Blog — Page 57

Dec 29 2016

Or…You Could Fucking PAY ME

Like many writers and publishers, I received an email yesterday from independent distributor AllRomance eBooks (that also has a publishing arm) informing me that they’re closing.

In three days.

Oh and they can’t pay me from this quarter. But they’ll give me 10c on the dollar if I agree to it as a settlement and don’t pursue legal action.

No, really, that is a thing actually suggested. Here, look:

We will be unable to remit Q4 2016 commissions in full and are proposing a settlement of 10 cents on the dollar (USD) for payments received through 27 December 2016. We also request the following conditions:

1. That you consider this negotiated settlement to be “paid in full”.
2. That no further legal action be taken with regards to the above referenced commissions owed.

I wonder what Skyla thinks of that?

You know what, though? Of course they’d go that route. Of course they’d decide that the ones who shouldn’t be paid are the writers. [ETA: I am sure it’s entirely possible other staff isn’t being paid as well.]

Because writers are the last ones to get paid. Everyone takes their cut and if something’s left over, we get it. If someone has to go without payment, it’s us.

You know, I’m also an editor and cover artist. And I like getting paid–in fact, I fucking insist on getting paid. But I also recognize that I would not have a job as a cover artist if someone didn’t write the fucking book in the first place.

Publishers. Artists. Editors. Marketing departments. Distributors. The producers of e-readers and devices books are read on. Typesetters. Printers. The dumb fucks running piracy sites who make money from ads on their forums.

This entire ecosystem exists because writers write books.

Distributor doesn’t want to pay? That trickles down and the writer ends up without money, and they’re expected to shut up and accept TEN CENTS ON THE DOLLAR ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME LORI JAMES???

How about no. How about you fucking pay me my fifty-fucking-dollars because that can pay for a three month supply of one of the cheaper meds I’m on. How about you honor your fucking contracts.

You avoiding bankruptcy is not my fucking problem. Money comes in, sixty percent is owed to other people? Put it in an account and don’t fucking touch it until you pay people what is owed!

I spent an hour and a half last night with increasingly strong alcoholic beverages trying to remove the fifty-odd titles I oversee from distribution. While the site frequently crashed. As of right now, I have nothing for sale at ARe–had anything sold today, it’s clear from their email I wouldn’t have even been entitled to my fucking ten cents on the dollar anyway.

What burns me even more is the number of writers I’d recommended ARe to. They’d paid on time, they ran a lot of free promotions, and they’d been good to me. So I talked them up, I encouraged self-publishers I know and work with to distribute through them. But this lack of transparency and outright fraud is fucking bullshit. [ETA: Multiple authors are now reporting their royalties reported today are lower than they were for the same period yesterday. If you have work at ARe, download your reports and screenshot ASAP.]

So no, ARe, I will not be agreeing to your bullshit settlement offer. Much like I said to a closing publisher when they tried to pay me in unsold books instead of money: NO.

Incidentally, Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Nook, Smashwords, and GooglePlay all do pay me, and if you have holiday money to spend, please consider picking up a book or seven. Bloodlines is still on sale for 99c. I also sell eBooks direct on Payhip–which pays me immediately–and Solomon’s Seal can be picked up for 50% off through the end of the year with the coupon code 2016ISTERRIBLE which you’ll find at the bottom of the page.

I also have Patreon with Patrons of Snark getting lots of cool stuff–everyone pledging by the end of the year will get thanked in Odin’s Spear.

…

Dec 22 2016

Human Suit and Patchwork Hearts

Well, I think most agree 2016 can be on its way and perhaps the door can hit its ass on the way out. Then we can barricade the door shut again. On the bright side, 2017 brings the return of Twin Peaks and Agent Cooper, so if Trumperdink can hold off on WWIII just long enough for Showtime to air all the episodes before I have to start my underground railroad, I’ll consider it a win for the year.

I’m away for the holidays (for the first time in…ever?) and staying for a few weeks with one of my brothers and his family. I get to do normal human things like a normal human person and learn what it’s like to live without the crushing weight of existential despair all the time (until I inevitably sign onto Twitter again). A human suit is both simultaneously ill-fitting and natural. I have made little bits of progress with the WIP for the first time in months and if I can just figure out how to get through this heist scene (not my forte) and move the action to the first emperor’s tomb, that’s bound to improve my productivity. I’ve mostly written the epilogue, and I’ve got the beginning, so now it’s just eight-odd thousand words of Oreo middle to figure out.

