'The Shadow Groom': Done! (Plus a Few More Things About Ye Olde D2D Drama)

Yeah, firstly, The Shdaow Groom is done! First draft is complete, and I left myself a lot of room for additional material meant to clarify a bunch of events in the story. This means the revision phase will be rather hardcore, but it's necessary. 

So in celebration, here's the obligatory happy dance video:

Actually, it's a perfect fit for the story, so I'm running with it. 😁 This book is on track (obvs) for the planned July 1 release, and when it's out, I'll be doing another BOGO sale over at my Payhip store to celebrate its publication.

And speaking of Payhip, I had to re-upload the files to the store because all links and end matter material (other than the "about the author" page) needed to be taken out as they all linked back to Draft2Digital. Books still distributed by them will have those pages and links, but not those I'm selling directly.

I'm still salty about raising my prices for the Grotesqueries books, but I'm also going to balance that out by doing perma-sales at my store. I was at first planning to offer monthly specials, but with my recent pivot, it'll be permanent -- as to what the sale would be, I'm looking at a number of options and still need to decide on which.

I do treat my writing and publishing as a business, which means earnings go back into the pot and pay for stuff I need to keep the machine going. Cover art image licenses, domain name, etc. -- those are supposed to be covered by my royalties, and if D2D will be taking an even bigger chunk off that, either I pay out of pocket with my day job earnings (all of which are already accounted for, budget-wise) or via credit card, which is my last resort if things go down that road. 

Do I regret sprouting roots in niche fiction? No. Never did, never will. But this is the way of things, and I gotta roll with the punches if I wish to stick around and see to the long tail of publishing my books.

Again, a final apology for the price bump for my Grotesqueries books and Ghosts and Tea sequels. If you do prefer to own my books as opposed to borrow them from library platforms or subscription services, keep an eye out for the perma-sale I'll be posting about soon.  

In the meantime, this is the final week for the 80% off sale for my Masks and Miscellanous collections. 

A Necessary Pivot (Re: D2D's New Fees)

I managed to talk myself off the ledge and have been trawling the 'net for indie author reactions to the news regarding Draft2Digital's fees, especially the $12 annual maintenance fee to be charged to authors who're already barely scraping by (you know, either new authors or niche authors like me in addition to other publishers and so on). 

And while I lump myself in with the group of unhappy writers who're already seeing our royalties cut down even more, I really had to weigh the benefits and the downsides of delisting my books from D2D and simply starting over elsewhere or just sticking to my Payhip site.

Now...

Payhip is non-negotiable in that it's here to stay even if no one's touching it yet. Maybe down the line I'll end up deleting yet again for that reason, but for the time being, it's staying. 

Losing D2D, however, means losing some of the places where my books have enjoyed a very, very modest amount of movement, i.e., Hoopla and Overdrive, both of which are library platforms (very important to me). I absolutely refuse to lose those as well as the listings I now have over at Bookshop.org and all those small, indie bookstores. 

There's a lot of scammers and bad actors out there trying to game the system for a quick buck, and those of us who are legitimate writers, particularly writers of niche fiction, get swept up in the shitty currents when companies like D2D (rightfully so) do what they can to stem the tide of garbage. And speaking on behalf of other niche writers or writers who're still in the process of finding their audience, we get really burned when our own efforts are so easily dismissed as hobbies or inconsequential noise (because of low sales) and are targeted with fees many of us can't afford.

And after a lot of thinking, rethinking, and future projecting, I'm afraid I'm forced to pivot.

In brief, guys, I have to raise the e-book prices for my entire Grotesqueries collection as well as the novella sequels to the Ghosts and Tea series. 

IT

SUCKS.

