I drink from the keg of glory

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A year ago, around Xmas time, I released Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor and Black Dog: A Biography as reader magnets for Brain Jar Press.

For those not immersed in indie pub terminology, reader magnet is short-hand for books/stories I give away for free, so as to entice readers into paying for other work/signing up for your newsletter. Nick Stephenson has an entire book about the strategy which you can download for free (and I’ll let you put two and two together about the reasons behind his choice).

The two stories have served me well since then—Hornets Attack, in particular, has picked up a couple of hundred downloads on various sites—but Amazon has been a sticking point. Unlike every other site, the big river isn’t a fan of letting you upload a book and making it free straight off.

They are willing to price-match with other stores, if a book is available for free elsewhere, but it’s at their discretion and you largely have to ask for it to happen. For a long while, that wasn’t happening with the two stories above. I’d point an suggest bringing the Amazon price in line with everyone else, and they wouldn’t budge. Not a big deal, but it made for an awkwardness—it’s hard to do a “hey, free stories!” post when you have to add a caveat about Amazon being the exception.

Fortunately, the latest request seems to have paid off (or the ‘zon’s price-match algorithm finally seems to have kicked in). After a year, both stories are now, finally, available for free via Amazon stores and apps.

To borrow a quote or two from the West Wing:

Josh Lyman: Victory is mine, victory is mine. Great day in the morning, people, victory is mine.

Donna Moss: Morning, Josh.

Josh Lyman: I drink from the keg of glory, Donna. Bring me the finest muffins and bagels in all the land.

Donna Moss: It’s going to be an unbearable day.

Automation

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Two years ago, when I kicked off Brain Jar Press, I dropped a bunch of cash on tools designed to streamline my processes. It started with a shiny new MacBook Air, breaking years of I-don’t-use-Macs ideology so I could run the mac-only Vellum software. That was something like two grand of expenses right there, coupled with an ongoing Adobe subscription and access to delivery tools like BookFunnel.

I knew I’d struggle to earn back that money in the first year, and I was totally fine with that. The point wasn’t making the money back, it was making every project I took on a little cheaper to publish. For instance, there was software that did everything Vellum did, but it was a pay-per-project concern or an ongoing subscription.

There are tools that could create covers instead of using Photoshop, but those tools aren’t as advanced or had a steep learning curve. I would be investing time and subscriptions fees to get advanced features, and the net result seemed likely to deliver slightly less than I wanted long-term even if I conquered the learning curve.

You can talk people through the process of side-loading ebooks onto their reader, but it takes time and it takes tech support and I’m happy to outsource both and take the time and attention I saved to future projects.

Because I’ve had those tools in place since Brain Jar launched, it’s been easy to forget how much time they save until external reminders show up. This last week has been full of them: another indie author asked a question about formatting their digital file, and I basically blinked and realised I never thought about such things because Vellum did it for me.

Another conversation, with a non-indie author, focused on the effort-versus-reward of putting together a small passion project not in a space to pitch to publishers–by the time we’d finished a cup of coffee, I’d put together a ebook files and a PDF ready for POD. By the end of the afternoon, there were cover concepts together. It took about three hours, total, to put together the production-side of things (and that was largely because the first cover I mocked up wasn’t a good fit for the style and content).

Essentially, I’d invested a bunch of start-up cash to ensure producing a book wouldn’t take a lot of time. That makes it easier to take risks with conetent, especially since there’s no real printing costs attached to producing ebooks (and, in some cases, in putting together print editions). It’s an approach that makes it easy to try something interesting, because it’s not trying to earn back a huge amount of set-up costs or time spent away from other tasks.

That’s an aspect of indie publishing that doesn’t get talked about a lot. So many of the conversations revolve around how to use those tools to generate a profit, that the fact you can use them to be a small-time art-punk weirdo gets lost in the shuffle.

Blurred & Indistinct

PETERMBALL Journal

One of the weird things about living in the twenty-first century is having these incredibly powerful, multi-purpose microcomputers in our pockets that don’t necessarily turn off the way you expect.

Ergo, you occasionally find weird photographs on your feed: blurred images snapped as the phone gets slid into the pocket; or snapshots taken while trying to set up the phone to navigate with GPS.

I like to think they’re glimpses of another universe, one that makes less sense than our own, trying to get out.