So I'm not in KU at all, so I generally don't even look at my page counts. However, I just threw down a new release, a 182 page, 70k word book. Today it went live and I went to grab the link only to find that Amazon's fake voodoo page count thing 1) reports on non-KU books and 2) has mine listed at 277 pages.

Now, I do my best to run an honest business and I also know some things are beyond my control but this seems to be something that is going to come back to haunt writers long term.

Allow me to explain: this book is not a long book. Most of my readers can finish it in a day or two. However, while they're finishing a 180 page book in that time, they're being told they're finishing a 280 page book instead.

This is going to create expectations. Already we have people who leave bad reviews or skip books for being too short. Now they're going to be seeing 300 pages as too short.

Now people will say that's not a problem because all books are artificially inflated in the Amazon ecosystem, so in a relative sense 300 is just the new 180. there are two problems with that:

First, Sears and Roebuck, AKA: This Too Shall Pass. Amazon isn't going to be the big gorilla forever no matter what anyone says. No big business lasts forever as a monolith. Either competition arises to become Pepsi to its Coke, or something takes over as Coke to its Royal Crown Cola. And when that happens, it's highly likely that that new store will report accurate (or at least in the realm of reality) page numbers to a population of book readers who have been taught that 300 pages is tiny.

Second, I'm not only selling on Amazon and other people don't only buy on Amazon. Let's say that Amazon really does last forever unto the heat death of the universe. Well I'm not exclusive to them. My readers aren't exclusive to them. But some of them will undoubtedly get their start reading my work from Amazon before possibly following my entreaties to buy it from DTF instead or they buy a print edition which DOES have an accurate page count. Again, they go from being shown ridiculously inflated numbers to the real ones and it gives the illusion that my output has decreased.

The running theme here is that the discrepancy of the Kindle page count to anything approaching reality will eventually reflect poorly on the author for readers who care about page count.

I'm not even wanting them to be honest about the page count, I just really, really wish they labeled it accurately as the page count as displayed by kindle devices, not the count that would be reported in say an industry trade or an actual, physical book. Or hell, report the real page count when there's a Matchbook linkage at least.

Also it looks stupid that the print edition of a book is 200 pages and being digital magically makes it almost 400.

Our library is having a local authors event; signings, Q&A, all that good stuff, and I've been invited to take part.

I've been a panelist for a webcomic group at cons before, but I had my artist with me and it was more group-oriented. Here, we're each getting speaking time and our own table to sell/sign our books and I've never done this kind of thing before. It's both exhilarating and terrifying (and I like public speaking).

I've got a question though for people who've done this before: what do you talk about during the talking sections? Am I supposed to busk for my books? Is that bad form? Should I start ranting about how the Moon Landing was fake and how the Civil War was a false flag operation perpetrated by Canadian werewolves?

I've had it just about up to here with the shoddy way the people that got hurt by the KU change have been treated.

Yeah, yeah, business is business and therefore should be cold and professional and whatever, but the way short fiction writers are being treated is the opposite of professional; it's childish. They're being called children, scammers, told that they're whining, that they don't put in as much work as long form writers, and that they've been gaming the system and this is some kind of karmic retribution.

That's bull.

Yeah, I'll admit that my first response to hearing about this was 'told you so', and I get the spite directed toward actual scammers, scrapers, choppers and other assorted folks that worked very hard to give short fiction a bad name.

But.

The people here? The People we're talking to every day on these forums? The weren't scamming. They were doing what they were encouraged to do. They were following what Amazon itself told them was the will of the audience. Highly charismatic people were telling them to go all-in; that this was the future and it was the long form writer who was going to have to change (lumbering, doomed dinosaurs we apparently were a year ago). Everyone that tried to tell them different, that it wouldn't last, was a heretic and a naysayer and a fool.

That's what they were getting here in a place dedicated to giving the best advice and information possible.

And don't dare say they don't put in as much time and effort into their work as the longform. I'm primarily longform. Take a look at my work and you'll see 100k+ pretty often. The book that gave me some of the worst trouble? The 13k word short that took me a month to write because it was very difficult to cram my usual worldbuilding and action into something that short.

So they were told all this and put all this work into it... and now they've gone from $1.30 to maybe as little as a dime overnight. That's a 90%+ loss. That's going from paying your bills to filling your gas tank. It doesn't matter that the $1.30 wasn't sustainable of if it was more than they were charging for it; that was what they were being offered for over a year and now people are being hurt by this. I don't give a damn about your 'business' when there are people suffering; what they need right now is support and sympathy and advice on how to adjust, not recriminations and browbeatings for having natural, human reactions to having their lives turned upside down.

If you can't do that, then please just gently seethe in rage at these awful huu-mans in silence; they really don't need your bile right now.