Nine days left for stuff this year:

Bloodlines is 99c. The Demons of Oblivion series is now complete (for better or worse) and that book is where it all begins. Virtual stocking stuffer?
Odin’s Spear e-ARC giveaway, complete with signed books and tuckerization. This is likely the last contest I will run for the foreseeable future (seriously stop me if I even contemplate it) so hop on board while you can. I am otherwise giving up on reviews forever–I just don’t write books people want to talk up and that’s okay, I love you all anyway because I’m a lurker too.
2016 is terrible so get Solomon’s Seal for 50% off at Payhip with the coupon code 2016ISTERRIBLE. I’m original like that.
Patreon drive: get your name in the “credits” of Odin’s Spear by pledging any amount as a Patron of Snark by the end of the year.

This time next year I’ll be able to post Livi’s post-Odin’s Spear Christmas novella for Patrons of Snark so that’ll be fun.

In shaping the epilogue of Livi #3, I’m getting a clearer sense now of the shape of the book and the shape of those first three, how they might stand as a trilogy if I decide not to keep publishing. The fourth is already done and is one of my favourite things I’ve ever written (it is The West Book and both makes me giddy as well as breaks my heart), but it starts a series of emotional cliffhanger types of endings, and if I publish that book, I’ll have to publish the rest of the series (ten…ten! They’re mapped out and I need ten for the complete story). I’ll decide next year if that’ll make any kind of sense or not. Those who have read the first loved it, and that’s heartening and what I try to focus on even if it can’t feed the cats while I work on the next one.

For now, I have to get back to that heist with my Zheng’s Tomb soundtrack in the background. Here’s a bit of Livi and West:

Patchwork hearts lighting up the dark.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, folks.

Dec 04 2016

Odin’s Spear e-ARC Giveaway

I still have another round of proofreading to do, which means I’ll be making the final files for Odin’s Spear Feb 7 release next month. Want to read it early? Unless you’re a Patron of Snark who gets e-ARCs, here’s your only other chance.

Review Solomon’s Seal. Anywhere. Give it five stars, give it one (although why you’d want to enter to win an ARC if you hated it is beyond me). Make it five paragraphs or five words. Doesn’t matter–reviews up a book’s ranking on stores and some advertisers want a book to have 10+ reviews before you can use their services (should I ever be so inclined), so anything works, and this little book needs all the help it can get.

What can you win?

e-ARC of Odin’s Spear (est. delivery: early Jan 2017)
signed print copy of Solomon’s Seal (est. delivery: Feb 2017)
signed print copy of Odin’s Spear (est. delivery: Feb 2017)
West (tiger) bookmark (est. delivery: Feb 2017)
your name used in Zheng’s Tomb (Livi #3, currently on hold but hopefully finished in a few months). Want an example? Look at Danielle, Mel, and Sparky in Oblivion.
probably other goodies I’ve yet to decide upon

Enter through the Rafflecopter at the bottom of this post. Also, reviews already posted still count as much as new ones do. Not every store requires you to purchase the book there, so you can post your review multiple places.

A winner will be drawn January 2nd 2017.

Solomon’s Seal is also currently on sale at Payhip if you use the coupon code 2016ISTERRIBLE, good through the end of the year.

Also until the end of the year, all Patrons of Snark (in good standing payment wise in January) will be thanked in the acknowledgements of Odin’s Spear–sort of a “this book is brought to you by” kind of thing. Still a few weeks left! I just posted the first five chapters of Odin’s Spear for patrons as well.

Also on the Livi Talbot front, I’m offering tidbits and Easter eggs about the series on my Facebook page if you want to play along: every “like” on this post = a different factoid.

Finally, Bloodlines is on sale for 99c until the end of the year. Tell your friends! The series is now complete so it’s a great time to start without any waiting for a future book.

I hope you enter to win Odin’s Spear–it was a difficult book that took a lot of work to polish up but I’m excited about Livi’s second outing and can’t wait for people to get to read it.
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Nov 24 2016

Wherein Skyla Fails at NaNo

Best laid plans and all that, right?

Previous years, I’d write 90K words in the first seventeen days. One year I hit the last week, didn’t like what I was writing, and decided to write Exhumed instead, and did 50K on that in the last few days of the month. I’ve had 13K word days, FFS–NaNoWriMo shouldn’t be hard.

But Livi #3 is sitting in limbo. I’ve written about 20K total on two or three projects this month, but nothing is going anywhere. I’m used to banging my head against things until they work (you don’t finish thirty-something books without that particular “skill”), but I think, ultimately, it doesn’t want to be written yet. I also think I know some of the reasons why, and I think I know how to solve some of the problems. But there are pieces that need to snap together and they’re not.

I think one of them is me.

All my life–like from my earliest non-traumatic memories–I have just wanted to write/tell stories. It was how I kept myself occupied being alone all the time. It was what gave me strength and power when I had none. It was what made living bearable. It was like breathing to me, and if I had to stop for any reason, I always felt half-alive until I could continue again. For years (right up until the year I got sick, actually) I was writing nearly 500K a year quite happily.