But if I want to keep my books in online libraries and other stores, that's one way of bridging the gap and ensuring I cross the minimum threshold that's now expected from everyone. I didn't want to do it, and it was all I could do to stick to a price point that's at the lowest end of the "sweet spot" in indie publishing ($2.99 - $4.99). All those books I referred to are now priced at $2.99. *

I thought at first that people would be more willing to take a chance on someone like me if I kept the price at 99 cents, but a low list price apparently isn't flying as well as I'd hoped. Readers tend to be put off, I think, by low prices since they instill doubt in the quality of the books being sold. I don't know how well this new price will go, and, apparently, I'm given till February of 2027 to turn things around or I get more money taken out (in addition to the cut D2D already takes from my gross receipts). 

If it still doesn't pan out by then, I'll go ahead and delist my books and sell direct. ** 

My Payhip store's already updated with the new prices, but one thing that won't change is the fact that my store will be enjoying way more sales than other online stores since it's my personal playground. Heck, it's more important now than ever that I do that, right?   

Anyway, I'm so sorry, everyone. As for print prices, those will stay the same. Print books are expensive as it is, and I'm already gritting my teeth over the e-book pivot. 

I'll be updating my pages throughout the day, so if this place gets a bit wonky, you know why. 

* Incidentally, the $1.99 price point is also somehow ignored or avoided by readers. 

** I've opened an account with Ingram Spark as a backup, but I'm still reading up on their services. 

New Draft2Digital Policy = I'm On My Own (How Lovely)

Okay, Draft2Digital just posted a new thing they're doing, which really screws over legitimate writers like me who barely make sales. While the post makes sense and we understand why they're doing it, the platform no longer has everyone's best interests in mind. 

So firstly, there's going to be a fee onboarding new authors. That's not what I'm annoyed about. This is the part that's not good:

Annual Maintenance Fee: An annual maintenance fee of $12 will apply to accounts whose earnings from book sales, meaning your net proceeds after D2D’s commission, total less than $100 over the preceding 12-month period. If you earn $100 or more from your book sales over 12 months, you will not be charged this fee.

I've always been a writer who loves putting out books in a very, very small genre: gay gothic horror. With hardly any romance, at that, so in that sense, I'm already screwed since the books that sell the most are romances of all stripes. And I'm cool with that. I write the kind of books I want to read, and I know there are readers out there who also enjoy them.

Here's the kicker, and I'm going to be up front about my sales: I average less than $10 per month in royalties. That's right. Less than ten bucks. I'm used to it, and I'm lucky enough to be working full-time at a job I actually enjoy. I don't need to make millions off my books, and I like that the pressure to keep putting out books to maintain high earnings isn't there. The last thing I want is for my writing to turn into another job. Know what I mean? That's a shortcut for creative disaster in my case.

So I'm getting backed into a corner. 

Before this, D2D reduced the royalty rates over at their Smashwords store. And then they put a cap on the monthly checks so that you have to earn at least $10 a month for you to enjoy a deposit into your account for each month. So now not only do I earn less from their main store, I also get to be paid every other month. 

That was the reason why I opened (or re-opened) my Payhip store, and as of this post's writing, I've sold nothing over there. It may very well change if I take the nuclear option and pull my books from D2D and simply sell them from my store. That actually would be the ideal solution in the end, but I've always been willing to offer readers as many options as possible. 

I do have an Amazon KDP account, which has been inactive in years, but it's still there. I hardly sell books at Amazon, anyway, regardless, so that's not even on my plate. There are too many things about Amazon that leave a bad taste in my mouth despite their being the largest retailer of e-books. I'd rather take my chances with my piddling direct sales store front. 

Anyway, you can tell I'm not only annoyed, but absolutely dispirited by all this. I'm going to learn to format my own .epub books so I can do everything on my own. Eventually I will be pulling my books from D2D and will be selling direct. Period. The print books will be another thing, too, so we'll have to see. 

I'm not giving up on writing. I do it for the love of the act of storytelling and sharing my weird shit with those who share my taste in fiction. I love adding my books to a tiny, tiny niche and seeing it well-fed, in a manner of speaking. But, yeah -- money talks, and if I don't make it, I have to take my ball and leave the playground. 

