Working Through Insomnia

Can't sleep. Creative brain isn't awake to write. So I've put what I hope are the finishing touches on the The Gift of the Bad Guy Kindle Edition and sent it off for review.

I've been having good results on the self-published version (in EPUB and PDF) with the sale price of 49 cents, so I'm going to leave it up for a while. That sale price is not going to be a permanent feature, but I'd kind of like to get a "critical mass" of copies out there.

Sales of the special Author Appreciation Editions (also available on that page, scroll down) are going to be closing on May 21st so I can draw a line underneath GOTBG and move on to other projects. Because of technical limitations, I'm not able to offer AAEs in Kindle format, though the PDF version works fine on Kindle and looks pretty sharp.

Top two questions I get these days are both from people who are eager to see the next newsletter, so I guess it's a hit. They are "When's the next one coming out?" and "Is there some way I can pay in advance instead of setting up a subscription payment?"

The answer to the first question is the last week in May... this way I have a whole month to accumulate content for it.

The answer to the second question is, yes, yes there is. I got like half a dozen inquiries along that line after the April newsletter went out, so I set up a "just send me the newsletter" payment plan. It's a one-time thing, gets you the newsletter for a year. The price is flexible. Default price is $25, which is just over $2 a month. It goes as low as $10 and as high as $100. So far most folks have been content to buy in at the $25 level.

The newsletter has generated way more "fan mail" than anything else I've done. It's really quite incredible.

On another note, in order to get more grist for Fantasy In Miniature I'm considering taking a page from other crowdfunders and doing a thing where people who make a donation to the site can provide a prompt. I'd put a "stock" limit of 3 or 5 or some other small number so I don't get buried... assuming there would be enough demand to bury me, of course. I'd put a field on the story to credit the prompter and list the actual prompt. If I do this, I think I'll name the service "For Prompt Payment and Speedy Insertion", which discerning readers will note is a reference to the greatest Edgar Allen Poe story of all time.

That's "if". Right now this is just an idle idea. If it tickles anybody's fancy, feel free to say so... an enthusiastic response can be the difference between "if" and "when"... though it would still be a "when". I've got a lot going on right now, so this would probably be a late June or July thing.

Anyway, I'm getting sleepy again... time to go upstairs and hit the floor.

Friday

News For Today

So, I somewhat impulsively re-did the site layout yesterday. I say "somewhat impulsively" because it was one of those things I'd had in mind for a long time but only actually got around to doing on a whim.

Overall response seems to be positive. Some people find the layout with the Twitter feed "cramped", but given that only the front page uses this layout I don't see this as much of an issue. Likewise I've heard from a couple of people who find the ads at the top distracting... they're at the top, though, so they can't distract you for long when you're actually reading.

Some people don't like having so much space on the right hand side of the virtual page when you're on the "reading page". The problem with just shrinking the parchment is that the background consists of three separate images I would also have to resize. Also, I'm not keen on the appearane that the page shrinks when you open a story... I'd say no one would care about that when the story's space expands, but people can be fooled by appearances. I've had three people ask me why I didn't put the "new" ads in the sidebar or suggest they might be just as prominently displayed there... but of course, those ads were in the sidebar before I put them up top.

Centering the sidebar in its space and/or expanding it might take care of that. The only reason I didn't do that to begin with is so that it wouldn't be so far off-screen for those few users who have 800x600 resolutions. Though I do wonder how essential it is to keep designing for people with that resolution. I just shrank the story-space by a few px after realizing that the margins I added meant that at resolution 80 the very end of the line was cut off, so you'd have to scroll back and forth just a little bit. Is this really necessary?

I guess I could maybe fit a skinny version of my Twitter feed into the space to the right of the sidebar, on the content-centric page, if people feel that's less distracting than empty space. But that's a project for another day. I'll let people have some time to get used to the layout and see how much it really is an issue. My experience is that the main thing people notice is change... for instance, one person lamented how lopsided the page looks now after the bottom of the scrollbar has been scrolled past. But the thing is, it's always been like that.

Personal Assessment

Didn't sleep at all last night. I laid down again this morning and I believe I got to sleep sometime between 6 and 7, until about noon or so. So I'm starting the day late, and short on sleep.

Plans For Today

I've got a chapter of Tales of MU to finish and post. I'd hoped to have it finished yesterday but at some point I got distracted by site design questions and writerbrain went away. So I'm not going to be finishing the week with a cushion, but on the plus side I should be able to turn out a really good sized chapter.