And now I…don’t want to write. And I don’t even care that I don’t.

I’ve been a pretty debilitating depressive episode for a year and a half now, the kind where my continued survival defies all logic. Previously the “fun” (not fun, but anyway) thing about bipolar disorder and rapid cycling was that as awful as major depressive episodes were, I could claw–and sometimes bounce–out of them and feel great. There is no bouncing now, though. It’s chemical, yes, but it had an external trigger that nothing can be done about, because I just get re-triggered again and again every day, and I can’t get it out of it. Becoming someone who will survive it doesn’t mean it goes away, it just means you survive when everything continues to be terrible and always will be.

Of course it only occurred me last week this might be one of the factors, when I looked back and realized I hadn’t finished a book since April (which I barely did) and hadn’t even touched for-pay projects, which normally I can write any time because I have no emotional investment. I know I’ve been suffering freelance burnout, and burnout from my volunteer commitments, but it hadn’t occurred me until recently that, hey, maybe the chronic depression is affecting me too! To be clear, the stories haven’t stopped in my brain. They never have (except while I was seriously ill, and I recovered from that), but I just…have no burning desire to put them on virtual paper. I mostly just want to burn through my day until I can sleep again.

I’ve circled around the “maybe I’m broken and not a writer anymore” thoughts a lot, as if that’s a thing one can suddenly stop being. And then how to fix things, because I like solving problems. I’ve dealt with writer burnout, but that’s not what this is. And I don’t know how to refill a well that seems cemented over, other than trying to keep hydrated and rested, eating foods I know will ultimately make me feel better, and dusting off the treadmill now that there’s snow outside and below zero temperatures. I’m going to take the rest of the year, particularly the last week of NaNo, to write whatever I want and try to find some spark of enjoyment in something.

If that delay’s Livi#3’s projected Fall 2017 release, so be it–you still get her second adventure this February.

There is still a week to enter to win a Livi Prize Pack, and if there are no entries, I’ll use it for a review drive for Solomon’s Seal in December as I’d originally intended. Solomon’s Seal is also on sale on Kobo for Black Friday/Cyber Monday, and Bloodlines will be 99c starting tomorrow until the end of the year.

Keep rising.

Nov 16 2016

Giveaway: You Need a Hero!

In dark times, we all need heroes, and there are plenty in fiction—reminders that women can fight monsters and win, especially when life is sadly not imitating art.

Not only do I want to give you some escapism with a few heroic characters, I want you to get to be a hero too. Now more than ever, various organizations are going to be on the front lines for the rights of others, and they rely on donations from people like you.

aw-no-you-didnt — Be the Wonder Woman the world needs.

I’m working with my partner in eviltry, Dina James, to raise some money for some worthy causes. For every dollar you give to Planned Parenthood and/or RAINN during the month of November (from the start of the month—it counts if you’ve already donated), you get an entry into a giveaway pack for the following goodies:

A signed print copy of Solomon’s Seal (Need a hero? Meet Livi Talbot.)
An e-arc of Livi #2, Odin’s Spear, and a signed print copy when it’s available next year
A signed print copy of River (Want to stand up for others without giving a fuck if people like you? Hi, River Wolfe.)
Tomb Raider, starring Angelina Jolie, in Blu-Ray
A hand-knit pair of handwarmers (not pictured—those are mine) in your preferred colour, because every hero and heroine in the apocalyptic future needs handwarmers

To enter after you’ve donated, forward the email receipt showing proof of donation to contest [at] skyladawncameron [dot] com

Donate $20 to Planned Parenthood? Get twenty entries. Donate $10 to Planned Parenthood and $10 to RAINN? Get twenty entries. Donate $5 to RAINN? Get five entries. The more you give, the more chances you get, but even donating as little as $1 gets you in the running. You have until 11:59EST on November 30 to enter.

While my contest is not US/Canada only and I’ll ship internationally (using the slow, cheap option–apologies), I’m pretty sure the movie is Region A. If that’s not your region and you don’t want the movie, I’ll draw another winner for it. If $500 or more is raised for all charities combined (the two I picked, and the two Dina picked–I’ll get those numbers from her), I’ll add a second prize pack (which may contain a different movie, I’ll see what I can find).

It doesn’t stop there: next head over to Dina James’ site where donations to The Trevor Project and/or the Trans Lifeline will enter you to win one of two amazing hero prize packs as well.

Remember: what is happening right now is not normal. It is not going to be fine. You are not crazy for noticing. This cannot be normalized and everyone has to pick up the fight in every way they can for as long as they can.

Rise. Resist. Rebel.

And don’t forget to read.