Specifically, I was wondering what percentage of the proper nouns in your setting is made up wholecloth. Further, do you have a pattern or scheme to what those names are, or do you just make them up on the spot? do people from different races/species or cultures have different sounding names? Do you max in normal names?

I personally like having internally consistent systems per culture. Ere halflings have a number of different male and female suffixes an take the last name of their opposite gender parent. Hailene have Classical names like Alexander or Magdalene. Miare (catfolk) have lots of r's and few guttural stops. humans/Half elves from Novrom have Greek/Roman-esque suffixes in thier last names (Arunsteadeles, Truedeles, Haraticus).

Names tend to be an issue for all writers, so let's talk about our processes and ideas.

If there's one reason I love Brandon Sanderson's work, it's the level of attention he puts into making each and every magic system in his worlds and how he usually puts more than one into each world.

Magic systems, especially unique ones, are hard. It's not uncommon to see a writer just give up and either just go with basic rituals, or that old Dr. Strange standby: Magic can do anything as long as it's plot sensitive.

Do you detail your magic systems? Tell us about them!

I have, for a long time, been an advocate for the Webcomic Method when it comes to marketing and selling my books.

For those of you who don't know what that is, a short primer: The webcomic industry is, like ours an independent-driven entertainment medium that has it's roots in the late 90's. A latecomer to the DotCom boom and bust, webcomics are (obviously) comic strips and pages published on a schedule to a website--usually for free.

By the mid 2000's, the business model was set by early works such as Penny Arcade, Megatokyo and Sluggy Freelance and worked like this: The comic itself is free, as is the archive of said comic. It exists as a fandom building device and advertisement for collected versions of the comic as well as a platform to sell ad space.

With the advent of Lulu and Cafepress, many of these sites (especially Megatokyo) also made revenue off of a side T-shirt business. However, the game changed when Penny Arcade and PVP along with the creator's group Teh Good Guys started expanding their merchandise into related fields. Notably, Rich Burlew of Order of the Stick (a roleplaying game universe comic), with the aid of webcomic marketing guru Rob Balder*, has expanded his offerings to a board game, card game and even mniatures for roleplaying games.

While--just like in our industry--there have been only a handful of break-out, 'media empire' successes, others have managed to do well. I myself ran a comic for three years that managed to pay for ts own upkeep and me and my artist partner's con costs.

What does this have to do with self-pubbing?

Webserialization. Webserials for short (though a tad inaccurate). These are text versions of webcomics, posted n a schedule chapter by chapter or story by story. While the infrastructure is still in its infancy (the closest thing we have to webcomic hubs like Keenspot or Drunk Duck is Drew Hayes's new project Starter Serials), the logistics are the same and so is the potential. Actually, there is more potential, as many comic pages don't work so well on mobile devices.

Which brings us to the experiment.

I've been running Descendants Serial for seven years, publishing for three. In that time, I did a cafepress with some logo shirts for my friends, but never promoted it beyond a link on the site.

This year, starting with the Christmas season, my intention is to turn the corner on merchandising following a request for a logo shirt with the new logo from a fan and others joking that there need to be Descendants knock-off merch like in the series proper.

I've already started by introducing two new shirts into my store and will be periodically running tournement-style votes on my site for fans to vote for new ones to come online.

Over the course of the year, I intend to make it bigger, publishing a few RPG splatbooks based on my fantasy series, and getting in touch with people to make the Descendants plushies and D-icons the fans talk about from the story itself.

Just over two weeks in, and I've made ~$10 because cafepress is awful and takes all my monies, but hopefully as I branch out, things will take off. The best art is, merch is, again more advertising for the site and therefore the books/more merch.

Will keep everyone posted on how this goes. I've already proven that the webcomic method can sell midlist level book volume one a shoestring budget (my advertising this year cost me about $60 total--everything else was stuff that happened because of the site), so hopefully following through on the model can pump that up to something a body can live off of instead of just paying rent.

*Disclaimer, I am friendly with both Rich and Rob, but haven't spoken to them in a few years.

Thread born of supreme annoyance.

Did you know that no sales channels support sequel series? (not even nearly alliterative ones).

I've been sitting here for several hours trying to figure out a firing solution for this. Obviously, the blurb can say 'sequel to X', but most channels, even Amazon, have a mechanism to alert readers to the next part of a series and listing as a new series basically free-throws that directly into the garbage.

I really, really hate listing it as SERIES Book 5 because it is not Book 5, it is Book 1 and I don't like lying to readers.

What other incredibly obvious things does NO ONE in this business seem to offer?

I normally get ~100 free downloads on Apple in one month. I checked D2D today and I had 48 yesterday alone. What went on there? I don't have any promos running, I'm on cooldown until All Saint's Day, so where the heck did all those downloads come from and how do I make that happen again?

