I thought I had mentioned this before, but apparently it didn't get spread around, so I felt I needed to mention this now, publicly, so that everyone was aware of it:
Starting over a Month ago, I began removing some books from the Kindle Unlimited program, and they will NOT be going back in.
Right now, it's only the books that have had very poor sales. KU is a numbers game, if a book sells a lot, and people keep buying it, keeping it in KU is fiscally sound. But if sales quickly taper off and they're poor? Then leaving it in KU kills me financially. Going forwards, everything that I write & publish will start off in KU for at least one 3-month term. If it continues to do well, or the series it is in is doing well, that book will stay in KU.
Besides, it's not like the prices on my books are high, when you consider that people who are a lot less popular than me, charge $5.99 to $7.99 for what they're putting out. MOST of my books are priced at $2.99 and $3.99, which in today's market is a steal. Even $4.99 for one of my works is a good deal. Even with the runaway inflation we are having, I have resisted raising any prices (and hope I can continue to do so). But KU has ALSO not raised its payouts. Again - KU is a numbers game - if I'm selling a lot, it's worth being in it. If I'm not, it ain't.
Pulling those poorly performing series out of KU also allows me to try and find a market on another bookseller where they may perform better. One of the terms of KU is that I can ONLY sell those books on Amazon. I've honestly considered (and may eventually) pulling my $2.99 books from KU (because who can't afford $3?) so I can put those out on other booksellers to try and encourage more people to buy my books on Amazon.
There's also another, sadder, reason for pulling some of my series. Every cover on Dan's Inferno was marked as 'Pornographic'. All of the covers. Yes, covers 2 and 3 were a little risqué. Cover 1 wasn't, and cover 2 was as vanilla as it comes. Someone at Amazon obviously took issue with the series and got it banned from advertising. I figured their next step was going to be to claim my having that series in KU was a violation, so they could ban ME.
So yes, sorry, but this is my sole source of income and someone at Amazon has happily been going around attacking my covers on other series as well, which has forced me off of Amazon's Advertising program for a while (and perhaps permanently).
Lastly I want to be clear that I will keep my major series in KU, unless it becomes clear to me that it's no longer safe. There are people at Amazon who use alleged KU violations as a way to remove people they don't like. I put my books in KU as a service to You, the readers, and my Fans, in an attempt to save you money. But there comes a time when I have to put my own well-being and ability to continue to write stories for you, first.
Sincerely,
-John Van Stry / Jan Stryvant
Okay, a lot has happened sine the last time I posted here and I do mean A LOT.
First of all, if I haven't mentioned it already, I got Covid, again, and I caught it from a vaxxed person at a dinner party. So excuse me if I've now decided that I don't want anything to do with THAT. As I believe I've mentioned here in the past, but will mention again: I have lung damage. I've been living with it since it happened about 3 decades ago, I should have filed for disability as it was an 'on the job thing' but I was young and stupid and didn't realize that I'd be dealing with it for the rest of my life. It's why I have asthma, and while my lungs aren't as bad as they used to be (they tried to kill me - twice). I'm still on meds for the rest of my life and they're not cheap.
So, I went to the doc, and he gave me some stuff to take with a warning to come back immediately if things got worse. Several days later, on a Friday evening, they did, but he was of course now out for the weekend. Come Saturday, my lungs were filling with fluid and I was having a hard time of it, so off to the ER, where they charge me about $2000 dollars to tell me that Yes! You have Covid, and Yes! You have pneumonia!
Now, go home and die!
Okay, they didn't say the 'and die!' part, but they did send me home, with no treatment, to do just that. What they SHOULD have done was send me to a hospital, like they did with a friend of mine. Covid caused pneumonia is pretty much a death sentence to someone with lung issues.
So fcuk that! I went home and took some ivomectin. I keep ivomec for my dogs, it's good for a number of things beyond parasites (and is used on people heavily in Africa and probably parts of South and Central America as well - Also in India). I also used it for all those years I had big cats - it really is a miracle drug, and it's over the counter, so it's cheap. By nightfall the Covid was GONE (so those people who are claiming it doesn't work are full of shit and liars). A lot of folks don't know that ivomec is good for a lot more things than parasites. It also works against blood born diseases and is an anti-viral. There's a reason they won the Nobel Prize for inventing it.
So on Monday when I saw my doc, all I was dealing with was the pneumonia, and it wasn't getting any worse, but instead was getting slowly better. He put me on stuff to deal with that. But all told that was 3 weeks where I wasn't working.
NEXT comes Baen. I submitted a novel for consideration to Baen back around April after talking with Toni Weisskopf, who is the person who now runs Baen and is the head editor as well. She had asked me to send something in, so I wrote a near-space scifi book (hard scifi) that takes place about 200 years in the future. Well just before labor day she told me that if I was willing to make a few edits, they'd buy it.
So yeah, I was more than willing to make the edits, and as they were mostly dealing with parts of the story she felt weren't clear to the reader or developed enough, I agreed that they needed to be done. There was a little back and forth on a few things, as I decided to add a bit more after some discussion and it ended up with an additional 20K words and probably 10K of existing got rewritten. So that took up ALL of September and a little of this month.
Normally I could have gotten it done quicker, but September is my yearly vacation (Reno Air Races) so for a little more than a week, I wasn't doing that much writing (though I did some). Vacation wasn't as good as I would have liked. Rental car agencies no longer rent cars. They just promise you one that isn't there when you arrive. Because they sold off all their stock as used car prices have skyrocketed.
I guess they get some kind of sick thrill making you wait in line just to tell you that they haven't got any cars. Nor does anyone else within 200 miles.
We ended up renting a U-Haul van and driving around in that for a few days. Amazingly it was considerably cheaper than the rental car would have been. There were also issues with the hotel (no maid service - spreads covid apparently) and I don't know about you, but I don't go to an expensive hotel and then expect to have to clean my own room. Needless to say, never going back to the GSR after 20 years of being a customer.
So anyways, parts of August and all of September were very busy. But the book I wrote for Baen is now off for them to deal with, it'll probably be out next fall. I'm back to working on the Valens Heritage series, about 6 weeks later than I meant to be however.
So yeah, things have been crazy around here.
