Did I share this photo collection before? Who knows. Worth a click of your time.
Amazon’s markup of digital delivery to indie authors is ~129,000%
A very smart bit of maths by self-published travel author Andrew Hyde following the launch, sales and stats of his book. The short of it is, Amazon is his worst-paying market - he receives notably less per book from them than he does from Apple, Nook or PDF - because as well as their 30% cut their “delivery charge” (levied on all books, but at 18MB a pop his (before compression after that post; he got it down to 2MB and they take $0.60 instead) is bigger than novels by a very large margin) takes $2.58 of his $10 cover charge.
But the same file, at the same size, hosted on the same servers (Amazon’s S3 cloud, on which half the internet depends), “delivered” in much the same fashion via anything other than a Kindle app/bit of hardware - only some of which will be via ‘whispernet’ and the rest via regular wifi the same as the rest of us, would cost $0.01 per five downloads, a massive mark-up for almost exactly the same ‘delivery’.
Also worth reading: an update on his sales sources after that post went massive.
… sometimes, your commenters, by which you often mean your audience and your readership, are really fucking annoying, and sometimes you don’t like them. Which you can’t say. Who’s going to pick up another book by a writer who says “My readers are awful pieces of shit and I can think of twenty of them, right off the bat, who should be drowned in hot pig blubber”? Nobody. “My audience are all complete pissflaps. Have you read my website comments threads? Utter inane gibberish. I would like to train a giant horse to fuck out all their eyes.” Who’s going to say that?
I guarantee you that even the sweetest and kindest writer has thought that exact thought more than once in their lives. And its corollary: “Oh god, my readers are such horrible demented shitbags, what am I doing so wrong that I attract them all to me?”
Just as I know that every writer has dropped the ball at least once and disappointed a reader. Or exposed themselves as a total prick or a frothing nutter.
Email frolics: It seems I run @RapSheetmag
From: matilda@blogdash.com - Matilda Tanascov
To: namelesshorror@gmail.com
Subject: Partnership Opportunity
Hello John,
My name is Matilda Thompson, social media manager at Blogdash.com. We’ve been following your blog at http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/ for a while now and your writing style is pretty great! I’m willing to bet PR agencies and Brands might find it appealing as well.
So we selected your site to offer you a revenue share partnership. Let me know if you’d be interested in this opportunity and I’ll follow-up with more details!
Best regards,
Matilda Thompson
Matilda@blogdash.com www. blogdash. com
From: namelesshorror@gmail.com - John R
To: matilda@blogdash.com Matilda Tanascov
Subject: Re: Partnership Opportunity
Hello Matilda,
I’m glad to know that you’ve been following my blog at The Rap Sheet for a while, since I wasn’t aware I’d taken over the running of their site. I’m especially glad you like my writing style, since I didn’t even know I’d written anything for them. I am buried down the bottom of their linkroll and they’ve mentioned me and I’ve commented there years ago, but if I’ve been contributing to their blog in my sleep then I’m due a raise for sure! I do that a lot; I woke up one morning in 2010 to find I’d been writing a column on beekeeping for the Guardian and a weekly Q&A for Techcrunch about the difficulties involved in running Linux on domestic appliances.
I’ll have to let J. Kingston Pierce know that the site’s mine now and I can start raking in the cash. Sweet! I can’t believe that old curmudgeon has been holding out on me all this time.
Some might say there’s been some baffling six-degrees-of-separation cock up in your hand-picking of data, or else your email farming software has encountered a serious glitch, but I know that’s not true. I look a lot like J. Kingston Pierce - we both have the same Mark Twain moustache and propensity for cursing loudly in public spaces - and I’m not surprised to hear he’s been getting rich off my hard work.
Best regards,
John Rickards
From: matilda@blogdash.com - Matilda Tanascov
To: namelesshorror@gmail.com
Subject: Partnership opportunity
Hello John,
My name is Matilda Thompson, social media manager at Blogdash.com. We’ve been following your blog at http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/ for a while now and your writing style is pretty great! I’m willing to bet PR agencies and Brands might find it appealing as well.
So we selected your site to offer you a revenue share partnership. Let me know if you’d be interested in this opportunity and I’ll follow-up with more details!
Best regards,
Matilda Thompson
Matilda@blogdash.com www. blogdash. com
From: namelesshorror@gmail.com - John R
To: matilda@blogdash.com Matilda Tanascov
Subject: Re: Partnership opportunity
My God, Matilda! So the rumours are true. I’d heard that Blogdash force workers to slave away in email farms, stamping out identikit messages regardless of response or context, slowly driving both recipient and sender into a hypnotised coma through repetition in order to render them mentally unable to resist Blogdash’s demands. One of my friends received fourteen Blogdash offers in a six week period last year and ended up selling his house and moving into a bloggers’ compound where he makes “like this on Facebook!” widgets and pens religious tracts on the meaning of Blog. Anti-blog deprogramming groups can help. If they’re forcing you to email against your will and need aid, try to slip a coded clue into your next repeat message.
Be strong.
John Rickards
From: matilda@blogdash.com - Matilda Tanascov
To: namelesshorror@gmail.com
Subject: Partnership Opportunity
Hello John,
My name is Matilda Thompson, social media manager at Blogdash.com. We’ve been following your blog at http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/ for a while now and your writing style is pretty great! I’m willing to bet PR agencies and Brands might find it appealing as well.
So we selected your site to offer you a revenue share partnership. Let me know if you’d be interested in this opportunity and I’ll follow-up with more details!
Best regards,
Matilda Thompson
Matilda@blogdash.com www. blogdash. com
I mean really - what self-respecting spammer doesn’t respond to a request for more details? I don’t even know if this is the real (easily-googleable) person or not, but the company’s certainly real. If this is a marketing tactic it’s a deeply bizarre one. I haven’t been mentioned on the Rap Sheet since (I think) 2008-ish in one of JKP’s round ups of copycat book covers, so I’m not even sure how the substitution happened, especially since my email address isn’t on there and their old link to johnrickards.com redirects here. It’s a genuine mystery!
Oh my. Shot for shot Sabotage tribute vid done with kids. (via @McKelvie)