06:04
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My wife reads a lot of romance novels, we were talking about possible plotlines so I sketched out the first third of one in an evening, some dialogue and stuff where it took me. I do read this thread even though I don't write for a living. She liked the story beats but hated the characters as written and was very critical. Probably best I haven't tried to give up the dayjob lol
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Aug 2, 2017 07:21
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The Fuzzy Hulk posted:Oh god. What is 3.0 going to be? This is KENPC 3.0, and there are no details about it. For a few minutes Amazon had a sentence on the KDP website that said this version was going to help them track pages read from "non-linear" reading. Common consensus is that it might mean you would no longer get paid based on the last page read but each page that renders (IE what they promised initially). But it doesn't matter because that verbiage is now gone. What still remains is some kind of wording that this new system is better at counting pages relative to other books, whatever that means. Some people are reporting lowered KENPC page numbers for their books now, but others are reporting higher numbers. It might be that as authors try to game the system Amazon is just "nerfing" the software advantages. Vellum, for example, initially produced books with lower page counts than other software. Then it became the page count producing leader of the software. Maybe this is to reign it back in? My theory is that Amazon wants to lower the number of pages being reported so that the monthly page rate number is higher, because this is the number that authors obsess over. The last few months have seen steady declines to that number and now it's the lowest its ever been I believe. EDIT: Just to put it in perspective, in July 2015 (when Hugh Howey's KU 2.0 launched) we were paid the kingly sum of $0.00578 per page read. Up until that point, KU 1.0 pool money would closely track the rate of growth of the readership. But KU 2 kicked off the huge disconnection between fund and user growth. If Amazon had kept the two linked, we'd be earning $0.0124 per page read instead of $0.00422. Jalumibnkrayal fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 13:47
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I had really hoped that KU 3.0 would enable them to cut down on the huge numbers of scam books that dilute the payouts every month. Huge bundles of crap with ToC links that take readers straight to the end, crediting a poo poo-ton of pages read. It's also probably extremely easy to bot this with a ton of free trial accounts, and I'm certain people are doing it. But if they can't accurately track which actual pages are read, instead of just the furthest read, it's not gonna happen.
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Aug 3, 2017 12:18
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hello self publishing world. I just got my Createspace proof copy and IT IS BEAUTIFUL MY BEAUTIFUL CHILD even if i did spot a mahoosive typo on the cover that somehow evaded the attention of both me and the artist for two weeks. I am stopping here to tell you probably yet again: * never use Kindle's print option for anything, it's Createspace with a concussion * seriously, it's horribly incompetent and you will wish you'd done it on Createspace and linked it to your Kindle version afterwards * everything on Createspace is vastly easier and fundamentally sensible in ways that Kindle print just isn't, and even the dumb bits of Createspace look like genius compared to Kindle print * the artist and i literally wasted a day wrangling with Kindle print's bullshit when Createspace has templates that would have done the hard part in minutes * really, Kindle print can't do author proof copies. What the. So does anyone know how to delete a never-to-be-finalised print version from your KDP bookshelf?
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Aug 3, 2017 18:40
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divabot posted:So does anyone know how to delete a never-to-be-finalised print version from your KDP bookshelf? I think your only option is contacting KDP support directly and asking them to do it, if that even works. There's no way to do it in the user interface.
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Aug 4, 2017 17:35
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:I think your only option is contacting KDP support directly and asking them to do it, if that even works. There's no way to do it in the user interface. everything about amazon's interfaces really is just complete poop at least they sell the frickin books, my word. 500+ copies on kindle, about 10 on smashwords, 0 in all the other stores. ("You gotta get it on iTunes!" they said. yeah that's great thanks) For print I'm just doing Createspace and people can buy the darn thing from Amazon. i'd call smashwords important since you'll have people who just want an epub or hate drm or amazon or whatever, particularly since my readers tend techie. but basically, bloody everyone who pays money's on kindle.
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Aug 4, 2017 18:25
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divabot posted:everything about amazon's interfaces really is just complete poop Congrats on the sales! Your book has an odd price ($6.35 in the US) for an ebook, so I don't know if that's just autoconversion from your local currency or what. You're over $2.99 so honestly you could probably go to $9.99 without losing too many folks. If people care about bitcoin they are young and have money to spend.
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Aug 4, 2017 23:11
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Congrats on the sales! Your book has an odd price ($6.35 in the US) for an ebook, so I don't know if that's just autoconversion from your local currency or what. You're over $2.99 so honestly you could probably go to $9.99 without losing too many folks. If people care about bitcoin they are young and have money to spend. yeah, it's £4.99 autoconverted to the price of the day, which has varied from $6.15 to $6.55 over the past two weeks. Pricing is a PITA because (a) Amazon get super upset if it's cheaper somewhere else and you really can't afford to lose Amazon (b) I don't want to rip off the Smashwords buyers, who are a small but vocal and appreciative audience and also Smashwords pays a bit better ($5.19 on a $6.60 sale). I might try $6.99 on amazon.com if I can keep £4.99 on amazon.co.uk. Most sales so far are US, sales in UK are bigger per head of population. Other countries, a smattering. The print version will be $17 US, £13 UK, EUR14.50. Not cheap, but I'm certainly not springing for a print run ... Createspace quality is actually really good and I can tell you, obey the guidelines and you and your readers will not be disappointed. Bookshops can hypothetically order it, though I'm pretty sure that's a thing that basically doesn't happen. I've done very little to promote it so far, a few podcasts, trying to become a rent-a-quote pundit. But it looks like I got lucky and wrote a book that was accidentally timely. Been super busy just keeping up with stuff. It turns out self-publishing to a professional standard of quality is work, and publishers actually do things ... The audience that are really getting into it are not the techies, but the business and finance types who are sick of bitcoin and blockchain BS. They are delighted. I like this audience because they have money! Must get the frickin proofreading done and the fixed copy uploaded. I told everyone Monday ...
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Aug 5, 2017 13:54
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divabot posted:hello self publishing world. I just got my Createspace proof copy and IT IS BEAUTIFUL MY BEAUTIFUL CHILD even if i did spot a mahoosive typo on the cover that somehow evaded the attention of both me and the artist for two weeks. Right now I'm waiting to hear back from a local bookstore about getting it carried there, reaching out to a local SF con about getting a table, and planning on getting a table at a weekend holiday market my church is hosting in a few months.
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Aug 8, 2017 20:26
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I am in the process of proofreading my book and I hope to have it out by September 1st. I just thought of a question though and thought someone here would know: will I need to copyright my book and if so, how do I go about that?
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Aug 9, 2017 15:49
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:I am in the process of proofreading my book and I hope to have it out by September 1st. You have copyrighted your work by virtue of having created it. According to the US Copyright Office http://www.copyright.gov/: Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. You should add a copyright notice, something like; My Book Copyright © 2017 by Bizarro Kanyon All Rights Reserved
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Aug 9, 2017 16:08
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Thanks so much.
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Aug 9, 2017 18:40
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Did anybody have any problems with the KDP dashboard today? All my page reads disappeared for a minute and then came back... I had a book blocked a couple days ago so now I'm freaking out. I guess I should add the pages are still showing on KDP, just book report is showing them missing, and it is doing it off and on again. Sometimes they are there, sometimes they are gone. The Fuzzy Hulk fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 20:32
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