I just saw on twitter that my favorite Fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson has made his Way of Kings, Book 1 of what he's more or less called his Magnum Opus, The Stormlight Archive, free on iTunes and Amazon today.

More interesting to me is just how much content this means he's giving way. If you're not familiar with Sanderson or The Way of Kings, TWoK is his love letter to the old school fantasy door-stopper, a book so larger that I'm fairly sure I could kill a man with the paperback.

So if you've been watching the news, you might have noticed that William Wallace's demands might well be met soon and Scotland will have Freeeeeeeeeedooooom. Or, you know, sovereignty.

Either way, and politics aside, a vote for independence will free throw the UK's pound sterling  directly into the toilet at least for a while.

Why does this matter to non-UK authors? Well that's my question: are our UK sales royalties converted at point of sale or at time of payment? I made a nice chunk of change in July there and it will be a much smaller chunk if the latter is true or the former.

A lot of writers here seem to either hate writing blurbs, or at least find writing them difficult.

I'm not one of those people. I like writing blurbs, mostly because I've got a lot of Barnum brand snakeoil in my blood and busking like a carnival barker is fun for me.

I've done a few blurbs for members here for publicity/ a free book / delicious baked goods, and I've gotten the process down pretty well even on my murderous 'write 6 projects at a time' schedule.

What I'm wondering is if people here would be willing to part with a few dollah dollah bills to turn their end of the blurb writing experience into 'Fill out form/Review Blurb/Ask For Refinements/Approve Blurb'.

And in the spirit of advertising...

Friends, do you feel that your talents are wasted condensing your 60,000 word novel into a 200 word teaser? Is the balancing act of hooking the reader without giving away too much getting you down? Will having to fill out one more Product Description form on a sales channel going to make you snap?

Then you need Uncle Vaal's Fantastical Auto-mo-Blurb. With this handy, dandy service, all you have to do is follow a simple set of instructions and a fully written blurb will appear before your eyes in a matter of days, pending your approval! You get to pick the tone and focus, and the Auto-mo-Blurb system does the rest! It's like a written trailer for your book!

Special features include: Tailored theming for series, optional properly formatted and presented content warnings, Pay nothing until the blurb is done to your specifications! Taglines and special 50-word descriptions for promo sites available. This service is available for erotica, but not for any work in any genre featuring child abuse, torture/gore porn or rape (sorry, but I have to read a synopsis from you to do my thing and... I don't want to read that stuff). Ask about our special rate of Speculative Fiction and even better rates for the following subgenres: Superhero, Steampunk, Weird West, Gaslamp Fantasy and Dungeonpunk.

[[Note: this is not me hanging out a shingle just yet. I'm trying to feel out demand and what I should charge. I feel I can handle ~3 blurbs a week except on 5th Wednesdays.]]

So for the past week or so, the site's been getting hammered by spambots. This is to be expected because how else would my readers of Superhero and Fantasy ficiton know about fake Ray Ban sunglasses, Ugg boots, and something called Canada Goose?

This week has been different though. The rush seems to be all from a small set of almost certainly botnetted IPs and they all follow an oddly specific pattern: the body is an excerpt from something that looks like a story and the username is an Amazon book link. I checked, and the links go to actual books. Precisely the kind of books you would expect to be sold via spam or the finest supermakret checkout counters in fact.

So yeah, there's a new, exciting arena out there for Bad Behavior beyond buying reviews, constant self-promotion where it isn't appreciated, and paying for fake likes. Welcome to the Age of Spam >_<

... is never knowing when people are going to figure out what's coming.

And hoo boy, did I miscalculate.

SPOILERS FOR DESCENDANTS #78 YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

So I'm in the middle of the big two-part reveal I started setting up three years and 1.5 million words ago in my web serial. This is the kind of Chris Claremont crap I started writing serial fiction to pull.

Basically, in the stinger of a one-off story, I introduced a 'juvenile' monster. The description clearly says it's a dragon, but no one calls it one. The creature doens't recur, but a year later, genetic material is used to transform a pair of characters in half-dragon looking supervillains. The genre-savvy big bad actively called them Beowulf and Maleficent. They recur twice, but I sink them for six months prior to the Big Reveal.

Meanwhile the Big Bad has been trying to invade the magical world and going to war with the natives.

Finally, #78 starts rolling out chapter by chapter. In chapter 1, something big and mean takes out an entire installation run by the big bad. In Chapter 2, we learn that it looks like and the main characters liken it to a dragon. In Chapter 3, we learn it's trying to communicate...

And my readers then hurl themselves bodily into the comment section chorusing 'I BET IT'S AFTER THE BABY FROM VOLUME 4!'


...And I immediately begin crying because there's seriously a whole extra chapter of foreshadowing before the reveal that literally everyone guessed.

END SPOILERS

So basically, this is a thread for posting your EPIC FAILS and EPIC WINS in the field of foreshadowing.