At any rate, I'll be talking about this in the future, I'm sure. 

Wherefore Art Thou, Authors?

The thing about being in the thick of writing things is that there's really not much to talk about during that lull. I did pass the 30K-word mark, which usually also starts the paranoia phase of my drafting. I now only have less than 20K words to go to wrap things up, and let me tell you, things go REALLY quickly once that 30K-word line is crossed.

I'm on schedule, and this is going to be a bit of a challenge to revise and edit once the first draft's done.

The folktale I'm basing this on doesn't have a significant resolution, and unlike, say, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", which I based Compline on, "The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Is" is a weird -- albeit funny -- story because in the end, the main character (who's as dumb as a rock) STILL doesn't know how to shudder. Oh, his future wife makes him, of course, but it's got nothing to do with fear at all but, rather, cold water.

There's a lot of satire in the original folktale, though, but as to what, exactly, is being made fun of, I'm not really sure. There are only a number of interpretations from psychologists whose take I've never been a fan of. It's an old oral folktale that the Grimm brothers merely collected for their books, so whatever the point is for that story is lost forever, I think. 

The one thing I can say about the main character in the folktale, though, is that as stupid as he is (or one can argue he's just impossibly naive), he actually displays an impressive amount of compassion and empathy. Oh, he's got no understanding that the people he's trying to help are dead, but the need to help is there.

I am taking a lot of elements from the folktale and rewriting them in my own way to fit my version of it. So Errol and Edvin's ages needed to be bumped down a little more than usual, but I'm not marketing this as a YA book. They're both 19, which allows them to be utterly clueless about life and the world and believing the universe revolves around them still. We all know how it was to think we're indestructible. 

Anyway, that lack of a solid point in the original folktale has been difficult to keep out of my own story, and that'll make for a pretty intensive revision phase with maybe a lot of deletions and new material woven in. Or at least it'll take me longer than usual to get that done. 

In reference to this blog post title, I'm wondering about the "old guard" of writers who've been very active for years and then suddenly dropped off everyone's radar (or significantly cut down on their presence everywhere). It's very difficult, keeping writing and publishing up. It's not only hard actually turning words in your head into readable text following a plot that does everything it needs to do, but also go through the rest of the publishing stages of revising, editing, book cover design, marketing, etc. 

The sudden or gradual disappearance of the authors whose books I own and am happy to add to gives me a lot to think about. Things aren't forever, and life happens to everyone. For those authors with a massive following and who enjoy significantly more success than I, I reckon the added pressure of reader expectations can also burn them out eventually. 

I do miss them. I miss their stories and their voices and only now hope they're all doing well. A handful of go-to writers are still writing and publishing fairly consistently, but they're doing so at a markedly slower pace. I've been trawling Smashwords for new voices to discover now, and the proliferation of AI-written books is putting a damper on things. I did get sucked into maybe four books from "authors" I now actively avoid, but I've also discovered one relatively active writer I'll be following. 

I'm still keeping an eye out and hope to run across more of these new writers. Serendipity rules, man. 

April Store Sale

Life's rough, and sales are good. Apologies for forgetting to update both my Payhip store and this blog, but a late day is better than nothing.

So for all of April, my Masks collection as well as my Miscellaneous collection are 80% off. In essence, most of these books are cheaper than my Grotesqueries novellas, so yay!

This sale lasts through -- yep -- the end of April, and it's only happening at my store. So if you'd like to snag a copy or two of whatever books you might have been on the fence about, go to the following pages for them:

Masks (80% off the entire series including the omnibus)

Miscellaneous (80% off the entire series including all the omnibuses)

There'll be another sale (a different one) in May, and I'm trying to make these offers a monthly thing. Hopefully I'll be a hell of a lot more on top of things by the first of May, but I'm me, and life is life. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the books if you do purchase any, and thank you so much for your support!