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1. The Free Kindle Promotion for Doing Time on Planet Earth is exceeding expectations. Granted I'd like some sales too. But I thought about it - what do I want most? I want people to read, think about, and discuss my book. The promotion ends at midnight tonight.

Both MD and my mother are going to try to get their respective book clubs to discuss it.
That would be cool. My book wants to be analyzed and discussed badly.

The paperback version should be available again by WED. I'm still waiting for my hard-copy proof to arrive, so I can approve and publish it. We're adding the author bio.

Today I submitted requests for reviews and entered a contest for best pitch on self-published e-books. We'll see if anything comes of it.

Sort of making this up as I go along.

2. A little frustrated with Create Space's shipping department - I don't get this. Their first deliveries to me - came without any issues. But the most recent ones - the five books, and the second proof have had delays. What's up with that? For the five books that I ordered? Create Space set it up so that UPS would deliver it to the Post Office, who would then finish the delivery - and apparently not until five days after they received it? Why? Because on the slip it said deliver it on May 18. Is it here? No, been delayed again.

Royalties Give me A Headache

I've always found royalties to be confusing. When I was trying to figure out whether to do the 30% or the 70% royalty formula on the Kindle, I read the fine print and threw up my hands - okay that's it, I'm doing the 30%. Screw it.

They even have a YouTube video explaining it:

Watch on YouTube

Now, I'm second guessing. Don't know why, right now -- I'm basically giving it away in a free promotion for two days. (It will be available again in paperback soon - by Thursday at the latest.) So I changed it to 70% royalties. You can actually change it.

Anyhow, I handled royalty calculations for books and video games in a prior life. Regarding books? I was working for a library reference publishing company, my job was to convince various journal, magazine and periodical publishers to give us their content to distribute in electronic databases to libraries. The fun part - is we weren't going to pay them that much for it. (Negotiated a sweet deal with Time Warner.) I felt like a used car salesman. Remember sitting at a restaurant with the rep from the Economist - where I explained the royalty formula to the rep, and the rep responds...so according to your formula, we're making approximately $10 a year, and you are making $10,000? Distributors always get the bigger part of the pie. After all they are distributing the equivalent of 1000 articles, and you are providing 5.

It's the law of percentages. After I left the evil library reference publishing company (by the way, they are all evil), I worked at a video game distributor company. I was attempting to set up a royalty calculation database - only one problem, the sales team had decided to do different royalty formulas for every distribution channel and developer they acquired or contracted with. One channel had a bizarre "infinity" formula created by the owner, who was allegedly a mathematical genius and the only one who understood the formula. Also many of these agreements were verbal and not in writing. I remember the Chief Financial Officer bringing me into his office and asking how the company was making any money? If they were giving the distributor 50% and the developer 47%, what did that leave us? I shrugged. Beats me. Also, who is the CFO, me or you? (Suffice it to say, I didn't stay there very long, actually no one in the finance or legal department did. Note - if there is heavy turn over in the administrative, legal, and finance sections of a company and they hire a new controller every five months - this is not a company you want to work for.)
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